WWQ&A: Character personalities
February 13, 2008
Hey, Kris here. You guys submit a ton of questions to our Webcomics Weekly podcast, and even though it’s an hour long, we can’t possibly answer them all! But now there’s good news. I’m introducing a new feature to Halfpixel.com: WWQ&A. It’s where the four of us will answer as many overflow questions as we can. Let’s get started!
Hello WW panel!
Love the podcast, listen to it every week, and hope to soon start a web comic of my very own! Right now I’m designing the characters for my strip and seem to be having trouble with it. The characters I’m making are always lacking in personality or are over used cookie-cutter stereotypes. How do you guys create such unique and interesting characters?
Basically, I keep running into those old sitcom characters cliches, having an extremely serious person and a happy-go-lucky guy. Should I be trying to break away from this? Or accept it?
Thanks a lot,
Marc Lefevre (ribbit ribbit, oui oui, etc.)
Good question. When I started out, I tried to avoid cliches, and ran headlong into them anyway. But you know, sometimes cliches are there for a reason. There usually is a centered character and an off-center character so they can play off each other. The degrees in which each of them is each thing can differ, but without it there’s no conflict.
Chex and Lyle were pretty much verbatim “crazy guy/straight guy,” but there was enough material to go for five years. I even had fun with the idea that no one in their right mind would even tolerate Chex for any amount of time. Chex was and is a tortured, delusional mess in a happy-go-lucky suit.
Now I have Vanderbeam, Cutter and Mr. Jinx. Vanderbeam isn’t happy-go-lucky or crazy, but he is off-center and he makes rash decisions. But he thinks he’s being centered and reasonable. Cutter is his straight man. But then I have the dynamic of Cutter and Mr. Jinx, where Jinx is even more of a straight man than Cutter is. So when they interact, Cutter can be the off-center one.
So that dynamic is always going to be present in some way, to drive action. What’s important is motivation. Chex had a lot of deep-seated issues that were fun to hint at, but that was all absurdity. Meanwhile, in “Starslip,” those characters are a lot more fleshed out, and they all have flaws and fears and desires that make them act the way they do.
If you’re having fun writing good material for a wacky guy and his straight-man counterpart, just write it. Readers will buy into it if it’s believable. There are a lot of strips where the straight man is ultra-straight, the wacky guy is ultra-wacky, and every punchline is telegraphed in the first panel. Furthermore, there isn’t a reason for these two guys to be friends.
These strips annoy me to no end because what could be a natural, fun scenario becomes forced and empty. If it’s not part of their character to have a reason to associate with each other, they’d both piss each other off enough to end the friendship. I feel that way about Ctrl+Alt+Del. It’d be one thing if it was just topical craziness like Penny Arcade. Gabe and Tycho are defined as “friends,” but they really only exist to explore a topic, not have adventures. Ethan and Lucas have history, and continuity, but in that relatively sane and normal world, Ethan would be a pariah. No girl would love him, no friend would tolerate his nonsense. He is a punchline generator among human characters. CAD works when it’s a topical gag. Whether or not Ethan gets married has no impact on any working aspect of the strip, so it feels hollow.
But if you’re doing a straight-up absurdist strip, you don’t need to worry about all that stuff. Look at Bob the Angry Flower. Bob is an awful person, and his friends are just there to play off him and set him off. We don’t care about motivation there; the strip is just an excuse to play with funny ideas. But if you are going to have, like, “two guys at an office”-type humor, they need a little fleshing out, even if you don’t reveal that background in the first six months of the strip. Writing background/biographies for your characters and keeping them private can really help you sort out motivations and make your characters more real.
If that’s what you want to do, anyway!
My two characters can be considered the basic “wacky guy” and “serious guy”, and I sometimes have trouble making them more than that. With some recent storylines though, I’ve been able to flesh out their motivations and back stories a bit.
Thanks for your words of wisdom Kris, it should help. *Thumbs up*
I think if you want the comic to be story driven then you can always grow and change the characters accordingly to the types of adventures they are put through. Just like in real life, if something happens to you then you change a little bit and become something slightly different.
Sweet! Kris linked Bob the Angry Flower! Bob’s on my top 15 list I check every week.
IMO - one of the best written strips out there.
my thought on cliched characters has always been that a cliche is great shorthand. if you’re doing the daily strip, when you’re just starting or just introducing a character, a cliche can be an effective tool to make readers feel like the character is known to them. the trick is not to rely on the cliche, but only use it as a starting point and to develop the character beyond it.
there are lots of different ways to start characters. i knew a guy who once said a quick and easy starting point was to look up a zodiac sign and use that as a basis and build from it. the important thing to remember is that all these things are just tools, and no one tool can do everything.
Cliches are kind of like training wheels. If you’re doing it correctly, a character will grow out of the cliche and develop it’s own “personality”. Even though you may create a character, that doesn’t mean you know them inside and out. A lot of times, you learn things about a character along with the audience as you wind through story arcs.
to me it comes down to emotions. why should the audience care about this character? sure the wacky or straight character could highlight his situation, but without some sort of connection emotionally with the audience, i think it gets lost.
for instance, charlie brown. i think most of his strips are not laugh out loud funny, but i kept coming back because i could identify for him (the loser) and root for him. i don’t have kids, so maybe that’s why i don’t relate at all to family circus. no emotion.