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 ...

LISTEN on our player!
Or Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com.au/podcasts/24f85853-5d63-44ac-885f-da23db0a53ad/the-quackcast

Happy Easter! Well that was Sunday, but happy Easter anyway. In honour of that yearly and ancient ritual holiday that has its roots in the rebirth of spring in the northern hemisphere our Quackcast is ...

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 ...

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 ...

LISTEN on our player!
Or Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com.au/podcasts/24f85853-5d63-44ac-885f-da23db0a53ad/the-quackcast

When love turns to hate… It's a common trope in fiction: partners split up and their once loving relationship turns to one of bitter acrimony! We see hate turning to love frequently too, that ...

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 ...

If you are setting a story in the past it can often be hard to get everything from the little things to the big picture right, especially if it's a period you haven't lived through yourself. Even then, your memory can play tricks on you.

It doesn't ...

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 ...

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 ...

Photo: “A Page of the Tuesday Funnies Used to Wrap a Mason Jar at the Thrift Store”. The San Diego Union-Tribune. (February 2025)

Gleaning for vintage supplies at the local thrift store, I made out with an assortment of cream coloured typewriter papers weathered by age from card stock cotton ...