The Hated, part two: Heroes we hate

Last week I blathered on a bit about villain Protagonists. These are evil, or “bad” characters who get to be Protagonists!

But what about more traditional heroes, or supporting characters are written to be the “moral compass” or “voice of reason”, or just ...

To me this is one of the most fascinating elements of storytelling. The idea behind Chekhov’s Gun is to employ parsimony in the information comprising a plot and content: If something isn’t essential to the story, just don’t include it. Little by little, it became more “if ...

Rogue from the X-Men encounters President Ronald Reagan!
(…who???)


Timeliness vs Timelessness

Some comics are very much “of the moment”, while others are more timeless.

Connecting to the events of the moment can be a worthy endeavor. The political satire of Jesus 2016 comes to mind. Webcomics are well suited ...

LISTEN!
Art by Ozoneocean

- Do you worry about offending specific people with your writing? Where's your line between honest expression and regard for other people's feelings? This was Bane's brilliant idea for a Quackcast. We touch a little on the idea of a “culture of offence”, where ...

It's that time of year again, the big blockbuster movies are coming and Marvels first movie of the year and contestant in this years superhero smack down is Captain America: Civil war.
Based on the massive Marvel crossover comic that saw Marvels superheroes taking sides over a controversial government ...

Pop culture is being visited by its own past. There's no denying the excitement surrounding the reappearance of the original Star Wars and X-Files characters after an absence of years.

We all know our mainstream entertainment is stuffed with more and more sequels, remakes, reboots, soft reboots, reimaginings, reintegrated ...

Hiatuses are a necessary evil in the webcomics world, it seems. Most webcomic artists can’t devote all their attention to their comic, and will at some point find that life – school, work, or family – gets in the way of regular updates.

In terms of maintaining readership, it’s best ...

If you haven't noticed, 2016 is all about pitting superheroes against one another. This coming spring, we'll have Captain America facing off with Iron Man in Captain America: Civil War, and DC's two biggest heroes at odds in Batman v. Superman: Dawn Of Justice. But forget about ...

this picture is only somewhat related to tone…but it has a costumed baby!

In my early days doing the Quackcast with Ozoneocean, we spent some time talking about story genres. I remember how we ignored whether something was a comedy, drama, or horror, because those aren't stories, but ...

This newspost was inspired by this week's Quackcast on testing your writing and knowing your characters. In the comments, KimLuster posted a Mary Sue test and discussed her annoyance in finding that one of her characters scored highly.

So what is a Mary Sue? Everyone sort of knows one ...