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I'm still a bit hazy, but I feel like blathering about something, so here it is.
I sometimes talk about "concept flail" in my reviews, but I rarely bother to define it, and I don't think it's actually part of the normal lexicon.
Basically, there exist characters out there who are too important to just dump, but who lack a clearly defined hook that lets people write them for more than the occasional cameo. They may have been created as gimmicks and caught on, or be somewhat bland Silver Age legacies no one's quite sure how to use as anything but a pale copy of someone else.
This leads to repeated attempts to give the character some sort of pizazz that flame out after the current creator leaves (or even before that!), and the next creator to come along tries something totally different, often jettisonning or at least ignoring the previous stuff. Eventually, you get a total mess where the character is distinctive only for having done everything once and excelled at nothing.
This is concept flail. People flailing about, trying to tweak the concept, but only succeeding at waving their arms around and shouting incoherently. Metaphorically speaking.
Power Girl is a good example of concept flail. Who here remembers her software company? How about the diet soda thing? And her phase where she was vulnerable to unworked natural materials? Being Kal-L's cousin, Arion's granddaughter, adrift without an origin, and then Kal-L's cousin again? She is, at her root, a redundant copy of a derivative, the Earth-2 Supergirl. Two steps removed from the core idea. Every attempt to "fix" her has had to deal with that fact, and it never seems to stick for very long. Making her owner of a software company, for instance, tried to tie into the then-new computer craze in the 80s (the same thing that gave us the forgettable Bug and Byte villains, or Megatak the computer game villain). Post-Crisis, she couldn't be from Earth-2 anymore, and Arion was popular among some writers, so she got made magical instead. And so forth. The recent Classified story about her pretty much wallowed in her concept flail before effectively giving up and saying "She's the Earth-2 Supergirl, you can forget about the last 20 years or so of changes".
But she sticks around because someone decided to put a window in her costume and played up the cheesecake.
I sometimes talk about "concept flail" in my reviews, but I rarely bother to define it, and I don't think it's actually part of the normal lexicon.
Basically, there exist characters out there who are too important to just dump, but who lack a clearly defined hook that lets people write them for more than the occasional cameo. They may have been created as gimmicks and caught on, or be somewhat bland Silver Age legacies no one's quite sure how to use as anything but a pale copy of someone else.
This leads to repeated attempts to give the character some sort of pizazz that flame out after the current creator leaves (or even before that!), and the next creator to come along tries something totally different, often jettisonning or at least ignoring the previous stuff. Eventually, you get a total mess where the character is distinctive only for having done everything once and excelled at nothing.
This is concept flail. People flailing about, trying to tweak the concept, but only succeeding at waving their arms around and shouting incoherently. Metaphorically speaking.
Power Girl is a good example of concept flail. Who here remembers her software company? How about the diet soda thing? And her phase where she was vulnerable to unworked natural materials? Being Kal-L's cousin, Arion's granddaughter, adrift without an origin, and then Kal-L's cousin again? She is, at her root, a redundant copy of a derivative, the Earth-2 Supergirl. Two steps removed from the core idea. Every attempt to "fix" her has had to deal with that fact, and it never seems to stick for very long. Making her owner of a software company, for instance, tried to tie into the then-new computer craze in the 80s (the same thing that gave us the forgettable Bug and Byte villains, or Megatak the computer game villain). Post-Crisis, she couldn't be from Earth-2 anymore, and Arion was popular among some writers, so she got made magical instead. And so forth. The recent Classified story about her pretty much wallowed in her concept flail before effectively giving up and saying "She's the Earth-2 Supergirl, you can forget about the last 20 years or so of changes".
But she sticks around because someone decided to put a window in her costume and played up the cheesecake.
