Conflict!

It's the essential building block of drama. You don't have a story without the basics of “someone wants something, and something's in the way of getting it.”

Screenwriting books - books I really love and have given me a lot - will often say that amping up the ...

So for some reason my youtube is being besieged by rant videos over The Little Mermaid live action movie by Disney… AGAIN. You'd think the algorithm would know by now that I only watch ER skits and debunking videos, but here we are.

The controversy (again) is over the ...

Hello everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck. This week as I weigh possible panel challenges for later updates, I wanted to return to our more usual analysis of panels. This week we're turning to the comic Heaven Hunters by ...

I was reading a critique of a series, a successful series, of novels. I think it's an urban fantasy/horror thing where the main character has a specific paranormal ability, limited, but useful in her detective work. She had a love interest, who was maybe on and off, but ...

I was supposed to write the last post on my ‘toxic’ character design series, but I've been deep cleaning the house all day and I'm exhausted. My brain refuses to think so that post will need to wait till next time. Instead, I'd like to talk about ...

I did come across this podcast channel last week browsing through Soundcloud called Predator Movie Minute. Now, I only listened through one podcast and decided it wasn’t my cup. However that podcast did bring up an interesting observation that made me look at the movie Predator (1987) from a ...

Last year (har har har obligatory New Year's Joke done) I'd started talking about Found Family, one of my favorite tropes in pretty much any narrative work, from movies to novels to comics and webcomics. Found family is when a bunch of characters, usually unrelated and mismatched, end ...

Hello everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck. This week we're talking about the comic Lite Bites. Specifically, a story called “After; Fire Sale.” b]Lite Bites is an anthology series edited by Genejoke, and “Fire Sale” was written by ...

So this line has become famous lately since Elon Musk has been using it to reinstate banned Twitter accounts in the latest episode of the Birdsite Drama.

I'm not going to get into any opinion piece on what I think of this development but if you haven't joined ...

Photo: “Crimson Stars: Chapter 1 Page 27” by Commissar_Tarkin. (October 2022)

Here is a Message from Commissar_Tarkin delivered to all the good citizens on the Duck—

“Hello! I've been told on the discord server that I can contact you about the fact that our comic is approaching the end ...