Used Books is celebrating its tenth anniversary on Feb. 23 (Thursday), so we are interrupting the story for a couple special extras this week. The first is posted Monday.

usedbooks writes:

The Beginning

Thursday, February 23rd marks the 10th anniversary of Used Books online. I started drawing UB shortly after ...

So last week I’d started talking about the reincarnation upon reincarnation of myth and legend into modern sequential and narrative art- and got some pretty insightful comments on why it persists for millennia (it is said that Euripides adapted the legend of Medea himself in order to make it ...

Welcome back, gang! Er, can I call y'all “gang”? Is that too informal or too assumptive about your willingness for complicity in my extra curricular activities? Eh, too bad. Once you're in the gang, there's only one way out. Now, while you're letting that sink in ...

In a chat where we were discussing our comics, Pit-Face told me that if Bones from Putrid Meat is Odysseus, then Blitzov from Epic of Blitzov is Gilgamesh. And that very solid analogy of the two characters’ function in her stories, got me thinking about how myth of all sorts ...

Huh. You're still here? I'll be damned.

Well then. Let's just go ahead and pick up where we left off last week, which if I recollect, was the beginning. Or at least, that's where you stepped into my world. Now, how you think about beginnings has ...

I was actually asked some writing questions the other day. Who the deuce would ask ME for advice? But I happened to have a little.


Here are some thoughts on writing that smallest unit of a story: the scene (reprise):


First off, what is a scene? What defines it?

It ...

At the start of the new year, I decided to make a couple resolutions. The first was that I am not going to buy any new clothes this year because I invested in a sewing machine because I plan to sew my own outfits from fabric.

The second resolution is ...

It’s something so often encountered and/or mentioned in stories (be they comics or novels or film) that it’s becoming in itself a cliché: Heroes aren’t interesting because they’re straight arrows. Villains are fun because they’re the ‘bad boys’, the ones that can do all ...

A little comic by Vasya Lozhkin: “I will take revenge”

Earlier today I was reading this article about an immigrant to Canada who learned English with the help of comics, and who now creates comics himself. It got me to thinking about what a great resource comics are for learning ...

art by Sandy Jarrell


The Hated, Part One - Villain Heroes

I've picked up all the “new” versions of the Archie universe and enjoyed them to different degrees for the most part. Sometimes there are a few laughs. Or some nice artwork. Or just the fun of seeing the characters ...