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In Characters
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 by admiralAre there a finite number of characters in the universe? The great and wonderful Joel sits down to pen his comic based on a set of known characters. He even elects to tell us about a few of them. My question, pointless as always, concerns the possibility that Joel will be able to cover all of the general characters on the Earth. Given enough generalization, will the characters in Joel’s strip ever become a complete collection of all archtypes or are there too many archtypes in God’s universe to fit into Joel’s, smaller, universe?
Writing stand up philosophy gives me plenty of room to ask questions that I have no intention of answering and this is one of them. Even I must admit that it is an intriguing question to have gone so long without an answer. Joel’s writing universe covers the grounds of Mulligan college and two gaming sets of characters. Do the characters in the games act as extension of the basic archtype characters from the college or are they extensions into archtypes of their own? Have you yet realized that I have no real concept of what an archtype is?
There are one dozen characters listed on the characters page as I type this. Eventually, this should be extended to cover characters who are currently unlisted. Additional characters are listed in the Western Wheel Carols section which more than doubles the complete set. Joel has active and passive heroes and villains who run from menacing to actively evil. Does Joel have a complete set of archtypes yet?
Writing does not work out well if all of your characters are mirror images. There is some distinct characterization in each of Joel’s active characters. Some essential characters do appear to be missing. If he has one, has he yet used the mad scientist archtype character? Are there any unlikely villains?
If Joel does not have a complete set of characters, then is it possible that he will eventually have all of the character types in his universe? I would consider that to be a question of definition. You can define the question in such a way that it will be true or you can define the question in such a way that it will never be true. When it comes to plot-lines, Joel is one of the best artists that I have ever seen. To me, the depth of his universe should be the definition of a universe that contains a full set of characters.
