Icepick

I'm working on a fairly standard walk cycle for pixel art based characters, and I've been using character maps to speed things up for me. However, some of my characters are notably shorter than others, which is leaving gaps in the sprites. I tried adjusting the pivot points to account for the height differences between the shorter characters, but some of the body parts just rotate oddly. Is there a way to use character maps to account for character skins that should be shorter (or taller) than the base skeleton, or do I need to use some other method? Thanks!