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 ...

Some of my earliest memories are playing with Star Wars toys - my awareness of the first film and the toys are muddled together, but I clearly remember seeing The Empire Strikes Back, and vividly recall the couple-years-long wait after that, before Return of the Jedi would come and resolve the ...

I read some writing…advice? Or commentary? Or something like that years ago that pointed out how often amateur writers will create Protagonists who are writers. If I'm remembering correctly, this was expressed as a bad thing, probably because it's overdone. On the one hand, they say write ...

The other day I happened upon a movie called Primer from 2004. It's well regarded for how original it is and also for being made for only 7,000. That's a shockingly low price, even for low budget films.

I enjoyed it, though I found it a tough ...

When we think of a Protagonist, the standard type that comes to mind is the underdog, maybe a young character who goes on a difficult journey and learns some lessons and faces many challenges, or a capable person who gets in way over their head in some kind of intriguing ...

shields up!

Our struggles are probably different in some ways, and maybe the same in others. But as comic creators, there are certain issues many of us have in common:

Finding time to make our comics,
Spending too little time…or too much time on them,
Making decisions about our ...

Hey, I found an image of the actual moment! yeah, real good, there

Last time we took a look at the little moment in some stories where a character has a moment and realizes that in spite of being able to get what they want (valuable magic rocks, or to ...

That's right it's reached 200 pages as of this week!

Belle is a B-Movie actress. See where it all started with friends and family and watch a sampling of her sometimes awful but interesting exploitation movies full of gratuitous exploitation of everything. Drama, humor, adventure across different genres ...

The moment of change in a character is not always crystal clear in a story. Very often the secret to good storytelling I think, is to understand all the structural elements in a story, and a character arc, and then to HIDE those elements so they feel realistic while they ...

In the past decade or two, video games have grown more and more sophisticated, in terms of graphics as well as story. 3D environments can be explored there, and with VR even more immersive experiences can be had. At the moment, comic shops are struggling, and the future of movie ...