Thread 150054630

>Random side character shows up without fanfare well into an established story's run, even around the halfway point.
>Things work out so well that they immediately become an irreplaceable core cast member, to the point that it feels weird to go back and remember there was a time where they weren't around, like prehistory.
You just love to see it.

How many characters introduced late do you know that achieve this organically?

>>150054630 (OP)
And it happened again with professor Calculus.

>>150054630 (OP)
I can only think of one example

>>150054630 (OP)
>Wait how do we keep using the captain?
>Just make every story involve a boat or a ship in some way.

Also

>>150054826
Toph fails to meet several important parts of OP's description.
>doesn't appear "without fanfare", the whole episode was just for her and Aang even got a Dagobah vision about her earlier that season
>Things didn't "work out so well they made Toph a core cast member", she was created to be part of the Gaang
Subjectively, it's easy for me to remember that she disrupted an established group dynamic. The episodes before Toph was introduced are less like prehistory and more like B.C./A.D. to me.

What happened with the captain is more like if the writers decided they enjoyed writing June so much they found ways to have her involved in a bunch of episodes instead of just two. (I wonder if maybe that's what happened with Suki, desu)

>>150055415
Suki would fit the mold, but sadly fell short because by the time she became a core member we were 2 steps away from the finale, so she ended up not being an iconic member but a sign of the endgame.

>>150054630 (OP)
Does Popeye count or is it a step too far to take over the strip from the established stars?

>>150055600
Popeye is a perfect example. The comic he usurped had been ongoing for a whole decade before he showed up and stole the show. He was a bit TOO successful, sure, but he fits the bill. It's not like he was shoved down people's throats, he took the lead role by popular demand.

In a way, you could say the same happened with Garfield, though it would depend on whether you could call Jon's original comic strip "established" with a measly 2 year run.

>>150054753
How is that hat not cutting off his circulation?

Good and old Charlie Brown

>>150057968
Microcephaly

>>150054630 (OP)

Opus in Bloom County.

>>150055600
>>150055814

Even if you don't count Popeye, Thimble Theatre/Popeye has a bunch of other characters that count.

Wimpy was a crooked referee that the audience instantly fell in love with and wound up being Popeye's best friend, Bluto was originally a one story villain that the cartoons used as a rival, and so on.

Pretty much the only Popeye character your average person would name that was there from the start is Olive and I bet a lot of people would assume that Popeye predates her if you asked who was created first.

Also Scrooge McDuck worked along the same lines as Popeye; originally created just as a plot device for a story thirteen years after Donald was introduced and wound up being so well received that he was brought back.

>>150055814
Garfield? I thought the strip was always called Garfield

>>150054994
I love how they gave Haddock an entire mansion and additional butler character just to have a reason to keep him on land and normalize him being away from the sea. I don't even remember if Tintin had apartment anymore after that

>>150058160
He's just Snoopy's owner in the Snoopy comic. It was always named "Snoopy" here.

>>150054630 (OP)
Ghidorah

>>150059636
the strip was named after and focused on Jon at first. once syndicated, garfield took off, and it was all eyes on him going forward

>>150054630 (OP)
Alot of Batman and Superman staples fall into that category. Of DC's trinity the only one who had a fully fleshed out rogues gallery was Wonder Woman, which is ironic, because DC's done her dirty for nigh 30 years now

>>150059692
Are you drunk, Anon?

>>150056176
Best Disney Character EVER

>>150054630 (OP)
>>150055814
>>150056176
>Haddock
>Popeye
>Donald
Wait, why the fuck is it always sailors?

>>150061407
Anon just cracked the code to prevent Poochies. Sorry but I can't let you live after this.

>>150054630 (OP)
Popeye.

>>150059479
Ham Gravy, alas we hardly knew ye.

>>150054630 (OP)
Dick Grayson Robin.

>>150061407
>>150062270
Dog bad.
Sailor Good.

>>150062826
Yes.

>>150061407
>>150062826
Donald, Popeye and Haddock are all supremely based as well. Now I want to see them team up on a sailing adventure.

>>150062942
Haddock speaks with an outrageous exaggerated french accent. He will only speak normally to fine ladies or when things are really, really bad.

>Holy fucking shit, a talking duck!
Once per episode.

>>150054630 (OP)
>How many characters introduced late do you know that achieve this organically?
Ruby summeres and layla miller from x-factor comicbook series.

>>150062942
Already crafted a meeting between Popeye and Haddock
>Crowded port in America, Tintin, Snowy and Haddock on the trail of the Almighty McGuffin
>Crate falls on Haddocks foot
>"Billions of Blistering Blue Barnacles!!!"
>Halfway across port, Popeye, with Wimpy eating a burger, hears the cussing
>"Was that what I 'eard?"
>Popeye goes off to look, and spots Haddock complaining to Tintin
>"WELL, BLOW ME DOWN!"
>Haddock turns round, shock and joy on his face
>"I don't believe it! POPEYE THE SAILOR!"
>"I knews it be you, Ol' Cap'n Haddock!"
>After embracing each other, (And almost crushing Haddock) the captain introduces Popeye to Tintin
>"After I just made captain, Popeye here was the best sailor I had working for me. Strong as an ox and loyal as a dog!"
>Snowy barks at this
>"They day he left my ship, I was so distraught, I took to drink!"
>"Took to it? You be drinking when I'd foist joins'd you! Arf arf!"

Then we get into wild adventures, with Rastapopoulos teaming up with Bluto, and Thompson and Thomson having to pay Wimpy's food bills.
>"We're fools for taking in this glutton's debts!"
>"To be more precise, he's taken us for fools!"

>>150063169
Pure kino, this is what the public domain was made for.

>>150055562
>Suki would fit the mold,
No. No she wouldn't. I know Avatar fags have to force Avatar into everything but just no.

>>150063169
>>150064662
Public domain, you say?
Here's your plot then. It even fits the naval theme.

wolverine used to be a one shot Hulk villain.

>>150054994
Does that really count?

>>150054630 (OP)
>an OC created just to be a Joker minion
>literally is one of the most important characters in the mythos now for better and for worse.

>>150054630 (OP)
Pretty much several of the Baby sibling characters as 3 of them seem to coincidentally be born the same year (which was 1998) and they include Dil from Rugrats (shown here), Bea from the British Dennis the Menace and Zoey from the French comic series, Titeuf.

>>150066381
i don't think Dil fits the bill, they spent a whole movie introducing him. this is about characters who just came out of nowhere or were never planned to be important becoming important.

Bibbo Bibowski was just some guy in a bar.... and incidentally also a sailor. heh.

>>150066102
>>150066381
No and no. This isn't complicated.

>>150066568
I think Harley fits. She was just a secondary character in of of many Batman TV shows decades into Batman's history, but blew up so hard she got canonized in the comics and became a permanent fixture in the batman mythos.

>>150054630 (OP)
Dogmatix doesn't appear until the 5th Asterix book (A & the banquet) but is in every story after that.

>>150062826
Kek

I've been reading Roy Crane's adventure strip Wash Tubbs recently, and it began as the adventures of a perpetually horny manlet Wash who wants to travel the world and fuck women. In one of his adventures he meets a sidekick adventurer named Captain Easy and he ends up being the muscle who does all the heavy lifting and in short order Wash becomes the sidekick. Eventually the Sunday's were exclusively about Captain Easy while the dailies were their adventures together.

>>150067621
I am pretty fond of this sex-crazed clown; really fun strip from the 20s and 30s. By the end if what I read is true the big muscle guy just takes over. No fun.

>>150059996
I don't think he counts. He's a villain for Godzilla to fight besides GMK, he was introduced relatively early into the franchise's history (10 years and 5 films in), and there's no central core cast of characters and kaiju the series focuses on besides Godzilla himself. Unless you mean him being part of Toho's Big Five, but that's more meta than anything

>>150056176
Happened again with Scrooge McDuck, too!

He was originally just gonna be a one shot, but then Carl Barks realized a rich uncle would be a useful device to send Donald on plenty of adventures

How randomly

>>150063169
>>150064662
Beautiful work. I wish I could work with anons like you on bigger projects.

>>150062942
That'd be so awesome

>>150067890
It took a while for Scrooge to become the character that became so loved. For a while he was a rich asshole who only had money to get what he wanted.

>>150054630 (OP)

A more extreme version is how Barney Google had been running as a strip for fifteen years when Snuffy Smith was introduced. Five years later, Google was pretty much reduced to a side character and was gone from the series by 1954 though his name never left the title.

Google basically only appeared in a strip named after him every other decade or so for the following seventy years.

never heard of these

Nancy took over the strip, which was originally titled Fritzi Ritz. better known to us as Aunt Fritzi

>>150066102
Harley was literally only created to be a one-off minion who pushes a fake cake holding Joker into a room, but Timm and Dini took a liking to her and kept her around in Joker's regular employ. I think it was when they sat down and hammered out her origin story for the Mad Love comic that they knew she was here to stay.

>>150073469
I notice from this threat that a LOT of comic strips suffer from this phenomenon. What makes it so that the author's original pitch peters out and dies while some some side character made by the very same author becomes immortal? You'd think all the extra effort put into the true protagonist would help them avoid this fate.

>>150066706
She was a significant character with a regular speaking role primarily made to assist one of the main villains. She was made to be as she was from the start and was not an evolved extra.

>>150063169
You nailed T&T's style of spooneristic repetition.

>>150073469
same thing happened with dagwood despite blondie being the face of the strip

>>150072822
liar

>>150062880
OG Donald was so fucking based.

>>150062880
>Donald canonically acting like Dolan

>>150055562
Suki has this nasty feel of a self insert girlboss that is there so she can be best at everything and have others keep fawning over how cool she is.

>>150071695
Scrooge's source of wealth wasn't even the number one dime but a magical hourglass in one story.

>>150071695
For the most part he still is that in Euro Comics. Americans have skewed idea of who Scrooge is through Ducktales

>>150063003
Does he really speak with an exaggerated french accent in the original belgian comics? I know he's been potrayed in english media with a english or scottish accent (sans nelvana cartoon which is just a gruff north american sailor accent). Is it written in a way where if we were to write someone with an exaggerated southern accent we'd have them say something like 'howdy yall, ya fixin to head down by the crick?'

>>150076459
NTA but not really thanks to Don Rosa’s comics that made Scrooge much more likeable

>>150063169
Blessed post, I love this shit.

>>150076474
No, Tintin and the main cast all speak in a very "standard" french dialect without any region-specific expressions.

Tintin is unambiguously supposed to be Belgian, and I think the Thom(p)sons as well, but I don't know if the other characters have specific nationalities. I always thought of Haddock as being French and Calculus being Swiss but I'm not sure where I got that from.

>>150071695
Yeah, I think it's really when Barks started including references to the adventures of his youth that he became a more compelling character

>>150054630 (OP)
Butters has technically been in the show since the first episode as a background character, but he was only ever properly introduced in season 3. These days he's one of the three major characters than most episode plots revolve around.

>>150061407
Navel Superiority

>>150077112
>Calculus being Swiss
Well, he was inspired by August Piccard, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Piccard so that makes sense.
Haddock's castle, Marlinspike, is inspired by a castle in France (although the real-life equivalent is significantly bigger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlinspike_Hall so that also makes sense.
Plus, he is:
1- French-speaking
2- A captain
3- From a long family line of captains
So, although Belgium has an access to the sea, it is within the Flanders region, which is not primarily French-speaking. And Haddock's ancestor is called "François De Hadoque": "De" means "from", it indicates a French noble lineage. If it was a Dutch name it would be "Van". Plus, the first name "François" speaks for itself.
So Haddock is either French, or of French origins.

>>150077144
Interesting typo.

>>150076416
???
She was, at worst, part of babby's first girl power episode for a kid show. If you want to see a character where they really hammer you in the head with that message and who has everyone sucking them off, there's Katara right there.

>>150078365
>Interesting typo.
Sleep deprivation is a hell of a drug, it makes many typos possible.

>>150073680
I think it's because the side character is made with a gimmick in mind, and the gimmick just happens to work better than whatever the main character is doing.

When it comes to love interests, Mary Jane is a case of this. She had a weird buildup to who she is, but Stan Lee, Ditko, and Romita (After he replaced Ditko as the artist) were doing that as a joke, and the real love interest was going to be Gwen. But Gwen was too derivative of Betty and (specially) Liz, while Mary Jane was a free spirit who had a more defined personality outside of Peter, and was more interested in playing around and not taking things seriously, which made her fun to read. So she took over as the main love interest to the point Conway felt Gwen was disposable.

>>150078823
Nancy specifically was created by Bushmiller after inheriting the Fritzi strip from Larry Whittington, so not only was Nancy a surprise takeover character she was also someone else's idea entirely and not the creation of the original creator

>>150078945
Also she looked funny, like a gremlin. I imagine that stuck to people's minds.
You could argue that unique eye-catching designs contribute to this phenomenon, like Popeye's fat forearms and pipe.

>>150054630 (OP)
Mean Machine Angel from Judge Dredd. Was literally just brought back from death with no explanation and continued to be used as a villain for decades and is even in the Stallone movie.

How often does this happen?

>>150080548
How the hell are bots getting around the captcha? Hiromoot please fix

That's was random

>>150059636
Tintin lives in random apartments early on but he moves in with the Captain after he inherits the mansion

>>150079585
He''s simple and very funny. A great addition to most stories.

>>150076474
In a crossover fanfic with americans, I'd give him one to make him stand out.

>>150076827
Scrooge is likable after a while in Barks' work. He's cheap and greedy, but clever, daring, and willing to risk his life for his goals.