Sexy teens, a summer camp down by a lake, hormones, a mysterious legend of a roaming monster, and ancient Indian burial ground… all the ingredients are here and ready for a deadly red soup of murder! And a good old fashioned classic sex comedy. My fave characters so far are ...

Paris Street; Rainy Day, Gustave Caillebotte, The Art Institute of Chicago

In less than twenty-four hours I am going to board a plane and end up in the city of my childhood. I am returning to the Windy City because it is Spring Break and because I yearn to have ...

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 ...

Used Books is celebrating its tenth anniversary on Feb. 23 (Thursday), so we are interrupting the story for a couple special extras this week. The first is posted Monday.

usedbooks writes:

The Beginning

Thursday, February 23rd marks the 10th anniversary of Used Books online. I started drawing UB shortly after ...

Welcome back, gang! Er, can I call y'all “gang”? Is that too informal or too assumptive about your willingness for complicity in my extra curricular activities? Eh, too bad. Once you're in the gang, there's only one way out. Now, while you're letting that sink in ...

Huh. You're still here? I'll be damned.

Well then. Let's just go ahead and pick up where we left off last week, which if I recollect, was the beginning. Or at least, that's where you stepped into my world. Now, how you think about beginnings has ...

I was actually asked some writing questions the other day. Who the deuce would ask ME for advice? But I happened to have a little.


Here are some thoughts on writing that smallest unit of a story: the scene (reprise):


First off, what is a scene? What defines it?

It ...

A little comic by Vasya Lozhkin: “I will take revenge”

Earlier today I was reading this article about an immigrant to Canada who learned English with the help of comics, and who now creates comics himself. It got me to thinking about what a great resource comics are for learning ...

I was hanging out with my family over the holidays, explaining that I wasn't sad or sick, but had been rubbing my eye because there was some dust or a hair or something stuck behind the eyeball. It was quite uncomfortable.

As I remembered how tears can flush out ...

Happy New Year’s Eve!
Thinking about the new year that is just about to begin, I thought to talk about beginnings in stories, and especially in webcomics.

How a story begins, the very first pages of it, are key for catching the audience’s attention and keeping it. The ...