Continuing our talk about building stories and crafting characters, let’s touch upon character personality. When building a character, we need to decide upon character traits, empathy, flavor, motivation and contrast. All three are fancy ways of saying "What does this character portray to the audience?"
Five Horsemen of the New Genesis
In they rode like heralds of the new era. The next fifteen months saw the approach of five sites that would define the webcomics scene for the next three years and remain important parts of it to the present. Call them the Five Horsemen.
The Five Horsemen were each a commercial success… five of the very few such successes online. This made them influential over both the art form of webcomics and its developing commerce. In this chapter, we'll concentrate on their artistic influence; later, we'll pick up the path of webcomics commerce.
Tellingly, each of them began in front of a computer screen. Continue Reading
Here's a survival scenario for humans (or whatever sentient species we have become, or has replaced us) in a couple of billion years, when it gets too hot to live here on earth. I'm going with the assumption that interstellar space travel is either impossible or very, very sucky.
We're going to build our own star. Continue Reading
2003 was a pretty scary year. Whether you agree with it or not, war is a pretty terrifying thing. We lost another space shuttle, another crew, and – in a bad case of déjà vu – followed a flurry of finger-pointing in the aftermath. Continue Reading
It’s been nearly a year since Comixpedia began its remarkable transformation from the rough concept that Xaviar Xerexes pitched to me, to the webcomics magazine that it is now, and I think we’ve accomplished a lot for a group of loosely-affiliated webcomics creators, living in our own far-flung corners of the world.
Damonk’s Own Quickie Personal Webcomic Year In Review
2003. The Year of Stuff. One Year after 2002, and 365.23 Days before 2004.
Backwards, it would be 3002…
…which time-wise, would actually be forwards.
After having been exposed no doubt to the bajillions of other media’s own versions of Year In Reviewstravaganzas, it’s clearly obvious that the one thing you would now crave most would be to hear YET ANOTHER person’s own thoughts on the year.
Continue Reading
Fish Muffin Scream Asphalt: Funny?
I remember with great fondness the first time I stumbled upon a totally surreal webcomic. I won’t say which one, just that it was one of the originals, something mindbogglingly bizarre that, over time, picked up its own cult following and is now a Minor Institution among webstrips. Continue Reading
I knew my wife was the person I was going to marry two weeks before our first date. We got together for coffee as friends, talked until one in the morning, and I walked her to her car. As she drove off, an overwhelming peace came over me, and I knew down to my core she was the one. It wasn’t like lightning striking or fireworks going off. It was as though I had just learned a new fact, like two plus two equals four or that water is wet. That’s how convinced I was. Continue Reading
I had to make a phone call today to the town of Hawthorne, California – yes, to the town itself. The woman who acted as the town's agent was disappointed to talk to me. I'm shutting down a store in a famous chain there. Continue Reading
You probably know that a court can prevent shops from selling certain materials. Did you also know they can prosecute retailers for selling adult comics to other adults? That retailers can be prosecuted and convicted for selling obscene material even if those comics are in a separate part of the store from regular comics? Did you know that law enforcement and the District Attorney’s office can make life very difficult for a private individual, for selling comics that are not obscene to minors? Did you know they can prevent you from drawing or creating anything, even if it’s for yourself in your own home?
You’d know all these things if you follow the thrilling exploits of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. You’d also know that sometimes, but not always, justice wins out over stupidity and repression. Continue Reading
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