Note: The images presented here are just a few of the great illustrations included in this chapter in the book!

Unity of design, of story, of vision, is perhaps the highest principle of art. And in the sequential art of graphic novels, design and story are inextricably linked. No element of a character design is merely decorative or isolated; everything is functional and interrelated to everything else in the story.

Characters in comics—the visual language of graphic novels—are analogous to characters in all other narrative art forms, but there are three distinctive areas worth introducing and emphasizing at this point in terms of how they affect unity and sequence.

Static and Dynamic
One way of looking at comics character designs is to explore the spectrum from static to dynamic. “Static” does not mean immobile or unchanging in this context, but rather that a character possesses a fundamental (i.e., prototypical) visual design or model. “Dynamic,” by contrast, means that a character has no single ideal design; the author determines the character’s appearance moment by moment, panel by panel. Neither type is superior, and there is a lot of crossover within the spectrum.

Static designs are a crucial part of daily comic strips, monthly comic books, and animated films, where often a collaborative team must strive for visual consistency. Another aspect is what we call “the restart method” of serialized storytelling: At the beginning of each new issue or story arc, the protagonist or antagonist reverts to his or her “default” look, no matter what alterations in appearance (especially costuming) might have occurred previously. Tied to this idea is corporate branding and packaging—the use of a character’s “image” to generate and sell products—which is less prevalent (so far) in the contemporary graphic novel marketplace.

Visually static—though no less appealing characters from Jef Czekaj’s Shark Hunters; Top Shelf, 2004; originally published in Nickelodeon Magazine, October 1999.

Static design is rarely concerned with the precise passage of time, and many static characters do not age or suffer the effects of weather or physical violence. When used in a more realistic context or contrasted with more dynamically designed characters, static designs call attention to the unreality and conceptual elasticity of the comics form, which can be a positive thing. For instance, in Jeff Smith’s Bone series (Cartoon Books/Scholastic Graphix), the comedic lead, Fone Bone, is a visually static, cartoony character who contrasts sharply with the more dynamically rendered dramatic lead, Thorn, whose appearance transforms considerably—and not always consistently—throughout the series. Says Smith, “There are two worlds in Bone: One has an animated-cartoon flavor; the other is more realistic and researched. To bridge these two drawing styles, I had a few bridging characters, including the dragons and Gran’ma Ben. Thorn is fairly realistically drawn. Gran’ma is halfway between the two worlds—a bit like Popeye. I made a stylistic decision to make her character a little stepping-stone between the two worlds so there’s a sense of unity.”

Iconic and Symbolic
The spectrum from iconic to symbolic is another useful mode of exploration. “Icon” has many connotations, but we take it to mean “a pictorial image simplified for the purposes of recognition by a large audience without losing some resemblance to the physical object the image signifies.” A symbol, on the other hand, is a type of visual metaphor (a literary device for comparison), related to the icon, in which the pictorial image stands for an intangible quality without a corresponding physical object. The silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s circular head and ears is iconic; Frodo’s ring in The Lord of the Rings is symbolic.

Alex Ross, famed artist of Marvels (1994), Kingdom Come (1996), and cover artist and character designer for Astro City (see pages 120-125), defines iconic: “You catch the sort of perfect snapshot of the most identifiable form of that character. Fairly simple, fairly direct. You look at [an iconic character], and you know immediately what it’s supposed to be and what it represents. It must be readable so that you understand it and believe in it immediately.”

While characters can possess symbolic attributes and objects, the term “symbolic character” is a difficult one to justify. Characters in any story with more depth than the most straightforward allegory do not symbolize heroism, unconditional love, jealousy, or corrupted absolute power so much as they embody physical and behavioral traits that the reader associates with such abstract ideas. To be clear, symbolism is not a direct, one-to-one comparison but an implied (and hopefully subtle) suggestion of likeness. Hammering the reader over the head with overt symbols is a quick way to lose an audience.

Dynamic page design from Miriam Katin’s “Eucalyptus Nights”: “All the characters on this page are Jewish and Israeli. All except one are soldiers,” Katin says.

Sequential Presence
Unlike a stationary figure in an advertising illustration, or an animated character in a TV cartoon, comics characters exist as part of a visual sequence arranged in space rather than across time—in a sort of map of moments. Each moment (or union of closely related moments) is often framed by a panel border. The author arranges the panels purposefully according to the available space and the story requirements. Theorist Neil Cohn calls a panel an “attention unit,” as each box is in effect a device for drawing and directing attention.

Since comics and graphic novels are meant to be read, not just looked at, page design that encourages clarity and left-to-right, top-to-bottom forward movement (the opposite for traditional manga) is of paramount importance—except when those are not the author’s intentions. Page design therefore exerts a strong influence on character design. Pages packed with panels dictate a different set of “shots”—angles, distances, scales, perspectives—than a more “airy” design with numerous open frames. A “talking-head” story composed of medium shots and close-ups might merit more constrained physical proportions, for example, and also a greater or lesser amount of visual detail as compared with a more cinematic or panoramic layout. But no matter the format, a character designer should know his or her character from every angle, at every scale, and from every distance.

Also important is the location of characters in relation to one another within each panel—making use of background, middle ground, and foreground to guide the eye and “direct” the action.

The shapes characters strike in space are also essential for helping the reader navigate the page and helping the author “pace” the story for maximum dramatic effect. As critic Tom Spurgeon pointed out, visual cues can increase the sense of motion and action—creating visual starts, stops, and pauses. The precise placement and positioning of the bodies, the shapes of faces and props, can move the reader from one side of the panel to the other, and from one panel to the next. A dominant structural element such as a panel border or a wall is a clear stop, and where an element breaks the border can cause the reader to move out of the panel, giving the work a careening or carefully controlled energy.

Page 14 from Don MacDonald’s Machiavelli: “A crowd becomes a shape of its own without devolving into its component parts.”