The other day I read a very interesting post by our very own Vickie of Used Books where she was talking about Romance. And what caught my eye the most was her description of the driving force behind romance stories as “relationship-driven conflict”- a very succinct way to put it ...

I'm a bit obsessed with “before” versions of characters. Where they start. The damaged dude or dudette who shows up at the beginning of a story REALLY needing a change in their lives, and usually not knowing it.

Even when the plot kicks off, these folks often don't ...

I'm indulging in what could be a problematic experiment. Bear with me…
In the history of this amazing webcomics hosting community there was a dark and interesting place in time and space, we called it “the Top Drawer”. Think about New York in the 1970s: dangerous, sexy, sleazy, unsafe ...

Thursdays with Banes - The Murky Middle

A good way to put together a story is to figure out some essentials, first - Elements of Character, Plot and Theme, and Building some World and all that. We've talked about these things around here a lot, and we'll prolly continue to ...

Every building needs a skeleton in place before building begins, so that the end product will be sound. It’s no different with fantasy world building: before you begin gathering and using your story’s bricks and mortar (= the research) you need to have the world’s skeleton, or rigging ...

Reflection Characters

When I was doing a little reading on the “Mentor” character type, I learned about something called “Reflection Characters”. It was an eye opener; I'd never heard of this before, though I could instantly see how it made sense in storytelling, and dozens of examples came to ...

Continuing to expand my knowledge and discover comics on The Duck that I had previously let slip by me, last week I found something amazing. A comic that seems low down in the ranking of it's genre. A comic that has only 10 Likes (including me) at time of ...

Every comic needs to be researched. Except maybe an autobiographical one, since it’s most likely you already have a thorough knowledge of what is going on in your life.

Or maybe you don’t, and this is your Cognitive Therapy homework.

In any case, a few exceptions aside, just ...

So you'd like to have your comic featured on the front page of the site here?
What does it take? Interesting question… Let me answer that for you. :)
The criteria is pretty straight forward:

1. The comic needs to have at least 15 pages.
The reason for this is ...

Well hell, long time no see huh? I'd like to say I'm back from my, er, break all rejuvenated and refreshed and what have ya but honestly it's damn near midnight and I'm running on three hours of sleep that I managed to eek out on ...