Art Journal 035: Outfits

Everyone has their own approach to character design.  Some focus on using rich color palettes to give a character a certain mood or hint at their personality, while others employ a wide array of abstract shapes to visually differentiate one character from the other. Everyone does a little of everything in different measures, but my favorite aspect of character design has always been drawing outfits, because to me what you carry with you tells a lot about where you’ve been, who you are and where you’re trying to go.  I would say this probably stems from my upbringing and the circumstances in which I started writing my comics, so it’s something that itself has been very much influenced by where I’ve been and who I am.  So this week I’m going to talk a little bit about the thought process behind how I dress my characters!

A lot of the characters I write tend to come from working-class backgrounds.  Central to the story is Lizzie, a waitress, and not a particularly upscale waitress either.  She’s a low-earner in a run-down greasy diner, overworked and tired, so something nicer like slacks and a nice collared shirt wouldn’t seem as fitting. She wears a pair of old pants and a button-down workshirt- something that doesn’t tear easy and can hide coffee stains well.  A button-down seemed like the better choice in my head because it had more seams and more pocket, so there were more edges I could draw to look weathered and worn.  She plods around in a pair of black boots, which are durable enough to get the most bang for her buck, have good traction on a slippery floor and provide much-welcome ankle support.  Her pants have cargo pockets so she has a place to keep things, and as a creative writer she’d always have a notepad and a pen handy, and cargo pockets are a great place to fit bulky things like that.  They’re all little details, but compared to more upscale or neater alternatives I think those specific choices visually inform the circumstances she comes from; she’s not a four-star this-way-to-your-seat waitress, she refills coffee mugs and scrapes gum off of tables with a butterknife. But the element that really brings out her working-stiff aesthetic is her nametag; there’s something about having your own name pinned to your chest that marks you as being an employee.  And I thought it would be fun to have someone shuffled straight out of work and into this frying-pan disaster, and the transition was so quick they’re still wearing their nametag pinned to their workshirt.  You’re never truly off the clock.

When I started the comic I had a couple ideas for how Lizzie would wear her bandana. In the early chapters of the comic I tried a couple out, and the specific style she typically wears seems the best for the look I wanted. She doesn’t really wear a fashion bandana, it’s meant to have a Rosie the Riveter sort of practical toughness to it, so that is the specific style I wanted to go for. The bandana was always important as a spot of red in a greyscale comic helping a character stand out, and I originally thought about her having it tied around her neck, or wearing it on her belt or tied on her arm somewhere, but those choices didn’t really work out since the attention-drawing effect of a big splotch of red was drawing the eye to her neck or her hip or her arm, and those weren’t as useful as drawing the eye to her face, where her expression is.  The same effect goes for Monday: red glasses are much more useful than a red tie because you don’t want to look at his chest, you want to look at his face, so the choice of where to put the red details was largely informed by what purpose that red was supposed to serve.  If you are going to draw the eye, it ought to be drawn to a useful place.

Monday is probably the nicest-dressed of the four main characters, but even when he started out he wasn’t exactly a sharp dresser.  His introduction found him in a suit and tie, giving the rough impression of being a working professional, but his suit jacket was unbuttoned and his tie was always loose, with the top button of his collared shirt undone.  It’s a nice outfit which was always drawn slightly disheveled, like it’d been put through the wringer.  Even before I was certain of what his job actually was, I wanted him to look like a “professional” who has been through a lot of action, and a disrupted business suit seemed the best choice.  In the early pages, to give him a sense that he doesn’t really have spectacular taste, I actually used to draw him with white socks under his pant legs, which is a huge fashion faux-pas, but I don’t think this was ever particularly visible.  The choice of his sunglasses came from an idea that the eyes are the windows to the soul, and as a man who kills people the reader would be denied a glimpse into the soul of a killer in all but the most seldom of circumstances.  When people hide their eyes, we believe they’re hiding some truth from us, and in Monday’s case that’s exactly what he’s doing, especially around Lizzie.

As I’d mentioned in another article somewhere, Alice was originally thought up as a temporary character who grew to become an irreplaceable part of the main cast, but even in the context of a supporting character her outfit was chosen with context in mind.  She’s a nurse, and her story introduced her as actually being in the hospital when the world fell apart.  She was specifically clocking out of work, so she’d gotten changed out of her scrubs into something more comfortable to drive home in- just a graphic tee and plain old blue jeans, with a light zip-up hoodie over top.  She’s got a pair of Chuck Taylors on since they’re light and cute, reflecting her personality.  Alice’s hoodie is probably the most prominent article of clothing about her, and it makes her role as a medic very obvious.  Her outfit was all simple clothes to get into and out of, assuming she would be hopping between her regular outfit and clean scrubs to wear on the job, so there’s no sense in dressing up too fancy.

Coming up with an aesthetic outfit for Lou was probably the easiest out of anyone to draw, since he’s basically an extension of the environment I worked in when I started making comics.  I was a mechanic and we had an office full of shop tools and our boss wore the same tees with holes in the chest pocket from holding bolts or wingnuts or just his pack of cigarettes and all of that just went straight into Lou.  He’s a thing-fixer so he’s gotta have his backwards baseball cap- it’s not a style thing, those hats just did a really great job keeping your hair back and the sweat out of your eyes, and you wore them backwards because when they’re forwards and you’re digging into a machine the brim would bonk against a metal frame or a pipe or whatever, and it’d knock your hat off.  As a mechanic I’ve had my hat save me from a couple bumps on the head too, so even as a thin piece of cloth there’s that benefit.  His t-shirt is a white undershirt that come six to a pack, and his pants are so old they don’t really cover his ankles anymore.  He’s dressed in the absolute most disposable clothing because they’re just assumed to get ruined with some unwashable grease or stain anyways. He did have nice boots though- my old boss always dressed disposable but wore hundred-dollar New Balance sneakers for decades at a time, since they were the most comfortable to wear when you’re on your feet all day.  

After the first hundred or so pages of comic I had the idea to give all these characters new outfits.  The setting is one of apocalypse- no one really has “things” anymore, so whatever you’re wearing you’re gonna be stuck in for the foreseeable future.  When the main characters arrived at a safehouse they had a couple new clothes to get dressed up in so I tried out letting them wear what they’d normally wear when they weren’t on the job- just about everyone was “on the job” when the story began, so everyone’s sort of caught in their work clothes.  In the story I also wanted to establish that it was getting colder, so everyone picked something warmer to wear as well.  This basically meant a stripey-sleeve shirt for Alice, a sweater for Monday, a hoodie for Lizzie and a Carhartt-equivalent jacket for Lou, overtop of what he was already wearing, because that’s what he’d be wearing anyways.  These were all well and good, but over the course of drawing that art I felt like the personalities of most of the characters weren’t showing as strongly in plain-old casual clothing as it did in their trusty work clothes, and I lost a bit of the subtext meaning, so when it was time to go back into the world again I made some revisions- Alice put her nice warm medic hoodie back on, but she ended up keeping the carpenter’s pants with the belt loop on the side.  Lizzie put her workshirt back on overtop of her hoodie- I thought about having her wear the hoodie over the workshirt but I felt like it covered it too much and took too much precedence, so it went underneath like I used to wear my own workshirt in the cold seasons.  I’d thought at some point to give her a pair of pants with zip-off capri leggings, which I was certain are a thing that existed, but no one really seemed to pick up on what they were. I like to draw them since the little tassles on the zippers made for good motion lines, but regrettably they don’t read well so at some point they might get changed- the video game sprite incarnation of Lizzie doesn’t have those zip-off parts anymore.  Monday’s sweater gets a hole shot in the chest and that was perfect motivation to let him dress up in a clean new suit, stepping back to his original aesthetic.  Lou, as always, is dressed exactly how he ought to be.

Speaking of Monday’s sweater fiasco, I had a lot of fun when I got to design the Omnimart workers’ outfits, since instead of individual characters I got to make a whole batch of them all at once.  The four main Omnimart employees all had specific departments they worked in, and even though they’d all be wearing the same uniform shirt I wanted to capture a bit of their specializations around that.  Amy worked in the crafts department, and is an avid knitter.  She’s got a creative punkish look with full sleeve tattoos, capri pants and facial piercings.  She carried her knit blanket on her shoulder for the majority time we saw her, and that was eventually revealed to be a compassionate gift for a friend.  Melody worked in the activewear department, so she had a matching-striped tracksuit on under her workshirt, as an athletic personality.  Her boyfriend Clark worked in electronics, so he wore a pair of DJ headphones plugged into a music player and he had a big music-plug design on his hat. Dale worked in receiving- while part of the team his job was basically to go in the back, take things off of trucks and store them in storage.  Since he had an out-of-sight job he dressed a little more casually, and wasn’t as beholden to button his shirt up as anyone else might have been.  He also got an engine-block t-shirt just to show that he’s a real engine-liking kind of guy; a stoic, quiet fellow who actually hit it off pretty well with Monday.  Their assistant manager, Ron, wore a polo shirt and khaki slacks, which in my mind always read as the cheap-business option for in-the-middle authority.

I believe clothing says as much about a character as the person inside them, and over time that clothing can serve as a chronicle of their adventures.  Cuts and scrapes and nicks and stains persisting from page to page make it feel like a person has really been through something tangible, and although many stories would allow a character to own and cycle through a full wardrobe the particular nature of this one lends the outfit someone wears an extra layer of context- since they’re going to be in it for the long-haul they have to make conscious choices of what they bring with them, and if you’re not sure where you’re going to be when the snow falls you’ll want to pick something warm and durable, because it’s going to have to last you a long time.