The end of the year is fast approaching. Per tradition these past few years, I have done an article focusing on setting comic goals or habits for the upcoming year. Last year, for instance, I had a whole bunch of goals to achieve, habits to establish and projects I wanted ...

How do you make a clever character stupid?

You give them an infatuation. A fixation. Something that completely overrides their critical thinking and better judgment. Something that drives them nuts like a switch is thrown.

And when that happens, they're dumber than a bag of rocks. (And they're ...

My comic partner and I have already started work on our comic projects for next year. The beginning of the year is always crazy for us, so we’re using the small grace period we have now to try and front load our comic work as much as we can ...

The telling of stories, in a big way, is about working emotions. A major reason stories have the power they do is that the great ones wring emotions out of us, and take us through some kind of emotional journey.

In a movie or TV show, things are different than ...

Now that's a little TOO scary!

Horror is perfect for metaphor and allegory. In fact, a horror story is often allegorical by default, what with its bizarre landscapes and freaky beasties.

Here are some categories of horror and some thoughts on what they symbolize:

Reality Bites


psycho killer! Qu ...

Dance With the Devil
the attraction and repulsion of horror


There a few things - movies, books, stories and TV shows - that scared me enough as a kid that I still remember them. Some are just moments from a book, show or whatever that wasn't that scary beyond that one ...

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Fight choreography is tricky. We have it in comics, plays, movies and TV. When it's in full motion the trick is that you cant usually show things connecting so you have to work around the safety ...

I was thinking about different filmmakers and how varied their processes can be. Stanley Kubrick was famous for doing multiple takes - sometimes dozens of takes and sometimes much more (!)

Meanwhile, Clint Eastwood will do one or two takes and that's it.

On the show Seinfeld, there were two takes ...

August ends today, and we pick things right back up with another character deep dive, this time of the fascinating Nicodemus Blacroft from the comic Devil’s Blood by the amazing Dragonsong12!


Devil’s Blood is the story of a city in crisis and the people that are trying to ...

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck. We return to our workshop series this week. First, some housekeeping.

As established last time, our page submission comes from xalienrath from the comic IWATSV. Specifically, we are looking at the update “3 ...