I hope you will all forgive me for not putting together a proper newspost this week! I've just finished baking a ginger cake (to be served after dinner tomorrow with warm lemon sauce), and I'm about to settle down with my family to watch A Muppet Christmas Carol ...

If you haven't noticed, 2016 is all about pitting superheroes against one another. This coming spring, we'll have Captain America facing off with Iron Man in Captain America: Civil War, and DC's two biggest heroes at odds in Batman v. Superman: Dawn Of Justice. But forget about ...

In the movie Annie Hall, the main character writes a play and uses it to give his failed relationship a happy ending.
There are countless stories where awkward, nervous protagonists…perhaps courtesy of awkward, nervous writers…win the battle, defeat the villains and get the gorgeous girl.

An unknown number ...

After spending three hours reading Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman in a public library on Friday afternoon, I ran into the most marvelous sculpture on display while taking a stroll through West Hollywood Park. The shiny, white sculpture was based on two popular and beloved comic book superheroes, Batman and ...

CHARACTER SHAPES
I've never consciously designed characters this way, but I recently remembered hearing about this notion some time ago, on the dvd special features for an animated something-or-other.
Characters derived from basic shapes can give a very strong impression of their basic personality type. This can help the ...

LISTEN!

For Quackcast 237 we asked people about the songs that inspire them when they do their comics, which songs go with which parts of their comics, what would be the ideal comic movie theme, what songs or music get you in the MOOD to do your comic, and finally ...

Usually I try to keep my newsposts geared towards art/writing/comics, but this week I have politics on the brain!

Here in Canada our election is only a month away (October 19, 2015 – get out and vote, Canadians!). I just spent my evening at a packed little cafe where ...

LISTEN!

Pitface, Banes, Tantz Aerine and Ozoneocean reunited for a repeat of the legendary Drunkcast of Quackcast 137! Almost exactly 100 Quackcasts later we hit the booze again, but this time we had a goal to pursue with our drunken ramblings: music. We decided to talk about what themes inspire ...

image by Walt Simonson

I read a lot of Marvel Comics back in the day. The Hulk, Spider Man, The X-Men…it was actually the ORIGINAL X-Men I really loved (which I read in reprints). Right around the time I was discovering those old Stan Lee/Jack Kirby X-Men stories ...

Image by Banes

Conflict
If you're anything like me (you poor soul), you may have learned about conflict in English or Creative Writing classes, and they told you that stories could either be

Man vs. Himself,
Man vs. Man, or
Man vs. Nature.

So a character would be either ...