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 ...

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Patriotism, flags, nationalism, religion, politics, national symbols hijacked by racists! These are some of the unique aspects of our cultural identity and national differences we chat about on this quackcast. I was inspired by HippieVan's newspost on Friday (about Cultural identity and how it defines our writing), to ...

Just the name inspires awe, a level of attention and gravity. Because it was a name before it became a noun: she was the ancient Greek goddess of revenge and retribution against those who committed any kind of hubris.

In stories though, a character that takes the position of nemesis ...

My city had a massive snowfall on Boxing Day this year – the day after Christmas, for you non-Canadians. Nothing too unusual for a Canadian winter, but even so the city always seems to grind to a halt when it happens. After having a neighbour help him get his car unstuck ...

Witness the birth of Salamander, a super-heroine granted powers by a fire salamander.

Erin is a fairly average 22 year old working in a pet store until the store is hit by an arson attack,
when her life is in danger things take a dramatic change.

Salamander is shaping up ...

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Chekhov's gun is the principal (as I understand it), that if you have some item, fact or piece of information introduced into your story that you draw specific attention to, then you'd better use it some how later on in your story. The simplest example is a ...

To me this is one of the most fascinating elements of storytelling. The idea behind Chekhov’s Gun is to employ parsimony in the information comprising a plot and content: If something isn’t essential to the story, just don’t include it. Little by little, it became more “if ...

Sorry about last week’s missed newspost, everyone! Last week’s post happened to fall on “friend Christmas.” I’m the world’s worst adult, and spent the day eating so much holiday junk food that I got sick and had to go to bed rather than finish writing. I ...

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What defines evil in fiction?
I say the simplest one is bad guys are selfish, good guys are selfless.
That is massively over simplistic but it's a good easy template for basic hero's and villains. Basic ones
I was just doing a quick thought experiment to work ...

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 ...