If you want to decent job of it, creating and using weapons in fiction can be quite tricky. There are a lot of pitfalls that newbies and even long time veterans of creating fiction fall into.

1. Number one is simply copying what others have done without understanding it yourself ...

In the movie Annie Hall, the main character writes a play and uses it to give his failed relationship a happy ending.
There are countless stories where awkward, nervous protagonists…perhaps courtesy of awkward, nervous writers…win the battle, defeat the villains and get the gorgeous girl.

An unknown number ...

this picture is only somewhat related to tone…but it has a costumed baby!

In my early days doing the Quackcast with Ozoneocean, we spent some time talking about story genres. I remember how we ignored whether something was a comedy, drama, or horror, because those aren't stories, but ...

I recently watched a concert of Ed Sheeran singing “Thinking Out Loud” when the camera panned to the person playing the piano and it turned out to be Chris Martin from Coldplay and the song finished with a duet. I sat there thinking, “Wow, that really worked.” Collaborating with another ...

CHARACTER SHAPES
I've never consciously designed characters this way, but I recently remembered hearing about this notion some time ago, on the dvd special features for an animated something-or-other.
Characters derived from basic shapes can give a very strong impression of their basic personality type. This can help the ...

Usually I try to keep my newsposts geared towards art/writing/comics, but this week I have politics on the brain!

Here in Canada our election is only a month away (October 19, 2015 – get out and vote, Canadians!). I just spent my evening at a packed little cafe where ...

I usually write comic scripts with a pretty specific idea of what each panel will look like when drawn: the setting, who’s doing what, facial expressions, and so on. What I almost never do is write any of that down. Except for specific actions that characters have to respond ...

Cogs and Claws is a surreal odyssey for your imagination.

In the opening sequence, a giant flounder emerges from an underwater pod and boards a space shuttle submerged in water. Soon thereafter, the shuttle is blasted into space where it joins several other spacecrafts driven by various anthropomorphic creatures.

This ...

LISTEN!

Pic by Ozoneocean

This time we're talking about conflict in webcomic writing, and any writing in general really. Conflict is one of the main drivers of a story, so you pretty much have to have it in there somewhere! But how do you approach it? Do you set ...

-LA Union Station taken by kawaiidaigakusei

“The next and final stop on this line is Los Angeles. Please collect all personal belongings and use the handrail when using the stairs. Please keep all hands and arms away from the automatic train doors.”

It had been a while. I needed a ...