Keep Characters Consistent (or Not)
Recent post excerpt from SAW Founder and Instructor, Tom Hart, in our Six-Month Graphic Novel Intensive:
“It came up in another group (those of you around last year will remember) about creating characters with a consistent visual look. In other words, making it look the same panel after panel.
Who's trying to do that? Some people really fret over it. For some it's effortless. For others (like me!), next to impossible...
I guess you're going to have to do it if you want this job:
Note how specific we get with proportions down to the fractions...
Mapping this out WILL help you. It's probably one extreme of solving this problem.
(I'll briefly mention that I never bothered to do this for my own signature character,
until 5 or 6 years after I created him, when a friend/fan sent me this computer animation...
I realized I never thought about what he looked like from the side before that!)
The other extreme to getting it all perfect is not caring at all. This can be done successfully. Josh Bayer is one of my favorite cartoonists, and his characters are all over the place. Note this first page from a recent comic:
This character has a far tinier head in panel 3, it's roundish in panel 1 and squarish in panel 4. Low neck in panel 2, high neck in panel 4. Long face, sometimes short, etc…
The idea of a "marker" is a good one. If your characters look sufficiently different, and each has an identifying "marker" (black hair vs light hair, short vs long, etc.) you should be fine, depending on your goals.
So those are the two extremes. Get it perfect or don't worry about it, and just help the reader out.
In between is probably where you will land, as I am. I am ALWAYS wrestling with "what do my characters look like?" I never settle. I try.
In short, it's a contract you make with your reader: how much do they expect consistency and how far are you will to go? Some readers are hard to please- others are happy to see your artistic fluctuations.”
- Tom Hart
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