A well written 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 from the beginning ...

Today we'll talk sequel and series character arcs, and focus on the cinematic portrayal of Iron Man

Last Week we talked about character arcs. They're an important element of fiction writing…although a lot of the time, there is no arc! But a strong, unpredictable character arc can ...

Welcome to the wonderfully creepy forest of Kellwood, a dank, yet cosy place, home to some very unusual inhabitants of the creepy yet deliciously cute kind… demons, vampires, werewolves and more! Poor Menu is a werewolf with no life skills who's starving, his only asset is an amazingly fantastic ...

I have always been a proponent for the belief that art and drawing can be used as a mechanism to bring two strangers from completely different worlds together. That is why it is no surprise that I gravitated toward a young student who preferred to use crayons, markers, and paper ...

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 ...

A lovely illustration from The Pirate Balthasar.

Initially, I had planned this week’s newspost to feature a selection of my favourite women characters on DD. But I realized as I was composing my list for this newspost that I was essentially just making a list of protagonists from my ...

I have been feeling inspired lately. It is not to be confused with the same wave of inspiration that usually happens when I listen to Bon Iver while driving down a highway at night (even though that also works). It is the type of inspiration where a story begins to ...

I'm not sure where I first heard of Li'l Abner. Maybe some bits and pieces in a Comic Review Magazine or something.

The Shmoo was a character on the old Flintstones cartoons I used to watch, and Lena Hyena had shown up on the movie Who Framed Roger ...

Somewhere between “all the time” and “hardly ever” lies an ideal update schedule.

I’ve read several times that frequent content updates is one of the best ways to increase traffic to whatever it is you’re creating online, but of course both your audience and yourself need to be ...

I read that a great ending should be “surprising but inevitable”. That's a tall order! To have the whole story leading to that inevitable conclusion, but not be predictable. Wow!

However, I've seen (and read…ah, let's be honest; mostly it's “seen”) several great endings that ...