When I was growing up in the 80s, stories that were marketed as ‘children’s' were occasionally brutal.

Characters got maimed or killed, tortured or traumatized, met with horrid ends in worlds that were anything but rosy. And this was a pattern that wasn't limited to, say, English literature ...

Lite Bites Cat Jam


Hey folks, Genejoke here. Hopefully many of you have noticed that the community project Lite Bites is up and running and updating regularly. If anyone isn't aware Lite Bites is a project a run with a mixture of short stories, reviews and other oddities.

https ...

Excellent news! Long-time Drunk Duck user, usedbooks, has an announcement:

usedbooks writes:

Hi, I hope you are well.

Used Books hit a milestone (those don't come too often these days), and I would be really happy to have a little nod in the newspost.

Used Books just reached 1500 ...

I've had the conversation multiple times - maybe based on something I read in the past - that the
business of taking care of your money, your credit, taxes and expenses is something that was never touched on when I went to school.

Well, these have been proclamations rather than conversations ...

Last week I wrote about what you can do when you make mistakes in the artwork of your webcomic. A mistake in the writing is oftentimes harder to fix than the artwork. Foreshadowing and building of the world’s foundations is baked into what you write, so when you finally ...

We like to consider ourselves open-minded, free of inflexible thinking and open to ideas. And we probably are- in certain areas. In others, we are not.

This is one of the few statements I still feel justified making in the absolute. Every person has biases. It's one of the ...

Three things happened that inspired me to write this article.

1) When reviewing an episode we recently completed for one of our comics, I realised I had missed a key character design aspect of one of our boys. Although it was not egregious, I did notice it, and it has ...

When this guy appears for a fight, there are eyerolls or scoffing sounds. The opponents start smirking and giggling, taunting and goading him because he's dressed to the nines. Or maybe he's got a very intricate hairstyle that takes hours to get just right. Or perhaps he has ...

I think a lot of us have dreams of growing up and changing the world. Impacting it in some great way. Or if you’re villain type, maybe in a bad way.

Anyway, now that I got your attention with changing the world.
I’m not talking about changing “our ...

When he created the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling was motivated by the desire to tell more meaningful stories. In his writing career up to then, his work had been heavily censored.

Serling realized that by setting his stories in fantastical situations, in alternate or futuristic versions of Earth, that he ...