A couple of days ago Banes gave us a wonderful article on the issue of who to please- yourself or the audience, and how that can go very right or very wrong.

So that got me thinking that we should also talk about the dreaded silence. You update a page ...

Did you know as an comic creator you are more than allowed to take a shortcut here and there? It’s true! You want to know something else? Everyone does it! So this week I want to share some shortcuts I have found immensely helpful when trying to speed up ...

I have been helping with the featured comic section for the last five years. A while back, a comic creator on The Duck asked how a comic gets featured, and this was the explanation:

In order for a comic to get featured on The Duck, it must pass through a ...

Balancing detail and speed is one hell of a trick for a webcomic creator. It is common pitfall for many of us starting our webcomic. Unfortunately one cannot always have both of these qualities in the work. We go ham on all the intricacies early on and then wonder why ...

LISTEN!

ALL the tropes!!!!
Based on Emma Clare's newspost, tropes are damn useful but they can also be your undoing if you handle them badly. Tropes are shortcuts to meanings, scenes, procedures or jokes that take too long to set up in their own right. You can use them ...

When you look at a developed artist you can recognise their work straight away. Maybe it is in the way that they do their lineart, or it could be the facial expressions that characters have, (think the Dreamworks Smirk), or maybe it is the tropes that they use in their ...

So last time we had talked about the Javert trope, a category of character that is very compelling and makes for excellent drama, immense suspense and often gets their own following in fandom. (Just check out Saito Hajime's hero's journey as a prime example.)

The Javert character is ...

Javert is such a stellar and powerful character in Les Miserables that he has his very own trope.

He's the skilled, dogged, unwavering locomotive of a chaser that in the name of the law, the church, the state, the cause pursues and persecutes the hero of a story, and ...

As creators, we believe that we are the gods of our stories. The tales we weave are of our construct and the characters are subject to our petty whims…at first. When we begin to craft our worlds and populate them with, what we hope, are well rounded characters, we ...

Preserving continuity is difficult with any writing project of length - with the weeks, months or more it might take to write a single novel or screenplay, it can be easy to forget things. So the problem is compounded if writing an extended series comic, TV or web series, movies or ...