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It's totally possible to
It's totally possible to have leadng characters (and, indeed their nemeses) who are in no way sympathetic. It's become the vogue always to have a "motivation" for a bad guy which casts him in a better light but it's not absolutely necessary. Just as you get people who are irredeemably evil (or just plain spiteful!) in real life, so characters can be the same.
Dorian Grey is a good example, as you say. In more recent times, Darth Vader became iconic long before Lucas felt compelled to put the whole of his backstory on screen. James Bond's Blofeld has never been portrayed as a nice guy - he knows what he's doing is evil but is motivated by nothing more than power and wealth. Even Disney could come up with Cruella Deville!
The key thing is that the character should have a well defined personality of his/her own. It doesn't have to be one we necessarily sympathise with.
Broken Voice Comics
Because comics are not just for kids
It's one option out of many.
 There are many different ways to tell a story, and each has a different type of leading character.
Most contemporary stories insist on a leading character with whom the audience can sympathize, even if only a little.  But great stories can be made with characters who are irredeemably nasty and unpleasant -- the Portrait of Dorian Grey, frex.
Or maybe that's a rule for written literature that doesn't apply to animation and comics? Â Could the additional emotional content of visual media make unsympathetic characters unable to carry a reader's interest in a leading role? Â Nah, I doubt that -- the visual storytelling arts seem to give the author more options, not less. Â I'm sure it's possible to have wholly unpleasant leading characters in comics and animation. Â It may just be more difficult, less popular, and thus more rare.
 ...
Anti-hero
I've always been a fan of Yosarian from Catch-22 and lets face it- he's a coward in the end. But the book isn't about liking Yosarian, its about the maddness and futility of war.Â
http://mylifeinrecords.comicgenesis.com
http://www.grantthomasonline.comÂ
You don't have to make
You don't have to make characters likeable, you just have to make them interesting. That's why Oz was such a success. That's why J.R. was such a popular character on Dallas.
As far as comics go, particularily gag strips, one of the problems is there really arn't any characters in a lot of them. People are consistant, and if you know them well enough even predictable. We're all meat machines that have been programmed to behave in certain ways partially through biology, partially through environment. There are things that are in-character for all of us to do and things that are out-of-character and we don't suddenly start doing things that are out-of-character unless there are some extraordinary circumstances providing motivation.
One of the problems I see with comics is that the characters are all interchangable. The writer comes up with a gag and then just grabs two characters and puts one in the role of the "straight man" or "rube" and the other in the roll of the "funny man". Next day's gag the two might be reversed. It doesn't matter if the gag totally contradicts behaviour we've already seen from both parties. They're just talking heads, place holders for the concept of "straight man" or "rube" or "funny man".
I never deliver a joke in my strip that would be out of character for the characters in it. If I come up with a joke that is out of character for the current cast of my strip then I'll create a new character for the gag, provided I feel the gag is funny enough to justify the new character.
Re: You don't have to make
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Vote Vito: Line Item Vito
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Vote Vito: Line Item Vito
Re: You don't have to make
The best comedy comes with two rubes...
... at the vaudeville!
Kiwis by beat!
Likeable but iredeemably evil
It's not entirely correct. You can easily have horribly unlikeable characters, such as the violent, mass-murdering psychopath Mr Ripley from "The Talented Mr Ripley" (by Patricia... Highsmith? Is that right? I forget). She managed it by never getting close to Ripley, never getting inside his head but simply watching him, and also by appealing to our everyday vague wishes of violence. We all wish people were dead from time to time. Ripley is the same except he actually kills them. The impulse is the part that we relate to. He's still like us. He just goes a little too far (and in a fictional book, "too far" is fine because it's not real anyway).
The Terminator is another good example. Everyone has a secret wish to be able to go anywhere and do anything and simply be unstopable. That's why we like the guy, even though he punches people's ribcages out the back of their spine.
Short form: You can get away with anything if you know, really know what you're doing.
- Joel Fagin
Re: Likeable but iredeemably evil
Um... am I the only one who's never fantisized about punching out someone's ribcage? 'Cause I'm pretty sure I haven't. Maybe that's why I don't consider the Terminator a very interesting character (or movie).
Jonathon Dalton
A Mad Tea-Party
Re: Likeable but iredeemably evil
That's why I said "even though".
The best villains - and whether you like the movie or not the Terminator is generally considered one of the best villains of scifi - are always the people we secretly wish we could be if it wasn't for those annoying consequences. I mean, who wouldn't want to be able to stop people talking with a gesture like Vader? Or have the grace, strength and mobility of the Predator?
In fact, the truly evil ones, the ones we're not suppossed to connect with in any way are often not "seen" at all or not represented as being even remotely human. You never see Sauron in the books of LOTR, and his representation is nothing more than an eye. For those two reasons, he is a villain we cannot connect with ever. There is nothing about him that we want to be.
Drifting firmly off topic now, but this is why some of the most manevolent, implacable villains are things. The One Ring, the glass clock, the Great Pyramid, Threshhold, the Gonne... They are more manevolent because they are not people, because as soon as they lose arms, legs and - most importantly - a face, they become that much more manevloent, implacable and alien.
At any rate, you have to work really hard at it to have a human-ish villain who is entirely unlikeable. Lector managed it, I think. Or maybe no. I haven't read the books myself so I don't know.
- Joel Fagin
Re: Likeable but iredeemably evil
I think we must just have very different taste in villains. I might enjoy watching the unusual things Terminator or Predator can do, but I never felt any more of a connection to them than I did to Sauron. They have no evident emotional presence and only simplistic motivations. For me, a great sci-fi villain would be someone like Ambassador Molari from Babylon 5, who was not a villain at all, just a bit too spineless when his government started going questionable things, or even Darth Vader (the original Darth Vader)- who proved himself not only easily quashed by the Emperor, but conflicted when it came to what to do with his son.
EDIT: Or Golem! I don't know why I didn't think of him before...
Jonathon Dalton
A Mad Tea-Party
 "For me, a great sci-fi
The best, most memorable imaginary villlians are the ones who do what they do because they believe it's right. Londo acted the way he did in B5 because he wanted to Centari rise again. Magneto didn't want to see the Holocaust repeated with mutants. This is a realist view of things: Osama bin Ladin, Hitler, Manson... these people fascinate us because they all believed they were doing the right thing.
But even two dimensional imaginary villians like Freddy Kruger, or The Terminator, or Jack Thompson, have their appeal because they allow us both the pleasure of substitution (take that you pesky teens!) and give us the ability to see things broken/ killed/ blowed up real good. We can thrill to their violence, and cheer because the violence against them has been sufficiently justified. Never under-estimate the power of our chimp ancestry.
To sum up: Both you and Joel are right.
I Agree with Tim 100%
But I think if you actively dislike the characters you're writing about, you've got a serious problem. If you, the writer, can't stand them, why would anyone else want to pay attention to them? Even with the "bad guys," you have to at least love to hate them. Or love to try and figure out why they're so messed up. The characters of mine that I don't like at all, I keep on the sidelines and use as little as possible.
Jonathon Dalton
A Mad Tea-Party
This is Relevant Beyond any one medium
This is a well thought out rant, indeed.
I'm not sure I agree, with every point though. Unlikable characters, even in the lead, are probably going to result in this less than comfortable reaction, but that can be used sometimes. Probably not in the genre of films she's discussing, but elsewhere.
That said, personally, I'm a firm believer in making people care about the characters. I'm usually more concerned with endearing my characters to the readers (not always easy with a bunch of crooks and killers) than anything else.
Tim Demeter
Reckless Life
Tim Demeter
does a bunch of neato stuff.
Clickwheel
GraphicSmash
Bustout Odds