Torn Vines doesn't have any vines or tearing in it! Poor Adam has no work and no home. He's on the streets of cold Oslo during winter time, just him and his cat… and to top it all off he gets attacked and beaten up, only to be ...

The Drunk Duck Awards FYC Comic Jam has started and going strong. There is still one last page that needs to be claimed. Also, anyone that wants to can send in “Commercial Pages” that break away from the plot. We have some people that are submitting an FYC page without ...

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Art by Ozoneocean

What makes the “meat” of a story? What makes you fall in love with it, keep coming back for more watches or reads or whatever? I contend it has nothing to do with conflict or culminations or climaxes, those are merely generic structural plottings that are ...

JOHN BYRNE

When I first became seriously interested in comics, John Byrne was at the top of my favorite artist list. He drew many of the classic “new” X-Men books, and was the artist on that series when it first became massively popular. The stories Byrne drew (and co-plotted along ...

A MESSAGE FROM Niccea:

I decided that for this year we will try out doing a comic jam for the For Your Consideration (FYC) pages.

"A comicjam is a creative process where one or more artists collaborates on drawing or painting one single comic. Often the process is that one ...

Rather than write about something I'm good at I thought I write about something I'm struggling with, and my attempts to resolve it. Writing characters with distinct voices.

Comics are usually conversations between characters. Speech bubbles are the preferred way to tell comic stories, as opposed to large ...

Today we'll talk sequel and series character arcs, and focus on the cinematic portrayal of Iron Man

Last Week we talked about character arcs. They're an important element of fiction writing…although a lot of the time, there is no arc! But a strong, unpredictable character arc can ...

A character starts in one state of being, and ends in a very different state of being.

The Character Arc in a nutshell!

Every time the subject of character arcs comes up around the site or on the Quackcast, one of the first examples that comes to my mind is ...

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Using accents and different languages in comics can be a challenge, or at least a challenge to represent. Some people will actually have their text IN a different language or even a made up language in the case of aliens, and they'll have translations in a footnote. Some ...

I read that a great ending should be “surprising but inevitable”. That's a tall order! To have the whole story leading to that inevitable conclusion, but not be predictable. Wow!

However, I've seen (and read…ah, let's be honest; mostly it's “seen”) several great endings that ...