What would you answer if I asked you to give me a list of all the people you’ve talked to today?
Sure, you jot down the name of your girlfriend, your teacher, your coworkers, your closest friends… You’d probably manage to give me quite a list.
But would you remember to list the cashier at your local grocery store? Or the bus driver who took you to work? Or the beggar who stopped you on the street to ask you if you could spare some change?
Life is full of secondary characters. And so are comics. When your main character enters a store and speaks to the sales clerk or bumps into somebody on the street, that’s a character with no background, no planned future, no large set of character sketches hanging on your wall… it’s a character you don’t really plan to use again.
Well, for today’s idea, let’s change that a little bit.
This is an idea for a comic strip. But this comic won’t have one main character. Each strip will have one main character. But the main character of the next strip will be a secondary character from the first strip.
Let’s say your first strip pictures a young man and his girlfriend going to the movies. Obviously, you should have all the same things here as you would have in a regular comic strip, like a joke at the end. Being experimental is not necessarily a good reason to be unfunny. So your characters go to the movies, buy popcorn, and you end with the protagonist screaming in horror when he realizes that his girlfriend lied to him when she said that “Mamma Mia!” was an action/horror movie. Or something actually funny.
In the second strip, you change the main character. The main character is now the guy or girl who sold your main characters popcorn in the first strip. And in the third strip, the main character is one of the secondary characters from the second strip. And so on.
Does that mean that you never get to use a character as the main character more than once? Not necessarily. After all, we are all secondary characters in somebody else’s life, so there’s no reason why the same character shouldn’t show up again later. As long as you stick to the formula and let the main character in one strip always be a secondary character from the previous strip.
I think that such a strip would be a very interesting experiment, and with the right writer and artist it could be a pretty good comic, too. At the very least, it will change the way you think about secondary characters. The random background characters become a lot less random when you have to use one of them as a main character in the next strip.
26 ideas down, 74 to go. Since I forgot to update yesterday, idea #27 will come later today.
Great idea, but just because I cannot resist, I have to point out that today, I have talked to no-one except my girlfriend, and my parents on the phone. Which is two more people than I usually talk to on a day off…
Had I been at work, I would of course have added another six people or so, all of them co-workers and bosses. I usually murmur a “merci” to the bus-driver on the route home, but I only exit in front about half the time, so even that is rare. And I tend to only buy groceries once a week.
Hey. Suddenly I realise; I’m a recluse!