I love to learn about all the little things that go into creative pieces that you may not realize are there. When it comes to high quality creative expression I have found that there’s always more that goes into it than most people realize. Fans and connoisseurs are usually the folks who take the time to understand those nuances. Notes from the Gutter on the Silver Bullet Comics site talks about how problematic it can be that all the characters in manga look alike (though they acknowledge it hasn’t appeared to affect their popularity). I’ll admit, that manga hasn’t been that interesting to me and as I read this I wonder if the generic quality of the characters hasn’t had something to do with that. In fact, manga has always felt kind of “cheap” to me almost as if the characters were drawn from a stock art collection… The paper they’re printed on doesn’t help either. Interesting.

The article goes on to say:

So, why is this a problem? Clearly it hasn’t adversely affected the popularity of these books among their fans, but, for me, the most important aspect of the art and craft of comics is storytelling. The foundation of good storytelling is clarity—the reader must intuitively and effortlessly be able to follow the actions of the story—and anything that hinders this process sends up a red flag in my book. If the reader has to struggle to tell your characters apart, to figure out who’s talking, to discern who’s taking a particular action, then no matter how compelling your story is, the reader has to remove him/herself from the action of the story to sort this out. It’s like reading a prose book and then happening upon a paragraph of blurred text—you have to stop reading the story and begin deciphering the story.

So, how can you avoid this? Simple: make sure your characters are visually distinctive. How do you do that? Answer: basic shapes. Any character’s basic body structure can be broken down into a few basic shapes and if you make sure that each character’s basic shape is distinct and recognizable, those characters will be distinct and recognizable regardless of what clothes they are wearing and at almost any size in-panel. The Disney model sheet below from Aladdin is a great example of this:

As always, there’s clearly a case to be made for doing the opposite, but I think one would have to be doing it by design and with a clear purpose trying to communicate something for it to be coherent.