Somethings that are part of the landscape can disappear overnight. Spring still arrives on time and the grass and bugs don't care. The fountains turned off to save water. The lights in the vending machine turned off to save power. And the memories of the dreams of the future ...

Hello everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck. This week we are checking in with the scavenger hunt launch in the last post, where I asked you to find specific examples of a panel in your work, and we have some ...

We talk a lot about Franchises here because those have been the big, widely known movies/stories in the culture in recent years.

But it's not all about Franchises - one thing that a standalone story can do, and occasionally does, is have an ending that changes the world forever ...

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Art: Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano

We're talking about WAR here! Trying to leave out politics, though that's really hard with war because ...

Villains are tremendously important for a story. They set the framework and standard for a lot of things in an unsaid but definite manner: how far your villain is willing to go sets up audience expectations for how big and how dire the stakes will be in the story.

If ...

Hello everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck. We'll be getting back to panel analysis in the coming weeks, but for my return to writing after a brief health break, I want to do that challenge I discussed some time ...

Picard Season Three hit the fan service HARD. I absolutely loved it.


The final season of Star Trek Picard is winning very good reviews from fans and critics.

Of course, in some corners there is criticism of fan service, nostalgia and ‘member berries’ being the driving force behind the season ...

my webcomic, Typical Strange, uses many fake films in its video store setting

A few years ago I spotted a book in the second hand store - one I'd read as a kid. I bought it and reread it. It was definitely more suited to the younger me - it was ...

In the latest episode of Star Trek Picard, a character talks about his efforts to prolong his own life in a way I won't spoil. He lets go of this idea, and in the message he leaves behind, he says "Evolution is not about preservation - it's about addition ...

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Today we talk about an unusual type of villain, a secret type of bad guy and a particularly nasty one: the person who maliciously does nothing. This ...