I've talked about villains before and how they can be very nuanced in their motivations (without those motivations being redeeming) but today, thanks to Emma Clare's Friday post, I became inspired to talk about abject, absolute, abominable villainy! The twirling mustache type, the one that is so pure ...

When the trailer for Detective Pikachu was debuted last Fall, I knew more than a few eight year olds who were excited for the film’s release. Several of my twenty-something and thirty-something friends were posting about it on social media because we also grew up with the pocket monsters ...

This is an eternal problem for readers. Writers don't really tend to care about it too much, but readers HATE it!
What am I talking about? Basically, it's when a character gains a power, acquires an item, learns some info or a spell, meets a magical person or ...

Comics have always had a special hold on people’s imaginations, with stories immersing readers in fantasy worlds where literally anything is possible. And, unlike books, comics combine the power of words and pictures. The skills of the artist mean that those worlds and other phenomena are there for all ...

As of Sunday afternoon, at least forty newspapers across the United States have dropped the long running comic, Non Sequitur, from its comic pages. The reason behind the loss in popularity is that the comic “betrayed (its reader base’s) trust with profanity.” The comic in question ran sometime last ...

Prepare for a long ass post cause we're here to celebrate all the progress our community of artists have made in 10 years! A couple of weeks back I wrote about the 10 year art challenge, asking for peeps to show off their progress from 2009 and then 2019 ...

With fewer art programs in schools these days on average, the next generation of budding artists looks bright.

In elementary school, students take a piece of paper, place it on top of a personal tablet and trace an image using a technique that is similar to using an animation light ...

How to Pick, Research and Implement Mental Disorder in a Character

So last time I talked in general about some basic concepts and principles about what constitutes mental illness, or, more accurately, mental disorder. The important thing to remember and keep from all of that is this set of truths ...

Writing a character with mental illness can be a very tricky thing. Writers usually go for the extremely rare, exotic and spectacular: multiple personality disorders, extreme manifestations of psychopathy or sociopathy, high functioning autism with that ever alluring ‘savant’ magic going for the character, bombastically spectacular schizophrenia… in many ways ...

This year, I am spending New Year’s Eve Weekend in Las Vegas to watch Lady Gaga perform in concert. (In fact, as soon as this post goes live, I might still be walking up and down the strip.) I always thought the way the first day of the new ...