In the early 60's, shortly after the beginning of Marvel Comics with the Fantastic Four, a second series was released: The Incredible Hulk.

As the Marvel Universe took shape with Spider Man, The Avengers, The X-Men and Daredevil titles, The Hulk stood apart from all the other Super Heroes ...

For the last few years I’ve been focusing almost exclusively on university. I’ve been working on some stuff off and on (see my lonely little title page here), but I haven’t finished an entire issue of a comic since the year I graduated high school. Basically, you ...

*Colin and Betty from Pinky TA

When you write a big long story that goes over many chapters and arcs, things tend to evolve, grow and expand quite a bit outside of what you originally envisaged. What I'm talking about here are side characters- These are people that may ...

Reflection Characters

When I was doing a little reading on the “Mentor” character type, I learned about something called “Reflection Characters”. It was an eye opener; I'd never heard of this before, though I could instantly see how it made sense in storytelling, and dozens of examples came to ...

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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 ...

“Well, are they?”

Gary Numan (and Tubeway Army) posed that question in 1979. These days it has more relevance that ever before.

“It's cold outside, and the paint's peeling offa my walls.”

As winter approaches in the Southern Hemisphere (winter is coming) my thoughts naturally turn a little ...

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Art by Ozoneocean

Banes, in case you were unaware, is the gold plated titanium platinum alloyed anchor of the Quackcast. This stand-up Canadian gent has been a solid part of DD for a while now, without his great humour, jovial personality, great talent, and lightning wit this podcast would ...

A well written protagonist will generally have some flaws, starting out as an underdog of some kind, with lessons to learn and improvements to make over the course of the story.

Granted, some heroes are, well, just heroes, who are pretty much who they need to be from the beginning ...

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 famous Star Trek episode that was an anvil-on-the-head racism allegory

ALLEGORY
Back in October, I took a little stab, if you will, at separating horror into various categories. Here's the link to that article:

http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2015/oct/07/things-that-go-duck-in-the-night/

What I didn't have ...