Creating a character is one step to the many layers of comic making. But how do we make readers understand and empathize with them to create deeper immersion in our work? Where do we start when rounding out characters? How do we make the audience care beyond the amazing designs you’ve come up with?

Here are six simple tips to help you build compelling and relatable characters!

1. Create a memorable design that fits within your universe: This is covered more in depth over here, but starting visually with something that melds with your world-building is important!
   
2. Start with the mundane: Small details like favourite meals, colors, birthdays are easy ways to start fleshing out

   a character as a writer, and make them believable and relatable for yourself, even if your audience won’t ever know

   
   

   these things.

   In the course of your comic, you can then key into visuals like a character’s house, their room, or an item they keep on their person as subtle and effective clues to their personality.

3. Find their voice: Creating a dialogue style that reflects the characters voice and personality can be used to your advantage as a writer. Have words that the character would say/pronounce differently, use apostrophes or contractions, or play with the way they construct a sentence, so that you can hear the character’s voice.
   
4. Keeping notes on what they would do in random situations: When planning out our plots, it can often help to understand ‘what would my character do

   next?’ Writing out scenarios

   that they wouldn’t have been seen in the main story/plot (whether that’s a simplea

   grocery run or an alternate time line that features a

   world different from their own)

   
   

   helps you ‘get in their head’, finds

   what makes them work, and what paths/decisions they choose.

   
   
   
5. Find what gives them depth beyond the plot: The events that take place around them may shape our characters, but

   we as people are so much more than the wave of happenings that shape us or

   archetypes that fill a role in a story. Why not apply that to your characters? It is easier to care about a character when you can convey that they exist beyond what’s happening to them.
   

6. Establish motives and drive: Once you uncover your character’s basic personality, clear and concise motives for participating in the plot are key. What is the point of your character’s journey? What do they want from all of this? Why did they CHOOSE to become involved? These are all aspects that kickoff our story and get the reader invested.