Pun names: how V.I.L.E. crooks get their names
Carmen's gang trades heavily in names that are jokes if you say them out loud.
Read enough V.I.L.E. dossiers and a pattern emerges: a lot of the names are puns, and the manuals often build the character’s whole gimmick around the joke.
Just in case, mollycoddled
Where in Time (1989) leans hardest on the trick, and its manual leans into the joke by giving each pun a matching occupation. Justin Case is a lawyer who specialises in pre-need lawsuits — just in case. Molly Coddle is a nanny who mollycoddles her charges. Ernest Endeavor sells cellos door to door as an earnest endeavour. Gene Yuss, purveyor of dehydrated water, is a play on “genius.” Nosmo King — read the name aloud and it becomes “no smoking.” Russ T. Hinge is, fittingly, a rusty hinge of a safecracker. Sybil Servant, a former Bureau of Standards employee, is a pun on “civil servant.” Sharon Sharalike drives a welcome wagon named for “share and share alike.” Earl E. Bird runs a worm ranch as an early bird would. “Auntie” Bellum, the die-hard Southerner, puns on “antebellum.” Even Kari Meback’s name and her alias line up: “carry me back” echoes the old song title, and her dossier nicknames her “The Virginia Creeper.”
The World and Deluxe gang
The geographic games play the same game more sparingly. In the Deluxe Edition roster, Sam O’Nella’s sandwich-booth business, “Sam O’Nella Heroes,” reads straight through as “salmonella.” Yul B. Sorry, the gang’s motorcycle-riding messenger, warns you of his own name every time someone says it aloud. Even the 1986 U.S.A. roster seems to keep the habit going in names like Polly Esther Fabrique, though without a surviving manual to confirm a joke-matching occupation the way Time 1989 does, that one has to stay a guess rather than a documented fact.
Not every name gives up its joke
Plenty of crooks in the series read as straightforward character names rather than puns — Ihor Ihorovitch, Katherine “Boom-Boom” Drib and Scar Graynolt among them — a reminder that the writers mixed wordplay with plain invented names rather than running the joke into the ground on every single dossier. The pattern says something about who was writing these manuals: game-manual copy doubling as a stand-up routine, aimed as much at the parent reading over a kid’s shoulder as at the kid working the case.