art by yours truly

So I was thinking… in this day and age if you get on any type of social media, you are going to be punched repeatedly with CONTROVERSY! HERESY! HEATHENS! LIBERTARDS! CONSERVOTARDS-OR-HOW-EVER-THEY-ARE-CALLED-TARDS! …and so on. On blogs and tweets and even more so on youtube, making a ...

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Raphael's School of Athens.

This week's Quackcast is brought to us by Tantz Ariene! Tantz is a very political creature, seeing as she comes from Athens which is pretty much the birthplace of politics AND philosophy, that's hardly surprising. Clever Tantz in her tantzglasses, dudeman Banes ...

(From the desk of kawaiidaigakusei)

Here is a little treat to celebrate the first week of Autumn. I wrote this version of “The Webcomic Artist Manifesto” in the Fall quarter for an art history class on Dada. A Manifesto is a public declaration used to incite or inspire a group ...

Reflection Characters

When I was doing a little reading on the “Mentor” character type, I learned about something called “Reflection Characters”. It was an eye opener; I'd never heard of this before, though I could instantly see how it made sense in storytelling, and dozens of examples came to ...

Rather than write about something I'm good at I thought I write about something I'm struggling with, and my attempts to resolve it. Writing characters with distinct voices.

Comics are usually conversations between characters. Speech bubbles are the preferred way to tell comic stories, as opposed to large ...

When independent movies became big in the 1990's, there was the sudden realization that a lot of flaws could be forgiven in visuals, acting, and production value when the story being told was original or compelling. They could still be effective and popular…sometimes with massive numbers of people ...

Accents, patterns of speech and the like can be a useful tool in introducing characters. In a film or tv show, a character's accent can immediately reveal the character's nationality or social background. And of course, we've all been conditioned by Hollywood movies to identify the bad ...

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And ...

Last time, solo heroes, teams of two, and trios were the order of the day. Today let's talk quartets, quintets, sextets, septuplets, octets, and…uh…neuf-tets…?
More possibilities for self-contained drama/comedy/conflict exist with groups of four or five. There are several ways to begin building such a ...

The Grazing Mongrel is a non-sequitur strip comic featuring social commentary based on the absurdity of modern life. It may be a little hit and miss for some: I laughed out loud at a few of the strips, others didn't quite hit the mark and some need you to ...