A young man receives devastating news… A diagnosis of incurable cancer in the brain. This shatters his world and leads to an exploration of death and despair as we're taken on a ride through his thoughts and shown his imagined funeral and the experience of fellow terminal cases in ...

The dream of money has to show up in fiction, at least to some degree - it's a very human driver/motivator.


Last week i talked about characters who are motivated by money. Here are some more thoughts on money and some of the different ways it's handled in ...

Photo: “Future DD Redesign (Original concept and additional touches by Emma_Clare)”

Attention Citizens of The Duck:
Important Announcement

Years ago the Duck community showed interest in a new design from its current soft yellow-bright yellow-turquoise-lime green-dark green-cyan color scheme and site layout. Mobile device technology has grown exponentially since the ...

Hello and welcome to Panel by Panel, an analysis of panels from comics right here on The Duck and exploring what they do, how they work, and what we can learn from them.

This week's panel comes from the Ghastley Heights strip “Pamphlets.” This comic is by IronScarf. Let ...

Kim is not a sociopath - but her many nuances make her most intriguing…and she has a scary side


The secret sociopath.

A story trope in fiction that can make for a shocking ending when done well, or probably an eye-rolling one
when not, is the secret sociopath.

A character ...

And we’re back with Fantastic Bestiary number 6. Being the number 6 in this series of articles I thought I’d bring up a mythic creature of a particularly devilish kind of aestethic. And as this week’s featured comic, featured by our beloved Ozoneocean, happened to be about ...

I’m taking a pause from the Fantastic Bestiary this week as I haven’t been my best healthwise lately. Also lately I’ve been distracted by something that has left me with this question poppin’ into my mind, And so this sunday I'm posting this question that perhaps ...

Last week’s post of the Fantastic Bestiary dealt with housespirits of ancient Rome. In this post we’re going to the far east, following up on another suggestion left by DD member marcorossi. We are going to study the Naga today. The Nagas are a race of serpentine beings ...

not the Smiths

I had a topic in mind for this week, but didn't get to it early enough, and it turns out that it's a bit too ambitious to bring together in time for today.

Instead, I'll go for the low-hanging fruit and spew out a ...

When we talk about science we usually think of something expainable, something physical that can be measured and studied and/or recreated in a laboratory. When we think of the supernatural we think of something unexplainable, something metaphysical that moves and operates in a realm beyond our senses and beyond ...