Who hasn’t seen this ubiquitous symbol? It’s one of the most typical motifs signifying the balance between opposing forces in the world- but also the ever alternating phases of destruction and creation, of overwhelming overturning of the status quo so the new can be created.

And that is ...

A few weeks ago, I bought a collection of old school video games released for the Sega Genesis. Buried within the game titles was Comix Zone, a game where the comic creator is one of the most important characters in the game because it is responsible for creating the settings ...

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In this Quackcast I wanted to talk about the magic of authorship: how the creator of a story sets up the whole situation so that they can convince the reader of anything. You can write a story about the smartest man in the world, and the reader will believe ...

Let me start off by distracting y'all from my complete and total failure to even show up last week by saying, hey! to celebrate TEN YEARS of PUTRID MEAT, Pit Face has made this special behind the scenes “the making of…” video for y'all! Check it out!
https ...

Paris Street; Rainy Day, Gustave Caillebotte, The Art Institute of Chicago

In less than twenty-four hours I am going to board a plane and end up in the city of my childhood. I am returning to the Windy City because it is Spring Break and because I yearn to have ...

From the Best of Banes Collection…

CHARACTER SHAPES

I've never consciously designed characters this way, but I recently remembered hearing about this notion some time ago, on the dvd special features for an animated movie or show. I don't remember which one.
Characters derived from basic shapes can ...

So last time I talked about the little extras that can go into dialogue and how that dialogue can be presented on the page of your comic, so I was thinking today might be good to continue in that general trajectory and talk about little extras in your character design ...

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This week we decided to all read out Creepypastas, just because! I's a popular thing on the net and people like that sort of thing… Well Banes and Pit do anyway. So what ARE Creepypastas? Well they're not the rotten spaghetti that had Banes blasting from both ...

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 ...

Failure is the stepping stone to success. That’s what I teach my students and my clients, and it is true, right up there with “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”: If you learn why you failed, you won’t fail again the same way- and that brings ...