Only Six Faces / Comic Books

• Hawkeye: David Aja pokes fun at himself over this in an issue of Hawkeye. Clint gets mistaken for Iron Fist (whose book Aja used to draw), and angrily asks why everyone keeps getting the two of them confused.
• Archie Comics:
  • Archie is relatively well-known for this, as a common story involves Betty or Veronica merely placing on a wig to imitate the other, leaving every other character completely fooled. In fact, the only female characters in Archie Comics not to have the same body and face type are either older women, the rare 'super-attractive' types such as Cheryl Blossom or Melody, who possess larger busts and more curves, or the Gonks like Big Ethel.
  • In one comic, Betty and Veronica both dyed their hair red. Aside from hair style, they looked identical.
  • It varies from artist to artist. Sometimes Cheryl Blossom and Melody have the same body as every other girl. Cheryl Blossom is lucky enough to get a slightly different face most of the time, though. In the early comics before the series developed its signature style, the two looked more different as well.
  • It is averted in Afterlife with Archie, as Francesco Francavilla manages to give every character a distinctive face and body. His Betty and Veronica are quite different (with Betty being taller, bustier and less slender than Ronnie), and it only diversifies from there.
  • Averted in the Archie Comics (2015) reboot, where more effort is given to distinguish Betty and Veronica.
• Artesia. It's more like two — one for men and one for women. Mark Smylie paints almost everything with great detail — human faces being the exception. There are certain variations, like slightly wider noses, wrinkles and scars. The only way to really tell the characters apart is hair and facial hair. With the Ensemble Cast, it sometimes makes things confusing. The old Artesia website used to have a Character Sheet, but the new one does not.
• In his list of 15 Things That Are Wrong With Identity Crisis, Linkara briefly mentions that Michael Turner could only draw two faces: male and female.
• Mark Bagley is a major offender, especially in Ultimate Spider-Man. He is often forgiven for this because he is an inhumanly fast penciller — in an era where comic fans are used to delays, Bagley has a habit of getting issues out early. Plus he used this to astounding effect in the Ultimate Clone Saga, wherein Peter's Opposite-Sex Clone really does look exactly like him, only female. Though Bagley does repeat his faces, they look much more like each other than any other character. Similarly, the Ultimate Richard Parker was immediately recognizable as the 616 version of Peter Parker.
• Jim Lee, though beloved for making comic characters have anime level coolness, a lot of the character faces he draws tend to look quite similar, especially Superman and Batman who could be clones (square jaws for the guys, pronounced pouty lips for the girls). This can result in Storm, an African woman, having the same face as Caucasian women Jean Grey and Rogue save for eye and skin colour. This is more noticeable in his later comics like Justice League (2011) compared to his earlier X-Men comics.
• Ed Benes tends to give every female character more or less the same face. This is especially noticeable in his Justice League comics, where Black Canary and Zatanna look like blond/brunette versions of each other, while Vixen, a black woman, has identical facial features to them.
• John Byrne is known for having his male faces look pretty similar (with trademark square jaws), while his female faces are entirely identical. This is especially noticeable when his Batman and Superman are on the same page: the two of them are twins who happen to wear different costumes. He averts this in the Generations graphic novels, starring Superman and Batman, because he draws Batman with the distinctive Lantern Jaw that he sported back in the Silver Age.
• Steve Rogers. Henry Pym. Clint Barton. Wendell Vaughn. John Walker. Jim Hammond. They're all blonde Caucasian males, and they were all active members of the Avengers at the same time circa 1990. And John Byrne just happened to be the writer/artist who added the Torch and US Agent to Avengers West Coast. Lampshaded in one of the Marvel Year In Review specials. [1]◊
• Captain Electron has an odd example of this, with Jay Disbrow's artwork generally managing to make the historical figures seen in the educational segments look distinct (if hit-and-miss as to how much they resemble their real-life counterparts), but all the other male characters having near-identical faces, to the point where the titular Captain Electron spends much of the story hanging around with a computer science student who looks like his twin brother.
• Frank Cho is somewhat infamous for this — especially noticeable since he copies his trademark "double-wide hips, toned wasp-waist/titanic jugs" combination onto every female character as well. Only the beefiest girls (She-Hulk, Valkyrie, Thundra...) fall away from this trademark look. The women are essentially clones with different hair. His male characters tend to differ quite dramatically, by contrast.
• A big problem for Steve Dillon, who draws faces very distinctively and very uniformly. Sadly this wasn't always the case, Dillon is an excellent draftsman, but even he has admitted to oversimplifying things in his work. This resulted in the "everyone is Frank" meme — because Dillon's work on The Punisher was so famous, Frank Castle's scowly mug is most noticeable when Dillon makes use of it or tries to modify it, including women, especially when they get mad they turn into skinny Frank Castles in wigs.
  • According to an article written after his passing, Dillon not only knew about the "Frankface" meme, but was actively trying to fuel it by putting it in everything he drew.
• Terry and Rachel Dodson draw a lot of similar faces (see quote page).
• ElfQuest was a rare aversion. Wendy Pini kept a concordance of the shapes of eyes, facial structure, etc., so that her elves definitely weren't the same faces with different (extremely elaborate) hairdos. Although elves are all slender and have bodies that are considered attractive in this culture, there was a lot of variation in that shapeliness, on the men and especially the women.
• Finder by Carla Speed MacNeil does this on purpose, in a civilization composed almost entirely of clans that intentionally inbreed to look like each other. However, the different clans (and the non-clan characters) have wide variety of very different faces.
• Harvey Comics has a tendency for this. It's especially noticeable with their human characters as they often have the same head shape, eyes and noses. This has lead to the fan theory that their most famous character, Casper the Friendly Ghost, is actually the ghost of Richie Rich.
• Jack Kirby's women are famous for being only distinguishable by their hairstyles. His other characters, on the other hand, are so varied and diverse that it almost makes up for it.
  • This is an improvement on how he drew people in the early Fantastic Four (and other comics of the time) — one letters column admitted his eight basic types bore an unofficial nickname, "Kirby's Kast of Kharacters."
  • Jack Kirby had four basic categories of faces: Heroic Adult Male, Heroic Juvenile Male, Heroic Female (aka Juvenile Male with Long Hair), and Kill It With Fire. There was some variety among the Kill It With Fire crowd; Thing looked nothing like Desaad who looked nothing like Dan Turpin; each of them was hideous in his own distinctive way.
  • In an early issue of Fantastic Four, this was even a plot point. By simply putting on a wig and a spare FF uniform, blind sculptress Alicia Masters looked exactly like Sue Storm^note See item #6. — to other characters, as well as the reader!
• David Lafuente averts this. He gives all the cast of Ultimate Spider-Man distinct faces, hairstyles, dress styles, and rarest of all, physical builds.
• Greg Land is infamous not only for apparently tracing his characters from porno magazines photos, but also for tracing entirely different characters from the same◊ photo. There have been quite a few joke campaigns to buy Land more porn just so comic readers can see some variety in his work.
• Surprise! Rob Liefeld goes here. Once, a "top 40 worst Rob Liefeld drawings" list showcased a scan of two data profiles on two different characters; the faces were identical, and the blonde hairstyles nearly so. The list asked readers, for bonus points, to guess which of the two was supposed to be Hispanic.
• Maybe not faces, but for Kevin Maguire, it's expressions. Look at Superbuddies or his JLI runs and you'll see the same confused expressions on the faces of the JLI.
• While Guillem March's male faces tend to be very detailed and expressive, his women are all drawn in a very similar manner◊: slightly pointed noses and chins, wide jawlines, pouty lips, and heavy-lidded "sensual" expressions. And huge breasts, but you probably noticed that.
• Millie the Model often consciously imitated the Archie Comics style and had many of the same artists, including Dan DeCarlo and Stan Goldberg. Unsurprisingly, the feature often shared this trope with Archie as well.
• Milo Manara only draws one type of beautiful woman. His female diversity in a nutshell: despite the characters having various ethnicities, they mostly have the same face, same middle sized chest and same body proportions.◊ To be fair, old or ugly male/female characters are more diverse in his works.
• Takeshi Miyazawa's drawings tend to have a limited range of faces and body types.
• Phil Noto also does this for his characters, but makes it so pretty. Ditto Jim Cheung, Olivier Coipel, Stuart Immonen ...
• Any interpretation of super heroes by Alex Ross will be super-detailed and almost photo-realistic... paintings of the exact same guy or girl, just in a different outfit (or painted green in the case of The Martian Manhunter, etc.)
• In the 2017 edition of Runaways, it quickly becomes clear that while Kris Anka is very good at drawing a variety of clothing and hairstyles, he only uses a limited range of faces. This is particularly apparent in the "Best Friends Forever" arc, in which Molly, Abby, and Klara all have the same face, just with different eye colors and skin tones.
• This was initially the case for the original black and white releases of the first volumes of Scott Pilgrim, with characters like Scott, Ramona, Stacie, Kim and Young Neil sharing much of the same features and having similar head shapes despite being completely different characters, with much of the differentiation between the cast coming through their hairstyles. Bryan Lee O'Malley's art style changed over the course of the series, however, and most of the cast's looks diversified with at least one unique facial characteristic for each character (Knives having Black Bead Eyes, Kim being the only one with prominent freckles, etc.) by the fourth volume. The color rereleases of the series also make some minor visual changes along the way to keep things consistent (e.g. adding Julie's glasses from the later books into the first volume).
  • O'Malley's later work on Seconds averts the trope entirely. Compare an early shot form volume one of Scott Pilgrim◊ to the promotional image from Seconds◊, and the difference is a clear one.
• The Smurfs take this to an extreme degree; apart from a handful of Smurfs who have characteristic features or wear an accessory, all of them look exactly the same.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) is often accused of taking this to the entire body. Many share a body and head type with Sonic, even if they're not hedgehogs. Many characters are distinguished by clothing elements, colored bodies, or hairstyle. This is part of the reason why the comics are immensely popular in the fan art community (one could make a drinking game out of browsing DeviantArt for recolors of Sonic). The body type is fairly easy to learn and since many characters design-wise could be dumbed down as 'different color Sonic with hair', novice artists often can fall back on tracing pages. Former artist/writer Ken Penders, after leaving the comic, had this trope levied at him over his echidna characters with people noting that they're all just Knuckles with clothes and more/less hair. It doesn't help that they're still like this even when he's retooling them for his own work.
• Used intentionally in the comic Sturmtruppen, where all the soldiers share the same body type, and so do the officers. Bonvi's point was to underline how much war "de-humanize" soldiers and turns them into an anonymous mass.
• Superman:
  • During the Golden and Silver Ages, Superman would run into lookalikes often — from his Kandorian cousin Van-Zee to Kryptonian rogue Mala to a movie actor called Gregory Reed — who were so similar to him that they could (and did) pass for him. Superman and Batman were also able to pose as each other with no one figuring it out until they explicitly identified themselves. This was an intentional plot point: Superman is just supposed to have "one of those faces", which helps to explain his Clark Kenting.
  • It wasn't just Superman — Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane and Supergirl encountered identical duplicates of themselves on a semi-regular basis, too. Villain Lesla-Lar was capable of posing as Supergirl in The Unknown Supergirl — and later Lena Thorul in The Girl with the X-Ray Mind — without Superman himself suspecting that woman wasn't his cousin (several years later it was lampshaded in Superman Family #206: Strangers at the Heart's Core as some kind of "cosmic coincidence").
  • Editor Mort Weisinger actually claimed (in response to a reader questioning the plausibility of this) that "it was a real-world fact that everybody on Earth has one or more exact lookalikes running around!" (The "everybody has a double" thing was a common urban legend, decades ago, but not so much these days.)
• Lampshaded in Tiny Titans, where Robin and Raven point out that without his hat, Zachary Zatara looks exactly like Superboy.
• Tom Grummett's characters tend to all have the same face. This makes it awkward when drawing characters who are romantically involved, such as Superboy and Wonder Girl, or Mach-IV and Songbird.
• In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud argues not to poopoo — as a deliberate choice, a simplistic art style makes the person, place or thing being depicted more universal and, in the case of characters, helps us read their emotions as well as identify with them.
• Franco Urru's art on Angel spin-off comics — his male characters are pretty individual but his women's faces and bodies are quite interchangeable. Particularly annoying since many of the characters are based on live-action actors who don't look alike — if you're drawing Juliet Landau with voluptuous curves, you're really letting your personal tastes influence your art too much.
• Charlie Adlard's art for The Walking Dead is especially bad with this, at least in the beginning of his tenure. He seems to have one stock "Unshaven White Guy With Large Nose and Scowl" face that he uses constantly for at least three or four different main characters, and most of the women (and Glen) are only identifiable by their hair and/or hats. In shots that just show the face, the reader has little clue who they're looking at, outside of the dialogue. On top of that, the range of expression for the vast majority of Adlard's characters is exactly one: semi-stoic serious face. This is especially notable since the first six issues were drawn by Tony Moore, who actually made all of the characters look very distinct from one-another, especially Lori (Rick's wife). Tony Moore being a complete and total aversion of this trope makes Charlie Adlard's work following Moore's departure all the more jarring, though he has visibly improved over time.
• In the German comic Werner: Brösel once revealed in an interview that his characters are mostly based on a very few faces with a very few variations.
• Wonder Woman (1942): While most of the characters aren't hard to tell apart unless they are noted as part of the story to be identical Harry G. Peter's art of college age girls makes those that aren't a fat or extra buff pretty interchangeable sans hair. As most of the recurring characters are the Holliday Girls it makes it quite difficult to tell if named characters are making a reappearance in an issue unless they are addressed directly.