Pre-Victorian Silhouette Portraits of Pop Culture Characters

The strong silhouette is a very important aspect of character design, not just in comics, animation, and film where I’m guessing you could identify most of your favorite characters simply by their profile, but also in videogames, where players need to be able to discern, at a glance, whether that approaching enemy is Horde or Alliance, Spy or Scout, Witch or Tank.

We think that’s why we’re so fascinated with the pop-culture papercut portraits of Olly Moss, especially the ones of live action characters played by humans. These characters have considerably less character design in their making than their drawn and animated counterparts, and yet, as subtle as they are, they are still completely recognizable.

Of course, context helps us out somewhat, as with Agent Smith up there, and many of the others below.

Many, many more are at Moss’ Blog. (If you’re wondering who some of them are, check the tags!)

(via Geeks are Sexy.)

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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