One story structure, that ozoneocean and I talked about many years ago on the Quackcast, was the Lone Protagonist as drifter.

In Pulp Fiction, Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) says talks about leaving the life of crime to walk the Earth. “Like Kane in Kung Fu. Help people, get in adventures ...

I was thinking about the idea of characters who have a dream of something - a wonderful life, a perfect situation, and are living for the possibility of getting there.

For me, the story that hits this hardest is Of Mice and Men, where George and Lenny, struggling during the Depression ...

I first heard the phrase “an itch to scratch” from the creators/writers of Better Call Saul. When they were expanding and deepening the “Saul” character from Breaking Bad, they needed to change a comedic side character into a fully rounded lead character. And Vince Giligan said that an early ...

Damaged Heroes


A well written, standard 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 ...

The Reggie Mantle theory is different. It involves chasing other guys' girlfriends and still expecting to be loved and admired by all. That's another article…

If anyone was following the behind-the-scenes drama at Marvel Studios in the past year or so, you may have heard about the idea from ...

teacher, teacher, can you teach me –

I was revisiting a classic movie, one of the ones on this list, in the past week or so, and thinking of the archetypal teacher/student dynamic in fiction.

So, in line with my Top Five Tales of Bands from last year, here's ...

Here we are - Thursday again! I tells ya, the weeks and months just FLY by.

It was April Fool's Day the other day, and I was thinking about stories, and how sometimes books, TV shows, movies, or whatever will try and FOOL us. Like, the entire story is a ...

It's just, like, my opinion, man



I've been rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation lately, and so much of what I loved about it on first viewing holds up beautifully.

Watching a series which is almost all standalone episodes is interesting, too. There's a basic premise of ...

There is a lot to understand about “camera shots” in comics - it's an endless journey for people who make comics, or movies, or any kind of visual art.

MEDIUM shots (see above) might be the most common shot in webcomics - or at least, they have been the most common ...

As a long-time reader of comics, I've known that some pages can be less clear when it comes to the reading order. In the West, we start at the top left, of course, and the expected move is to read the way we read text - left to right, and ...