How to Design a Creative Cast Page

As you establish an online presence for your comic some effort should be given to an informational page that focuses on the major, and sometimes minor, components of your story: your cast. Sure, you can write a paragraph about each character and be done with it, but a creative cast page can say a lot about both the story you are telling and about you the creator. A creative cast page can also play double duty if you can repurpose it as a promotional tool for conventions and events. Here is how to design one.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• List of your characters, their defining traits, and stand-out story lines
• Images of each character
• Basic coding skills or coding reference materials (optional, depending on how involved your page gets)

1. Present each character as if they were writing a personal ad for themselves. This is great for relationship or dating-themed comics since it really ties into the central theme of the story.

2. Choose a telltale quote from the comic for each character, something that really epitomizes their personality or place in the story. Even better is to showcase that panel from the strip as part of the character's biography.

3. Structure the biographies of each character in a spy or military comic as if it were a dossier or FBI file. Include any back story that you have about your characters, even if it's never been explicitly discussed in the comic (unless of course, it would be a spoiler).

4. Get creative with the possibilities of the Internet by creating an image map with rollover features to showcase each character, one at a time, when you mouse-over their portion of a large image. The text below the image can be made to change to correspond to the character you hover over or a box can appear next to the cursor.

5. Show connections between characters with a chart or diagram. A family tree would be fun for family drama that deals with multiple generations or a flow chart for an office strip. If things are really complicated and some characters share more than one connection, a Venn diagram can be used to show their interconnectedness.

Tips & Warnings

• Many scripts and features can be found pre-coded for use on your website with a simple search. Conversely, if you see a feature used on another site you can often use the "View Source" feature of your browser to see how they did it.
• Not all of these suggestions will work for every comic. Pick and choose the best ones for your story or use them as a jumping-off point to brainstorm a cast page that is perfectly suited for your particular strip.

[sallyemaycreate]

on 6/28/2009 Thanks for the great tips... good article! *****