Sitting back on a Friday evening, remote control in hand, I decided to watch one of the latest Pixar Animated short films. To me a short film is the perfect length of time (six to nine minutes) to tell a story with an exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution. They ...

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What happens to characters after the big action scene or climactic moment? This could be anywhere in the story but it's usually close to the end ...

The suspension of disbelief happens automatically in readers and audiences if a story does its job.

Audiences WANT to believe in a story when they start reading or watching it.

I mean, you can' t count on everyone. I remember going to see the Benjamin Button movie and my friend ...

I'm not sure who the first fictional character was that I became attached to. The Cat in the Hat? Superman or Batman? Animal from the Muppets? Oscar the Grouch?

In any case, Jughead Jones was somewhere in that very early group of beloved characters. I liked Archie, and envied ...

It's 1995, the fall of the Soviet Union has gone hard for its former states, particularly Ukraine, which has partiallly collapsed into anrachy. This is the story of a young person with a shotgun struggling to survive the harsh winter alone in the snow, hiding from fellow humans in ...

There aren't many survivors left unscathed in this post apocalyptic world, you have to make friends where you can find them. With that in mind, Devil befriends Sister when he saves her from being attacked by a violent man. Sister is a friendly robot that seems to only want ...

A few years back, a comic app called Bit Strips was very popular on social media. It was a cut-and-paste type of comic creator that allowed an easy way to design a character and create stories or comics featuring the creator’s likeness. BitStrips was popular on social media or ...

Therapists are the type of character whose occupation can easily seep into their ‘off the clock’ life. It's not something that can often be helped. Psychologists don't ‘turn off’ their perception of behavioral patterns and personality analyses, the same way you can't ‘unsee’ the rabbits after you ...

I like mentor characters.

This is not just me of course; the mentor and protagonist relationship is powerful. Some of the best moments in many stories are the first encounter with the mentor, the training and sense of discovery for the protagonist, and the eventual loss of the mentor character ...

With the New Year’s celebrations been and gone, New Year’s resolutions are upon us. Although most of us may be setting comic goals for 2020, it’s important to remember that we need to take care of our physical and mental wellbeing. This is easier said than done ...