Vol. 64 No. 2 (2016)
Article

Aliens Are Just Like Us: Personal Names in The Legion of Super-Heroes

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  • Laurel Sutton
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00277738.2016.1159446

Published 2016-04-02

Copyright (c) 2016 American Name Society

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Names created for alien comic-book characters in the 1960s provide an insight into cultural naming norms of the time; personal names had to be structurally familiar, so that readers could relate to them, yet different enough to seem other-worldly and/or futuristic. This analysis focuses on the personal names of The Legion of Super-Heroes, a team of super-powered teenagers from the thirty-first century. Their invented names conform sharply to English-speaking US American norms in terms of gender marking through syllable count and phonetic choice. The names of the future are very much like those of mid-twentieth-century American comic-book readers.

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