hi! i'm currently scripting my clangen comic and was wondering something when i stumbled onto your blog. do clangen comic authors often cut characters/ not include every in-game character? i've had a lot of cats throughout the moons and not everyone did something significant. for the sake of efficiency, i've considered not including them in the comic. i understand this is a "do what you want; it's your comic" question, but i still wanted to seek out advice from people who are more experienced!
Mod Lucky 🍀
I am known to be very very pro cutting characters from your comic! Population management in clangen is no joke, and for the sake of your sanity and your readers, slimming the cast down to a reasonable size will benefit your storytelling. We've all had 200moon elders with redcough show up just to die next moon, or even cats we just haven't particularly clicked with and didn't bring much to your overall narrative. Clangen is the inspiration, not the ruleset you have to abide by!
There are two main ways to reduce character bloat - Preventative Measures and Narrative Pruning. [[wowowow i went on for a while so popped this under a readmore!]]
Slowing the Growth - Limit the amount of litters a cat is allowed to have (mine is 2), amount of siblings within a littermate group allowed to have kittens, amount of kittens allowed in a litter, turn off same sex increased adoption, and exiling loners/rogues/kittypets who don't catch your fancy. This will help limit your clan size, and make relationships between characters feel more intimate. You can name them all, give them distinct personalities, and you're not managing ten pages of cats.
Managing the Existing Crowd - silently keeping a larger clan of "no-names" so to speak. They exist in the world but don't demand panel time, only when they become relevant to they get the necessary promotion of a personality. Background fodder, cats to have in mass death events to set the stakes of your world. Foolfeather had two kits that grew to be adult warriors that never narratively contributed to the story the way Darling did - so I axed them both. Merging cats together, like Wheatburn and an un-named sibling, or letting cats choose to leave the clan are fun options.
Of course, you can do whatever you want forever - some people love the chaoticness of "canon events" clangen - and enjoy the challenge of following their own preset rules, but a comic is also a curated experience with a goal to tell an underlying narrative. The second most important thing is this reduces the amount of different cats you have to draw - focusing on the character designs of your main cast to be recognizable, while not having to overcomplicate them to compensate for a large amount of single color black, brown, or white cats.
Anyways! Wishing you luck on your clangen journey!
