Last week we focused on character growth VS tropes to run characters but Tantz had the idea to look at alternative growth for characters who did NOT grow well (after the original trilogy). So in this Quackcast we apply that to various Star Wars characters. Tantz tackles an alternative path and form for Anikin and Darth Vader, re-imagining them as two separate people. I tackle Han Solo and Princess Leia, thinking of them both as a happy couple who adventure and travel together in the Millennium falcon. Banes imagines Boba Fet as the head of a crime family!
In our members only Patreon video Tantz imagined Phasma as an amazing character who works her way up to being the Darth Vader of the new trilogy, instead of the toothless joke she was in the real film. I talk about Fin as a disturbed, reserved veteran character who's slowly deprogramming, has a lot of PTSD and complicated feelings about the New Order. Banes talks about an alternative version of Rey and Luke, a Luke who became a distinguished and honoured Jedi teacher, like Professor X in the X-men, and a Rey with perhaps Luke as her dad, a Rey who's an adventurer and good fighter but still has to LEARN to use the force and have an interesting progression unlike the rapid magical progress of the film version.
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by The White Noise isn’t Working - sands pouring white noise fuzzzzz, layers upon layers of creepy, yet catchy electronica pop stack up over the white noise fog, creating a rich broth of audio delight.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Last week's Quackcast on Character growth VS tropes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/quackcast/episode-654-tropes-vs-character-growth/
Featured comic:
I Love You Lin Peckett - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2023/sep/25/featured-comic-i-love-you-lin-peckett/
Featured music:
The White Noise isn’t Working - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/the_white_noise_isnt_working_/ - by Rmcool, rated A.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Tue, 12 March 2024
Banes did a really interesting newspost about panel order and how we read comics- not just left to right or right to left but which panel flows to what and how you get the reader to go in the right direction when something isn't intuitive. We're all comic people and we host a comic site so this was perfect for us to tackle! And as we talked it out we realised that clever panel layout can be employed to assist in true nonlinear storytelling. Film and TV attempt to do non-linear but can never ever truly do it, despite extreme degrees of wankiness with some writers film is simply a liner medium and will always be that way because it plays at a specific pace and that can't be changed within the medium. (you have to introduce external conventions like forcing people to skip to other parts). So whenever someone tells you a film does non-linear storytelling because of time-jumps or flashbacks, it's not true, it's always linear. But I digress, comic layouts can be clever and confusing. They can enhance or hinder clear storytelling and communication in many ways. Do you experiment with layouts? This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Explorer Chronicles - Prepare for a marvellous adventure! The sun is shining, the birds are singing, warm breezes tickle the air, wide green vistas spread out invitingly before you, the distance is lost in the morning haze. This is a light digital orchestra of joy, promise, and anticipation! Topics and shownotes Links This was inspired by Banes' newspost about panels here - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/mar/06/how-do-i-read-this-comic-panels-flow-and-blockage/ Our own examples of strange panel layouts…
Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 5 March 2024
I remembered that a promised Quackcast was AI: slavery for artists and creators. It's slavery because it uses our creative products as fuel for it's database training for free and then uses our work to make money for their creators, essentially exploiting us for free. This isn't just about the image generators, it includes crap like chat GPT too: that system steals and repackages the creations of others without credit, payment or any acknowledgment. The use of all this sort of AI (except the ethical ones), is immoral, unethical and is a practice that basically endorses slavery. How does it make money? The idea that it will always be the way it is now or that “the genie is out of the bottle” and “there's n going back” is childishly naive and completely ignores the way previous examples of “disruptive” tech are integrated into the commercial world. Great previous examples are the spread of free music, programs, games, and videos on file sharing services in the late 90s. We STILL happily have for all those things now and they're all still multi-billion dollar industries because things adapted and laws were changed. The moral is: if you are an intelligent, moral, ethical person then do not use generative AI. And don't think that this is the Apocalypse and that it's all doom and gloom with no possible hope in sight. The industry will eventually correct itself and there will be a new balance, as there always is. This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Sandra’s Day - A spicy little latin number Chassé’s in with some fancy footwork, does a clever spin, grabs a willing partner and twirls them around the dance floor before finishing up with a hard stomping finale, a crash and a grand exit! Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Direct download: Quackcast_677_-_You_cant_spell_Fail_without_AI.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 27 February 2024
Oh baby it's cold outside… That's a tricky song, well it's not really but a few years ago the silly pop-culture warriors on Twitter started acting as if the song was all “rapey” with the male in the song trying to pressure the woman into sex. The problem was they were absolutely ignorant of the correct cultural context in quite a misogynist way. In the era the song came from women could not be seen as openly actively wanting sex so they had to play flirting games like the one displayed in the song. The reason the modern “rapey” interpretation is misogynist is because it strips the woman off her power and agency and casts her as an innocent, sexless child with low intelligence, instead of an adult woman with sexual needs actively participating in a game of flirtation with the man she's chosen. Understanding cultural context is vitally important if we don't want to come off at idiots. History, geography, and time all blur this context but usually all you need to do to get the right feel for is to take a moment to familiarise yourself with a few other examples of contemporary media and absorb those differences. Rarely do you need to do more than that, but sometimes wider cultural study is needed. The very worst mistake you can ever make though is to look at something only through modern eyes in complete isolation from examples of stuff from the same time and place. At best, you will NEVER properly understand it, at worst you will come out with all sorts of idiotic theories like the Baby Its Cold Outside morons on Twitter. This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Un Re Stop Comics - Quatermass and the Pit! This is some freaky Delia Derbyshire early Doctor Who stuff. Freaky fractured soundscapes of mind twisting terror and wonder. This track sucks you into another dimension where you see with your ears and hear with your skin. You brain will never be the same! Topics and shownotes Links Oh Baby It's Cold Outside lyrics - https://genius.com/Idina-menzel-baby-its-cold-outside-lyrics Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_676_-_Baby_its_cold_outside_cultural_context.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 20 February 2024
It was Valentine's Day last week so let's talk about lurv. Love makes the world go round, love solves all problems, love heals all, love is eternal, love is all you need, all you need is love… Well those are all the typical and utterly meaningless pop culture platitudes but they sound good. Why meaningless? Because “love” isn't defined, it's a very vague term that can mean a lot, far too vague to be used the way it is in those phrases. Love can involve lust, friendship, patriotism, affection, yearning, passion, honour, protectiveness, stuffiness, obsession, and so much more. And none of those things are the same, they can all be wildly different and yet still be “love”. So that's sort of what we chat about - different kinds of love and how people use it in pop culture, especially webcomics. Whether us part of our genetically coded instinctual imperative to breed and safely transfer our genetic template to another generation or something more complex and nebulous, we try and address quite a lot of it 😚 This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Opposites Attract - Frenetic and full of a buzzing diffuse energy that suffuses everything like a universal static charge. This music drank waaaay too many espressos and red bulls so now it’s bouncing off the walls, tasting colour, and seeing in 5 dimensions. Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 13 February 2024
Do you change your style to go with current fashions or do you stick with your own thing and stay independent of changing trends?
Fashion in design concerns everything! We can talk comics: art style, panel style, lettering style, use of media, writing styles. We can talk clothes, product design, even the design of things that people mistakenly believe are driven by 100% practical concerns like firearms. Fashions in design are everywhere when you know what you're looking for.
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Tue, 6 February 2024
Here we're fulfilling the promise of Quackcast 671 and examining what the art can tell us about the artist! Can certain themes, an art style, choice of imagery, jokes, humour, character opinions, colour choices or anything else tell us anything about the artist? This can be pretty subjective though a lot of stupid and dishonest critics pretend it isn't and tell us great long stories about how this director is “deeply misogynist” because of certain repeated themes - I once watched a youtuber focussing this criticism on Tim Burton with content that was 100% subjective motivated reasoning entirely dressed up as objective fact. It was very silly. It helps if you know a bit more about the artist, their opinions and life when using the art to examine them so you don't go too far off the rails like that youtuber. It still doesn't give you a reliable result but it's better and if you do it well it can at least be entertaining and make sense. In our Patreon vid we tackle our old fave Star Wars and see what that can tell us about George Lucas. A very cool way to begin! And I think we managed to come up with some interesting insights. For the Quackcast first we jokingly examine each other's work in a critical way… then we move on to our absent Quackcast Alumnus Pitface and examine her using her first main comic on DD, Putrid Meat. This was a fascinating examination! If you're still unsure about this sort of thing, take the example of pulp writer Robert E Howard. Reading his stories in the order they were written was well as knowing a little about that man's biography seems to give you a fascinating insight into his thinking and reasoning! THIS sort of thing is where examining the artist through their art shines, even though it is still largely subjective. This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Maynard and Grimm - Grim and hauntingly introspective. This theme takes you down some dark and mysterious paths, into gloom and hidden places. Be careful, it’s very, very dangerous! Topics and shownotes Links Putrid Meat - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/PUTRID_MEAT/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_673_-_By_their_deeds_you_shall_know_them.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 30 January 2024
A fun topic this time. We decided to chat about our fave fantasy creatures. Mine was elves, Banes' had the bigfoot and Tantz had dragons! We chat about where our love started, why we think we like the creatures and a bit about the creatures themselves. For me it was because I always identified with the elves I read about in Tolkien and Brian Froud's book on fareies because I was slim and slight, with long hair and sharp features. Banes loved bigfoots because he liked that it was a local monster to him and it was very much into Universal monster type creatures. Tantz loved dragons because they were awesome, beautiful, powerful and mysterious. So what are YOUR fave fantasy creatures and why? Do you agree with what we say about elves, bigfeet and dragons?
Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_672_-_Fave_Fantasy_Creatures.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 23 January 2024
Art VS the artist! Can you infer something about the creator from their creation? Do you think the art is an accurate reflection of the artist? For THIS Quackcast I wanted to tackle the idea of whether you could judge or infer the mind of the artist from their creation and how wrong some people have been about that, but instead we got all turned around and misdirected and talked mainly about separating the art from the artist when the artist is discovered to have done something horrible, or is at least accused of that. Can you still go back and watch the Cosby Show for example? The position I'd like to go with is one of default separation- we should always have some sort of distance between the art and the creator when we can because if we don't then it's going to be very tricky to be able to really appreciate anything… there's always someone nasty in the mix somewhere and we're doing a disservice to the other people who worked on the thing as well as culture as a whole if we close of access to stuff or shut off our appreciation for things because someone involved in them was later found to be awful. But then there are other aspects to this too: you don't want your consumption of the art to monetarily advantage an awful person, and it also depends on how closely the art is connected with the artist and whatever awful thing they did. We also talked a tiny bit about judging the the creator based on their creation and how unfair that can be. One example of mine is Masumuni Shirrow who created many amazing and influential cyberpunk works like Ghost in the Shell, Apple Seed, Dominion Tank Police, Intron Depot, Black Magic 66 etc. but I feel people unfairly dismiss him because he also loves to draw sexy women. He's a genius with incredible artwork, densely plotted, clever, intellectual, thoughtful, philosophical, yet exciting action cyberpunk stories that have been pretty foundational in our modern culture, and yet some morons dismiss him for also drawing sexy ladies. I hate those people. This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by The Focus - a creepy yet beautiful piece that brings points of colour to a cold grey landscape and eventually ramps up to a climax that sounds as if it was played in reverse with pieces of broken glass. Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 16 January 2024
This Quackcast is about using influence wisely! I had a DD comic creator come to me, apparently a bit distressed at some of the things we'd said in our last Quackcast about drawing adult comics- they had decided to delete their entire webcomic. I checked on google and it turns out they deleted it everywhere, not just DD, even down to their twitter! I've since talked to them some more and got more of the story and made sure they were ok but it was pretty alarming at the time nevertheless. That got me on to the idea of being responsible with your influence: when you have any sort of platform people listen to you and think you have authority. Because of that you have to be mindful and try not to pretend you know more than you do, don't confuse objectivity with subjectivity or opinion with fact, always try to qualify things, add context, and give exceptions. On our Quackcast we talk very authoritatively about ways of doing art, drawing, writing stories, what comics should look like, dos and don'ts etc, and we always have very strong opinions. But the funny thing is that we're usually pretty hypocritical- because we'll do a Quackcast recommending specifically against something and explaining why it's bad and then we'll have another Quackcast parsing that very thing. Sometimes that change of attitude happens during the course of a single podcast! If you listen to us at all, take what we say as advice rather than instructions. We each have fields of expertise on specific things- Tantz on psychology and ancient Greek history, me on Graphic design and art, Banes on music and comedy, we all have expertise and decades of experience running a webcomics hosting site, producing webcomics and podcasting, but we don't know everything about everything! Outside of those fields our knowledge is a bit general and even within them we all know we still have way more to learn! So take what we say with a grain of salt.
Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_670_-_Wise_use_of_influence.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 9 January 2024
The number of the Quackcast is 669 so that means it's time for sexy stuff again! But despite the topic this isn't an adult cast and we keep things to a respectful tone. We chat about how drawing sexy characters can be a lot of fun but they don't have to be realistic or anatomically correct to be sexy; stylised, simplified, or abstract forms can be just as alluring and get the pulse racing, it just depends on the setting, story, and other themes in there. And conversely, a perfectly realistic form with realistic anatomical features can be very unsexy if things aren't done right! We talk about times when sex in a comic is not about sexiness (sex scenes can be very serious or nasty), and also when having sexy looking characters doesn't indicate that it's a sexy comic- just like in real life looking sexy doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sex. We talk about how sex scenes in porn, comics, imagery, movies and TV shows normally never reflect reality because actual sex tends NOT to be very visually appealing- sweatiness, cramps, mess, gravity, bad breath, bad smells, bad hair, awkwardness, embarrassment, fatigue, disappointment, boredom, not to mention positions that hide all the interesting things from the viewer. Because what is so compelling about sex is NOT actually the bizarre reality, it's the procreation instinct of the viewer. That's tied up with our physiology, partly in our brains but also to do with various organs and glands that secrete hormones, pheromones and other chemicals which drive our behaviour. Sexiness is a symbolic shortcut to evoke that, which is why we don't ever how to show sex in its full gritty reality: the viewer does the majority of the work, they only focus on the thing that suggests to them the idea of sex and heir instincts take over. Which is also why when you normally think of sex you don't usually think about the the ‘mess’ so much. Then we briefly touch on some sex myths that media perpetuates mindlessly, like the idea that smoking is required after sex, or that losing one's virginity has to involve any pain or blood, or that hymens MUST be broken, and that the “pop your cherry” phrase is actually pretty disgusting and perpetuates a bad sex myth.. This week Gunwallace was still overwhelmed with holiday duties so I picked out a sexy them from the past. Is this a theme for a comic? No! It could be a theme for X Up, it does have some Wah Wah guitar (the sexiest guitar), but it isn’t, this is a theme for the number 6. The number that a certain DDer, Plymayer, gives to comics when he feels they deserve it: “A 6 out of 5”. This is a theme for a concept, the concept of a supportive DDer, To plymayer, and to every 6 he has ever handed out. (Okay, so it’s also a theme for X Up … but don’t tell anyone). Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 2 January 2024
Happy new year. Happy 2024! In 2023 Tantz finished her first volume of Without Moonlight and started on her new fantasy webcomic Verdant involving magic, witches and giant bugs. Banes tackled a number of things but the standout was his cheeky comedy romance comic Kaiju Valentine about a normal sized man and his gigantic girlfriend. For me it was finally finishing the 8th chapter of Pinky TA and starting on the second chapter of Bottomless Waitress with Banes. Now we're all looking forward to starting Key of Dreams this year. It's a dream story with ancient Greek gods based on a script written by Tantz, with artwork by all of us. What things did you mange to achieve in 2023? What will you be starting in 2024? This week Gunwallace was busy with Christmas and new year so instead I dipped into out stores and puled out a prize, Gunwallace's them to Kings Club - This is a modern mafia movie soundtrack, starting off eerie and atmospheric and then ramping up the cool and bombastic. There’s traditional theme bolstered by a hard gritty rock techno edge. Topics and shownotes Links Tantz: Banes: Banes & Ozoneocean: Ozoneocean:
Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 26 December 2023
Merry Christmas! Today we interviewed John Celestri, a new member of DD and a very cool person. John has worked as an animator on some of the coolest shows in the 70s and 80s. He was the guy behind Boba Fet on the Star Wars Christmas special, he animated She-Ra, He-Man, Rock and Rule, the video game Dragon's Lair and more! He's a true legend. We're making our weekly DD Patreon vid free for everyone to see as a Christmas present, so go check it out: https://www.patreon.com/DrunkDuck John is a truly interesting guy. he's been working as an animator, writer, illustrator and creator all his life. It was so amazing to talk to someone who helped create the original She-Ra and He-man! And that maddening game Dragon's Lair that no one could ever get anywhere through, he actually animated that! Amazing stuff. On DD he's hosting his comic Bloodwing Fire Fist Angel. He chats to us about that and more, so tune in to hear what he has to say and have a look at our free vid on Patreon. Merry Christmas from Drunk Duck This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Delos - A haunting, nightmarish horn draws you into a vast creepy echoing world, lit by the sparse, lyrical plucked notes on a melodic electric guitar. This is regal, scary and terrifying at the same time. The sounds of a vast underground desert cave at night. Topics and shownotes Links Bloodwing Fire Fist Angel - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Bloodwing_Fire_Fist_Angel/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_667_-_Merry_Christmas_and_Interview_with_John_Celestri.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 11:34pm PDT
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Tue, 19 December 2023
We're up to number 666 Quackcasts so our topic this time is evil! Evil is a complicated subject, we all think we know what it is but we really don't, there are just so many aspects to it so it's very hard to fully encompass. Broadly “evil” can be something very subjective: anything that runs counter to our own well-being as individuals- people, things and situations that do us harm. You can expand that to your property, your family, friends, acquaintances, pets etc. As that definition gets bigger though to encompass your neighbours, street, suburb, city, state, and country it becomes more objective bit by bit, till we come to the idea that “evil” is something that runs counter to human rights, or the existence of life in general, or the right to self determination etc. A more objective view of evil. But there's MORE! There's an embedded idea in our culture that “evil” is caused by external forces, smoothing that's quite popular in a few religions and myths. Characters like the devil, Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, or demons which encapsulate, perpetuate, influence, control and characterise “evil”. They embody it, they work to spread it, they influence people with it. The idea is that everything evil in the world is caused by them. It's often wrongly assumed that all religions are structured like the Abrahamic ones (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) with a good and evil duality and “evil” being associated with the underworld in some way, but that's really just caused by looking at them from a mainly Christian lens. Death and the underworld aren't evil in most religions and rather than having strictly good or evil characters, “evil” is usually a matter of context and any character can be a mixture of both good and evil. There's a good reason for this type of externalisation of evil though- by characterising it in such a symbolic way it helps us better understand different aspects of it and look at it from different angles. After-all characterising, symbolising and simplifying is how we better understand all reality, that's what's behind mathematics, physics, and all sciences really. The last big evil factor we chat about is something we could also call “malice”, that is the active act of deliberately committing evil as opposed to simply doing something that is defined as “evil” for, another reason, i.e. taking your parking spot because they need it, killing a person in the line of duty as a police officer, not holding the elevator doors open for you because they were in a hurry… Instead they do those things because they want to cause harm and they enjoy it. This is how we like to portray psychopaths and serial killers in fiction. But even with malice there is a spectrum: on one end the person does the thing because they want to cause pain and distress, on the other end they do it simply because their own needs and pleasure are all that matter, they know that they cause you to suffer but that's irrelevant to them. So the big take away from this is that there are a lot of different ways of thinking about “evil” and it's often a spectrum rather that just one solid thing. But how do you define evil? How do you use it in your creations? This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by On The Edge - Star Trek Adventures - I wager 20 Quatloos on the Vulcan… This is an epic, awesome intro, it builds steam from a portentous beginning with digital French horns and strings, gathering urgency and energy as it rockets into something grander and more dangerous. Trumpets blast us to a new dimension. Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 12 December 2023
This week our talk is an art one: eyes! We talk about how to draw them, adding meaning and expression, the way different cultures use them, different styles for doing eyes, reflection, shadow, focus and a million other things!
Eyes anchor a face, they're THE most important landmark because humans are instinctively drawn to them as are most other creatures because eyes are an ancient thing that connects most animals, not just mammals but birds, reptiles, fish, crustaceans, arthropods, arthropods, insects and more. And for this reason hiding eyes or blocking them or even removing them is a great indication of evil or that something is wrong. There are Soooo many ways of drawing them from simple dots, circles within circles, lines, or going full on with something more realistic.
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Tue, 5 December 2023
We're talking about parody and its evil twin satire. There are good parodies and bad ones but we feel the better parodies are the indirect ones that make fun of and exaggerate the theme or the vibe of something rather that simply doing a direct copy but with jokes; For example, Austin Powers and Kingsmen are indirect parodies of spy films, Blazing saddles is an indirect parody of Westerns, The Princess Bride and Shrek are indirect parodies of fairy tales, Galaxy Quest and the Orville (first season) are indirect parodies of TV SciFi shows etc. Direct parodies can be great too, like Spaceballs, or McGruber, but they run more of a risk of by relying on the fact that you've seen the original. Another main type pf of parody are the grab-bag ones that include direct parody scenes from all sorts of different IPs, these are probably the weakest of the type. Things like Hotshots, Meet the Spartans, and Not another teen Movie are good examples. Finally there's satire, which is parody with a point, sometimes those points are very sharp! satire uses parody to make clever comments, it's not just making fun of the tropes it uses. Good examples are The Life of Brian, and The Onion website, Whachtmen (the comic and movie), The Boys (TV series and comic). Horrible examples are the fake news sites that use “satire” as a defense when in reality they only exist to spread misinformation, propaganda and sell advertising.
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Tue, 28 November 2023
This Quackcast tackles the issue of AI comics on Drunk Duck. We're discussing either a ban or rules that would enable them to be posted under conditions. We also talk about AI generated imagery and the issues with it and well as its future and the relationship between it and artists. This is a very complicated and much misunderstood subject. First, there are two main types of generative AI: we'll call them ethical and non ethical. Ethical AI is trained using licensed and copyright free material. Non-ethical AI is trained using stolen material. The benefit of using ethically trained AI like the one Adobe created is that copyright isn't at issue and allows the creation of imagery that can actually be used commercially without problems. There are many myths about generative AI: 1. It allows a person with no skill to be able to create art: 2. The purpose of free unethically trained generative AI is to democratise the process of creation: 3. It's fair use, transformative art: 4. Just like any new process, photography or digital art etc: 5. The same things as sprite comics or fan art: 6: It's like an artist using references or taking inspiration: 7: It's Pandora's box. Once it's opened there's no going back: Conclusion:
Topics and shownotes Links Community discussion here: Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 21 November 2023
Well the culture of DD is strongly tied to our distant origins in 2002 back when we were formed, 21 years ago in the early days of the internet when things online were just getting good. Dylan Squires, aka Volte6, had some spare time and decided to invest it in creating a webcomic hosting site. Those weren't really a thing back then, there weren't even that many webcomics online back in 2002 and social media wasn't a thing yet either. Gen Xers and the older Millennials who started out on DD from the beginning didn't grow up with the internet or social media. They dived into the net and learned about it from it's early days in the 90s when they were in their 20s and 30s. This gave them a very different character to younger Millennials and Gen Z who're more embedded with the net because they grew up with a world bound by it. In particular social media has made people more extreme, partisan, tribal and more likely to be embedded in social bubbles because the algorithms used to encourage user participation and retention force people into social echo-chambers and push them towards extremest positions by only showing them things that elicit strong reactions. The original admin team on DD were all educated, professional young adults, with successful webcomics. All were North American. None were overly political or religious but they weren't anti-those things either. They were an accepting crowd with neutral views on most topics, back when the internet wasn't driven mainly by social media outrage and fake pop-culture wars. So they created a very welcoming and open community. The only other webcomic host at the time was the Keespace/Keenspot duopoly which ingrained a culture of “haves” and have-nots“: Keenspot were the picked few webcomicers who got to join the elite group with special privilege on the site while Keenspce consisted of everyone else. Many of the Keenspot creators actively looked down on the Keenspacers, so much so that they eventually changed the name of that part of their site to ”Comic Genesis" so they couldn't be confused with the Keenspot comicers. Drunk duck was a massive contrast to this! We vowed never to have a classist structure and to always stay egalitarian. Indeed the most skilled, professional, and established comicers on DD have always mixed freely with newbies and vice versa, everyone is always ready to help one another. Drunk Duck was always built around the idea of community. When Drunk Duck had its major collapse in about 2012 we lost a lot of users to other sites, mainly Comic Fury which had been created by one of our own disaffected people. They went there because it had a similar feel to us (since it was roughly based on us). It was founded by a younger Millennial so the social feel was quite different. At the stage a lot of the users who went there and stayed were younger Millennials because they had just been starting out and needed a stable host, they also hadn't been around on DD long enough to establish any sort of loyalty. So Comic Fury had a massive boost at that point and kept up the momentum eventually welcoming the young Gen Zers, while Drunk Duck had older Millennials and Gen Xers rejoining us. Hence DD always had a different, older, more neutral feel. Things move at a much slower place. We have to mention the massive corporate sites: Webtoon and Tapas. These places are what DD was set to be when Platinum comics brought us back in the mid 2000s. They had a bit of the Keenspace/Keenspot feel of haves and have-nots, they encourage a lot of users who's creative ideas are based on producing products. It's a very ambitious crowd and the work often veers towards a bit of a mainstream, unified blandness just by the nature of them being so large, successful and corporate driven. There's nothing wrong with that it's just the nature of those types of site and it's exactly what DD had started to become before them when we had the big money. So that's the reason we are how we are: a bunch of weirdos! When the other admins left and I was managing the site on my own I wanted to keep us how we were because I felt that's what our loyal people appreciated about us. So I engaged other admins who matched that vibe. I feel we've stayed pretty much the same since we were founded in 2002. What do you think? This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Magic Power Ball - Intense, driving, action oriented electronica that makes you want to dance. You’ll want to bop and move to this track. It’s a slow start but it picks up the pace quickly and takes you along for the ride! Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 14 November 2023
Stakes are a part of a story. What does a character want? What means the most to the character? What are they after, what do they care about? Stakes can be really subjective like that and they can also be objective and more universal like death, debt, a threat to a home, nation, planet or even the universe. The most important thing though is that you can communicate the value of those stakes to the audience! It doesn't actually matter WHAT the stakes are as long as the audience understands that they're important. Sooooo so many writers seem to have zero idea about that. One idea is that you need to “raise the stakes” in order to get the audience to be more invested, which certainly works but what a bad writer will always do is just crudely add onto the objective stakes: “Ten people were in danger but NOW it's 500! But wait… now it's 6000. OMG, now it's a million! Oh wow, the fate of the known universe hangs in the balance!”. The truth is that at a certain point it loses value, we just can't relate very well to bigger and bigger numbers and the “known universe” is an empty concept to most people. To really raise the stakes you have to pick things that the audience CAN care about and/or show that it's really affecting the characters in a way the audience can symbathise with.
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Tue, 7 November 2023
Multiverses are really popular in fiction right now, eg. Dr Strange into the mouth of Madness, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Flash, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Rick and Morty, and The Loki TV series (which I love). So what is a multiverse and why is it used? Basically when multiple universes coexist at the same time, either there are a few and they're widely different or they are infinite and every possibility exists. In the real world the idea of multiple universes is purely theoretical and a relatively minor part of various quantum physics theories, while in fiction it's an important tool for mashing together separate IPs that wouldn't normally fit together and also telling interesting stories with parallel elements and “what-if” scenarios. There are some obvious logical issues with the way a lot of multiverse ideas are presented in fiction, though the concept is clearly magical rather that scientific in the way it's used it should STILL have logical consistency in order to be plausibly believable. One of the biggest issues is that the multiverse is too anthropomorphic and deterministic: humans are far too important, different worlds are “created” when people do different things, and in most of the different world the same people, places, and events exist and even when they don't the same characters exist, ie. no matter which world or who it is there will always be a Spiderman. This idea wouldn't be supported be any multiverse theory. The easiest multiverse idea to use in fiction is the one where any random change produces a split and a new world. These random changes would NOT be whether you decide to go down a a different path because that is a very complex change an not in any way random, it'd be about simple particles in the quantum realm doing different things because those are the only truly random events. The trouble is this would happen incalculable times every femtosecond in every part of every new universe, but it WOULD produce infinite world worlds where many different possibilities exist. There would be many, many, many almost identical versions of the same world with no visible change at all, there would be many worlds with all sorts of small changes and big changes but still having the same events and people in them and there would be just as many worlds where everything is different and no people in them at all. The trouble is that the kind of changes would be more limited than we think despite the infinite nature of the world because “initial conditions” play a huge part. The thing about initial conditions is that if they're different the end result will never be the same no matter how many times the scenario runs, and you also can't accurately predict what the result will be at any point unless you know the initial conditions that generated it. What this means that time will play a huge part: the point a which the universes diverge is significant to the amount of change and the kind of changes that will happen. But these changes could only involve things that are possible- there couldn't be a universe where there is a version of you that was born a different sex or ethnicity for example because those changes would have to have happened too far back for the conditions to have resulted in YOU. Every time they would result in someone else quite different from you living in a scenario that was also very different. Eg. the initial conditions were different so the result can't be the same and the further back the changes happen the more divergent the result, regardless of the infinite nature of the variations. This also mean you can't have a version of New York where magic exists, or a version of earth where we have two suns or something huge like that. But a world where you have a beard, where you became an accountant instead, where you died in childbirth, where you won a Nobel prize at 21, or where you're evil and have a goatee etc are all possible. Anyway, what are you fave depictions of a multiverse and do you use multiverses in your work? This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to The New Butler - Portentous, epic, intriguing, glorious and really quite regal.The one proudly proclaims wealth and taste (a very rare combination in these crass days). It speaks of wide open rolling green grassed grounds and forests surrounding the lordly manor house, packed with partridge and pheasant for hunting…
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 31 October 2023
Happy Halloween! The time of spookiness and ghosts. Spooks messed up the cast so the sound quality is really bad I'm afraid, I tried to do what I could to fix it though.
How do you go with horror and did you dress up for Halloween? This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by History, An Intimate little epic fantasy - A royal fanfare trumpets the arrival of this epic beginning, hinting at gig things to come and adventure in mist shrouded lands of high mountains, deep valleys, and shaded forests.
Topics and shownotes Links This week we made our Patreon vids available free to all because we liked our costumes so much! First Halloween vid - https://www.patreon.com/posts/dd-patreon-vid-91934504 Second Halloween vid - https://www.patreon.com/posts/dd-patreon-vid-91932022
Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_659_-_Happy_Halloween_2023.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 3:00pm PDT
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Tue, 24 October 2023
We're chatting about the subject of musicals for this particular Quackcast. You might think this has nothing to do with webcomics but webcomic musicals popup from time to time, like The Black Parade on DD by Ashlee S.
Direct download: Quackcast_658_-_Marvelous_musicals.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 17 October 2023
Direct download: Quackcast_657_-_The_art_of_the_tease.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 10 October 2023
This Quackcast is a sequel to our Quackcast last week on alternative character growth, but instead of Star Wars this time we decided on Indiana Jones. It's a really interesting creative writing exercise, we think up a better, more interesting way of of growing and continuing an established character and their adventures.
Direct download: Quackcast_656_-_Character_Growth_2_Indiana_Jones.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 3 October 2023
Direct download: Quackcast_655_-_Alternative_Character_growth.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 26 September 2023
Today we're chatting about characters who're mainly based on tropes VS those that grow. You see this difference quite clearly in a lot of British comedy VS American comedy where characters are set up in certain ways, e.g. the nerd, the sassy one, the mature one etc- in British stuff they tend to revert to type, which is their most important trait, while in American stuff they tend to change and grow based on interactions and experiences. There are MANY exceptions though and one way isn't inherently better than the other.
Direct download: Quackcast_654_-_tropes_vs_character_growth.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 19 September 2023
Today we're talking about STAR TREK! Star Trek is a pretty influential piece of pop-culture. Most interesting to me is that it's a future that is NOT a dystopia. It's a large scale vision of a future world where everything is NOT terrible and collapsing in on itself. You can count those on one hand. It's worth talking about just because of that. Instead of taking the boring, tried and true dystopia route the creators of this world decided to explore a premise of “what happens when a world actually works?”.
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Tue, 12 September 2023
Our topic this week is making your characters individual, distinct and setting them apart through physical traits. In many mainstream superhero comics or manga the only difference between most characters is their outfit, hair, and skin tone. There are a few reasons for that but a big one is that it saves time if the artist doesn't have to change to much when they're drawing different characters. Professional arts work hard and have to work fast so things that make work faster and easier are needed. In our Patreon video we mainly talked about giving them different shaped boobs... A really great example of this sort of thinking is Steven Universe where characters are very physically distinct and certainly don't all follow the same old usual patterns.
Direct download: Quackcast_652_-_Physical_traits_that_set_characters_apart.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 5 September 2023
We're chatting about a couple of things today: the DD 2023 Awards which are in their completion faze now, and "strong" characters of any gender. Some people mistakenly think that so called "male" traits make a character strong: physical strength, anger, power, leadership, height, muscles, meanness etc not realising that none of these are male traits, they're JUST traits. The masculinity or femininity we assign them is all cultural. By combining a lot of these traits you often just end up making an unlikable dickhead. Character strength has more to do with how well realised the character is, how well they fit into their world, the effect they have on other characters, weather they're "active" or "passive" in a story. It's a complex subject and we go much deeper into it during the cast! How do you write "strong" characters? This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Boxdog - A contemplative, reflective, serious piano driven intro leads into a happy, pleasant pop-song, first as drums and a bass take over, then the process completes as lead duties are handed off to an electric guitar and the tune fully opens up!
Direct download: Quackcast_651_-_Strong_characters_of_any_gender_and_DD_awards_stuff.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 29 August 2023
There are a lot of things that only exist in fiction and really don't have any basis in reality and yet we THINK they do! It's just that fiction has done such a great job of making us believe this stuff and setting it up that it pretty much replaces reality. We focused on spies for our Patreon only video, and how the version we know from popculture in Kingsmen, Mission Impossible, James Bond, Chuck, and many other things is complete fiction.
Direct download: Quackcast_650_-_Fake_things_that_only_exist_in_pop-culture.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 22 August 2023
When you're drawing people in a webcomic one of the common ways to indicate gender is by outfits, but why are clothes gendered at all and is that a constant?
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Tue, 15 August 2023
This week's cast was an experiment and if it works out we'll do more! We came up with the idea for discussing a comic live on air, the hard part was choosing it, for that we settled on our trusty Kawaiidaigakusei to help us. She chose “Up the Pyramid” by BUDLO. And this was her rationale:
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Tue, 8 August 2023
We're having a chat about characters that differ from the source material and turn out crap because of it. Characters where the people adapting them didn't care, understand, or even take time to read the original stuff because they thought they knew better.
Direct download: Quackcast_647_-_characters_screwed_over_by_adapters.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 1 August 2023
Drawing fight scenes is damn hard! One of the best ways to deal with this is to use references, but that's hard too because it's a pain to find the ones you need! So today we're talking about making your own reference pics for fighting because that's what I just finished for Tantz- I stripped shirtless and wielded some of my many antique swords in fight poses for Tantz to use in her new fantasy webcomic.
Direct download: Quackcast_646_-_FIGHT_Drawing_and_references.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 25 July 2023
We're chatting about the current state of AI, it's use, abuse, and the moronic way it's typically being utalised by mid-level businesses to screw over creative people and save money in the short term.
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Tue, 18 July 2023
We're talking about the pop-culture myth of psychopaths and sociopaths and other stuff like serial killers. Yes those conditions do exist, well sort of (not exactly with those names), but the pop-culture versions we know from the media are mostly myths. The real things aren't as exciting or flashy as the versions we know and love/hate from movies, comic, books, TV shows and podcasts.
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Tue, 11 July 2023
With the release of the new Indiana Jones film comes some questions… We haven't seen it yet but we hear a lot of people don't like it and it's already being called a flop. But is that because it's actually bad, because people want it to be bad, or because it doesn't match people's expectations? What's the real story? It's hard to know at this point.
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Tue, 4 July 2023
Gatekeeping can be a pretty dickish practice… but not in every case.
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Tue, 27 June 2023
Injuries, especially to the head can be extremely bad but people are hit over the bonce and knocked out in popculture all the time. In violent sports like boxing or MMA it's often a goal, it's a common thing in games too, the “KO” is a staple. In TV shows, movies and comics it's seen as a kind way to deal with an enemy, people will even do it to their very best friends to protect them from going through with some scary activity, often knocking them out and tying them up and then taking their place or something. Knocking people out has become so memed that the fantasy version has replaced the real version and it's even influenced how we think about it.
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Tue, 20 June 2023
We base our images of aliens in comics on aliens in TV shows and movies mostly, because those are the ones we all know.
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Tue, 13 June 2023
Today's topic is Nudity: Nudity in comics, censorship, self censoring, what you can get away with on DD, ratings, nudity on other platforms and how it affects the reach of your work, and more!
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Tue, 6 June 2023
Beginners at webcomics make mistakes, rookie mistakes. In fact people tend to make a lot of the same mistakes and we're going to chat about some of those in the Quackcast, but there are certainly a LOT more!
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Tue, 30 May 2023
Rumours can be damaging stories deliberately spread to harm people, they can grow organically of their own accord. Salacious rumours replace truth and stick around in history, like the silly stories of Catherine the Great and horses, Nero fiddling while Rome burned, Marie Antoinette saying “let them eat cake”, or the famously wealthy Roman general Crassus dying by having molten gold poured on his head. All rumours and silly stories but they become stronger than real history.
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Tue, 23 May 2023
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Tue, 16 May 2023
We're talking about WAR here! Trying to leave out politics, though that's really hard with war because it's basically ALL politics but on fire. So we're talking mainly about depictions of it or at least aspects of it, in art and the media. Both Tantz Aerine and myself work on war comics, Without Moonlight and Pinky TA respectively (plus Tantz also does Brave Resistance with Pitface), so we have some knowledge of the subject from a creator perspective.
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Tue, 9 May 2023
Generational tensions are a cultural constant. It's popular to pick on the young and say they're lazy, irresponsible, stupid, changing things in silly ways etc, but it's also just as popular too defend them and debunk myths associated with younger people, we don't have that with older people and I find that a bit sad and disturbing. This cast tackles the myths associated with “boomers”.
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Tue, 2 May 2023
Asterix and Cleopatra VS Netflix… We were initially inspired by the furious reaction over Netflix's new series on Queen Cleopatra, a purported “documentary” and it's seeming focus on fantasy rather than history, but then we started thinking about the brilliant comic Asterix and how it handled history… It didn't pretend to be accurate, it's a comedy afterall, and yet it managed to retain a great level of veracity without taking too many liberties.
Direct download: Quackcast_633_-_Asterix_is_GOOD_history.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 25 April 2023
We finally gave in to temptation and just started chatting about Star Wars. For our Patreon video we were talking about the idea of pivotal pop-cultural landmarks that changed the cultural landscape in various ways. Star Wars definitely qualifies… but instead of finding other examples we just decided to indulge in a Star Wars only cast. We didn't do more than scratch the surface unfortunately though. It's a cool cultural phenomena and it's something we always refer back to when we talk about story structure. SO please bear with us as we indulge!
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Tue, 18 April 2023
What rights are people actually entitled to? That question is a lot bigger than you think!
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Tue, 11 April 2023
The Quackcast this week is about entitled bossy Karens. In fact it was originally going to BE “the Karencast” but the whole “Karen” thing is a bit sexist and pejorative. So why a Quackcast on overly entitled people then? Well aside from we stealing it from Tantz's newspost on Friday, those kinds of people make great minor villain characters. They can be comic relief baddies but they can also be deceptively dangerous when they really DO have connections to back up their arrogance!
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Tue, 4 April 2023
Have you ever watched a series devotedly then lost touch with it for some reason for a while and then gone back to it a couple of years later and tried to get into again but this time you look at it with a very different perspective? Or maybe you loved a movie when you were young and decided to watch it again as an adult to see if it holds up?
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Tue, 28 March 2023
We're talking about the importance of a good cover in this cast. Another technical comicscast! I love making coves, they're one of my fave things because I get to stretch my artistic muscles and get a little more flashy and creative with my art and graphic design. They can also be pretty dread things to work on when you've used up all your creative powers on your actual comic and have nothing left over…
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Tue, 21 March 2023
Today its another technical comics making focused cast, suggested by Tantz Aerine! We cover our notions about how to maintain character consistency and consistency in general, plus a bit on speech bubbles and the text in them. I was SOOPER tired towards the end though so I wasn't all there mentally but the guys carried it through admirably.
Direct download: Quackcast_627_-_Character_consistency_and_speech_bubble.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 14 March 2023
Today we talk about an unusual type of villain, a secret type of bad guy and a particularly nasty one: the person who maliciously does nothing. This is a person who COULD intervene to resolve a dire situation or save someone, they could do it easily; they know how, they have the means, they're not scared or unsure, and it doesn't mean much risk to themselves, they just choose to sit back and watch the person die or the situation collapse… either because they know the result will benefit themselves or they're just curious to watch the person die or the everything turn to crap for the victim or whatever. Either way they COULD easily intervene but they choose not to.
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Tue, 7 March 2023
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Tue, 28 February 2023
HPKomic is a great guy, he's been on DD since almost the beginning. He alternates the Friday newsposts with me, he focusses on the intricacies of comic panels. This time he asked people to talk about their own processes though and I thought this would be a good topic for a Quackcast!
Direct download: Quackcast_624_-_Comic_panel_creation.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 21 February 2023
Arrogance is a fun subject. Related to cockiness, hubris, assertiveness, self confidence and pride.
Direct download: Quackcast_623_-__Arrogance_vs_humility.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 14 February 2023
This is when the writer leads you to think something big has happened in the story, like a character dying or falling in love or winning a big prize or something, only to have the character alive in the next part, or the prize or love never mentioned or addressed- this is “schmuck bait”.
Direct download: Quackcast_622_-_Whaddaya_take_me_for.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 7 February 2023
Toxic positivity can take all sorts of forms, but I think it's most easily recognised by someone telling you to be happy about something when you just don't feel it. It's a really odd, nasty, weird feeling when a person tells you you're basically not allowed to be grumpy or even neutral, you MUST be happy. How many times have we all been told to “smile” by someone?
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Tue, 31 January 2023
My idea was to talk about social pariah characters, people who it's socially acceptable to laugh at, despise, or even hate. They can be the uncool people, the dorks, the dags, the idiots, the overweight, the ugly, the old, the out of touch, the over the hill… On the extreme end they could be monsters and criminals. Generally they're written pretty two dimensionally as a collection of cliches, but when the writing goes beyond that to lend them humanity is when it goes to the next level.
Direct download: Quackcast_620_-_losers_are_human_too.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 24 January 2023
Talking about AI again but this time our subject is different: Does it have a negative influence on culture?
Direct download: Quackcast_619_-_Artificial_culture.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 17 January 2023
The Saying goes that The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence. Envy and jealously are destructive, negative feelings that either lead to bad outcomes or just make you feel pretty crappy. It especially affects creators! We get down about our artwork, our writing, the popularity of someone else's comic etc and we wish WE were as good as them and wonder why we aren't… maybe we're just not as good? If we could only just have their talent, their luck, their skill then WE'D be awesome too. it's just not fair…
Direct download: Quackcast_618_-_The_grass_is_always_Greener.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 10 January 2023
Adventure is a fun genre! Not as many things get made for it these days but it used to be hugely popular in the past. It's one of my favourite genres and this is what we're chatting about for the Quackcast. What IS adventure? I think it usually involves a whole lot of different things like exploration, action, discovery, heroic protagonists, rivals, travel, exotic places, fights etc. It can be set in the past or in the modern day. Good examples are The Mummy, Indiana Jones, the original Tomb Raider, the two new Jumanji films, Strange World, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ducktales, Tailspin, Jungle Cruise, Uncharted and so much more. I'd love to know your faves!
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Tue, 3 January 2023
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Tue, 27 December 2022
Happy Life Day! Hahaha!
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Tue, 20 December 2022
Inspired by Banes we did a Quackcast on SUPER TEAMS! You know those groups like the Justice League, the Avengers, the Suicide Squad, or even Monkey, Pigsy, and Sandy from The Journey to the West (Monkey Magic is my fave version). These are super powerful characters on their own but together they're even more awesome because their strengths and weakness complement each other in interesting ways. DD had its very own super team in the form of the Heroes Alliance, where a lot of DD creators got together to work on a shared universe. And back in the 2000s DD had a “Civil War” even with Keen Space (AKA Comic Genesis), where a huge number of our creators and theirs participated in something like a DC Vs Marvel crossover battle.
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Tue, 13 December 2022
The 1930s were quite a uniquely influential time for a number of reasons. The 1930s were the very last days of the old world before the new one was born in the apocalypse of the 1940s. Old empires, kings, colonialism- forces that had shaped the planet for decades were about to be shattered for the good, thankfully. New technologies were on a rapid rise as things were spiraling closer and closer to global war, Air travel was becoming a reality even as the old ocean liners were still the main means of transportation connecting the continents, people were building cites around the realities of car travel. Cinema had changed drastically with the advent of the talkies. and so much more!
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Tue, 6 December 2022
There are times when you need to give your brain a bit of a break, that's when comfort shows come in handy! Movies and TV shows you can watch again and again- you can appreciate them every time and they don't get old. The tension never gets too much for you because you already know what's going to happen. You can just relax and enjoy the familiar story, revelling in the company of characters you know and visiting their world once more. They're great for creating to as well because you don't have to worry about missing anything important.
Direct download: Quackcast_612_-__Comfort_food_for_the_brain.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 29 November 2022
Doppelgängers was the subject of our Quackcast today. What are they? Generally they're evil duplicates of people. Originally if you saw one it was supposed to be a portent of impending doom, but they've since evolved through pop-culture to be mirror people who envy the originals and want to kill them and replace them. There are MANY other kinds of Doppelgängers too now: Future versions of people, clones, robots, virtual copies, alternate universe versions, spirits, demons, helpful lookalikes, and more.
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Tue, 22 November 2022
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, so the saying goes but it's absolutely true. There is a layered subjectivity to it based on personal preference, the cultural standards of your community, the ethnic traits of you and your peers, prevailing global fashions in appearance, the dominant archetypes in the media and so on. All these things combine to form our personal subjective ideas of beauty. You can see this yourself if you look at paintings, statues, masks, frescoes and other artifacts that have been produced by all the diverse cultures on earth over thousands of years: there IS no standard, eternal, objective of beauty.
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Tue, 15 November 2022
So how do you like comedy that makes you cringe? You know that really awkward humour where you feel embarrassed for those involved and almost in physical pain for them? You feel really bad for them… It could be cruel pranks, or jokes based on lies or misunderstandings that are just carried way too far. Personally I find them hard to take. It CAN be great like in the original version of The Office, but even that was REALLY hard to watch at times.
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Tue, 8 November 2022
There are all kinds of relationships and they're great fodder for stories. The most typical is when two characters are getting INTO a relationship- all that will they/wont they stuff. But characters could also be ending a relationship, or maybe ending one in order to get into another, they could even be in a stable, long term relationship, although those aren't quite as common in media. My favourites are the ones where sex and attraction isn't a factor: relationships between family members, co-workers, friends etc. For some reason when it's platonic I find that a lot more compelling than sexual tension, especially when there would normally be the potential for sex- i.e. two unrelated compatible people with the same sexual and gender preference.
Direct download: Quackcast_608_-__Lovers_and_other_things.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 1 November 2022
Happy Halloween! Our topic is horror Sci-Fi. Sc-Fi brings with it a whole lot more interesting things you can do with horror and scary stories and there are so many great examples, from the worlds of HP Lovecraft, Alien franchise, Dead Space, Doom, Warhammer 40K, Event Horizon, the Cell, the SCP universe and more. We were inspired by Bane's newspost about horror and technology and all the cool responses he had. What's your fave horror SciFi?
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Tue, 25 October 2022
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Tue, 11 October 2022
When creating fiction we always have to stylise experience in many and various ways in order to communicate with the viewer in a way that's meaningful to them because it's usually impossible to simply show them the exact reality of something and expect that same meaning to carry through.
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Tue, 4 October 2022
We are talking about the trope of the Cad, AKA the Player. F***boys are their little scrappydoo kid-brothers, we call them “fun” boys for obvious reasons… It's a fun trope which is often exaggerated for comedic effect but actually comes from a very real thing! There are a lot of famous pop-culture versions though like Barney Stinson, Pepe Le Pew, James Bond, and The Continental.
Direct download: Quackcast_603_-_Players_Cads_and_fun_boys.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 27 September 2022
What happens when the victim becomes the victor? Most of the time it's like the classic line from The Who “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss”, typically revolutions (and elections), that promise change don't really deliver, the new people use it as a chance to get revenge on their enemies, take advantage of things the same as the last guys, and do everything they can to cling to power. The true exceptions are rare and special, i.e. Vaclav Havel and the Velvet revolution.
Direct download: Quackcast_602_-_Its_my_turn_now_bitches.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 20 September 2022
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Tue, 13 September 2022
There's a lot of buzz about so called AI generated art at the moment using programs like Dall-E, Neural blender, Dream studio lite and so on. People use text prompts, i.e. “flying clockwork fish balloon” and the AI generates “art” based upon that. It usually does this by using actual art and photography created by real people, and visually mixing them to create a new image. Some results are much better than others.
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Tue, 6 September 2022
Source material is something that we can love and respect, but it's just as often disregarded, degenerated, and denigrated, especially these days where it seems like everything you see is an adaptation or even an adaptation OF an adaptation or worse. I think it's important to go back to the sources so you can see what was truly great about the original to begin with. It can help you see what was lost in the adaptations and to discover new and important meanings and ideas that you never would have guessed at.
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Tue, 30 August 2022
What makes a character two dimensional? What makes them three dimensional? Does it matter that they only have two dimensions to them? This was an idea that GeekyGami posed and so we thought we'd explore it in the cast. My own theory is that a character that is purely archetypal, tropeish, or cliche, with everything about them flowing from that archetype, and they never go beyond their archetypal traits- that makes them 2D.
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Tue, 23 August 2022
Today we're talking about a technique in storytelling that we're calling the “revelation”. Inspired by Banes doing an article on the weird trope in movies of having a character discover newspaper stories about the villain that suddenly reveal the true stakes of the story and kick things into high gear. There are other types of revelation in stories though and they're used in different ways.
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Tue, 16 August 2022
Leaders are not born, they're created… literally in the case of fiction, created by creators of comics, books, movies, and other media! For this Quackcast I was inspired by two things: a video on Leader Characters by the satirical YouTube channel Terrible Writing Advice, and the Disney movie Lightyear, in which the lone wolf classical hero figure learns how to lead.
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Tue, 9 August 2022
How do you describe your work to sell it to people? Writing blurbs is a real skill! You generally have to avoid doing these four things: Underselling, Overselling, Selling the wrong story, or Revealing too much. It's quite a tricky balance to master. I've been writing feature blurbs for comics here on DD for many years now (about 16), so I've developed a technique but even I haven't mastered it!
Direct download: Quackcast_595_-_Oversold_to_the_Moon.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 2 August 2022
The Manchild can be a fun character or they can be pathetic. They're a staple of comedies because they're an adult that gets to act immature and childish, without the restraint and responsibilities imposed by adulthood. This can make a great contrast; “The adult man acting like an immature child”, John C Riley and Will Farrel have always done that extremely well, as did Chris Farley back in the 90s. It can be be portrayed as pathetic and sad when the person can't seem to be able grow up or take on any responsibilities. They're often characterised by people with “childish” interests, like the cast of the Big Bang Theory, or with a childlike love of something like sports like Kevin in Kevin can F Himself.
Direct download: Quackcast_594_-_Grow_up_Or_dont....mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 26 July 2022
The risks of online creative success
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Tue, 19 July 2022
History is happening faster now. With the growth of universal high speed communication and cheap world travel, culture and technology move at unprecedented speeds. Because of these factors the rate of change is different to what it was at any time in the past. This is an objective and verifiable truth rather than subjective perception: the current speed and quality of global communication has never been possible before and that has ramifications for how the world changes.
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Tue, 12 July 2022
The Superhero movie cast last week was popular, I wanted to chat to Tantz about different types of superheroes. We all know that the same kinds of superheroes seem to popup and reoccur in multiple forms all the time, even within the same worlds, i.e god-like superheroes like Superman, Captain Marvel, Omni-man, Homelander, or Magical types like Doctor Strange, Zatana etc. It was a fun chat about all the categories and subcategories we could think about!
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Tue, 5 July 2022
I wanted to do an easy and fun one this week and just chat about our fave superhero movies, starting with our firsts! For me and Banes it was Superman with Christopher Reeve. It's a real classic, full of positivity, hope, and optimism, all with bright colours and classic iconic imagery… In that way it's a bit like many of the Marvel films and the more popular DC offerings like Aquaman and WonderWoman, but without the overbuilt and over-defined muscles!
Direct download: QUACKCAST_590_-_Fave_Superhero_Movies.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 28 June 2022
A and B stories… And C, and D etc. It seems that it's more popular than ever to have stories with multiple concurrent threads. This is when you have a main story and a bunch of other sub stories all happening at the same time. These might come together at the end of the story or they might peter out. We don't get many stories just made with just an A-plot and nothing else these days.
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Tue, 21 June 2022
Sometimes it's worth revisiting old ideas because you can do them better or explore them deeper. This could be in the form of a full reboot, or it could be as simple as reusing a pose in a panel or using the same theme again like Pixar does with 90% of their output i.e. “coming of age”. Like them you don't need to feel obligated to always do something totally original, revisiting old ideas is a great way to refine them, create better work, or explore different aspects of them you hadn't considered before and put new and interesting spins on things. Consider that Pixar's Turning Red, Encanto, Moana, Coco, The Incredibles 2, Ratatouille, Inside Out, Brave, Onward, and Luca all share the same “coming of age/childhood independence” theme and yet all do it in unique and original ways, exploring different aspects of the idea from all sorts of angles.
Direct download: QUACKCAST_588_-_Revisiting_Old_Ideas.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 14 June 2022
Our very own Tantz made a newspost last week about the idea of “Heroes” who are really villains… or at least they're actually villains who think they're the hero, but come to realise that they aren't. Sometimes that makes them change their ways and they seek redemption, maybe even becoming a true hero. Sometimes they just lean into and embrace their true villain nature.
Direct download: QUACKCAST_587_-_Heroes_who_are_Villains.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 7 June 2022
How do you keep on with your creative output when something happens to you? When you lose function or are impaired in some way, how do you adapt or relearn so you can keep on as you were before? Maybe you can't and have to change to another medium that's a better fit for your abilities? Comic creator Bravo1102 once talked about how he moved from drawing to using action figures to make his comics partially because of his eyesight. My own eyesight has suddenly started to go bad and I'm having to adapt to that, and Tantz tells us how her deteriorating eyesight forced her to work digitally.
Direct download: QUACKCAST_586_-_Working_with_disability.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 31 May 2022
Adaptations of one thing into another is an interesting process. What's lost, what's gained, what modifications do you have to do to make it happen? As webcomicers we do it all the time in many ways, we have to adapt our influences into ideas, adapt those to stories, and adapt those to images and comics, which isn't trivial! It's often quite difficult to transform the written word into narrative sequential art- what portion of the writing gets directly turned into images, what's cut, and what becomes dialogue? For me about 20% is cut, 78% becomes art and 2% becomes dialogue or captions.
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Tue, 24 May 2022
We start off with the idea of talking about art techniques, tips and tricks we've mastered and could help people with but the cast turned into a discussion about drawing male and female characters- also trans, androgynous, etc. There's an art to representing gender in imagery! It's super important to remember that the way we see gender in art is mainly culture based rather than an innate biological reaction and the perception of gender in art is different according to your cultural background. It's basically a visual language that everyone learns, but as an artist you have to learn to actually “speak” it, and that's not as straight forward as you think.
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Tue, 17 May 2022
Spoiler- we don't actually talk much about Yu-Gi-Oh! But I feel it's a good example of a pretty bad story- a so-bad-it's-good story, but bad nevertheless. The idea we're talking about here is that it's useful to look at bad stories and stick with them because they can really help you write better. They're a lot more useful than good stories because you'd rather just enjoy those and it's a bit harder to examine them for technical details, but with “bad” stories the faults stand out strongly. Instead of simply dismissing a bad story or making fun of it, it's more useful and valuable to try and “fix” it: try and work out why it seems bad and think about what would be needed to make it better, then think about how that applies to your own work. Maybe you're actually making many of the same mistakes?
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Tue, 10 May 2022
Let's go forward in time to the past so we can get back to the future and kill our grandfather and be our own ancestor while we step on a bug and change the course of evolution 200 million years in the future and doom the Morlocks to a date with Doctor Who, while Bill and Ted drive a Delorean in the Old West and save Fry's dog as it waits out the front of the Pizza place… Time travel is fun to talk about, but it's easy to mess up because paradoxes in plots pop up all over the place as timelines intersect and cross over and over, getting tangled and logically prevent events that have already happened from happening!
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Tue, 3 May 2022
David's always right - Introducing Hpkomic! Hpkomic has been with DD since the earliest days, he's a comic artist, writer, English teacher, and podcaster. He even participated in the second comicbook challenge that Platinum held way back in the day when they controlled DD, and came second! He was part of many community events, like the Drunk Duck Civil War (the DD answer to the comic book Marvel Civil War) and DD VS Comic Genesis, which was the DC Vs Marvel of Webcomics! In fact he has the oldest post on this version of the DD forums! After the site was fully deleted at the end of 2005, he was the first person back who commented with an offer of help to get things back online again. Bonus points if you can find it.
Direct download: QUACKCAST_581_-_Davids_always_right.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 26 April 2022
The full team is assembled yet again! Tantz came up with the idea of having a look at fantasy worlds in fiction that have strong ties with the “real world” and how they function together. Her main example was the world of Harry Potter which has many strong connections to the real world and yet manages to stay very well hidden, which stretches plausibility a bit. The World of Casandra Clare's Mortal Instruments is similar in that regard, it's deeply tied to the mundane world and yet it stays hidden from it to a degree that isn't really possible.
Direct download: QUACKCAST_580_-_Fantasy_worlds_crossing_over.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 19 April 2022
The DD Awards have come around again and now it's time for you to join in! To start with there's the red carpet event! Simply draw your characters showing up to the awards ceremony, submit it to Tantz and get on board with the awards! There's a link bellow… The DD Awards are a fantastic community even that we've been running on the site for years and years. It's a great way to get more eyes on your comic and increase your community presence. All you have to do is join in, create comic pages on the awards theme featuring your characters in the various events and things and you're part of it. Like most awards ceremonies it's not really about who's best or most popular or whatever, it's about participation, making your work visible to people, raising your profile, and getting eyes on you! To that end the red carpet event is up first, get in on that and make a start with the awards! No new theme this week so a instead a reprise of Gunwallace's theme to Freddy Reno Went Missing - A relaxing day in the warm sun at the beach. The smell of sunscreen on skin and salt air tinged with a pungent hint of seaweed. This music rolls in like a pleasant breeze, washing away negativity with its easy, jazzy, calming sounds. Sit back, sink into the warm white sands, let them cushion you as the heat of the sun melts away your worries. Topics and shownotes Links How to be a part of the red carpet event - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2022/apr/08/participate-in-the-dd-awards-red-carpet/ The DD Awards comic event - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Drunk_Duck_Awards_2022/ Featured comic: Freddy Reno Went Missing - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2022/apr/11/featured-comic-freddy-reno-went-missing/ Featured music: Freddy Reno Went Missing - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Freddy_Reno_Went_Missing/ - by OrGiveMeDeath_Ind, rated M. Special thanks to: Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/ Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/ VIDEO exclusive! Become a subscriber on the $5 level and up to see our weekly Patreon video and get our advertising perks! - https://www.patreon.com/DrunkDuck Even at $1 you get your name with a link on the front page and a mention in the weekend newsposts! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: QUACKCAST_579_-_2022DD_Awards_begins.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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Tue, 12 April 2022
BANES RETURNS! …to talk about boobs with the rest of us. The topic of the discussion this week was brought to us by Tantz's newspost on the 2nd of April about bosoms and how their shape and size doesn't matter. In the crusade against “sexualisation” in comics people tend to focus too much on big or “unnaturally shaped” boobs, but the truth is that any type of boobs can be fetishized and by reacting against one type you just cause a new form of exclusion.
Direct download: QUACKCAST_578_-_Punching_toys_in_the_boobs.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PDT
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