Anyone that has written or read fanfiction knows that the AU is the Alternate Universe: the placement of a given set of characters that come from a specific IP or franchise or book or movie into a completely different setting, timeline, or even genre.

The LOTR cast might be thrown ...

Hello and welcome to Panel by Panel, an analysis of panels from comics right here on The Duck and exploring what they do, how they work, and what we can learn from them.

This week's panel comes from the Ghastley Heights strip “Pamphlets.” This comic is by IronScarf. Let ...

And we’re back with Fantastic Bestiary number 6. Being the number 6 in this series of articles I thought I’d bring up a mythic creature of a particularly devilish kind of aestethic. And as this week’s featured comic, featured by our beloved Ozoneocean, happened to be about ...

Character Motivation

One thing I appreciate in well written stories is the hidden motivations of characters. Well written characters, just like real people, have contradictions to them. Desires and needs that are sometimes in conflict with each other.

Story structure tells us that a character has to WANT something. The ...

LISTEN on our new player!
Listen on Stitcher ​​- https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/drunkduck-quackcast
Or TuneinRadio - https://tunein.com/podcasts/Books–Literature/Drunkduck-Quackcast-p1150194/

Let's go forward in time to the past so we can get back to the future and kill our grandfather and be our own ancestor while ...

As a compulsive - and rather obsessive – writer I often find myself tinkering around with language. And I’ve always found the creativity and imagination that can go into the language within a fictional world to be similar to that of an illustrator. When done well it can bring color and ...

Photo: Life is Strange 3, bonus episode “Wavelengths”. Square Enix, Deck Nine.

The studios at Square Enix and Deck Nine have delivered a third installment to their Life is Strange series, titled True Colors due to the protagonist’s ability to see auras, that is both sobering and surprisingly critical ...

As Easter has come by to melt away the final vestiges of a long, cold winter (at least up in these parts where I live) it feels like a good time to bring up the mythology of witches. Witches have a central role in the Easter that we celebrate here ...

Our world seems drab, grey, mundane. But some escape it through a magic portal that transports them into a colorful, beautiful, adventurous magic world.

A world that is secret, known only to the select few as everyone else lives on unaware in the real world. And yet, the secret magic ...

Last week’s post of the Fantastic Bestiary dealt with housespirits of ancient Rome. In this post we’re going to the far east, following up on another suggestion left by DD member marcorossi. We are going to study the Naga today. The Nagas are a race of serpentine beings ...