We chat about how your characters evolve over the years. Webcomics are typically projects that extend over many years or even decades, slowly evolving as they go. Your characters change over that time due to all sorts of factors: you forget how to draw them between pages (I've done that so many times), you want to try out new things or popular styles, you use the wrong references, you change how you feel about certain things, or you change how you write them for various reasons.

For me I've been drawing my character Pinky since the late 90s, Pinky has been going for 27 years now in various forms and the characters in Bottomless Waitress have been around for over 10 years. In those comics I now take months between drawing new pages so it's easy to forget how I'm suppose to draw them, I have to look up the last 4 pages every time and research how they're supposed to look, I remember most of it but it's easy to get details wrong. Because of that the characters evolve over time when I make little mistakes that become embedded and then reiterated.

Other changes happen when I just decide I don't like older styles and want to try new things: less cartoony, more cartoony, more realistic, more manga influenced, more painterly etc. Pinky and the rest of the characters in her comic have gone through so many changes over the years and I'm grateful that the webcomic format allows me to have that freedom. Bottomless Waitress is a collaboration with Banes so I don't change the writing of the characters, but I change the look of them just as much and experiment with new styles. I do not understand how ANY of their hairstyles work so those change slightly all the time because of that.

Character bibles would help but who has time for that crap? haha! How have your characters changed and why?

This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Base Reality - A demonic game of Pac-man that gets more and more intense till reality is destroyed, we head on up into the afterlife, then float around in purgatory for a while before becoming reborn into Pac-man! An intense electronic journey into metaphysics!

Next week we'll be talking about Avatars and selfies self images. Week after: Blending improvisation with solid story plotting/structure as you carry on drawing a comic

Topics and shownotes

Links

Featured comic: Shimmer Redux - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/nov/17/featured-comic-shimmer-redux/

Featured music: Base Reality https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Base_Reality/, by Stever_Blotto, rated T.

Special thanks to: Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/ Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/ Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/

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