A story is not a story if your character sails smoothly through it with nothing ever interesting happening. To make it interesting, we need to raise the stakes and make life difficult for our hero - and then watch them overcome the challenges.
One way to raise the stakes for your character is to introduce an antagonist.
What is an antagonist?
“A person who actively opposes or is hostile to someone or something; an adversary.”
Antagonist comes from the Greek word antagonistes, which means “opponent,” “competitor,” or “rival.”
In popular culture, antagonists include The Joker in Batman, and Darth Vader in Star Wars. In cartoons, there’s Dick Dastardly, and Wily Coyote.
Now let’s look at some examples from my strip ‘Gerald the Goat’.
Gerald the Goat is a bit anarchic, so I felt that he needed a character to keep him in check and to occasionally serve him his comeuppance.
The first antagonist I came up with was the bull. However, bulls and goats aren’t natural foes.
The bull got to chase Gerald around a bit, however, there was never any real sense of danger.
Then I thought of making Rex the police dog into an antagonist, but again dogs and goats aren’t natural foes, in fact they can get along, or even the goat becomes the dogs antagonist.
So I got to thinking what is a goat’s natural enemy?
I thought a mountain lion would be pretty cool, but a snow leopard would be even cooler.
The Only trouble is the strip was set in a town and not the remote mountains of Afghanistan or Mongolia.
However, the solution was right under my nose.
Another long-running character, Granny Mills, had gotten into the habit of ‘borrowing’ pets from the local zoo. And so I thought, that’s it! The snow leopard is at the town zoo but periodically escapes to harass Gerald.
Over to you:
Whether you already have a cartoon strip or if you are putting one together, how could you introduce an antagonist to your strip’s setting?
Some common examples include:
bad bosses
animals that are natural rivals
monsters
What’s next
I’m currently working on a storytelling course to be released in 2020. I put out a Cartoon Newsletter, which as well as containing a whole bunch of different characters, will also keep you informed about any cartooning course.
Add your name and e-mail to the orange box below, and I’ll wing a copy your way.