Historical Figures Go to the Same Academy

I'm working on a strip comic/ one-pager comic focusing on the Enlightenment thinkers. I'm also including influential inventors, scientists, and artists.

My main problem is thinking of punchlines, and making things funny. Of course, I'll have a look at Rule of Funny for more inspiration. But we're talking about a bunch of thinkers in a high school with conflicting ideas. Anyone have any random thoughts or trivia I can throw in? Thanks!

Confirmed Characters

• Jean-Jaques Rousseau: The new kid at school. A romantic, he often thinks optimistically and believes that people can change.
• Voltaire: Fellow classmate/philosopher. Rousseau's snarky, sarcastic best friend.
• Mary Shelley: Women's rights leader and writer. Usually hangs out with Rousseau.
• Thomas Hobbes: The school bully. He feels that he can justify it with his belief in all humans being naturally evil. John Locke is his biggest rival.
• Montesquieu: A political thinker that often likes hanging out in the chemistry room so he can apply science to social interaction. He is also the class president, which he uses as a way to test his political theories.
• John Locke: Very reasonable and kind. Another rival of Thomas Hobbes. He often helps Thomas Paine and the American students with their homework.
• Immanuel Kant: A kind, religious one who is a transcendental idealist. He often guilts people when he says that beautiful things cannot be explained with science.
• George Washington Carver: A young scientist and educator. He knows how to operate anything with a peanut.
• M.C. Escher: A quiet and sickly child with a love for illusions. He has a tendency to walk on the ceiling for no reason, and this annoys Copernicus with a passion.
• Frida Kahlo: An artiste of few words, but with a lot to say. Her art is often looked on as strange, so she relates to her friends Escher and Dali.
• Cesare Beccaria: Class vice-president. He studies the justice system alongside Montesquieu, but with a more gloomy perspective.
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A stern and serious composer. He's also Beethoven's strict tutor.
• Ludwig van Beethoven: An often picky composer. He tends to stop playing music if he thinks no one is listening to him. Between Mozart and Haydn, he's a bit of the "baby".
• Joseph Haydn: Mozart's best friend, as well as his admirer.
• Andreas Vesalius: A scientist that studies anatomy and human bodies. He gets creepily angry when he runs out of test subjects...
• Edgar Allen Poe: A talented writer and poet, although he is often in a gloomy mood. Ominous birds like to follow him for some reason.
• Sigmund Freud: An intelligent scientist and dream analyzer. Despite this, he's the school creeper, and everything seems to be about sex.
• Charles Darwin: The OTHER school creeper. He likes animals, and often has at least one hanging around with him at all times. Old churches hold very hard grudges against him.
• Nikolaus Copernicus: An outspoken scientist who coined the heliocentric theory. This often gets him into trouble with the church, so Galileo often takes the heat for him.
• Galileo Galilei: Formerly an outspoken scientist, he is now shy about presenting his ideas toward others. He follows Copernicus everywhere, and often acts as his personal groupie.
• Thomas Paine: A young political writer, who secretly wished he were just like John Locke. He often asks Locke for helo with homework, although he's very tsundere about it.
• Leonardo Da Vinci: An amazingly popular artist, he's president of the school's art club. In his spare time, he likes to show his friends his "amazing new inventions".

New/Considering Characters

• Albert Einstein
• Niccolo Machiavelli
• William Shakespeare
• Gregor Mendel
• Francis Bacon
• Confucius
• Mohandas Gandhi
• Thomas Jefferson (by popular demand)
• Benjamin Franklin
• Salvador Dali

So it's basically like Afterschool Charisma and Clone High?

Also make John Locke a fan of Lost.

edited 22nd Apr '11 12:14:50 PM by Five_X

I write pretty good fanfiction, sometimes.

Albert Eisenstein was... not a genius contrary to popular belief, but extremely curious, creative, and intuitive. Oh, and odd. (smart, but uber smart like everyone makes out).

I'd recommend looking a bit into their personalities if you want some accuracy, otherwise go completely for the rule of funny I guess.

edited 22nd Apr '11 12:55:33 PM by jasonwill2

as of the 2nd of Nov. has 6 weeks for a broken collar bone to heal and types 1 handed and slowly

You're forgetting Erasmus and his friend Thomas More.

You can't go without mentioning Martin Luther either.

edited 22nd Apr '11 12:56:20 PM by chihuahua0

Lenin and Stalin! Put them in there and watch them conflict with Thomas Jefferson and Locke. But Madison might like Lenin's ideas... he was kind of socialist.

as of the 2nd of Nov. has 6 weeks for a broken collar bone to heal and types 1 handed and slowly

Bonus: have Martin Luther King, Jr. meet his namesake.

And have Karl Marx get into arguments with Lenin and Stalin. "You're doing it wrong!"

edited 22nd Apr '11 11:41:05 PM by Five_X

I write pretty good fanfiction, sometimes.

Eh, I feel that Hobbes would be the teacher's pet or Knight Templar hall monitor/student body leader. He's the guy who used "life is nasty, brutish, and short" as an argument for an authoritarian leader, he certainly didn't advocate humanity staying in its natural state of dog-eat-dog.

He might be the passive-aggressive backstabbing nerd who justifies his tactics with survival, but I don't see him going out of his way to bully people if he's strong/popular enough to do that in the first place.

Oh, and he'd probably be best buddies with Machiavelli.

edited 22nd Apr '11 11:48:55 PM by melloncollie

You have almost entirely Western European figures. You may want to cast a wider net.

Also through in a cave man.

Don't forget Confucious.

Confucius is about a century older than everyone else. Maybe he could be the school counselor or something.

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

You know, the historical Mozart actually had a tendency to have a very immature sense of humor (he loved practical jokes, and he also wrote a song called "Lick my Ass". He was a hard worker, though. Maybe he can be a very strict teacher and composer, but an easy going prankster when he's not? I can also imagine him watching shows like Family Guy and South Park.

Gregor Mendel joined a monastic community in order to have the time to study heredity with plants, so maybe he would have an external appearence of a very pious monk havin a not-so- secret obsession with peas and other types of vegtables. I can imagine a scene where all the figures are a t lunch, and Mendel is meticulously examining the peas on his plate and working out what lineage they come from. When he realises that everyone is staring at him, he immediately switches to reciting Ave Maria and claims that he's trying to breed a new type of pea that can be used as a rosary.

Charles Darwin could also be going on about Barnacles.

edited 23rd Apr '11 2:43:14 PM by SantosLHalper

Halper's Law: as the length of an online discussion of minority groups increases, the probability of "SJW" or variations being used = 1.

My advice is to try and not align any historical figures into a "bully" role or something like that, just because it's very easy to make with controversy or horribly misinterpret a person's ideals.

Also, I advise going on a wiki walk and trying to find an important historical figure from each country, just so you can have a vast resource pool.

Read my stories!

• Five X: Yeah, I get that a lot. I am a fan of Clone High, though I thought of this before I heard of it. I've looked into Afterschool Charisma, I just hope it doesn't have a humorous tone like my story does. ; _;

• jasonwill 2: It's been hard to find personality aspects, but I keep looking. I guess you could call the characters Anthropomorphic Personification s of the ideas and well-known facts of their respective person, which is why I want my main focus characters to be from the Enlightenment.

Also, Considering what era Lenin and Stalin were from, they'd be rather young... I imagine they'd kinda be like the Cutie Mark Crusaders, or the kits. I'd need some more research on em. I like your idea, though! I'm trying not to include to many Founding Fathers, since I'm thinking of doing a crossover with my friend who makes a similar comic.

If I may make a recommendation, you gotta find a spot for Friedrich Nietzsche, "the bad boy of philosophy".

Oh! And Caligula as an out-of-control party boy who somehow became the student body president.

"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko

If Nietzsche's in this then Schopenhauer needs to be the emo philosopher.

wut rly

this is the same guy who kept making music after he went deaf right

If people learned from their mistakes, there wouldn't be this thing called bad habits.

Hey Edmania, believe it or not, this is actually true. This was what he did during recitals. Just because he never gave up due to being deaf doesn't mean he couldn't have been a brat.

The Blog The Art

Okay. I started to work on this idea again. I have a few ideas on quirks and character interaction that I'm satisfied with, but I really want to work on how to get the plot ball rolling.

I don't want to make it seem that the two main characters (Voltaire and Rousseau) have no personality, so I want to make their interaction and personality traits obvious in early strips. I'm just not too sure how to do that without making things seem too random.

Does anyone have any ideas? And will it help at all to show you guys some of my work so far?

For a fun little quirk, Rousseau did not like children.

Also, I vote for Bismarck as the other school bully. Niccolo Machiavelli would also fit; Hobbes was all for an ordered society, and was definitely opposed to having folks running around doing whatever the hell they wanted.

edited 4th Aug '11 6:37:40 PM by Morgulion

This is this.

Yes, it could help,

Also I would recommend giving equal credence to every figure's ideas. People can get pissed about that kind of stuff.

And I'd also say you should read/listen/see the work of each character you include, or at least most of it, then show your work.

edited 4th Aug '11 7:14:01 PM by TheEarthSheep

Still Sheepin'

You could use Thomas Edison as a Honest John's Dealership

Bite my shiny metal ass.

I think this needs more figures from the Classical Era. People like Alexander the Great, Cleisthenes, Herodotus, Hannibal, Caesar, Sun Tzu, even Nero as some crazy egotistical guy.

And going into the Middle Ages for stuff, perhaps Saladin, Charlemagne, Lief Eriksson, Roger Bacon...

Bonus points if you make Roger Bacon the Academy's Kevin Bacon, being in most scenes and being able to be connected through different scenes to each of the characters, to varying degrees.

I write pretty good fanfiction, sometimes.

I'd put good ol' Karl Marx, and good ol' Bakunin

Marx vs Locke vs Bakunin vs Hobbes... An epic free-for-all.

edited 5th Aug '11 8:56:05 AM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

Neitzsche.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

Since the heroes are of the Enlightment. Make the Faculty into fuddy-duddy medievalists with Saint Thomas Aquinas as Head-master and Saint Thomas Torquemada as Games-Master / Coach.

edited 5th Aug '11 10:50:16 AM by Trotzky

Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!