A herd of deeply philosophical and imaginative pet alpacas with very different personalities live on a farm. Hana the alpaca (aka “The Roomba Ranger”) is easy-going and creative, yet still aware of the realities of the farm like wool shearing season. The other alpacas have varying degrees of awareness that ...

image by Banes, based on a story narrated by Lazy Masquerade


Making Horror Comics - a chat with Genejoke


I spoke to Genejoke about making horror comics. GJ makes a lot of comics here on the Duck. He has an anthology series here called Lite Bites, and multiple other series on ...

Last time I started talking about religion as a great umbrella term for a lot of facets of worldbuilding you can take into consideration when constructing the world of your story, be it webcomic, novel, series, or anything else.

This type of worldbuilding is especially prevalent in fantasy worlds, but ...

Good Morning Chumps !

Fall is in the art and I am drinking some instant coffee. Its' almost Ocrober and that means No-nuts November is right aroung the corner. I Cant atrualy eat nuts, not the tree ones anyway. I can eat peanuts beacuase they don't grow on trees, but ...

If you look up Wikipedia on apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction it will be described as a subgenre in which the earth’s (or another planet’s) civilization is collapsing or has collapsed. It can be due to the cause of nuclear war, or climate change, a pandemic (maybe one that ...

Redlettermedia, in an old review of Michael Bay's Pain and Gain, contrasted that movie to The Wolf of Wall Street, directed by Martin Scorsese.

In the Wolf of Wall Street, the RLM guys say, there's a subtext that we're ALL capable of the mistakes the main character ...

During the filming of Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock was unable to be on set one day. His crew filmed the scene for that day (I believe it was where Arbogast, the detective, goes up the stairs where he encounters Mrs. Bates). Hitchcock saw the footage, and said he had to reshoot ...

Last time I'd written about gender toxicity and what a trap it can be for creators seeking to write powerful characters. It is not something that only plagues the “strong female character” attempt, but also the “strong male character” and definitely the “strong LGBTQ+ character”.

Too many of these ...

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck. This week I am going to be looking at a panel from the webcomic FCL55 that I think does a great job developing an aesthetic through balancing details within the design. FCL55 is ...

A long time ago I read something, I think an interview with a respected screenwriter or something, where he brought up the movie “Rain Man”.

If you haven't seen it, it's about a struggling wheeler-dealer type guy, played by Tom Cruise, who goes on a road trip with ...