History Main / DistinctiveAppearances

* This trope can be difficult to pull off well in war comics. Every character generally must be a young male, wears the same uniform (usually including a helmet or other headgear), often necessarily of the same ethnic background, etc. Giving characters distinctive appearances without [[ArtisticLicenseMilitary violating basic military realities]] presents a lot of challenges - particularly if the artist already has OnlySixFaces tendencies. Joe Kubert's character designs for ''[[{{ComicBook/SgtRock}} Sgt. Rock]]'''s Easy Company are a good example of an artist successfully giving soldiers Distinctive Appearances despite all those obstacles.

* One chapter in ''How to make Webcomics'' (By Kurtz, Straub, Guigar, and Kellet) even went so far as to describe the (black-and-white) layouts of the different characters in PVP, pointing out the different areas as light and dark, and how no two characters had the same arrangement.

* [[Manga/FullmetalAlchemist Edward Elric's]] [[BringMyRedJacket bright red coat]]. Most of the other State Alchemists wear the same uniform but are visually distinct enough that you can tell them apart, in part due to varying body types.
** Only in the original anime, though. While he does wear it in the manga and Brotherhood, its appearances become much less frequent as the story goes on.

* This trope can be difficult to pull off well in war comics. Every character generally must be a young male, wears the same uniform (usually including a helmet or other headgear), often necessarily of the same ethnic background, etc. Giving characters distinctive appearances without [[ArtisticLicenseMilitary violating basic military realities]] presents a lot of challenges - particularly if the artist already has OnlySixFaces tendencies. Joe Kubert's character designs for ''[[{{Comicbook/SgtRock}} Sgt. Rock]]'''s Easy Company are a good example of an artist successfully giving soldiers Distinctive Appearances despite all those obstacles.

* Anyone who has tried to illustrate ''FanFic/MyImmortal'' has run into this problem. Everyone is deathly pale. Everyone has dyed their hair black. Everyone wears the same "goffic" clothes. All the distinctive aspects of any character's canon appearance (Harry's glasses, for example) are soundly eliminated.

* Also by Valve, the characters in ''VideoGame/{{Left 4 Dead}}'' all have distinctive silhouettes as well as the various special infected.

* Despite being very much a ImprobablyFemaleCast, it's possible to tell nearly every member of the ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'' cast apart by their silhouette, as demonstrated in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3C-VevI36s this video]]. The abundance of nice hats and nonhuman features (ears, tails, horns etc.) and distinct accessories certainly helps.
* Every single Robot Master in the ''VideoGame/MegaManClassic'' series is designed with a distinct body, which helps a lot when you consider how they [[OnlySixFaces tend to have similar faces]]. Many can also be told apart by their silhouettes (much like the ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'' example above), if ''9'' and ''10'''s [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPScPaInWOI promo]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeIRUVPROOU videos]] are any indication.

* This was Creator/{{Todd McFarlane}}'s objective when he started drawing ''Franchise/SpiderMan'', and it mostly worked. His silhouette is pretty standard... except that it's often contorted into odd poses, and sometimes those big white eyes are staring out of it.

* The first ''Film/{{Transformers}}'' film was criticized because the robot characters were so complex it was hard to tell them apart in past paced action scenes, especially characters with remotely similar color schemes. The later films addressed this by adding more colored parts to existing characters, and adopting vastly more distinctive appearances for new ones.

* During production of ''WesternAnimation/TheIncredibles'', an animator did outlines of each of the Parr's heads, to make sure each of them was distinct from the other. Creator/BradBird liked the sketch so much he had it made into a T-shirt.

* You have a FiveManBand, a group who is defined by their roles and quite often their physical size and appearance. You want these characters to be memorable, so you make them as different from each other in appearance as possible. TheLeader is muscular, TheLancer is slender, TheBigGuy is really huge, TheSmartGuy is really small and oversized glasses, TheChick has [[CurvesInAllTheRightPlaces all the right curves]], etc.