EE Idea Thread

[EmergencyExit]

This is for Emergency Exit ideas only. It wasn't very active last time around but I'm remaking it here anyway. This is for any random ideas or thoughts towards regarding EE you might have. I have the right to use any ideas brought up in this thread.

[Eheheh]

Not exactly a suggestion for the comic, but I seem to recall you asking ages ago whether people thought you should change the archives so the special holiday pages were separate from the main archives. I was re-reading parts of the archives recently and discovered it actually is kinda annoying to be in the middle of a big dramatic part and have the flow interrupted by a sudden page of people going trick-or-treating or somesuch. So my official vote now is for having the holiday specials separate from the main archive, but still easy to find of course, they're too good to not see.

[The Mortician]

If I recall...

"A robot invasion by a mad scientist."

[834n]

While in another world something happens at home. Robbers could break into the building (unlikely given the apartment) or the villains could be behind it, but somehow someone messes with the portal and traps the crew in whatever place they were visiting. They need to seek some other way home.

[Roofpig]

One word - monkeys.

[EmergencyExit]

One word - monkeys.

Well, there was "a" monkey.

[834n]

Bob's forced to show his wings in public in order to save some random person falling from somewhere. Like, he's walking around the city and a guy falls from painting a billboard.

I say this cause I like seeing Bob suffer!

[MegaRose]

Hey, new reader, found it off TV Tropes. I have a Comic Genesis forum account anyway so I figured I'd chime in.

Send them to explore a universe where purple and green aren't normal human hair colors. Because Saya, Karl, and to a lesser extent Burgundy confound me more than Eddie ever will.

[EmergencyExit]

Welcome! Maybe I should have a introduction thread for these cases, glad to see those Tropes hits working out.

Probably will happen eventually with all the worlds out there. Though we came close with the BR crossover. Laura and Orion's home world was basically ours so seeing some of the hair colours was odd, as Laura commented here.

Saya's eye colour was commented on in PD (though you can't really tell, it's written very small on the photograph, see the large image in the fanworks section), but overall strange hair colours are fairly common there too.

There's sorta a reason for the obscure hair colurs, besides sometimes being dyed, but overall it's just how I like colouring them.

What puzzles me about Burgundy is her goddamn ethnicity. I think I had her as Indian decent originally but really I have no idea by looking at her.

[MegaRose]

What puzzles me about Burgundy is her goddamn ethnicity. I think I had her as Indian decent originally but really I have no idea by looking at her.

I think you could pass her off as Southeast-Asian. Laotian, Cambodian, Thai, etc. etc.

[Eheheh]

What always puzzles me is how much time people will spend trying to work out the ethnicity of comic strip characters. I remember it happened regarding Grace from EGS as well. Not meaning to disparage all of you who find the subject interesting, but I fail to see the point myself. It's the sort of thing that never even occurs to me until someone starts wondering 'aloud'. I just really, really don't see why a person's ethnicity matters at all (be they real or fictional), even simply at the level of 'huh, interesting combination of features/colouring that person has, wonder what genetic combination could have caused that'.

Mind you, it doesn't annoy me quite as much as people who seem to find it necessary to make all and sundry aware of their character's star signs. I've read far too many (mostly amateurish things come to think of it) where at least one character's full stats are given in the actual comic itself, in one big lump - name, age, height, weight (why do we need to know that?), ethnicity, and star sign! It's annoying! Maybe I'm just a grouch.

[/mini-rant]

*ahem* As for Burgundy (look see, I'll join in and everything) - you could just argue that a) in a world where humans and non-humans co-exist and green and purple can be natural hair colours and eye colours there exists a place where people with Burgundy's colouring are very common - you know, make up an ethnic group. Or b) she is the result of random genetic shuffle, with ancestry from many parts of the globe resulting in an apperance that cannot really be described as anything in particular. I think that would make her Australian

[EmergencyExit]

Well things like weight I don't bother with but some of the others I think really add to the creation of characters. The more you know about your characters, the better you can write for them and the more real they feel. There's plenty of things I know about my characters that'll probably never even get mentioned in comic, just stuff I think of to help build the character.

I do height because I need to know how to draw the characters in comparison to each other. Without that, Bob may be shorter than Jason one day and taller the next, making for unclean inconstancy that is probably easy to find in early comics.

Things like age, ethnicity and even height can all add to the character's personality and how they act. Take Nights for instance, he has a major height complex : P. Darwin in Undead Friend has a bit of one too but for the opposite reason of being insanely tall.

Age is important to know where they all are standing in life, for most of the EE characters it shows they're all for the most part starting out, how old they are might reflect how mature they are. Thing about this though is EE time runs allot slower so the age hardly changes but they will age a bit over time.

Ethnicity is something I am a bit loose on, as I don't draw everyone extremely accurately to their ethnicities. I've been told before Karl doesn't quite look like the average black guy. He's half Hispanic, but that really doesn't justify it if we're talking accuracy. But it's something I've been improving on. I think having a ethnicity in mind for a character helps define how they can be drawn, such as I try to give Jason's more Asian style eyes. It effects the height and body type sometimes too, Jason's half Asian half Caucasian, therefore his height is just a bit under average. There's also other issues about his half heritage but that's for later. Bob's got semi-pale skin and red hair and green eyes, all traits that can be found in people of strong Irish decent. He also speaks in his Irish accent occasionally. It comes down to how much you are into character detail. Characters are my focus in my work, it's usually for my characters more than anything else people get into my comics. So I enjoy flushing them out as much as possible.

So they're can be good reasons for them, I just think it's up to personal taste whether a writer uses them or not, but I don't think it's a silly thing to ever do.

For me I started out just drawing whatever I liked. Guy with green hair, brown skin and dark blue eyes? Sure! But now I try to work reasons into this stuff a bit more, which I found helped me discover allot of interesting things about my characters.

Weight I just find too difficult to calculate, there's so many factors involved : P. I'd more likely just list body type if anything.

Course with characters like Vladic, we have yet to see his full form, his human disguise isn't really any ethnicity as it's made up.

As for having these things listed for the readers, well it can help them understand where the character is coming from a bit better. Also, if someone was to say draw fanart in a different style, they'd have good info to go off on >_>.

Anyway such are my thoughts on that. I'll probably go with one of the suggested ethnicities for Burgundy.

[MegaRose]

<.< >.> When I create a character I define birthday, age, height, weight, blood type, internet screenname, favorite song/book/movie, ethnicity and nationality (separately), parents' occupations, place of birth...even for aliens.

I go by the theory that the more you know about a character, the better you can write them.



Edit: My theory is that every ambiguous brown-skinned character in fiction is from 'Mysteristan.' Current population: Ishboo from the old All That, Rolf from Ed, Edd, n' Eddy, Fes from That 70's Show, and Brock from Pokemon.

[Eheheh]

To both of you I say: Fair enough. Those are all very good reasons for going into such detail, but at the same time it's not something I could ever see myself doing (you know, if I could find out where my writing skills went and make 'em come back). Those things are clearly important to both of you for adding character depth and probably are very important to other people as well, but they're just not important to me. I dare say if I tried to create a comic I might change my mind, but that's something that is outside my range of skills.

The way my mind is set up a person's appearance* means nothing or very little, all my characters are deliberately or unconsciously vague - whether they're characters in stories or characters I create for RP's, if I can get away with it I'll even omit specific gender and let the reader make up their own mind (although some characters of course come complete with gender, just as some have dark eyes or long hair, if that's how they pop into my head it will generally be mentioned at some point in their story/description). Of course, this is so much easier to do in short story format, rather than comic format, but that doesn't stop me getting irked when I encounter what I'll tend to classify as 'too much needless imormation'. But I will keep in mind the reasons you have mentioned and hopefully I'll come to accept that what I see as 'needless', many others may well consider 'vital' and get less snotty about it all in future. Wish me luck and an open mind.


* age, star sign, blood type, etc..

[RunAwayPenguin]

Haha. I understand both points. And in my writing, when someone mentions someone's weight their probably going to get laughed at, and a favorite book is going to get dissected by other people. I put that information into a conversation so it doesn't seem like excess information thrown out there.