Comic Fury Webcomic Hosting - Pulse- Characters too Similar

A least a few weeks ago, I started getting complaints about the female characters in my comic being too similar. To iron out what is the problem, I made a chart of the five women (intentionally leaving out Lucy's glasses and freckles)-



(Assuming the characters are always drawn like the chart, which is probably very optimistic) the feedback I had gotten was that their hair was too similar. And I went through several stages of changes, ending up with this so far-



Annie is the lead, and immune to any changes. Tabitha is the next most common character to appear. Both of the first two are flying superheroes. Lucy is Annie's best friend (and roommate later), so whatever changes were made to her had to be compatible with potentially seeing her waking up, sleeping, etc.

I made more dramatic changes to Dr. Mae and (the twins) Mira and Arim because they appear less (and maybe I'm less attached to their appearance). I suspect any dramatic changes will have to be retroactive, and that would involve editing the old page, which is more reasonable with the characters who have appeared less.

I know that I could give their heads more unique proportions, but I'm not sure if that would look strange unless I had a very cartoony style.

Any thoughts or complaints? Is this enough (assuming I edit the old pages to reflect this change)? The comic has recently switched from black and white to color, I'm debating if I should try to color the older pages along with making these changes, or make these changes now and wait to add the color.

I don't think the face shapes are a problem, but looking through your Pulse comic, there's a big problem with body-shape differences. Women come in all sorts of shapes, curves, and sizes, and all your women have very similar body shapes: big breasts and curvy hips. Women don't always have to have bulbous breasts to be sexy. Take this Google image search for women body types to get an idea of what I mean.

Additionally, there might be a problem in how they act. No two people act the same way, just as no two women act the same way either. These differences can make one character feel very different from another, even if they have similar body shapes or faces.

I really don't see why people would confuse your characters, from just looking at the face. I would've been able to tell them apart, except maybe for Tabitha and Mira/Grim. Annie's hair does look similar to those two, but her facial feature is so different it sets her apart.

But I can see why some people may be confused since hairstyle is the most obvious feature for woman and that's what they notice first. Adding color does help distinguish people, and as Kupocake said, the problem may not be the characters' features but their personalities. If you see all good comics and tv shows, there is always a certain character archetype attributed to each one. For example, there is the "logical", "angry", "hotheaded", "positive thinker", "leader", etc. If they behave all the same way, there is no special connection that readers associate with a character, so remembering them may be difficult.

Hmmmmmm....I would suggest expanding on the physical identites of your female characters beyond just body shapes and hair styles. The glasses do help, and going to color means you can add skin color to your characters, as you already know. Other things to distinguish your characters can include perhaps a unique article of clothing, maybe a tattoo, or something he or she constantly holds or has (like a clipboard or a sidearm). Perhaps developing a catalog of body poses to go along with personality types, such as an angry person always having a clenched fist, or a shy person looking embarrassed. Body language and facial expressions can go a long way toward that.

I say this with all due respect to you and your art, and I speak only my subjective opinion, but your inking style might possibly lean toward making your characters seem more alike than unique. For me alone, the inking style tends to emphasize the shape instead of the finer details of the character. I am not suggesting you change your style at all, just offering my perspective on it. And usually it's the most realistic or the most cartoony styles of drawing the human body that allow nuances to be most noticable.

But making nuances in head shape, body shape, and other characteristics of the human body can be a challenge for any art style since such detail can often be subtle and missed easily enough by even observant readers. Although I prefer your B&W art, your color work will be of greater value in your objective of making your characters more distinguishable.

I recently read the book "How to make Web Comics" (TERRIFIC book, BTW) and one thing that jumped out and pounced all over me was the chapter about giving your comic characters clearly discernible and unique "looks". FWIW. they provided two useful tests for this -

If your characters are reduced to silhouettes, can you still identify them?

If your characters are in Halloween costumes, can you still identify them?

I hadn't thought about it from this perspective before and just those two little tips led me to seriously rethink the overall look of my comic characters, and make them much more visually differentiated. It's easier if you have a more cartooney style, but even if you're drawing realistic, you can still vary a lot - Height, weight, posture, slouch, shoulders to hip width, hair, bulk, and handy visual shortcuts like glasses, clothing items, etc. Put Linus in a Halloween costume, and he's still the one with the blanket. The book really stressed the importance of this, especially the silhouette rule. It led me to completely redo the outlines of my own characters for better variance.

FWIW!

This is the best thing you could keep in mind while designing characters. It's great advice.

As for your characters, your redesign of them is decent, I can tell them apart, but I would honestly change up their facial structure a little bit, you know, make some longer, some shorter, etc. Also color shouldn't be a thing that distinguishes them, so I'm focusing on the black and white, and I have to say that Annie, Tabitha, and Mira & Arim look too much alike. I can tell there's differences, but having to keep in mind that Mira and Arim are the ones with solid dark eyes, and Annie is the one with no nose bridge, and Tabitha is the one with cheekbones is a little tedious while reading a comic. People don't want to be interrupted in the middle of reading to try to remember who is who because they look fairly similar.

But I guess in the colored one you did change Mira and Arim's hair and eyebrows, so that's fine. You're on the right path, just keep pushing it a little bit further. A good practice is to just go to a really busy place (like a mall on the weekend) and sit and look at people. Notice how different they all are, how many shapes and lines make up their face. All the different hair styles, hair consistency, etc. Hell, even bring a sketchbook and do some caricatures.

Keep it up, though. You're on the right track.

All good advice.
I'd like to add the suggestion that you try tweaking the shapes of your character's forehead, eyes, and ears. A character with a larger, flatter forehead is going to look remarkably different from one with a more narrow, rounded one.



Excellent advice here. Giving one character wide hips and a narrow upper body, while giving the next an even set of curves, and the next a flat profile, is a great way to make them stand out from one another. However, giving every female character large breasts and curvy hips makes them all seem generic, and it honestly comes across as the illustrator just wanting to draw big boobs.

While I won't disagree with all the people saying to make the body shapes more different, I will also note that putting it in color *definitely* helped make them more varied.

In the black and white set, to me it's the hair lines that come off as misleading at a first glance. If you took the color out of the second set, it would still be the same. I don't really know how to explain it much, but if you lessened and thinned out the lines used for hair strand direction, the hairstyles will become easier to identify each character with.

Something like this (my style is horrible but this is just for an idea)

I don't disagree with you, but in this case it is a superhero comic. That seems like it motivates both the men and women to be certain shapes. I'd agree they all have curvy hips, but not all of the characters have big breasts (although the two who appear most often clearly fit into that category). I'd think that Mira, Arim and Dr. Mae are more average (for a superhero comic), and Lucy is pretty small-busted (at least by comparison).

A (slightly outdated) example of Lucy:


When I designed the comic, I wanted to have two female superheroes and try to make them a unique combination. I made one tall and blonde, with kind of body that someone would expect, and then give her a really unusual personality that didn't seem to fit. Then I decided to make the other one short and brunette. I could think of other examples of a tall blonde and a short slender small-breasted brunette, so I thought I'd go in the opposite direction- make the short brunette excessively busty. It seemed like they would then be pretty unusual.

(Maybe it was a mistake, but) the two bustiest characters are the two characters who appear most often.



Well, that's something to consider as well. That whatever differences there are might be too subtle.

Maybe that's something I haven't considered.

They each of their own personality- Annie is idealistic, curious and optimistic. Tabitha is impulsive, confident, likes to play mind-games with people, and careless. Lucy is blunt, unable to hide her emotions, and skeptical. Dr. Mae is motherly and kind. Arim (the one of the twins shown here) is unmotivated and passive. Mira (the twin not shown) is a bully and always looking to pick a fight with someone.

Maybe those personalities need to be more reflected in how they act- or that I'm being too subtle about it.

Yeah, I think color will help (maybe even it could solve the problem on it's own), but I'd like to at least try to fix the problem in the harder to accomplish ways.

I really do think that communicating personality via comic art is the great invisible skill/challenge. There are tons of tutorials on how to draw, how to color, how to do FX, etc, but genuinely being able to communicate a character's mood and psyche through their body and face language is a tricky badger. I think this is one of those skills that separates the talented amateurs from the pros. If you can find them, I'd recommend having a look through "Terry Moore's How to draw Expressions" and "Terry Moore's How to draw Women" for some tips and examples from a seriously excellent comicbook artist. I lean on his expressions book a lot, and was very impressed with his extended cartoon example of communicating different moods and personalities just using simple circle faces, with line mouths and two dots for eyes, and body language.

They do have different heights and body types (or at least varying degrees of curvy and bustyness- but this is a superhero comic). Annie (5' 3") and Lucy (5' 4") are on the short end, Dr. Mae (5' 9") and Tabitha (5' 9") on the tall end, and Mira (5' 7") and Arim (5' 7") are in the middle. Bust-wise Lucy is the smallest, Dr. Mae and the twins are about the average, Tabitha is busty, and Annie is very busty. I've been meaning to make a height chart that might better display them without me having to explain verbally, but I've been waiting to solve this problem first.

This is a superhero comic though, probably physical variations are less possible. You are less likely to have someone overweight, and some of the characters have to be viewed in costume and then not in costume. Annie and Tabitha both have identical superhero costumes (a reason why they are dramatically different in height and in color), Mira and Arim don't try to hide their identities, and the other two are civilians.



(This is just a headshot, but) I think there is clearly a difference between them. But if there is enough of a difference is subjective.

The Halloween costume question is hard to answer. It depends on if the person viewing the item is familiar with the characters, and what kind of costume you are having them wear, and if you mean compared to the other characters in the comic. If I took Tabitha and put her in a White Queen (from X-Men) outfit, someone might assume it's White Queen. I once had someone take a picture of Annie/Pulse and post it somewhere, the opinion of the person was that it was meant to be a female Megaman.

If they were all dressed in identical costumes that covered every part of their bodies, I'd think that it would be easy to identify Annie and Tabtiha (just because they are much more busty than the others), but it might be hard to tell the others apart right away (until the reader considers the heights of the characters).

Not necessarily overweight, but think about the way physical attributes would show up. For example, a female character who has a lot of upper body strength would likely have somewhat broad shoulders, and would be more muscular in the core and chest than busty.
Or, a character who was exceptionally fast would likely be very lean and wiry, and probably have long legs and a light frame.
Everybody's body frame is different, and everyone carries their weight differently. Try gesturing people you see in public, getting their figure and form as fast as you can. You eventually get to a point where you can identify who you were drawing just from a few quick marks..

A common rule of thumb for me: If you need colour to tell them apart, you haven't done your job as a character designer.

(Although this is more a problem of folks who just learn to draw one white person, and then think colouring them in black makes them a minority)

^Totally true, this, and it should be an enshrined rule for all comic creators, I think. This is why I made my own comic greyscale. Several people have asked me when/if and why don't I do it in color, which would get more viewers, but my own thinking is that I want the look and the characters to work as line drawings first, and then let color and FX be adders, instead of depending on color to paper over any underlying weaknesses with flash.

(And just to be clear, I am *not* saying this is a problem with your work, Lightfoot, it's just something I've observed often enough to notice, especially in many Marvel and DC comics today where poor basic artwork is camouflaged by lots of Photoshop)

I'll experiment with at least one or two of them (I'm not sure which yet). I guess based on your opinion, it's more important to alter Tabitha and Mira and Arim (Annie is immune to changes). I'm a little worried though that whatever I produce by altering the facial proportions will look strange or out of place with the others. That the comic isn't cartoonish enough for anything that isn't too subtle to be effective.



That's a thought. Maybe I should produce an example of this.



I guess to be honest at least with these first five women I didn't see them having any special attribute that would give them an unusual body and just made them variations on kind of the average superhero comic female body. Annie and Tabitha wear armored suits, although at least with the two of them Annie is kind of thinner and Tabitha has kind of a bigger body and wider hips. Lucy is a secretary, and her power isn't physical (and I thought it sort of made sense for her to share a similar body to Annie, except for bust). Dr. Mae is a doctor obviously. Mira and Arim are cyborgs. I suspect the complex they work in has some vague physical fitness requirements, so you'd only have people who were at least vaguely fit.

There are thin characters yet to be introduced- Annie's mother, and a shapeshifter (who turns herself into Annie and Tabitha, and I wanted her body to be unlike theirs).

Even still, physical fitness aside, I'm talking about their -frames-. Look at the shoulders, follow them down across the chest, and compare them to the hips.
Have you ever seen the kind of guy who's not fat at all but looks it because his shoulders are like large stones? That sort of thing.
I dunno, I just think your characters look the same because, well, any physical differences from one to the next are extremely subtle. All have potential back problems in the form of unrealistic bust size, and all have the same general frame and shape. As I said before, this comes across as the illustrator -... Actually, I'm not even gonna say it again, it's too obvious.

I completely agree with this post. Even real live people aren't this subtle about body/face shape differences. I can tell my average-weight female friends apart just from their hips alone; that's just how incredibly diverse the human body shape can be. Regardless of the style you're going for, it's important as a character designer to make enough differences so that your viewer won't be confused from character to character. You don't have to be cartoony to exaggerate.