One of my favorite tropes (at least I think it's a trope. Not sure how common it is) is the “unknown hero”.

It's when a character who's known to us, the audience, maybe very well, and is at least somewhat important to us.

The character dies and ...

This wasn't the official poster, but the teaser poster, for the Last Crusade. There was a giant
version of it in my local theater before the movie came out. Excitement unbound at the time!

My earliest clear memory of Indiana Jones - or one of his movies - was in a ...

It never really occurred to me how many of our heroes are orphans.

Superman was the last survivor of a planet that perished. He was adopted by loving Earth parents, but he's one of the iconic orphans in fiction.

His counterpart Batman, of course, lost his parents at an ...

Hello everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck. This week we are checking in with the scavenger hunt launch in the last post, where I asked you to find specific examples of a panel in your work, and we have some ...

We talk a lot about Franchises here because those have been the big, widely known movies/stories in the culture in recent years.

But it's not all about Franchises - one thing that a standalone story can do, and occasionally does, is have an ending that changes the world forever ...

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Generational tensions are a cultural constant. It's popular to pick on the young and say they're lazy, irresponsible, stupid, changing things in silly ways etc ...

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Generational tensions are a cultural constant. It's popular to pick on the young and say they're lazy, irresponsible, stupid, changing things in silly ways etc ...

So for us Orthodox Christians it's Good Friday today and it'll be Resurrection Day (Good Saturday) by the time you're reading this. In the neighborhood where I live, a new (boisterous and with many members) family has moved in, who brought a live rooster a few days ...

my webcomic, Typical Strange, uses many fake films in its video store setting

A few years ago I spotted a book in the second hand store - one I'd read as a kid. I bought it and reread it. It was definitely more suited to the younger me - it was ...

Since I first read it, the book “Save The Cat!” has been incredibly useful to me as far as thinking about stories, outlining them, and finishing them. It's a fun way to approach structure, and applies to a LOT of mainstream stories.

It's become an essential textbook in ...