What is in a name?
Many discussions preceeded the final naming the tool as COMICS. The first placeholder name was "YAZ", a double, double backronym for either "Yet Another Zebrafish" tool or "Your Analysis of Zebrafish data", whereas "yaz" is both a species of fish in Russian (link?) and meaning summer in Turkish, Turkish also being the nationality of one of the supervisors of the summer projects during which the tool was originally developed.
The second placeholder name was FishViz (suggested by myself). During the discussions on the final name, OntoViz, AnaViz, Anatomics and many other suggestions were made. However, most of them were found to already be in use for similar tools. Eventually we agreed on Dmitrii's suggestion COMICS, as this name is not used for just one specific tool, for which it could be mistaken, but is already a highly overloaded term. Software named "comic", "comics" and "comix", with capitalizations so random Margo Roth Spiegelman would be pleased, already represent computer software and services in many different domains, including bioinformatics. However, we think that rarely has an acronym been more befitting its phrase, as Cartoon OMICS is all about generating comics, albeit with serious biological content. We went with all capitals, as COmics has already been used and Comics would be all too plain.
COMICS is also used in the names of several computational omics research groups, such as that at Georgia Regents University.
Magnus Palmblad