Just thought it'd be interesting finding out how you people came about creating your characters.

Me personally, I was just doodling and I came up Christian. He's a devil in my webcomic for those of you who dont read it. For some reason, he came together really smoothly. It was one of those times where the character practically draws himself. His expression got me thinking about his background and his personality.

That creative spark got me to come up with a handful of other characters including a cyborg and a ghost lady. Then to bring a sense of normality I drew my representation of a typical teenager, Johnny.

I've so far only used Christian and Johnny in my webcomic. No plans have been made to put the others in but, I never say never.

So how did you create yours?

Basically, I wanted to draw a scythe. But without drawing Death. *giggles* I basically think what my characters want to behave like, and what would that translate as in terms of behavior and appearance (psychology background at work here). Then I play around with little things (for example, hook noses. I don't know why, but I get a kick out of drawing them).

But first I design the personality I want, and then I draw the appearance around that. That way it is consistent with the person's character and the comic book character has more chances of reaching out to the reader.

...of course, I can do that better in a story... but the idea is the same. ;)

Half of my characters are exagerrations of real people. SO, that makes it easy to begin with.

From there I just draw and draw and draw until I come up with something that looks interesting to me, or something that fits the characters personality.

Really, I think for the other characters, I just doodle and if something begins to look interesting I continue and refine that doodle. Some of my characters I base their personalities off of the doodles I draw.

Once you get a story going, it's easy to create a couple of characters that are needed to progress the plot. I started to do that in my old comic. It got a bit confusing though.

Wee!

The Monkey Island characters were made when I messed up a doodle of a Kirby series character.

I looked at it, and it looked like a monkey, and I figured I'd try making it in Fireworks, and then I turned it into a comic... which I need to start updating again >_>

A majority of my characters are real people. I find it easier to write for them as I've literally known them for so long. EJ is real, Dice is real, Bagelman (real name is Alan) is real...

The trick is not making it all an inside joke. I think I manage to avoid that quite well. The other half of it is making people relate to the characters. Typically people like to read about wacky characters, so I'm glad I know only crazy people.

From real life. SRSLY.

I freely admit, I have a deep-seated fear of zombies. And zombie apocalypses.

So Nancy came out of an attempt to make fun of that... She's totally inept, and looks more like a playboy cartoon from the seventies than a necromancer. Her sketch (which I colored and turned into the title page for the comic) came out perfect the very first time. Then, of course, she needed the most non-threatening zombie ever as an assistant... Arandu's character sketch (which isn't posted yet) also came out perfect the fist time. In it he's wearing an aprom with bunnies on it. Best zombie ever. And then I figured I needed a wise-ass character... thus Emp. His design changed a little (he originally had antlers), but he's pretty much as seen in the first sketches.

Nancy was a fluke, though. Normally I get much more in depth about how I want designs to be, what characters I need to get the story told. Nancy is just a gag strip, really, but my other storylines are very character driven. With Anzie, it's been like fitting in pieces of a puzzle. I designed Anzie first with no back story, then started thinking of a world for her to live in, what she was going to be like, what other personalities I wanted her to encounter. After that, it became sort of a process of plugging characters in to holes in the story. 'I need someone who knows what's going on, but isn't allowed to tell the whole story' became Mama Dee. Once I do that, the characters kind of grow inside their function until they're more real people.

Most of my characters are all based off of various aspects of myself. Rose is based off of my nearly uncontrollable anger and desire to hurt people. Ceruss is based off my dislike of the human sex drive. Avi (an as of yet, unintroduced character) is based off of my habit to overthink EVERYTHING that is far too simple.

Al is based off of my brother, and Hana is based off of what I think the perfect woman would be like.

The way I create my charcaters:
I drew a couple of sexy gals in groovy outfits... Later I had a story (based around a number of things and including the girls), and I just made their characters fit in with what I wanted to say in the story. All other characters I make for my main comic are the same: They're made to fit the story.
Sometimes I'll have a cool idea for a character out of the the blue though. Still, it's their participation in a story that gives them real character, not what I want for them.

For the other comic I do (Pink Skin), I just use mostly the characters from my other comic (Pinky TA), so they're already made. It's a "humour" story though, so one character gets to be nasty, one gets to be dopey and one gets to be wry.

Too easy. If I want particular personality traits, I give them mine. I have more than enough to spare. ^_^


...Maybe that's why they're all so wooden... -_-

PFTS, my gag-strip is based entirely on people I know here at ASC (makes sense as it is for the ASC paper). The only exceptions are the "America, 2106 AD" characters (who don't appear often) who are based on the predicted demographics for what the USA will be 100 years from now (obese and hispanic).

My newest strip, GuGu is based off an idea Rich had in jest. He is a gay black walrus-man who fights homophobes, nazis, and the KKK with his walrus powers and ninja abilities. His personality is an amalgam of various people, including myself. The Klan characters are based mostly on Klan reasearch I did and on Discovery/History Channel documentaries about them. I then hyperbolized them into a highly organized and intelligent terrorist force so that the comic would be more than just chopping up rednecks with a sword. There is another character coming, but I can't just come out and say it so it is size 1ed at the end here..

Spolier below:
It's Dionysus!

Physically...Jordan is based off my friend, Katie. and Ash is based off my friend Bailey. Shae is not based off me physically, but everyone likes to assume that, so i'll go with it. The mom is based off my mom. Fenrir is based off my cat, whose name is...hahah, Shae. I named my character after my cat. Kinda sad. The guys, Danny and Raffie, were not modelled after anyone in particular. But certain parts of my guy friends show up in these two.

Personalities...however...are a different story. It's a mix of how I want to be, how I am, and how my friends are, how we interact with each other. Physically...they may be based off people specifically, but personality-wise...it's a melting pot.

Creating characters comes so natural to me that there is hardly any reason to them. I have so many characters and stories of epic proportion (like one about a centaur v. humans war in ancient Greece) that I could spend the rest of my life telling them all, but alas.. That whould require me to either a. have that as my career or b. win or marry someone with millions of dollars so I dont have to work one or two mundane jobs 40+ hours a week just to survive.

Anyways..
Agent 84 (my avatar) was based on me at work as an airport operations agent, but Ive since discontinued Expect 9er Left due to lack of interest.

From "The Worlds Kinda Blue" I already posted how Kami and Spastic Elf came about and here's what it says:
"Kami came about in late 1998 when I wanted to draw a character to represent me in the now forgotten V-Chat program. My user name was DemonFire-Kaminari and people would call me Kami for short because I also would host the main room for Microsoft under that shortened name.
A blue demon girl, cute, unique, and with kaminari kanji on her somewhere (thats that red thing on her forehead) to represent the name I was using.

I was also inspired to do this by a person I met in that chat room who called himself Spastic Elf and had an adorable blue elf avatar he made.

This same person is still an inspiration to me and indirectly motivates me to draw."

It was my third attempt at designing that character that stayed.
Basically, the two characters are primarily intended to show my affection for him.

For Oni No Noroi... I just wanted to do something in a historical Japanese setting.. with demons, samurai, and whatnot.
Though Ive really toned down the whole aspect of demon*s* in the story.

Narou came about in 1999 when an online friend of mine, who is an amazing artist, and I wanted to do an epic fantasy story together using your typical unlikely hero based on a bizarre drawing I did. Narou was one of the characters in the story. I got so enthusiastic about designing it, that I couldnt hold my all of my ideas back. My friend bailed on the story citing that he just couldnt keep up. (That and I think he really hated that I insisted we use the dragon king I designed, which he didnt like.)
After this, I had liked Narou so much, that I decided to make a story with him that happens after the original story.

Toss in a cute child, a dragon from the prequel story, an effeminite knife-thrower obsessed with being the next big hero, a bitter exiled noble looking for revenge, and a runaway princess and there you have it..
Narou !

The characters from my first manga Vastar, came from actual characters I played in D&D campaigns. I already had their stats, bio and personalities out on paper, so all that was needed was to turn that into a story.

For NFA, the ideas for characters came from a variety of sources of inspiration like Record of Lodoss War, Berserk, and Sailor Moon anime/manga. Personalities and things came from D&D campaigns I played in, and it grew from there.

Alex (of 'Danmit I Changed Again' ) was named after me, his current look (every few comics, this changes) is that of an Emo because i'm getting good at drawing emo faces!

Hmm... My webcomic is fairly new, so for right now, I only have two main characters. When I introduce the rest, I will come back and explain them.

When I create a storyline, I usually start with the setting. I decided to put the setting in a high school, present time, because high school is what I know best, since I'm in it right now. Then, I decide what kind of storyline it should be~ Drama? Action? Comedy? Horror? etc... Since it's in a high school, I figured it would be a drama, since there is a lot of drama involved anyway. I wanted it to be a comedy, because every high school has comical moments. I wasn't sure if there was going to be action, so I just left it at that. Next, I decided what my characters were going to represent in the story. Since there are so many stereotypes at school, I decided to make the main characters have an exaggerated stereotype.

I made a list of all the non-offensive stereotypes I could think of:

Prep
Jock
Nerd
Geek
sk8ter
punk
emo
goth
hippie
vintage
junkie
anime nerd
cheerleader (which kind of applies to 'prep')
the quiet type
techno nerd
drama fag
just normal
wannabe

(There's more, but they're either offensive or I can't think of them all)

Then, I picked out the stereotypes I wanted to use:

Prep
Jock
Nerd
Geek
Punk
Emo
Goth
Anime Nerd
The Quiet Type
Drama fag
just normal

I split them up (good guy side, bad guy side):

Good Guy:
Punk
Emo (I know, emo kids should be on the bad guy side XD)
Goth
The Quiet Type
Drama fag
Just normal

Bad Guy:
Prep
Jock
Nerd
Geek
Emo
Goth
Anime Nerd
Just normal (the other side >_>)

I then decided I needed some main characters, so I picked out the two stereotypes I wanted to use for them: Punk and Emo

I then decided on their personalities. For the punk kid, I wanted him to be uncontrollably angry. I also wanted him to be kinda on the cutsy side, because damn it, he's the main character.

For the Emo kid, I wanted him to be uncontrollably whiney and annoying, but also cute so people don't hate him to begin with.

I then named the punk kid Dacre and the emo kid Caden.

And that's how I did it. They didn't take after anyone or anything. Oh, and I'm going to use the other stereotypes, I just didn't get that far into my comic yet :)

Ouch, that was long...

I tend to make characters in pairs for comedic scripts. Clench & Cheese, Boig & Bitty... they play off one another. It's fun if they are stereotyped but also not (skinny and fat, dumb and smart, etc). Once I draw them a few times in a sketchbook their personalities emerge pretty quickly, especially if I've got a cookin' story. I don't really think of story as a separate thing, though.. I just let it go in a general direction and let the characters play off one another. Every so often I'll add someone new (in Boig & Bitty I threw in a character named Lothario John who was a rank and skanky loser modeled after I guy I knew in high school).
Webcomics are great because you immediately have an audience and there's no limitation on how much (or how little) you can do. Self-imposed deadlines and no possibility of ever making a red cent! Hooray for art!
You can see Boig and Bitty and many others at my animation blog http://carrollhach.typepad.com/blog/

Honestly, I wish I had an answer as complicated as all the earlier ones posted here, but the truth is, I've completely forgotten. Most all of my characters either emerged as the story progressed or were thought up seperately and sort of got mixed in. I didn't put a whole lot of thought into it at all, really; I suppose they were waiting inside the story like sculptures waiting inside an unchiseled block of marble (or some equally pretentious and hackneyed simile).

If I were to give advice to others on creating characters, though, I would advise that you make them realistic, with real thoughts and emotions and ideosyncrasies, and try to approach them from every angle. Okay, so say your main character's the last son of a dead necromancer who's trying to put all of his dad's horrific creations back in the grave. That's great. But how has that affected his day-to-day life? Is he haunted by his dad's legacy, or does he see it as just an unfortunate twist of fate, or is he repressing emotions? What's his social life like? Where does he live? Does he have any relatives? Do these relatives annoy him? Where are these relatives now, and what are their lives like? What does he do for a living-- where does he get his income and such? Does he enjoy his job? Does he take showers every morning? What's his favorite brand of breakfast cereal? What does he daydream about? If he were to die tomorrow, what sort of funeral would he want? Most importantly, before the whole "got to kill all of Father's zombies!" thing ever happened, what did he want to do when he grew up-- what were his future goals and such?

You're not just sticking words in some sock puppet's mouth here, remember. You're recording something that a real person said (even if he is fictional). However, it's probably best if you don't list all this background stuff in the comic right off the bat. You don't even have to mention 95 percent of it at all. I just recommend doing it to remind you that your characters aren't acting out a story. They're trying to live their lives, same as us. (Though there's certainly nothing wrong with a few flat stock-type characters thrown in for balance...)

Wow... HVH has so many characters in it that a fair number of them are in serious need of development.

But, yeah...

For HVH, I mostly just started with simple characters in a comic about Heaven and Hell: God, Devil, Jesus, Angels, etc.

So, there I have God, Jesus, and Lucifer (or Lucy as I like to call him). Then, I decided I wanted to make the archangels have ridiculous personalities, so, I decided to use the Catholic list of archangels (Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael) and give them strange personalities based on what I know about them.

Mike- He's a warrior, so I made him the general of Heaven.
Gabe- He was the messenger for Jesus' birth according to Christian tradition, so I, naturally, made him a mailman. Since it's not exactly a glorious job like Mike's, I came up with Gabe's defining character trait; his jealousy of Mike.
Ralph- Well, he's not as well known (I think he's only mentioned in the Catholic bible, but I could be wrong), so I made him the "teenager."

After that, I came with up with the demons.

Succubus- Pretty obvious. The whole demonic temptress thing... At first, I was just gonna make her a slut, but after too many Law and Order: SVU episodes, I changed her background around. It's kind of ironic that she's currently the deepest character in the comic.

Umbra and Jim- No idea how I came up with these guys. Umbra's appearance is clearly based off a ninja and Jim's is obviously based off a ghost, but I don't know about their personalities and stuff. Strange, seeing as Jim is one of the most popular characters.

So, that was the original cast, I added in others I went along. Em and Vickey were just added in because I felt I needed more female characters, Erag and Columbine were created because I felt like I needed actual antagonists, and the Assimilator... well... I just wanted to use that as a name because I thought it sounded cool.

As for my other comics... Grim and Bob's characters are all just parodies of the horror genre and Teenolgy's Dr. Knowitall was just "pulled out of my ass." (Figuratively speaking, of course)

most of my stories are based upon dreams i had, so the main characters are pretty much there. where i have to do the planning is with the supporting characters. while years ago, comics could do heavy voiceovers of the characters{he was a man who was curt with those close to him, blah, blah- look at the old ec's}, people nowadays want to be shown that and how do you show that- by characters interacting. and the main character is only as good as the supporting characters. i consider the main character traits.- how they would clash with their friends, etc. i try not to love them-characters are only plot devices to move the story along. i tell myself-it's a physics problem. you got all these molecules in a box and you're watching the reactions so you can get the box to a certain state. of course, if i think of schroedingers principle that might explain why some characters appear to just write themselves into a storyline.

hartchamber
i try not to love them-characters are only plot devices to move the story along.

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Words cannot express the amount of rage that filled me as I read that.

create them? they created me!

Well I have a very active mind and the Lost King the summit of it. This whole comic was just CRAZY with the creation.
I was walking in a empty construction area and Then I decided no one was watching me, so I'd start the whole "pretend" thing, you know where you just start acting out a story for no better reason that nothing else to do. I can't tell much more beyond that because it has plot spoilers in the story, but the characters surfaced like this:
Ragman was put in my head as me, I was wearing a gray sweat-shirt and I thought it would look cool for a brooding character like ragman. I also was just doodling with a completely different character idea, and I screwed up the one showing eye, and it made him look PISSED. and I liked it. The swords just added to it I think.
The lion dude...well I don't know, I recall something about playing with my spear and he kinda jumped into my head of a lion guy in a coat beating the hell out of people with a spear, then I annoyed Rich with whether it was an idea worth doing.
Beth...I don't know, I really don't have much of an idea in mind for her yet, but I wanted to have a girl in there so it wouldn't become a sausagefest.
Hodunk: popped into my head after playing Icewind Dale II for a long time, how fighters have amazingly low intelligence, and then I wondered why they didn't have down syndrome, so I figured why not give one a mental problem other than insanity?

My characters seem to enjoy pesturing me on which way the storyline goes. XD

Anyways, a few were created for me and given to me. (Gary, Whisp, Aaron, Robby, and Mr. Floppers.) But the rest were drawn and thought through. Scott I drew lotsa times before being happy with something. He was cute... but he needed an attitude. He was cute, had an attitude but he needed a reason. Sarah came along, sweet innoncent small human child. Then Scott was cute, had an attitude and was wraped around a LITTLE GIRL's finger. XD

The other's I kinda watched some people. The king and General Siene were spoofs of a good friend's older brother. (Who was crazy.) The trio, Maria and Jeremia and Josphe, were all randomly put in. I liked their designs and made them into something more!

Mostly though, They were all randomly created and developed slowly in this asylum of a mind. XD

Characters are the hardest things for me to come up with in a story. Or at least flesh out. When I think up a story, I will see and hear scenes of it in my head, and my job is to just put them on paper. I usually know how a story will end before I think of a beginning to it. After I come up with a basic storyline, the characters sort of develop by themselves. By seeing and hearing those random scenes in my head, I already have a basis on what a certain character would sound and act like. Most of the time I just need to put a face on that personality.

Sometimes I have a vague idea of a character, like "ok, this person acts like this, so I want them to be tall and blonde." That's what I work with. Sometimes that calls for just sketching different facial structures over and over and over again. Or sometimes I just ignore the problem completely until it just comes to me. There are times when I know right away what I want someone to look like and I go from there.

The very first sketches for LLW are here:


As you can see, Dan is pretty much the same as when I first sketched him. I pretty much knew what I wanted him to look like from the beginning. However, with Captain Sal, you can also see that I had a lot of trouble coming up with a design for her. That sketchy-shady thing was the product of me being bored and just trying my hand at cross-hatching and the basic idea of Captain Sal was born. I really like the severe and angular aspects of the sketch and that's what the character became. Her personality changed a bit due to her appearance, but I see that as growth in me as a writer and artist.

Nenna has not been introduced yet, but her appearance has changed slightly.

Essentially my ideas are hit-or-miss. Things with either just come to me and I'll fly with it or I will struggle and struggle with something until I finally come up with something for it... maybe days, weeks, months later.

I could talk about my USFDS characters, but they are just exagerated aspects of my own personality, that is pretty normal.

Error is where character design becomes interesting, while it hasn't really come up yet in the story Alf is pretty much an attempt at a character who has Zero personality, it may seem like an easy thing to do, but I've noticed in science fiction that even most robotic characters who are meant to be devoid of emotion often display a distinct personality, this is most noticable in the case of data from star trek, it annoys me that an andriod with apparently no emotion can apparently desire to be human.

Through my story I want Alf to pick up a personality along the way, but not due to learning anything, or though any bizarre spirituality nonsense, but through bad programming and damage.

My brother and I sat down 3 years ago, him with a sketchbook and me with a name dictionary. We came up with a personality, he'd draw it and I'd name it.

Never thought then I'd start it back up 3 years later all on my own. :)

Here's the first ever picture of my characters, drawn by my brother and coloured by me. In Paint. Hilarious. :D

I do love the set-up of that pic, though. Always meant to redo it, never yet had time. I should kidnap someone and make them do it for me. ;)

Hmmm, I think to some extent characters evolve from things that are needed for the story or from a simple concept that I think is cool, but they also take things from me, and from people I know.
Rekki Lune, for example, literally started as this sketch of a character who looked vaguely like a female version of Akuma from 'Street Fighter', but with a sword. Her hair is red because I had a reaaallly nice red pencil crayon that I loved the colour of. I mixed the design with the concept of a kind of 'Female Cloud Strife', a small, slim warrior with an oversized sword. As soon as I gave her green eyes though, her personality suddenly shifted and she became a lot like my older sister, who is a very formidable, proud and practical lady. The final result, after a number of tweaks and messing around with her backstory was the Rekki seen in the comic.
Sarin was a lot simpler, she's a kind of amalgamation of three people, one of whom is my Japanese teacher, Amano sensei, and the other two are old highschool friends of mine. I think she gets her pedantic, crotchetty nature from me though! Hahahaha.
Other characters tend to have similar 'creation stories', part real-life, part inspired by books, games, anime, films etc. part thrown out of my brain randomly.

When I was MUCH younger, I would grow up watching those crazy scfi B-movies from the 50's to 60's late at night as well as the current scifi movies.... along with horror movies, snice I was a BIG fan of horror. so I loved the gore, etc, as well as the super cheesy, wacky things. like as found in the scifi movie Barberlla, which was sorta like a 50s scifi parody in itself.

I was also a big fan of Sailor Moon at the time... so what I did was that I had an idea of combining all elements from Sailor Moon, those crazy B-movies, and the horror movies, to just see what would come out.

basically I took some pyshical traits from Chibiusa (chibimoon) and Usagi (Sailor Moon), the brains of Ami (Mercury), the fighting prowness of Makoto (Jupiter) and Haurka (Uranus), etc... well, you get the idea. I basically picked what I liked the most and found the most unique in each Sailor moon Character, and combined them all together to make Camilla (who at the time was called Malicami, or even.. Camiusa).

step one was done. and then I wrote out the Scifi/Magical girl/Horror plot, and I have to tell you the oringal was pretty crazy. it went something like this:

"In an certain parrell universe, on an certain planet called Gaia something was about to happen.
An evil, mad Genius named Malicami aka Camiusa was about to unleash her fury upon the unsuspecting population. She was tired of how things were run on Gaia, espeically snice most of those imporant things on Gaia was run by idiots! So she started an devious plot to take over the world!
But unfountely for her, others had the same exact plan... so She'll have to fight Space aliens, Space Pirates, other Mad sciencists of Gaia, demtented gods, Zombies as well as the Men in Black orangization to save the world from being conquered by evil people so that she can conquer Gaia by herself at a later date.
In order to do all this, she invented an device which would let her transform into an battle-ready outfit as well as disguse her. she recruits her two best friends, Ranmza and Duppy, to help her in her goal of saving the world from those nasty characters... then... world dominmation!!"

of course, things are slightly different now.. but it was a pretty good plot as it went. too bad when I drew it out on comic, none of it made sense.

Dasien: Basically, I used to snatch Frederick's of Hollywood catalogues out the mail. The physical appearance kind of evolved from that. Some of the earliest Das drawings exist on tracing paper, for... um... obvious reasons. The character, on the other hand, evolved from various female friends of mine.

Parker Lynn Bailey: Initially my homage to Jan Smithers. Later evolved into a sock puppet of my opinions.

Lord Crimson: Was initially designed to resemble Vince Neil and had a completely different story. Brought him into Dasien as a side character. Changed him to a brunette after I decided I had too many blondes. Turned him into a villain out of necessity. Has slowly evolved into a thinly-veiled caricature of myself.

The Gooch: The Gooch is one of my less original characters. Resembles various "Kingpin" characters, namely Marvel's Kingpin, Kenner's Police Acedemy Kingpin, and most notably Big Boss from the COPS cartoon series. There are some other very obvious influences, as well. Some of which I'm slowly rediscovering. Moving on...

Max: I wanted a character that looked like Kevin Nash. That's basically it.

Goldie: Don't really remember, but she's probably an homage to Harley Quinn.

Dave: The undeveloped character gag. Usually found more in anime than anything. The best example would be Detective Conan, which introduces so many characters per episode that literally some characters exist for the sake of being a suspect and introducing themselves. "I'm so-and-so." Also kind of poking fun at characters whose entire developement is "He is a cool guy".

Oh dear. I love creating characters, though I don't have nearly as many as I might like. TAE will only use one plot-important character I'd made previously, and for a different story; all the others were pretty much made for the webcomic. However, if you look closely and know some of my characters for other stories, you might catch a glimpse of someone as a cameo or a random person in the background.

But honestly, creating characters is the easy part for me. Putting them into a coherent plot is difficult, and the characters themselves will sometimes change what I'd planned out.


And to hartchamber: I disagree with your opinion of characters as plot devices. A story without characters that people can love is generally going to be a boring one. I view my characters as real people (and unfortunately, that's led to a couple of mental problems on my part), and they have just as much say in what goes on in the story as I do. It's truly the characters that make any story unique, not whatever plot twist you can come up with. And without the characters, is your story really anything more than an overused plot idea?