When he created the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling was motivated by the desire to tell more meaningful stories. In his writing career up to then, his work had been heavily censored.

Serling realized that by setting his stories in fantastical situations, in alternate or futuristic versions of Earth, that he ...

Technology has reached a Golden Age.

Interesting, innovative individuals that have the ability to bring enough intelligence to the table in order to improve humankind are the ones to seek out.

Forty nights ago, while perusing the channels on my subscriptions, an announcement popped up about a tech convention headed ...

Hello ducklings! I’m back with another interview, and this time we’ve got our wonderful sea captain Miranda! So, Captain Miranda, please introduce yourself!!

Miranda: Hello ducklings! I'm Miranda! I'm a full time computer engineer and in my spare time I enjoy baking, doing puzzles, playing video ...

Sometimes the arch villain of the story is the one pulling all the strings in the background, and the protagonists don't know about them until the endgame.

And other times, the arch villain gets to clash with a protagonist (or an opposing character) that is also a mastermind pulling ...

Photo: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes TV Series (1990)

A click of the remote would tune into mutant turtles riding a pizza shooter while commercials for Nickelodeon Gak and Floam consumed the screen. It was a real zany time to grow up in the early nineties thanks to the creative ...

So this is a trope that unfortunately is very true in life as well. TV tropes calls it “We ARE Struggling Together” and I call it ‘the divided front’.

When the Big Bad is so bad that everyone agrees to set aside their differences to fight it off, then usually ...

There’s always an issue every artist has at some point and that is having stiff looking characters.

It is incredibly hard to actually have a fluid looking character. Also because, as humans, we are kind of stiff. Not every single person moves smoothly like a Disney character gliding across ...

Conflict in a story is not only necessary, it can be the juiciest part of your comic. Think about it! We often remember and recount the parts of a movie, comic or show where the emotions were the strongest. A solid vitriolic scene can result in one hell of a ...

Welcome to my Underground Layers

-Banes, your pop culture references are as on point as ever!



I've talked about story structure here many times, normally in similar ways.
A different approach to character and story, one I haven't used much personally, is what we could call the “onion ...

An effective way to land the climax of your comic arc is to build it up using foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is when a creator lays down small nods or clues throughout their story that an event is going to happen or a character is going to act a certain way. When ...