Art Journal 005: Character Design

This week’s journal is going to explore the ways I like to design characters for upcoming or current arcs in the comic, which means there might be some minor plot spoilers here.  I won’t spoil anything major, and if I do (since I can’t spoiler tag a Patreon post) I’ll convert the spoiler sentence into binary and paste that here, so if you want to read the spoiler you can just run the numbers through a binary translator (like this one, for example http://www.roubaixinteractive.com/PlayGround/Binary_Conversion/Binary_To_Text.asp). But the process of designing story characters is so deeply interwoven with the story itself so this paragraph is fair warning for anyone who might not want anything minor or major spoiled.

My method of designing characters focuses largely on context and subtext.  Characters are built up from a hundred tiny little details that make sense in my head and, while they may never be consciously noticed by the readers, they work together to “sell” the sort of character I’m intending someone to be.  For comics I tend to keep peoples’ facial features pretty simple, partly because I’ll do a lot of shaping them with painted tones and partly so the reader’s eye can fill in the blanks with the ideal it wants to see.  As far as facial details go my belief is more details -> more distinct -> more defined -> more distant; the reader’s brain isn’t optimizing what you’re seeing, there’s less gap for them to fill so it becomes more foreign, less familiar and more ugly, or aged or beaten or worn or otherwise further removed from the reader’s perception.  Facial detail isn’t the be-all end-all of character design.  I tend to use facial expression, physical gestures, habits, tics, manners of speaking and other emotive context to define a character, but one of the biggest elements I work with is their outfits.  Our clothing says a lot about us- who we are, what we do, what we earn, the problems we anticipate or the way society expects us to present ourselves and how we respond to those expectations- and I’m much happier focusing my designs on aesthetic context than worrying if I’m not using different-enough eyes or noses, because ultimately it’s the character being alive that makes them distinct, not just the building blocks they’re made out of.

A lot of the time characters start out as an idea, a niche or a role that needs to be filled and as I design, say, a supermarket employee I’ll try this haircut or that, this crook of the eyebrow or that one, maybe they have a woven blanket for comfort- that they knit themselves; maybe they knit, but not like a grandma knitter, like an Etsy nitter, with tons of tattoos and maybe they have a compassionate personality to be making comforting knit blankets for people, and I get someone like Amy from the Omnimart.  That’s a rough summary of the train of thought I’ll follow when making new characters, but it illustrates the sort of “this piece expands on that one and recontextualizes the others, which collectively inspire this next piece” process I was talking about above.  Chantelle’s apartments, the Cop/Army chase scene, the Omnimart and the Bikers all needed me to stop and develop a collection of new personalities for the main characters to play off of, so a lot of the time I’ll create characters in batches.  Instead of just expanding on their own individual traits I’ll weigh who they are against who they’re surrounded by and how they might bounce off one another.  They might be more or less reasonable with their overbearing assistant manager or I might decide hey, maybe these two have a relationship and that’s why they both have matching pistols, so when one of them is stolen it’s a big deal to the guy it was stolen from, and I can give the pistols engraved names so something like “Mercy” might have a new meaning in the context of being carried by a struggling pacifist.  

Who a character is internally and who they are externally in relation to the characters around them often go hand in hand, and even that mix can evolve as a character is being written into the narrative of a comic.  Some characters aren’t planned at all, they’re developed entirely on the page to fit a need like many incidental characters; they’re designed to be incidental but wind up sticking around and growing into major parts of the story (like Alice’s origin) or they were added as incidental flavor but were useful to draw from while writing story arcs years and years later (Deon and Donna, the gatekeeper rastas at Tombstone).  Some characters were added as hooks, planted deliberately for the long game (01010011011000010110110001101100011110010010000001010111011001010110100101110011011011010110000101101110011011100010110000100000011101000110100001100101001000000110110001101001011101000111010001101100011001010010000001100111011010010111001001101100001000000100110101101111011011100110010001100001011110010010000001110010011001010111001101100011011101010110010101100100001011000010000001100001011011100110010000100000011010000110010101110010001000000111000001100001011100100110010101101110011101000111001100101110). The story is an organic, evolving thing, and no character has actually remained exactly how they were initially planned, but by fleshing out their personalities you have a pretty good toolbox to adapt characters to the needs of the comic and vice versa.  The more alive they are the easier it is.

Tombstone as a setting is one I’d been planning to work towards for a long time.  It involves a lot of setup on my part to ease from the narrative of “street survivor” to “actual community” and in particular the storyline I’m building towards requires a bunch of pieces set up before I knock them down (01001001011101000010011101110011001000000110000100100000011011010111010101110010011001000110010101110010001000000110110101111001011100110111010001100101011100100111100100100001) so like the big arc scenes before it, I’ve had to plan a bunch of characters in advance, so I’ve picked eight of them to share here and sort of flesh out my thoughts, plans and intentions for them and how this impacted their design, as an example of all the above stuff I typed.  Using this article’s image I’ll go through in numerical order so even if you’re not entirely familiar you can connect the description to the above design.

1) Throughout the comic Lizzie has lamented her job as a waitress and bemoaned the unreliability of her coworkers chalking her overtime on the wall like a prison inmate.  We’ve never actually seen any of her coworkers outside of Frank, their employer, but she’s alluded to them for hundreds of pages. Doris is the waitress at the Jade Garden restaurant in Tombstone, and she’s basically the living embodiment of everything Lizzie has ever complained about. Doris is one of Lizzie’s former coworkers and, in fact, she’s the exact one who ditched out of work on the last day Lizzie was called to fill in at the last minute (p. 18)- the place she was leaving when a car wreck scarred her all over- and depending on your interpretation she may be the reason Lizzie nearly died or the reason she’s still alive.  So introducing Doris is introducing a long-time soft nemesis to the story’s main character, someone who put a rather deep chip in her shoulder, and I wanted to capture Lizzie’s exact sentiments in one human being.  Like Lizzie, Doris still has her work uniform from Frank’s Diner- they’re distinguished by being the only ones with rectangular nametags over the left pocket- and a pair of old New Balance-esque work shoes, something comfy to stand up all day in but worn in with age. She’s an older woman so she has a degree of seniority over Lizzie but she’s not sick or frail, she’s perfectly able-bodied and capable of working.  

Doris’s expression and mannerisms are meant to convey two things: one is that she is a thick callus of apathy that can only develop over decades in the service industry, she just openly does not give a you-know-what about anything; and two is that she has the wisdom and cleverness to match her age. Doris knows she can call in sick any day she doesn’t feel like working and she knows that even if everyone else turns down a call to come in Lizzie Cooper is the dope who will never say no to a last-minute shift cover.  Whether it’s because Doris had different living situations where she didn’t really -need- all forty hours worth of pay or she knew Lizzie needed every red cent she could scrape together (p. 368), she’s smart enough to know she has a fall girl every time she wants to call out of work, and Lizzie herself is perfectly aware of all of this.  Doris is a weathered old soul who is always casting discrete sideways glances; she wears a confident, knowing smile which glimmers like salt in an old, sore wound.  Times were looking pretty grim but fortune smiles; her favorite coworker made it in from the storm!  She’s got plenty of reasons to smile how she does.

2, 3, 4) From it’s inception Dead Winter as a story always had the idea of a wild-west setting in its blood, with vast expanses of lawless, inhospitable terrain bathed in gunsmoke and uncertainty, dotted with small pockets of civilization with their own isolated politics and their own sets of problems.  The Jade Garden restaurant was designed to be a central social hub for the city of Tombstone, like a western saloon in an urban environment where there wouldn’t actually be any saloons.  As one of the only places currently wired with electricity they stock refrigerated drinks, they plugged in some arcade cabinets, they dragged a pool table inside and the food ain’t too bad either; it’s where the people in town go to get a hot meal, a cold beer or a couple hours to distract themselves or fall into a hand of cards at the back booth.  And rather than make it an out-of-place bar or saloon I thought an adapted Chinese restaurant would fit the aesthetic well- being able to cook a lot of healthy vegetarian meals is a greater boon to a town than a backroom full of beer kegs, after all.  And since the restaurant is intact, it needs people to run it, so I had to design a small family to staff it.

As of this writing the Leung family haven’t formally appeared in the story yet but they’ve been planned for a while.  What I’d initially planned was a single father and an adult child, but I couldn’t decide whether a son or daughter would interact more interestingly with the main characters so I decided, why not have one of each?  Lee (#2) is the elder sibling, working the kitchen with their father.  His posture shows a defiant confidence in the face of adversity, knowing that even though it may not be the most glamorous job in town his is one of the most vital.  He’s young, his hair styled short and loose to give him a sense of personal freedom- he’s not so much an obedient son as he is one who can do what he likes but knows what he really ought to be doing.  His younger sister Molly (#3) works at the Jade Garden as well, but she doesn’t necessarily share her brother’s sense of duty.  She’s a more quiet and withdrawn personality, her eyes doing a fair deal more talking than her mouth does.  She’s the type who’d rather be left alone but her job at the counter as an intermediary between customers and her family put her in regular direct contact with people who disrupt her bubble- her expression captures a sort of quiet resentment for what she needs to do.  Everyone in Tombstone carries some manner of weapon or another but Molly has gotten her hands on a rather vocal one.  Their father Cheng (#4) is an older man who is not in his best health. His design is meant to show a degree of sacrifice, weathered and weary from sacrificing a part of his life so his kids could have a better one.  He’s the boss of the Jade Garden and the primary cook, but he suffers from a language barrier between him and his customers so he balances a codependence with his children- he’s given a lot for them so they give back to him.  The three were designed together so their interconnectivity can help tell the story of their origin before the main characters arrived at their restaurant.

5) Sheriff Will Tanner is the law in a lawless town in the thickest spaghetti western sense of the term.  He’s the head of the printer’s union at the newspaper so he has a working-stiff aesthetic about him.  His broad-shouldered shape, thick torso and overall manner is roughly based around the paternal idea of a football coach.  His facial features were planned to be jagged and geometric so when he shifts between the cold stranger mode and his friendlier father-figure mode there’s a visual difference in the lift of his eyebrows and the smile of his moustache.  Sheriff Tanner actually borrows some clothing inspiration directly from Lou and Lizzie, the two working stiffs within the main party.  He’s got the same Carhartt-esque work jacket as Lou, with the same brand logo on the left chest and he wears the same sort of black treaded boots Lizzie does- it’s clothing shorthand to show that he works with his hands and stays on his feet for long hours.  His overall look is meant to invoke an honest earthiness as a man who has “put in his hours”, and that’s why people trust him enough to make him Sheriff.  Also, since there’s no tin badges or anything to signify a lawman he wears a strip of white cloth tied around his white forearm.  Corporal Ross and the other two deputies both have the same white cloth around their arm, that’s meant to stand out as an imprompu badge.

6) Maria Martinez was the Editor-in-Chief of an entire newspaper and now she’s the Deputy Mayor under the paper’s owner, Mayor Richardson. This means that before the end she was overwhelmed with work and after the end she is in charge of all the actual micromanagement of an entire volatile jury-rigged little town. She’s a very busy, professional woman and she won’t waste her time or yours.  Her eyes are meant to show a level of calm, deconstructing whatever problem she happens to be looking over.  She wears a blue blazer because she’s a professional, she projects an image of self-respect and authority and while her posture is stern she hints at an empathetic heart.  The shooting glove on her right hand is as much a message as it is a practical tool, and her boots are much more functional than flats or more formal footwear- she’s the woman on the ground making sure the whole town is glued together, so she maintains a “practical professional” aesthetic.  Her role and demeanor as a Writer’s Boss is intended on a deeper level, particularly in relation to any writers who might be rolling into her town looking for work.

7) An old metalworker and Tombstone’s armorer, Randy Marshall has developed a reputation as a drunk, and if you get to know him you’d found out just why and how he earned that reputation.  Randy is a timid man, he stands with a slouch and keeps his head low.  His eyes are always squinted shut, like his cheek muscles are anticipating some painful wince.  He’s got a long, almost muppet-like face, hinting at a weary, harmless soul.  Randy’s design is someone who isn’t having a great time, and his missing left pinkie shows a level of victimhood in his story.  When he sits he’s always fidgeting, he’s always keeping his hands occupied- this could be taken as a mix of his nervousness and his creativeness, being the builder that he is.  He wears very plain clothes, the sort of stuff you wouldn’t care if you got grease stains on, and his pocketed fishing vest gives him a handy tinkerer look to him, since not everyone carries such big pockets in arm’s reach.  He drinks not out of addiction but as an escape and this shows in the way he handles his bottles. When he smiles it’s a tired smile, a realization that maybe Lou and Monday might be the best thing to happen to him in a long and miserable week.  It’s the smile you wear when the sun creeps out from behind dark clouds, and while you’re not certain how long it will shine for you’re thankful that it’s there at all.

8) The self-proclaimed and universally-agreed-upon mayor of Tombstone, Stephen Richardson is a businessman cut from an old cloth.  He’s a fast-talking charmer, a charismatic orator who knows the best way to meet his ends is to convince others that they’re their ends as well.  He wears suspenders, rolls up his sleeves and ties no tie to give him the sense that even though he’s the paper president he wasn’t handed the seat, he’s worked his way to that position.  He’s done every job in the company, he knows how the gears of the industry turn and he’s pretty good at keeping those gears turning for the foreseeable future by whatever means necessary.  Like Doris his face has the lines and angles that come with advanced age, but unlike her he’s got the nimble stride of a carnival barker.  Mr. Richardson maintains a commanding presence and when he speaks he does a lot with his hands, moreso than most other people; he wears many hats but he’s a salesman, first and foremost, and a salesman who doesn’t glow with confidence isn’t much of a salesman at all.

There are more than these eight characters planned or currently existing in Tombstone but I thought they’d be a good set to expand upon to outline how my thought process works when I’m creating new characters.  They tell their stories not just by how they look but by the things they do and the way they respond to one another, and capturing that is central to my character designing process.  Some of the best ideas are the ones you haven’t had yet, and you won’t find the right details or the perfect connections until you start fleshing out a rudimentary version of your characters.  You can never build momentum until you start moving forward; it’s in the act of creating that we’re truly able to create.  Once you get going though, it’s hard to anticipate where your creative process might take you, but that’s where you learn to be a good engineer.

Thanks for reading!