I read almost all of the comics in my local paper (Chicago Trib) daily. In the last year or so, they began running a strip named Watch Your Head.
http://www.uclick.com/client/baw/wpwyh/
It concerns a group students at a predominantly black college.
I’ve been reading this comic for several months, but have realized that I have a hard time telling the characters apart. One of the guys is fatter than the others, and I think one of the others tends to dress more “gangsta” than some of the others, but for the most part, they look pretty similar to me. Most of them are slender young blacks, casually dressed, with reasonably short hair. Heck, at times I’m not even clear whether they are male or female. Perhaps because I have trouble telling them apart, I don’t clearly distinguish between their personalities either.
I’m wondering if anyone else feels similarly about this - or other - strips.
And, if others do have trouble with the characters in this strip, why is that? I know it is drawn more “realistically,” unlike - say - Hagar the Horrible where you have drastically different body types and unchanging wardrobes. Or Broom-Hilda, where they are different species. But even in a strip like Brenda Starr I am able to distinguish the characters.
The only other strip I have had similar problems with is For Better or Worse. At times I have not immediately distinguished some of the younger women characters based on appearance alone, but have had to look to the situation to tell who they were. But such confusion occurred rather occasionally, instead of WYH, where I find myself not caring about the comic or any of the characters, because none of them have developed individual personalities in my mind.