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This week we mine Banes's ideas about damaged protagonists. Does having physiologically damaged protagonists (as opposed to merely flawed), make them more realistic or relatable? I think we came to the conclusion that this isn't necessarily the case at all, in fact it can mean the opposite ...

A well written protagonist will generally have some flaws, starting out as an underdog of some kind, with lessons to learn and improvements to make over the course of the story.

Granted, some heroes are, well, just heroes, who are pretty much who they need to be from the beginning ...

I'm a bit obsessed with “before” versions of characters. Where they start. The damaged dude or dudette who shows up at the beginning of a story REALLY needing a change in their lives, and usually not knowing it.

Even when the plot kicks off, these folks often don't ...

As all y'all probably are well aware, I am a hilarious genius. All cartoonists are hilarious geniuses; we have to be! Well, half the time anyway- the other half we spend hating ourselves and overcompensating for our inadequacies. It's a storied and well-documented tradition dating back to the ...

In a story, a Protagonist wants something, and some kind of obstacle is in the way. When the Protagonist makes a choice, good or bad, to take them to that goal, we're off and running!

But what happens if they don't get what they want? What happens if ...

A well written protagonist will generally have some flaws, starting out as an underdog of some kind, with lessons to learn and improvements to make over the course of the story.

Granted, some heroes are, well, just heroes, who are pretty much who they need to be from the beginning ...

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 ...

Norman Driscoll is a damaged old guy, having suffered some bad experiences during the Vietnam war, unfortunately his current situation isn't helping him out much… lately the city and the community seems to have gone to crap- violent gangs controlling the streets attacking people with impunity, what's a ...

It's probably a good thing that humanity hasn't found any other sentient life in the universe, if many sci-fi comics are anything to go by. There's always an intergalactic war going on, and the humans are usually the jerks. For example, let's take Terra: Earth is ...