stretchin' out them stories!

I think I first heard the phrase “uncompressed storytelling” via the great John Byrne, comic artist and writer, and man of very strong opinions. He was criticizing some other writer or comic series (I don't remember which one) about hinting at stories that wouldn't ...

The Walking Dead has been a successful comic-to-screen adaptation. Back when the show started, in 2010, the comics-on-film trend had not hit high gear.

High gear wasn't far off, though. Iron Man had already come out and was huge, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe was soon going to take ...

Who doesn't love a happy ending?

Eh, there are a good few people I've met that just turn their noses up at happy endings, because apparently according to their opinion, happy endings are for the weak.

But for all other normal people, a happy ending is a good ...

For better or for worse, we are creatures of categorizations. We love to label things, and to sort them into neat little boxes so that we are absolutely certain we know what to expect when dealing with each one. It is that sense of familiarity that we are looking for ...

I like mentor characters.

This is not just me of course; the mentor and protagonist relationship is powerful. Some of the best moments in many stories are the first encounter with the mentor, the training and sense of discovery for the protagonist, and the eventual loss of the mentor character ...

LISTEN on our new player!
Listen on Stitcher ​​- https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/drunkduck-quackcast
Or TuneinRadio - https://tunein.com/podcasts/Books–Literature/Drunkduck-Quackcast-p1150194/

Happy 2020 all you lovely people who listen to us!
What we're talking about today are tropes in fiction that bother us because they don't ...

Game of (Sticks and) Stones

I heard about the new Dave Chappelle special, Sticks and Stones, and couldn't wait to finish the long work day to get home and watch it.

A lot of it was hysterical and I was laughing loudly, sounding like some kind of sick donkey ...

The lifeblood of your comic is the characters in it. They offer a way for the audience to be invested in the world and contextualise any conflicts that will inevitably occur. So it is important that the characters don’t come across as flat. A flat character is one dimensional ...

I have come across many awe-inspiring sights Along my Summer travels across the Eastern Coast of the United States. I have walked inside grand mansions decorated with Victorian-era Second Empire, French Rococo Revival, and Aesthetic movements on Newport, Rhode Island; I touched a replica of the Caves of Lascaux in ...

You’ve got your amazing idea down for a story but how do you begin? You want to make your first chapter amazing! This is where you need to lay down some concrete foundations to get your audience main character and why they care about what is happening to them ...