Here on DD, your thumbnail is your first impression and as such you should take care with your thumbnail, as it is your first chance to make an impression with a reader. Full disclosure, I don't really like our thumbnails here on DD. These stamp style thumbnails are too ...

Any creative person knows that the hardest thing can be to find an audience for your work. On one side of the great divide we have the creatives (the writers, artists, fashion designers, architects, musicians, dancers etc), and on the other we have the consumers. Those consumers have a voracious ...

Last week we looked at lovable/hateable villains. So, in that spirit why not flip this coin and talk about what makes a hero feel real. Now, a protagonist is not necessarily a hero. For instance, despite being the main focal point through which we, the audience experience the story ...

Raytoons has created a board game that you can own. He writes:

In this turn-based strategy card game from Raytoons Comics, each player must form their own team of characters (from the Quackup comic book series) and must defeat other players through mini-game missions and battles! Game missions and conflicts ...

I've talked about villains before and how they can be very nuanced in their motivations (without those motivations being redeeming) but today, thanks to Emma Clare's Friday post, I became inspired to talk about abject, absolute, abominable villainy! The twirling mustache type, the one that is so pure ...

One of the best types of villains are those that you love to hate. Despite how much you would love for them to shuffle off the mortal coil, they continue to captivate you with their malice and determination and you know that when they do leave the plot, whether deserved ...

Have you ever read something and it gave you the “feels?” Something that was so intense that you couldn't help but feel the emotional truth of a fictional moment in time? In many ways that is the highest form of our art, and possibly any art; to communicate an ...

image by Ben Burgraff

When writing a historical fiction, it's very likely that you will need to include some actual historical personalities along with your historically-adept yet fictional cast.

Depicting a historical character is hard enough when there's a general consensus among historians and popular belief about who ...

You have a comic! You love it! You think it's amazing! But when faced with explaining it to other people outside of the webcomicshpere, you feel yourself deferring, prefer instead to shuffle your work under the rug, hoping that you don’t find yourself looking too weird. At least ...

When I see artists just getting into the craft or people simply looking to improve their art ask for advice, the most omnipresent answer is “practice”; I don't like that answer. It assumes the person asking the question doesn't realize this is obvious, and hasn't already been ...