Casting Characters in Comics - Larger casts, personality and temperament

Last week there was a post about smaller regular casts in a series - The Loner series, the Duo, and the Trio. Here's that post:

https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2018/aug/01/casting-characters-in-comics-123/

With a larger cast, things start to get more complicated - but with more possibilities for different relationships and conflicts between the regular characters.

There are many ways to figure out a cast of characters, of course - you can base them on your friends, family, co-workers, or whatever; they can be adaptations of existing characters with some details changed…

I'll go into an idea here that you may not have tried.


Personality and Temperament

I sometimes like to figure out the temperaments of a cast of characters I'm creating, to see if there's a balance, or somewhat of a balance. If there are too many of the same type, things may need to be adjusted.

There is an ancient pseudoscience to do with the body's "humors" - different body fluids were thought to represent different particulars and illnesses in the body. The personality types were Choleric, Phlegmatic, Sanguine and…I think Melancholic? Something like that. It's explored here on TV Tropes:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourTemperamentEnsemble

My approach (when I use it) is similar but a little bit different - I don't like how the Four Temperament lists certain personalities as "emotionally unstable".

I like the idea of the line between a logical, left brained person and a creative, right brained person, crossed with a spectrum of a more active, extroverted, action taking temperament and a more nurturing, introverted type.

So if you cross the lines, you get four quadrants, just like in that Tvtropes link.

One type will be passive or nurturing and logical
One will be action-taking and logical/practical
One will be more creative/flexible and extraverted/action oriented,
and One will be creative/flexible and more passive and introverted.

Put these four characters together and you've got a pretty well-rounded cast of temperaments!

This can be expanded to more than four characters, with other castmembers falling in between the extremes more, and some being less mature than others, which would change them as well.

Notice that this has nothing to do with the relationships between the characters, their jobs or functions in the story, but DOES show you how they might react (very differently) to the things they experience in the series!

So anyway, that's the temperament approach!

Have a fine Thursday,

Banes