Photo: “Untitled Signature” by Francis Picabia

The year was 1915, when a thirty-six-year-old Francis Picabia showed up to the New York Dada scene. His alibi to leave Europe was a story about his travels to Cuba in order to purchase molasses, a story he cleverly forgot once he arrived in ...

Psychic Powers

Comics and fiction in general has presented to us many fascinating concepts that has kept our imagination hungering for more. Whether it be time travel or magic or technology lightyears ahead of our current frame of comprehension. But one concept in particular that always gets me hungering for ...

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Let's talk about total immersion… When consuming media rather than creating it, if you're lucky you become immersed: the struggles and fears of the character ...

One common story formula involves a character receiving a magical gift…or magical ‘curse’…and being forced to deal with the chaos that the magic causes.

In Liar Liar, the slick, dishonest attorney is compelled to only speak the truth.
In Groundhog Day, the main character repeats the same day ...

There has been a lot of online discussion in recent years about the idea of “strong female characters” - what makes a good one, a bad one, etc. All the accusations of sexism, either anti-woman or anti-man have gone along with these discussions, in the glorious, exaggerated way people argue online ...

I want to play a game…

Here we go lads, lasses, dummy thicc axes, I meant to do a movie review for Scream last week but I saw The Ruins and just felt the need to get into it.

Anyway for Scream! So, be warned, there are spoilers, probably bad ...

I'm wounded but you can't see it!


A lot of stories involve a wounded and/or flawed character. It's a staple of strong storytelling; a character has some kind of pain or wound to overcome, and that's the inner journey they take along with whatever outward ...

When I was growing up in the 80s, stories that were marketed as ‘children’s' were occasionally brutal.

Characters got maimed or killed, tortured or traumatized, met with horrid ends in worlds that were anything but rosy. And this was a pattern that wasn't limited to, say, English literature ...

Yesterday Greece's most iconic and proliferate composer, Mikis Theodorakis, passed away at the age of 96. He was a symbol for social activism and human rights. He was in the Greek resistance in 1943 as a teen, then in the anti-junta fight, he was tortured, exiled, prosecuted, and still ...

Ideas both big and deep can - and has - been explored in Sci Fi. Some themes that have resonated with me include ‘What it Means to be Human’. This could be said to be the point of ALL fiction in a way I suppose. But to explore humanity through the lens ...