Above: Final Fantasy IX (2000) by Squaresoft. Below: Final Fantasy XIII (2010) by SquareEnix.

One of the main influences of my art style comes from the Final Fantasy video games of the late 1990s and early 2000s. I remembered being mesmerized by the full orchestrated score by Nobuo Uematsu, I ...

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Dialogue is one of the most important elements for storytelling in most webcomics (there are exceptions). But dialogue is often hard for beginners, writing out imaginary conversations to push stories forward, show characterisation, or expositions are skills that don't come naturally! Banes has given us a helpful newspost ...

One dock, three people. Una garza negra, the black dock.

It is sunset at a small pier as two men sit silently side-by-side when one of them breaks the silence. The two have an exchange of small talk when the quietest man begins a philosophical discussion about society and how ...

Well hell, long time no see huh? I'd like to say I'm back from my, er, break all rejuvenated and refreshed and what have ya but honestly it's damn near midnight and I'm running on three hours of sleep that I managed to eek out on ...

As all y'all probably are well aware, I am a hilarious genius. All cartoonists are hilarious geniuses; we have to be! Well, half the time anyway- the other half we spend hating ourselves and overcompensating for our inadequacies. It's a storied and well-documented tradition dating back to the ...

What is the best atmosphere to create in? This applies to art, of course, but also to just about anything you might be working on independently.

Some of my friends seem to be able to work with limitless distractions around. Fairly regularly I go over to my friend’s house ...

So, I tend to be long-winded. The mark of a historian, probably, or I maybe I just love to hear myself talk. But rarely does that become so evident to me as when I’m turning my comic script into actual comic pages. Suddenly what seemed like a brief remark ...

MAD Magazine shows up once in awhile in our conversations around The Duck. Not a whole lot, but once in awhile. And when someone mentions it as an influence or whatever, there's usually a chorus of Duckers who chime in, expressing their agreement and their love for MAD.

Al ...

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 ...

It seems that I get into a very opinionated argument whenever the topic of discussion veers toward Neon Genesis Evangelion. Usually it is about how the Evangelion movies are awesome and how the main character is not so awesome. That being said, it has been twenty years since the mid-1990s ...