I can't help but notice that a lot of ppl's comics on dd have really catchy or witty names... and I've always found it hard to name things. So how did you come up with your comic's name? What were some other names you had considered?

For me:
The Optimist was a hard one. I brainstormed and wrote down like fifteen different possible names (ok that makes me sound prolific; it was like: The Optimist, The Optimists, Samizdat Optimist, Saint Kazimieras and the Wolf, The Wolf and Saint Kazimieras, Kazimieras and the Wolf, etc. You'd only really 'get' the wolf part at the end, unless you're really crafty... I've only mentioned it a few times, on page 2, on the graffiti page, and it's on the cover of the Samizdat Optimist...) But when I was finished writing it, I decided that The Optimist was best, because it didn't pigeonhole it too much.


Misfit Assassins: hah. I went to the mall with my dad and I was telling him about this comic idea I had.. I was like, "Well, it needs the word "assassins" in the title.." and after a while I was like, "Misfit is a really cool word..." (it's much better than ragtag!) so after hemming and hawwing, MISFIT ASSASSINS won!


sorry if this topic has already happened- actually I'd bet that it has, seeing as we've discussed just about everything under the sun concerning comics already...

Kung Fu Comics didnt have a nice ring to it, and the abbreviation KFC is already taken.


seriously though...Idk, it just...came to me.

I wanted to be named after the world it is set in, so I kept putting sounds together till I hit on something I liked.
Simples.

Plastic- I had a whole other story planned at first, it was about a girl who was trying to get into the popular clique and get closer to the supposedly straight girl she wanted, but she was being fake and plastic in trying to keep up appearances.
I changed the story but the name just stuck.

Not-so-super Ex-girlfriend- exactly as advertised xP

Y:me?! A yaoi, 'Y' for the y chromosome

Well, I knew that I wanted the word 'vampire' in my title so people knew what was in it right away. After that I wanted a word basically like 'illusion', and phantasm is just a cool sounding word to me. XD Also the title ended up being used as a part of a line in the comic.

A while back I considered changing Vampire Phantasm's title to just plain "Dim", for no real particular reason other than I just like it too...but I decided against it as I figured it didn't make as much sense and would be too annoying to change around my sites and everything I've made that has the other title in it. =/ I'm still considering using that title for a horror story of some kind...

"The Hub" is kind of an alternate reality in which folks from all sorts of, oh, let's say "dimensions" wind up in. I imagined it being this kind of intersection of worlds. Or... a hub. Mmmhmm.

Eh, I've said before that "The Hub" was kinda the first thing that came up, and I went with it. That was 'round abouts 7 or 8 years ago. I never considered changing it. And I might have been able to think of somethin' a bit more... exciting. But I'm stubborn, hard-headed, and an idiot, and once I come up with an idea it'll take an act of God to change my mind. Plus it's not so original, and if you google it you'll come up with a bunch of other comic-related queries. Although no comics with the same title, thank God. There is a "Hub City" in some superhero comic, but I can't remember which one.

Meh. I like it.

I had a long process of brainstorming titles with MAG-ISA.

I was thinking somewhere along the following titles at first:
- Manus Dei (eng trans: hand of God, tagalog trans: Kamay Ng Diyos)
- Alagad (losely translated in English as "follower")
- something that has anti-christ or demonic connotations in it.

I was all over the place coming up with a title. Until I decided to call it MAG-ISA.

Why? Its because its the tagalog term for "to be alone".

Because that is the adjective that best describes the situation of ALOT of the characters in this comic. One way or another, there's this feeling of the theme of loneliness. Regardless if the character is a protagonist or antagonist.

Also, it made it easier to design the logo. (I know I suck at graphic design and this logo needs improvement but here it is)


The letters "M" and "I" can be represented by the silhouettes of the main characters.

Ooo, I like threads like this! *hops in*

For CTV, when I joined DD in '04 I was so eager to post up my pages that I thought were so good at the time, but I had been drawing this comic since '02 for my friends and still had no title for it. I came up with the concept for the entire thing because I put the words "vampire" and "pirate" together one day and got the portmanteau word "vampirate" from it (yes, long before all those other vampirates showed up!) so I wanted to put that in the title somewhere. I have mixed feelings though, people get mad when Charby isn't in the comic enough!(he's only the title character, but not the only main character) I also get people who are upset that it isn't a gimmicky, vampires-on-a-boat comic like those popular novels.

Honestly, I couldn't think of a better name for the comic and I've gotten a lot of readers thanks to the word vampirate in there...I get some traffic from people either looking for the novels or the other webcomic.
Some folks don't realize it says "vam-pirate" and my mother-in-law thought it was pronounced "vampirette" (like a little girl vampire! ha!)


Unlife is Unfair: A spiritual spinoff of CTV though a completely different tone, I got the name from a quote by one of CTV's zombie characters. Of course, the zombies in that comic are a completely different sort, so I started UIU to make Romero zombie jokes!
I came *this* close to naming the comic "Fallapart Fernando", since the main zombie character...falls apart.

Used Books
I asked my brother to help me. He is a catchy title kind of guy. We had a strange conversation.
"You're always good at titles. What should I call my story?"
"Name it after the main character."
"There's not one."
"There has to be."
"No. Not really. There are three."
"One of them has to be the main character."
"Not really."
"What's the story about?"
"Well, it's... um. It's mostly centered around the characters."
"Tell me about the main characters."
"Um... Well. There's an ex-cop and ..." [Omitting my lengthy description, mostly stuttered through since it was just a vague concept then.}
"I don't understand what they have in common. How is that a story?"
"Well, they're friends and they hang out in a used book store together."
"Oh! Name it after the bookstore."
"The store name isn't at all related to them, though. It's named after a former owner."
...
Anyway, I don't remember where it went from there. Both of us got frustrated, and one of us just said "Used Books" so it stuck. I can't remember if it was more after the bookstore or a metaphor for the characters (the story takes place in the time after a crime syndicate ruled the city, and the characters were active players in that but are now "retired" ). -- Btw, my brother also suggested I name it after the cat. (I believe the exact suggestion was "Jiro's Happy Funtime Party" )

Gelotology:
I wanted a playful name that was sciencey and academic. (It's a science gag strip.) I knew it needed an "-ology" in it. I considered calling it Lolology, but that wasn't smart enough for me, so I Googled "science of humor" and found the official terminology. Now my comic has a smart name that people can't remember or spell properly. :-P

The Quiet Field:
This comic is based on a short story I wrote for my mom. I was writing it for a birthday present (because I have no money), and I couldn't settle on a title. Her birthday was fast approaching, so I quickly came up with one based on the first paragraph of the story:

At the end of a narrow, sunny road in a small, quiet town stood a quaint bakery made of rich red bricks. The bakery had stood there for many years, and the baker was known by everyone in town. His father had given him the bakery, and his grandfather had built it over fifty years ago. Behind the bakery stretched a lush green field, filled with long grasses and dappled with rocks and bushes. It had been left to nature long ago, before the bakery had been built, before the baker’s grandfather had been born, before there had even been a town.

Anyway, it actually ends up having more meaning later in the story (when I think about it), and I love symbolism, so it works nicely. When I decided to make a comic based on it, it took on yet another meaning because I decided to draw the comic with no narration and little to no dialogue, relying on gestures and pictorial representations instead (otherwise, it would be boring, going word-for-word from the story).

usedbooks
I believe the exact suggestion was "Jiro's Happy Funtime Party"

I smell a spinoff! XD Seriously, that would be hilarious.

Salt the Holly: Shortly before I started StH, I had a dream of epic proportions. After foiling an evil mastermind's plot to take over the world, I said, "We sure salted his holly," and then promptly woke up. A Google search turned up no relevant results, so I figured I had completely made up a phrase. =p

...But Not Really is something BetaJess and I say a LOT. I guess we can't help our limited vocabulary, but we can name a comic in its honor!

omg I always wondered what Salt the Holly really meant (I'm about halfway through, and was expecting there to be some sort of kung-fu transformation into some sort of kickass person named Salt the Holly.)

Usedbooks: haha... lolology makes me lol. Truly punny. lololololology

the thing about the word "hub" is that it's easy to remember, which is great. The bad thing is, if you look at it too long it stops looking like a word.

I originally called my comic "Stoner" -- after the beings in my story who could manipulate magic stones. And while it had a somewhat funny double meaning with those who like to partake in certain "herbal enhancement" -- I thought it might be a little confusing and certainly would be lost in a google search. Herbal enhancement it seems, while illegal, is very popular. Who'd a thunk.

So I opted for Endstone. I just made a list-- blackstone, whitestone, bonestone, stonestone... and endstone sounded best. Plus I think there's a clock company called Endstone, but that certainly wouldn't be confused with a webcomic.

Anyhow.

Let's see. How did I come up with "I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space!!!"? There was soooooo much thought process behind it! It took me weeks, and boxes of tear-soaked tissues. The stress to come up with a name for this project was just killing me!

Naw, I came up with the title and the plot in the same moment.

Air Raid Robertson is named after its title character. So yeah, explaining the name of the feature is basically the same as explaining why I named him "Air Raid Robertson".

I was reading a bunch of old reprints of serialized comic strips from the 40's and 50's. Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates, and that sort of thing. I thought it might be fun to do something in that format for the web. Except, well, I wanted to do it in the sardonic tone that I usually approach my material with. I wasn't sure if I could write in a "Sunday Comic Strip" format since I usually work in a short story manner. (I eventually convinced myself that I could)

I was thinking of all the old pulp type stories that were published back in those days. I didn't really want to do a Western or a detective feature. I also wasn't interested in science fiction or a vigilante like The Shadow or Doc Samson. Everybody else was doing stuff like that.

It was then that I decided on having an aviator hero. I was thinking of something that Warren Ellis wrote about all the aviator heroes that existed in the 30's since airplanes were new and exciting. That sort of thing is old hat these days though, so the number of pilot heroes are ebbing considerably.

It seemed like a good angle to me. I would create a webcomic about a silly pilot hero and I probably wouldn't have to worry about a billion other webcomics with similar themes. (Most of which were potentially better written and/or drawn than mine) It was at that point that I thought up a name.

I was thinking of how Stan Lee gave all his characters alliterative names so he could remember them all. Bruce Banner, Peter Parker, Scott Summers, Warren Worthington, Reed Richards, Stephen Strange etc. I was trying to come up with something wholly or partially alliterative that seemed to have a nice zing to it. "Air Raid Robertson" seemed to fit from the outset. It was as if the name was waiting patiently for me to think of it.

It's always nice when that happens.

The Capital of Helsinki is just a goofy nonsensical bit like "A Hard Days Night". I used Helsinki because I like the name of the city. It was either that or something like Azerbaijan. It didn't take a lot of thought, which is much like the strips in the series itself.

Father Will Come And Set Me Free was supposed to be a one-off story. But, well, it got a decent amount of hits when I posted it so I decided to make it an anthology title for various short stories.

Public Domain Funnies is just an example of form following function. That series is just me riffing on public domain comics, so that just makes sense.

Din Krakatau has a convoluted history...

I used to make rather experimental music and I was looking for a new name for a new project and I wanted something with noise or relating to noise... "White noise" is meh, I thought... too typical and sounds too close to "white power" so I scraped that. I started searching through the dictionary for other kinds of noisy words and ended up with Din. And then I appended the word "Krakatau" to that (which is an alternative spelling of Krakatoa), giving something of a "volcanic noise", but if you abbreviate it, it gives you DK, which sounds like "decay". Perfect, I thought...
well, the project fell through. LAter I used it for ANOTHER audio project for awhile, but in the end I decided that if I ever will publish any music, it'll be under the name Pink Noise Inferno, so the name became free.

Jumping ahead in time: early 2008, I'm starting to work on an untitled webcomic and I suddenly need a name to publish it under. So I just took Din Krakatau and slapped it onto the pages, haha (I had four pages ready at this point) but to make sense out of the name I gave it to a god, a hammer, and to the wielder of the hammer. Personally I think hammers go well with volcanoes and fire, so that's where I went with it.

Amen City Chronicles is also a name with a somewhat convoluted history. It started with a comic idea for a character named Angela which I came up with in the 90s. Later I took this idea and I was going to revamp it into some sort of an "extreme" book and make it part of a trilogy of rather blasphemious books, called the "Amen Trilogy". Well, I dropped the whole idea, cut out most of things that were put in there for shock value only and forgot about the whole thing. In a later revamp of Angela (under a new name) I moved the action to a city named "Amen City".

When I started working on Din Krakatau, I tied it to the Angela thing and several other projects, so it made sense to call the whole series "Amen City Chronicles" (which is what I'll be using for the restarted Din Krakatau, whenever I get around to redoing the art in b&w).

I was pretty proud of the title 'Dying to Live'. It started with wanting to draw a horror-comedy comic, and I spent about 2 minutes trying to come up with a title. I figured the characters would be college students who'd been turned into monsters, but wanted to be human again...so they wanted to live again...'to live', right there...then there's the fact that they're undead...'Dying to Live'. Play on words, perfect title.

In the case of Cricket's Creature I decided to name the mute alien after a toy poodle I met named "Creature," I later decided to name the protagonist "Cricket" for no real reason-- I saw an episode of the Goosebumps TV series with a character named Cricket and I thought that it was an interesting name. When trying to think of a title I liked the alliteration of Cricket and Creature so I came up with "Cricket's Creature."
In the case of Arbitrary Comix I just wanted to a place to put all the stuff that was either too short to have an entire comic devoted to it or doodles that I never bothered to explore any further. That said I expected it to feel random and disjointed but I didn't want "random" in the title so I chose a word that meant something similar and went with "arbitrary."

The title of 'Schizophrenia Bloom' was based on a lyrics of "Jelena" from The Gathering. In particular, this:

Far and wide she'll gaze
Upon the flowers bloom
Jaded, her mind in a daze
From the medicine gloom

Love that song.

**

Arachnid Goddess' name was something of a reluctant decision that I decided to simply jump into cold water for after much hesitation. Honestly, a strong front runner was once 'Giant Cave Spider Story', sort of jesting at the game of a similar name. I also considered 'Giant Cave Spider Zygiella', this one a poke an anime naming conventions, but ultimately both were too corny for what I sought to do.

Aurora Borealis
"White noise" is meh, I thought... too typical and sounds too close to "white power" so I scrapped that.

Funny, when I hear the phrase "white noise" I think of a dreadfully numbing Michael Keaton horror film, not white power.

This from my comic's intro:

inro
"Pinky" is a nickname, referring of course to the hair of the main character (dyed). The "TA" is the initials of her name (yet to be revealed), also an obvious joke on what the comic might first seem to be about and what I like drawing: Tits and Ass (or "Arse" as I prefer to say it).

Her name is Tatyana Anova. It was revealed in the comic a while ago.
I like "TA" because it's ambiguous too. It's not "T&A", it's just "TA". That could mean anything.

"Pink TA" is short and fairly catchy, so it's a decent enough name.

The spin-off was supposed to be a sexy comedy... So "Pink Skin" was the perfect catchy title, that related nicely to the comic :)

The working title for Shades was "Spirit of Britain" because that more or less summarises the main theme of the comic. However, I always felt it was too long for an action title and too corny to be taken seriously.

While I was writing the script, therefore, I'd just keep writing down lots and lots of different titles. Every week, it seemed, I would have a different favourite. When I brought an artist on board, I continued to invent different titles. I hoped he might help me to choose one (by now I had lists and lists of them!) but he actually liked the "Spirit of Britain" idea, so I was no further forward!

Finally, we reached the point where I was ready to start posting pages online and it just so happened that Shades was my favourite for that week! The word has a number of layers of relevance to the story. It hints at the fact that seeing things in "shades of grey" (and the application of good old British common sense!) is preferable to dogmatic extremism, it's an archaic word for spirits (which have an important role to play in the story) and it describes the central characters (who, when we first meet them, are shadows of their former selves).

My second favourite title was "The Past Casts a Long Shadow" which I abandoned simply because of the length. I still like that one because it describes the effect of history on a nation's future and, at a personal level, the effect that past experiences can have on our present lives. I may still use that as a subtitle but, for now at least, Shades it is!

DAJB
My second favourite title was "The Past Casts a Long Shadow" which I abandoned simply because of the length. I still like that one because it describes the effect of history on a nation's future and, at a personal level, the effect that past experiences can have on our present lives.

Man, the trick there is shortening the thing to the essence.

You could have "Past shadows" or "Shadow-past" or "Long Shadow". All of those sound like comics I'd check out :)

ozoneocean

DAJB
My second favourite title was "The Past Casts a Long Shadow" which I abandoned simply because of the length. I still like that one because it describes the effect of history on a nation's future and, at a personal level, the effect that past experiences can have on our present lives.

Man, the trick there is shortening the thing to the essence.

I did. I shortened it to "Shades"!
;-)

Sort of, but single word shortenings like that are different. It's strange, but true. :)

For example: the tagline in my ad is "sexy war", which has a very different feeling to either "war" or "sexy" on their own.

Wolf: Well, when I was thinking about the title I already knew this was a quasi-fantasy,in that it turned lycanthropy into a medical condition. So I didn't want to put Lycanthropes or Lycanthropy as a main title as I felt it would, in the end, be misleading (there are no werewolves in Wolf). I still did want the werewolf slant/ feel to it though, only more down to earth. Hence, the feral mark of a wolf. Hence, Wolf.

In Session: That's easy, it's a strip about happenings mainly before, during or after class, never in the playground. Hence, from the expression 'class is in session', came the title, In Session.

Sanctuary: This is of my favourite type of titles- Sanctuary denotes the two hubs/ elements the characters revolve around: the hi tech plant where everyone works more or less like drones (yes, sex is work there, among other things) and the natural shelter our hero is about to meet when he gets the motivation to break away. Hence it's about Sanctuaries and the true meaning of Sanctuary.

And lastly Coven, which is not yet begun, but the story is already typed out: It's about modern witch Covens. Mainly. Hee hee! But it is also about the concept of who is 'Coven', as in, part of the same 'good guy' team. It isn't always those that seem so. :)

Thur and Viera are the names of the land where the action takes place.

I never thought that the TA in Pinky TA meant anything else other than female anatomy...

Edbang, my co-artist/ co-author, came up with the title FIGHT. When I first came up with the general concept for the story, I had zero idea on what to name it. The story was an open-ended journey, completely freeform, that we made up month after month based on random phrases.

http://www.drunkduck.com/FIGHT/index.php?p=258423

I was wracking my brains for a title, while it was staring at us right in the face. Ed saw it first. Genius.

I actually came up with the idea and title while browsing the internet one day while bored. I came across one of those geeky forums where they ask ridiculous questions and people have a zillion answers it seems.

Well one of the questions was "Who would win in a fight between a pack of Bears VS. a horde of zombies?" I actually didn't read any of the responses because I really wasn't that interested. (And in those geek forums they have a tendency to get WAY to technical... about ridiculous questions.)

But a few days later I was going through my sketchbooks and found a Bear character that I'd designed awhile ago, but just didn't know what to do with him. (LightBulb!) I thought, this might be so ridiculous it could actually work. I obviously expounded on the original idea (maybe a little too much :))

So I went with Bear VS. Zombies, because I didn't really want to beat around the bush as to what the comic was about. Pretty straightforward title.

Some people have recently complained that Bear hasn't been in the book in awhile, and it's call BEAR VS. Zombies. Well he isn't the only character, but as a whole, the story mainly is his... So don't fret.

"Ever Hollow" originally started out named "Hollow Hill Manor"

I named it after the manor that the main character lived in. "Hollow" was chosen as the family name. it was also the name of the hill the manor was built on because the hill itself was hollow/empty. so there was allot of play using the word "hollow" and where it was significant to the setting.

when I redid the comic (i.e. rewrote the whole thing from scrap) I knew I had to rename it because the manor no longer played such a huge key part in the story. but I still wanted the word "hollow" in the title regardless.

I played with it until I had three choices that I liked:

"The Hollow"
"Forever Hollow"
and "Ever Hollow"

the first sounded a little too simple. and it sounded like the comic might have been based off of "sleepy hollow" or something that might throw the readers off.

the second one wasn't too good either because it carried a high sense of "goth" or "emo" weighing on it which isn't true at all.

the third was the best choice because not only did it carry the nature of the main character's plot and story, but it sounded interesting enough that a reader might very well check it out just to see what it was about.

at least that was how I went about choosing the title in the end. thus "Ever Hollow" was officially named. and I am proud to own it :D

Well. It actually took me a while to come up with the name, Ryu's Krew.

I was sitting at home, just scrapped what would have been a very big project for me. Which dealt with my then current version of my character, Ryu's (who was indeed a hedgewolf. oh the originality) past. Because I had made a comic strip of him for almost a year at that time, and I felt it was necessary to explain how he got there, etc etc.

I scrapped it because it was very terrible. Maybe even terrible enough to make your eyes bleed.

AND anyway, so I sat down, created two new characters, and had the setting take place in the future.

There originally was 4 characters, to Ryu's Krew, but I scratched one of them because it was a terrible knock-off of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. And anyway, so I had the characters, and I had to play around with words.

Eventually, it got to be Ryu's Crew. But I hated the C, it just didn't work. So, as clever as I thought I was, I substituted a K in for the C.
And thus, Ryu's Krew was born.

The end.

Rudolph is the main character's name and I wanted my username to be the same as the comic but Rudolph was taken so I changed it to an F. His name is still spelled Rudolph in the comic. The title also refers to the mess up Cham makes with the reindeer's name calling it Adolf.