I usually write comic scripts with a pretty specific idea of what each panel will look like when drawn: the setting, who’s doing what, facial expressions, and so on. What I almost never do is write any of that down. Except for specific actions that characters have to respond ...

Like I've mentioned before, I was…and am…a big Archie fan. As a youngster, I would pick up a digest from the grocery store checkout line whenever I had the money.
I would usually flip through the digest before buying, to see if there were any stories drawn ...

image by Walt Simonson

I read a lot of Marvel Comics back in the day. The Hulk, Spider Man, The X-Men…it was actually the ORIGINAL X-Men I really loved (which I read in reprints). Right around the time I was discovering those old Stan Lee/Jack Kirby X-Men stories ...

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What's best? One big climax, multiple small ones, early, or delayed? How much should you work UP to a climax? What about anticlmactic events, how important are they?
Climaxes are really important in stories. Often you work up to them over the course of a whole series, but ...

Summary:
There's a bit of exposition to get through here, but it's going to be an interesting and fun story so stick with it, ok? Michelle “Mike” Vinson is a Pandora AND a Faust, she accidentally frees some demons and they offer a deal she finds too good ...

Like any typical night that I get exhausted from staying cooped up inside the house, I grabbed my car keys, started up the engine, and went out on a drive by myself. Tonight was a bit special because I had a mixed CD soundtrack of the arcade driving game, Wangan ...

Summer here is hot and dry, but it's so short that sometimes it feels more like a coffee break in an endless winter than a real season. People who live in the prairies know that each summer day has to be savoured - tucked away as a little memory for ...

Is there a word for these?

I’m talking about those things that you automatically start drawing when you have a piece of paper and no specific ideas in mind. The images that find their way into the margins of your notebooks, onto napkins in restaurants…or on a whiteboard ...

I'm not sure who the first fictional character was that I became attached to. The Cat in the Hat? Superman? Jason Voorhees, maybe?

In any case, Jughead Jones was somewhere in that early group of beloved characters. I liked Archie, and envied his dating life with Betty and Veronica ...

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We've talked about formulas before, but mostly in the context of escaping formulas and reinventing them.
NOW however we're talking about using existing formulas to create a story, or creating new formulas and sticking to them to come up with your stories.
Formulas can be a good ...