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Starwars, Ender's game, Captain America… All these are great examples (or bad ones) of “retcons”. But what IS a “retcon”?
What it means is that you go back and change an established work by adding new information that has the effect of changing it in a small or ...

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Art from Wikipedia

Welcome to the the yungle
Characters make or break a story. In this quackcast Tantz Aerine brings all her skills as a head-shrink to bear and gives us the low-down on Jungian character archetypes! Jung was a clever Swiss bloke, a contemporary of that strange fellow ...

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Art by Ozoneocean

In this Quackcast we cover the Importance of good linework in comics and different line techniques such as Herge's Ligne claire, the traditional thick line for characters and thin for everything else as exemplified in the work of Mucha, variable line widths as in Manga ...

Recently I wrote a throwaway character for my comic based on a real-life friend of mine. In short, he’s a loveable misanthrope. And because he’s based on a real human being, I felt like I owed the character something: he won’t grow, or change, or become a ...

art by yours truly

So I was thinking… in this day and age if you get on any type of social media, you are going to be punched repeatedly with CONTROVERSY! HERESY! HEATHENS! LIBERTARDS! CONSERVOTARDS-OR-HOW-EVER-THEY-ARE-CALLED-TARDS! …and so on. On blogs and tweets and even more so on youtube, making a ...

I think we all do this – you leave a quick note to yourself with some great idea you’ve had, or something you need to remember to do later on. Days, weeks, or months later you re-discover the note and you have no idea what your past self was thinking ...

A story can be strengthened by coordinating the first and final images in some way.

It's not a hard and fast rule; it's not a rule at all. But it can be worth trying out in your writing!

The movie Halloween (there it is! I had to start ...

It's that time of year again, the big blockbuster movies are coming and Marvels first movie of the year and contestant in this years superhero smack down is Captain America: Civil war.
Based on the massive Marvel crossover comic that saw Marvels superheroes taking sides over a controversial government ...

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 ...

I've recently been watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries on Netflix. Phryne Fisher is undoubtedly a wish-fulfillment character – almost unapologetically so. She is sexy, bold, and intelligent. Whenever a new challenge is put before her, she reveals a previously-unmentioned skill that saves the day (see the above image where ...