Once characters interact in a narrative, readers are presented with at least two perspectives. If, as Roland Barthes noted, the "deception" of one character always implies the "being deceived" of the other, and if the hero, from the perspective of the antagonist, becomes an antagonist themselves, then aren't values conveyed by the narrative such as the "own" and the "foreign," the "prestige-less" or the "prestigious," just a matter of perspective? Using a corpus of 419 characters from the most successful comics since 1945 from France/Belgium, East Germany, and Ivory Coast, it will first be demonstrated that each comic character can be described as a complex sign that can be broken down into various units that enable the distinction and thus the identification of each character. As diverse as the characters of different comics may seem, a quantitative analysis of the features by which the characters differ from each other within a comic reveals that the visual language of comics has stabilized (proto)typical distinguishing features that are used within a specific geographical/temporal context or even across contexts for the representation of character identities (e.g., "species," "capital," "gender," "origin," "age," etc.). By integrating human and dehumanized characters into a narrative discourse, not only are they depicted in comics, but they are also constantly valued or devalued by the respective narrative roles, interaction with other characters, and the voice of the narrative instance. Thanks to the cross-context corpus, it can be shown in conclusion which character identities in popular comics are assigned the highest/lowest prestige, what geographical deviations may occur, and to what extent the character structures of classic heroes like Tintin, Lucky Luke, or Spirou and their respective antagonists have actually been disrupted in contemporary popular comics.