The Stealthiest of Puns

Ever run across the Stealth Pun entry on TV Tropes? It’s mostly something where writers get to feel clever by inserting jokes into their work that they don’t explicitly call attention to, often in the form of sleazy puns or references. One example listed on the page is from the old Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series where the character Oz–who is a werewolf–habitually wears a sheepskin jacket. Making him a… well, you get the idea…

Well it wasn’t too long ago that I realized I’d crafted a pun so stealthy even I didn’t realize it until it was more or less too late. For many years we’d been intending to introduce a traveling doctor and their bodyguard, with the bodyguard role eventually fleshing out into a Native American, and the name of that Native American kept coming to me as “Whitecloud.” There were times I would go out and research looking for alternatives but nothing just seemed to fit quite as well, and so the name persisted and persisted until finally, the character was introduced. But she wasn’t introduced by name right away. We decided to leave the readers in a bit of suspense as we brought Issue 17 to a close with the newcomer raining down tear gas to drive off a Huachuca charge.

Somewhere in our in-between issues break as I was looking at Dawn’s art for that sequence for the dozenth time or so, a realization hit me so suddenly that I let out an audible groan. The mysterious Whitecloud’s first appearance in the comic had featured her unleashing…

…a white cloud.

I had without any conscious intent stealth punned myself.

Honestly though, with her name still unrevealed at that point I could have changed it, so the fact that I did not do that probably says even more than anything my subconscious may have done.

Well played, me.