Conflict!

It's the essential building block of drama. You don't have a story without the basics of “someone wants something, and something's in the way of getting it.”

Screenwriting books - books I really love and have given me a lot - will often say that amping up the ...

So for some reason my youtube is being besieged by rant videos over The Little Mermaid live action movie by Disney… AGAIN. You'd think the algorithm would know by now that I only watch ER skits and debunking videos, but here we are.

The controversy (again) is over the ...

Site redesign update, NEWS!

The new comic page template is up and running on the test site here: https://next.theduckwebcomics.com/
However, I've been working to make sure it will have a seamless transition to incorporating the customisations on people's individual comic templates so I had to ...

I'm a big fan of story structure. It can be a big help to figuring out how to put a story together in a way that works. Not that structure needs to be followed in a slavish way, or that one structure applies to every story.
But it can ...

Wrapping up this series of character designs for antagonists, villains, and even protagonists with toxicity as their flaw, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the toxicity of inactivity.

The motto is well known- all that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to ...

Hello everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck. This week as I weigh possible panel challenges for later updates, I wanted to return to our more usual analysis of panels. This week we're turning to the comic Heaven Hunters by ...

The term “Mary Sue” became a lot more mainstream a few years ago - but around comic book websites like ours, and circles that were into writing and deeper fandom have been well versed with this for much longer.

The Mary Sue is a character who has abilities or positive qualities ...

Photo: “NeverLore: Cover” by InkyMoondrop. (February 2023)

InkyMoondrop writes:

Hi!

NeverLore doesn't seem to have an especially great launch yet, but Chapter 2 is about 70% done, will dive into an actual fantasy environment and I think I'll let it return to a Weekly update schedule with publishing ...

The other day I saw a clip of Frank Frazetta explaining his artistic process and what made his style unique, I found it fascinating. It made me remember just how awesome he was and how little regard he has in the wider art world. There were a lot of great ...

Site redesign update, NEWS!

Alexey will now begin to tackle comic page templates, making them conform to the new style. Em has come up with two templates for us to start to work with (compact and standard size). These will be the standard default, unedited templates, but they will also ...