An old movie called Sullivan's Travels is about Sullivan (natch), a film director who makes successful but shallow comedy movies. He wants to abandon these efforts and do a more serious project about the plight of the downtrodden.

After some wild adventures posing as a hobo, Sullivan experiences some ...

this pic has nothing to do with the subject; i've just been waiting for a chance to use it

Writing what you know is one of those old canards that show up in writing advice, thought it's not up there with things like “show, don't tell” and ...

Time doesn't really exist in comics. Someone can blast through multiple pages in seconds, or linger on one panel for years. Well, that would be rare. But you see what I'm saying.

What if you want to make your readers slow down? To give your pages the pace ...

LISTEN!

First up: Happy birthday to Kawaii! Happy 32nd birthday and 4 year of doing admin stuff on DD ^_^
We all love and respect you on DD XX

A psychopomp is a physical manifestation of death. These are of course impossible in reality since death is a process, not ...

I’ve written about controversy before, and how it has its uses. But I haven’t really yet discussed what makes a comic controversial.

There are the usual hype-controversies like gender bending and race swapping in characters, but in my opinion these types of controversial issues are just what I ...

I was watching the 2015 series of Poldark the other day and I noticed something strange;
None of the characters have the moral grey areas and twists that we expect of characters in modern stories, where they behave one way but it turns out they were thinking the opposite all ...

Having decided that shock value is needed in your comic and you must scare, disgust or generally traumatize your audience in some way in order to get the emotional reaction to serve your theme and your subject matter, how do you decide when and where to draw the line? (note ...

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In this Quast we talk about immortality, which is a common trope in literature. Who seeks immortality in stories? It's usually bad guys, and it usually has some sort of extreme price,catch or dark side, so much so that people actually believe that if immortality WAS real ...

Where's Chuck? - Retcons

Hello again!

On the previous Quackcast we talked about retcons - here's that episode if you care to listen:

http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2017/jul/08/quackcast-331-retconning-your-work/

A retcon is a little tricky to define perfectly, but I guess it boils down to an alteration ...

CATHARSIS
from the Best of Banes Collection


A writing instructor once gave me brief advice on how to write a story, structurally speaking. It was 1/4 Act One setup, 1/2 Act Two complications and rising stakes (I think), and about 1/4 An Act Three “cathartic ending”.

I ...