I’ve written about controversy before, and how it has its uses. But I haven’t really yet discussed what makes a comic controversial.

There are the usual hype-controversies like gender bending and race swapping in characters, but in my opinion these types of controversial issues are just what I ...

I was watching the 2015 series of Poldark the other day and I noticed something strange;
None of the characters have the moral grey areas and twists that we expect of characters in modern stories, where they behave one way but it turns out they were thinking the opposite all ...

Emotional Charges and Diminishing Returns

Many writing methodologies suggest mapping out the emotional change of each scene. The scene either starts positive, and goes to either negative or “extra positive”, or starts negative and goes to positive or “extra negative” by the end of the scene.

So if a lovelorn ...

Apollodorus Kratos is a dashing, young artist and scholar of archeology stuck in the shadows of his deceased father and floundering relationship with his female colleague. He is generally an observer who captures secret glances of couples at train stations in his sketchbook. After speaking publicly at a conference, he ...

LISTEN!

The saying goes that “Good artists copy, great artists steal”, it's attributed to various luminaries such as TS Elliot, Picasso, Tantz Aerine etc, but the important thing is the true meaning: there are very few original ideas, culture is built up out of inherited inspiration that is built ...

They say that the best and most important elements in visual arts, from movies to comics, are done well when the audience doesn’t quite notice them. And that is definitely true- research and plot development and world building are some of them about which I’ve already talked about ...

This time out I wanted to talk about superhero comics again and turn the spotlight onto the one that was responsible for me discovering Drunkduck in the first place…Dasien.

Over the years the comic has become slightly entwined with my own comic, but always they have remained the own ...

Having decided that shock value is needed in your comic and you must scare, disgust or generally traumatize your audience in some way in order to get the emotional reaction to serve your theme and your subject matter, how do you decide when and where to draw the line? (note ...

Last Thursday I talked a little about writing a scene, in terms of the change that happens, what the character wants, and what obstacle is in the way of achieving that want.

But what about dialogue? Eh?

One way to help define what's going on in a scene is ...

We’ve heard it and experienced it many times: For a creator to make an impact, to truly etch his/her message in the brains of his/her audience when it comes to art, from novels to films to comics, imagery with a high shock value is employed or simulations ...