The female lead of the series, Alana is Marko's wife and Hazel's mother. She is a native of the planet Landfall, and like all Landfallians she has wings,\ although her wings do not allow her to fly until issue #18.After joining her planet's war against the Wreathers (one issue says she was drafted after flunking out of state college while another says that she joined the military a few months after her father remarried Alana's childhood friend, Even), she was subsequently reprimanded for "abject cowardice" for hesitating to kill civilians and was redeployed to the planet Cleave, where as a prison guard she met Marko. She developed a friendship with him and when she learned he was to be transferred to a more brutal prison from which detainees never return, she helped him escape, just twelve hours after having met him. She later married him and gave birth to their daughter, Hazel, in the series' first issue.
The male lead of the series, Marko is Alana's husband and Hazel's father. He is from Landfall's moon Wreath, whose people have horns or antlers and can wield magic. Marko was a foot soldier in his people's war against the Coalition of Landfall. He was raised since a young age with the knowledge of the atrocities that Landfall committed against their people. When Marko left Wreath as an adult, he was still "a gung-ho kid who just wanted to do [his] moon proud and kick some ass." This changed the first time he saw battle, after which he began to develop a less militant and more pacifist outlook. When he tried to share these misgivings with his fiancée Gwen, he realized from her unsympathetic and jingoistic responses that they had grown too far apart to continue their relationship. Marko surrendered to Coalition forces as a "conscientious objector" 18 months before the beginning of the series. He was a prisoner of war on the planet Cleave until his guard, Alana, escaped with him, married him and conceived their daughter, Hazel. Wreath High Command sent The Will after Marko because Marko "renounced his oath and betrayed The Narrative" by fraternizing with an enemy combatant. Though he is a pacifist who vows upon the birth of his daughter to never again use his sword, and dislikes the practice of owning firearms, he does so nonetheless when his family is threatened and is so skilled with a sword that he can dispatch an entire squad of enemy soldiers armed with firearms, for which he is referred to by Prince Robot IV as a "force of nature".
The daughter of the two lead characters, born in the first issue, who occasionally narrates the series. She has wings like her mother, horns like her father, and green-brown eyes unlike those of either of her parents. She spends most of her childhood growing up in the organic tree-like rocketship with which she and her parents escape Cleave. She is seen taking her first steps at the end of the third story arc, and is speaking in simple phrases by the beginning of the fourth. She celebrates her fourth birthday in the sixth story arc, during a part of her life when she and her grandmother are being held in a Landfallian detention center.
Izabel is the ghost of a teenage girl from the planet Cleave who was killed by a landmine. She manifests as a reddish torso with her intestines hanging out from under the hem of her T-shirt. She comes from a family of resistance fighters who built tunnels to escape people who invaded Cleave. She makes a deal with Alana to save Marko's life in exchange for being taken with them when they leave the planet, but to do so has to bond her soul to Hazel's. Although Alana is initially reluctant to allow this, she finally relents and soon comes to appreciate Izabel's presence since she can act as a "babysitter" at night and allow Alana and Marko to rest. She has the ability to create realistic illusions with which she can disguise her appearance, although these do not work on machines such as the Robots
A member of the royal family of the Robot Kingdom, assigned by Landfall as their primary pursuer of Alana and Marko in the beginning of the series when his wife is pregnant with their first child. Like others of his race, he is a humanoid with a small television set for a head, which Vaughan explains is influenced by a fascination with old televisions that he developed when he began writing for TV. He also has blue blood and the ability to morph his right arm into a cannon. In the beginning of the series, Prince Robot IV has just returned from a "two–year tour of hell" after which he had to be given a new leg following a brutal sneak attack. His brain "reboots" after he is injured confronting the family in the third story arc and he is still missing when his son is born in the fourth story arc.
One of the freelance bounty hunters hired by the Wreath High Command to kill Marko and Alana and bring Hazel back alive, not only for Marko's betrayal but also to prevent news of Alana and Marko's coupling from spreading and thus threatening troop morale. The Will is accompanied by a Lying Cat, a large talking feline that can detect lies. Vez, the woman who hires him, says she hired The Will because he shares Marko's moral relativism. When he travels to the sexually permissive planet Sextillion and is presented with a six-year-old sexual slave girl, The Will kills her pimp. The Will was once the lover of The Stalk, a female spider-like bounty hunter who is also assigned to Alana and Marko until she is killed by Prince Robot IV, for which The Will vows revenge. He develops an attraction to Gwendolyn even as he mourns The Stalk. His sister Sophie, who addresses him as "Billy" and who introduced him to The Stalk, is another Freelancer who works under the name The Brand. In the third story arc, he decides to abandon his Freelancer life but suffers a near-fatal injury. Although his life is saved at a hospital, it is said that he will likely never fully recover from the trauma.
Lying Cat is a large female talking feline companion to The Will who aids him in his work. Green in color and with yellow stripes, she has the ability to detect when a verbal statement is a lie, which she indicates by saying "Lying". Her power is limited to the state of the mind of the person speaking: she can detect deliberate deception, but cannot detect a falsehood if a given statement is believed to be true by the speaker. According to Izabel, Lying Cats always play by the rules, an allusion to the fact that a Lying Cat must also admit ethical truths as well as factual ones. When Gwendolyn, who becomes Lying Cat's ally, accidentally kills a man, Izabel says that they had no right to execute that man in his home, which Lying Cat cannot deny. It has been revealed that Lying Cat was the runt of her seven-kitten litter, which has caused her distress.