shorts.

Of all the skills it takes to make comics, writing is one of the last I tried to tackle as a student and practitioner myself. Now that I’ve been working on it for about 25 years, trying to teach it is both fascinating and daunting. Quite simply it a HUGE […]

Somewhere to start, on ‘Story’

A lot of studentscome to mewith a whole epicin mind. Those who want to tell sprawling tales that will end up slip cased novels in the hundred of pages! Understandable. I mean, it’s Comics! Of course there’s a lot of people looking for that. I’m pretty guilty of doing it a few times […]

The short and silent story

For the first few weeks as we study the structure and formalism of Sequential art, we’re also going to start keeping diary comics. And to keep focused on short narratives, while also forcing students to think about how to express their ideas in a limited format. There’s a strong tradition […]

Haiku, Senryū & Tanka

On the site here I’m exploiting the surplus of material out there about writing for film and books because at their core, stories are stories! Studying how writers tell them in other mediums is one of the key ways I learned about how to write my own. And being a related […]

Write A Short Anything…

In the First post, I said I think Ty’s talk is an excellent crash course in Genre Writing, sometimes cast as lowbrow, but most popular forms of writing these days tend to conform to clear genre tropes, or making a point of hybridizing those for dramatic novelty. There’s nothing intrinsically keeping […]

An aside on Genre vs Literary

Trope – noun -(ˈtrōp) plural: tropes : A word, phrase, or image used in a new and different way in order to create an artistic effect. – a : A word or expression used in a figurative sense : figure of speech – b : A common or overused theme or […]

girl#2 – a comic about tropes

In my post “Like moving pictures, but not” I specifically talk about some of the ways Sequential Art and Cinema are different; How there are things comics can do that are completely unique to it. That said there are many ways in which they are similar and certainly a lot […]

Visual Storytelling in Cinema