Another comics rule of thumb I’ve been thinking about recently:

Give your lead character somewhere visually distinctive to live.

It doesn’t have to be weird or exotic. The Parker family home in Forest Hills was very ordinary-looking. But it said something about who this guy was in a way that readers were visually reminded of every time they saw it.

HQs tend to be cool. Avengers Mansion. The Bazter Building. The avier School. The JLA Satellite/Watchtower/Cave. Well, maybe not the cave.

Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum was cool. Luke Cage living over a revival movie house in Times Square was distinctive and interesting, especially when contrasted with Danny Rand’s Riverside Drive townhouse.

But Captain America, in the 60s and 70s, when he wasn’t living in Avengers Mansion, lived in a series of bland, featureless, unmemorable apartments. For a long stretch he lived in the Falcon’s guest room in Harlem, but even that was bland and empty.

Then Stern & Byrne took over the book and put him in a Brooklyn townhouse with WWII-era decore in his place, and bam, all of a sudden it was interesting and memorable, because it said something about him.

Byrne also gave Misty Knight an apartment with one brick interior wall with a curved fireplace setting, and that was distinctive enough to set it apart from just some blando apartment.

Don Blake never lived anywhere that told us anything about him, not that I recall.

Tony Stark had boring apartments (swanky, but not in a memorable way) for a long time, but Stark Enterprises was distinctive.

A setting with some texture helps a lot.

Kyle Rayner’s apartment was full of art supplies and the coffee shop on the ground floor was a recurring touchstone.

If you’re writing the series, give your artist something to work with.

If you’re drawing it and the writer doesn’t, make up something that works; you’ll need to draw it multiple times, so use it to say something.