Does your webcomic contain characters? Maybe even places? Perhaps it also needs.... a title? If any of these things are true, you've probably had to sit down and face the struggle of deciding names for the things in your comic, as well as for the comic itself. These things are important, giving vital information about tone, genre, details of setting, and all sorts of other cues to the reader... But why's it gotta be so hard? Anyway, today we're gonna talk about it!

In this Episode:




• How did you come up with the name of your comic? Characters?  Locations? Share any stories about working names/titles that didn’t make it into the final!
• What makes names better or worse in your experience?  Where is the balance between creative/memorable names but not and confusing/poorly-thought out names?
• What is your advice to someone who has a bunch of their plot and story figured out but they’re stuck on naming various aspects of it, or the comic itself?

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Episode Release Date: June 18, 2025

Episode Credits:

Ally Rom Colthoff (Varethane) - she/they, chirault.sevensmith.net wychwoodcomic.com

Christina Major (Delphie) - she/her, sombulus.com

Kristen Lee (Krispy) - she/they, https://ghostjunksickness.com https://www.lunarblight.com

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The Intro "DO IT (feat. Shia LaBeouf)", and the Outro "It's Good To See You Again!!", both by Adrianwave, have been used and modified in good faith under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Licensed. Edits include: Fade IN/OUT, and a repeat added to the beginning of "It's Good To See You Again!!". For more information on this creative commons use, please reference https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.

Transcription

This transcript is auto generated by our recording software.

Hello, and welcome to Screen Tones where we talk anything and everything webcomics. Today we're going to be talking about coming up with names.

00:36.61

Thorb

I'm Verathane, my pronouns are she/they, and I make the webcomics Chirault and Wychwood.

00:42.35

Delphina

And I'm Delphina. I use she/her pronouns and I make the webcomic Sombulus.

00:51.13

Krispy

Hi. And I'm Krispy. I use she/they pronouns, and I make the webcomics Ghost Junk Sickness and Lunar Blight.

01:00.38

Thorb

Does your webcomic perhaps contain characters? Maybe even places? Perhaps it also needs a title?

If any of these things are true, you've probably had to sit down and face the struggle of deciding on the names for all the things in your comic as well as for the comic itself. ah These things are important. They give a lot of vital information about tone, genre, setting details, and a lot of other cues to the reader.

01:27.96

Thorb

But why has it got to be so hard? Today we're going to talk about it. The first question that I've got, because I personally am awful at coming up with names myself.

01:39.82

Thorb

And so I want to ask questions to people who have very cool names for their comics. ah My first question is, how did you come up with the name of your comic, the characters, the locations, and share any stories about working names or titles that didn't make it into the final?

01:55.02

Thorb

We'll start with Delphi.

01:57.53

Delphina

Oh my gosh.It's been so long. But I know for Sombulus, I like to look into the definitions of things and if you go into a word, like ‘Somnambulist’ is an actual word. You can look up what that means in the dictionary. But I wanted something that kind of sounded like that, but could be fictional and that I could buy the URL for.

02:27.05

Delphina

It was really important to me to have my own yeah URL. So I got Sombulus and that was pretty nice.And yeah,I feel like there's some other things before that that are just vaguely fantasy influenced.

My first comic, once I decided to make it its own thing instead of a fan comic, I named it Meridian Oracle because I thought that sounded really cool.

03:01.59

Delphina

Yeah, I don't know what it meant, but like, just cool sounding words, right? So just kind of mashing things together and also kind of peeling back the dictionary for fantasy sounding things, you know, Latin based or whatever is really fun for me. So that's kind of what I do.

03:25.23

Delphina

Characters, gosh, I don't know. It's all vibes.

03:32.63

Delphina

it's all vibes i feel like i don't have great answers for that either i don't know that anybody's great at this right but locations i think i put a little more thought into because once i had the setting and once i had a lot of things around like this is what the societies are like these are like flying people who have different things. So a lot of the names of places in Sombulus will be something like Goddess Flight or something like that.

04:08.00

Delphina

i think the first kingdom you start out in was Tyranny. And I'm like, Oh, I just kind of made that like, isn't that nice and ironic?

04:19.75

Delphina

It's just, you can, but you can kind of get that way too.

04:34.26

Thorb

Did you do the thing where you made working names for things and then had to change them out later?

04:40.17

Delphina

I don't think so. They just kind of like everything, all of my comics have just kind of existed as my comic. It's like, oh, yeah, that's my comic.

04:53.28

Delphina

But eventually you do have to come up with names and stuff. And so, yeah, just deciding from there.

05:04.33

Thorb

How about you, Krispy?

05:06.19

Krispy

Okay. So it's interesting when you do name a lot of these things because vibes do play a lot into it.

05:20.44

Krispy

And you know, it really depends thematically and whatnot. So as far as ghost junk sickness is concerned, I didn't personally name it that.

05:33.38

Krispy

The original title for the comic when it was just a solo project by me. So these characters are still shared by space. And then I went and did a solo project.

05:44.50

Krispy

It was called Divine Ace, which is just absolutely like, I don't know, but it's just Divine Ace.

05:52.81

Thorb

It's so anime.

05:54.21

Krispy

It's so anime.

05:55.25

Thorb

I love it.

05:56.07

Krispy

And like, if you see the influences that I had at the time, you're like, it was very like a Final Fantasy title. I was really into the edgier kind of stories and whatnot. And I was like, yeah, I want that angle. Like, you know, I'm gonna call myself out like Final Fantasy seven Advent Children rotted my brain. And then, you know, we expanded the project and then Space got involved again. and then she came up with the name Ghost Junk Sickness. And I think from that, we usually take a lot of things from different places and then you just slowly thread them together.

06:35.57

Krispy

And I know that we originally wanted something a little bit weird to say because it is a very weird title to say. It always catches people off guard and has something punk sound and something just going to be in your brain.

06:52.42

Krispy

I don't remember exactly the train of thought that led to that just because Space was involved with that. But I do actually have notes from when we named Lunar Bright, well, Lunar Blight.

07:04.93

Krispy

When we named Lunar Blight, it kind of does this weird cascading thing when we name our comics, because I mean, like, that's just going to be the thing that you're stuck with when you talk about it. So I'm going to read off like kind of how it went to Lunar Blight.

07:23.96

Krispy

So it started with because it was very moon themed. So, you know, we went with that. So that was kind of like, OK, We're going to stick with the moon and we'll go from there. And we wanted two words to be like, it's about a moon and that there's a struggle.

07:40.27

Krispy

So it started with Umbral praxis that went to Umbral Omnium. So that's hard. And then Moon Effigy, Umbral Effigy, then Umbral Piety, Moon Ardor, Lunar Gospel.

07:57.45

Krispy

Caustic Moon, Lunar Caustic, Umbral Blight, and then we were like, okay, we like Lunar Blight. That's where we went from there. And so it was just this neat little cascading thing of like all these words that eventually hit, you know, I guess the vibe as far as that's concerned.

08:14.96

Krispy

Expanding into naming places or characters and stuff. Ghost Junk was actually pretty themed. We did a lot of, like, Greek-inspired things. So I'd actually do some research about towns, names, and places that I'm like, okay, I want it to feed back into Ghost Junk Sickness.

08:32.55

Krispy

Because... the twist at the end is that that story is like multi-universe kind of door opening so you can bleed a lot of like our world into their world. So, okay I'm gonna just pick up a lot of old world language and stuff and put it in there. This is why Gefjun and Junder are like more of those kinds of names especially with some of the little isms in the core or the stories with the tattoos being also Greek and whatnot. So I usually take like a theme and I just kind of cascade it down from there and that helps minimize the huge, ‘where do I start' kind of thing.

09:25.40

Thorb

Oh, nice. That's a good approach, I think, like generally having a concept for some sort of central theme or premise that unifies everything. Unfortunately, I tend to go with the placeholder strategy. But what I've learned is that the concept of a placeholder is actually a myth, because any name that I come up with as a placeholder is it. It will be the final.

09:50.87

Thorb

Like, that's my curse.

09:53.66

Thorb

Yeah, I named so I do tend to do the thing where like the title or the name is just something that sounded cool to me. When it comes to characters, I do try to take features of the setting into consideration. So like with with Chiralt in particular, less so with Wychwood, but in Chirault, I tried pretty hard to steer clear of names that had like a really like an obvious cultural significance, like a name that immediately you're like, oh, that's this specific religion or something like that in the real world, just because I was working with a fantasy setting where none of these things necessarily applied.

10:35.83

Thorb

Sometimes a lot of the characters I kind of named a bit on a whim. In one case, though, for Kiran in Chirault, I used one of those baby name generators where there's a bunch of websites that do this online. They're just huge databases with suggestions of what to name your kid.

10:56.86

Thorb

And they have massive, like thousands, and thousands of names. And you can choose by letter. I think there's some that have some interesting algorithms that you can search by looking for specific types of things.

11:10.59

Thorb

And I just kind of hit the randomize button a lot until I hit on something that seemed like it would fit for the character that I was about to do. But usually I'll just pick a name from the ether and apply it to them and then they're stuck with it forever and my curse can become their curse.

11:31.20

Thorb

Most of the cast of Wychwood I named when I was eight years old because I thought their names sounded neat. The title itself was actually a neighborhood in my city. It's called Wychwood. There's like Wychwood Barnes and a bunch of parks and stuff like that.

11:49.50

Thorb

I don't think I knew that. I think I just saw it written down somewhere and thought, that's a neat word. I'm going to put that in my story. And then I did. And since then, I've had to kind of figure out how to fit it in there.

12:04.27

Thorb

And the way I made it ended up working was that the title of the story is the name of an organization within it. And of course, they can name their organization, whatever they want. It does lead to some questions at conventions and stuff like that. So I tried to come up with a different name when I was developing the comic. I was like, I can't go with this. I need to do something else. I need a good name.

12:27.27

Thorb

And I thought about it for like two years. And I never did come up with a better one. So anyway, that's my story. Which I guess will lead to the second question, because I feel like a lot of the names that I've ended up with are not necessarily optimal for a few reasons.

12:48.09

Thorb

But before I talk about it, I want to ask the actual question about that, which is what makes names better or worse in your experience? Where's the balance between creative or memorable names that aren't confusing or poorly thought out names?

13:04.03

Delphina

Oh, gosh. Okay. So, I mean, this is always going to be a little subjective, right? But if if we're talking about a name that you have to type in to a search bar or a yeah URL for somebody else to find, you want to make sure that it's intuitively to spell for your readers if you go for like some very weird spellings or something like that that might trip you up and make your comic harder to find and then we also touched a little bit on the convention experience because i feel like everybody wants to ask you like oh you know ‘what's the name of your comic mean’ or ‘what what is this all about’ and so you have you find yourself explaining it over and over again

13:48.54

Delphina

And yeah, so... You want to make sure that you have a little bit of an explanation for that in mind. But also, like, if it's hard to say or if it's just hard for people to read and parse or hard to pronounce, that might get a little frustrating for you after a while, especially if you're talking about it in real life a lot.

14:14.76

Delphina

And I feel like for Sombulus this happens because people hear, like, Zombieless. Or they misspell it with like an extra O at the end or or something like that. Like that's one of my regrets for Sombulus.

14:30.47

Delphina

But I do like the fact that I was able to get Sombulus.com. So that's nice that it was unique and not like a real word that I had to fight for.

14:41.72

Delphina

And also that it kind of ties into the story. If you, start digging under like what the root words are for that. So I think I didn't do too bad with Sombulus. I could, I feel like that maybe there was a better name out there, but like, I don't have a lot of regrets about it.

15:02.14

Delphina

And I think the other direction that goes sometimes is if you choose like a very common name, word or phrase or something like that that that falls into the trap of you're going to get too many false positives when people search for your name like, if it's just a one word name of a comic that, okay there's a million things named this so now people are gonna like,maybe confuse it or confuse it with other comics even.

15:32.84

Delphina

So I don't know. I feel like you want to just kind of keep an eye out for that search. Do a couple of Google searches to see what other things turn up when you search for this name for a comic and like how you can maybe put a little spin on it. Give it a little twist or something like that.

15:53.74

Delphina

I think that's what you want to do. And that's where the line is.

15:58.15

Krispy

I've seen it a lot where folks have the name of their comic and you want to obviously look it up and you put it in the machine, the search engine. And I mean, you're going to come up with just a random assortment of things.

16:28.02

Krispy

But it also makes me wonder if like SEO isn’t as... i I don't want to say important, but I also want to say important to folks these days like where they search.

16:38.51

Krispy

Old man moment, but when people are like “I use, you know, YouTube or TikTok to search up things”, I'm like, wow, really it's interesting. Okay.

16:50.01

Krispy

So I think it's just, I don't know, old school thoughts. When you're coming up with names, I do think it's important to be like, ‘okay, my comic's going to be, you know, Farmer Cat Attacks.’

17:03.24

Krispy

And, you know, I'm going to Google that or whatever. I'm going to see what kind of things come up. And, you know, do I want my comic associated with whatever kind of comes up? sort of thing. I think that is important to me personally and especially like how important it is to have your own website too, especially in this age.

17:22.04

Krispy

And, you know, claiming that Sombulus.com, we were lucky to have LunarBlight.com and Ghost Junk Sickness being so unique. That said, I don't think that your comic has to be so unique that it's like the most unique

17:39.85

Krispy

There's things that can come up with it that are okay to associate with that. But, you know, there is a level of caution that you have to take to be like, is this searchable? Usually what I'll do is if it doesn't come up with the name. So, you know, if I'm going to look up Sambulus and if Sambulus doesn't come up, it always does, which is very fantastic.

18:01.87

Krispy

But if I look up Sombulus and Sombulus doesn't come up as something else, I'll put ‘Sombulus comic’.

18:09.35

Krispy

That will usually guarantee but if it doesn't, I'm gonna be a little wary when stuff like that comes up because you want your comic to be accessible and memorable too. I guess one of my things that I will caution people on when they make titles is try not to fall into traps of like common phrases. I'm seeing that as being a little popular these days. And I'm just like, like, that's fun to an extent, but like, what does it say about your work?

18:40.94

Krispy

Will that stick with people, kind of thing? And, you know, I think that you get lost in being like, ‘oh, well, this is a memorable experience/ tagline and you're going to associate my comic with a tagline.’ And I'm like, oh, that might work out depending on how memorable the comic actually is. So, you know, just things to be cautious of. And also, like, does it match the comic? Like, are the vibes, you know, coherent enough?

19:09.40

Delphina

Yeah, that's a really good point, too, because I feel like a lot of people will name their comic something maybe a little jokey at the beginning because it's like a joke at the beginning. But then the story moves on from that and the direction of the comic, especially with the years and years that we do webcomics.

19:27.49

Delphina

You're going to see things like this change. And then all of a sudden, you're five years down the line and like this kind of jokey name doesn't fit at all with the more serious tone that you're doing anymore.

19:39.51

Delphina

It's hard because this stuff evolves so much and you're not really sure exactly how serious or light it's going to stay.

19:52.51

Delphina

In particular, with kind of jokey titles, I see that happen a lot. And that's why even though I have a comic that has a lot of comedic elements, I didn't really consider something like that because I'm like, I think it's going to move on from there. So if you have that inkling, maybe something to keep in mind.

20:12.53

Thorb

I actually came very close at one point to naming Travolte Scarf Boy was here because that was what I used to write on the page.

20:20.10

Delphina

Yeah, it's still in the title, isn't it?

20:20.16

Thorb

before so

20:21.73

Krispy

Oh my god.

20:23.58

Delphina

Like still on the website?

20:24.00

Thorb

It's the subtitle.

20:25.22

Delphina

Yeah, yeah.

20:25.49

Thorb

It's the tagline.

20:26.44

Krispy

What?

20:27.61

Thorb

Yeah, if you go to the website.

20:27.83

Delphina

Yeah, you can see it there.

20:29.68

Thorb

It's because Scarf Boy was here.

20:31.12

Krispy

Oh my god.

20:34.77

Thorb

Before I named Kiran, Scarf Boy was what I called him. So... Baby Name Generator saved him from that fate.

20:40.57

Delphina

Oh my gosh.

20:43.65

Thorb

He could have had it forever.

20:48.52

Thorb

Yeah, what Delphie was saying earlier about that, like having to spell out a name if it's something uncommon, that's definitely the thing that I've run into a lot.

20:59.05

Thorb

At every convention, you can kind of see it, like people will ask like, ‘oh, what's your webcomic? What's it about?’ And I'll be like, ‘oh, here's the name.’ And they'll be like, ‘wait, that's the name?’ And if they don't see it visibly, like right there, if I'm trying to tell somebody about it in person,they won't know how to spell it. And I've just come to accept that as a fact.

With Wychwood, the case is mostly just that it's one of those words that has an ambiguous enough sound that it's like, is it a witch? Like a magic casting witch or like something else?

21:32.03

Thorb

Like which ah which of these things is like the other? And so I'll have to spell it out for that reason. Like witch with a Y and no T. And then the question is always like, oh, what's that mean?

21:44.72

Thorb

And I still don't have a great answer for that. Chirault was another case of just a word that I thought sounded neat. Iit doesn't really sound like anything else English, so people will usually pause and be like, ‘oh, can you repeat that?’

22:00.54

Thorb

And then I'll spell it out. It actually is a real French surname, like the last name, so pronounced “Chirot”. So when people ask me how it's pronounced, I'll give them kind of my personal pronunciations, but technically because it's also a real name of real people who will search up if you do a Google search for it. You have to specify a comic when you search the names of either of mine for these reasons.

22:27.45

Thorb

But like, you know, there's real people who actually are called this. So I can't own the pronunciation, maybe just for only my own comic. But yeah it's something that I was aware of going into Wychwood, which involved by the time I really was thinking like, oh, I could have come up with something better. Like, I was so deep into it, that I couldn't change.

22:50.23

Thorb

I actually wanted to change before I launched Wychwood. I was like, I've got a chance to come up with a better title. But then the curse kicked in, the mummy's curse, and I couldn't.

23:00.17

Thorb

So I just had to keep it.

23:02.55

Delphina

Had to keep it.

23:02.77

Krispy

Oh my god.

23:02.88

Thorb

Just nothing else would feel right.

23:08.46

Delphina

Well, I think it's interesting too about the names of characters because the pronunciation of those, I didn't look up online and they did turn out to be like real names sometimes for characters like Astyr, like the proper pronunciation of that is like Aster.

23:29.77

Delphina

That's an actual person's name and I just kind of messed it up and so I kind of had to get to this place like when I hear people pronounce the names of my characters where I'm like it's fine if it's not pronounced exactly my way because it's all subjective anyway, and there's lots of people named like different things, so that's just something to steel yourself for too if people like mispronounce your name characters names or or whatever like

23:57.43

Delphina

I don't think there's anything around that. And we're doing a visual medium anyway. So they're not going to hear the names a lot. So you're going to get a lot of readers just interpreting things in their head in a certain way and maybe misspelling them or mispronouncing them when they talk about them.

24:13.60

Delphina

And the more you can be okay with that, find your peace with that, the more you'll preserve your sanity, I think.

24:22.44

Thorb

I feel like I got kind of used to that just by having my own name in actual real life is also pretty tough to pronounce for people when they're just reading it online.

24:31.34

Thorb

So I've always fielded questions about that too. So when it comes to my characters, I'm just like, well, it's just a thing that happens, I guess.

24:39.76

Krispy

I think it's just good too. Like Delphie said, steal yourself away for the sanity thing. Because I've seen cases where people get pretty intense about wanting, like, their characters names or places being pronounced a certain way but also it's just like the world is a very big place and we pronounce things differently all the time uh and people are really weirdly obsessed with that and i think that we shouldn't so like

25:03.85

Thorb

There's also cases where some names might have cultural connotations or like associations that you might not be aware of going in.

25:08.75

Krispy

mm-hmm

25:12.09

Thorb

So it's generally always a good idea to look these things up. But for instance, I didn't know until I was probably... two or three years after introducing the character that like Astrid, at least at the time, like people considered it to be basically just a female name.

25:30.52

Thorb

And so I put it on a male character and I would have people being like, ‘oh, like, did you know this’ and I was like, well, now I do. But also I don't, I've decided I don't care. So whatever I want it to be.

25:42.74

Krispy

Yeah, I think it's just important to really go in with a lot of that intent. And also, like you said, Thane, like figuring out, doing some back research to see if something like a connotation related to that name is something that you don't want on something that you've chosen too.

26:01.04

Krispy

And we do a lot of that back and forth. One of the cool things that I really like about the names of our chapters in Ghost Junk Sickness, I absolutely love the names of that because they're all music themed.

26:12.16

Krispy

And, you know, we went back and forth with like, okay, what are the vibes? What is the meaning of this, like a certain music kind of term and how are we going to relate to that? And also kind of seeing some terms and being like, okay, do we want that associated with it?

26:28.57

Krispy

Or what is it? What's relevant these days and stuff. So there's actually a lot of back and forth workshopping, which I know it feels like very mundane or benign.

26:42.74

Krispy

But there was just a lot of back and forth to really be careful about some of the words that we used, if it was relatable to the chapter or anything like that. And that yeah same goes with character names. I think it's just very important to be like, okay, like I want this, but what does it mean if I'm going into a territory that I'm not familiar with either? Like as far as other people's cultures are concerned. Cause you don't want to just be like, I,

27:17.56

Krispy

Cause you don't want to just be like,I'm just going to say it, when we were all growing up in the manga bubble of, like, 2000s to 2005, and, like, all of our characters' names were, like, Ryoko, San, and, you know, everybody was Sakura and stuff.

27:24.50

27:37.67

Thorb

When you start making something more polished like actual public consumption, then you do have to be a bit more considerate about the sources for things.

27:46.61

Krispy

Yeah, that's that's the thing.

27:49.91

Thorb

This leads pretty well to the third question, which is what advice to someone who has a bunch of their plot and story figured out, but they're stuck on naming various aspects of it or the comic itself?

28:05.71

Delphina

Yeah, I mean, I think you had a great suggestion about looking at baby name sites and stuff. There's all kinds of stuff out there that will show you like name meanings and stuff. And the good news is if you have a lot of your plot or story figured out, then you'll have that much more stuff to work with. So if you're looking for something that's like, okay, I know this is going to be a hard and tough series, then like I want some...

28:31.53

Delphina

names that mean like perseverance or something. And you can look up names that mean perseverance, or whatever the values are, whatever the themes that you're going with can kind of speak to those topics.

28:45.87

Delphina

I really like how Krispy mentioned, like, you know, ‘oh, we want so sort of a punk feeling thing. So we're gonna like workshop some some things together and see how how these words fit.’ I think combining two or more words can kind of help with that, both to keep things distinct, but then also get the feel or vibe that you want. And yeah, just kind of spitballing it, see what you know, bring it up with your friends and stuff.

29:21.85

Delphina

Give them a list of things and like, you know, did but which of these sound cool, which of these sound nice. And I think other people might see things that you don't when you do that. So yeah, there's all kinds of things that you can do. And I feel like at the end of the day, you kind of do fall into the curse of like, once you give it a name in one way, it's hard to change it. I don't think it's impossible. But yeah, just do your best.

29:54.87

Delphina

Don't let it stop you from getting the comic out there, of course, but do what you can.

30:01.66

Krispy

I always found one of my favorite starting points was the website Behind The Name.com. That's one of my favorite places to go because it is absolutely massive and has a lot of resources for finding out names and the meanings of names, surnames and whatnot.

30:20.30

Krispy

You can kind of click around. There's also generators that go into like fantasy names too and names around the world. I like that as a starting point and not necessarily a stopping point just because I always think it's imperative to have some research if you're taking names from other cultures and stuff like that to really feel what it means.

30:40.20

Krispy

But I think it's a nice starting point if you're like, you know, a little overwhelmed with what you could choose from. And unfortunately, a lot of this and a lot of like, what we're kind of all talking about is that like, there's no one way to name your stuff.

30:55.81

Krispy

And that vibes is very much the dictator of a lot of that stuff. I think it's cool if you have a lot of stuff, plot, meaning chapters, whatever, created for your work.

31:09.14

Krispy

And you can name on top of that to give them more meaning. If that's like, you know, something that's important to you. But it feels a little intimidating at first, which is why I really like Behind The Name just because I'm just like, okay, I'm creating a character and I know that they are the feelings that they are going to start with and ah a name that starts with an A. Like, this is what I'm going for. And I just start from there to give myself a little bit of direction.

31:37.96

Krispy

But like I said, there's no one way to do it. But there are tools. There's a lot of tools out there to help you kind of find your way and go from there.

31:48.18

Delphina

It's interesting. Like I do actually have a rule for myself for character names. I want each of them to have a different starting letter for the most part, because I feel like it might be a little easier for readers if they can't remember the whole name, like if they can just remember like the first bit of it, it's a little easier. I did break that rule with Sydney and Sonia, but I feel like the S-Y and the S-O combination are different enough in our language that like it doesn't trip you up too much, but yeah.

I feel like sometimes when I'm reading a comic and everybody has very similar structures for names, or if you're really going out there on the fantasy branch, like, and, and like just bunch of mashed together symbols that aren't recognizable in a language that I read. I'm gonna have trouble remembering those names. So whatever I can do to make that easier for the reader.

32:52.45

Thorb

Yeah, I think ah that was something that I do, and not necessarily as like a hard rule, but when I'm coming up with the name of a character, if it seems like it might be a little too similar to someone else, even if I like the sound of it, I'll be like, I'll file this away for later.

33:08.87

Thorb

see if I can find a use for it later. I think generally just getting a lot of sources together and just looking around is good. Finding things like making lists of things when you like the sound of something, just like writing it down and save it so that eventually you might find a use for that thing.

33:28.34

Thorb

Ultimately, it really comes down to being decisive. Like all this, like it's based on vibes. The vibe is fundamentally what sounds good to you?

33:39.38

Thorb

Like, what do you think will fit with your story?

33:43.00

Thorb

And personally, that's probably where the hardest part comes in because I'm like, oh, man, decisions, that's tough. Feels so permanent. But I ended up just running ahead after making sure that the things that I'd chosen weren't like, you know, they didn't have hidden context that I absolutely didn't want. Or like I did the research to make sure that it would at least work.

34:07.32

Thorb

And then I'm like, I think I can live with the drawbacks of these things. And I don't want it to make this comic take another five years to get released to the public. So I'm just going to go for it. And at some point, like it's going to be a bit of a toss up, like how much will it bother you to go forward with a placeholder name?

34:25.51

Thorb

Sometimes maybe just going forward anyway, is like the way to get the comic out there. And it's like when you get stuck on the concept art stage, and never proceed past it. This is kind of part of that because the names are also intertwined with the world building and with the tone and with the identity of this thing that you're trying to present to an audience.

34:46.19

Thorb

So having that, like making that call at some point, like this one, or maybe not perfect, but I'm going to go forward anyway. It can be pretty valuable.

35:02.62

Thorb

Something else that occurred to me though, with that mention of themes, maybe in my next comic, I'll name everybody after flowers or types of trees or something like that. And just eliminate this whole problem.

35:13.25

Thorb

People who do that really have a galaxy brain.

35:18.01

Delphina

And flowers also have additional meanings and stuff.

35:20.72

Thorb

They do.

35:20.77

Delphina

So you're yeah, you don't have to think about it too hard.

35:21.32

Thorb

It's perfect. And they sound cool. Man, they were onto something.

35:28.55

Delphina

Yeah.

35:28.73

Krispy

you solved it

35:28.71

Delphina

Or what about the people, but the names, like the light novel Japanese names that are like 50 words long. Don't do that.

35:38.08

Thorb

Oh my gosh, yeah. I'll just make it be an entire paragraph of a book. It'll be like something out of Homestuck troll culture.

35:46.87

Thorb

They live in the space future where every short movie title name has been taken and movie titles just got longer and longer until they take up, like, you know, they're 2000 words long.

35:56.90

Thorb

I'll Just describe the whole plot. It's incredible.

36:00.63

Delphina

Oh my God.

36:01.38

Krispy

at least you know what you're getting in for! Thanks light novels

36:01.48

Thorb

We might be getting closer to that, at least in anime.

36:11.31

Delphina

That's like, you don't want that kind of barrier to entry where people just can't remember like the six words you have.

36:27.21

Thorb

Well, I think that will be a goat cheese and roasted red pepper wrap for today. Thank you so much for listening. I've been your host, Varethane, and you can check out my work at chirault.sevensmith.net and wychchwoodcomic.com, which I can spell out for you if you want.

36:45.20

Delphina

I've been Delphina and you can find my comic Sombulus at Sombulus.com.

36:51.53

Krispy

And I'm Krispy. You can find my work at ghostjunksickness.com or lunarblight.com.

36:57.83

Thorb

We'll see you later, slappers.

37:00.61

Delphina

What's your name again?

37:03.07

Thorb

Slapper, obviously.

37:04.61

Delphina

What?

37:05.06

Krispy

How do you spell that?

37:06.88

Thorb

S-L-A-P-P-F-U.