One of the toughest tropes in any kind of narrative work, from novels to comics to movies is the Sacrificial Lion - but not for what might be an obvious reason: having to axe a top tier character. It's because the trope is something that will affect and carry through ...

Every hero goes up against a villain. Every protagonist against an antagonist. This is the main clash that drives your story, any story, forward be it slice of life or epic drama.

One of the elements that can make this driving force compelling, that will make the clash interesting and ...

A couple of days ago Banes gave us a wonderful article on the issue of who to please- yourself or the audience, and how that can go very right or very wrong.

So that got me thinking that we should also talk about the dreaded silence. You update a page ...

If you have checked out the Drunk Duck Award Forum thread that is being moderated by Niccea, then you would have seen the list of award categories posted. This is a useful list if you want to see if your comic qualifies for any of the categories before creating a ...

Iron Man and the multi film arc - revisited


There are spoilers below for the Iron Man and Avengers movies, Civil War, and Spiderman Homecoming


The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been breaking new ground in movies with their various interconnected films for about ten years.


The MCU began with Iron Man ...

In my day job, I am occasionally asked to attend events or webinars as part of professional development. Earlier this week I happened to be at one of these activities focussing on the future of artificial intelligence, which you would think would be a riveting topic for discussion. But soon ...

A discussion at twitter (you should be there! If you haven’t looked for @Drunkduck you should, add DD and you’ll be added back!) brought to my attention a very subtle but very aesthetically and narratively pleasing element that, when we take the time as artists to factor it ...

Have you noticed that it’s very rarely that in a webcomic (or any narrative work) there’s a category of tasks or activities that people do very often in real life, but extremely rarely in stories?

Watching TV, being on the computer (when NOT being a hacker or doing ...

A well written protagonist will generally have some flaws, starting out as an underdog of some kind, with lessons to learn and improvements to make over the course of the story.

Granted, some heroes are, well, just heroes, who are pretty much who they need to be from the beginning ...

There are few scenes more dramatic, more alluring and more riveting than the moment when the one of the main characters of a story makes the Turn: the moment where they change their convictions- for better or worse.

If properly prepared, the Turn is an extremely cathartic and exciting moment ...