Two-Face: They actually let him keep it!
A Super Hero trope that originated in The Silver Age of Comic Books.
Way, way back in the campy Silver Age, superheroes usually had too much time on their hands. As did their readers. As such, the superhero should be able to waste time in the same kinds of hobbies as their readers did.
That's why we have so many superheroes who are into collecting. But, instead of collecting rocks or strains of alien herpes, they'll collect alien rocks and their enemies' evil weapons. These collections might be all over their base, have their own room in the base, or be only a modest trophy rack with all the keys to different cities they saved from destruction.
When the reader is treated to a view of their collectibles, the result is a Continuity Cavalcade of references to prior plots that often reaches into Scenery Porn territory. Having collectibles that appeared in previous issues is a good way of building the legend around a character, giving space for interesting plots and helps explain why exactly character has such a big Secret Base. Sometimes, it may serve as Chekhov's Boomerang, as the hero takes an old relic from his collection to defeat an enemy that has invaded the hero's lair. On the other hand, some writers just forget all about continuity and say, "Heroman goes to the room where he keeps a trillion of his old foes' super-trinkets," or something. In which case, the trophies are Noodle Implements and Cow Tools that leave the reader/viewer wondering: "How the heck did he get that?"
This might seem odd today, with the changes that both superheroes and the hobby of collecting have gone through. As superheroes started to be more relatable, they had too many problems on their hands to worry about their collections of MacGuffins all the time. And, as children (and, let's face it, adults) became more interested in collecting manufactured items such as Star Wars action figures or even comic books, the idea of having a never-ending collection ceased to exist for those of us who aren't filthy rich.
Also, superheroes who put too much thought into their collections began to look like a bunch of overgrown children.
Superheroes also have a thing for making shrines to people: Photos of enemies, statues of friends and Love Interests, the chattel that belonged to their old sidekicks, et cetera. This might be a bit creepy to modern readers: "So, Superman, you really have a room in your fortress filled with depictions of your scantily clad cousin? Why, exactly?" But it makes sense when you consider that, comics being a visual medium - decades before the Decompressed Comic revolution - it was pretty hard to represent someone's feelings without resorting to clunky speeches like, "Jane is so beautiful! If only I could tell her how much she means to me! But I dare not...for a girl so lovely would never marry a lame man!"
For examples detailing the collecting exploits of more normal individuals see The Collector of the Strange. Compare Shrine to Self. Subtrope of Battle Trophy.
Examples
- Astro City:
- Subverted with Samaritan, who has "the Closet" (not that kind), a Phantom Zone that he uses only as storage space for the many awards and souvenirs that he receives, and which merely gather the extradimensional equivalent of dust.
- Played straight with the Trophy Room in Honor Guard's flying base.
- And the Furst Family seem to have a lot of supervillain knick-knacks lying around, but the number of trophies (compared to cans of evil or "gizmos-Augustus-wants-to-tinker-with-at-some-point") is anyone's guess.
- Ultiman in Big Bang Comics is headquartered out of the Secret Citadel, which is hidden in an active volcano. Being that it's based on the Fortress of Solitude, it's naturally packed to the gills with souvenirs, trophies, and just plain exhibits. As if the writer was going down the 'stock superhero hideout amenities' checklist, he's got (among other things) the shrunken lost city of Atlantis in a huge fishbowl, a giant dollar bill, and a rubber Apatosaurus.
- The DCU:
- Batman has his Batcave, with the iconic giant penny and the robot T. rex, souvenirs from early Golden Age adventures that have been depicted in the Batcave since those days, and all the bat-sidekicks' uniforms, and a Dalek.◊
- Many depictions of the Batcave show the T-Rex as part of a security system.
- The Bad Penny is also always depicted. Lampshaded by the Thing in the JLA/Avengers crossover. "Your idea o' small change, huh?"
Poison Ivy: So, Harv, what became of the giant penny?
Two-Face: They actually let him keep it! - In the animated series The Batman, the trophy room is started at the suggestion of Alfred, who proposes that if the public grows to like Batman, he could have a Batman museum, like the Flash has his.
- In Batman: The Animated Series, the trophy room has a shrine for Batman's childhood hero the Gray Ghost. This results in a neat Call-Back in Batman Beyond, when a villain infiltrates the Batcave and the first thing that (semi-retired) Bruce Wayne does is go get the Grey Ghost mask to protect his identity.
- The costumes of his sidekicks sometimes hold significance for Batman because, well, most of them have since either died or graduated from being sidekicks. Several versions of the trophy room have a separate shrine in memory of Jason Todd. In one comic, the password to enter this shrine was "Chili Dog", chili dogs being Jason's favourite junk food. Manly Tears time.
- There's one lovely moment in an old comic when Batman and Robin are going through their souvenirs with those unsettling Golden Age smiles, and we get the immortal line:
Robin: Gosh, Batman— remember this leather thong? It still has your teeth marks in it!
- A lot of the items also tend to be fully functional, as Inque found out when she infiltrated the Batcave and got a face-full of Mr. Freeze's ice gun.
- In The Batman Adventures, Dick Grayson reveals that the trophy collecting was his idea. He begged Batman to keep the iconic robot dinosaur. Initially, Batman refused, but the next morning, Robin found it waiting for him in the cave. After that, they started collecting trophies as a way for Dick to feel good about the things he did after he agreed to stop drawing attention to his accomplishments in civilian life. The comic ends with a grown-up Nightwing entering his new apartment in his own city of Bludhaven... to find the mechanical dinosaur waiting for him, with a note from Batman that it's to help him start his new trophy collection.
- Deconstructed in this Parody strip: Batman Hoarder.
- The giant penny is the most notorious part of the Batcave collection, because it's actually outlived the character who was responsible for its location, a one-shot villain called "The Penny Plunderer". Adaptations and later continuities of the comic instead tie its origin to Two-Face, a much longer-lasting villain with a coin theme.
- In the possible future displayed in the short story "Twenty-Seven", it's revealed that Batman ultimately decided that, to keep things manageable, each of his cloned Batmen must destroy the trophies they took during their 27-year lifespan as part of their fatally decommissioning themselves, so the new clone has a fresh lair to fill with their own trophies.
- Central City opened The Flash Museum in honor of their resident superhero.
- Green Arrow as well. He was, after all, a Batman rip-off, like many Golden Age superheroes.
- Most iterations of Justice League of America have a trophy room. This sometimes serves as a Chekhov's Gun, despite Batman making sure the trophies are harmless. During the time the first Green Arrow was dead, the second one used a collection of his father's original cheesy arrows to defeat the Key, a super-powerful villain. Being able to open portals to higher levels of reality doesn't quite help when you're still vulnerable to a boxing glove arrow to the face. In The Sandman (1989), Dr. Destiny's Materioptikon — stored in the League's trophy room after his defeat — turns out to be Dream's stolen Dreamstone, with some modifications. Fortunately, Martian Manhunter lets him take it.
- The Legion of Super-Heroes has a Hall of the Fallen, to honor all Legionnaires who have died in battle, especially Ferro Lad. That stays true often from reboot to reboot.
- Much like Doctor Strange, Madame Xanadu keeps minor demons sealed in mason jars in her shop, and assorted magical items and memorabilia she's collected across her long life. She's very miffed with John Constantine for stealing stuff from her, most notably a relic named the Wind's Egg.
- Superman:
- Superman's Fortress of Solitude has a zoo with animals from across the galaxy, shrines to his home planet, statues of his friends and enemies, a window to the Phantom Zone, toys and weapons from all around, and even (in All-Star Superman) the RMS Titanic. That is because Superman is a gigantic nerd, and this is why the world's richest nerd's house will look a lot like the Fortress of Solitude.
- When Supergirl arrives in Earth, Superman builds a new wing for her own trophies.
- Superman also gave his pal Jimmy Olsen a souvenir of each adventure (which Jimmy, naturally, keeps scrupulously organized and labeled). This was the focus of a story in Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen in which a criminal on the run corners Jimmy and orders him to provide some gizmo to help him escape the law.
- One story shows that Superman also collects various letters, not only from those he's helped, but also angry or sorrowful letters from those he couldn't save (or their families).
- In the Silver Age, Metropolis also features the Superman Museum, dedicated to their hero. It was probably the inspiration for the later Flash Museum. Unlike the Superman Museum, the Flash Museum was actually the focus of a number of stories and managed to stick around in Post-Crisis incarnations.
- There's also a "future" Superman Museum in several Legion of Super-Heroes continuities — with a holographic Jimmy Olsen as the tour guide.
- Superman's been in at least one Galactic Petting Zoo, and at least one version of Brainiac had the MO of "Collect all the knowledge, then destroy the originals so my copy's worth more".
- Wonder Woman (1987): For a very brief time in the '90s, Wonder Woman had the WonderDome, a weird living alien construct that hovered over Gateway City and of which her famed invisible jet was an extension; it served the same function as the Fortress of Solitude or the Batcave. It was unceremoniously dropped from her mythos and forgotten in the early '00s. Since then, the Themysciran Embassy in Manhattan has become her new home base/shrine to the gods/museum.
- Batman has his Batcave, with the iconic giant penny and the robot T. rex, souvenirs from early Golden Age adventures that have been depicted in the Batcave since those days, and all the bat-sidekicks' uniforms, and a Dalek.◊
- Judge Dredd: No, not Dredd himself, since he doesn't really take any of his past enmities personal enough to even consider collecting supervillain trophies. However, the Justice Department as a whole maintains the Black Museum, which houses mementos to some of the most infamous criminals they've faced. This includes Mean Machine Angel's robotic arm, Sov-Judge armor, the heart of serial killer PJ Maybe, the dimension globes of the Dark Judges, and the brain of mad Chief Judge Cal.
- Marvel Universe:
- The time-travelling villain Kang the Conqueror from The Avengers has a vast trophy room consisting of items (and in some cases, corpses) of various Marvel heroes and villains who he's defeated across the multiverse.
- Doctor Strange has a number of magical items which contain or seal away various mystical menaces. Unlike most other examples, he has a good reason for maintaining this collection - those things are too powerful to be allowed out in the world and too powerful to risk destroying. So the collection comes with the job of Sorcerer Supreme. This became plot-critical when he was forced to destroy all his artifacts to prevent another sorcerer from getting them and then had to spend a year re-sealing all the evils that had just been loosed. This can also kick off minor plots where one or more visitors to the Sanctum meddle with an item with predictably disastrous consequences.
- The Fantastic Four store the advanced technological wonders that they have collected over the years, along with assorted memorabilia, at the Baxter Building. The list has included Doctor Doom's time machine, a Skrull spaceship, Vibranium brass knuckles, pieces of Doctor Doom's armor and, for a short time, even Dr. Doom's comatose body. The Baxter Building is such a noted repository of super-science goodies that it acts as an attractive nuisance to villains whenever the Family is absent. And the perennial presence of Dr. Doom's time machine is so famous that raiding the Baxter is possibly the Marvel universe's most convenient way to start a time-travel adventure.
- In the future of the Maestro (an evil future version of the Incredible Hulk) from The Incredible Hulk: Future Imperfect, Rick Jones had a trophy room/reliquary full of mementos, including Captain America's shield, Spider-Man's web shooters, Nova's helmet, several Iron Man armors, Wolverine's indestructible skeleton, and the Silver Surfer's board.
- The famous Spider-Man story "The Kid Who Collected Spider-Man" (from Amazing Spider-Man #248) is about a young boy named Tim Hammond, who idolizes Spider-Man and has an extensive collection of newspaper articles and other artifacts of Spider-Man's career. Spider-Man visits the boy, tells him his origins and even unmasks himself in front of the kid. At the end of the story, it's revealed that Tim is suffering from leukemia and only has a few days left to live.
- Wolverine
- In "The Best There Is", Mister X's trophy room includes Han Solo frozen in carbonite.
- In Old Man Logan, the future president of the United States, the Red Skull, has his own trophy room full of items belonging to superheroes he and other supervillains killed.
- In "Wolverine Goes to Hell", Logan's trophy room in Madripoor includes the eyepatch from his Patch persona. Then the room gets destroyed.
- Both the Four and members of Planetary maintain large collections of the world's secrets, including mementos from dead superheroes and alien artifacts. As Mr. Snow observes when visiting a parallel earth "They killed an entire world so that they had somewhere to store their weapons."
- Discussed in PS238:
Ms. Kyle: Oh, yeah. We had a trophy room in our space station. It was the silliest thing I'd ever seen. Herschel tried to make it look like a museum, but I always thought it looked like someone had put the Twilight Technomancer's garage sale on the walls.
Ms. Oberon: Well, my class hung a bunch of Civil War swords on the walls. They brought them back from that... I don't know what to call it. A kidnapping arranged by a fellow student? - Alan Moore's Supreme had many trophies in his secret lair, as well as his mythopoetic zoo. A bit more humane than that kept by Superman, as there were only gateways to other dimensions, not cages. Of course, he had his own version of the Phantom Zone as well, Looking-Glass Land, where his greatest enemies are housed for the good of mankind.
- In Tomorrow Stories, Cobweb has the Vault of Voluptuousness, which contains souvenirs of all her cases, very few of which are SFW. Her version of Kandor, for instance is the Nano-Bordello.
- Tom Strong:
- Tom Strong's volcano base. An adventure has his enemies create a trophy room as well, all part of a Xanatos Gambit. His archenemy Paul Saveen claims it was intended as a tribute to Tom's success — and actually compares it to the trophy room of a hunter.
- Tom Strange's Strangelands in Terra Obscura. In America's Best Comics A-Z, we see a layout of the Strangelands drawn to resemble the one of the Batcave featured in Who's Who, which notes the special trophy room — including a robot T-Rex!
- Subverted and lampshaded in Wanted. During a guided tour of his lair, the Professor mentions that the supervillains were not supposed to keep trophies from the fallen heroes (to avoid any reminders that they ever existed). Played straight in that he still kept a certain tattered red cape on display.
- Watchmen:
- The Minutemen's headquarters contains at least a few trophies, including Moloch's solar mirror weapon and King Mob's ape mask. This is, of course, a Shout-Out.
- Nite Owl II also keeps a modest trophy case in his workshop full of mementoes from his career as a superhero. Then again, he is supposed to be kind of a dork.
- The Incredibles: As he is retired, Mr. Incredible has a rather smaller version in a room of his family home, mostly magazine cover articles and thank you notes from children he saved, but also a jar labelled "Bullets that bounced off me".
- Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Bruce Wayne stops to look at a glass case containing Robin's costume with "HAHAHA JOKE'S ON YOU BATMAN" spray-painted on it, hinting at the reasons why he Took a Level in Jerkass.
- In Die Another Day, Q has a collection of items from previous James Bond installments.
Bond: So... this is where they keep the old relics, then, eh?
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- In the Iron Man Films, Tony Stark's basement lab was already a trophy room in the first film, with his expensive cars and prior tech projects on display (and in use, in the case of "Dummy" the robot); it just got an upgrade when the lab became the primary workshop and display room for the Iron Man suits.
- Odin has one in the Thor series underneath Asgard in his vault. Throughout the movies, it houses an Infinity Gauntlet (although Hela deems it to be fake in Thor: Ragnarok), the tesseract, and Surtur's skull.
- This tendency became a major plot point of Sky High (2005). Here's a hint for all the superheroes out there: don't let your kid have access to your collection of confiscated supervillain weapons!
- Doc Savage's Fortress of Solitude, being the basis for Superman's, had many of the same characteristics. Including being the basis for a "supervillain steals superweapon from it" plot.
- Nightside Adventurer Club's decorations: the shadow of Leopard Man, alien skull, used as an ashtray, something from Black Lagoon, stuffed and mounted, the ever-burning demon head, a mummified hand of the original Grendel monster (donated by Beowulf himself) and other interesting stuff.
- Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain:
- Mech keeps a trophy room in his home.
- On the other side, Penny (a villain) decides to keep a magical cursed statue she stole as a trophy, largely since she doesn't know what else to do with it.
- In John Creasey's The Toff series, the titular character, Richard Rollison, kept a trophy wall of souvenirs of his cases.
- Doctor Who: Near the end of "The Unicorn and the Wasp", the Doctor goes through a box to find a book he wants to show to Donna, and picks up various trophies from previous adventures (including a piece from a Cyberman and the Carrionites' crystal ball) in the process.
- On Eerie, Indiana, Simon and Marshall keep souvenirs from their bizarre encounters in a cabinet in Marshall's attic. Each item is tagged at the end of its episode and locked away; only the two boys have keys.
- GoGo Sentai Boukenger: the Boukengers store all the precious they collect (and have to fight the various evil organisations and their mooks for to get them) in a special storage facility. Among these precious are items that actually belonged to their enemies to begin with, like the hearth and brain of the Gōdom God and Ryuuwon's helmet.
- A much smaller version of this, and in a somewhat non-superheroic sense, in Assassin's Creed III: as you progress through the game and defeat each of the Colonial Rite Templars, you acquire a memento from each one which is then displayed in the Davenport Homestead's main house.
- AC games in general tend to have downplayed examples, but the Tiber Island Hideout from Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood would have Renaissance paintings of major targets, paintings purchased from art merchants, all the weapons the player acquired (which could include a Bone Dagger of Romulus, the Sword of Altair and the Armor and Dagger of Brutus) and small models of the Da Vinci inventions from the side quests. And an ornate box to display the collectible feathers in. And outside the Animus, the gang is residing in the Monteriggioni Villa Sanctuary from Assassin's Creed II where the historic Assassin statues are still on display, and Desmond can collect objects like a Medici Flag, the original feather box and Mario Auditore's sword... to unceremoniously place on a portable metal shelf because Desmond and the others don't have time to play around with these things and are on the run from a nigh-omnipotent MegaCorp.
- Naturally, such a museum appears in the Batman: Arkham Series games—several times, in fact! The first real example is actually a villainous version in Arkham City where Penguin has, fittingly enough, the abandoned museum as his base of operations and he's been modifying it with morbid new additions of the corpses of thugs working for the other supervillains in Arkham City as well as having several set up and waiting for the most prominent people in Arkham City, including one for Batman himself as the centerpiece of this sick collection. In the same game, the Batcave itself appears as a challenge map and has a few hallmarks of the typical Batmuseum in it, particularly the animatronic dinosaur. And later on, in Arkham Knight, the GCPD serves this role, having weapons and other items from supervillains (some donated by Batman himself) who don't appear in the game otherwise, such as Anarky's jacket, Talia al-Ghul's sword, and the Scarface puppet. As you play through the game and defeat the various supervillains, more items will be added to the museum as well, and Aaron Cash narrates brief descriptions for all of them.
- In City of Heroes various veteran rewards allow you to put these in your Supergroup base. These are only decorative, and serve no function otherwise.
- Though not on display anywhere, the game also has a menu of souvenirs as a way of recalling past adventures.
- Similarly, as one might expect coming from the same developer, Star Trek Online has trophies both in the Captain's ready room aboard his/her ship, and in the mess hall. Some trophies are acquired via rank and level, while others are earned from coming in first place during raids or completing difficult accolades. Of course, other people are only going to see these if they're invited aboard.
- While Jackie Estacado from The Darkness II is hardly a hero, he does have a trophy case in his library full of Artifacts of Doom he finds throughout the game, with narrations from Johnny Powell.
- The BBC's Doctor Who Adventure Games have one for the TARDIS that you can visit.
- The Elder Scrolls games throw far more artifacts and other items of power and significance at the player than they conceivably have a use for, and many players like to keep mementos of tough kills and hard-won quest rewards. Starting with series' 3D Leap in Morrowind, it is possible to fill up whatever place you call home with these treasures and put them on display. However, the physics engine introduced in Oblivion and present in Skyrim, makes it far harder to display more than a few of these items, as trying to place one item next to another will usually knock the already placed item out of place, if not send it flying across the room. Thankfully, many Game Mods exist for each of these games which make this process far easier, including full on dedicated trophy room mods.
- The "loot storage" problem often befalls Fallout players, and so Fallout 4 introduced weapon stands and armor racks for displaying the various weapons and bits of clothing and armor that the player accumulates over the game.
- In The Force Unleashed, Ozzik Sturn's trophy room includes Jar Jar Binks frozen in carbonite.
- In Horizon Forbidden West, Aloy gains command of a central base, which her allies gradually fill up with furniture and other decorations, but also with mementos of their various achievements. These range from pieces of armor off a defeated enemy, to a large boulder that Kotallo somehow lugged across hundreds of miles of mountainous terrain for the purpose of display.
- Kingdom of Loathing allows players to buy their own display case to fill whatever the hell they want. There's even leaderboards to keep track of it all.
- The Lord of the Rings Online allows players to decorate their houses and gardens with trophies, leading to many hobbit holes with a dragon's skull on the lawn.
- Mass Effect examples:
- In Mass Effect 2, artifacts bought or otherwise acquired during the course of the game end up being displayed in Shepard's cabin. These include a collection of model ships, a tank filled with exotic fish, a space hamster and a picture of their love interest. Various DLC add a Prothean orb, the helmet of Shepard's original armor found at the Normandy crash-site and Shepard's original dog tags.
- Mass Effect 3 contains most of the above items, which are found scattered through the Normandy, having been put into storage during its retrofit. If in a romance with Tali, after a certain point in the game, she leaves a photo of herself unmasked on Shepard's nightstand.
- In the Leviathan DLC, Shepard can pick up a severed Husk's head that Dr. Bryson was experimenting on for the cabin.
- In the Omega DLC, Aria sends you General Petrovsky's chessboard.
- The episodic Sam & Max: Freelance Police adventure games from Telltale Games had the closet in the main characters' office fill with souvenirs from the previous installments — including a Card Sharp from the first season who was left bound and gagged for months after being interrogated, eventually, the whole office becomes loaded with big items that don't fit in the closet.
- Scattered around Roger's quarters in Space Quest 6 are various items from earlier games.
- In many of her games, Tomb Raider's Lara Croft has one in Croft Manor that serves as an Easter Egg. Often, the treasures inside are call backs to previous titles. It makes sense for her as she's an Adventurer Archaeologist.
- In Treasure Mountain!, the Super Seeker fills a room full of trophies from exploring the mountain.
- Twilight Heroes, like Kingdom of Loathing above, allows the player to fill a display case with whatever they want; this trope especially fits if said items are the trophies taken from various recurring enemies.
- With the introduction of taxidermy as an in-game mechanic in the Extinction DLC, it's possibly to do this in ARK: Survival Evolved. You're even able to take taxidermy skins from humans—including yourself!—which can basically be used as mannequins if you find better armor or weapons but can't bear to get rid of that sword that you used to kill an entire pack of raptors single-handed or the armor which protected you long enough to survive that encounter with a tyrannosaurus.
- In Grrl Power, Deus has a rather spectacular series of collections in his base. The items in them range from a perfectly normal ashtray made by a young girl to a vast array of (allegedly replica) swords to one great big whopping Chekhov's Gun.
- Whateley Academy has a huge one - the Homer Gallery - in the main campus building, locked so outsiders don't accidentally stumble upon the fact that it's a Superhero School. Each dorm has its own smaller trophy room. Some of the weapons in the Homer Gallery still work - which is an important plot point in the Halloween stories.
- A number of other superteams in the Whateley Universe do the same. For example, SPECTRUM keeps a public gallery of the more harmless spoils of their trade, and one of their primary members, the Green Witch, keeps a vault full of more problematic mystical artifacts.
- In Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow, Ultron is shown to keep a vast vault full of mementos from the hundreds of heroes he slaughtered in order to rule the world.
- In The Simpsons, every time the attic or closet is shown, we see such items from past episodes as Homer's space helmet, Mr. Plow jacket, a box of Mr. Sparkle, a Malibu Stacy doll, and several other items. The giant stone head of Xtapolapocetl is also occasionally shown sitting in their basement.
- Young Justice (2010):
- Kid Flash collects a souvenir from every mission, possibly working on that museum there'll someday be. The show's young too, so currently it's kinda small but getting there. An item from it has come in handy once or twice.
- In season 2, Beast Boy takes over the job of collecting souvenirs for the team.
- The Justice League also has a trophy museum at the Hall of Justice in Washington, D.C., which is open to the public. Naturally, at one point Intergang brings a display to life.
- Ben 10 had an example of this in the original series, with Ben occasionally collecting in a small box weapons and objects he got over his adventures. The box is seen again briefly at the beginning of Ben 10: Alien Force, where Ben picks the Omnitrix from it.
- In Teen Titans (2003), it's revealed that Robin has a small room set aside as this. (Although they call it an evidence locker.) One of the more prominent items in it is the remnants of the Puppet King.
- Played for Laughs in DuckTales (2017) — Webby shows the triplets the mansion's "Wing of Secrets," where Scrooge keeps his treasures from years of adventuring. Several are shown to be supernatural and dangerous, but Scrooge himself is nonplussed by her waxing dramatic about them — apparently, the "wing" is just his garage.
- In Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the Joker comments on it when he teams up with Batman.
"Look at all your toys! My own wing! I knew you cared."
- The Metropolitan Police have the Black Museum, a collection of items from famous crimes.
- The official CIA museum contains, among other objects, several captured bits of ostensible al-Qa'ida related paraphernalia, including a gas mask, a training manual and the AK-47 that purportedly belonged to Osama bin Laden, alongside a German Enigma cipher machine from WWII.