I like mentor characters.

This is not just me of course; the mentor and protagonist relationship is powerful. Some of the best moments in many stories are the first encounter with the mentor, the training and sense of discovery for the protagonist, and the eventual loss of the mentor character ...

Hi all, for those of you who are regular users of the site but don't frequent the forums, I just wanted to draw your attention to this. We've been talking about doing basically a big group skype “meet-up.” If you're interested, the thread is here: http://www ...

In many parts of the world, this Sunday is Mother's Day. So I thought we'd take a look at some of my favourite Mothers in fiction.

http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii25/Banes500/moms.png

How many of these Moms and their shows/movies/comics can you identify ...

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 ...

Lately I've been spending some time doing some light renovations on my house. I'm under some pressure with this stuff, and it's been very difficult, mentally.

For the most part, things are working out so far. These are renos that some people could pull off with barely ...

When independent movies became big in the 1990's, there was the sudden realization that a lot of flaws could be forgiven in visuals, acting, and production value when the story being told was original or compelling. They could still be effective and popular…sometimes with massive numbers of people ...

Daredevil was a comic I didn't read regularly, although I went through an issue of DD from time to time and had enough interest in the whole Marvel Universe to know his basic history quite well.

Of course, this once-obscure area of interest is now general knowledge, so we ...

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 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 ...