Have you ever noticed that among the dead webcomics, a preponderance of them have “Hiatus” on their tombstone? That tombstone being, of course, the final page posted years and years ago with a promise they will be “right back” after a “short break”. There are of course a number of ...
The Dread Hiatus
Amelius at 9:57AM, Jan. 27, 2019Writing Mental Illness (Part 1)
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, Jan. 12, 2019
Writing a character with mental illness can be a very tricky thing. Writers usually go for the extremely rare, exotic and spectacular: multiple personality disorders, extreme manifestations of psychopathy or sociopathy, high functioning autism with that ever alluring ‘savant’ magic going for the character, bombastically spectacular schizophrenia… in many ways ...
Exposition - Just the tip
Emma_Clare at 12:00AM, Jan. 11, 2019
In a nutshell, exposition is a big ole mound of information that the author wants the reader to know before they move on in the plot. It often gets a bad rap but that is usually due to it being used incorrectly. There is definitely a place for exposition so ...
Winding down and looking back
Emma_Clare at 12:00AM, Dec. 21, 2018
It’s that time of the year where we are all winding down, kicking back and looking over the events of the past year. For me, this was an up and down year full of excitement, friends, hardships, bad landlords and many, many new things to eat. Despite not going ...
Serialized vs Episodic Storytelling
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, Dec. 1, 2018
There is a general trend in mainstream media and sequential art to generally value serialized works (in shows, series, comics, etc) over episodic ones. They are considered to be more elegant, more dynamic and more interesting than episodic ones. While this might definitely hold true, is it so as a ...
Organizing For Comic Making
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, Oct. 20, 2018
Procrastinating is an art. I know it well for the past 7 years or so of making Without Moonlight, I have updated extremely sporadically. Some updates had months spanning between them. But this last year I've been producing steadily two pages a month. I know, I know, it's ...
Having a chat - Planning good dialogue
Emma_Clare at 12:00AM, Oct. 19, 2018
If there is one thing about your comic you will want to nail it is the manner in which the character’s speak to one another. When it comes to creating good and effective conversation you have to keep in mind two things.
1) Does the dialogue progress the story ...
White Swan, Black Swan
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, Sept. 29, 2018
In Swan Lake, the black swan Odile is transformed by her warlock father into the white swan, Odette, and posing as Odette she tricks the prince into breaking his oath to the white swan- because clearly making life-binding oaths to a woman you know so little you can mistake her ...
Earning Your Twists
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, Sept. 8, 2018
There's nothing more intense than subverting the audience's expectations: The righteous character that always says the truth says a lie. The character that values all life ends up murdering someone. The bad sort, the punk that's always terrible ends up saving the day or doing something decent ...
Quackast 389 - Intimidating Baddies
Ozoneocean at 12:00AM, Aug. 28, 2018 LISTEN!
What makes bad guy intimidating? Tantz Aerine made a great newspost about the question, carefully outlining various key bad-guy properties like confidence, composure, efficiency, and amorality. Banes, Pitface, Tantz and I stomp ALL over that, traipsing about like drunken, muddy rugby players, as we blather on about our opinions ...