Right, so this is somewhat fudged – my locations and definitions may not match exactly with those of any specific yogic or tantric traditions.  But whatever spiritual tradition you follow, they are a great way of getting started thinking about body language for specific characters.  Most people have one or two that are much stronger and more comfortable, and one or two that they are not comfortable with or can’t access at all.

A few notes to explain some of the poses: The gentleman demonstrating the Root chakra is both leading with and gesturing at the level of his root chakra.  The lady is not so blatant, but that sway in the hips can also be seen as the energy centre of the pose.  The hungry pose in the Stomach chakra got me thinking about that bit in Julius Caesar:

Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

Note you could do the exact same pose on a werewolf and it would still work – the stomach is not leading the way, but it is powering the whole body.  In Throat – that’s a con-man or salesman of some sort – someone who is focussed primarily on the words themselves, not the meaning.  The guy walking around in Brow is a type I see a lot of: he is so totally off in his head that the rest of his body is almost superfluous.  The head is leading so much, he almost seems to be lifted off the ground.

I’m pretty sure I read about this somewhere – it’s not my own idea – but I don’t remember where.  The poses are mine at least…

Again, it is very important not to start treating this like a mix-and-match, or some sort of secret code.  Use it as a starting point for explorations, but try making the pose yourself.  If it doesn’t feel right for the character or the situation, try something else!

Based on Paul Ekman’s research, it appears there are 6 basic, innate and universal expressions.  All others are combinations of these, in varying degrees of intensity.  For more info, see Scott McCloud’s Making Comics (from which this info is unabashedly ripped) and for an amazingly in-depth view of the subject, Gary Faigin’s Complete Guide to Facial Expression.  As always, this info on its own is not enough – always try to make the expression with your own face and inhabit the emotion you are trying to draw – try to draw the feeling not just the surface.

The cartoonist Seth, from an interview with Carousel Magazine [PDF] :

I have felt, for some time, a connection between comics and poetry. It’s an obvious connection to anyone who has ever sat down and tried to write a comic strip. I think the idea first occurred to me way back in the late 80’s when I was studying Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strips. It seemed so clear that his four-panel setup was just like reading a haiku; it had a specific rhythm to how he set up the panels and the dialogue. Three beats: doot doot doot— followed by an infinitesimal pause, and then the final beat: doot.

…I am very aware of the sound and ‘feel’ of how the dialogue or narration is broken down for the panels. If you have to tell a certain amount of story in a page then you have to make decisions on how many panels you need to tell it. You need to arrange these panels — small, big or a combination of the two — and decide how to sit them on the page. All these decisions affect how the viewer reads the strip; there is an inherent rhythm created by how you set up the panels. Thin panel, thin panel, long panel: this rhythm is felt by the reader, especially when you put the words into the panels. When writing a comic strip I am very aware of how I am structuring the sentences: how many words; one sentence in this panel; two in this one; a silent panel; a single word. These choices are ultra-important in the creation of comics storytelling, and this unheard rhythm is the main concern for me when I am working out a strip.

The ‘words & pictures’ that make up the comics language are often described as prose and illustration combined. A bad metaphor: poetry and graphic design seems more apt. Poetry for the rhythm and condensing; graphic design because cartooning is more about moving shapes around — designing — then it is about drawing.

If you are drawing a picture of a house, you want it to look like a house, a specific house. However, to cartoon it properly you have to simplify it down to a usable graphic. You have to walk that fine line between trying to convey some ‘real’ element of the living world that is recognizable as just what it is, in all its specificity, and to make the image iconic and simple enough to be moved about on the page effectively as a piece of the cartoon language. This tension between the ‘real’ and the ‘cartoon’ is the central tension in drawing a cartoon strip. You don’t want to fall too much into the iconic because then the strip becomes visually boring, and you don’t want to become too detailed (or real) because then the drawings become dead things sitting there on the page and slowing down the reading of the cartoon language

From an interview with the cartoonist Seth in Carousel Magazine [read the whole thing in PDF] : (via Austin Kleon)  In face, Austin has a bunch of interesting posts about comics and poetry!