Talking Stock

A good character is a three-dimensional character, right? They have to be relateable. With wants and fears that make sense. And a bit of a history. And a flaw or two to keep them “human”. And a wound to try and overcome. And maybe even a contradiction within ...

This newspost is inspired by ozoneocean’s recent thread and quackcast about evoking emotion. I've recently been struggling with the opposite issue in my own comic. The whole project is really just a light-hearted excuse to draw my favourite things and write odd characters, but it's also held ...

Military Varient is an honest portrayal of military life from an infantry Marine during the post-9/11 years. The comic follows a slice-of-life comic strip format from the perspective of Detone, who was only eighteen-years-old when he decided to enlist because he wanted his life to have adventure and to ...

I'm all in!
Poker reference.

We've all read comics that grab us and get us invested completely in what's going on. And we've read others that don't do it for us. Most are probably somewhere in between, with hits and misses. Such is life.

And ...

LISTEN!
Art by Ozoneocean

What makes the “meat” of a story? What makes you fall in love with it, keep coming back for more watches or reads or whatever? I contend it has nothing to do with conflict or culminations or climaxes, those are merely generic structural plottings that are ...

I like mentor characters.

This is not just me of course; the mentor and protagonist relationship is powerful. Some of the best moments in many stories are the first encounter with the mentor, the training and sense of discovery for the protagonist, and the eventual loss of the mentor character ...

Daredevil was a comic I didn't read regularly, although I went through an issue of DD from time to time and had enough interest in the whole Marvel Universe to know his basic history quite well.

Of course, this once-obscure area of interest is now general knowledge, so we ...

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 ...

Cast of an obscure 1970's science fiction flick. Current whereabouts unknown

One of the challenges…and maybe one of the greatest pleasures…of creating a series is populating it with a cast of heroes. I know I spend many weeks or months tinkering with characters and deciding who they ...

I recently watched a concert of Ed Sheeran singing “Thinking Out Loud” when the camera panned to the person playing the piano and it turned out to be Chris Martin from Coldplay and the song finished with a duet. I sat there thinking, “Wow, that really worked.” Collaborating with another ...