Naming Your Characters
Submitted by Compugasm on April 15, 2006 - 00:02
I have a character called Snail, and the Easter Bunny. I admit, not especially creative. But he looks like a snail, and it's a name that's easy to remember.
I was digging around in the basement of god-awful comics, when I came upon one that even went out of it's way to give the characters the worst names possible. I'll change the names to protect the innocent, but I'm talking about Dr. Regina Van Beirdorf-Hausladenhoffer. You know, the famous entozoologist?
It just rolls off the tongue, right? Imagine the havoc this causes with text bubbles. Every other character in the strip went out of their way to refer to Dr. Regina Van Beirdorf-Hausladenhoffer (the Entozoologist) often. They never called her just "Doctor", but the full, hyphenated, impossible to remember name each time. I emailed the creator, inquiring about the name of this character, and how it came about. I'd post it, but the explanation I got back was three pages long. It was a history of alternate timelines, marriages, etc... and I should have expected as much. The only comic effect was in the repetition, and overly detailed explanation of everything.
If you don't care about the artwork that goes into making a comic, the writing is all you have left. Figure out what works and what doesn't. In a sense, Dr. Regina Van Beirdorf-Hausladenhoffer is funny, but it doesn't work.
- The repetition humor wears thin, real fast.
- The name is too long and screws with the text bubbles.
- It's impossible to remember.
- If your comic is going to focus on dialog, rather than artistic ability, t must be some amazing dialog to keep my interest, and doesn't piss me off to read it.
I'd go out on a limb, and say that naming characters, really isn't that important. Sure, there's some exceptions. Would "Darth Vader" be less cool if his name was Jimbo Ostrovsky? Most definitely. But, it's the writing which defines a character, not the other way around.
Nameless characters don't
by Terrence Marks - 04/15/2006 - 16:17
Nameless characters don't bother me, unless sentences are being delibarately convoluted to avoid the subject. In Kevin & Kell, Kevin's father is a good example. He hasn't been given a name, but there aren't any comics you look at and think "They're going out of their way to avoid mentioning his name".
The things I've learned about names are:
The longer and more unusual a foreign name is, the less of it people will pay attention to. Unless the reader has experience with Polish, for instance, Przeclawa, Zbigniew, and Wladyslaw all get scanned over and parsed as "Polish name". "Dr. Regina Van Beirdorf-Hausladenhoffer" gets parsed as "Dr. long name". If there were also a "Dr. Theophrast von Hohenheim" in that comic, I'd never be able to remember quite which was which.
I've had to rewrite dialogue a number of times because a character's name was too long to fit in on the same line as the preceeding or following word. If you have a choice between a long name and a short one, go with the short one.
Do names matter? If they're ordinary names, not really. It doesn't matter too much if a guy in your supporting cast is called Ted or Sam.
http://www.sparepartscomics.com
http://www.yousayitfirst.com
http://www.namirdeiter.com
--
Terrence Marks
Spare Parts
You Say it First
re:
by Katie Sekelsky - 04/15/2006 - 09:35
I'd say character names can be important. Like the example you gave, evil characters tend to fit better into evil names. I've also had a habbit of trying to find names whose meaning/origin has some significance to their personality. Then again, sometimes I pick names because they sound cool :) (And, in case, a character name came straight out of the "from" line of a spam email...)
Anyhow, in the specific "doctor" case you mention here, yeah, it probably wasn't the brightest idea. I can see how such a long name could easily annoy the reader, even after just a page or two.
-reva-
http://www.thinksynch.com
-reva-
http://www.thinksynch.com
Names aren't important
by Brad Hawkins - 04/15/2006 - 00:37
I agree. Of the nine major characters in my strip, two have legitimate names, four have names that describe their personalities or occupations, two have names that are completely unknown and one is just referred to as "that sheep." No one's complained yet.