"EH SEE EF AM IN A FIGHT, MAN, SOMETIME AH FERGET TE TEK EM OOT…"

"So where did you hide the money?"

"Ooaaar..stuffed it out a cows arse!"

also, i concur about Mr Ellis' execution of Alice's dialogue. tres subtle, tres chic.

— Baz.

Audiobooks from English speaking authors is a good way to go too like Stephen Fry.

@Amuletts: That all Dwarfs seem to be Scottish is one of the many cultural misunderstandings. I believe Games Workshop always cast their Dwarfs and Squats (if you've played Warhammer 40k long enough) with Northern English accents because, as we all know, many of the English miners came from Yorkshire. Like insisting that *all* folk music must have come exclusively from Ireland and Scotland rather than across the British Isles as a whole it does mean that you've boxed yourself in on a creative level.

@D.Bethel: Thats really intruiging, for the film Downfall, actor Bruno Gantz requested either newsreel footage or audio of Adolf Hitler speaking in normal conversation so he could best act how Hitler was in normal circles rather than what we see at the rallies and speeches. Apparently there is only one audio recording of Hitler talking normally and he, like Castro, sounds shy, introverted and almost mumbled his words which was why Gantz acted like he did and it made the film feel all that much more authentic for the trouble which was superb.

I feel for Hispanic characters your method would work best as it gently informs the reader that what kind of culture the character is from and doesn't infringe on the story.

@Tim: I was going to cite Warren Ellis as a fantastic example. In Freakangels he sets himself the extraordinarily tough task of writing in a Mancunian girl Alice. Manc isn't as hard an dialect as Geordie, Scouse or Weegie but its still tough to convey it through text. How he does it though is absolutely brilliant in its sublety because he just uses the odd bit of slang such as "summat" or "fookin'/fook" and lets her manner of speaking do the rest which reads well.

Don't get me wrong– accented dialouge can be used to effect– in fact, we're a few pages off from introducing one such character in Spy6teen– but it is for the purposes of a later reveal…still, that character sticks around for some time, so I might be shooting myself in the foot…
I will say that you can get away with it at times and if it fits the character– after all, would Nightcrawler be the same character without the occasional "Mein Gott!"?

…you have got me thinking though– I might go back to the script and turn down the accent dial a tad. When it finally pops around, let me know what'cha think!

For his dialogue, I used what I'll call accented dialectical syllable accents (writing out "sample" as "essample", por ejemplo) rather than whole misspellings, which I abhor. Unless you're working toward a post-modern meta-masterpiece, misspellings takes the reader out of the context of the narrative, forcing them, instead, to sound words out, to play a game the author has made them stop to play. While there are certain scenarios where that may be appropriate, it is not so for the comic I make. I would use examples such as the above example sparingly and, knowing Castro's reserved demeanor while speaking English, would instead use short sentences, pauses, and placeholder words to accentuate his accent rather than draw neon-tinged attention to it.

One of the steriotypes I refused to enter into was SCOTTISH DWARVES! Ever since LOTR every dwarf has been Scottish. And, okay, I can accept that some dwarves are scottish but ALL OF THEM?!! Alright, my comic is based on a D&D game and if the player used a Scottish accent when rping his dwarf I'd probably have to use it, but luckily for me he doesn't.

Also I think if the accent, or should I say misspelling words to make something *seem* like an accent, gets in the way of what you are communicating it's BAD. Probably better to use plain English and let us imagine the rest.

Your advice is good though. I remember reading 'The Little Country' by Charles De Lint. Great book, but it was set in Cornwall, and De Lint is American. He went out of his way to use cornish language and stuff, only to ruin it all by using the word 'jeep.' *wince*