I watched an interview with Ira Behr, the writer and showrunner on Star Trek Deep Space Nine. He talked about his days in the DS9 writer's room. It was the 90's, and the early days of the Internet. Even in those days, Star Trek discussion was flourishing online ...

Hello everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck. This week we're going to look at the usage of infographics in comics as expositionary devices. Our panel for this comes from the comic Meatware by The Jagged. Specifically, we're looking ...

So! 2023. Did my annual tarot spread this morning and the cards that came up seems to promise quite an eventful year. But I’m not gonna go into detail about that since it is a personal prediction of mine. Instead I’m gonna talk about how something that may ...

When I was a youngster…and as I got older, too, I was always a big fan of the Super-Team. The X-Men, X-Factor, Alpha Flight, The Avengers…some of these were my favorite comics. And of course, the Super Friends was an old school cartoon that we loved as littl ...

JOHN BYRNE

When I first became seriously interested in comics, John Byrne was at the top of my favorite artist list. He drew many of the classic “new” X-Men books, and was the artist on that series when it first became massively popular. The stories Byrne drew (and co-plotted along ...

Photo: “The Uncanny X-Men Issue #319, Untapped Potential: Bobby Drake and Rogue Talk About Sand Castles“. Marvel Comics. (December 1995)

Saturday morning was spent mall trotting like a typical nineties mall rat. The mall was like a ghost town in the early hours of the day when every storefront was ...

Rogue from the X-Men encounters President Ronald Reagan!
(…who???)


Timeliness vs Timelessness

Some comics are very much “of the moment”, while others are more timeless.

Connecting to the events of the moment can be a worthy endeavor. Webcomics are well suited to this kind of approach, too, with our ability ...

Photo: X-Men Series II Trading Card Collection (1993)

An unopened, cellophane wrapped pack of trading cards is a sleeve of anticipation. The probability of finding a hologram or a rare character card is reason enough to get excited.

Around the time the Uncanny X-Men cartoon gained popularity in nineteen-ninety three ...

On the last “Mind Tricks” discussion, we talked about false memories, where a characters' true nature is hidden from them because of memory loss or artificial memories.

The Phantom Life is similar, certainly in the two examples that I thought of initially…but the stories play out
in a different ...

Snow changes everything. The entire environment is completely different, and the minute-to-minute operations of life become more complicated and troublesome.

In comics, snow can be a lot of fun. Flakes can fill up the pages and add to the grit and danger in comics like Sin City…

One of my ...