A Little New Year's News... and the New Year's Eve Archive Dive

First and foremost, I want to wish you all a happy, healthy New Year. Thank you for your support of this site, and for your participation in the ongoing discussion of webcomics. I've got some truly awesome things planned for this site in 2014 including a complete, top-down redesign of the site itself. We're trying to roll this out in the first part of 2014, and it's going to make everything here more user-friendly, accessible and enjoyable. I think you're gonna love it. Stay tooned for more details.

Archive Dive

And now, here's one of my very favorite posts on writing. It's the centerpiece of the writing chapter in The Webcomics Handbook, and I think it's a tremendously effective way to improve your writing -- humor, drama, sci-fi... you name it.

Writing humor is something many of us grapple with. In the past, I've discussed a method that I advocate called Fermentation. And in many critiques and discussions, I've found myself advising writers to push or push further or push to the Funny. And every time I write those words, it occurs to me that the phrase is somewhat ambiguous and my advice may be missing the mark.

So I'm going to try to refine the Fermentation method, and I've love for those of you who are working in humor to try it out and let me know how it worked for you. (More on that later).

The Fifth Panel

Before I begin, I guess I'd better make it clear that the title is merely a colloquialism. I realize many of you work in fewer than four panels -- or in many more than four. That's really not the point. 'Fifth Panel' simple has more pinache than 'One More Panel.' ...

Read the entire post and comment there.