I've been wanting to ask this question somewhere for weeks, after spending the last several hours wandering about this forum I think this just might be the place... anyhow...
Some comics have a very small cast... perhaps three or four characters and the occasional walk-on, others have vast numbers of semi-regular characters, what do people feel are the pros and cons of having small, medium or large casts? Do you feel that a certain number or characters is ideal? If so how many?
Also do you get annoyed when a comic you read suddenly starts following the events in the life of a previously minor character, or even an entirely new character or characters? Does it make an interesting change? If you have done this in a comic you draw/write why did you do it? Do you feel it worked?
If you have a large cast, you run the risk of having characters and never using them. (TV shows often run in to this problem of devoting an entire episode to a new character and then never mentioning them again.) If you have a small cast, they need to be very well developed or they get boring really fast. The core crew for my strip is about 4 friends who all tee off some trait in each other. (The Golden Girls is a good example of a tiny cast that plays off each other perfectly.) I also have an extended stock of characters, at last count a little over a dozen or so, who take turns interacting with the central cast.
I generally like to keep it at 6 or lower as that seems to be the right amount to balance storylines out. Having 6 in The Asylumantics for example gives me enough different personalities to go in almost any direction I need to.
Also do you get annoyed when a comic you read suddenly starts following the events in the life of a previously minor character, or even an entirely new character or characters? Does it make an interesting change? If you have done this in a comic you draw/write why did you do it? Do you feel it worked?
Not at all. I think it gives a comic a nice change without altering the core story too much. It's also a great way to test ideas and if they don't work out just kill off the new character!
It depends on what you consider the cast. Take CRfH, for instance. It has six primary characters (and two more secondaries that have appeared to join the primary cast). However, the secondary character cast is easily three times the size of the primary, if not four or five times the size. We've never had a story about Waldo and Steve, but both have played integral parts of the story. Satan has been the *focus* of several stories, and he's but a secondary character as well.
Alice! on the other hand focuses on Alice and Dot, and sometimes their friend Joanna. It's got a decent sized secondary character cast, some of whom show up once and never again. We deal primarily with Alice and her fantasies, and her friends.
Some comics focus on one character alone. This works... but sometimes you can feel constrained by always dealing with the same person day in and day out. In many ways, this is why casts expand. Hell, when CRfH first started, it was about three guys. The girls appeared after a few months and weren't intended on being primary characters. But soon they grew into a new role. Characters change... and the writers often find themselves surprised when a character they never intended to be more than a one or two shot character suddenly becomes a favorite and a new focus for the comic.
Robert A. Howard
[quote:bf0de2e75b="Townie"]If you have a large cast, you run the risk of having characters and never using them.
*cough* Robert Jordan *cough*
Interesting, seems like my original plan to have about five protagonists was about right then...
In actual fact I've ended up with seven, one of the extras was envisioned as an antagonist, and still is sort of a grey area as to who's side she's on and why, the other.... the other ended up being part of the main cast as the result of the most amazing drawing experience I've had with this comic so far... Intended to add depth and contrast to one of the original main characters he was supposed to show up, be light-hearted and slutty and then go away again, but when I drew him for the first time he kind of grabbed hold of the pencil and drew himself... seriously I've never had so little trouble drawing a character and then I looked at the finished sketch and there he was staring at me with these huge eyes saying 'I may be light hearted and slutty but I have depth and angst and a whole sub-plot of my own' and I said to myself 'damn, so you have' and went away and rewrote huge chunks of the plot to take his subplot into account.
Was a real epiphany moment.
There's no rules... it's whatever you as a writer can handle, and what your comic's genre will allow. As comics go, I think I have a lot of characters, but I like to think I can stay on top of them, moreso now than before. Generally, you'll find that you have to cycle around your supporting cast, but always maintain a focus on your title characters expect in the case of the "side character subplot story", which I have just done myself.
But really, it comes down to your ability as a writer, creator and self-editor. If you're skilled enough, all of your characters can be layered and fresh. Start small though, grow the strip naturally. Do it at your own pace, set your own rules, and it should work
Fourteen characters at the current count that have been named and had speaking roles. Another two that will appear soonish or laterish, and I'm thinking of another to bring in when appropriate because a story will definitely revolve around him throughout the strip. He'll still be secondary though.
Really I've got three main characters, and a few that are regular enough to argue their way into this category. I think it gives you variety and fleshes out the world a bit. My setting's a primary school and a cemetery. It needs a population for both settings, so it's required to have a few extras flitting in and out. I do have plans for stories involving, if not revolving around, each character. If there's a down side it's finding the time to bring them all in and fully develop them quickly. I take the view that when you first meet people you don't spend time with them straight away to fully get to know them, unless it's a new cell mate in your local prison...you get to know them over time.
I don't like a lot of characters...UNLESS they are gradually introduced.
One of my pet peeves is a comic that has fifteen people all starting out at the beginning of a comic. The way they justify this is to give you a lengthy run-down of each of them in the prologue. I hate that. Who can keep that many people straight?
If you get too many characters, just kill some of them off...
There's a distinction to be made between main characters and supporting cast.
Main characters, the ones whose actions drive the plot, need to be limited in number. One to five, maybe, otherwise the story will lose focus. These characters should be well deveolped and multi-faceted, at least to the extent that character development is a major focus in your comic.
My feeling is that supporting cast should be rich. Friends, family, roomates, co-workers, lovers, casual aquaintances, people you meet once at the bus stop and never see again. These characters serve to help define the main characters, rather than being focal points in and of themselves, and they can be one-dimensional, if they need to be. Indeed, spending too much time developing the supporting cast can be dangerous, as they can turn into main charcters if the writer isn't careful, which, once again, can make you comic lose focus.
Right now, at under 100 pages, I have four main characters, and at least nine suporting characters, and plan on adding more. Real people don't live in tight, isolated groups of six or so, they have vast social networks of dozens of people. While it would be impossible to potray all of this, especially in a low-bandwith medium like comics, a reasonably rich supporting cast of, say, ten people, can really help to make both the main characters and the world feel more realistic.
I think the real limit is how many characters you can create that are 1.) interesting, 2.) different enough from each other that no one can possibly confuse any two, 3.) capable of carrying a short story arc on their own, if needed.
I have a fairly large cast for OOTS; six protagonists, plus about 10 villains, plus about a dozen recurring characters (Roy's dead father, for example, or the pair of lawyers). I'm pretty confident that none of them can be confused, and feel that I could draw a story for any of them if I felt like it, so I'm OK with having so many characters. What tells me that I haven't gone over the limit is that when I go to conventions, each fan always has a different choice for who their favorite character is.
I agree you should set yourself something of a limit for main characters. The supporting cast can be fairly large (and if you keep going for years it probably should be to allow some variety and help give the impression that there's a whole world out there - just how many characters have Marvel introduced over the years? There's probably thousands if you add 'em all up).
After a year I'd gone too far and ended up with too many main characters and not enough time or space to do them all justice. Fortunately I'm getting to the point in the story where I can drastically "prune" the character list. Now, I'd planned this point from the beginning - I'm just going to have to nobble more characters than I'd planned to. But it's a bit of a drastic way to sort out something that's a result of my bad planning, and I run the risk of upsetting readers who might see some of their favorite characters wiped out.
So, to sum up - I'd suggest you limit yourself to a handful of main characters and concentrate on them. You can introduce more supporting characters, but do it gradually so your main lot don't get lost in the rush.
Hmm...I dunno if culling them would work in mine...seems very likely being dead wouldn't necessarily mean they're out of the story...spirits in the cemetery next door and all that...
I'll stick with the dozen I've got and work on developing them, eh?
Really, I think it depends on how you plan to use your characters. In some instances, just having 3 characters can make your world seem rather small, then again, for a gag-strip, are more people really needed?
The more epic the story, the more characters one is going to need (can't build a world without critters in it, now can we?), and even then you shouldn't go around putting out dozens and dozens of new ones.
I think a good example of how a lot of characters can go wrong, is Ken Akamatsu's 'Negima', which has 2-4 main characters, and about 30+ other characters, which are constantly used, making it really hard to even remember who's who. It floods the story, which in itsself is, to be honest, really bad, unless you're a pedophile.
What I regard as a good example of where a lot of characters do work is 'The lord of the Rings' where the characters are split up in substories. Though it still makes all of it really complex.
So to my opinion, the more complex the comic's world is, the more characters it is likely to have/need. The more characters it has, the better you have to manage main- and sub-plotlines. So more characters means more work.
Also do you get annoyed when a comic you read suddenly starts following the events in the life of a previously minor character, or even an entirely new character or characters?
I think that if played right, minor characters can provide a really good spin on a story. Minor characters can grow, maybe even becoming a main character, or fading away again. He/she/it could have been doing something which didn't really seem important in the beginning, but then it becomes a big problem to the main characters. The fun with this is that you can use a lot of subtle fore-shadowing.
Allowing minor characters to influence the story is also a good way to give your readers a feeling that anything could happen.
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How many characters?
I've been wanting to ask this question somewhere for weeks, after spending the last several hours wandering about this forum I think this just might be the place... anyhow...
Some comics have a very small cast... perhaps three or four characters and the occasional walk-on, others have vast numbers of semi-regular characters, what do people feel are the pros and cons of having small, medium or large casts? Do you feel that a certain number or characters is ideal? If so how many?
Also do you get annoyed when a comic you read suddenly starts following the events in the life of a previously minor character, or even an entirely new character or characters? Does it make an interesting change? If you have done this in a comic you draw/write why did you do it? Do you feel it worked?
RE: How many characters?
small - familiarity!
large - variety!
no!
NOT APPLICABLE
No!
Maybe!
Story related stuff was happening away from the main character!
Sure!