The story behind names

The roots of my current comic date back to my college days. On the side of all the "serious" comics I would work on, I would just doodle silly comics about my friends and I while I listened to lectures and whatnot. So my characters are technically named after real people, thought they've really become characters of their own, and really don't relate much to their real life counterparts (my comic does drift closer and further from reality from comic to comic, though).

For my artist name, mattchee: My name is Matthew. My last name starts with a G. My friends used to call me Matt G. - when you say it really fast you get "mattchee" so then that kinda became my nickname. I liked it and it's stuck.

I hate making up names though. If I make them mean something, I feel silly about it, but if I don't I feel like I'm not caring enough.... ugh. I named my son Matthew, so I guess that shows how creative I am in the name department.

I don't really put much work into names anymore. At one point I started using street names I saw on my jogging route (ex: McFadden, Brookhurst, Warner, Edinger). They make nice surnames when I need them. But what I really like are object names (ex: Harbor, Elm, Corbel). It doesn't matter to me if the name has a great meaning, I'm more concerned if the name has a nice sound or invokes a feeling when it's said or heard.

I have reasons behind my names but it isn't really fancy nor revealed in the plot often. Just backstory development that no one but me and maybe some others know

hahaaa this is fun! i love comin up with names. i used to always come up with funny words and stuff and write them down. so i had a huge list of names and stuff to pick from for other comics and stories. but for Robo Hole i just kept tryin to find names that i really liked but never payed a lot of attention to before. like Graeme, Blythe, Hazel, Page, Delaney blah blah blah. (even tho most of those characters arent even in the story yet)
for my character Parsnip tho i was gunna name her Moira. but i was shoppin one day for a recipe and it needed parsnips. but i didnt know what those were and i thought theyd be some really cool lookin veg cuz the name was so cool. but they turned out to be sad lumpy white carrots. so i figured they shoulda saved that name for somethin cooler and i decided to name my character after it so that the name could get some justice!
for my character Geckie i kinda just came up with it. i was tryin to think of a fun/alien-ish name for his type of character. but i also wanted it so sound like a sound-effect so i was just makin noises and Geckie came out of it

I love pick up names, because it's funny. I rely a lot on meanings, but seirously, having meanings for every character is strange. I use websites for babies names. Or mythology books.
Or it's a good joke (like my main chara, she's named Echo and she's mute, IRONY LULZ).

My artist name comes from two things I liked when I was like 12 years old, and I used up to three names until being 16. It ended up being a japanese word, but with no itention at all. I just liked the sound.

This might sound weird but to be compleatly honest I go about many different ways for each character and rah story. The first thing I do is just look up a baby list, I try not to go by meaning but more the sound of the word first then the meaning behind the name. Then if I'm still having trouble deciding :v I often say "well... What would their parents agree on?" It's a question that I feel a lot of people don't ask that question to themselves xD but yeah I often ask my self simple things first like "do they look like a Larry? Was Larry even a popular name back then?" "Do they hate their name?"

It's little questions like that which help me out, of course a lot of names I pick I often look for meanings that fit how I picture them in the story or what I think their parents would like.

Well, my name, DynamoToon, has an odd story behind it. So my name used to be Anderman67 because I was a dumb kid and loved the enderman from minecraft. But I realized it was a dumb name so i asked my friend to help me think one up. We thought of a bunch of silly names, but the ones that stuck was Toon Dynamo, Dynamic Toon or DynamoToon. I think u know which i one i picked.

Literally, the name I use, Monstrosaur7, came to me in a dream.....yeah. This is how the dream went.

So I was sitting at home, and I got really excited to play Skyrim one on the N64. I plugged it in and I was amazed on this revolutionary new character creator. The first thing I had to do was to play a mini game that would dictate my characters name. The game started off as Tetris but when you completed a row, the blocks turned into letters. This next part is kinda confusing due to "Dream Logic" and i'm not sure if it was the computer picking letters, or me picking letters, or the letters forming names but somehow the end result was Monstrasaur.

After I woke up, I told my brother about it and he suggested having it be Monstrosaur (the "O" replacing the "A") and I later added the 7 because some places require a number.

So yeah, my name came to me in a dream, as I played Skyrim one on the N64!

For me it really depends, for characters it usually comes pretty naturally but when I feel stuck I tend to go on those baby name websites to see if I can find anything that fits the character in mind. When it comes to name meanings I don't always go by that but half the time I do.
I have a character that is an angel (I have a few actually but most of them are from the Bible) she is currently the only female character I have that is actually an angel and so far probably considered the most beautiful character I've made. I had trouble coming up with a name so I looked up angelic names and one of the lists that someone made was Adriel (the a and d pronounce Odd) The name means "flock of God" from what I've read, it's actually used as a boy's name but I don't mind giving my characters names that normally don't go with their actual gender but so far she's the only one xD I'm happy with it so I guess that's all that matters?
Whenever I look on baby name sites for characters I need to make sure my mother isn't present.

Vikiro Hop actually came from a sorta weird place. One night I was really tired falling asleep and noticed a sticker on the side of my work desk had a bunch of scratched off letter. The jumbled mess oriented itself into Vikiro Hop. I thought it would be a good name for a character. Androgynous and doesn't sound like it is from anywhere in particular. Most people get the pronunciation wrong. (Vik-ear-roe Hop) Eventually I decided it would just be a good pen name.

For me coming up with character names is both easy and incredibly difficult it just depends where I start. I can take names from anywhere and they sorta amalgamate in my head. Sometimes a name will pop up and I will try to create an entire character around that. (From what I gather Neil Gaiman did something similar for Coraline.) Other times I'll have everything about the character fleshed out except for the name and it will stay that way for a disturbing amount of time.

Band names are something I've had to come up with too many times and that is always an uphill hike. From now on I'm going to decide band names without the other members input. It's just too much work to get people to agree and too many terrible suggestions.

My original screen-name was "Cisco" which was the name of my cat (who i had from age 2 or 3 to 14 or 15)
my screen-name now, being EmoKawaiiChibi, was actually something i created for a name in a game i downloaded back in 8th grade (IMVU)
I went with EmoKawaiiChibi because of 3 things: im emo. im cute. and im short
plus i was just starting to get into the anime/manga life
so i knew kawaii meant cute and what chibis were
so i put it all together, and arranged it in a way that i liked the layout of the name and initials
and thats my simple little story of how i became EKC/EmoKawaiiChibi :3

Well if we're talking about artist names My name Nema was (and still is my nickname) I got it from freshman year when I created an anime club. We started making our own anime, we had characters an everything. I named my character Nema. when we all figured out what our names of our characters would be, Asia, thought up a brilliant idea, she said we should call each other by our character name to remember them. I said okay and so did everyone else. eventually everyone got bored of the project and dropped it all along with the idea of calling each other by our characters name, the only name that stuck was mine, mostly because it was easy to say and shorter then my real name.

What a cool subject!

For me, there are a couple ways I pick out characters' names. Back when I first started writing, most of my stories were set in fantasy worlds, so I went through an old baby names book my parents had and wrote down a bunch that sounded really cool to me. I used that list as a sort of base, and more often than not I combined two or more to create one that worked for that particular story... Skeen, Norriem, Taleeko, Erowyn... It's actually really fun!

My current comic was somewhat different, because I designed the characters first (before the plot or anything), and I honestly can't remember how I picked out those particular names. I do know one thing I always consider is if a character is the type of person who would be given a nickname, and if they are, they are for sure going to get a name that's easy to shorten!

For coming up with names for cities, villages, etc. I usually end up writing a lot of random words backwards and seeing if I can combine them into something that sounds good.

I have always been a fan of cool, unusual names, so I'm never gonna have a main character who is named Kate (no offense to any Kate's out there lol).

Sometimes I research names, other times I rely on my "name bank." That is to say a list of names I want to use but need the right occasion for. I care a lot about naming so a lot of my list is unused. There are also a lot of badass names on there that I don't want to use if there is ever a better character for it.

Masahiro's name turned up pretty easily, for some reason. I knew I wanted a name that sounded Japanese, and I knew I wanted it to be slightly longer - and "Masahiro" just kind of turned up, and stuck.

Akane is actually named during the course of the story, and I (... and by extension Masahiro) picked the name for fairly obvious reasons - Akane means "crimson".

The other names of the characters who have turned up so far - Kazue, Chouko, lady Watanabe - etc., do not have that much thought put into the meanings of their names, but puts more emphasis on the way they sound. Fun fact - lady Watanabe is the only character in the story so far to be addresssed by her last name. Everyone else operates on first-name basis.

My naming-process differs depending on the story I'm telling. Aside from Akane, most of the Grassblades-characters get names based on the sound of them, rather than the meaning - but I've got a scifi story where the main characters are named Vesto and Zorya. Vesto is named for Vesto Slipher, the guy who discovered the galactic red-shift AND assisted Clive Tombaugh in his discovery of Pluto, and Zorya is named for the Slavic twin goddesses Zorja Utrennjaja and Zorja Vechernjaja, the morning and evening stars.

I ADORE felines and ancient Egypt, so I came up with "Sekhmet" quite easily. I used it as a nickname and a username for a long time (some people still call me that!...) and one of the main characters of my comic is named "Sekhmet", because she lives in an alternate world/universe where ancient Egypt has left a far larger mark. That's all I can say without spoilers!

The name "Shanti" was easy to pick, as it came from my wife's username on the web.

As for Infected Blood, that's the nasty name given by most people to the species which my main characters belong to. The actual name is AIMS, but common folks, scared and hateful toward this species, came up with plenty of fake rumors, including that AIMS' blood carries all sort of diseases. Ignorance and racism/speciesism are two of the most horrible human traits, and it's something I wanted to represent as strongly as I could. So, siding with Sekhmet and Shanti, I own that name as if it were mine

... >.>

I says random names out loud until I find one of them sticks and matches the characters

... Thats about it. Ironically Bowen means of Noble born! .... or son of Owen XD

Ha! yes the same here! I wonder what Tebetha means. Oh it means Gizelle (if you follow the variates) beauty and grace, yeah that kinda works too. Hmm wonder if Garfric is a name ...

Some West names came before the characters, others I didn't decide on until the last second. None of them have a meaning as such, though Serge fits quite well, but I know when the name is right and after that there's no changing it.

Jed was originally Jet. Then Ged. Then Jed.

Glista was always Glista.

Morris was like, 'yeah, that seems right'.

Serge I had been struggling with and was like YES THAT'S THE ONE when I found it. Then I forgot about it completely and had to find it again.

If you're looking for names, I highly recommend watching end-game credits from the Assassin's Creed series and other similar franchises. These games are made by teams that are massively multi-cultural and the credits for them go on for a very long time. It's a constant stream of unusual names and you can sit there listening to the music picking out the ones you like, mashing them up a bit or whatever. Games, films, shorts, bibliographies, anything with credits is a really valuable resource.

OMG the amount of re-naming I've done because I forgot their name!