Characterization Marches On/Newspaper Comics

Examples of Characterization Marches On in Newspaper Comics include:

• Early Calvin and Hobbes strips featured Calvin being part of a troop of Cub Scouts. Later strips however show Calvin as being someone who dislikes organized games, so Watterson abandoned the Scout strips.
  • Although his personality was still the same - he really didn't work well with the Scouts and tried to avoid or lose them at every opportunity. It's easy to imagine he simply quit after it didn't work out (or more likely, got banned).
  • Knowing Calvin's family, his dad probably urged him to try scouting as it "builds character."

• The character that would eventually become the Pointy-Haired Boss in Dilbert was initially an unnamed balding manager who was more cruel than stupid. Then one day, Adams accidentally drew the hair on the sides of his head slightly pointy and liked the resemblance to devil horns. Curiously enough, Adams then started making him more and more stupid but made his hair also more and more pointy...
  • A similar process may be occurring to the CEO, originally a bald man dumber than Pointy-Haired Boss, whose forehead has been becoming more elongated until he looks like... this.
  • Dogbert was originally just an actual pet (albeit able to talk and hyper-intelligent), even in one strip as having a leash and being taken for a walk. Nowadays, he is almost totally human-like and interracts with everyone on a human level (although he is still willing to take advantage of the legal implications of being a dog if it suits him).
  • Dilbert himself used to be a science-fiction genius whose wild inventions made up some of the plots. Once the comic started focusing almost exclusively on office humor and lost the sci-fi elements, he was just another engineer.
    • He still has his occasional moments of sci-fi genius, however, as shown in a storyline in April 2008 where he builds a particle accelerator and took an antimatter Dilbert to work with him.

• Mo of Dykes to Watch Out For has always been on the uptight, Soapbox Sadie side but was a little bit more cheery in her younger days. Two scenes in the first year of the strip shows her idly singing to nobody in particular; "I Wanna Dance With Somebody", and then "Groovy Kind of Love" in another. It is extremely difficult to image the Mo we know now singing like that.

• In The Family Circus, the dad was a stereotypical 60s buffoon: wore a hat, smoked a pipe, drank, was overweight, ignored Thel, et cetera. He was soon overhauled into a more sympathetic, trimmer father figure.

• A Running Gag in FoxTrot is super-nerd Jason's undying enthusiasm for school, with him looking forward to every big test and dreading the arrival of summer break, much to the annoyance of his siblings. In early strips, Jason hated school just like they did.
  • Roger is so impossibly bad at chess that an Internet site which assessed his skill matched him up with a preschool student. In early strips, Roger was actually better at chess than Andy and she was always trying to guilt trip him into letting her win (which is also somewhat at odds with her current characterization).

• A very early Get Fuzzy strip shows Satchel being perfectly aware who Martha Stewart is, when Rob compares one of his meals to hers, and Satchel points out Martha Stewart doesn't use garnishes. However, a much later storyline (shortly after Stewart got jailed) involved Satchel trying to donate money for her, but not really knowing who she is, what she did wrong, and why she needed help. Of course this possibly is more an example of Series Continuity Error.

• When Sally was first born in Peanuts, Linus was seen considering a relationship with her ("When I'm 22 and Sally is 17, do you think she'll go out with me?"). Quite ironic when you consider he would spend the next forty years fending off her advances.
  • Charlie Brown in the first few years of the comic was quite different from the self-hating loser that he would later became; he was rather cheerful, he liked to play pranks on others, and sometimes even boasted about himself.
  • In the first years, Snoopy actually acted like a normal dog and had no thought bubbles. He also appeared to be more of a neighborhood dog as opposed to being Charlie Brown's pet. He consistently called Charlie Brown by his name in early comics, but suddenly forgot and started calling him "the round-headed kid". Peanuts in general is chock full of this. One early comic depicted Lucy as being able to catch baseballs on her own easily. This later looks downright ridiculous as she is shown failing to catch every ball for the rest of the series run.
  • In her first appearences, Lucy was a cute little Cloudcuckoolander, pretty much nothing like her later incarnation.

• In Zits, Jeremy's older brother Chad was initially depicted as a gleaming, near God-like figure with a square jaw whose full face is never seen. In later appearances, he is shown in full and more or less resembles Jeremy but taller and with a goatee (though that last was acknowledged in a strip where Jeremy questions Chad on why he grew the beard).
  • Likewise, Pierce was more of an angry punk in the early strips before evolving into a happy but very eccentric guy.