It's Valentine's Day as I write this, and the day after (or many days after) when you're reading this.

Anyway, I thought I'd run down (or run up) my top five science fiction romantic couples. I don't think I've done this topic before, but ...

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck. This week I am going to be looking at a panel from the webcomic FCL55 that I think does a great job developing an aesthetic through balancing details within the design. FCL55 is ...

In Skin Deep, an old comedy/drama by Blake Edwards, starring John Ritter, I found one of my favorite movies for a long stretch of time. I watched it over and over. But the part everyone talked about, with the glow-in-the-dark condoms – I really didn't like that. I preferred ...

On the last “Mind Tricks” discussion, we talked about false memories, where a characters' true nature is hidden from them because of memory loss or artificial memories.

The Phantom Life is similar, certainly in the two examples that I thought of initially…but the stories play out
in a different ...

When a character the story's cast and audience identify and are familiar with dies, the effect is, or should be, monumental.

Not only because that effectively ends that character's journey (and arc), but also because as an event it has immediate ramifications for all the surviving characters.

First ...

We grin and support John Wick as he ploughs through dozens of people per minute in his revenge quest over his murdered dog and ruined car, but we gasp with shock when the Wicked Witch of the East pursues a single person to take revenge for killing her sister with ...

I've talked many times about story structure. Even with a structural approach, there are a lot of questions to be answered, struggles to be had, and hard thinking to be done to make a story work.

One big moment that I like thinking about early in the writing is ...

Usually in adventures, thrillers and other stories, when the main characters are romantically involved, the B plot (or even the A plot) is the ‘will they/won’t they' question: will they get together in the end, usually with a happy end scene of marriage, or some such thing. Romance ...

As the Orthodox Easter approaches, I set out to make the traditional sweet bread. It's a tricky affair, because the recipes are often unreliable, or something might happen which you realise too late, and the dough won't rise, or won't pull apart as it should. I ended ...

Often in making webcomics, creators may try to have more action than discourse, as it tends to make the comic more visually interesting and give opportunities to avoid ‘talking head’ scenes.

However, I think that sort of conundrum is a potential trap that might prevent creators from truly making use ...