Title Drop/Comic Books

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Three of the Sin City books' ("A Dame to Kill For," "The Big Fat Kill," and "That Yellow Bastard") titles occur in either dialogue or narration. The film adaptation also works in the first story's retroactive title, "The Hard Goodbye,".
  • In DC Comics' new weekly series Trinity, every story (there's two per issue) is named for a snippet of dialogue.
    • Since "Trinity", while it refers to the main characters, isn't an official team name, does its repeated use qualify as well?
  • Marvel Adventures: Iron Man # 6 has the phrase "Destructive Reentry" used twice. It's a Meaningful Title, considering the issue.
  • The first big Spider-Man event of the Brand New Day era made sneaky use of this trope. It had what sounded like a pretty typical comic title until Norman Osborn dropped it in-story:

Osborn: For every life you save...there's a million new ways to die.

  • Issue 24 of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead. It gets a double-page spread to itself, and then another page when it's repeated.

Rick: It's obvious now that I'm the only sane one here! We already are savages, Tyreese. You especially! The second we put a bullet in the head of one of these undead monsters -- the moment one of us drives a hammer into one of their faces -- or cut a head off. We become what we are! And that's just it. That's what this comes down to. You people don't know what we are. We're surrounded by the dead. We're among them -- and when we finally give up we become them! We're living on borrowed time here. Every minute of our life is minute we steal from them! You see them out there. You know that when we die -- we become them. You think we hide behind walls to protect us from the walking dead! Don't you get it!?
Rick: We are the walking dead!
Rick: We are the walking dead.

  • Birds of Prey doesn't get a Title Drop until issue #86, when Lady Blackhawk suggests that it might be a fitting name for the team. It is immediately rejected by everybody else on the team.
  • In one issue of the Sonic X comic book, Sonic was abducted by the Society for Observing and Neutralizing Interdimensional Creatures and Xenomorphs. Guess what the acronym for that is.
  • Watchmen almost does this with the phrase "Who Watches the Watchmen?" but the graffiti is never shown completely.
    • In The Movie, "Watchmen" is the name of the alliance. However, the graffiti still remains.
    • Ozymandias mentions that JFK had part of a speech he intended to give in Dallas that read "We in this country, in this generation, are by destiny rather than choice, the watchmen on the walls of world freedom." Unfortunately, he was assassinated (possibly by the Comedian), by those Ozymandias described as on "the walls of world tyranny," before he could deliver it.
  • Astonishing X-Men had something of an example, with Cyclops saying that the team had to "astonish" the public if they were ever to be trusted again.

Kitty: Disapponted, Miss Frost?
Emma: Astonished, Miss Pryde.

  • Spider Jerusalem describes The Word as a "great Transmetropolitan newspaper". This is the only mention of the series' title.
  • From the 1989 James Bond comic Permission to Die.

Q: Do be careful, 007. Her Majesty may have granted you a license to kill, but that doesn't give you permission to die.