Designing memorable characters

How to create the next cosplay sensation

Editor’s Note: It’s Wednesday, so that means it’s New Comic Book Day and another edition of Amazing Journey!

The Amazing Journey column will touch on a comics-related topic, such as writing the first issue of a series, what it’s like to run a comic book store, working with artists, and how writing comics is different from writing prose.

Amazing Journey back issues

True believers unite (#1) | My comics origin story (#2) | Comic event series (#3) | The comics of Kickstarter (#4) | Single issues or trades? (#5) | From prose to comics (#6) | Adapting a celebrated fantasy series into a comic (#7) | Charting a career in comics (#8) | Comic book spoilers (#9) | Lessons from Kieron Gillen’s masterclass (#10) | Comics marketing 101 (#11)

Creating a character in fiction is (relatively) easy. You come up with their name, give them a favorite food or saying, maybe a few lines of physical description, and then let the reader’s imagination fill in the rest.

In comics, it’s not that simple.

You have to, you know, actually decide what they look like, and that includes hair color, eye color, physique, height, what clothes they wear, their style, etc. And then, if it’s not a comic based in the real world, you have to design their weapons, gadgets, how their super powers look, what color their aura is, it’s exhausting!

I first came across this issue when designing the vignette cards for my first Kickstarter campaign. I sent the artist a couple of reference photos of what the characters should look like and he wrote back, politely, “umm, I need more than this?”

I obliged and got to work, distilling the essences of each of the featured characters to from thousands of words of prose into mini-character biographies, and the resulting illustration turned out amazing:

Credit: Danusko Campos

This experience got me thinking about what makes a memorable character.

In fiction, you put a lot of work onto the reader to create a picture of the character from your words. That can be good, because you let the reader become a part of the process and each reader will have a slightly different version of the character in their heads. But it can also be bad, as in doing that, you are necessarily creating a fractured version of that character that makes it harder for that character to “spread.”

In popular culture, it’s usually the movie, TV show, or comic book characters that dominate the landscape. If you ask people to picture what Harry Potter or Gandalf looks like in their heads, they are much more likely to be thinking of Daniel Radcliffe or Ian McKellen than a particular book illustration.

But just because you are creating in a visual medium does not mean that your main character is going to become the next Wolverine or Princess Leia.

Take for example, Jonathan Hickman’s Powers of X series from four years ago, which introduced two new characters who were created by mixing the DNA of existing mutants.

One was Cardinal, the red Nightcrawler character below who everyone forgot about after the third issue.

And the other was Rasputin IV, the metal female Colossus in the center of the cover with the giant magic sword who people are still talking about four years later and who, despite being an alternate timeline character, forced her way into the mainline Marvel continuity because of her popularity.

What was it about her that made her stand out so much? I went to Reddit in search of answers and found some good ones:

• “Awesome design, cool sword, fun mix of powers, strong personality, and, really, what did any of the others do but die?”

• “Hot metal woman with magic sword is a good recipe for a popular character.”

• “She’s the only one with a distinct personality, has the most eye-catching design and she has by far the most page time.”

• “She was teased for the longest before hand. It inspired the audience to wonder/imagine who she was, ‘who are her parents? Is she a clone?’ Getting the public to fantasize and create their own answers creates hype and interest and a feeling of participation in their fandom.”

These are all great answers, which another Redditor boiled down to “advertising/hype + focus + design.”

But the danger in deconstructing anything and then using that to build something new is that your creation could become a hollow shell. So it’s important to keep in mind that a new character needs to not only visually capture the reader’s imagination, but also has to have depth and impact on the story.

I’m trying to balance all of the above as I fine tune my first-issue script and hopefully create an instant connection between the readers and Beatrice, the main character of the series. Because this comic is a spin-off of my existing book series, I have the benefit of existing material, story, and illustrations to bolster Beatrice’s first appearance on the comic page. And I’m keeping all of the above in mind as I write the next entry in the NYC Questing Guild series and introduce new characters and build up existing ones.

Credit: Rebecca Sorge Jensen

That brings me to the Question of the Week and your last chance to enter the June giveaway. To enter, simply leave a comment with your answer to any of the Questions of the Week from any June Amazing Journey post.

What makes a character memorably for you? Or alternatively, name a relatively new character that got your attention quickly.

As a reminder, we have two new prizes for this month’s giveaway, both from indie comics creator Curtis Clow. First, for U.S. residents only, you can win a copy of Clow’s Beastlands Volume 1.

Second, if you’re outside of the U.S., you can win a digital copy of issue #1 of Slightly Exaggerated (please indicate in your answer if you are ex-U.S.).

What I’m reading this week

A light-ish week as we reach the last Wednesday of the month and head into the holiday weekend. Let’s take a look!

• Thor #35: The final issue in this volume and perhaps a conclusion to the Black Winter story teased at the end of the first arc? Although I am all for closure and not wanting to limit the next creative team, I hope that Al Ewing picks up this story and runs in to a more fulsome conclusion.

• Darth Vader Black, White & Red #3: Daniel Warren Johnson writing and drawing a Darth Vader story=Insta-buy. I was fortunate enough to meet Johnson at NYCC two years ago and snagged a copy of his Old Man Skywalker mini-comic. And I am super looking forward to his Transformers series coming out in October.

• X-Men Before the Fall: The Heralds of Apocalypse: The third of four one-shots setting up the Fall of X takes a look back at what Apocalypse has been doing since X of Swords and it sounds like we will go even further back. I like what Al Ewing has done with Arakko in X-Men Red and so this is a must-read. The question remains whether Arakko will be blasted into status quo smitherines at the end of Fall of X and return to being an empty planet or whether it will be cemented as a permanent fixture in the 616 universe going forward. We shall see!

What are you picking up this week?

Backlist Catch-Up

I finally finished

Jason Aaron

‘s Avengers run last night! I loved the development of the 1,000,000 BC Avengers and how their stories intertwined with the present-day narrative, and how Aaron used this story to tie-in his previous Marvel stories (hello Thor’s granddaughters!). Overall, it was a crazy end to a great run, and I’m also looking forward to the next chapter in the Avengers saga!