What's in a name?

When I write the comic and I haven't officially named a character, I usually just throw in a placeholder name until I decide on a character's official name. Ernest and Brad are definitely placeholder names in here because I didn't want to say "X" so I could figure out speech bubble placement. There's a future minor character who I just called by her job title. If someone has a long name they just go by an acronym, but hers is PP, and I ended up naming her Pipi. Her name is NOT a Pierre Polievre reference, for the record. I can't stand that mf.

In about 20 pages we're going to have another run-in with Miriam's unnamed boyfriend from chapter 1 and his name is also Brad. Bradley Gunn. It just feels like a rural Ontario country boy name to me. Although it wasn't my original intention (I put that placeholder name in before I officially named Brad), I ended up keeping it because it kind of implies that the crew pulls their aliases from people they know.

We'll learn Ivanhoe's alias in a few weeks, and also how he got his real name.

Sometimes a character's name just comes naturally, others take me FOREVER to give a satisfactory name. One future character is Carl, and there was no question that he was a Carl. There's also Smith Morris, who was originally going to be named Chester. In the pencils for his pages, the characters refer to him as "Chess" until I decided Chester was too dorky a name. I even thought about naming him Chad at some point. But I feel like Smith kind of has WASP vibes, and he comes from a WASPy family.

I'm still working out the name of one of the biggest characters in the story, but his name needs to be perfect and I'm struggling with it.