Accents, patterns of speech and the like can be a useful tool in introducing characters. In a film or tv show, a character's accent can immediately reveal the character's nationality or social background. And of course, we've all been conditioned by Hollywood movies to identify the bad ...

If you want to decent job of it, creating and using weapons in fiction can be quite tricky. There are a lot of pitfalls that newbies and even long time veterans of creating fiction fall into.

1. Number one is simply copying what others have done without understanding it yourself ...

I love Christmas Eve. Possibly more than Christmas Day. Both are great fun, and reuniting with friends and relatives I rarely see is delightful of course.

But the quiet anticipation of Christmas Eve is where it's at. For me it's usually a day off work, wrapping (occasionally running ...

Jane Alexander, Butcher Boys

That happens to be a line from one of my favourite albums, a combination CD/graphic novel from an obscure now-defunct South African hip hop group.

I think it’s pretty easy to understand how a South African group would come to that conclusion. When I ...

Apparently the difference between “terror” and “horror” was first expressed by writer Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), who said that Terror is the dread and apprehension about something happening, while Horror is the actual encountering the frightening thing.
Maybe this is what they mean when they talk about “suspense” vs. “horror”. Have ...

A friend of mine, many years ago, showed me a cartoon that was fascinating, funny, and horrifying. In my memory, it was the first anime I'd ever seen. I'd forgotten most of it over the years, and would try to find it once every so often, without knowing ...

(The following perspective piece may be more representative of a deranged mind than of a model that will actual work – attempt to replicate at your own risk)

A while back there was a discussion here on the Duck about what gives us renewed inspiration for our art, about the sorts ...

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Photos by Howard Schatz.

Content:
In Quackcast 207 we talk about bodyshapes in comics again; as a follow up from the chat we had about it in Quackcast 205 we thought we'd let the community weigh in with their thoughts… so Banes and I could get the chance ...

Does everyone remember floppy disks?

This morning, the top trending topic was the warning issued by Vint Cerf, vice-president of Google, that we must create tangible back-up copies of all our digital works or else we may lose everything, every memory in a “digital Dark Age”. So I read about ...

Around Spring of last year, in an attempt to keep my pen moving, I signed up for a life drawing class. It was the first time since high school art class that I was going to draw human models in real life. Over the last decade, most of the human ...