Tue, 24 September 2024
Being right on the internet is Sooo important… Being right in relationships is a much older thing than the internet and a far harder and more destructive issue. There's an old meme that goes along the lines of “if you're a man you're always wrong”, so the idea is that you say something like “yes dear, you're right” every time there's a disagreement and that's the key to a happy relationship… which is of course harmful meaningless nonsense which infantilises both people. THAT is NOT admitting you're wrong, it's literally just pretending, it's insincere and doesn't help anyone. The approach you should take is to understand WHY something is wrong. Among my many favourite films is Scott Pilgrim Vs the world. In it he has many cartoonish, exciting, and exaggerated battles with the exes of his new girlfriend Ramona Flowers, but underneath and besides that, more powerfully and interestingly he resolves with his own exes and it's only when he does that, that he can truly move forward. Instead of a flashy, crazy battles like with Ramona's exes, Scott simply realises what he did wrong and owns up to it with each of them. That makes you respect the character far more and really helped tidy up the resolution of the story. Villains coming to a self realisation and admitting they're wrong can make for a very powerful ending. How do you go with this, do you remember a story where a character admits they're wrong or have you been able able to come to the realisation that you're wrong about something and accept the correction? This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by Somewhere in the Universe - Driving beat taking us on a road trip to hot and heavy, fiery groovetown in a muscle car under the bright sun on burning vinyl seats, windows wound down and blasting us with oven air but we don’t care because we’re rocking all the way. Topics and shownotes Links
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Tue, 17 September 2024
Today we're talking about setting the scene and communication through the art on the panel. Movie directors are a good thing to follow because it's a related art form. We mention the compositions of Spielberg, Sergio Leone, Wes Anderson and more. I came from a fine art background so I used to often try to emulate the compositions of classical art. Banes recommends reading “Framed Ink” by Marcos Mateu-Mestre. What inspires you with your art direction? Do you think deeply about it or do you just depict the characters in the most efficient way possible to tell the story? This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by It’s my turn to save the world - High energy, purposeful, cute and full of stars, twinkles, and lines as straight as glowing laser beams, burning through with fearsome power and heat!
Links The cover image is from a Banes choreographed panel from our sexy horror comic Key of Dreams that was part of the DD anthology! Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 10 September 2024
The topic we're talking about today was inspired by my ruminations on Bullshido martial arts promo demonstration videos. These are the videos where a martial arts master shows off their skill in a patently fake demonstration, usually starting with breaking concrete slabs or wood and then progressing to a performance where they show how easily they can defeat all of their students who try and attack them. The really bad ones will pretend to channel “chi” (a fake energy) and knock down their students without even trying! The thing is that often the teachers actually believe they can really DO this stuff because the reactions of their students make them believe that it's real. And the students believe it too because of motivated reasoning (they WANT to believe), and they are influenced by each other. It's all one self reinforcing bubble echo-chamber of belief. There are two reasons I'm talking about this in terms of webcomics: 1. Bullshido is the origin of the amazing and silly martial arts and superhero moves and techniques in comics and animation and it's interesting to know where it comes from. and 2. this sort of stuff is why we have preconceived ideas about why a lot of pop-culture is good or bad: We fall for a sort of tribal thinking that's created by our tendency to follow the beliefs of others without examining them for ourselves. It's the sort of thing that results in cults, conspiracy belief, and our opinions on political figures. It's even why we believe that valve amps, Les Paul guitars, Stradivarius violins, and vinyl records sound magically better than the alternatives. It's a fascinating and fun topic and we go deep into it! This week Gunwallace wasn't able to make a new theme so I re-issued the theme to Kirsha Brackets - A warm rush of frenetic activity! Modern, bright, shiny, new, fun, action, happening, moving, going, bouncing, bubbling, hopping, motivation! Topics and shownotes Links
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Tue, 3 September 2024
Cross cultural influence is a marvellous thing and very enriching to creativity! It's lovely when you can see multiple cultural influences in things, whether comics, movies, art, fashion, music or anything else. It's inspiring and leads to new and more interesting things. I picked promo images from some recent Pixar movies Turning Red, Encanto, Coco, and Moana, because they're good examples of the process and what it can result in. The flip-side of that is “cultural appropriation”. That's where you take something that's important, sacred or representative of another culture and you claim ownership of it or use it in an inappropriate way, not giving the true source any respect and not seeking permission. unfortunately this is often used as a false accusation by people who either try and white-knight or are just trying to weaponise the idea in order to gain status or make a point, which has a number of very negative effects: It drives people toward monoculuralisim in their expression, makes people afraid to experiment, it can make people less likely to see ACTUAL examples of cultural appropriation and more likely to discount or ignore real examples of it. In the Quackcast we mention Big Trouble in Little China, which was a wonderful blend of American action film and Hong Kong kung-fu movie. The Clint Eastwood Western A Fist Full Of Dollars is a version of the Japanese samurai film Yojimbo, made by Italians. And then of course the Samurai films of that era were inspired by America westerns anyway, so there was all sorts of deep cultural mixing.
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Direct download: Quackcast_703_-_Cross_Cultural_Influence.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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