Failure is the stepping stone to success. That’s what I teach my students and my clients, and it is true, right up there with “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”: If you learn why you failed, you won’t fail again the same way- and that brings ...

Unless you live in one of a handful of places scattered across the globe, either still sucking on the dregs of medieval Catholicism or entrenched in the aftermath of colonialism, Carnival probably means jack shit to you. Or maybe it does, but it's likely not an entity in and ...

Tsukue is born one day into a mysterious world where she is given a purpose but she isn't like the others people there. she is more curious and dreams, she questions the world around her and their mysterious creator. Manga styled line art is combined with coloured pencils and ...

So last week I’d started talking about the reincarnation upon reincarnation of myth and legend into modern sequential and narrative art- and got some pretty insightful comments on why it persists for millennia (it is said that Euripides adapted the legend of Medea himself in order to make it ...

Welcome back, gang! Er, can I call y'all “gang”? Is that too informal or too assumptive about your willingness for complicity in my extra curricular activities? Eh, too bad. Once you're in the gang, there's only one way out. Now, while you're letting that sink in ...

Coydog and TheDeeMan have started an indiegogo campaign to complete publication of our “Chevalier the Queen's Mouseketeer” children's book series. If you remember, “Chevalier” ran here on DD and won the DD award for “best all ages comic” in 2013 and 2014. Here's the link to their ...

In a chat where we were discussing our comics, Pit-Face told me that if Bones from Putrid Meat is Odysseus, then Blitzov from Epic of Blitzov is Gilgamesh. And that very solid analogy of the two characters’ function in her stories, got me thinking about how myth of all sorts ...

Huh. You're still here? I'll be damned.

Well then. Let's just go ahead and pick up where we left off last week, which if I recollect, was the beginning. Or at least, that's where you stepped into my world. Now, how you think about beginnings has ...

I was actually asked some writing questions the other day. Who the deuce would ask ME for advice? But I happened to have a little.


Here are some thoughts on writing that smallest unit of a story: the scene (reprise):


First off, what is a scene? What defines it?

It ...

It’s something so often encountered and/or mentioned in stories (be they comics or novels or film) that it’s becoming in itself a cliché: Heroes aren’t interesting because they’re straight arrows. Villains are fun because they’re the ‘bad boys’, the ones that can do all ...