A mustache-twirling villain is awesome fun! Someone who basks in their villainy and enjoys every bit of popping the toddler's balloon and kicking the occasional puppy while hatching evil plans.

These villains are the flamboyant main antagonist that makes the story interesting and fun, because we love to see ...

Holy Unholy Alliance, Batman!

Last week we talked about what I called the “villain combo platter” with different types of villains that could make for multifaceted kinds of conflicts for the hero to face.

At the time, PaulEberhart mentioned the alliance between villains that happened at one point during Deep ...

Back when the Deep Space Nine series was developing into a more serialized kind of story, the writers wanted to define the major threat from the distant Gamma Quadrant. Who was going to be the big villain for the series?

The stakes were pretty high, here - what if the villains ...

So it's fun to rant about tropes I hate but I actually prefer to gush about tropes I love.

And one of them is what I call “the bargain”: it's really a game of wits between a (usually lawful) villain and a hero (or protagonist/antagonist, take your ...

There is no story without a theme. Even when written without anything prepared in terms of a message, a story will always give people things to think about and messages drawn from how the story was set up and how it was resolved (if at all).

So I don't ...

Normally in stories there is the hero vs the villain or the protagonist vs the antagonist. As the audience, we generally expect to root for the hero or the protagonist and hope for the villain's or antagonist's comeuppance.

But there come those times when we find ourselves rooting ...

Welcome to my Underground Layers

-Banes, your pop culture references are as on point as ever!



I've talked about story structure here many times, normally in similar ways.
A different approach to character and story, one I haven't used much personally, is what we could call the “onion ...

Who doesn't love a good intrigue, some scheming in the shadows, some low chuckling behind a curtain?

The author.

It's the author that doesn't love it. Or rather, the sheer background work that needs to go into writing a good scheming plot, counter plot, and the whole ...

Protagonists are always in need of antagonists.

Usually, those are visible, concrete, specific: the protagonists are up against someone or someones who are obstructing their way to attaining their goal. Some are even so powerfully clashing against each other that they are nemeses. Superman and Lex Luthor, Batman and the ...

Frames (a.k.a panels) are great, they can look simple or extraordinary, they can help the comic flow and provide feelings, a feeling of dread, excitement, anger, etc. Frames are more than just lines that encase the moments of our characters.

When you’re making your frame you always ...