Last year (har har har obligatory New Year's Joke done) I'd started talking about Found Family, one of my favorite tropes in pretty much any narrative work, from movies to novels to comics and webcomics. Found family is when a bunch of characters, usually unrelated and mismatched, end ...

There's a weird hermit living at the edge of a street. Rumours fly about him and what he does all day, whether he's a criminal or a psychopath. People don't go near him or his property and any interaction is minimal. Until a young vagrant kid stumbles ...

So hitting a girl (or a woman) is extremely tropey. Regardless of how progressive your story is, a man hitting a woman runs a high risk of being considered lowly or less than heroic. That's because generally, women are considered weaker than men, thus an easy target. A woman ...

Rogue from the X-Men encounters President Ronald Reagan!
(…who???)


Timeliness vs Timelessness

Some comics are very much “of the moment”, while others are more timeless.

Connecting to the events of the moment can be a worthy endeavor. Webcomics are well suited to this kind of approach, too, with our ability ...

It's common knowledge that a solid origin story will make a character. It'll often also make the story being told. Origin stories can be and often are the foundation for characters and plotlines, since motivations, plot points, and even stakes are set in them.

But what makes a ...

So it's fun to rant about tropes I hate but I actually prefer to gush about tropes I love.

And one of them is what I call “the bargain”: it's really a game of wits between a (usually lawful) villain and a hero (or protagonist/antagonist, take your ...

So I'm exhausted today, at the end of a very eventful week and a lot of work piled on work.

Which means I can't discipline my brain to write something more artsy or tropey. Though censorship is a trope, right?

When do we have censorship appear in stories ...

I've talked at times about how, as I make Without Moonlight, I have to constantly make choices on what to include and what not to from …reality.

By that I mean that true, documented (and even photographed) events from the nazi occupation of Athens during WWII are so grotesquely ...

I revert to talking about tropes I hate, because I don't want to talk about things happening around us but I still want to talk about something I despise.

Tropes I hate it is!

The horrible slap n' kiss or “slap slap kiss” trope.

Especially prevalent in lakorns (Thai ...

Not every story involves the underworld, or however the world of the dead is called in the setting. However, it still exists.

Every time the characters consider their own mortality in the story, the world of the dead looms in the backdrop. The way the characters think about death, life ...