Creating Comic Characters: A Primer

" . . . Oh dear God, it's a Mary Sue."

Sometime yesterday after 1:00 PM I said these words, upon the realization that a new character of mine (whose details I won't get into right now if only because one, it'll ruin the suspense, and two, if I actually SAY anything about Character X it'll be taken as the Word of God) was just . . . built up too much. Safe to say, Character X is being rebuilt as we speak.

Creating characters may be one thing -- and the details of which are covered in so many other tutorials online -- that it's worth detailing how a comic character differs from, say, a character you might come up for a written story of yours, or a role-playing game. The differences?

• Ease of Illustration - If you plan on drawing this character over and over (and OVER) again, it ought to be something that is easily-enough drawn if you expect to be able to keep drawing at a particular speed. Granted, the more you draw a character the easier it gets, but it's still a problem if your character happens to have several features that are not easily drawn -- elaborate masks and tattoos, large wings... if it take too long to draw, you've got a problem.
  
• Visual Originality - Okay, great backstory aside, how do they LOOK? A common sin of most video games who think just altering the faces of their characters is originality enough, the easiest way to check if you're doing it right is the silhouette test. If your bodies are too similar or the hairstyles are too confusing, this will highlight most problems. If you don't do this, you get posters like this one where the only reason I can tell one blonde from another is by the clothes. And even that doesn't get me too far.
  

(Yes, Adam Hughes, I know it's not your fault you get stuck with trying to make DC's intellectual properties look unique, but come on, man . . .)

• Visual Appeal - This should NOT be confused with sex appeal lest you draw all your women with the exact same size breasts. Visual Appeal, rather, focuses on the aesthetics of drawing the character; regardless of how attractive or "disgusting" a character is intended to be, they should still have a general degree of characterization that makes the character appealing somehow. A good example of "ugly" creatures with great visual appeal are the movie-monster archtypes; the mummy and Frankenstein's monster might not be the type of creature you want to run into in a dark alleyway, but they still retain a certain level of charm about them.

A lot of this comes down to the artistic skills available as much as everything else -- if you spend huge levels of time drawing all your characters, ones with actual tricky parts might not be that much of a stretch -- but in a comic story, not hitting all three of these points results in lots of problems.

• Not remembering that a character should be easy to draw will only slow down your ability to draw pages, leading to burnout.
  
• Not designing visually unique characters means that readers will confuse them for each other way too often. (In recent pages, for example, Nate and Vince have been getting confused for each other -- familial relations aside, it's a sign that I need to tweak them a little further to prevent future issues.)
  
• Not designing characters with a certain visual appeal in mind means that readers don't get the characters at all... and thus your efforts end up in vain.

At the heart of all of this is that you still have to create great characterization, but comic characters need that little bit of extra effort. What sort of character details do you think are important?

Break Panels Revealed: 5 Times When You Just HAVE TO Break out of the Box (Literally!)

There are lots of little tricks that good Comic Artists do in order to keep their readers in thrall and show off their wonderful (HA!) artistic skills. One of these worth pointing out -- and one I happen to use often -- is the notorious Break Panel.

What is a Break Panel? I've got an example of one at the top of this entry. In the simplest explanation I can think of, It's a Panel with something in it that "Breaks" out through the usual panel border/gutter.

Why use Break Panels? Well, there's lots of reasons that make sense:

1. You Want to Emphasize Certain Parts of Your Characters. We all like certain parts of our drawings, and if you just don't feel like clipping off a certain amount of hair from the shot, you shouldn't have to. This is usually good as a minor break, where there's just a few bits of the character that need saving, but you shouldn't just draw in random chunks of hair or crown to justify doing a break panel. This reason is meant for continuity's sake , so those certain parts that need emphasis (for plot or characterization reasons) remain in shot and (more importantly) in the reader's mind.
2. There's a certain emotion needed from the panel. This is the excuse rationale for our example; Jigsaw's mouth is agape (presumably from seeing Slick), and it simply helps emphasize the jaw if it's breaking more than just the laws of cartoon physics. The shocked expression continues through in the hairs poking out of the panel as well,
3. You're Foreshortening. Let's face it, it's easier to foreshorten a single character than an entire background. As long as you do this sparingly, it works, and it helps further emphasize whatever is in the foreground as well.
4. You're doing 'Tight Paneling'. I hope you have a good reason for doing tight paneling, but if you've already consigned yourself to a 'crowded' effect for whatever other reasons you've already got in mind, you're probably cutting off bits left and right in order to fit everything in. Break Panels allow you further crowd things in without sacrificing the artwork.
   
5. You misjudged on the gutters and/or panel sizes. It happens. It's better to provide some continuity of an image than to randomly cut off a few fingers.
   

Like any tool in your visual arsenal, be sure to only use it when it needs it -- overusing any particular element reduces the impact of that element. Every other panel doesn't need to be broken, just like you don't always need super-close-ups of people's eyeballs and you don't always have to draw women's chests with inflatable cleavage.

As far as Break Panels go, each panel draws attention to itself, which means it also draws attention away from the other panels. It's a great way to bring more attention to your page's MVP (Most Valuable Panel), but they can't all be all-stars.

Whatever Software You Use, Know How to Use It.

In previous examples of how I work on the comic, I've mentioned a plethora of programs used - Illustrator, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop Elements, etc. It's not that these programs are the best for what I want to do, but instead because I know a little of each and so it's useful to have such experience in a few different programs, enough that you can fake your way around others if necessary.

Encouraging people to experiment with different features and methods in these programs tends to work better when you're not in a hurry to get the results, which is all the more reason to build up a backlog. There's no secret to this one; a little bit of time will help you find the magic bullets, and it's best to learn on your own.

How else do you plan on remembering it?