The Brand of a Character

I've been doing some research the past couple weeks on a 1970s Disney comic. I won't go into too many details here because it's due to be published later this year, but one of the key findings was that some folks at Disney felt that the freelance artist who worked on it didn't adhere closely enough to some of the characters' visual design and had another artist change it. It was a situation not unlike when Jack Kirby was drawing Jimmy Olsen, and DC editors brought in Al Plastino and Murphy Anderson to re-draw Superman's and Jimmy Olsen's heads every time they appeared.

Now, we're talking about the 1970s here, so marketing was a very different beast than it is now. Today, you can readily find many large companies offerring up their charcters in significantly different styles than what had come before. On the newspaper funny pages, we've got legacy strips like Flash Gordon and Popeye with significantly different designs than what they'd been known for. In cartoons, both Disney and Warner Brothers have in recent years eschewed their 'traditional' character designs for exaggerated ones that have almost single-line-thin limbs. In comic books, artists are regularly brought in specifically to bring their unique style to the characters; there was a Fantastic Four comic a couple years ago in which every page was by a different artist and the art style shifted radically on a literally page by page basis. People seem to have largely come to the realization that what fundamentally makes a character that charcter is NOT the specific art style they're presented in, and audiences understand that not every artist draws in the exact same style. Part of the interest is in seeing how another artist interprets the same character -- witness this sketch of Don Martin's Captain Klutz as rendered by Fred Hembeck.

But what strikes me is that this had been proven plenty of times by the 1970s. Did Kirk Alyn's portrayal of Superman bear any resemblance to the Fleischer animated one? Did Arthur Lake look like the Dagwood Bumstead that Chic Young drew? You want to stay within the same medium -- compare Robert Lowery's performance as Batman against Adam West's. Compare Mort Weisinger and George Papp's Green Arrow against Denny O'Neil Neal Adams' version. Heck, go back to the earliest days of published comics -- there were two simultaneous versions of the Yellow Kid in different papers back in the 1890s, one by Richard Outcault and one by George Luks.

Now clearly different creative teams are going to have differing levels of perceived quality, so some versions are going to be more popular than others. And in some of the examples I noted, they weren't running concurrently and, thus, didn't really "compete" with each other in terms of impacting the brand of the character. But collectively, I think they very much do illustrate that the important elements of a character's "brand" are not what they look like. Why people didn't seem to understand that in the 1970s is beyond me.

Was it simply an exercise of power? I recall the story a friend of mine told me back in college where he worked at an ad agency that worked with Hanna-Barbera, and they had to get H-B approvals for any illustrations they did. Those were always a pain in the butt, and would frequently come back with notes like, "Fred Flinstone's left arm is a centimeter too thick" or "Yogi Bear's nose should be pointed half a degree further downward." It turned out that those comments were all coming from one guy who felt a sense of ownership over the characters and made comments like that expressly for the purpose of being able to claim he had input on each illustration. So were those other instance similar? Just exerting power for the sake of saying they had a hand in it? Or was it a personal thing -- that they felt the need to display power over the freelancers? "You have to produce art to my specifications, no matter how inconsequential"?

Without knowing all the specific individuals involved, I don't think anyone can say. But I bring it up to emphasize that character designs are really exceptionally maleable. What makes a character speak to an audience isn't the specific style of line that's used, but what the creator is imbuing into the work. They'll obviously bring their own style to the work and that will have an impact on garnering people's attention, but it won't have an appreciable impact on the character brand.

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