As an artist, I know that my upbringing, my influences, and things I’m exposed to all play a part in the way my characters look. Even if said character is a 70-year old Japanese woman missing an eyeball working as a baker on a lonesome island off the coast of Zanzibar, a part of me will still find its way into the character’s design, not only as far as the more intangible traits go, but even the more obvious physical attributes as well. It could be as simple as the way she smiles, the shape of her ears, or the way her fingers seem to be wiggly; something of mine will just have to find its way in there. Sheer detachment and objectivity are simply impossible.
Magdy El-Shafee, Egyptian writer and illustrator of graphic novel ‘Metro’ seems to agree when he says “you just can’t be neutral.” However, to him, that only applies to the messages his characters are conveying, “Whether you like it or not, your own very personal points of view are going to be reflected in the work you do.” As far as the way his characters look, however, Magdy makes sure they are designed according to their purpose away from any personal influences or preferences “For Metro, Shehab, the protagonist, was simply supposed to be a very modern, practical, neat-looking young Engineer who wasn't necessarily supposed to be too likeable, but followed a cause that readers could sympathize with and relate to. My first initial sketches of Shehab gave him an edgier nose and uneasy unlikable eyes which made him all too detestable. Although an overly heroic morale for Shehab was out of the question, since realistically speaking no one is hardly ever like that, but I still didn’t want people to hate him. So features that neither exaggerated heroism nor absolute evil seemed to fit him best.”
Kareem Lotfy, a Cairo-based street artist, makes it a point that self-expression is nowhere to be found in his work. “I really don’t want to express myself because I really don’t see the point of exposing myself to the world. Sure, expressing myself in a drawing might be good for like… personal therapy or whatever, but it isn’t necessarily relevant to the rest of the world. I prefer to create pieces with more cultural relevance.”
As I go through some of Kareem’s pieces, I spot two that truly seem to stem from opposite directions: a boy in a wheelchair and Lotfy’s more popular veiled Marlene Monroe. “See, wheelchair kid is pure personal therapy; as a kid I was never really into sports out of fear of possibly getting injured so it was kinda like growing up in a mental wheelchair without having to physically be in a wheelchair. This isn’t something I find relevant to anyone other than myself, so it's not something I would make an effort to put out there in the world. Marlene, on the other hand, well I made her for pure commercial purposes really. I kinda regret it.”
Why would Kareem regret creating a piece that has been sold through London’s Gallery Nosco and made its way to a pop art show in Singapore alongside originals from Warhol, Lichstenstein, and Falle? “Like relationships, the one that means the most to you doesn’t necessarily have to be the most successful one. I just felt no emotional bond when creating Marlene.”
A culturally relevant piece of work whose creation held an emotional bond for Lotfy is his portrait of an army officer. “It’s one of the rare pieces where I didn’t feel like a visual DJ by simply mixing and matching different visuals together; the subject matter and line art were all purely my own, yet it wasn’t a part of some personal therapy, it still has some sort of cultural relevance to other viewers. Whenever you enter a home in Cairo, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll find a portrait on the wall of some family member dressed in military attire. As a culture, we seem to be very proud of any military association and like to show it off. Officers are almost like the pop culture icons of families down here. Why his eyes are covered in thick black strokes? Well I initially drew in a pair of eyes that I felt were far too expressive. They say eyes are the windows to a person’s soul, yeah? Well I just don’t feel that really applies to Egyptians; when I hop into a cab the first thing I notice about the driver is his mustache then his mouth. I just had to take the eyes out so I just scribbled over them, but then it looked like I was intentionally censoring something, so the next logical step for me was to add a pair of glasses.”
Going with the flow of the process with no pre-determined notion or plan for the piece or character is something Kareem feels most comfortable doing. “I just like to go ahead and draw. The big fat repulsive character I drew under Merghany Bridge got his shape from the initial layer of white paint I covered the wall with before starting to draw the outlines of the character. There was no logical thought-process behind it, really.”
British comic book illustrator Lee O’Connor, who has created a variety of characters, from a machine-gun toting Santa to Box-headed kung-fu fighters and ruthless badass cowgirls, tries not to leave much to chance. “I realize now that my menacing Santa is probably a cross-pollination of kerazee idea-germs between a page-long Daniel Clowes strip called ‘Sensual Santa’ and an old Amiga computer magazine cover from the early nineties that showed Santa blazing away with two automatic weapons. All ideas are guaranteed stolen. Anything I could do to make Santa seem somehow alien or unsettling was chucked in; he’s moved somewhere a bit warmer as well as gone in for pink PVC in a way. Rosy, alcoholic cheeks and a filthy beard, yellow teeth, copious body hair, superior firepower all added to the look. It was all good. The inferred “Goodwill to all Men” meaning is that Santa’s already homoerotic – take that, Middle America! Santa’s a bear! And secondly he’s practicing such Goodwill to men that he’s shot his reindeer and mounted one of them. I wanted it to be Rudolf, but I couldn’t get a realistic reindeer nose looking good in bright red.”
Being the crazed comic book fanatic that I am I cannot help but notice that there seem to be more and more comic books coming out featuring tough butt-kicking female protagonists created by male artists. O’Connor, who himself has contributed to the creation of tough female wrath, sees nothing complex in the psychology behind this phenomenon. “Guys like violence. Guys like hot chicks. I think the two have just been mashed together without much thought about it at all in plenty of comics. It might as well be Arnold Schwarzenegger with breasts and an only-slightly-more-inviting deportment than usual for all it matters in the script of those comics. And there might be a small percentage of a female audience who would go for ass-kicking hot chicks, but if you really want to get girls reading your comic, what you need is a lovely, sexually-non-threatening boy with clear skin and a delightfully floppy side parting, dressed in a fashionable cardigan and holding a mug of hot chocolate plastered all over the cover. It’s shocking. Those girls’ mothers need to have a proper sit-down conversation with them and tell them that real boys aren’t really like that.”
Sometimes it is even good to base character designs on well-known public figures as Magdy El-Shafee did with the corrupt politician cum businessman character in his graphic novel Metro, “I based his features on a well-known local politician with a reputation for being corrupt. In comics, it’s very powerful to base characters on well-known public figures with an already established reputation as it aids the reader in developing an opinion about the character without having to explain him too much.”
I can see much thought and planning going into developing the more central characters of a work of art, where less subconscious influences are at play, than those characters that linger in the background or those that are required to be more generic than specific. Which brings me to the work of Brazil-based political cartoonist Carlos Latuff, whose drawings focus on the Palestinian cause and the war in Iraq. Many of these feature renditions of popular figures such as Bush or Blair, who would look a certain way for understandable reasons, but what about the more generic, “insignificant” soldiers; what determines how they look and why the look a certain way?
“In fact they're NOT insignificant soldiers, since they have guns and green signal to kill people over the premise of "fighting terrorism", "bringing democracy" and stuff. Even being lower class cannon fodders, they are armed to the teeth occupation soldiers, ready to suppress any resistance,” Carlos says with passion.
I guess there are more important things in this world to think about than the psychology of character design.
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