Can Mary Sues make for a successful comic?

[Pimpette]

How about that comic they made to advertise lasers?

They actually made a comic for that?
I never clicked it - I thought it was just whoring out comic characters to promote lasers or something.
But I don't think very hard.

[McDuffies]

Yeah it was like, a full comic in vein of Sore Thumbs, only even more pointless and forced. I read the first storyline or so, after which I decided that I'm too busy rearanging my cd's alphabetically to continue.

In other words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4wh_mc8hRE

[Rkolter]

I never read the comic, but boy did I salivate over the lasers. I dreamed of taking one with me to Six Flags and popping balloons with it*.

*No, not kids balloons, that's the wrong kind of evil.

[Turnsky]

I never read the comic, but boy did I salivate over the lasers. I dreamed of taking one with me to Six Flags and popping balloons with it*.

*No, not kids balloons, that's the wrong kind of evil.

ryan wants his frikken lasers!

[McDuffies]

Don't ya be popping my baloons.

[Wendybird]

Most of my encounters with the term "mary sue" have been in the realm of fanfiction - and yes, I have written a Harry Potter Mary Sue story. Don't throw eggs at me! I was young and silly! At least it wasn't romance - I inserted myself as a friend of Ginny's in the second book. Anyway - back on track.

My impression of the term, possibly because I know it in that context, has been associated with fanfiction in general, and female self-insertion as the romantic interest of the hero in particular. And this is a large portion of fan fiction with a long and persistent history. It dates back to some of the earliest female proto-geeks, who all imagined themselves as the one person who could turn Spock into a sentimental, quivering puddle of goo.

In my mind the major problem with the Mary Sue form is that a perfect/normal/preternaturally lucky character distorts the characters around them, ruining what was cool about those characters. In other words, what people like about Spock/Batman/Snape/the coolest guys ever is that they're untouchable, and if you go around saying you touched them it ruins the whole show.

So yeah, if your character doesn't do that she's fine, but isn't a mary sue as I know them.

[KWill]

In my mind the major problem with the Mary Sue form is that a perfect/normal/preternaturally lucky character distorts the characters around them, ruining what was cool about those characters. In other words, what people like about Spock/Batman/Snape/the coolest guys ever is that they're untouchable, and if you go around saying you touched them it ruins the whole show.

The distortion is a good point. I suppose that's what makes the difference between a Mary Sue and a Mary Poppins.

[Wendybird]

I like that. All the characters around Mary Poppins are meant to be distorted. It's like, you can have characters, or you can have caricatures, but it's hard to have both in the same story.

[McDuffies]

If we're talking about what the defining elements of Mary Sue are - seeing that Mary Sue is (at least the way I see it) a projection and wish fulfillement of the author, I don't think that it needs to be a perfect character or someone who always has things going for them. For many, going through unpleasant or even torturous circumstances is part of the fun. But there are two things that people rarely doubt about themselves and those are their intelligence and moral high ground. So I think that those are two things that Mary Sue always posesses: moral and intelectual superiority over other characters. Some geek will draw himself to be even worse geek, but he'll get the girl in the end because in his daydream, he is a good guy and the jock is a bad guy.

[Deathbringer]

All the characters i create are me in varying degrees anyway. Just usually more female, more German, or less restrained on Ebay