When you’re creating something like a webcomic it’s very easy to diminish your own work. You work on it every day and, if you’re anything like me, you only ever see the mistakes. During my regular stalking of the comic forums I came across a thread asking ...

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 ...

image by Ben Burgraff

When writing a historical fiction, it's very likely that you will need to include some actual historical personalities along with your historically-adept yet fictional cast.

Depicting a historical character is hard enough when there's a general consensus among historians and popular belief about who ...

Building a platonic friendship has its challenges, not only because as an author or creator of your webcomic you will need to handle the audience's propensity to assume your male and female lead will be romantically involved, but because of the demands you'll need to meet to make ...

I'm not sure how many creators do it, but I often place my original characters in different settings, writing out stories about them very much like I'd write fanfiction about some established franchise.

It's even more fun when I do it mixing them up with characters from ...

So there's a lot of talk and discussion on how to approach the creation of your webcomic (or novel, or short story) regarding planning out your plot, the degrees of planning out, and the option of flying by the seat of your pants.

I have done both, both in ...

Last week there was a post about smaller regular casts in a series - The Loner series, the Duo, and the Trio. Here's that post:

https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2018/aug/01/casting-characters-in-comics-123/

With a larger cast, things start to get more complicated - but with more possibilities for different ...

We all talk about the sheer necessity to create characters that don't appear cardboard, that are fleshed out, that generally feel like real flesh-and-blood, living, breathing people (regardless of your character's species or nature) with personalities that ring true to the audience.

There are several elements that contribute ...

Time for a change of pace! I don’t usually like to do a lot of these types of articles but this topic might benefit from a touch of experience. So bear with me and my small trip into self-indulgence.

Some of you might know that I am actually part ...

So last time we had talked about the Javert trope, a category of character that is very compelling and makes for excellent drama, immense suspense and often gets their own following in fandom. (Just check out Saito Hajime's hero's journey as a prime example.)

The Javert character is ...