Tuesday, July 09, 2019

why "Voldemort" sounds familiar

During a brief in-office reverie (one of many such reveries, to be sure), I thought back to a stupid character I had created for an old Superforce comic I had written and drawn back in the late 1980s. The character was nothing more than a cynical plot device, created before I even knew the phrase "cynical plot device." His sole purpose was to revive characters that had been killed off in previous installments of my poorly drawn and written story. He dressed in a brown Jedi-ish cloak like Obi-wan Kenobi, so of course his first name was Alec, as in Alec Guinness. His last name, denoting his ability to resurrect dead people, was Levdemor, taken from the French for "lift/raise from death." (I know more French now than I did back then, so I know a more proper way to express the concept of "raise the dead" would be verbs like réanimer or ressusciter. In fantasy settings, the French term is réanimation morbide.)

I had forgotten about this character by the time I began reading JK Rowling's Harry Potter series in the early 2000s, but for some reason, her Voldemort ("fly/flee from death") sounded familiar to me. Maybe I should sue for telepathic theft.



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