Throughout literature and modern media, many faults and drives for leads, damsels and villians have often been motivated by a tragic backstory so much so, that to employ one for your story may appear trite or cliche. There is, however, a way to use a tragic backstory effectively and can ...

Last week, we looked at killing off characters. So it seems only fitting to follow it up by talking about introducing new characters into your story! This is your quick cheat sheet to helping ease your readers into getting to know the new players in your world.

Try to introduce ...

There comes a time in any webcomic creator’s career where they have to be mean to their characters. And there is nothing meaner than letting the proverbial Sword of Damocles fall on a beloved (or equally unloved) character and watching their head roll to the chorus a shrill cries ...

We live in a world that can be exceedingly beautiful or appallingly harsh, and everything in between. And as art reflects one's experiences, emotions and questions about this world, it's unavoidable that both the themes of amazing beauty and the themes of absolute terror, disgust and horror will ...

Usedbooks writes:

My side project, Strange Creatures, just passed 50 pages, so it's kinda legitimate now. It's more of an illustrated novel than a graphic novel. Anyone looking to check it out, I recommend starting at the beginning to avoid spoilers: http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Strange_Creatures/5561567/

Oh ...

Recently, my writing partner and I have gone on a very short hiatus whilst we rework a few things to accommodate another project and it got me thinking about the almost inevitable and sometimes dreaded occurrence that is, “The Hiatus”.

It is very rare to find an artist or team ...

So for the last few posts I’ve been meaning to go back and finish off an idea that I had begun to explain, albeit poorly, but, as you can see, I have not. I know that there is more I could do with it; more I could delve into ...

A character starts in one state of being, and ends in a very different state of being.

The Character Arc in a nutshell!

Every time the subject of character arcs comes up around the site or on the Quackcast, one of the first examples that comes to my mind is ...

Depicting a culture different to ours can be a tricky process. There are a ton of pitfalls involved, from showing a stereotypical (right down to racist) almost fetishized version of the actual culture to presenting it in a light directly connected to the author’s/creator’s culture (therefore either ...

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 ...