Ying and Yan by TonyAlpsen

Ying and Yan are twin brothers who are joined at the hip…and the shoulder, and everything in between.

It's a simple, perfect premise for standalone jokes playing off the brothers' conjoined status, or the difference in their personalities, or snarky commentary on life ...

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith beheading Holofernes, 1611-12, oil on canvas, (Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples)

There are several different ways to read a painting. The perspective of the reader adds a new insight to the history behind the art. For the purpose of this article, I have selected Judith beheading Holofernes ...

But and Therefore

I'm a fan of user-friendly, practical advice on things, especially writing. It's why I dig the Banes Method (it's not my method; it's just named after me).

Anyway, I came upon some dandy advice from Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park ...

Aight y'all, go ahead and fasten yer proverbial seat belts, on account of we got a lot of ground to cover with this one! Actually come to think of it there ain't really too many proverbs about seat belts; more like I'm stretching out a turn of ...

In any work of art where storytelling is concerned, dialogue (should) play a central part. The relatability of the characters hinges on how they behave, and a lot of that behavior is verbal, especially in movies, theatre and comics (but also books. And everything else.)

So how do we create ...

So last week I’d started talking about the reincarnation upon reincarnation of myth and legend into modern sequential and narrative art- and got some pretty insightful comments on why it persists for millennia (it is said that Euripides adapted the legend of Medea himself in order to make it ...

Welcome back, gang! Er, can I call y'all “gang”? Is that too informal or too assumptive about your willingness for complicity in my extra curricular activities? Eh, too bad. Once you're in the gang, there's only one way out. Now, while you're letting that sink in ...

In a chat where we were discussing our comics, Pit-Face told me that if Bones from Putrid Meat is Odysseus, then Blitzov from Epic of Blitzov is Gilgamesh. And that very solid analogy of the two characters’ function in her stories, got me thinking about how myth of all sorts ...

Huh. You're still here? I'll be damned.

Well then. Let's just go ahead and pick up where we left off last week, which if I recollect, was the beginning. Or at least, that's where you stepped into my world. Now, how you think about beginnings has ...

I was actually asked some writing questions the other day. Who the deuce would ask ME for advice? But I happened to have a little.


Here are some thoughts on writing that smallest unit of a story: the scene (reprise):


First off, what is a scene? What defines it?

It ...