A well written protagonist will generally have some flaws, starting out as an underdog of some kind, with lessons to learn and improvements to make over the course of the story.

Granted, some heroes are, well, just heroes, who are pretty much who they need to be from the beginning ...

I’ve written about controversy before, and how it has its uses. But I haven’t really yet discussed what makes a comic controversial.

There are the usual hype-controversies like gender bending and race swapping in characters, but in my opinion these types of controversial issues are just what I ...

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No new Quackcast this week so we're going retro.

Sorry guys… 334 didn't record correctly. I only discovered that while editing. Two Quackcasts we'd recorded didn't work, TWO in a row: the spare AND the current one! I don't check them right after I ...

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Art from Wikipedia

Welcome to the the yungle
Characters make or break a story. In this quackcast Tantz Aerine brings all her skills as a head-shrink to bear and gives us the low-down on Jungian character archetypes! Jung was a clever Swiss bloke, a contemporary of that strange fellow ...

FYC Examples by usedbooks and Whirlwynd

In less than one week, voting will open for the 2017 Drunk Duck Awards. In the past, the initial voting comes in the form of a Google Doc where you fill in nominations for comics that are the best fit for each category. Once ...

From the Best of Banes Collection…

CHARACTER SHAPES

I've never consciously designed characters this way, but I recently remembered hearing about this notion some time ago, on the dvd special features for an animated movie or show. I don't remember which one.
Characters derived from basic shapes can ...

I came across a little blurb the other day about Mary Sues, and fanfiction, and how the writer of a fanfiction is basically writing a fantasy, inserting themselves as the character at the center of attention, immaculate, glittering and perfect. Basically everything you want to smack into a different galaxy ...

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Art by Ozoneocean

This Quackcast was based on Tantz Aerine's newspost from two Saturday's ago: Death in comics.
We lightly expand t to death in all pop culture in the Quackcast. It's an interesting topic! Not the one we were originally going to do though… We ...

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Raphael's School of Athens.

This week's Quackcast is brought to us by Tantz Ariene! Tantz is a very political creature, seeing as she comes from Athens which is pretty much the birthplace of politics AND philosophy, that's hardly surprising. Clever Tantz in her tantzglasses, dudeman Banes ...

JOHN BYRNE

When I first became seriously interested in comics, John Byrne was at the top of my favorite artist list. He drew many of the classic “new” X-Men books, and was the artist on that series when it first became massively popular. The stories Byrne drew (and co-plotted along ...