ABSTRACT
In comic books – including manga and graphic novels – and all kinds of animated films, characters are composed of a variety of heterogeneous representational materials. Comics combine words and pictures, and their pictoriality itself is far from “stable” or uniform: Even within the same series (intended to represent a continuous storyworld), various artists with distinct drawing styles and techniques are often employed interchangeably. To recognize something as a character still means to attribute human-like qualities, especially agency, intentionality, and a sense of causality to cartoonish body representations. However, there are many peculiarities and specificities for assembled cartoon characters due to their specific “medial ontology.” This chapter addresses the primary threshold of “characterhood” in such contexts, as well as questions of representational correspondence and variable degrees of agency and complexity. Cartoonization is discussed as an ambiguous and unreliable narrative mode with respect to medial transparency: audiences can never be sure which of the visible (and audible) traits of characters and their actions are merely abstracted or exaggerated aspects owed to their conventional medial representations (pointing to an otherwise “more realistic,” but partly “obscured” storyworld behind) and which representational aspects can be understood as belonging to characters and their worlds. Cartoonish character representations leave equal room for the imagination of “literal” vs. “metaphorical” readings until reasons are provided in favor of one option or the other. Intersubjective constructs based on cartoon aesthetics can remain much more open to interpretation and negotiation of social and narrative agency than any live-action film could ever hope for.
