Home: Writing for Comic Books: Chapter Three - Character Development: Observing People

Chapter Three
Character Development
(cont'd)

OBSERVING PEOPLE

One of the best things you can do to learn how to convey characters as believable human beings is to observe people (but don't be rude about it!). Start by observing yourself. (This can be very scary, I'm the first to admit.) As you respond to different stimuli, step back and think about why you react in the way that you do. Where did your reaction come from? Was it something you were taught by your parents, family, friends? Are your responses based on previous experience or are they rooted in fear of the unknown? Where did your likes and dislikes, loves and fears come from? When you can tap into that, it becomes easier to do it with other people and your characters. It's the first step to empathy that is important to the creation of art.

Observe other people. When interacting with family, friends, and acquaintances, try to empathize with their feelings. Even if you've never been told the exact roots of their emotions, try to understand where the emotions came from. Watch people on the street. Look at their body language. What does this suggest about the person in your mind? What emotions can you draw from the person's face and movement? Again, you may be way off base, but that's not the point. It's an exercise in connecting the dots in a way to create a complete picture, a skill you must possess in order to create believable characters.

PROTAGONISTS AND ANTAGONISTS

Action/adventure stories, including superhero comics, tend to break characters down into good and evil, heroes and villains. If we follow the basic hypothesis stated in this chapter that people have many different masks they wear/roles they play in life, that people are never all one thing, then by extension, nobody is ever all good or all evil. Your heroes may have negative qualities. Your villains may have admirable traits. That makes them more complex and vastly more interesting.

When approaching storytelling, I tend to think in terms of protagonists and antagonists rather than heroes and villains.

The protagonist is the primary character of the story. He or she may be hero or villain or an average person, but it is the character whose story is being told. Of course, it is perfectly acceptable to have multiple protagonists as any ensemble movie or superhero team comic proves. It is the protagonist who should take the key action at the climax of the story that resolves the conflict. The protagonist is the character with whom the author wants the audience to identify and is the character who should be most profoundly affected by the events of the plot.

The antagonist is what stands in the way of the protagonist achieving his or her goals. The antagonist may be a villain or hero or a series of circumstances.

What defines a hero? There are as many answers to that question as there are heroes. We generally define a hero by his or her ability to overcome great challenges--internal or external--for the greater good. You can tick off a list: bravery, strength, intelligence, etc., etc. If I were to select one trait that I feel is integral to all heroes, it is compassion. A hero absolutely must care about people other than him or herself.

One thing that is often important to the hero is humility. In the traditional hero's journey, the hero doesn't recognize that he or she is a hero at the beginning of the story. It is only through testing his or her resolve and overcoming adversity and his or her own shortcomings that the character comes to be seen as a hero.

What defines a villain? Again, there are as many answer to that question as there are villains. Again, you can list numerous traits: violence, an unwillingness to accept responsibility, jealousy, envy, anger, greed, a short temper, etc., etc. If I were to choose a single element that is integral to a villain, it is selfishness. A villain is concerned with his or her own needs above all else. They may want something that on the surface seems like a good and noble goal, but they are willing to sacrifice anyone or anything (other than themselves) to get it.

Writer Ruth Morrison once explained the difference between a hero and villain in this way: "A hero is a person who overcomes a tragedy and promises never to let the same thing happen to anyone else. A villain is someone who overcomes a tragedy and swears never to let it happen to him or herself again." I really like this observation.

It is important to keep in mind that most villains don't see themselves as villainous or evil. We're all the heroes of our own lives. Even Hitler believed he was doing the "right" thing, regardless of how appalling his actions were. A villain has an unshakeable belief that they can do no wrong.

Often, heroes are portrayed as "common" people. The goal of some storytellers is to celebrate the sense that any one of us can be a hero. They create their heroes from the every day, hoping to inspire the audience to bigger and better things. They imply that heroes are one of "us."

Sloppy writers frequently fall into the trap of making their villains an outsider, an "other." They don't want the audience to feel that a villain could be one of us--it has to be one of "them." It is my observation that in soap operas, villains are often "foreign devils." They are not members of the core families, but rather people who come to town from another place. In order to make villains all the more loathsome, bad writers pile all kinds of "negative" qualities on them in order to stop the audience from identifying with them. One short cut that became popular in the mid-90's was to show us a scene of the villain or general troublemaker smoking a cigarette. Another shortcut used in action/adventure and mystery novels in years past (but not that far past...) was to make their villain all the more repellent and alien by making them "sexual deviants"--homosexuals--reinforcing the negative stereotype that all gays, lesbians, and bisexuals were twisted and not to be trusted. Personally, I find a villain that could be one of us far scarier than one that is completely alien.

When you compare heroes and villains, they often have many common traits. They may even have common goals. But what separates them are the lengths to which they will go to achieve their goals.

Now that we've covered the basics of story structure and character development, we can now begin our focus on the specifics of writing for comic books, beginning with outline or "page breakdown..."