Imagine converting entire old-school, table-top role playing game sessions into comic form including all the dialogue and visuals conjured up between a group of friends, a pile of papers, pencils and a handful of rolling dice. Starlights does just that in a fictional realm setting where each player jumps scene ...

The Bestest Evar: Revisiting Mary Sues -
And a Contest!

Way back in the day our friend and my grizzled old mentor HippieVan did a post discussing Mary Sues - and we followed it up with a Mary Sue “contest”.

Many of us comic creator and reader types have probably known the ...

Low-Fidelity (Lo-Fi) Chill-bop Music has played a crucial role over the last year in my ability to calm down and feel at ease. Originally used as background music while doing homework or as a sleep aid, Lo-Fi music has been around for a while. The idea is that it layers ...

Dialogue is a very important element of writing. From novels to webcomics to movies, good dialogue will show things seamlessly, effortlessly, while at the same time they are unsaid.

What I mean to say is that good dialogue will have two levels. One level is going to be the overt ...

I have never been an X-men fan. More like a casual consumer of the movies, and that was only until the disastrous (in my opinion) Wolverine singles and the Dark Phoenix movie which I couldn't finish. Props to everyone who managed to enjoy those films! These things are a ...

We've all been told how in story telling, showing is a lot better than telling.

Showing gets hard if your main character is a loner that interacts with nobody. Even harder if he/she is a stoic that emotes very little. The audience will have no way of knowing ...

“I can hear you. Who are you? What are you doing under the balcony?” Andrew leans over and directs his attention toward the mysterious stranger he had just heard rustling and urinating in the bushes outside his home moments earlier. “Hello..”, the stranger replies back, “I, uh…I was just ...

You’ve got your amazing idea down for a story but how do you begin? You want to make your first chapter amazing! En medias res means opening in the midst of the plot. This way, exposition is bypassed, allowing you to fill it in more gradually, either through dialogue ...

When a character the story's cast and audience identify and are familiar with dies, the effect is, or should be, monumental.

Not only because that effectively ends that character's journey (and arc), but also because as an event it has immediate ramifications for all the surviving characters.

First ...

Drawing Lies - Deception, Insincerity and Sarcasm

Stories and characters have many contexts where emotion is needed - the happy and sad and angry and scared of it all is a big focus of my own comic drawing - I keep it cartoony (with as few lines as possible) and maybe slightly exaggerated ...