It may just be my impression, but usually when a story is set in a dystopian setting, the dystopia is played straight. However, when the characters encounter or start off in a utopian setting, they almost always will end up realizing that the utopia is actually a mirage, and in ...

It's Resurrection Saturday today! What better occasion then than this to talk about the resurrection trope?

Usually, cancelling out a character's death is not a good thing to do in a story. It undermines the weight of the stakes involved and/or the sacrifice or seriousness of the ...

Batman and Robin are fighting crime in the real world!



https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/11/police-deliver-vengeance-on-gamblers-while-disguised-as-batman-and-robin

Two police offers in London used Batman and Robin costumes to allow them to get close to illegal gambling operators plying their nefarious trade on Westminster Bridge.






Batman has a long ...

As creators of stories, be they novels or graphic novels or comics, we all have heard the adage “write what you know”. It's been drummed into our minds to the point that its cold fingers have our impostor syndrome in a deathgrip every time we venture our to write ...

Absolute Boyfriend: Volume 1

So, you’ve got this amazing story idea bouncing around in your head—yay, go you! But now comes the big question: how do you actually start the thing? You want that first page to blow your readers away, right? Let’s talk about one of ...

I generally avoid using current events in my articles about webcomics, but this time I can't help it. Signalgate has been living rent free in my mind ever since the editor in chief of the Atlantic broke the story.

There are many reasons for that, most of them not ...

No matter what the characters in your story might be doing–fighting crime, resisting alien invasion, surviving in a harsh radioactive wasteland, or just working in an office–sometimes it's fun to remove them from their ‘regular’ activities and place them somewhere different and out of their social comfort ...

Photo: “CH 1, Pg 11”. Legacy of the Elementals created by Anime Alpharie. (March 2025)

Anime Alpharie writes:

“Hi everyone!

My name is Alpharie, and I am sort of new! I had a comic on here years ago and I've since lost access to that account. Blighted, that's ...

Time is something that affects us all and as we age we become more aware of it because it seems to speed up, things become less permanent, and we become aware of our own mortality and mortality in general. Humans are a very long lived species as things go but ...

There was a recent article in the Guardian about how playing Dungeons and Dragons had helped siblings bond and cope with the death of their father. It got me thinking about the role that role-playing has played (now there's a phrase) in my own life.

For me role-playing began ...