Office Hours - Character Types and Ship Dynamics

Time for some more questions from the inbox! If you have a question, feel free to drop it here.

do you have a character or character type in your back pocket you've been wanting to write into a comic but havent had the time or space to yet?

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Ooh, this is such an interesting question! I actually don’t have this relationship with my fictional characters! My character types tend to emerge as I’m writing them—I’m evidently more of a pants-er if you subscribe to that sort of plotters-versus-pants-ers dichotomy about storytelling. Like, I am working on a project right now about some teens figuring their lives out, and my main character turned out way more sullen than I anticipated, and then I discovered she’s got kind of a thorny little mean streak. I love being surprised by my characters like that.

I feel the same way about ship dynamics, which seems so odd because I love romance, and so many of those stories are predicated on managing reader expectations about tropes and ship dynamics. I don’t think about them ahead of writing my characters. Sometimes I’ll draw them doing something mundane, and I’ll learn things about them. Sometimes their dynamics are exciting right off the bat, which is cool. Other times they get along so well that it’s narratively boring, at which point I introduce a Conflict that will challenge the comfortable way they interact with one another. It’s all about causing problems and doing things for the plot. Fiction is a great place to put that impulse.