what if there was a creepy basement…

Barbarian was one of the new movies I enjoyed last year. As far as I know, it got good reviews, and a mostly-positive reception. Some people criticized it for making no sense. It's a fair point - although like I said, I enjoyed ...

As we approach the end of another year, I had a few ideas about topics related to endings.

If you've read my articles for awhile, you may remember discussions about wants and needs - the plot objective that is more ‘physical’ is the want, and the emotional or thematic pursuit ...

As we head into Christmas very shortly, I have just this wish for all of y'all - that you are happy, and fulfilled, and your life is as close as possible to the one you want.

This has been a challenging year for many of us. It's unusual times ...

When I was a youngster…and as I got older, too, I was always a big fan of the Super-Team. The X-Men, X-Factor, Alpha Flight, The Avengers…some of these were my favorite comics. And of course, the Super Friends was an old school cartoon that we loved as littl ...

It's been said by…someone that a character WANTS something. It's one of the ingredients that makes a compelling character. It's also something that makes a character relatable, even one who's very different from the reader/audience.

Most of us aren't centuries-old robots, but we ...

I know we've talked about exposition before, but a couple examples popped into my head recently…even though the examples are not recent.

When I was a youngster I loved the Hulk character. Today I remembered a specific issue of that comic, from way back, where the Hulk was ...

Doppelgangers were thought to be an omen of death or bad fortune. If you see a being that looks like you, doom awaits!

The name has evolved to mean a lookalike, usually supernatural or unexplained. There are many stories that feature Doppelgangers, whether ghostly, clones, mirrors come-to-life, robot duplicates, or ...

by Frank Miller

SHOWING MOVEMENT

I was talking to my brother about writing scripts for comics and mentioned that I sometimes forget that what I'm writing can't move. I'd start accidentally writing as if it were a movie script, with characters moving around, then realize that I ...

Last week we talked about alternate endings in movies like Army of Darkness, Clerks, and Little Shop of Horrors.

In the comments, you mentioned classics that I can't believe I didn't mention, including CLUE, which was made with four different endings to be played randomly in different theaters ...

Within the past couple years I finally saw the original ending of Little Shop of Horrors directed by Frank Oz. This movie made a big impact on the culture when it came out. It wasn't super important to me personally, so it was years after the release of the ...