Okay, I’m going to say what all the other Confabulators have either hinted at in emails to me or allowed to go unsaid on their blogs: this week’s topic was frustratingly hard to write. That is, until I understood the question (link to This Week’s topic blog post).
It doesn’t take much to put a vision of a character in a person’s head: The boy with the lightning-shaped scar. The bronze man with the gold-flecked eyes. The masked man on the white horse.
That’s Doc over there on the right in the picture but maybe you missed the Lone Ranger reference. With a certain group of fans you don’t have to say much more than that about some of the more iconic characters. The same would be true with the Harry Potter fans, I’m sure.
For instance with Doc Savage, his physical features are so amazing that they only bear mentioning once each time in the original supersagas. He’s very tall, very handsome and he has some interesting habits. One of the more famous ones is how he unconsciously makes a trilling sound when he’s working on a problem. He has a vest with a lot of pockets that he almost always wears and it’s when he’s dressed as a ‘normal’ person that his clothing is gone into with any detail. However, it’s when he’s in a room with others that his physical features are shown rather than described. People ‘look up’ to him, they ‘move around’ him, they are in awe of the force of his personality.