Characters

Characters give your dialogue an identity. Once a speech bubble is assigned to a character, it automatically inherits that character's balloon style, and readers can meet the cast through character sheets.

Open the Characters Manager from the Backstage sidebar of a work (or via the work card menu → Characters).

The Characters Manager at a glance

The page header shows the character count and the toolbar: Roster Preview, Import, Export, Team library (when your work belongs to a team), From template, and Add Character.

Below, stat cards summarize Total Characters, Active, With Portrait, and With Voice, plus counts per role (Protagonist, Antagonist, Supporting, Minor).

Each character card shows the portrait (or initials — portraits and reference images are shown as thumbnails sized for the card, not the uploaded originals, so the page stays quick with a large cast), a role badge, the bio, age and gender, whether a voice is assigned, and — importantly — how often the character is used: Used in N (speech bubbles referencing it) or Unused. On the right, a live balloon sample renders the character's effective speech balloon style.

You can search by name or bio, filter by role, and sort by manual order, name, role, or recently edited. Drag cards to change the manual order.

Creating and editing a character

Click Add Character (or the pencil on a card). The editor dialog contains:

Basic Information

• Name (required) plus optional Localized Names for English, German, French, and Spanish — each falls back to the main name when empty.
• Role — Protagonist, Antagonist, Supporting, or Minor.
• Age and Gender.
• Portrait / reference image — Upload image, choose From library (the asset picker, pre-filtered to images), or paste an image URL; a live preview shows the result.
• Reference images — extra expressions, poses, or costume references with labels (e.g. "angry", "side profile"), added by upload or From library. These are CMS-side working material; the exported manifest carries only the portrait.

Biography

A Default Bio plus Localized Biographies per language.

Speech Balloon Style (Character Override)

The same balloon configurator you know from Work Properties, scoped to this character. Set the balloon type — Normal, Rectangle, Panel Top, Panel Top-Right, Panel Top-Left, Thought, Shout, Whisper, or Connector — colors, tail, and typography, with a live preview (type your own Preview text to test a line of dialogue).

Click Create Character / Update Character to save.

Linking characters to speech bubbles

Characters connect to dialogue in the editor: select a speech bubble on the canvas and choose the character in the Speech inspector tab. From then on the bubble renders with the character's balloon style, and the character card's Used in count reflects it. See Speech Bubbles.

Card actions

Each card offers: Edit, Duplicate, Share to team library (team works), Assign Voice, Deactivate/Activate (inactive characters are dimmed and excluded from the roster), and Delete.

Assigning a voice

Assign Voice opens a list of available text-to-speech voices (with provider, locale, gender, and age). The assigned voice becomes the default when generating spoken audio for this character's bubbles in the Audio Localization tool.

Templates, import & export

• From template creates a pre-filled character (archetype starters) that you then customize.
• Export downloads all characters as a JSON file; Import loads a character set from JSON — handy for reusing a cast across works.

Team character library

Team works get a shared Team library:

• Share to team library (the share button on a card) publishes a copy of the character for teammates. Re-sharing a character with the same name updates the team's copy.
• Team library opens the shared list; Import copies a character into the current work.

Roster Preview

Roster Preview shows the active cast as readers might see it — portraits, names, and roles in a grid. To publish full character sheets as bonus content, create Character Sheets in Extras and link each sheet to a character.