"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And ...

Two-thousand fifteen started off with Kroatz wishing everyone in the Drunk Duck forums “growth, satisfaction, and purpose, even if it comes with an almost equal amount of suffering and loss.” I do not believe any statement made in this last year comes as close to this to sum up the ...

I love Christmas Eve. Possibly more than Christmas Day. Both are great fun, and reuniting with friends and relatives I rarely see is delightful of course.

But the quiet anticipation of Christmas Eve is where it's at. For me it's usually a day off work, wrapping (occasionally running ...

Last time, solo heroes, teams of two, and trios were the order of the day. Today let's talk quartets, quintets, sextets, septuplets, octets, and…uh…neuf-tets…?
More possibilities for self-contained drama/comedy/conflict exist with groups of four or five. There are several ways to begin building such a ...

In the movie Annie Hall, the main character writes a play and uses it to give his failed relationship a happy ending.
There are countless stories where awkward, nervous protagonists…perhaps courtesy of awkward, nervous writers…win the battle, defeat the villains and get the gorgeous girl.

An unknown number ...

Yesterday evening my friend and I donned our prettiest dresses and went to see The Marriage of Figaro. Neither of us had ever been to the opera before, and we weren't the only ones - it was “student night” where they sell cheap tickets to the final dress rehearsal, so ...

LISTEN!

In Quackcast 245 we TRY to talk about my idea that fictional characters, stereotypes, tropes and situations in media have influenced their counterparts in reality, and in a lot of ways helped to create them. Fictional stereotypes and tropes are made out of simplified models of things that happen ...

It had been years since I donned my black cocktail dress to spend an evening listening to one of my favorite writers, and that is exactly what I did on Saturday night. The scene was set in Long Beach at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center and I was excitedly waiting ...

It was great to read about the various influences on people's comics last week. I don't know if this topic called for a second part, er, so here it is!

Once again, these are the major influences I've identified for my current comic, Typical Strange. They stretch ...

Art by Gunwallace

If anxious art exists, that’s what I make. Particularly in the early stages of a drawing I tend to be very tenuous and unsure of myself. I become more confident when I move into colouring, but that uncertainty is definitely reflected in the way my art ...