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When heroes fail… Hey, why would you ever want a hero to fail? Well there are a lot of reasons and listening to this Quackcast will tell you why, but the quick version is that you don't want your hero to be a perfect Mary-Sue sort of character ...

In any work of art where storytelling is concerned, dialogue (should) play a central part. The relatability of the characters hinges on how they behave, and a lot of that behavior is verbal, especially in movies, theatre and comics (but also books. And everything else.)

So how do we create ...

So last week we started off talkin' about rules and why we might need em, right? But what exactly do these rules apply to, ya might wonder. Ya might not wonder, actually, but too bad, I'ma tell ya anyway. We'll start where any comic starts: with your basic ...

Image by Gunwallace, from Utterly Rucked, found here on the Utterly Drunk Duck!

Photocomics

My somewhat undisciplined, regularly wandering mind went, awhile back, to the possibility of doing photocomics instead of drawn ones.

Of course, my fanciful thoughts hit a wall after realizing the amount of WORK that goes into ...

Logan Copyright 2017 20th Century Fox

Like any loyal X-Men fan, I made my way to the theater to watch Logan during its opening weekend last night. Before the screening, I had been watching reviews that mentioned the film's “R” rating and how it traded its wide audience in ...

Well last week we had chaos and disruption, so reckon it's high time we reestablished some order around here. And to do that ya need rules, right?

Rules. Yeah… Oh boy.

Well fine, we ain't got to call it “rules”; we can think of it as a set ...

Bill Paxton, 1955-2017

Bill Paxton was a regular presence in my prime movie-loving years. As the punk in The Terminator, the Marine having a meltdown in Aliens (“no way, mian!”), and the nasty older brother in Weird Science, he could be tough, scary, AND funny. He was always memorable, even ...

Failure is the stepping stone to success. That’s what I teach my students and my clients, and it is true, right up there with “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”: If you learn why you failed, you won’t fail again the same way- and that brings ...

A character will stay stuck in their ways if they can, just like a real person tends to. It takes effort to move forward and achieve things. And we resist.

In the beginning of a story, a character might feel comfortable where they are, but they are usually incomplete in ...

So last week I’d started talking about the reincarnation upon reincarnation of myth and legend into modern sequential and narrative art- and got some pretty insightful comments on why it persists for millennia (it is said that Euripides adapted the legend of Medea himself in order to make it ...