the cruel tutor himself, Pai Mei

One of my favorite character types is the gruff/grizzled old mentor. Tough as nails, mean or cranky on the outside but with great knowledge or support to offer when you know them, or when they know - and trust - you.

I've talked about ...

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Folk tales are the primordial ooze of culture. Nobody knows where these stories began, nobody owns them, They're added to and expanded by successive generations. They ...

When talking about personality, one must mention Freud.


pictured here with a small cigar.

Yes, even me. (Anyone who knows me knows I'm not a fan)

Despite my personal thoughts about his theory, mad props and respect has to be given to Sigmund Freud for being one of the ...

The physical space that a character inhabits often seems far more passive than it really is. Space is more than a matter of creating a backdrop, though. Why is it that some characters feel as if they’re moving against a wall paper background while others inhabit a far more ...

I have never been an X-men fan. More like a casual consumer of the movies, and that was only until the disastrous (in my opinion) Wolverine singles and the Dark Phoenix movie which I couldn't finish. Props to everyone who managed to enjoy those films! These things are a ...

I've compared “Avengers Infinity War” to the classic movie cliffhanger in The Empire Strikes Back.

But the Marvel Cinematic Universe actually pulled off an almost-“Empire”-level story a couple years before that, in Captain America: Civil War.

The MCU started off with multiple movies setting up Iron Man ...

It is a typical evening in the study office for James Darius Deckard when a large earthquake interrupts the news. The culprits behind the cataclysmic event were a group of ordinary humans who have acquired super powers, and now go by names like Osiris, Morning Star, and Storm Drake. The ...

It is always a good time when I learn about a fully-fleshed out character with a history, family tree, team affiliation, famous love-interest, and storyline. It is almost more of a mystery when a new character is discovered so late in the game I have to question why their existence ...

We've all been told how in story telling, showing is a lot better than telling.

Showing gets hard if your main character is a loner that interacts with nobody. Even harder if he/she is a stoic that emotes very little. The audience will have no way of knowing ...

We've talked about superheros being like gods, setting themselves up as gods, and maybe even some of them being gods, but what if they all were? Demigods that is, coming from a celestial pantheon? That'd mean their enemies are probably similarly mythologically derived… that's the story here ...