This beautiful image is from the movie Metropolis by Fritz Lang, it shows Atlas the giant carrying the weight of the entire city on his shoulders. In this image Atlas represents the combined might and labour of the working class. Interestingly the same theme in imagery is often used for ...

HAPPY THURSDAY!


The comedic premise is very much the same idea as a premise in any other genre. It's got the same elements…Character, goals, themes, conflict…

Plus laughs.

One way to look at or create a comedic premise is that it has some kind of separation from reality ...

There are some comics where shadows don’t really exist- like Tintin where nothing casts a shadow at all. In other comics, shadows play a huge part, like Sin City. And yet in others they are just part of the natural environment of the comic and nothing more.

All are ...

So I suppose it is no secret I like activism, standing up for a cause and giving it your all no matter what. From my comics to my actual life I have been doing so.

But what about the imagery that gets such a thing across to an audience in ...

Failure is the stepping stone to success. That’s what I teach my students and my clients, and it is true, right up there with “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”: If you learn why you failed, you won’t fail again the same way- and that brings ...

In a chat where we were discussing our comics, Pit-Face told me that if Bones from Putrid Meat is Odysseus, then Blitzov from Epic of Blitzov is Gilgamesh. And that very solid analogy of the two characters’ function in her stories, got me thinking about how myth of all sorts ...

My city had a massive snowfall on Boxing Day this year – the day after Christmas, for you non-Canadians. Nothing too unusual for a Canadian winter, but even so the city always seems to grind to a halt when it happens. After having a neighbour help him get his car unstuck ...

Last year for Black History Month I profiled Black Panther, the first black superhero (see that newspost here). This year I’m sticking with the black comic character theme with a mini-history of Chuck Clayton, one of the first non-white characters in Archie comics.

These days Chuck is an established ...

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OMFG you sexist PIG! Heh… today we talk about trying to recognise sexism in your OWN work, what to do about it, and WHY. It turns out it can be very hard to do, and if you DO acknowledged it the instinct is to rationalise it away, justify it ...

Last time, solo heroes, teams of two, and trios were the order of the day. Today let's talk quartets, quintets, sextets, septuplets, octets, and…uh…neuf-tets…?
More possibilities for self-contained drama/comedy/conflict exist with groups of four or five. There are several ways to begin building such a ...