-Art by Trico

Like any other backpack-toting American kid in the nineteen-nineties, the one thing I looked forward to each week (well, after TGIF) was Saturday morning cartoons. My absolute favorite show was X-Men The Animated Series which led to frequent trips to old, dusty comic shops to buy Series ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

]
Satanic Ninjas are after a magical item of power and a sexy space pirate bounty hunter is slaughtering alien monsters, meanwhile nerdy all American teen Eddie just wants a hot date for the high school prom!
This is a gorgeous pastiche/parody of all the best of the 1980s: heavy ...

-a famous Star Trek episode that was an anvil-on-the-head racism allegory

ALLEGORY
Back in October, I took a little stab, if you will, at separating horror into various categories. Here's the link to that article:

http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2015/oct/07/things-that-go-duck-in-the-night/

What I didn't have ...

Pop culture is being visited by its own past. There's no denying the excitement surrounding the reappearance of the original Star Wars and X-Files characters after an absence of years.

We all know our mainstream entertainment is stuffed with more and more sequels, remakes, reboots, soft reboots, reimaginings, reintegrated ...

Last week marked the loss of two actors who brought my favorite fantasy villains from childhood films to life.

I was only a baby when Jim Henson's musical fantasy film, Labyrinth, was released in theaters. The fact that there were once home videos of me singing along to “(Dance ...

If you want to decent job of it, creating and using weapons in fiction can be quite tricky. There are a lot of pitfalls that newbies and even long time veterans of creating fiction fall into.

1. Number one is simply copying what others have done without understanding it yourself ...

A mysterious raven-haired woman is battling a demonic beast. The creature's grotesque, hooved body lunges before it gets stabbed in the torso by a large blade. The next few panels show Danaya waking up from her nightmare. Was it all a bad dream? It looked and felt so real ...