Hello everyone! I’ve got a little bonus news post for today to explain a couple of things.
Nothing about Socks and Puppets was ever really planned… comics are written and posted as I go along. This is fine for simple gags, but there’s more depth to these characters than I’ve shown. If you read the comic on my site (rather than through a site like Tumblr or Facebook) you’ll have noticed that below each comic is a list of characters included in that comic, which you can click on to get a list of all comics including that character.
Many people in the comic are one off throw-away characters that I use just to make the jokes work, but every character in the comic that I’ve given a name to has a personality and a story behind them… even if the comic has never shown much of it. It’s increasingly tempting when writing to include character humour alongside simple puns and gags, but my comicpress dashboard tells me that S&P has ballooned to over 40 characters in the last couple of years. That’s an unmanageable number for me, and I can only imagine that it’s even more confusing for readers. I asked around a little, and even those who have been following the comic for five years don’t really recognise more than a couple of characters I have.
The biggest source of new characters I have is tabletop RPGs. S&P has a lot of tabletop-fantasy-RPG jokes, and today the comic has over thirty characters from six campaigns and four different game systems. It’s time to sort this mess out.
Josephine and I have done some design work, and amalgamated all of S&P’s fantasy characters into a single party of five main characters that we’ll be using for fantasy-RPG comics from now on. While I don’t intend to be writing an overarching story, I’m hoping that the personalities of these characters will serve as a source of fun and make for better comics overall.
To help everyone along, I’ve added a “Cast” tab to the navigation above the strip. You can get a little summary of each of our five heroes there, or just click this link to have a look.
Characters- colour coded for your convenience!
But where are the good aligned metallic PCs to balance out these chromatic evil ones?
Eaten by rust monsters, I’m afraid.
Yeah, much of the design in this group is aimed towards visual cues to help character distinction. I don’t want to be limited to the whole “one outfit per character” thing that so many comics and cartoons end up with, (especially with Fife, who should have a different outfit in nearly every strip…) – but I want to have consistent visual themes for each character.
Colour is one of the strongest cues, so I’ve actually sorted my colour pencils into palette sets for each character. While it’s not a rigid rule, expect to see some consistency in visual themes from now on.