Tue, 2 December 2025
Today it's sort of a fun one, we're talking about avatars that people use to represent themselves when they communicate online. It's an important part of communication because it influences how we represent ourselves and how we relate to others. I've been on Drunk Duck over 20 years and in that time I've had many different avatars as I've changed my role on the site and chosen to represent myself in different ways. The same with Tantz Aerine and Banes, as well as our avatars for Google, Twitter/X, Facebook, and all other social media. Over time many corporate interests have seen the value of people's need for avatars and they've sort to co-opt it and market in opportunistic and cynical ways. The most typical is to limit your choice of avatars to images they have licenses for so they can advertise, like Netflix and Disney Plus. Another common way to do it is Snapchat's method and something Meta tries when you create a “3D” avatars that are roughly based on yourself, dressed in items of clothing they create, with hairstyles and facial expressions etc. they they offer so that you have a limited illusion of personalisation and representation. Their goal is to hopefully make you buy special features for that avatar to make you stand out more. Personally I hate anything that takes away true freedom of expression. It goes much further than that though: the whole reason why Meta (owner of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and more), is even called “Meta” is because their ultimate goal was to change the internet so we all communicate via a 3D interface with 3D avatars to represent us all, with clothing and designs that were bought via NFPs. Test versions of that were already in place before it ultimately failed, but not before people spent quite a bit of money on their silly character's appearances. How did YOU come to use your particular avatar and how long have you been using it? Do you use art you've created, a selfie photo, or something you saved from your online activities? This week Gunwallace game us a lovely musical theme to - Destruction Inc - A hidden, mysterious, technical, cyber world with code and sparkling neural pathways… this electronic tune is quite intimidating and alien though the notes of a piano serve to humanise it, as does the driving beat.
Links Next week: Blending improvisation with solid story plotting/structure as you carry on drawing a comic. Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 25 November 2025
We chat about how your characters evolve over the years. Webcomics are typically projects that extend over many years or even decades, slowly evolving as they go. Your characters change over that time due to all sorts of factors: you forget how to draw them between pages (I've done that so many times), you want to try out new things or popular styles, you use the wrong references, you change how you feel about certain things, or you change how you write them for various reasons. For me I've been drawing my character Pinky since the late 90s, Pinky has been going for 27 years now in various forms and the characters in Bottomless Waitress have been around for over 10 years. In those comics I now take months between drawing new pages so it's easy to forget how I'm suppose to draw them, I have to look up the last 4 pages every time and research how they're supposed to look, I remember most of it but it's easy to get details wrong. Because of that the characters evolve over time when I make little mistakes that become embedded and then reiterated. Other changes happen when I just decide I don't like older styles and want to try new things: less cartoony, more cartoony, more realistic, more manga influenced, more painterly etc. Pinky and the rest of the characters in her comic have gone through so many changes over the years and I'm grateful that the webcomic format allows me to have that freedom. Bottomless Waitress is a collaboration with Banes so I don't change the writing of the characters, but I change the look of them just as much and experiment with new styles. I do not understand how ANY of their hairstyles work so those change slightly all the time because of that. Character bibles would help but who has time for that crap? haha! How have your characters changed and why?
Next week we'll be talking about Avatars and selfies self images.
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_767_-_Character_evolution.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 18 November 2025
This cast is about supporting the individual and interesting creator in the face of crappy, generic Ai produced slop. Because individuality, human mistakes, and human weirdness are so much more interesting than averaged out, smoothed down, generic pablum that's produced by “generative” Ai. I must apologise though because I slept through the usual Quackcast time (I was sick), and it took my brave, loyal and helpful cat almost 2 hours to finally wake me up and get me ready for the cast! So my brain wasn't fully awake and I was a dopey ditz for most of the cast. Gunwallace joined our crew for this cast. He's always a welcome member to the team. These big Ai models work by stealing text and images from all over the place and giving us averaged out versions of them. The text and images they churn out are typically bland and often wrong because they are an average of both bad and good information that are delivered in an entirely overconfident manner. AI is a great real-time example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. The blandness is key though- this is why as a creator you shouldn't feel disheartened, the novelty and creativity of you work is still wake makes it interesting in the face of all this generic glurge. As Ai use increases, genuine creatives will adapt to it and make it their own as just another of their tools. The people who think they can replace creatives will be disabused of that fantasy just like they were with things like photography and synthesisers: Photography didn't replace the artist like people feared, good photos still take a lot of skill, experience, talent, and training to produce. Synthesisers didn't replace musicians, you still needed to know what you're doing to make music with them. Ai is much the same in that the generic images and text produced by inane “prompts” are generic garbage based on stolen content and the more they're produced the more generic people will see them to be, unless true creatives come along who know how to manipulate them to produce interesting things instead of simply simulacra of interesting things. It is already starting with people who forgo Ai trained with stolen IP and instead use their own work for the training models. And to a much lessor extent for people who use prompted Ai creations as the basis for further creative work of their own. In the mean time though fully creator produced work will always have value. This week we have a best-off Gunwallace - Awfully decent fellows - JAMES FREAKIN’ BOND. That's all I originally wrote. This is one of my faves that I often listen to.
Links
Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_766_-_The_importance_of_drawing_earnest-ly.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 11 November 2025
In the immortal words of Banes: “I don't draw blood unless I have to!” Takoyama is the creator of the comic Thrudd Goddess of Thunder, which the Quackcast theme song by Gunwallace is based on. In my own main comic, Pinky TA, originally my thoughts were that there would be nothing that was off-limits. If I wanted to draw it I would, if the story called for it I would… No matter how bad, no matter how unfamiliar I was with the subject, no matter how hard it was to draw or how long it took or how much I didn't like doing it: fight scenes, complicated architecture, weird cameos, complex costumes, complex mecha, using a toilet, sex, eating, sitting around a meeting table, animals etc. I've since moderated my feelings about that after many years. Staying within ratings has benefits and taking extra time drawing hard or boring things isn't fun. One of the things I've always avoided in my comic work is Manga style and chibi figures because I have no confidence in my abilities for those, I have tried and the best I can do is an uncanny valley version that looks extra bad. What features in the current skyscraper ad was a version of Sailor Moon in my own style (which was part of a meme at the time) I'll make that the cover image- that's not really me doing manga, it's me doing my interpretation of it because I can't do it. What are some of the things you avoid drawing? Stuff about Trump, religion? Toilet use, bands singing on stage, people sitting around a meeting table, heavy gore scenes, people eating, cameos, chibi, manga, your OWN face?
Topics and shownotes Links Forum inspiration: Things Undrawn https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/180148/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 4 November 2025
Imagine a spherical cow… That's an old physics joke about how perfect mathematical models often don't fit with reality. You have to simplify and abstract things. People wrongly imagine that the universe is built out of maths and think that natural phenomena follow the laws of physics in an elegant way… this is not quite true, mathematical models and physical laws are abstractions and simplified models that sort of match with reality but never completely because the macro scale reality we experience is ultimately the result of what happens on the quantum level and the relationship between those two is very hard to figure out. We HAVE to simplify concepts in order to communicate about them, the trouble is that this leads to errors and stupid ideas because people base their reasoning on those simplified versions of concepts. You get a lot of dumb ideas that are based on a kernel of truth but aren't really true and become more false the more you try and use them in the real world, like: you get tetanus from rust, heat rises, you can get a cold from going to bed with wet hair or standing in the rain, gender is simply male or female, comics and cartoons are just for kids etc. This has always interested me because we have a lot of idiotic ideas that are common in culture and I've always wondered where they come from and why they hang around- it's not because people are stupid, it's because communication requires us to shorten things down. The trouble comes when we don't allow for that and just take those simple versions as if that's all there is to it. Like people who get tetanus vaccinations whenever they get scratched with something rusty for example- Tetanus is horrible and can kill you but rust doesn't cause it; rather it's a bacteria that lives in soil, usually around animal dung, so places like farms. The reason people think rust is a source is because rusty nails that have been in the ground on a farm will cut you and will most likely give you tetanus, but so will a stick, a bit of bone, or even a cut caused by ANYTHING at all that you happen to get dirt in. You will probably never get tetanus from scratch from anything rusty in an old workshop, on the road, at the beach and so on. Most people's ideas about evolution are wrong: it's not about “survival of the fittest” or simple things to complex things or about progress towards a goal or perfection, there's no such thing a “the next strep in evolution” or something that is “more evolved” than something else. Evolution is the process of change over time driven by circumstance- that is a simplified explanation but more accurate than some others. Changes that work better in certain situations can hang around and influence further change. They're not part of a positive progression, in fact they can lead to extinction for many reasons. In the Quackcast we try and take this topic back to fiction, covering ideas like “cartoons are just for kids”. This idea probably stems from the success of Disney and how strongly that was tied to cartons, comics and children's entertainment with Micky Mouse, Donald Duck, Snow White etc. Cartoons and comics were never just for kids in any period, there have always been comics addressing adult concepts like political commentary, eroticism, propaganda, military training and proper weapons usage, and just general adult humour. A survey or anything from Warner Bothers Loony Tunes from the 40s and 50s clearly shows that. The trouble comes when unthinking people let kids have access to any cartoon or comic without supervision or oversight. Or when they try and make rules about comics and cartoons based on the idea that they're “just for kids”. Have you been the victim of poor reasoning because someone based their ideas on simplified concepts? Or do you believe them yourself? This week we have a best-off Gunwallace and this time it's the theme to the music we use for our intro - Thrud Goddess Of Thunder - Big fat beats and an epic sound! This one really brings the thunder! It’d be great as the intro tune to a professional wrestling match. It builds anticipation perfectly and really slams home and delivers on its promises. Epic sounds!
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_764_-_The_problem_with_simplification.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 28 October 2025
Happy Halloween! This North American tradition of dressing up for October has spread around the world and we on the Quackcast acknowledge that by dressing up and joining in with the fun! Us in costume will be in a freely viewable video to anyone that looks at our Patreon this week, you don't have to be paid subscribers. I am a skull-faced Mariachi because I have a great skull mask and a pretty awesome authentic tailored charro suit and wide sombrero, Tantz is a magical steampunk vampire in fantastic makeup, a vintage hat and gothic coat, and Banes is a creepy Pennywise screencap haha! See us here: https://www.patreon.com/DrunkDuck on our Patreon vid for this week! When I was a little kid growing up in Australia back in the day Halloween was this strange thing you ONLY saw on American TV shows, usually part of the storyline for seasonal episodes. When it started coming here I, like a lot of people, resisted it because it seemed like obnoxious cultural imperialism… but I've accepted it since because the dressing up part is obviously fun. In the Quackcast we chat about dressing up and some horror stuff. I watched both Scary Movie 1 and Scary Movie 2 for the cast to get into the feel of things. I had never seen them before! Despite being parody comedy movies I still found the killings in the first movie pretty disturbing most of the time and it just seemed like a normal horror movie in a lot of ways but with brighter lighting and dumber jokes (I actually found Heredity much funnier and less horrific). The second film was a much broader comedy, which was pretty silly in many ways but the jokes were also better done, especially the reconstructed skeleton scene. What are your fave horror comedies? And what will you dress up as for Halloween? This week Gunwallace has given us the musical theme to - Le French Ninja - This strikes me as saucy French take on the videogame inspired theme to Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. It has the sidescroller beat-em-up 8 bit feel, but it’s cooler somehow, wearing a beret and a black turtleneck.
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 21 October 2025
We start off with a bit of a satirical interview where Banes and Tantz attempt to interrogate me over the slowness of the updates to the site. Banes asks the easy questions and Tantz hits me with a far more adversarial approach, I counter with all sorts of deflections like an annoying modern politician in order to show how people handle conflict. Here's Banes' explanation for his idea for the topic: We also use our own comic characters to explore the idea and examine how THEY cope with conflict. How do your characters cope with conflict? This week Gunwallace has given us a featured theme to - Lavender - A chill, reflective, and somewhat triumphant piano heavy tune that slowly builds up and up into a positive resolve, like an explosion of water in a beautiful fountain.
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: Comics mentioned: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 14 October 2025
In this Quackcast we're chatting about the massively overblown impression that forensic science has in modern pop-culture media and how that can even affect reality when unscrupulous prosecutors use the public's misguided faith in “expert witnesses” and TV influenced ideas of the infallibility of forensic science to influence and sway juries when they shouldn't. Our perspectives (the Quackcasters), on this are fallible and limited because none of us are legal experts or forensic scientists of course, so we tried to focus on the pop culture stuff rather than real world examples too much. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was really responsible for massively popularising the importance of forensic science in popular culture. The search icon that is EVERYWHERE is the magnifying glass which has zero to do with “searching”, it's only in use because it comes from the image of Sherlock Holmes and his use of that device to look for forensic evidence in the form of fingerprints among other things. These days there are so many shows where forensic science is the main driving factor in all criminal investigations: Handwriting examination, bullet striations, DNA, Blood splatter patterns, wound examination, bone injuries, facial reconstruction of skulls, voice pattern recognition, polygraph tests, fingerprints, blood type, body language and facial expression examination, traces of hair and fibres, and so on and so on. What they don't tell you is that many of those things have a massive failure rate, some are completely unreliable, and some don't even work at all, but according to popular media all of them are absolutely infallible. In reality not even eye witnesses are completely reliable and all these methods (the ones that actually work), are only used in conjunction with many others as prompts to further investigation, NOT to prove guilt on their own as they're often shown in pop-culture. They don't really even build a case, they just tell you where you should probably look so you can put together a timeline, establish where a person was, discover new people to talk to and establish the veracity of their story. Do you know any examples of silly, overblown use of forensic science in pop-culture? Or examples in the real world even? Another best-off from Gunwallace and this week it's - Fox Academy - Mysterious detective music. That's all I had written from when it was first aired! Haha! It's pretty much that though and it fits with our subject this week.
Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 7 October 2025
It's October and so it's time to talk about horror again! Not may fave genre but there are decent things that make it up and Banes, Tantz and I chat about some of them. Recently I enjoyed the anime DanDaDan and the American adult animated show Haunted Hotel, both on Netflix. They're both horror themed silly comedies that have a bit of parody of the genre and I really appreciate that. The horror comic I most recently enjoyed was DemiMon Hollow Town Syndrome, which I also recently featured. We brought up a lot of different horror themed work on DD and you can check that out in our links bellow. What are your fave horror themed things that you've seen recently? Fave horror comics on DD? This week another special from Gunwallace - Pestilent - thoughtful, haunting, reminds me a little of a classic horror film soundtrack. Pretty scary! - Originally from Quackcast 285, 22nd of August 2016.
Links Tantz's horror discussion thread - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/180101/ Mentioned horror comics Cover image from Tantz's Verdant - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Verdant/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_760_-_whats_up_with_horror.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 30 September 2025
Police themed stuff is a popular genre! It's full of tropes and stylised aspects and generally very different from the reality, both from the actual police perspective and the perspective of those that deal with them, and I think I prefer it that way because the reality is usually pretty sad and ugly for all involved. So today we're talking about police theme things, set in the present, past, and future! One of the tropes we covered is the savant cop. It's a character that's based on Sherlock homes, they're not always officially police, in fact like him they're often private detectives or “consultants” is the popular thing these days. Sherlock Holmes was basically just a super genius but these days it's fashionable to make the expertise pathological, even stuff that's based directly ON Sherlock. They often NEED to be neurodivergent, from Monk, to High Potential, to Patience, The Finder, Bones etc, Though not always, like The Mentalist and White Collar. Then there's Law and order (and it's spin-offs). This highly venerable show made its mark by doing what most cop shows never do: showing what happens AFTER an investigation. You actually always got too see the trial. Other shows sometimes did that but for Law and Order it was solidly part of the format and that was pretty cool. It's not realistic because everything happens way too fast and orderly but it was good to see anyway. My fave manga/Anime cop themed stuff is Dominion Tank Police and Ghost in the Shell. They cover things from the police perspective and they're amazing. They envisage how police would work in a future world, one with tanks that can tackle even the most severe aspects of crime in an exaggerated and comical way, and one that has expertise hacking and taking a more black-ops, specialised military approach to their work. Patlabor is like Tank Police in that they use heavy vehicles but in their case it's mecha instead of tanks and the approach isn't comical. There are good sci-fi approaches in Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, and even Galaxy Rangers. Stuff set in the past is fun too, we have the Sherif of Nottingham in Robinhood as a very bad fellow, there's The Name of The Rose and Cadfael with actual monks acting as investigative policemen during the time of the crusades, then Tombstone and a host of other cowboy shows and movies that cover all aspects of the law in the late 19th century American West. Rush was one of my faves, it was about a policeman in Australia during the gold Rush in the mid 19th century, that was a very unique view and a great theme song! Almost as good as the theme song for the original 1970s version of Van Der Valk, a British show about a Dutch police investigator in the Netherlands. I would say my faves are Miami Vice due to the style, The Mentalist due to the cleverness of the main character without resorting to supernatural or neurodivergent abilities as well as having a woman in charge of the team and the way they generally had a non-adversarial relationship with their captain, Dominion Tank Police, Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex, and The Bill- but only the early seasons of it before it turned into a ridiculous soap opera- It began as a very procedural cop show showing every aspect of policing from the most minor crimes to more serious stuff in a very realistic way without flashy fights and car chases or constant gristly murders, nothing else did that. So what are your faves? Do you like copshows? Would you prefer them to be more realistic? Do you like the fantasy/historical/Sci-Fi stuff or do you prefer them to be set in the present day? Another best-off from Gunwallace and this week it's - Grey Sky Blue Moon - I’m tempted to write a bad early 80s rap for this, but I won’t torture people that way. This tune is remarkably 1980s in style: rap, dance style music, exactly like you’d get from a big budget movie from 1984 or ‘85. Think Beverly Hills Cop or Police Academy. It’s perfect! It’s a great match for the crazy light night hi-jinks that the girls of Grey Sky Blue Moon get up too!
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 23 September 2025
Confidence is key! Confidence can make very attractive protagonists and villains and it can make almost any character sexy because confidence is compelling. Main characters and villains never have to be confident, but if you want your audience to be drawn to them it's a great technique. To make a sexy, compelling character confidence works was better than skin tight clothes, lingerie, big muscles or bouncing boobies. What is confidence? It's self possession, being comfortable in yourself, being sure of yourself and your decisions, positivity, an air of competence, command, and even control. All these things can work together to become confidence. But there are ways of faking it too: Being arch, arrogant, superior, being an arsehole, entitled, bossing people about, relying on a higher rank or superior job title etc. these things are easy to mistake for confidence and many people tend to imitate or strive for these traits thinking it will make them attractive and popular, but it never quite works. A character doesn't have to start out with confidence or be confident all the time. Many achieve it on their journey over the course of a story. For some it's only in specific contexts, like when they're experts at something. Some start out confident and lose it in the story in order for them to be rebuilt. The mousey girl with glasses and the ponytail doesn't suddenly become sexy because she takes off the glasses and lets down her hair, rather it's because she becomes more confident and those things are symbols of that. Who're some of your fave confident characters in fiction? For me: The Dread Pirate Roberts is a great example, Lord Blackadder in Blackadder 2, lord Flashheart and Captain Flashheart from Blackadder 2 and 4 respectively is a massively confident and attractive character, Elvira Mistress of the Dark is a woman with so much confidence she's a sex-symbol for the ages, Gomez Adams as played by John Astin is supremely confident, Alan Rickman's Sherif of Nottingham stole the whole movie because of the character's confidence. This week Gunwallace was is back an in perfect form, he gave us a second take on a theme to Curse of the Office Werewoman - Creepy, driving, compelling, official… HR is sending you directives you simply CANNOT ignore! Get to it, obey like a good office drone and shake dat ass on the dance-floor!
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 16 September 2025
Mortality is a heavy, heavy subject. It was brought up in the forums a while ago so we're chatting about it now. We talk about death in popculture, how we treat death in our comics and our growing awareness of mortality as adults. You become increasingly aware of mortality as you age, mainly because you witness more and more of it in action; pets, celebrities that you loved, public figures that you're aware of, grandparents, family friends, parents, friends, and eventually even you have health scares. It's a cumulative thing, but eventually you move from being young and immortal to having the spectre of death ever-present. The ultimate goal of ALL life is immortality, it's what it always strives for in various ways; the two main ones being longevity and reproduction. Life is amazing in that it's a self sustaining bunch of chemical reactions and processes that have an inbuilt goal to keep on going forever however that can be accomplished. There are almost immortal things in our world like the earth and our sun that are billions of years old but even they die eventually and they have no way, will, or mechanism to prevent that, unlike life. But even though we as humans have relatively long lives compared to most other living things and we reproduce quite well, we as individuals certainly are NOT immortal and we have to deal with that in many ways. Our cultures traditionally separate death from normal life, we venerate it through religious practice, explain it and mythologise it. In the modern day we're separated from the realities of death more than ever before because childhood mortality is super low, we all live longer than ever before and when we reach the end of life we're hidden away in retirement homes and hospitals. Most people live in cities and don't experience the same close relationship with death that those on farms and fishing communities constantly dealt with. But it never goes away. As time moves on it always draws nearer, like a slowly creeping shadow. Which is a great analogy because light seems so bright and active, warm and enveloping, it seems ever-present and forever lasting- our sun is four and a half billion years old. But the end will come for that too eventually and things will return to darkness. Darkness and non-life are the natural state of things, life is only a brief glow, an aberration, momentary. The idea that life and death, dark and light are equal, different sides of the same coin and in balance is total and complete nonsense: Darkness and death are the normal, ordinary, basic, state of things- it's ubiquitous and universal, whereas life like light is unusual, precious, singular and special. Never forget that.
Links Mortality thread - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/180089/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 9 September 2025
Today we're chatting about things that are ostensibly superficially straightforward, but are actually quite clever and layered in many ways. The two prime examples are Paul Verhoven's Robocop and Starship Troopers. They can both be taken as simply dumb, hyper-violent action films, but both are also good, solid, basic satirical critiques of society. Robocop is a critique of over-corporatism and commercialism, where the myth that “private enterprise does it better” is taken to an extreme. A company takes over the police and the governance of the city of Detroit. Policeman, officer Murphy is killed on the job, only to be revived as a cyborg and we find that the corporation owns him even after he's dead. He becomes their mindless robot slave. The whole film can be taken either as a violent action movie about a super robot cop blasting his way to justice, or as the story of a literal corporate slave on a journey to regain his own humanity and freedom and in doing so he has to murder the CEO of the corporation to free himself. Which is a very symbolic act for an American film where CEOs are seen as demigods. Starship Troopers can be taken as a simple story of brave solders flying into space and fighting back on a crusade against disgusting bug aliens that threaten earth. But we learn that the aliens were only after earth because humans threatened them first, and rather than being the underdogs, the humans are actually massively superior and the aliens are afraid… rather than fighting for our existence we're actually committing genocide (or xenocide), which was also the point of Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. With that little bit of extra info all the testosterone, gun firing, soldier camaraderie, patriotism and support for the troops takes on a sinister edge. If we look at it with the right angle we see that they were Nazis all along. I really appreciate stories with those sort of simple layers that can be taken in two completely different ways. It can be very easy to fail at though when the audience doesn't see your other layer at all or your “clever” message isn't very clever or well delivered. Stories certainly do not need to have layers and alternate reading to be good. I appreciate simple straightforward stories that are as they appear to be. But these ones with single extra layer which means things have a very different and obvious reading are fun. Fight-club is famously that sort of story, when we find that Tyler Durden was imaginary all along and it changes your reading of the story, you can still just take it as it seemed in the beginning though. I think the Life of Brian qualifies as well: at the beginning we think it's a satirical version of the life of the messiah, directly making fun of Christ and the bible stories, but at the end we learn that Brian really was just a simple normal guy all along like he and his mum claimed and it changes to a story NOT making fun of Christ but rather the mindless populace who never really cared about Brian at all, they just overlayed a symbol on him and worshipped that instead which took away all his control and killed him in the end. Still, look on the bright side…. Do you like these sorts of stories?
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 2 September 2025
What happens if an author makes a massively popular story but takes ages and ages to finish that last part of it, and people are waiting breathlessly for years and years for them to end it? Would you support the idea of others taking it off their hands and finishing it FOR them? After all if the IP is popular enough and they've already sold it for tv shows and movies, the public feels they have a sort of ownership over it (Game of Thrones/A song of Fire and Ice)… This was the idea behind Tantz's newspost last week and we wanted to talk it out more. We on the Quackcast all say “NO”, mainly because that's not the right thing to do but also because as a reader it always feels “off” when its not the voice of the actual author. The example I go back to isn't George RR Martin, but Robert E Howard- A big strapping lad from a small town in Texas and a very talented writer for the pulps in the 1930s. He created many amazing characters but most famous among them was Conan the Cimmerian, thief, warrior, and king. The final Conan story by Howard was “Red Nails” and many people regard it was one of his best. Those people are wrong and they are idiots. Red Nails is a reworking of The Slithering Shadow (which I wrongly called “the hidden City” on the Quackcast), the main thing you can tell about Red Nails is that it wasn't written by Howard, it's just not at all in his style, apart from the things it takes from the story it's based on. The Slithering Shadow is a perfect example of a Conan story: it's short, very tightly written, and it expresses all the themes a good Conan story always does- the power of the individual and their will to overcome any challenge, even unknowable supernatural horror, and the contrast between the wild barbarian man who knows himself and the decadent, soft city dwellers who cling to a decaying society built on inequity and evil. The Red Nails on the other hand copies those aspects without understanding them, Conan is a mere side character doing his own thing while pirate Queen Valeria is the main character from who's perspective we see. It's novel and great to have a female character perspective from Howard but he just didn't ever do that. The details and action in this long and sprawling uneven story are paper thin and rushed over without thought which again is something Howard never did. It also includes a great big graphic portion about a woman being captured, whipped and spanked in a very lurid exploitative way, which Howard just didn't do, especially not in his Conan stories. It's an obvious fake that freaks hold up as the best Howard Conan story but I say it's crap and something taken out of the hands of the author and finished by someone else. When Robert E Howard died by suicide in the 1930s the legacy of his writing continued on. Author Lin Carter rather scurrilously repurposed a lot of Howard's other fiction and rewrote them as Conan pastiches, at first claiming they were original Conan stories by Howard, and Red Nails is possibly a good example of that sort of thing. Later on other authors like L. Sprague de Camp and Robert Jordan took on the mantel and continued with the character and he later made his way into comics and movies, the same as James bond, Batman, Superman and a hundred thousand other pop culture and comic characters that are part of the broader cultural landscape now, for better or worse. As a fan, you DO start to feel you have a sort of ownership over characters and sometimes even feel you have a better understanding of them than the original author… So would you ever consider taking over the work of someone else, not in a fan fiction way, but becoming the author of official works? Or could you see that happening with your own work? In many respects I would hate it, but in others I'd be intrigued and interested.
Links Inspired by the newspost by Tantz - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/aug/22/the-ending-is-always-yours/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_755_-_My_ending_is_not_your_ending.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00pm PST
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Tue, 26 August 2025
Dialogue is used for more than just simple speech, it moves the story forward, it indicates what characters want, what they feel, what they want others to feel and more. But it's used a bit differently across different media. Comics have their own particular ways of doing things and it's quite interesting! We thank Banes for coming up with this topic! In pure prose the world is all relayed in text so dialogue is king there, characters can talk and talk forever and everything can be relayed through their speech if the author wants. Radio plays are much like prose, but actors help out with their performances, SFX has a role, and time is a factor. Plays are a different thing, settings, scenes and props are limited so a LOT of work has to be taken up by the dialogue, but it's all governed by linear, limited time, so once something is said it's gone, you can't linger on it or go back over it, so it has to do its job in the moment (this isn't a disadvantage though), but the actors can do all the work of showing expressions, tone, emotions, humour, physicality and many other things. Movies, TV, and games are different again, they're also limited by time (though you can go back if you like), the actors can do a lot of the work and massive amounts of work can be done with the visuals. Lastly we have comics where like prose they are not limited by linear time, and like film visuals can do a huge amount of the work. Dialogue in comics can work very well when there's a symbiosis between the visuals and what is written in the speech bubbles. Like film you can offload a lot of work of the dialogue to the visuals. When I do a page I write out what the text should be but I don't finalise it till I have the page art done, though I know what the characters need to say and how the story should go. When the page is done then I whittle down the text to make it work with the visuals, so a character might just say a single word, but because of the art it can be like a full paragraph of meaning. When I work with a pre-written script like in Bottomless waitress or The Key of Dreams I can't change the dialogue so I make sure the way I draw the scene and the characters delivering it enhances what's said and even helps it say much much more. I also letter things in such a way that it tweaks the delivery of the dialogue, so the characters are “acting” it out in a specific way, like giving each sentence its own bubble and placing them in specific ways, closer together or massively spread out, making them different sizes, colours, or shapes etc. How do you approach dialogue in comics? And how do you prefer to see it as a reader? This week Gunwallace has given us a musical theme inspired by Stiletto - The coolest of the coo. Step into the warm, cozy, underground lounge and sip an espresso martini. The bass thrumbs a tune out of dark wood, the piano does the tango, the guitar floats on a sunny, serene pool, and the percussion sneaks into a corner to be alone and snuggle. Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_754_-_The_role_of_dialogue.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 19 August 2025
Banes was the brains behind the Quackcast this week! His idea is that a character's internal struggle and how that conflicts with the realities they face can be a great driver for a story. -cribbed from listening to Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad fame. Banes is a much better story writer than me so I can't explain it as well, but a good example is Walter White from Breaking Bad who starts off as a mild mannered dad and struggling chemistry teacher who moonlights at a car-wash to make ends meet- his internal struggle is that he actually sees himself as an unrecognised genius and someone who was unfairly wronged in life and so never reached his full potential. With his cancer diagnoses, the debits and worries that introduces into his life and the opportunity to fix everything by breaking the law, that interacts with his internal conflict to turn him into a drug kingpin/mafia boss/evil villain. It's a very interesting way to do character development! It can really inform how you change and craft your characters in interesting ways. Unfortunately I had taken a strong painkiller for toothache before the cast so I was not mentally able to understand the topic correctly haha! Part of the Quackcast I talk about how internal struggles are not needed for all characters and that James Bond is a good example of that- he's better when he as no conflict between his internal struggle and an external conflict and he's just supremely confident. Examples of Bond where he does have internal struggles are weaker versions of the character. Have you given your characters internal struggles to help them develop and change the story when that internal struggle conflicts with the challenges they face? Or can you look at your stories and see that in your characters?
This week Gunwallace gives us a lovely musical theme to The Art of Running Away - A thoughtful early morning cup of coffee in a cold, empty room, alone. Contemplations on life, mortality, and the dancing motes of dust in a stray beam of sun, illuminating a disk of warm light on the floor, occupied by a single, happy cat.
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_753_-_driven_by_internal_struggles.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 12 August 2025
This is the 3rd and final part of our censorship trilogy, you'll be glad to know! We tackled censorship past in the first one, then censorship present in the second, and now it's time for censorship future… as it applies to us, sticking our money where our mouth is. How do we tackle “censorship” on our comic hosting site? Spammers get their accounts deleted right away, people who steal art and claim it as their own are not welcome either, posting illegal adult content is a no-no, making accounts to harass other members, encouraging hate or violence against other groups, or posting real images of violence or death against humans or animals is also not welcome. We have an old TOS (terms of service) that you agree to when you join the site, plus our old site etiquette document that both ask people to behave nicely on the site and warn that things that aren't appropriate can be deleted. Apart from all that we're actually very open, one of the most open and accepting comic hosts online. We don't police your political or religious views and adult content is fine here. Showing genitals, using harsh language, fair use parody and satire etc. is all OK and we welcome them! We like to think of ourselves a objective and culturally agnostic. Apart from that our main concern above everything else is the health of the community and the preservation of our website, because if there's no community or no site to host it then there's no point to anything, is there? My small team and I have struggled for YEARS to keep this site going, I have personally paid thousands of dollars of my own money and our community have also paid thousands to keep us going through our Patreon and our other community drives. We have put love, many thousands of hours of constant work and vigilance week, after week, after week after week for over two decades to keep the site running and to keep it as a place you can always come back to where your hard work is safe. If something or someone jeopardises that we have to take it very seriously because it's so easy for the site to be damaged now that the internet is so limited by companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta. By the same token those who make snap decisions about our entire site based on the momentary and ephemeral actions of some miscreant who has temporarily fallen through the cracks and posted inappropriate content, and ignore the struggle, the work, the money, the compromises, the effort, the vigilance, the pain, and everything that goes into keeping this oldest of the free comic hosting website communities running are almost as bad as those miscreants who create the problems in the first place unfortunately. This week Gunwallace has given us a musical theme inspired by Mister Man Eater - a magically expressive carillon. Warm yellow and pink light sparkles as it flows from one side of the room to the other in a mystical swirl. Topics and shownotes Links DD forum topic on the subject - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/180055/?page=1 DD TOS (Terms of Use) - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/terms/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_752_-_Censor_3_how_it_works_on_DD.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 5 August 2025
Last time we talked about old fashioned censorship, NOW we're talking about how it's used these days! Back in the day there were limited pathways for you to disseminate information: newspapers, radio, TV, public speaking, posters, books, film, pamphlets, ads… They were all easy for governments to shut down in various ways. But then along came the internet and suddenly it was a free for all! Anyone could easily make a website and info was freely shared for good or ill, and it was almost impossible to stop. Then Google made things easier than ever to find. Youtube meant we could share videos. Along came social media where it was easy to connect with others and get info out, Twitter users were even described as “citizen journalists”. Smartphones from Apple and Google made it even simpler to share stuff. But little did we know the seeds had been sown for a return to the bad old days… Monopolies are usually a bad thing and now the internet is divided among a small cadre of huge monopolies. The massive success of social media at connecting us, Google search, Youtube for videos, and Apple and Google at managing our phones and online lives has narrowed us all down and made us far more vulnerable. It's still possible to skirt them all and use other services, but their reach, versatility, utility, ubiquity and user-bases means you're sacrificing a hell of a LOT if you do. Governments are still ineffective at censoring these but they can ban and restrict them which means the media companies that own these services introduce there own forms of restrictions and censorship as a way to try and avoid that and the loss of revue it would mean. The impact of those restrictions are massive since so much of our lives are online now. They can have all your online accounts deleted, it can affect access to all the photos you've taken of your kids, your phones and tablets can become useless, work contacts and friends can be lost, years of work at building an online client base or fans can be wiped out in seconds with no way to get it back, and that's just a small sample. There are REAL costs involved too, these media companies like Meta can steal your money from you and you have zero recourse- the building of those fanbases and connections, online galleries, video production etc has REAL monetary value FAR in excess of the service they provide you (especially since their ads and data mining pay for it), but they treat you and your work as a free resource. Corporate censorship is THE worst issue facing us now in this context, because of its power, reach, arbitrariness, and total lack of any accountability. With a simple change of their Terms of Service, new policies, the AI bots they're using to police stuff suddenly for no reason you can find yourself in peril. Lastly there is the idea of “cancel culture”, which has been quite exaggerated because it's seen as left wing and therefore scary. The truth is it's always been around and practised equally by right wing, left wing, and centrist people. The internet HAS given it more reach and made it a bit easier to “cancel” people because you can more easily find out info about them and what they've done and you can also easily make up things and spread campaigns to attack people whether they're based on truth or lies. What is “cancel culture”? Basically it's a kind of mob justice with all the issues and problems mob justice always has: people are stupider in groups, there is no presumption of innocence or context, and there's no possible limit to the “justice” enacted. For every righteously cancelled person there will be many more who it was done to maliciously. And ALWAYS remember when you support stuff like this, if it can be done to others then it can be done to you. We like to think that these things are only done to “bad” people, but reality doesn't work that way, anyone can see you as bad at any time. Out of it all though, corporate censorship is by far the worst, as the official Drunk Duck Instagram can attest. In an ironic twist it was taken down and deleted by Meta after this Quackcast was recorded. Drunk Duck has had itself “censored” repeatedly by Google because their system downgrades us on its search engine for their own silly reasons, like lack of a mobile site option, putting social media results ahead, we got downgraded for lack of HTTP even though it's not needed at all on our site because accounts contain nothing sensitive and don't deal with money, so we had to pay money to get that up and running to retain our visibility… Gunwallace wasn't able to do a theme this week so instead we have a reprise of Tales from Two Tiny Tittybars - Bouncing boobs in DA CLUB! This was originally from 6 Nov, 2017 in Quackcast 228.
Links Previous Quackcast on censorship - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/quackcast/episode-750-censorshipping Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_751_-_An_internet_FULL_of_censorship.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 29 July 2025
Hey ho! We thought we'd address the topic of censorship again on the Quackcast! Next week we'll chat about how free speech and censorship works now on the internet the way it is now, but for now it's a bit of a rambling overview because it's a gigantic topic! With “free speech” and censorship people always imagine that it's something very basic and black and white but when you look into it the complexities and complications are pretty huge, not to mention there are NO universal global “free speech” rules and that is a big issue with the internet and instantaneous unregulated communication which bypasses national borders. Basically “free speech” usually means that governments aren't allowed to restrict the political expression of individuals because that is essential for preserving free democracies. We expand that to “free expression” in a more general sense because we don't want governments restricting what we can say or do (within certain limits). And that's just a taste of how complex it gets. Not to mention copyright issues, fair use, obscenity, ratings systems etc, it all factors in! On Drunk Duck we need to have a ratings system that comics fall under. Our Adult rated comics have restrictions on them, and we don't allow comics that depict underage characters in sexual situations, (that can be hard to police). Comics designed to defame others can also face restrictions. So censorship is everywhere! Though DD is more free than other comic hosts on the net and that has always been one of our main features from the very beginning! What have been your experiences with censorship? This week Gunwallace has given us a musical theme inspired by Mortify - A sepulchral, highly evocative, almost dreamlike reverie on the tenebrous existence of the penumbra between life and death, dark and light, where souls hang on the edge of oblivion. Topics and shownotes Links Info on freedom of expression https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/rights-and-freedoms/freedom-information-opinion-and-expression Forum post about censorship issues https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/180046/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 22 July 2025
This week our cast is about the folly of following fashion! It could be with clothes, hair, interior design, architecture, music, OR creation! Things like plot styles, story structure, art, lettering, fonts, jokes, twists etc, all are subject to fashions of the day. And we are driven to participate in it, not because we're fashionable creatures who want to be “in” with the latest trends, rather it's because at our core we're just simple social animals and following fashion is an instinctual way for us to fit in with our social groups and participate in the simple social hierarchies based on how closely we follow the current fashion and how cleverly we express it. It's herd behaviour. But why is it folly? There are a few very important reasons that you shouldn't follow fashion: Slang changes all the time. The very worst and most stupid thing you can ever do is try and unironically keep up with current slang, especially if you're trying to see “cool”. Why is that? Because the people most up with the latest slang are 12 to 14 years old, do you really want to be thought of as cool to a 12 year old? Aside from that the constant changes mean that using current slang dates you more than anything and gives the opposite of your intended meaning, instead of ever being cool you will look very stupid. If you must you can use it ironically and that will save you, you can also use it historically to date your stuff to a particular time, OR you can invent your own like A Clockwork Orange, the Simpsons, or The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Now we come to the topic of “style vs fashion”. You can be stylish instead of fashionable, this means you pick styles from where and whenever you like (even current fashions), based on your passion for those things and you intelligently incorporate them into your own personal style. The difference is that you are not simply following a trend because it's the done thing, going along with it, doing your own poor version of it because you don't really understand it and it not fitting in any way with you what so ever. Style is making the best choices and picking the best examples of things that worked, while fashion is simply fitting in. So what have been your own worst fashion mistakes? This can be in creation, clothing, hair, whatever. Did you try and jump onboard with manga style when that first became the big fashion in Western comics? I know I tried and did a terrible version of the style! Did you do the whole non-linear story thing? The alternative world thing? The superhero in the “realistic” outfit and setting thing? The “webtoon format” vertical scrolling infinite canvas thing? There are many more fads and styles… It's NOT a bad thing to do any of those as long as you're not just don't it because it's the popular thing at the time. Gunwallace wasn't able to do a theme this week so instead we have a reprise of May the Rain Come, by Zimeta. It's a very beautiful piece. From Quackcast 177, 28th of July, 2014.
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Tue, 15 July 2025
Tantz Aerine showcased LGBTQ+ comics and creators for Pride month in June with the help of Skyangel, Mainly on Bluesky. It went to so well that she came up with the amazing idea of doing more monthly features for other themes. She doesn't want to dictate to us what those theme should be though, she wants input into the idea so we can all come up with good themes together! The idea behind a month long showcase isn't to be socially conscious so much as having a reason to bring more promotion to creators- that's important to remember. This is marketing :) We have a forum thread discussion* where people have shared their own recommendations. InkyMoondrop, Bravo1102, Lothar, Dragonsong12, PaulEberhardt, Kawaiidaigakusei, and J_Scarbrough had some great suggestions already! PaulEberhardt: Bravo1102: Dragonsong12: Lothar: Ozoneocean (me): Kawaiidaigakusei: J_Scarbrough: All good suggestions but some of them can be joined into others I think? Something like “Hispanic Heritage” could go into a category like Kawaii's “Language Other than English Month”, and “Poverty” and “Drugs and alcohol” could be subsets of “Mental Health”? Also on the Quackcast Banes suggested February for “Romance” because of valentines day. Please give your opinions and suggestion! Tantz wants a popular vote of these.
Topics and shownotes Links *Let's design DD Month Events together! (forum thread) https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/180026/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 8 July 2025
Novels are basically long stories. They tend to have a lot of different plots and things all happening at once, unlike short stories. When writing a novel you have a lot of freedom to tell really BIG stories, stories that spanning worlds and centuries if you feel like it. In this Quackcast Banes chats to Tantz about the art of novel writing and what makes a novel Tantz is a good person to talk about that with since she's published a few novels in her fantasy Art of Veiling series. And Banes is a good person to ask about it because he's interested in writing a novel of his own! Have you ever had plans to write a novel? Do you prefer them over short stories or comics? How would YOU approach writing a novel of your own? This week Gunwallace was overwhelmed so as another best-off special treat we have a reprise of the theme to Ginger&Shadow - Lovely string music with the competing themes representing the two cats. From Quackcast 204, 3rd of February 2015.
Links The Art of Veiling - https://www.amazon.com.au/Art-Veiling-Awareness-Tantz-Aerine-ebook/dp/B00CRMM25K Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 1 July 2025
There's always time to start learning something new! If you think you're bad at art and people told you you lacked talent back in the day and that if you didn't start as a child then you have no chance to be good, please know that all of that is false- you can become an amazing artist whenever you start. In-born magical “Talent” is absolutely not required! Practise is ALL you need. None of this “10,000 hours” bullsh*t either, that's another myth. Just keep working at it over and over and practising new things till you get the results you want. This cast was inspired by Gunwallace's newspost last week where he discusses this very thing. We go a bit deeper into the subject and Tantz lends her considerable academic and scientific weight as well as numerous anecdotes. It really is a persistent myth that you can only learn well as a child and then after that you may as well not even bother, but that's wrong for a lot of reasons. Like most myths it is based on grain of truth: children's brains are “empty” so they're predisposed to gather as much knowledge as fast as they can, copying from everything, so they can learn to survive and become functioning humans. Because of that they can seem to pick up the basics pretty fast. When you're an adult you don't have that need anymore so you pick things up slower. That's all it is, you can still learn at any age and in fact adults have the advantage: they're more dedicated to what they want to learn and they have the experience and intelligence to understand what they learn and make better use of it, so they can synthesise that knowledge, apply it to other things and sub in other knowledge and experience to augment their learning. In my own experience teaching digital animation to tertiary students, in which they were taught how to use media creation tools on their computers, the basics of animation and how to create a full animated project, the older students did so much better than the younger students that they were in another league. People of the ages 50 and 60+. They were more dedicated and more interested. The younger students 18 to early 20s had more trouble understanding what they were doing and staying focussed. And in my experience as an art student at university it was much the same, older students always did better, without exception. Why is this? When you're older you have more experience and can deal with distractions better. You have much more draws on your time so when you really want to do something you will be more dedicated to it because you have to make that time count. You have more money to put towards to what you're interested in. You care less about the positive or negative reinforcement of others; you don't do what you do for praise and you don't care as much about criticism. Your brain is fully formed so it's not being confudled with hormones or structural changes. Your social situation is more stable and less crucial so it doesn't interfere as much with things you want to do. Obviously there are things that make it harder too: Physically you're more prone to injury and slow healing. You're not as fast. Your eyes and ears might not be as sharp. You have much less free time and have to make moments count more. You haven't got the same dedicated support structure that most younger people have, and so on. But despite all of that the advantages still help older people win out. So learn to do art better, practise writing, learn other languages, learn to dance, play guitar, weld, code, whatever you feel like! Have you got any experience learning something when you're older vs learning as a kid? This week Gunwallace has given us a musical theme inspired by The Midnight Tea Party - Relaxing and exciting! A feathery, glittery explosion of laconic violin and electronica. We’re in heaven and we’re having a rave! Topics and shownotes Links Gunwallace's newspost about Starting Late https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/jun/25/starting-late/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_746_-_Its_never_too_late.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 24 June 2025
History is something big that happens in the past that you look back on and wonder about… ofttimes we only know about it from the pages of a book, old video footage, relics in a museum, or something like that, but there are also living resources for history in the memories of older people and indeed in your OWN head. This Quackcast was inspired by me thinking about musicians like Prince, Queen, and David Bowie- many younger people now are looking back on them as if they were musical geniuses, like Beethoven and Mozart, but I can clearly recall when they were just pop-musicians, you were interested to hear their latest stuff on the radio of their latest video but it wasn't ground shaking. They were not considered super dooper massive cultural icons then, in fact they had less regard and hero worship than most modern young celebs do now! Your average popular “influencer” probably gets more regard now than David Bowie did back in the 70s and 80s. As Generation Xers Banes, Tantz, and I were part of a world in the later days old the cold war, when it was at its peak, before the end. This flavoured all of culture in all sorts of direct and indirect ways and if you don't understand that then you can't properly understand those cultural products that came out of that time. All the massive prosperity of the west and ultra-capitalism from the 1950s onwards with the USA solidly driving all western culture was because after WW2 the world was split in 2 and everyone had to unite around the USA because they were the strongest power militarily and economically in opposition to the “communist block”, NATO vs the Warsaw Pact. It's the reason American media from Hollywood stayed as so huge, the reason American influence in music was so primary, and the same with style, design, and technology. But there are plenty of direct influences too, a character like James Bond makes no sense outside of that split world, in fact nor does any spy fiction that came from then. The Klingons in Star Trek were Russians. The action genre in movies solidly had to do with the cold war- Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger's career's were formed around Cold War influences… What big aspects of history where you “there” for? The fall of the Berlin Wall, Perestroika, 9/11, The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the start of myspace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the beginnings of social media and influencer culture, the rise of reality TV, the fall of bookshops…?
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 17 June 2025
Professions in fiction are usually always portrayed in very exaggerated, super fantastical expert versions of themselves. Like if it's a psychologist they generally know exactly what a person is thinking, why they're thinking a certain way, what all their issues are, why they have them and how to fix them. They can tell if a person is lying and the truth they are coving up by doing so! If it's a police detective and they're a main character they can generally solve any crime pretty easily with their amazing abilities… if they're NOT a main character then they're usually pretty useless though haha! Why is this done? Well there are a few reasons, one is that the creators might not know very much about the profession so they pack in all the best parts of it into their portrayals, especially if they want to show that their character is the best at something. One reason is that it's a good shorthand and saves time and resources if you just pack one character with the skills of 10 people instead of having to write an entire team, so they become almost an avatar that represents the idea of a profession. I think of the character Doctor Hodgins in the TV series Bones, he specialises in slime, bugs, and soil samples at a forensic pathology lab - real experts in that field say that it would require a large team of people to match the work of that character. We commonly see this with action heroes. Spies for example, specifically field agents have so many skills and abilities that they do the work of an army of people. John Wick represents the fictional occupation of a hit-man with fictional skills of solider martial artists. Doctors in fiction (as main characters), can recognise any malady without advanced testing or machinery and usually cure them in a single day. Artists can reproduce any style of work extremely quickly and draw super realistically from memory. Musicians can play any song with no practise and grab an audience's attention and emotion with it in their first performance. Sherlock Holmes is ostensibly a prime example of this trend, he's an expert detective and can solve any crime with almost superhuman powers of observation and leaps of logic. In most versions of him that is how he's always portrayed, but that's actually not quite right since the version of Holmes we're given is mediated through the perspective of his partner Doctor Watson who is astonished by Holmes and hero worships him, so he could almost be considered an “unreliable narrator”. In THIS way Sherlock Holmes could be an example of the CORRECT way to handle this trend: He SEEMS to be a super expert mainly because the view of him we see is recounted by a person who thinks of him that way. What are some issues with this? If it's done too much it can easily get on the nose a ruin suspension of disbelief. It can also create unrealistic expectations in audiences and this can cause REAL harm in reality when people expect all their ills to be easily diagnosed and cured- and when they aren't then they turn to alternative medicine (fake medicine) which promises cures and yet does nothing but pretends it does. People will shun real police who can't seem to solve disappearances fast enough and turn to psychics or even violent vigilantes instead. So there are indeed bad consequences for taking things too far in fiction. Has your job ever been misrepresented this way? What are some of the worst, silliest versions of this trend? What are examples of when it's done right? This week Gunwallace has given us a musical theme inspired by Machine World - Desolate plains, the image of post apocalyptic destruction, black rocky sands, rusting steel wreckage, the massive skeletal remains of long dead machinery, haunted, ancient, abandoned, yet humanity persists. Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_744_-_Over_Qualified_and_Overplayed.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 10 June 2025
This is a weird one to encapsulate, but it was based on an idea I had while re-watching Star Trek the Next Generation and I had to explore it with my fellow Quackcasters, Banes and Tantz. I believe it's generally better to enjoy something in the order it was created rather than the chronological order of the story because you'll understand it so much better in terms of why things are as they are, the creative and aesthetic choices and cultural impact. Re-watching all of Star Trek the Next Generation in order taught me so much about how and why the show and characters developed: NOT from a lore and story perspective but from a practical, technical perspective. I'm watching for the stories but I also notice different filming techniques, lighting choices, sets, props, costumes, how and why the actors perform and act in certain ways, line deliveries, and a million other things: basically the reality of the thing and it's interesting to think how that conflicts with fan lore, or “this is why they went this way with the character” vs “the character did that because…” And it's especially powerful if you can connect it to the culture and current events of the time in which it was created. Now in the world more often than ever people look at creative projects in a kind of cultural vacuum, totally isolated from any cultural context except their own current culture at the time they view the thing, which is bad enough but people's passion of reboots and prequels compounds this. Whether it's Marvel, Dr Who, Star Trek, Star Wars or whatever you'll see this happen with any popular creative IP: the established meaning of these things will be changed constantly due to retconns and a sort of fan lore takes over as a way to make sense of it all. I think it's important to understand the real reason why things are as they are… That said though it is also very important that later generations are able to develop their own cultural connections with established IPs in their own way and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact if they can't then those IPs will die, their continued interest and passion is what keeps those things alive and current! It's just important not to lose sight of why things really developed as they did and enjoy things for what they are rather than for what they are AFTER retconns. Hahaha, I hope this makes some sense? What are the most annoying bits of fan lore you've come across? Personally I can't stand the Warhammer 40k lore now, it just gets worse and worse as time goes on.
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 3 June 2025
It seems like every single “badass” in TV, Movies, books and comics is “ex-special forces” or something like it these days. It's become a meaningless cliche. Writers use it as a shortcut to show a person is super tough and competent, able to handle ANY situation and also have a dark past. We chat about how silly it is to overdo the cliche and why “being ex-special-forces” doesn't really make a person better at being a “bad-ass” than anyone else. More likely it means they're probably a more burnt out, have far more injuries, PTSD, and more personal demons than the average person. Special forces soldiers tend to get deployed more than others and they train more and harder. Many are killed in training or acquire bad injuries from it and PTSD, let alone from active service. Aside from that rather than being taciturn with a thousand yard stare and a grumpy personality and a gravely voice, all special forces people I've met have been entirely normal people, indistinguishable from anyone else. Rambo from the first movie is one of my fave examples, he's an unstoppable killing machine but at least the story tries to explore his PTSD and the terrible way his country abandoned him when it had no more use for him. What are your fave ex-special forces people in fiction? This week it's another best-off Gunwallace and so we're replaying a track from Quackcast 209: Joe Pop! This was a great little theme that Gunwallace wrote funny lines for in the style of the characters from the comic strip, Joe Pop. Banes and I act them out! I'm on bass. Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 27 May 2025
Sometimes you get hooked into things, you become a fan and you wonder how you got there. A while ago you were laughing at those dorky, obsessed fans over there and now suddenly you're one of them! That's what we're talking about in this cast, the things that hook you in and our own stories about what we were unexpectedly hooked into. The idea came to me as I was making a coffee and signing the words to XTCs Great Fire. It's a silly song with lyrics about a fire burning in Noah's Arc and also in a house, which is a metaphor for the singer's growing love. XTC is a strange, very progressive British pop group from the 70s and 80s. They have some extremely thoughtful and intelligent songs about culture and social issues and many that are just foolish pop-songs and yet I like them all and happily sing along to them. But I wondered how I got there. It was 1994, I was extremely sick with chickenpox, trapped in my bed for weeks with nothing but books and my radio for company. Every so often the same few songs would come on the radio and I began to love them. I cant remember them all now but there was Spoonman by Sound Garden, Positive Bleeding by Urge Overkill, and Senses Working Overtime by XTC. Senses Working Overtime is a sort of a mediaeval chant and drone, paired with pure bubblegum pop about empirical philosophy. It's about our perception of the world and the difference between what we're told and what we personally experience. I find it beautiful. I had no idea why they kept playing that song though, it came out in 1982 and it wasn't being re-released, there was no reason for it to be played over and over at that time along with recently released hit songs. In fact I couldn't even track it down. Years later it was re-released on their best-off album, Fossil Fuel, but even THAT was hard to track down because none of the music shops stocked it or could order it for me. When I finally got it I listed to all the songs over and over and became a fan. I was indoctrinated! I love their crazy silly pop-songs and their intellectual stuff about the failings of society equally. In this Quackcast we have a few similar stories, like the way we were drawn in to Star Trek while we initially found it dorky, and things like Buffy the Vampire slayer, Harry Potter etc. Do you have stories about things you were hooked into? if so, what were the hooks? Did you know that I didn't even like comics till an art lecturer forced me to draw them and it wasn't till I was posting my comics on Drunk Duck that I actually started to appreciate comics in general?
Links Senses Working Overtime by XTC - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrcemZpOmpI Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 20 May 2025
Do you like acting? Do you like being part of collabs or community projects? Do you like radio plays? If you answered yes to any of that the DD radio play is for you! Way back in 2011 we did our very first Drunk Duck Radio Play and NOW we're reviving the idea! We have a brand new DD Radio Play and we need YOU to be a part of it! In 2011 when we did our first play it was an amazing community project that so many of our great members participated in. Ally Heart wrote the script, many different people supplied voices for the characters, and even MORE people did comic pages for the comic version. In 2012 and 2013 Gunwallace wrote the scripts and people returned happily to be a part of it. Unfortunately around that time our site went through so troubled times and we lost focus for big community projects so there was never a fourth play… till now! Gunwallace has found the his 3rd script and that's what we wont YOU to join in with. Our DD plays are comedies focussed around a parody detective noir theme. The lead characters are always Maxwell McDuff, a gritty private detective, and Bill Duck who's an adventurer and world traveller hero type person. They get into all sorts of strange scrapes and daring mysteries. You can check out the latest scrip and see if you'd like to submit a voice tryout for any or all of the characters in the link in our shownotes. Also let us know if you'd like to have a go at the comic version! Special note- we had fun trying to do a live radio play version of our sexy collab comic Key of Dreams, which we'll now be uploading to the site. Lin in the shownotes. This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by A Wing To the Stars - Melancholy, starkly blue waves of dim light in the glittering darkness of a dead galaxy.
Links Our NEW DD radio play script - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/179981/ ALL THREE previous DD radio plays are here - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/quackcast/episode-147-merry-xmas-dd-radio-play-omnibus-edition/ Our sexy collab comic NOW online!! - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Key_of_Dreams/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_740_-DD_Radio_play_4_planning.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 3:00pm PST
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Tue, 13 May 2025
Artwork from Key of Dreams When you're working on a project with other people, a comic collaboration for example, it's usually best to decide on different roles for everyone according to what they're best at (writer, artist, layout design, pencils, inks, colour, backgrounds lettering etc), and let them handle it. You don't micromanage and make decisions for them. Basically they're the “experts” on those things now so you wait and see what they do. The idea for this Quackcast came to me after someone defended the super clunky Star Wars prequels with the old argument that George Lucas created them and he also created the original Star Wars so he must know best and certainly better than any “haters”. In reality though the prequels are an excellent example of why you MUST defer to people who know better. The original trilogy of Star Wars movies were created at a time when George was still a small fish in a big pond, he wasn't powerful or rich enough to have much control in the industry at that stage. He came up with great ideas (Star Wars, Indiana Jones etc), but had to rely on the studio system to get them made, which meant he had to collaborate with people who's job it was to make great movies: directors, script editors, Foley artists, casting directors, concept designers, model makers etc. As well as studio execs and producers. He had to compromise on what was feasible. But after the massive success of the movies, making a mint off of the sale of IP and merchandising, and his SFX studio Industrial Light and Magic being the industry standard, many years later when Luca worked on the prequels he had unrivalled power. He didn't have to defer to anyone anymore, he didn't have to collaborate or make compromises. He was the last word and he knew best… Except he didn't. In the years since he made those initial movies he hadn't directed much or written many scripts and the Prequels show that all too well with bad dialogue, clunky direction, bad plot choices etc. He even got rid of his expert model makers and all the work they did and used CGI instead because it gave him more control. TL,DR: The original Star Wars were good because they were made as collaborative projects by very experienced people while the prequels were mainly controlled by a guy who lacked a lot of expertise and it shows. I've worked in 2 collabs recently, Bottomless Waitress with Banes and Key of Dreams with Tantz and Banes. On both those projects we all have distinct roles and we stuck with them very easily! We worked within them and didn't ever bump into each other or try and take over anyone's role and so these are good examples of smooth collaborations which produce results people like. Bands are great examples of collaborative projects, especially when they're working with people who all get the chance to shine and handle their own roles. This is why I love Led zeppelin so much: back in the day Jimmy Page was the band leader and lead guitarist but he let each member handle what they were best at in their own way so it worked as a group of collaborative experts and you can really hear that in the sound! I ramble because I'm tired and I have a headache but I think this is an interesting point: You can't be an expert at everything so when you work with others let them handle what they do best and you do what you do best. There are many examples of great collaborative projects where many people working on them are great at what they do and come together to produce something magical. Some of my faves are Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds (rock opera), Led Zeppelin, The Life of Brian, The Empire Strikes Back and more… What are yours? This week it's another best off from Gunwallace! The Jacket Comic - Wiry, punk, gritty, shiny and cool, this one jangles in on lyrical chords, sounding indie-rock with an almost Arabian flavour at times as the strings howl and echo up and down the scales. A rocky tune it for the coolest jacket in the world. Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_739_-_Deferring_to_Experts.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 6 May 2025
Ensemble casts is the topic for today! But what do we mean by that? The way I'm defining it for THIS Quackcast is that you have a group of main characters where any of them can function in a chief protagonist role for part of the story, they're all on the same side and they can work together in smaller groups or in one big group. This is a common structure for modern sitcoms and a lot other things like The Avengers, Star Trek the Next Generation, or Lord of the Rings for example. They're not just a group, but a group made up of “main characters”. One of the advantages of an ensemble cast as opposed to just a group or a one or two main characters is that they can share the load story-wise and make it much easier to develop new storylines and work your way out of holes and blocks. This is because they all have advanced character development and so create stories and pathways just in how they interact with each other, their differing world views and how they approach situations very differently. It's harder to develop multiple main characters but it's easier to maintain a story in the long run, especially if it's a long running story. Banes and I have an ensemble cast in Bottomless Waitress consisting of the three waitresses, Polly, Jane, and Francis. There are other characters like Nicky the truck driver, Wilfred the scientist, or Craig the bus-boy but they're not as important or developed. Each of the three ladies can independently drive a storyline on their own, they can work in tandem confronting each other or together against other characters of situations, or all three can work as one. There are a lot of combinations and possibilities. Do you have an ensemble cast? Do you like it when stories use one as opposed to more of a group with a leader or just one or two main characters? This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by Plague Rat - a very dark, heavy, and serious intro leads up and into a beat heavy, 80s inspired, cool dance number that just drags you along and up out of the doldrums of the post-apocalyptic disaster of a plague-ridden, sad world, into the coloured lights and cool vibes of the dance floor!
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 29 April 2025
People in stories, especially bad guys in stories usually want to take over the world, but why? What's really to gain? Even in reality it's a complex question. That's what we're talking about here. What's the real reason to want to be the boss of everything? Money isn't the objective because when you become the leader of everything money is irrelevant, you control all standards and commerce. Is greed a motivation? Well no because being the boss of everything eliminates the motivation for greed. Power is the only true objective: being the ultimate boss means you can control everything. It's a crap load of responsibility and work though. On a smaller scale, why do you want to be the leader, the CEO, the king, the boss, the emperor? It could be because you have an overinflated ego and you think you deserve it so you can show off to others (Trump). It could be that you want power and control over others. Maybe it's the only way to can achieve safety and security, by getting to the top and being in charge of everyone else? Or maybe you have a vision for the future or a passion for something and being the leader is the only way to can enact your vision or preserve it? A very small scale example: I rose up on this site and became its leader. I started out as a comicer like everyone else, joining in 2003, positing my comic in 2004. Dylan Squires, creator of the site (known as Volte6), was always the leader then. I became more involved in the community and was made a moderator. I was passionate about the site and wanted things to run well and do right by the community. Eventually I was made an administrator with power to run the site. I was part of a small group of fellow admins. As time passed they all left and it was just me in charge. Through negotiation I took control of the site from the owner at Wowio. I later established my own team to help me run things. Through all that my only motivation was to make sure the site stayed running so that people could post their comics as usual and get comments and engagement. I'd love if someone else could be in charge instead of me though but it's a very complex and expensive process. Why do you think people want to take over the whole world? Especially bad guys in stories? This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Degrengolada - Creepy, brooding, building, exciting, evocative. Something exciting and interesting is about to begin! This is a slow, measured dance that’s leading to something big!
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_737_-_Why_take_over_the_world.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 22 April 2025
Happy Easter! Well that was Sunday, but happy Easter anyway. In honour of that yearly and ancient ritual holiday that has its roots in the rebirth of spring in the northern hemisphere our Quackcast is on the theme of resurrection! The idea that people can come back to life in realty is pure fantasy but it is an essential part of all different kinds of fiction. In classic time-loop stories like Groundhog Day, Palm Springs Meet Cute and others everything tends to reset at a set point. People can die and they will all come back regularly to repeat their day again. It's a very regular and understandable for of rebirth, just like spring! Contrast that with the way monsters are randomly reborn for horror movie sequels; they're killed in all sorts of ways but still tend to come back and varying points with no rhyme or reason, more like a random natural disaster. The place where resurrection has truly found a home is fantasy Isekai stories, usually in manga and anime. The reason for this is because extra lives and resurrection are a key part of game mechanics, originally platform games but later RPGs: you need extra lives in order to complete the games, without them it's just all too hard. Isekai stories already BEGIN with a resurrection because the protagonist usually dies crossing the road to save a kitten, small dog, young child, or schoolgirl in a short skirt, and is reborn in a fantasy land as the new hero. But now that almost all fantasy Isekais are based on the mechanics of fantasy RPGs most include regular resurrection whenever characters die IN the story. Their friends just go to a temple with some gold or a special item and bring them back. An honourable mention for the regular rebirths in Marvel and DC comics… They usually make use of alternative dimensions but nothing is off limits in those crazy stories. What's your fave sort of resurrection trope? Vampires? Different dimension versions? Cloning? Paying at a temple? Cyborgs? Virtual life uploads? Or magical rebirth? This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by Geist Gears - Follow the flow into the machine! Clunking and zapping as you traverse the circuits and electric doors inside, swelling capacitors, glowing diodes, flashes of deadly plasma from arcing conduits! It’s deadly but exciting.
Links Tantz's back from the dead newspost! - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/apr/19/back-from-the-dead/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 15 April 2025
Welcome to another DD Quackcast! We were going to discuss Ad Hoc rationalisations and also “what happens AFTER you take over the world” but both topics were waaaay too trumpish and we didn't feel like getting negative and ranty about that fellow's foolishness so we thought we'd talk anime instead! But what is anime? At its simplest it's just cartoons like any other but they happen to be from Japan. There's more to it though, most anime has a articular look to it: reasonably realistically drawn worlds and reasonably realistic figures but they all tend to have slightly oversized heads, huge expressive eyes, tiny noses and mouths, and very stylised hair and reactions. That's not always the case but it's pretty typical. But these days “anime” is also made in Korea, China, France, the USA and more, it's become a style rather than a country of origin thing. What differentiates it from Western animation? Mainly that the the figures were more realistically drawn, with more realistic and detailed backgrounds, while the typical Western style was much more stylised, flat, and simplified. These differences do not denote higher quality or a lack of quality, it's just about what's being prioritised: In Western animation all that flatness and stylisation meant that facial expressions could be enhanced, animation could have more more frames and everything could look smoother and more dynamic. For anime that mean you could have much better drawn, more realistic looking figures (always with 5 fingers!), as well as things like shading, reflection, and shadows, along with much more detailed worlds that they exist in. The trade-off was less frames, jerkier animation and many simplified scenes where they repeat movements, pan and zoom over still backgrounds to fake movement, and even replace backgrounds with things like lines to indicate movement. The upshot of this was that the more realistic style in most anime can have more appeal to adults, while the much more abstract style favoured by Western animation is always seen as a bit childish so it's been harder to maintain the adult animation industry in the west and it's not anywhere near as diverse. But the real difference is that the animation industry in Japan is massive because of the culture of producing manga which gives animation a constant pipeline of massively varied and interesting material, and the insatiable appetite of the public for new series. And because so much is constantly being produced it means the diversity of story style and genre is incredible and there is something for EVERYONE, of all ages groups, rather than the mainly violence and or sex focussed adult stuff, Simpsons clones, or kid focussed stuff in the West. It's a big, fully mature industry, while the western animation industry just isn't- it's much smaller and the older teen and adult part of it is immature so that diversity of style and genre is weak and very inconsistent. Would you agree? What are your fave animes? This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Landscapes and Stick Figures - A mechanically surreal piece, like mechanised people all made of crystal glass, dancing in an intricate series of interweaving and interlocking moves. It’s quite beautiful.
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 8 April 2025
When love turns to hate… It's a common trope in fiction: partners split up and their once loving relationship turns to one of bitter acrimony! We see hate turning to love frequently too, that's another common trope, I saw both when I watched Willow again last night. Mad Martigan and Sorsha went from hate to love to hate to love again, and Sorsha and her mum Queen Bavmorda went from love to hate. It's a staple in fiction because it's a staple in reality. It's such a solid staple in reality that many violent crimes and even deaths are caused by it at the extreme end. It's nasty in reality, but in fiction it's used for drama, comedy, plots, and inciting factors. It's fascinating to me that two very opposite feelings can be so closely related, I'd suppose that it's because of a few factors: passion can apply to anything, once you reach a level of extreme emotion, you're turned up to 11, it's very easy to switch from love to hate and the same passion level applies regardless. When you open yourself up to love you become very vulnerable and it's easy to be betrayed and hurt because of that. There are also biological and neurological factors: if the brain becomes used to the release of things like dopamine and oxytocin due to certain interactions but those hormones are no longer associated with those activities then you could feel rage and disappointment as a reaction instead as a sort of withdrawal- obviously I am NOT a neurologist. This doesn't just apply to people but ideas and politics too. Saruman from the Lord of the Rings is a great example, his hate of the evil powers is twisted into it's own kind of love. In reality I notice that whenever a person shows a lot of passion over an idea they are apt to switch to its opposite: religious people who become atheists and vice versa. People on one side of politics (left or right) can be apt to switch if they're crazy passionate enough. Mussolini is the posterboy for that. For me I feel this with creative pursuits, when a creative partnership dissolves I can feel very badly about that person. I also feel this more with friendships than loving relationships. So what are some good stories about love turning to hate or Vice Versa? War of the Roses is a classic of this genre. The relationship between Stirling Archer and Lana Kane is this back and forward, over and over. The Anime Masumune-Kun's Revenge follows the long plot of the lead character attempting to get revenge on the person he once loved and in the process falls in love with them again. One of the prettiest folk songs in the world is a song about hate: Scarborough Fair. It sounds like a beautiful love song but if you understand the lyrics you know that it's the opposite. The singer asks a person to relay messages to a person they once loved: if they can perform a bunch of utterly impossible things then they'll be a true love again. But of course those things can never be done because the true meaning is that the relationship over and all the lovely verses actually mean “GO F*** YOURSELF!”.
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_734_-_When_love_turns_to_hate.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 1 April 2025
Watching, reading, and listening to things a second, third or even a million times can offer you a whole new experience. Why do we pick up the same thing to enjoy again? It could be nostalgia, it could be the need for comfort in the familiar, maybe it's research, or maybe you're rewatching the early episodes of a series so you can get more enjoyment out of new, later episodes that you haven't seen before? Whatever the reason it can be an interesting experience, especially when you notice a whole bunch of things you never thought about before! You can see it through new eyes. And because you know how things ended up you can focus more on details, aesthetics, and character development rather than mainly on the plot. Since I've got lots of streaming services now I'm rewatching heaps of faves. I haven't seen the later seasons of Archer so I'm rewatching that at the moment. It's my 3rd time on these early episodes and I'm noticing new things as well as seeing things in a new light. I noticed Jessica Walter (Mallory Archer), Jeffrey Tambor (Len Trexlor), Judy Greer (Cheryl Tunt), were all in Arrested Development together. I had previously believed that Archer was an irredeemable arsehole from the get-go, and all the other characters were basically good but became arseholes as a reaction to Archer, but a rewatch shows that they were always ALL aresholes exactly as bad as him! I'm also shocked by how brutal and violent the show is and how often they don't even fully resole endings. When you revisit things often they're not how you remember them. Usually that's just because your memory is faulty and you have an interesting experience seeing something how it REALLY is. But it's awful when things actually HAVE changed; an old fave that's been retconned and edited... witness the stupid stormtroopers riding badly animated dinosaurs in Starwars! In comics like Asterix you can drink in the art and the historical and political references, find yourself noticing little side stories in panels and all sorts of character relationships going on. What are your fave things to revisit? And why do you do it? Or maybe you never revisit things?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Misfits of Fandom - no need for Redbull, coffee, or Monster energy drink, the tune has all the get up and go you need! Feel that thrum in your veins! This techno blast will drag you up and get you moving.
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_733_-_Watch_again-_Rediscovering.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 25 March 2025
Parody and satire are a certain kind of humour. They're VERY easy to do because you just base them off real, already existing things, then you twist it a bit to add humour and make it ridiculous. But that's where it gets tricky! Satire is a parody of a real situation rather than fictional, it tends to have a harder edge. Where it usually goes wrong is that people mistake it for something straight, i.e. NOT satire, not comedy, not exaggeration or ridicule. The two main approaches to parody are a broad satire of a genre, like Princess Bride on fairytale fantasy, or a more targeted approach like Spaceballs which satirised Star Wars, and things in between like Airplane, which made fun of the film Zero Hour but also used it as a chance to parody the disaster movie genre and include a shotgun approach to pop-cultural jokes, making fun of everything happening in the 1970s. When I was growing up Mad Magazine movie parody comics were always a fave of mine, I'd prefer them to the actual movies they made fun off. The art was amazing with great caricatures and the humour was always very cheeky. Asterix was another comic series I enjoyed, which involved a lot of historical satirical humour. One big issue with that kind of targeted humour though is that it's often very dependent on its references for the jokes to fully work, so if you lack familiarity with them it won't bite as hard or sometimes not at all. The trick is to include enough of the context for context dependant jokes so that they can work regardless. If you do your job well enough people will not even remember the original and your satire or parody will completely stand on its own! In our Quackcast we even covered things that become self parodies like the Deadpool Marvel Movies, some of the Roger More James Bond films, the late horror franchise films like Nightmare on Elm street, Friday the 13th and so on. What are some of your fave parodies or satires?
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_732_-_Meet_the_Parodians.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 18 March 2025
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Tue, 11 March 2025
Today we have on a super special guest, The Doodler! This is another on our technical series about art making and this time we're talking about lighting. Tantz suggested we interview The Doodler for this because she's Tantz's go-to person for lighting issues in scenes. It was great to chat with The Doodler about her lighting techniques and the different challenges presented by different scenes. The Doodler was much better at explaining the concepts than I could have been so it was a pleasure to have her on the cast! You might know the Doodler for her long running comic The Second Crimean war, about an alternate history of the Russian takeover of the Crimean region after the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 90s- this comic was created in 2010, before the modern takeover of Crimea in 2014. It's a popular and well drawn comic with top level artwork. It's mostly black and white with some limited use of colour. It's over 800 pages so it's a sizable chunk of comic to get into and I highly recommend it! Lighting is the most fundamental thing there is to visual art because it allows all things to be seen: a radiating body sheds light rays in straight lines around itself and these are absorbed or reflected off the objects they hit, in turn we see those objects because of the photons that are reflected into our eyes… It's MUCH more complex than that though. As comic artists we usually do things backwards: we draw line art, which would mean the default is that EVERYTHING is fully lit and visible, then we work out where the light comes from and what's in shadow. The simplest way to handle lighting in a comic is just to draw stuff as if there ware spotlights illuminating it all from the viewer perspective, like a stage play or TV sitcom- no shadows, full lighting. A more advanced, realistic approach suggested by The Doodler is to treat the image like a 3D space and work out where the light comes from (the sun, a flashlight, an overhead light etc), then ray trace from that point to work out what's in shadow and what's lit up. Listen to the interview to get a much better discussion on it than what I can write here! Gunwallace wasn't able to give us a theme this week so we're replaying his theme to The Second Crimean war - Heavy, grey winter skies, pregnant with snow and sadness. Cold snaps the brittle air, crystal daggers hang in the forest, a whistling breeze sings of desolation and loneliness. A thaw will be long in coming to this blighted world of war and suffering… Synth violins and cellos set the scene beautifully, touches of quiet bass and piano round out the landscape of the Second Crimean war. (Originally part of Quackcast 494)
Links Our guest The Doodler! - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/The%20doodler/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_730_-_Lighting_by_The_Doodler.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 4 March 2025
The 3rd in our technical art-making series, we're talking hair, feathers, and fur today. How do you draw those highly complicated, textured things? Well the complicated, difficult way is to draw every single strand of hair, every follicle of fur, and every filament of feather… But that has a lot of disadvantages! So how else do you approach it? The simplest way is to draw the overall shape that the full thing makes up and just do an outline of the rough edges. So for a hair style that would be the full shape with some hairs sticking out at the edges, with fur that's sort of the same thing though it's a lot less smooth than hair, with feathers just draw the whole wing with a few edge feathers and for the feathers themselves draw some parting in the filaments. Then what you do is add some texture within the shape, but only enough to suggest the rest, the viewer's brain will fill in everything else. If you want to get more advanced and painterly then you use the colours of the thing (feathers, fur, or hair), to create impressions of texture, shape, shadow, and highlights within it. The straighter hair is the more shine it will have, and conversely the curlier it is the less it can have, the same goes for fur, unless the hairs are facing you end on, in which case it has no shine. How do you approach these things? This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Grapeshot - A charmingly, whimsical, sea themed folky tune, promising adventure, action, booty, and freely flowing grog. Dance a little jig to the joyous violin! Topics and shownotes Links
Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_729_-_The_Feather_report.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 25 February 2025
Today we're going into another aspect of creating artwork for webcomics! This time it's painting skin, a topic that Tantz suggested. How do you render skin? It's a super common thing in comics and there are many, many ways to do it! We're not experts on all the methods so we just cover what WE do. We all have different approaches and you'll have to listen to the cast to see what Tantz and Banes say. I'll chat quickly about how I do it here. I have 3 main methods but first up it's important to know some things: There are NO such things as different skin colours, that's a dumb socially constructed myth, skin is all shades of brown from very dark to very light, this is because ALL skin is made up of just four main pigments mixed in different amounts, which you can use to mix any skin tone. There are black, Yellow, red, and white. Melanin is the black tone but can be yellowy and reddish, yellow carotenoids from diet, red from blood, and white from the colour of the skin alone. Mix those colours in varying proportions and you'll get exactly the right brown pigment you need for any skin tone. My first main way of painting skin is the simplest. I just do cell-shading in two colours. I pick a colour for the person which will be the main tone, then I select a slightly darker version of that same colour, dark enough that you can see the difference but not that it's too different. Then I do their whole bod in the main tone and use the second tone for shadows with a hard edge between them, no fading. It works super well! The next type is the fake painterly approach. I pick three tones. There's a light tone, a darker tone that is reddish or orangish in colour, and a third tone that is muted purple or blue- this is because it's a generic contrasting colour to the yellow and orange tones in skin. The lighter parts of the skin are all painted in the light colour, the reddish tone fills the shadow and the purple tone is just used as a line between the two tones; a penumbra, which is the separation between light and dark, that can often help shadows look darker and more striking than they are. Fade them a bit at the edges so the separation isn't so harsh. This method can work just as well for much darker skin tones too. My last method is the real painterly approach where colours on the skin are influenced by environmental colours and coloured light sources. You can use a 3 colour approach like the last method but take the colours from the environment. It could be blue, greens, reds etc. This is great for making your figures a part of the image instead of sanding out unnaturally from it. Some special notes: How do you do skin? One single tone, shadows, gradients or something more complex? Gunwallace was kind enough to give us a theme inspired The Inheritors - An interesting mix! It starts off with a slow, stepped drumbeat, that sounds a bit like the intro to “slave” by the Rolling Stones, then crashes to a dubstep and rayguns and scifi blasters, before moving into a classical music inspired race of synth violins, flutes, cellos and other sneaky instruments, ten arrives at its destination: an electrified barrier where yellow and black diagonal lines bar the way!
Links
Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 18 February 2025
We haven't done anything about actual art-making for a while so we thought we'd start a series on technical stuff. Starting out we tackle painting sea and sky! These are key general background elements, they're the two biggest simple background features you can get, you don't always need them but it's good to understand these big features for outdoor scenes and how they work. Sky and sea can be super simple features in art, in the most basic version all you need is a horizon line and pretty much nothing else, but they can also be super complicated and advanced if you want to go the other way. Skies can vary massively based on the time of day and what's in them, like clouds or pollution, and it's the same with the ocean. There are also basic physical principals that drive how they look: The sky is blue because it scatters and deflects blue light, it's darker towards the top of the sky (as long as the sun isn't there), because the top of the dome of atmosphere is thinner and less light is reflected, while towards the horizon the sky usually gets lighter because the atmosphere is thicker, the angle is different and so it's more reflective of sunlight. The sea is made up of water which is transparent, filled with stuff, and also somewhat reflective- so it looks various shades of blue in the deeper parts because it's a dark reflection of the sky. In the shallower parts the colour gets lighter because the sea bottom is more visible and helps reflect more light, the sea can also have a lot of green weed or algae in it which also affects the colour, as does the colour of the sea floor. So in the middle of the day the sky will be dark blue at the top and fade to light blue at the horizon while the sea does the opposite, starting with dark blue at the horizon and fading to lighter blue and then even green when it gets close to the viewer. Colours change at dawn and dusk when the angle of the sunlight is very low and being scattered and reflected in different ways: You get reds, yellows, oranges, and pinks usually. The low angle of the light on the water means that much more is reflected and so the colour is very different! Clouds, night, sun, and moonlight change that again! It gets very tricky and interesting and we cover all that in the cast! How are you with sea and sky rendering? Do you go simple or complex?
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Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_727_-_Painting_Series_Sky_and_Sea.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 11 February 2025
Do you have a big ego? Do you know someone who has? This Quackcast is about utilising egos for comic characters for comedic purposes, to humanise character, or to make villains more unlikeable and or funny. Big egos are a sign of poor self esteem, people inflate their egos to cope with feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. For examples of that we have a certain prominent politician and also a tech billionaire as perfect representations of every facet of that concept. :) Personally I LOVE a protagonist with a big, inflated ego, especially if it's also illustrated that it's undeserved, and often shown punctured. It's pretty uncommon for protagonists to have big egos though unfortunately because people see that as weakness in their character and status rather than making them more interesting. Big egos are far more common in villains, mostly because it's seen as a negative trait, but also because it's an easy way to show how weak and pathetic they are, they're also a goldmine for easy laughs. The latter is the reason that the characters with the biggest egos in fiction are often not the main villain but the villain's lieutenant. My favourite protagonists with big egos are Tank Girl, George Costanza from Seinfeld, Duckman (played by the same actor as George. Jason Alexander), Flashman from the books by George MacDonald Fraser, Space Dandy, Basil Faulty from Faulty Towers, Hyacinth Bucket from Keeping up Appearances, and Meg from the series Drifters. I'd love to name more but it's not a common trait, though you can point out a million villains with massive egos. In the Quackcast I examine Conan the Barbarian as a story about ego: Conan acquires a massive ego as a reaction to being kidnapped as a child and living as a slave, then being trained as a gladiator and lauded with praise and women. That only increases when he gets his freedom, joins his friends and becomes a successful thief. He's then tasked with rescuing a princess from a cult and returning her to her father. His ego is so big he eschews the help of his friends and tries to do it alone. He's captured by the villain, Thulsa Doom, the same man who killed his mother and enslaved him. Thulsa lectures him on the strength of ego and manipulation before crucifying Conan on a tree. As he dies, Conan's ego dies with him. His friends find his body and take him back, reviving him without ego. In then end Conan defeats Thulsa Doom, Thulsa expects his ego to dominate Conan and save himself but Conan kills him the same way Thulsa killed his mother, and does it totally without ego. As a last gesture he burns down Thulsa's temple and his cult disbands: the last two symbols of Thulsa Doom's over inflated ego. Do you agree with my take on Conan the Barbarian? Do you like characters to have a big ego? If so, what are your fave examples? Gunwallace was kind enough to give us a theme inspired Therion Inside of Me - Rocky, raw, groove with a godly chorus of cool backup singers. Let this one burn into your consciousness and enjoy!
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Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
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Tue, 4 February 2025
We're chatting about the comics you liked as a little kiddo this week! The topic was inspired by a thread in the DD forums. This is always a fun topic and I always have to mention Asterix because it was so amazing. This week Tantz had to bow out but we have Gunwallace to replace her, and Banes is back! Gunwallace is a fellow Antipodean, that means he and I share many of the same cultural touch stones, particularity the comic Footrot Flats. (Tantz is still on the Patreon only video) Footrot Flats is a newspaper comic by the New Zealand creator Murry Ball. It's about a working sheepdog called “Dog” who lives on a farm owned by Wal, a single guy who works hard, drinks beer, and loves rugby. It's a comic that Australians saw as very “Australian” because it played into the mythological rural, working class image that we invented for ourselves, New Zealanders who have a similar history and felt the same, hence the shared popularity of this amazing very classically Kiwi comic from New Zealand. Footroot flats comics be seen in many great collected works as well as an awesome animated film from the 1980s called “Footrot flats: The Dog's tale”. I fondly remember it for the hit theme song sung by New Zealand singer Dave Dobbin, “Slice of Heaven” which is one of my favourite ever songs. Gunwallace has even designed a cocktail inspired by it. I will list the recipe here and I urge to try it while listening to that song! Cocktail recipe!
Which comics did YOU like as a kid, which can you say STILL influence you now?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Snake in the Office - Chaotic, sexy, rocking, snake charming to layers of groovy electric guitar and a piano tiptoeing around with a charming little tune tying it all together like a fine Persian rug! A sinuous synth clarinet impersonates a snake charming flute while giving us a lovely 1920s feel.
Links
Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_725_-_Your_fave_comics_as_a_kid.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 28 January 2025
Is there a culture of plutocratic classism in the USA? I'm inspired by Trump's America and how people think that people like Elon Musk and him are above the law because they're rich, while conversely the lowest rank in society are the homeless and the poor. But what do I mean by “Plutocratic classism”? A plutocracy is a society where people's position is determined by their wealth, classism is our tendency to discriminate based on social class, put that together and you have people determining social value by how much money a person seems to have. Gunwallace joins us for this Quackcast, replacing Banes while he has a sabbatical, he along with Tantz Aerine and myself examine this idea from an outsider's perspective. Gunwallace like me comes from an extremely egalitarian society where the idea of obvious classism is frowned upon. Australia and New Zealand were countries created by people leaving the classist aristocratic society of Great Brittain so that they could make something of themselves outside of that rigid system where class was determined by family name, accent, where you grew up, where you went to school etc. In our countries any sort of obvious classism is seen as extremely vulgar and worthy of social attack. Of course aspects of it still exist but it's bellow the surface. Tantz Aerine's Greece has been through a number of changes, coming from aristocratic origins as well as modern communist influences. It means we all have an external view on this subject Plutocratic classism is a vision of the world that shows up all over American media, classically with something like Trading Places with Dan Akroyd and Eddy Murphy, even another Eddy Murphy film, Coming to America, Illustrates that beautifully. In the former a homeless black person and a wealthy white stock trader and made to switch places in society (mainly their level of wealth swaps), and they're subsequently treated extremely differently. In Coming to America an African prince comes to the USA and disguises himself as a poor person, the way he's treated changes dramatically. As the story progresses he meets various people at different social economic levels: the well-off middle-class small business owner father of his girlfriend in particular, as well as her rich ex, and all these people are treated as being on different rungs of the social class ladder depending on heir wealth. It's seen in very common tropes like the “dead hooker” jokes, the way homeless people are constantly shown as expendable trash, and the way people who live in trailer parks are looked down upon in American media, it's pure plutocratic classism. This shows up in American pop-culture media constantly. While the wealthy are seen as ersatz aristocracy and their children are viewed as scions, princes and princesses. Have you noticed this trend in American pop-culture media? Do you agree that it exists both in fiction and reality or is this all just communist bulsh1t that I'm blathering on about? Gunwallace was kind enough to give us a theme inspired by Ghats - A hypnotically relaxing track that builds up the pizzazz level with a synth trumpet band. From a quiet spa retreat to a full on Vegas show! Get a lot of those sexy showgirls!
Links
Featured music: Special thanks to: VIDEO exclusive! Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_724_-_Americas_Plutocratic_classism.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 21 January 2025
We're talking about how technology and design changes so much over the years and how that can change things with plot in story and it can also help pinpoint the date of something sometimes better than other things like fashion. The biggest one we talked about were phones, which have changed so much over the last few decades. Universally connected smartphones mean huge story changes- characters can all look up whatever they need at any time, communicate with people instantly, entertain themselves, take photos and videos etc. That can massively affect plots! But the look as well as the use is very distinct too. Early phones were the famous candlestick design with the separate speaking tube and you couldn't dial directly, you needed to ask an operator to connect you. Eventually we got rotary telephones with a heavy symmetrical hand-piece on a cradle, they started off with a rotary dial but later versions had buttons, they also featured the classic curly cord between the hand-piece and the unit. The next big change were phones that didn't have a cord, they were connected to the base unit by radio, those were very popular in the 90s and are still in use today, although much sleeker and smaller. Then came mobile phones, handys or cellphones… The early versions had to be large units because there were almost no phone towers so their batteries and radios had to be very powerful and large to compensate, so initially they were only in cars and a sign of wealth because they were very expensive. They shrunk down but you still needed to carry around a large “brick” with a handle to boost their power due to limited tower infrastructure. When we got more towers that allowed for much smaller phones, although still pretty large, but they could fit on a belt. The next big change was smaller phones with digital screens for texting and they could actually fit inside your pocket! This was dominated by the famous Nokia phones from Finland. Then came along folding “flip-phones” that could be smaller and status and wealth was shown by how small your phone was, Motorola and Samsung dominated there. We got phones with cameras, this required larger coloured screens and phones increased in size again. The all metal Motorola Razar flip-phone was one of the stand-out designs, but there were many form factors and brands. After that the next big change were the first smartphones, which were dominated by Palm and Blackberry. People could use the internet and full email on them and they were a status symbol for celebs and businesspeople. After that of course the touchscreen smartphones came along, Prada had a famous model but it was the iphone by Apple that kicked off the trend and democratised smartphones for everyone. Google followed with the Android operating system and democratised the concept even further, becoming the “Windows” of phones, with Android being on phones from many makers and creating phones of different price-points and capabilities from basic cheap models to incredibly high end creations. Things are still changing but the next big change were big size smartphones, lead by Samsung and their “phablet” Note phones that even included Wacom stylus tech, making them mini portable Cintiq tablets. That was initially laughed at by Apple and others but of course everyone eventually followed the new trend. Now we have folding phones with flexible screens, smart watches, smart-rings etc, but none are really taking off yet. “AI” seems to be the next big change but no one really knows what to do with it besides photo editing and writing phone messages for us. I didn't cover beepers, pagers, tablets, computers and so on but they're significant as well. All this tech has changed a lot, changed us and changes how stories are made. When I did my first big trip over to the USA in 2010 I got my first smartphone, an HTC Desire, the best Android phone at the time, because I didn't like Apple and Android allowed me more freedom. I got a local sim when I went to the states and it was an essential device to me. I justified the purchase because I knew I could have my music on there, it would be my camera, computer, email device, phone, map, newspaper, and everything else I needed. I've had many smartphones since but remember it fondly. How has tech changed things for you, in your stories, or reality? Does it help you date stuff you watch and read?
This week we're doing another Best-off! Gunwallace did these themes inspired by Bottomless Waitress a few years ago. He was So inspired he gave us TWO! 490 - Bottomless Waitress II - Part two of the BW cannon! Revenge of the banjo! We start off with a tractor roaring into life and a banjo opening us up to the sounds of rural Midwest America- wide open corn fields, golden wheat, grain silos, quiet back-roads, haystacks, big red barns, and a kinky little diner where the coffee is bottomless and so are the staff! Ava’s diner is a welcoming place for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Buttered buns, glazed donuts, and creamy desserts are a house speciality! So swing on by. No entry at the rear, we prefer you to come in by the front door.
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Direct download: Quackcast_723_-_Changing_tech_and_design.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 14 January 2025
Main characters with main character syndrome? What is main character syndrome? Well the way we're dealing with it here it's normally a snide criticism you level and someone who seems to think the world revolves around them, like social media “influencers”, selfish self centred people, that sort of thing. Popular figures like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are great examples: they imagine the world should bend to their whim, and normal rules don't apply, like a main character in a fictional story. The funny thing is that not many main characters think or act like that. Some do but they're the exceptions. Generally it's comic-relief side characters, villains, or antagonists who have main character syndrome. It's especially true for villains because behaving that way is easily seen as a negative and being selfish like that harms other characters in their world, being a great example of “evil”. Other characters typically notable for it include Queen bees in a highschool setting, also dominant “jocks”, and the love interests in harem anime- each of them think they're the main character, while the actual main character is a characterless blob. Main character syndrome isn't always a negative thing though! It can be fun or funny, or it can make you more invested in the world. Exceptions where main characters have MCS are the protagonists of noir detective stories. Every main character in Seinfeld had MCS, not initially but that's how the show developed. Cher in Clueless starts off that way but graduates out of it. In superhero comics MCS is definitely something you often see, I think Batman can have it depending on the writer, Deadpool is a good candidate… A fave example of mine is TankGirl, she has it 100% and it works in her favour, she moulds her world to her will. Do you have a fave example of a fictional character with Main Character Syndrome? Gunwallace was busy this week so we have a reissue of Gamma Blue Smoldering of Creel - Heavy rocking fire. This is a hammer forging red hot steel on an anvil, rhythmically pounding it into shape, slamming into it with thunderous blows, drawing out the metal into a brutal sword of pure rock!
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Direct download: Quackcast_722_-_Main_characters_with_main_character_syndrome.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 7 January 2025
A standard thing in stories is to have multiple plot lines. In short stories or when you're just starting out as a writer you tend to have a single line, the A plot, but as soon as you get a bit more experience and write longer stories you'll find the plots tend to branch and multiply, even if you don't always fully intend it. The usual is to have the A and B plots: the A is the main one that drives the story and the B is where you put other interesting junk like character development, villain stuff, comic relief, love interests etc. But it can get a LOT more advanced than that and you can have far more than simply A and B. The genesis of this cast was that I was moaning and groaning about long-form TV series that are intended for binge watching these days. Instead of being reasonably contained episodes you're actually watching a 16 hour long movie and I find that fatiguing and stressful because with those plot structures you feel compelled to watch and finish it (not all in one sitting, but finish it regardless). My complaint was that these things tend to have the A plot as the overarching story plot that connects all the episodes while the B and C plots etc are reserved for the episode itself, and that is NOT how it should be done, at least in my opinion. When series started this trend it would be a C or D line that connected the episodes, just minor developments and a continuing lore. Then it moved up to a B, major story stuff but the main storyline was still episodic, but now it's the A line and that is not cool.. according to me. In the Quackcast we chatted about interesting structures and variations, like twin A plots that complete for attention. One of my personal faves are the A and B plot lines that constantly switch: An A shifts down to be the B and vice versa over and over so you're not sure which is the main line. That's very organic and keeps you on your toes. One of the most boring versions are strict A and B plot structures where it's all pure formula and things just don't break out of that so you know that one line is always less important to the other and things become too predictable. Do you play with A, B, C, D etc storylines or just not bother and let things develop into that on their own, or do you just stick with only an A? And what do you LIKE in stories you consume?
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Tue, 31 December 2024
It's not the new year yet but this is the final Quackcast of 2024 and it's coming out on New Year's Eve! Another big point was that our programmer, Alexey, finally left us. That was very sad but he didn't feel he could keep up the work anymore. So we will be looking for another programmer or programming team with Python of UI capabilities to pick up on his work. The test site with the unfinished updates is linked bellow. Banes started Continuity Falls, replacing HPKomic's Panel by Panel feature, which was a much loved deep-dive into comics on DD and the web in general by the learned and experienced HPKomic (linked bellow). HPKomic wound up his segment to move it to his own website. While Continuity Falls is the first front page comic DD has had for almost 20 years, since Duck and Quail, it's slated to be a collab comic though it's just Banes for now, it will be an interesting ride! It has a very retro 1930s feel and I love it! We had another successful DD awards AND a Secret Santa recently too, which are marvelous little community projects by Drunk Duckers and really bring people together. The awards recognises people's great work on the site with their comics and the Secret Santa is a way to have fun, gift some art to someone and get gift art in return! All linked bellow. What were your biggest moments of 2024? Did anything cool happen with your comic? This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by Imago Nebraska - Like a super-dooper slow and chilled out Oxygene 4 from Jene Michelle Jare, this is thoughtful, sleepy, spacey, relaxed and otherworldly.
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Tue, 24 December 2024
Happy Christmas eve! In this penultimate Quackcast of the year we decided to have a free day and just chat about any subject that interested us at the time. Next week will be our final cast of the year when we'll do a year in review. We even went back to our roots and did some silly accents, mine were of course A-mazing! (they were pretty crap TBH) We touched on many subjects from the Adams family and Wednesday, even the Munsters (which I mistook for the Adams Family at one point… OMG what a dumbarse), the new Superman movie, Asterix, Corto Maltise, Chinese anime, Lower Decks, Shangri-La Frontier, Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online, and a host of other silly things. Happy Christmas to all who celebrate it! As a present I'm making this week's Patreon vid freely available here - https://www.patreon.com/DrunkDuck This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Hyacinth Webcomic - Heavy bass introduces the cast of usual suspects in this theme that beautifully echoes the intro of an 80s action TV show, blended with something more arty and eerie!
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Tue, 17 December 2024
This Quackcast was inspired by world renowned idiot Robert F Kennedy Jnr. We decided to talk about writing dumb characters. I keep calling him John F Kennedy Jnr because I am also an idiot. Some context: he wants to remove approval for the life saving Polio vaccine and allow dangerous unpasteurised milk to be widely sold, among other things. He's a classic idiot. This put us in mind of fictional idiots. Some classic fictional idiots: Lil' Abner, Jethro from the Beverly Hillbillies, Breckinridge Elkins, Mr Bean, Baldric, Biff Tanner, Dark Helmet, Homer Simpson etc. Idiots as protagonists are often rather innocent while idiots as antagonists are usually comic relief sidekicks (like Bebop and Rocksteady from TMNT), or comic relief villains. We don't usually get a serious villain who is also a fool,except in reality unfortunately. Who is your fave fictional moron or do you have any tips for writing an idiot? This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by The Side Characters - A solid piano groove that bounces and judders along before being joined by a snake charming synth bass that takes us on short exotic side-trip to the middle east and back! Topics and shownotes Links
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Tue, 10 December 2024
Non-linear stories are a different way of telling a tale. There are many famous examples (Pulp fiction, Mulholland Drive etc), where the sequence of events isn't in strict chronological order. This style has gained a false reputation of being superior or more advanced or challenging to an audience than linear stories. That is of course false, the nonlinear style as been around since storytelling existed are more closely mirrors the way we think about stories and tell them to each other : We often tell people about the end of a story first and then back track (“I had a terrible day today”, “I broke my leg”, “I won a thousand dollars!” etc) , we also jump to important parts , introduce other figures and give them back stories (“Then I saw Gene! You remember Gene? The lady with the sleepy eye, she used to look after you when you were a baby…”), and so on and on. Pure Linear story-stelling is actually much harder to do because it isn't natural to us, though a lot of non-linear stories are made by people constructing liner stories first and then going back and rearranging them. Life and time are linear but our thinking and awareness is not. I would posit that the reason we sometimes seem to find non-liner stories a bit more difficult isn't because of the style, rather it's because those examples are not well constructed. When they are, you don't even notice the form! Neither linear nor non-linear is a more advanced form, they're both simply different ways to tell a story. This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Secret Agent British Intelligence II - A cross between classic Spanish guitar by Rodrigo, and those cool wiry guitar riffs from James Bond Dr No, all mixed up into a little hacienda party melange! Topics and shownotes Links Inspired by Banes's newspost - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/dec/04/im-out-of-order-youre-out-of-order/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Direct download: Quackcast_717_-_Stories_out_of_order.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 3 December 2024
Is it important to Identify with characters? This question occurred to me as I was watching a rather banal sitcom, Rules of Engagement. I love two of the stars, David Spade and Patrick Warburton, but it's not really that engaging a show, the humour is anodyne and a lot of it is based around traditional gender roles and expectations, but I forced myself to watch it anyway just to see more of the aforementioned stars. The only way I was able to get into it was because I somewhat identified with David Spade's character- being a small blonde guy with long hair and a bit of a perv, haha! We discussed the idea long and hard in this Quackcast and came to some interesting conclusions. One of the ideas floated was that you don't have to identify with any of the characters at all as long as the story is good enough. Another idea is that there are ways to make the audience identify with ANY character regardless of who they are; first person writing is the easiest, making them the main POV character can work, making them an underdog, or giving characters a relatable feeling, experience or situation works too. The classic way of doing it is to make the character somehow similar to the audience it's intended for. This is a banal, amateurish, and basic way of doing things, but it makes up for basic writing. It's why most action films have traditionally have average, bland male stars, usually white and looking between 20-40, and “chick-flicks have the same thing but with a woman. It's why animes often have an extremely bland male star as the main character, especially for harem anime. And this is also the reason for the current fad of gender-swapping and ”race-swapping“ in everything, though through that they're attempting to broaden appeal. I think representation is a related factor (But NOT the same thing), and that IS important: to be able to see that people like you are ”seen" by the rest of the world and represented in the stories you consume is essential for a sense of self and how you fit into the world. It's something that's needed: people who look like you, talk like you, with lives like you, the same sexuality, gender etc. being represented positively in the stories you consume. That will never not be important! But main character doesn't need that unless the writing is super thin. I rationalise this because even though I'm a straight, white, middle-aged, Australian man I easily identify with any main character regardless of age, gender, sexuality, nationality or ethnicity when the writing is good. But when it's not you cling to what you know: Anything familiar. What do you think? Should main characters always be made to be audience proxies? And if so how should that be done? Can you name things where you identify with none of the characters but still enjoy it anyway? This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by the Railroad of the Wallachian Library - Creepily atmospheric… grey twilit mists swirl and eddy, tensions build, electricity crackles the air as your hackles rise… a ghostly locomotive charges out of the billowing fog only to disappear into the darkness. Topics and shownotes Links
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Direct download: Quackcast_716_-_Identify_with_characters.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 26 November 2024
This is the third in our weapons trilogy and it's about what happens AFTER the ultimate weapons have done their work: Apocalypse! The end of all things… This term comes from the bible, with the Book of Revelations which talks about what happens during the end of the world, but aside from the myth it's a pretty real concept- there are a LOT of ways the world can end and has indeed ended for various civilisations throughout history. If you want to go riiiiight back there were the different mass extinction events that ended almost all life a few times on this planet. In the history of humanity we have the fall of Rome, an event that was felt for almost 1000 years in Western Europe! It ended technological development, scientific research, the progress of culture, communication, trade, and production were shut down. Development atrophied and technology reversed and reverted. Meanwhile in Northern Africa, the middle east, South America and China advanced empires flourished, but that didn't stem the rot in Europe because there was little contact, communication or trade. There are other examples of this but that's the main one that comes to mind. Modern fiction is replete with a lot of different apocalypse and post apocalypse stories in many different forms (both natural, man made, and mythological). After the second world war the major influence was the idea of nuclear annihilation. A famous early example was On The Beach, a chilling film about American sailors on a submarine who survive the initial Apocalypse. They come to Australia in the Southern hemisphere and try and rally because life seems almost normal there, but when they travel back to the US to find survivors they learn everyone is dead that and the nuclear fallout will eventually even kill the people in the southern hemisphere down in Australia. The whole planet has an inescapable death sentence so all that's left is to choose how and when they will die. 20 years later 1979 famously gave us Mad Max! Which was a beginning of a whole genre of crazy low budget ultra violent deiselpunk post-apocalypse SciFi with muscle cars and torn leather. In this first movie it's pretty tame, we assume that society is slowly breaking down after an apocalypse but people are still keeping things going nevertheless. Max is a leather-clad highway policeman with a wife and child. Pretty soon though a road gang ends his little slice of normalcy and the Road Warrior is born. After that the world of the Mad Max films becomes more and more chaotic and alien, totally divorced from any connection to our present day society. This spawned many imitators, usually terrible but sometimes strangely amazing. What are some of your fave stories in the genre? The cover of this Quackcast is inspired by the 1985 Canadian film Defcon 4 (an image originally created in 1976 by Angus McKie). A Canticle for Lebowitz is a seminal story in the genre, about the preservation of culture and technology after an Apocalypse and how that can help rebuild things and that humans will inevitably repeat the same mistakes… Hell comes to Frogtown is an amazing and fun take on the dieselpunk post-apocalypse genre and definitely a fave of mine. But I think my faves would have to be The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham. Often thought of as “cozy catastrophes” because even though the world as we know it ends and the characters have to re-adapt they do it in a very level-headed way and they find a new normal- that is actually one of the very few absolutely accurate and realistic takes on what happens during and after a real Apocalypse which is why I appreciate it so much: life goes on, it's not the same but you do what you can to make it that way. What do you think? A fan of Waterworld, Fallout, Terminator 2, The Walking Dead, The End, Radioactive dreams, Don't look up, something more fun or more depressing?
Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 19 November 2024
Last week we had an overview of weapons throughout history and how it's a constant game of balance and oneupmanship. Now we're looking at future weapons and Scifi stuff! There's a lot of potential and a lot of interesting ideas you can use in comics and stories. We talk about a few of these and some of our faves, as well as our own inventions. Future weapons can take all different forms, many kinds of directed energy weapons, energy propelled projectiles, satellite based weapons, drone and robot technology, autonomous weapons systems etc. Biological and chemical weapons are super scary but generally pretty useless in reality, even as terrorist weapons because they're so imprecise and uncontrollable and take a lot of work to set up and deploy. This means they will hit people who aren't your target and they also have an excellent chance of not even working at all despite all the preparation and cost, so we're not even bothering with these in the discussion. One future Scifi weapon concept that always comes up are “plasma” weapons. These are super undefined and no one really knows what they are because they can be so many things. When it comes to weapons what we mean by “plasma” is the very hot gas that has free ions so that it's electrically conductive like metal. We know dangerous plasma mostly from its use as a cutting torch in welding and also the gigantic planet sized solar flares that seem to erupt from the surface of the sun are plasma that's following the huge loop of a magnetic field projecting from the sun, because it can be controlled by magnetic fields. Given this it can be used in a few different ways as a weapon: you can use it like an explosive chemical propellant for firing bullets, you can use it as a sort of flame thrower (especially effective if you can direct it with a magnetic field), you can contain balls of plasma with magnetic fields and throw them like canon shells, or you can use the plasma as an electrically conductive medium to direct lightning bolts. Directed energy weapons are very traditionally SciFi but have only ever seen limited practical usage despite the old popularity of the “Death Ray” and lasers as weapons. They're attractive because the only limiting factor is your energy source, you don't need to carry ammunition so theoretically you can have unlimited shots, they travel at the speed of light so you can't miss, they're not affected by friction or gravity so there are no ballistics to work out either, there's also no loss in energy like there is with traditional guns where the propulsive explosion badly transfers energy to the projectile. The trouble is that they don't work very well as weapons because you need to put in a LOT of energy to do any damage over a distance because they don't work well in an atmosphere, you also have to hold it on a target for a long time. This category includes the aforementioned lasers, microwave weapons, electron beams, particle beams etc They have a lot more potential as space weapons where atmosphere isn't an issue and their lack of recoil is a huge advantage. Electrically accelerated projective weapons known as “mass drivers” are another category. They are capable to much higher speeds than traditional guns or missiles because they're not limited by the compression of gasses. In this group we have Gauss guns aka coil guns, rail guns and some other variations. They use magnetic or electrical fields to accelerate projectiles. The main advantage is speed, increased safety because they don't need dangerous propellant, and shots only limited by your electrical capacity. The disadvantages of these systems is that they're very complicated, they can't use explosive projectiles, and they have a high failure rate- Railguns are the most promising system but each time they fire they produce clouds of burning fire, which is caused by layers of metal being stripped from the rails inside them, which means they degrade very quickly and the rails have to be replaced constantly. We all know the potential of drones, but the use of autonomous self directed weapons where the drones can pick their own targets is where they become scary. Autonomous weapons are already a reality in large defence turrets on ships, around army bases, and important buildings (like the Whitehouse). They can be set to radar directed target acquisition, which they need for defence against fast moving missiles. Machine gun turrets on the defences along the DMZ between North and South Korea also work like this. Even cruise missiles are somewhat autonomous in that they can find their own way to their targets. What we're really worried about though are things like predator drones or tracked bomb disposal robots coming after us with weapons like mounted machine guns, both are possible and have been tested. Satellites have limited weapon capability, none have enough power onboard to carry useful energy weapons, while mass drivers and traditional projectile weapons introduce the problem of recoil which is extremely hard to cope with for a satellite in orbit. They can carry missiles like nuclear weapons be they're extremely vulnerable to attack for such an expensive weapon. successful experiments have been made using traditional guns against other satellites but they're very messy and dangerous to everything in orbit. A stupid idea that was proposed were the “rods of god”: giant tungsten poles which the satellite could drop as destructive gravity driven bombs, The trouble is that would be super expensive to get into space, the accuracy is extremely bad and the energy needed to aim them would be too costly. It would only be useful as a “sword of Damocles” if you had them always hanging over specific targets, but even then they'd be very easy to disable. We came up with our own future weapons. Mine was a marshmallow gun that would spray masses of harmless sugary marshmallow fluff all over your enemies, then use a microwave emitter to massively expand the marshmallow and heat it to debilitating levels. This would envelop people in masses of injurious, burning gooey muck, which would then harden on them and any surface it touched. It would also be terrible for the insides of electronics and machinery.
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Tue, 12 November 2024
Today we have onboard with us our resident theme maker, our classic composer and musical genius! He does all the DD comic inspired themes that regularly appear on the Quackcast and has done so for the last 10 years! In that time he's done almost 600 musical themes. At the moment Gunwallace is the games-master of a Star Trek roleplay thing that Tantz, Banes, and I all do after the cast. He's based an illustrated story on it called “On the Edge” with art by Banes and Genejoke, and some by Tantz and me, Ozoneocean. Gunwallace is a multi-talented creator, artist, writer, musician, composer, author, cook, and mixologist! This hale and hearty, towering example of a New Zealander has been posting comics here forever, notably the author of the very popular Playmobile art comic “Character Development” and the popular one panel strip “All Unicorns to Battle Stations”, among many others. He was a zine writer from way back in the day and he's STILL in the Zine-Scene now, having met many popular creators in that field as well and being one himself, he was even in talks to work with the world famous Lord of The Rings Director Peter Jackson at one point! In his free time he has written cookbooks based on bizarre old recipes, and books of cocktail recipes based on drinks he's devised himself and with friends. In this cast we have a long meandering chat with him about a whole bunch of things and by the by we also include many of the themes he's composed over the years. In order of appearance they are: Bruno harm, Life and death, Clint, Joe pop, Pinky TA, Typical Strange, Without Moonlight, Ginger and shadow, God's Revelation, and Super Temps. A message from Tantz: Join the fun, get more people to know you, and interact with more artists on Blue Sky! Follow us on - https://bsky.app/profile/theduckwebcomics.bsky.social (@theduckwebcomics.bsky.social) where the Quackchat continues every Sunday! This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by A SuperActionGirl - This starts off with a weird stuttering electronica synth sound that echoes and vibrates as it stammers its repeating yet evolving chorus of notes in way evocative of fractal patterns or blooming flowers, finally ending with a phrase that seems to reference a similar sound from the start of Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who Topics and shownotes Links Gunwallce's latest project, On The Edge - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/On_The_Edge/ Featured comic: Featured music: The comics with themes played in the cast:
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Direct download: Quackcast_713_-_Gunwallace_Master_Composer.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00pm PST
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Tue, 5 November 2024
This week we're talking the development of weapons, tactics and armour over the millennia. This is a fun little overview of everything from ancient stone weapons, to bronze, to iron, steel, guns, tanks, and jet-fighters and all the interesting stuff in between. Comic stories often involve literal conflict whether set in the past, the present, future, or fantasy and Scifi, so overviews are always good. There are a LOT of misconceptions when it comes to this stuff, we tried to address a few and correct them in the cast. Like people didn't go from bronze to iron because iron was a better material. People had to move to using iron because bronze is made of tin and copper and those two materials are not found in the same place, changes in empires and wars disrupted trade routes so badly that supplies of the raw materials were no longer viable. Iron was a substitute because it's common and doesn't need any other components, though it's inferior because it's more difficult to work, not as hard so it doesn't make as good blades or armour, and it rusts easily. It wasn't till people finally discovered steel that iron became better than bronze. Some other misconceptions: There has never ever been an “ultimate weapon”, rather it's always a balancing game. As one thing starts to help people dominate in a particular field other things develop to counter them and so on forever into the future. Do you know any misconceptions? How do you think weaponry will evolve to counter drones?
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Tue, 29 October 2024
Halloween is on the way and we always do something different for it. This time we're doing a commentary for the 1987 vampire movie The Lost Boys! We even dressed in Lost Boys themed outfits for the Patreon vid which we will make available to ALL Patrons (even free ones), as a treat. The Lost Boys is an interesting comedy horror vampire film, it distils a LOT of really big 1980s style trends and yet it doesn't seem old fashioned or twee because it takes the viewer to the era and accepts you rather than keeping you at a distance as an outsider. You see punks, the surfer beach culture, metal-heads, new romantics and more. It's just a great showcase and super exaggeration of the styles. The movie starts off with the awesome Cry Little Sister theme by Gerard McMann which is 80s but also has a timeless creepy gothic feel, it's the perfect intro to the movie, setting the slightly edgy, creepy tone and coolness factor at the same time. But it also contains the perfect summary of the theme of film to come. McMann wrote the song after reading the script rather than seeing the film so he was able to get at the central things that are easy to miss with all the cool visuals: it's a film about families and loyalty. Two families compete for survival, one are the Emersons who have just moved to Santa Clara to be with their grandpa, the patriarch, the other is the vampire clan led by its patriarch. The vampire clan wants to absorb the Emersons, starting with the oldest son Michael, but youngest Sam doesn't want that to happen! Cry Little Sister is from the perspective of the Vamps alone though while the film is from the perspective of the Emersons. This is a fun, stylish movie and we had a lot of fun watching it all over again and doing this reaction cast! Comics even have a prominent place in the film with the vampire slaying Frog brothers working at a comic shop and using comics as a way of bonding with Sam as well as finding out how to deal with the vampires. Have a listen and maybe go and watch the movie again.
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Tue, 22 October 2024
-Cover image: female Sagittarius silhouette pic by Tantz that only took a moment to create but its impact was way larger! The fleeting greatness ducks of in the wind! This is a weird one based on a notion I had: Life and experience isn't typically based on long moments, rather it's all based on very short, lightning quick highlights: a song that lasts 3 minutes is massively striking and important and its impact can reverberate down through the decades, despite only lasting such a short amount of time. Things like comics can take days, weeks or years to make and yet each page is consumed in no more than seconds! But even so, it can have a huge effect. This goes into all aspects of life and creation because it's how the brain of most adult neurotypical people works: we don't experience the world as a real time 24 hour, 86400 second long drag, taking in every instant as it happens, rather we phase all that out and only focus on a highlight real of interesting moments- those get expanded in importance and we think they take up more time and space than they actually do, this is why you constantly forget routine things that you do during the day (did I put sugar in my tea? What did I come in here for?), because your brain is on autopilot for the unimportant routine things. And this is why we think time slows down when something scary happens: because our brains actually start taking in awareness in real time and noticing everything! In reality any fight only lasts a few seconds or a minute or two at most, most things in sex are like that too, and the old adage with war is that it's a few minutes of action and many hours of boredom… And yet when we depict those things in stories for comics or film or whatever we always massively stretch out those moments of action far longer than they could ever last because that is the only way to make them realistically relatable to the viewer: Because when you experience those things your awareness is extremely focussed and so they seem to last much, much longer. It's not always like that- When you're a child your brain (for a neurotypical) still needs experience in order to understand how things work so it has to be constantly taking in everything, which is why it's so easy for children to get painfully bored and why time seems to last SO much longer. There are also unfortunate people who's brains are always stuck in that mode so all life and experience to them is absolutely interminable. I feel like I have the opposite issue where I have very little awarenesses of anything specific and time zips past at a breakneck pace, like the Rolling Stones song Rock Off “I'm zipping through the days at lightning speed” but change “days” to “decades”. To get back to the point of this- Things that take hours, days, or years to create but only a few seconds to enjoy and experience, can STILL create an impact that lasts forever. Even a movie which can go for 2 hours or more is usually only enjoyed as a few import but very short scenes that we increase in importance in our own brains - Which is why we often remember things differently to how they really were. I think it's extremely important for creator to understand this: how people take things in and consume media and reality as a “best off” compilation of important moments, but also that even though something might take forever to make and most people will only take a few a seconds to experience it, its impact can be huge and last much longer.
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Direct download: Quackcast_710_-_Ducks_in_in_the_wind.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 15 October 2024
Dragons are cool, aren't they? That's our subject for today, specifically the giant, monstrous beasties of myth, fantasy, and legend. They can be evil, they can be clever, they can be animalistic and wild, they can be friendly, they can be wise and all knowing, there's absolutely no common personality to dragons at all. There's this old idea that there are “Western” and “Eastern” dragons in myth, that is simply nonsense and just a relic of an older way of looking at the world. The truth is that dragons are present in most cultures in some form. Famous dragons in myth are the ancient Germanic creatures like Jörmungand, Níðhöggr, or the dragons fought by Beowulf and Siegfried. There's the famous dragon that was slain by Saint George, the godly Celtic dragon that adorns the Welsh flag, there are many wise demigod Greek dragons, as well as the more animalistic Hydra. There's Tiamat from Mesopotamia, a more godly creature, and speaking of gods there's the Rainbow serpent from the Australian indigenous cultures who created all the world! The Mayans had Quetzalcoatl with its rainbow body and beautiful feathered wings. Then we have all the dragons from East Asia and Southeast Asia who can be outright godly and imperial or simply associated with elemental aspects of the landscape but this is barely scratching the surface. Dragons in culture are FAR richer than “East Vs West”. What from do they take though, what defines are dragon? Well most dragons are serpentine and reptilian in form, with scales, large teeth, and an elongated body. they often have four limbs with claws, a pointed tail, and sometimes even wings, usually bat style but sometimes feathered. Those are not needed for a creature to BE a dragon though, the long serpentine form is enough. Dragons in modern pop-culture fantasy tend to have a long tail long neck, scales, a head covered in horns and or fins, a big body with four limbs, and a large pair of bat wings. They can be anything from cat sized to the size of a continent but are usually the size of a big house. Fantasy gave us many notable dragons and fantasy art really lit my young brain aflame, with the wonderful imagery by the likes of Michael Whelen, David Roe, and so many more. As a child I was captivated by an image of “Smaug” on the cover of an ‘80s printing of Lord of the Rings. Later I was fascinated by the dragons in the stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffery, Katherine Kerr, Terry Patchett, Gordon R Dickson and more. I’m sure many have fond memories of Dungeons and Dragons and the book series Dragonlance. Not to mention the great movies like Dragonslayer, How to train your Dragon, Dragonheart, A flight of Dragons, Raya the Last Dragon, The Hobbit, Reign of Fire, Jabberwocky, Game of Thrones and more. Then of course there are human dragons! There were some dragons in myth that could take human form. Draco, who we get the name of “draconian” laws from was a Greek fellow with a draconian name. Vlad the Impaler's dad is supposed to have earned the title of “Dragon”, which is why we call him Dracula (son of the dragon) and where we get the fantasy horror vampire creature's name “Count Dracula”. A “dragon” in modern Greece is a particularly evil type of criminal (which I won't discuss here). A Dragon in US business language is a powerful investor. And a dragon-lady is usually a very intimidating and powerful Chinese woman. But my favourite human dragon is Haku from Spirited Away. What is YOUR fave dragon? Is it from myth or fantasy? Do you even like dragons at all? This week we have another best off from Gunwallace. Due to the dragon topic I selected Gunwallace's them to Dragonet from Quackcast 251! - It's best described as “Royal, commanding, and bleak”. Topics and shownotes Links
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Tue, 8 October 2024
Cyberpunk is a cool genre we have never covered exclusively on a Quackcast before. But what IS cyberpunk? It's a subset of SciFi, it's usually near future, involves body modifications, grittiness, street level computer use, techno body modification, and hacking. At least that's the way it started. Formative influences on the cyberpunk genre were the first Tron movie, Bladerunner, and Escape from New York. Tron showed us what cyberspace was, while Bladerunner and Escape from New York gave us gritty near future dystopias with cool tech, modified humans, and most importantly the punk aesthetic which was the gritty street youth fashion of the late 70s and early 80s. Punks plus computers signalled a more universal use of the new technology of computers in the near future world especially as imagined by Willian Gibson with his novel Neuromancer. There were other influential cyberpunk writers like Neal Stephenson with SnowCrash and many more. My fave was Manga creator Masamune Shirow with his books like Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed and more which tackle subjects like trans-humanisim as humans evolve with technology and then INTO technology itself. In the late 80s and early 90s cyberpunk was very influential in anime with the likes of the Ghost in the Shell movie, Bubblegum crisis, AD police, and the amazing milestone that is Akira! A very formative game in the world of cyberpunk was the RPG Shadowrun, which was near future urban fantasy plus cyberpunk in all its pure glory. These days we have the computer game Cyberpunk 2020, but it's an extremely derivative and pale shadow of what had gone before it, it functions as a sort of a retro “greatest hits” of the genre, but it's a good intro into it and that goes for the Netflix anime of the same name. There were various unrelated genres inspired by cyberpunk- Steampunk, Dieselpunk, and the later dubious genres raypunk and atompunk which are just rebranded early standard SciFi. What is your fave example of cyberpunk? Do you know what cyberpunk is? When did you first come to cyberpunk? This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by The Return of Jake Sunrise - A desolate red dirt desert, a wind whistles through and carries with it a torrent of sound and energy, flooding in like a sudden rainstorm, bringing with it life, colour, and revitalisation! The desert blooms. Topics and shownotes Links
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Tue, 1 October 2024
Fight choreography is tricky. We have it in comics, plays, movies and TV. When it's in full motion the trick is that you cant usually show things connecting so you have to work around the safety aspects in various ways. In comics you can show things connecting but how do you make the movement and the narrative believable and exciting just by using still images? It takes a lot of skill! Animation has to be the easiest way to depict fights because you can show the results of hits AND you can easily make moment believable but there are always challenges. There are 3 main types of fights: duels, brawls, and battles, though there are a million combos and variations between those. Duel: one against one. Brawl: everyone against everyone. Battle: a big group against another big group. Fights usually involve a character that wants something and another trying to prevent them from getting it so the narrative of your fight has to include that dynamic, not simply action for its own sake. I've worked at drawing a few fight scenes myself for my comics and I think I do a pretty decent job at it. I visualise the fight progress in my mind, work out the beginning, middle and end of it (treating it like a mini story), and then visualise cool images that depict parts of the progress and action in the most dynamic and sexily interesting way possible. That works well for duels. Battles are more chaotic and it helps just to focus on a few key parts while leaving the main fighting in the background. Trying to show the overall clash on a larger scale is very easy to mess up: look at the stupid battles in the later Lord of the Rings movies, the troop moments make no sense at all, they're just running from here to there to everywhere pretty pointlessly, but when things focus down on individuals at a smaller scale it works much better! What are your fave fight scenes? And how do you go about choreographing a fight in your comic? One of my faves is the duel between Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride and the first fight in the movie the Duellists.
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Direct download: Quackcast_707_-_Fight_Choreography.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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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 PST
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Tue, 27 August 2024
Following on from last week with our Quackcast on faces, this week we're chatting about expressions, which is a very natural progression! expressions are a great way to enhance communication in comics. they can be fun to play with but tricky to master. Though when you get them right they really help lift your game. Exaggerated expressions are seen more in cartoony work rather than realistic styles but drawing good expressive faces still works well regardless, even if they ARE more subtle. One of the funniest things about drawing facial expressions is how your own face tends to mirror what you're drawing at the time, so you can look like a freak! One of the big myths about non-verbal communication is that it comprises the vast majority of communication, which is pretty silly and easily debunk-able, but the fact that myth is still so popular shows how important expressions are to us, at least in our perception. Obviously the vast majority of communication is primarily through language alone, but body-language and expression do help. For our Patreon video we all tried drawing facial expressions real time, that's where the cover image comes from. Banes and Tantz were great! I wasn't. This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by The Gimblians - Introspective, considered and thoughtful. A short little compact track that leads us down a silent snowy path through a dark forest in the moonlight… and into a bouncy castle filled with clowns! Topics and shownotes Links
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Tue, 20 August 2024
Drawing faces is one of the most natural things for us to do, and they're very easy for people to see that they're faces because animals are evolved especially to be able to see faces- people mistakenly think this is just a human thing but it's clearly something that happened much earlier. We're so good at seeing faces we see them where they don't exist (paradolia). So drawing them for comics should be super simple, should it? Well it is and it isn't. You can always get better at things and drawing faces is something that has a vast range of difficulties. They can be as simple as a circle with minimal features, or more advanced attempts with everything clearly laid out with shading and a perfect expression, and everything in between… How I do it is something in between: Sort of realistic but still pretty cartoony. The easiest way to do more realistic faces is to understand the rules: The eyes go roughly halfway on the face. The eyebrows go up above and create a shaded line, the mouth and bottom of the nose divide the bottom of the face into thirds. And that's you average face. Drawing different ethnic traits though is very tricky without being racist! So practise those a lot before coming out with anything publicly. An important thing to know is the myth of symmetry. The myth is that perfectly symmetrical faces are more beautiful, this idea was put forward a few years ago by a plastic surgeon of all people and many ate it up. The reality though that very symmetrical faces can actually give you an "uncanny valley" feel so that the face can start to look unnatural and alien. It's VERY easy to make perfectly symmetrical faces in art, now moreso than ever. You simply draw one side of a face, copy, paste, flip and join them. It's a good technique to use to quickly draw a portrait but a smart move is to rough up either side and remove some of that symmetry subtly. Beauty is about being average (not too far outside norms) and the cultural standards of that particular point in time, symmetry is a small and basic part of that, NOT the prime component: a good clue as to why this is the case is the fact that humans don't all look the same, people from different ethnicities have very different facial traits and beauty standards, and we can very easily see that beauty standards throughout time varied massively and constantly. Saying that beauty is based on symmetry is like saying cars are based on wheels- in one sense yes but in all other senses no. How are you with drawing faces? What's your secret? Can you draw people of different ethnicities without being racist? What style of faces do you draw? NEXT WEEK- The expression cast This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by The Hotel - Trapped in a never ending loop inside an elevator. Are you going up, down, or… sideways? Ring the bell for service. You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.
Links Please consider purchasing a copy of our latest DD anthology A Flock of Dreams to help DD https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/jul/20/quackcast-697-the-dd-anthology-comic/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Direct download: Quackcast_701_-_Faces_come_out_in_the_rain.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 13 August 2024
We chatted about Greek Myths last week and found the subject so interesting that we thought we'd do a part two! So even MORE Greek myth stuff for Quackcast 700. There are just so many great stories like the myth of the Hydra and how it was so hard to kill because when one of its many heads were cut off it would just grow another one. Or the Minotaur that was trapped in a labyrinth under the palace of Minos in Crete in order to imprison him because he was a monster. The labyrinth was of course built by Daedalus. I love all the stories about Daedalus who was a genius inventor and architect, basically an engineer and a scientist, and I love that he as an inventor is a celebrated character of myth. Not many cultures have myths about such characters. Odysseus is another favourite of mine, he was a genius strategist and just an all round clever man who could always come up with plans and amazing solutions to problems… a bit of a MacGyver if you will. And he's another interesting character to be celebrated in myth. My favourite gods are the siblings Artemis and Apollo. Apollo only because he's a sun god and he's an arrogant, pretty fellow so he's fun to draw. Artemis is a fave because she's so capable, competent, and driven, plus she has an awesome name. she's seen as a virgin, maiden hunter goddess and another aspect of Athena. The Roman version was Diana and our modern version is Wonder Woman. Who are your fave gods or humans in Greek myth? This week Gunwallace wasn't able to do a Quackcast so since this is Quackcast 700 I decided to reissue our theme to Quackcast 500! - This was an awesome rocky anthem for the DD Quackcast. It’s all hard guitars and loud stonkin’ sound! With the super-duper added contribution of us all shouting “500”! Topics and shownotes Links
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Tue, 6 August 2024
We're chatting about our fave Greek myths! Greek myths are foundational to a lot of Western culture, they're what superheroes are based on as well as all sorts of epic stories. Lots of scientific concepts and ideas are based on things from mythology. The stories resonate down through the millennia because they're so relatable and human- rather than being about stodgy perfect beings who live in a magical realm and guide their mortal charges like children, the Greek gods of myth have the same emotional drives, lusts, jealousies, and personal problems of any modern person living today. Many of us find our own way into the myths. For me it was the astronomy books I loved as a child because I adored the images of the planets, stars, and nebulae. They had names from Greek and Roman myth and there were stories explaining where the names came from. Aspects of Greek myth would pop up all through culture; the naiads, dryads, and fauns in CS Lewis's Narnia books, the plays and music based on the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice… Hercules was always everywhere, and one of my favourite cartoons as a child was Ulysses 31, a French Scifi show based on the Odyssey. Then there are all the classic sword and sandal movie epics like Clash of the Titans! The Greek gods even show up in the musical Xanadu, a childhood fave of mine. These days people have have many animes, video games like God of War and Assassins Creed, movie and book series like Percy Jackson, the 300 and even Wonder Woman. I'm sure the 90s Kevin Sorbo series Hercules the Legendary journeys and its sister series Xena Warrior Princess were big inspirations for many! Even the Disney cartoon about Hercules. Not to mention all the secondary and tertiary influences like He-man who has more than his share of Hercules in him, even carrying a sword inspired by Greek weapons (though he's also based on Conan, who has Hercules in him too). It's funny where Greek myth references pop up- a lot of them in the names for technology and technical computer things because the scientists and engineers who created them were a little pretentious and wanted to show their classical learning. One of my faves is the name for the days of the week- In English most of them are the names of Germanic gods- Tuesday = Tir, god of war: Wednesday = Odin, Wodan, Wotan, god of wisdom: Thursday = Thor, god of thunder: Friday = Frigg and or Freyja, one a mother god he other a goddess of fertility. They were named that as a translation of the original Latin names because of course those days were named for Roman Gods: Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus… which were of course translations of Greek gods: Aries, Hermes, Zeus, and Aphrodite. So what are your fave characters from Greek myth, fave Greek myths or fave pop-culture things with Greek mythic influence? How did you come to learn of the Greek myths?
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Tue, 30 July 2024
Hair is a weird thing isn't it? It's just a bunch of thin filaments that stand out and hang from the body, most visibly from the head. Everyone is bald as an egg underneath this coating of head-fur, but the floof on top takes on a life, body, and shape of its own even though the truth is that it's just thin threads all buffed up with a lot of air. Hairstyles can indicate class, status, wealth, occupation, style, coolness, lack of cool, age, date, and any number of other factors about a person and where and when they fit in society. We also have strong reactions to hair: love, hate, revulsion, or disgust. It can indicate whether a person belongs to a community, a society, a religion or a sect. It's a gigantic subject, so lets limit it down to just a few things… In the years between wars fashion fought back and other styles prevailed, but World War 2 bought millions more men and women into military service and THIS time those fashions stuck. It wasn't till the late 1950s and early 1960s the the first reactions to post war ultra-conservatism started to show up with what eventually became the counter culture movement exemplified by hippies. Long hair on men was seen as an act of revolution. Their conservative parents somehow forgot that their own parents and grandparents before them had long shaggy hair and beards (if they wanted them), and treated the long haired youth like something new and weird, when in reality it was their own conservative war traumatised generation that were the weird ones. That aside, what hairstyles do you like? What do you gravitate towards? Do you like particular styles on characters that you draw or read about in comics? I love big hair and long hair on my characters because short hair is really hard to draw. But these days I experiment with my styles, even bald styles which are interesting, though not full bald because that's just easy mode. This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by The DD Anthology: A Flock of Dreams - A very dream-like cruise on a sea of somnambulance…drifting off into dreamland with piano and soft sounds. Floating on waters of heavy, dully shining mercury. Topics and shownotes Links
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Tue, 23 July 2024
We present to you our latest Drunk Duck anthology comic: A Flock Of Dreams! A Flock of Dreams features 166 pages and 13 different stories by our creators. They're sexy, comedic, mysterious, fascinating, dark, terrifying, and magical! We created this anthology in order to raise money for improvements to our site. Drunk Duck is an awesome free community run webcomic comic host, in fact we're oldest online! We've been around since 2002 and have a hell of a lot of history. People have grown up reading comics on our site, creators have married either other, had kids, and the kids have grown up to become creators on DD. Please help us preserve this legacy. A copy of A Flock of Dreams costs $25. Or you can cut out the middleman and buy it from me directly at by sending $25 USD to me through Paypal, but you will need a gmail address to download the anthology - https://www.paypal.me/Drunkduckwebcomics Over the years DD has produced several anthologies but this is the only second one we've put together especially for sale to raise money for the site. We really hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed creating it for you!
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Direct download: Quackcast_697_-_The_DD_Anthology_comic.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 16 July 2024
We're talking about tropes that we like hate. Some we brought up were conspiracy theories, especially the ones that involve a whiteboard where all the info and photos stuck on there are connected by red string and the ones in anime where at the end of the episode a mysterious character looks at the action from a distance and says cryptically “ah, this is all going exactly to plan…” Others included Isekai, Life re-dos, power couples, Time loops, and 1930s style adventure. Oh, and one I hate is the courtroom episode trope. What are your fave story tropes and which ones you do dislike with a passion?
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Tue, 9 July 2024
Pop-Culture, and the way it's always changing… We fall in love with pop culture but it's constantly changing and new pop culture is always being created, which means that as time goes on less and less people will care about the same pop culture as you. And what you were into will become niche and obscure, even though at the time you fell in love with it, it was massively mainstream and all over the place! The term “Pop-culture” started as a sort of critical description of what was thought of as a low quality, disposable alternative to “true” culture, but we've long since embraced it and no longer see it as something lessor. Pop-culture is simply the universal, current, contemporary culture that we all have access to. The two biggest factors in pop-culture are time and money: Time, because there's a constant turnover of content, people lose interest in things constantly so we always need new things; and Money, because the more money put into something the bigger it will get in pop-culture and also the more something can earn (because it's part of a popular concept) the more likely more of those things will be made (i.e superhero movies, Isekai anime etc). Older, previously created pop-culture still continues to exist but rapidly loses popularity and availability the older it gets. By its nature there is an extreme bias towards the new. Here we're talking about how massively popular and universal things become niche and unknown. It can revive because mining older pop-culture to make new pop-culture is very lucrative and easy, but it's never the same when it does. Even perennially popular things like Star Trek, Marvel and DC constantly change with each new iteration. Companies like Disney re-release their older IPs in their original forms but the purpose of that is to maintain the popularity of their brand (and now the streaming service) to help market their newer stuff. Pop-culture is a ravenous beast that must consonantly be fed with the new and money. What are some Pop-culture things you love but no one else does anymore?
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Tue, 2 July 2024
Is your work consistent? It's hard to maintain consistency but it does pay off: consistency in art work, style, character, writing, humour, updates and every other factor. To aid consistency in commercial works they come up with a “bible” which has drawings of character from all angles, all their colour swatches, their outfits, accessories, weapons, vehicles, floor plans of buildings, etc, as well as descriptions of their characters and the story style. That sort of thing is a huge help and especially useful when you have teams of people working on the project and need to hand over to other people. For a webcomicers a “bible” is usually overkill and involves as much work as several chapters of the comic itself. Some creators find them very useful, but for most of us it's wasted work. It's a good idea just to just a rough page of profile images to refer to because if you base your references on previous pages that's a great way to compound errors that are made earlier in the comic- believe me I know because I do that all the time. The very most important aspect of consistency though is style. If you have a characteristic style and a specific style of doing characters it does not matter ONE JOT how “good” your art is, and perfection is irrelevant. As long you draw it the same way each time people will be able to understand it and see that it's a deliberate choice. It will make your work look honed and professional. How do you go with maintaining consistency? I definitely have my own style but I'm not good at consistency as the images of my main character in the cover image shows. Today we reissued Gunwallace's theme to - Charby the Vampiriate - A classic comic on DD and a very classic theme by Gunwallace featuring a very Vampiric organ (from Quackcast 173). Charby the Vampiriate is a real poster-child for consistency! Although the comic and style have evolved a LOT over the years, Amelius manages a frightening level of stylistic consistency with a massive ensemble cast of different characters. Topics and shownotes Links
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Tue, 25 June 2024
Betrayal is not a fave theme of mine in any media. I really dislike it, but it's so popular! We've talked about this one before but no one really remembers Quackcast 427 so we're having another crack at it! We talk about all the different aspects: political, love, country, loyalty etc and really have fun with it! What I dislike most about the betrayal theme is when a character lies to get into a relationship with another character, or betrays the trust of someone they're in a relationship with. It's like nails on a blackboard to me, and yet it's done all the time so it must be entertaining and popular to other people? Betrayal by an organisation, a country, or superiors is also pretty popular but I don't think that approach is so bad because it usually reflects how people feel rather than a personal attack. Take Rambo for example: in that his country betrays him, but we all understand that it's a parable about how Vietnam war veterans were abandoned by their country and not given the support they needed. In my comic Pinky TA I use the “betrayed by superiors” theme, mainly because I was influenced by Ghost in the Shell when I wrote it and that was a popular theme in more serious anime at the time. It's also a good parable for growing into adulthood. Have you used a betrayal theme? Do you like it, or do you hate it like me? This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Oswald the Overman in the Lesser Planes of Hell - Starting off cutesy and friendly and pink this tune quickly spirals down into surreal, mind melting weirdness followed by a little bit of Louie Louie on the keyboards just to get us back to feeling in a party mood again! Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 18 June 2024
Benevolent racism, sexism, ableism, and whatever other “isim” is an interesting aspect of those otherwise negative things. It's not as obvious in its negativity, it's well-meaning and yet quite misguided. So what is it? The term “Benevolent” makes it seem nice and harmless and that IS how people mean it, but that's because they're a bit clueless and ignorant. Benevolent sexism, ableism, and racism is basically using a “positive” stereotype to characterise someone based on their ethnicity, gender etc, like “all black people have natural rhythm”, or “women are more sensitive and in touch with nature”, or “blind people have all their other senses massively heightened”. So why is that a problem, you might ask? Because a stereotype that characterises an individual based on an assumption about their gender, their ethnicity or any other group they belong to is STILL a stereotype, it's still false and has nothing to do with them as an INDIVIDUAL person. What people really do when they use these benevolent stereotypes is to keep that person “other” from themselves, preventing them from relating to that person as a fellow human. It also puts the person in an awkward position, having to fit into or live up to standards that have nothing to do with them, i.e. “I'm an Asian so that means I have to be amazing at maths, a doctor, expert at martial arts, and constantly doing spiritual Buddhist ceremonies…” Anything that prevents us properly relating to people as fellow humans is a problem whether it's openly negative or seemingly positive. The argument in favour of benevolent stereotypes is to combat the negative ones and in that it has a place, a limited one but a place nonetheless. Think about the old “noble Savage” idea, native people used to be universally looked down upon but then this idea developed that they had a “nobility” of their own, free from the constraints of civilisation, they were in touch with the natural world etc. For black people it was the “magical Negro”, an older black person who's only trait seemed to be that they were friendly and there to offer wise life advice to white people. For south Asian people it was unarmed martial arts expertise, spirituality, and ceremony. For gay people it was “the gay best friend” who would give sage love-life advice to a female main character, do her hair and pick our her shoes and look fabulous. These stereotypes served the purpose of combating negative images and making a place for these groups in the mainstream. They had a place, but their time has passed. Examples are legion and usually very silly. Can you recognise them when you see them? Have you experienced them yourself? Do you use them yourself? What are some you can think of? One I hate the most is when bad stand up comedians tell us the “differences” between men and women, and it's just a list of stupid stereotypes.
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Direct download: Quackcast_692_-_Benevolent_racism_and_other_isms.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 11 June 2024
Thirst trap is the topic of today's Quackcast! What is a thirst trap? It's basically someone presenting themselves as very sexy in order to get attention for some sort of reason, rather than just happening to look attractive. So it's usually used for some sort of advertising purpose, to sell their OnlyFans, to get a date, or more conventional advertising. Today we're talking about it it terms of comics :) Years and years ago there ws an explosively popular comic on Drunk Duck called Craving Control. It was very well drawn and featured a sex, very busty women who would eat uncontrollably and get very fat and then slim down again quite suddenly. For some reason this was MASSIVELY interesting to people. The reason I mention it hear though is that their thumbnail pronominally featured a very boobular cleavage shot of the main character. Many of us creators on the site envied the popularity of this comic and chose to copy that thumbnail style. Suddenly there were all sorts of comics on the site being advertised with boob or butt thumbnails. Thirst traps everywhere! It started a fad on the site. People all suddenly re-learned the ancient lesson that “sex sells”. In our cast we expand this a bit to talk about some of the famous thirst trap comics that often don't deliver on the promise of their covers like Vampirella, along with Witchblade and Red Sonja. This was something that existed even before comics back with the old pulps. Artists like Margeret Brundage were famous for their scantily clad, busty women in compromising situations, which the stories within weren't nearly as racy. The of course we have “bodice-ripper” romance novels featuring women in tight corsets and men with bulging chests… Have you been guilty or at least tempted to use this tactic to promote your work? I know I have! Future topic: Benevolent sexism, also benevolent racism. This week Gunwallace was still unwell so I picked a sexy sounding past one to go along with the the topic today - Pep Squad - These girls are here to get you motivated! You can almost SEE the dance routine in your mind’s eye, and believe me, it’s pretty sexy… They’ve got some moves. The crowd roars as the pep squad performs, bumping, grinding and sliding on the stage. (from Quackcast 409) Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 4 June 2024
Mister V, aka Arborcides is our guest today, doing an interview with us about his huge project “Dozer Manifesto”, now finally completed! You can read the entire thing here on DD. It's about a fellow called Marv Heemeyer, resident of the Colorado town of Granby, and his decent into craziness, resulting in him creating an armour-plated, armed bulldozer, designed to be invulnerable, so he could crush the town and destroy his enemies with impunity. You might have heard of it being call the “killdozer”. The story was pretty sensationalised at the time and most people rooted for Marv as some sort of Robin Hood, or avenging angel, righteously taking revenge on enemies who had unfairly crossed him. There was very little consideration given to the other side, or the lives of the people he impacted. Mister V's comic really takes pains to tell the story the right way! In this age of mediated and sensationalised “reality” where fake conflict is inserted to tell better stories, people are characterised according to tropes, the truth is spun, and our very image of what is real is continually distorted, Mister V beautifully fights against that and delivers a fully balanced, nuanced view of the entire story from beginning to end and many years after. As a resident himself of Granby where the action happened, he had special access to the locations and the witnesses involved, which makes the Dozer Manifesto fascinating reading and elevates it from a comic to an actual historical document. This week Gunwallace was under the weather so we reissued an older track that fit this theme perfectly! Dozer Manifesto - Start your engine… The sound of the powerful diesel motor as it comes time life… you can smell the fumes. Dry, dusty, industrial, rocky, the guitar thrums with a mechanical rhythm, hot and fast. (from Quackcast 465) Topics and shownotes Links Our intview subject today: Mister V, aka Arborcides - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/arborcides/
Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Direct download: Quackcast_690_-_Mister_V_Dozer_Maifesto.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 28 May 2024
What was one significant inspiring piece of pop-culture that a massive influence over your creative endeavours? All of us have had many, many different influences over the years but that's certainly NOT what we're interested in here, what we're talking about is that one thing you can remember that had a huge effect on you, why, how, and when. For me, I picked the time I saw the Tank Girl movie. It was all the way back in the mid 1990s. The movie didn't have much promotion so I didn't see it in the cinema because I didn't even know it was being screened, I only remember some radio ads. It came out on video very quickly and that's how I saw it. I rented it out and I actually own that very video cassette now because I bought it when the shop went out of business years later. An Ex stole my DVD and I can't buy a digital copy online here But I digress… When I saw that movie it was the perfect critical mass of creative influence for me. The story wasn't very good and it bore little relation to the comic but it was full of so much 1990s alt culture that it's a perfect time capsule and exemplar of the period; From the post-punk alt club fashions, to the alt rock and grunge soundtrack curated by Courtney Love, the aggressive alt-grrl femininity, the fantastic scenes depicted, the haircuts, and then there are the performances by Lori Petty, Tony Collette, Ice T, Malcom McDowell, Iggy Pop and more. It set off the creative bulbs in my head and I spent all evening creating a huge drawing on 3x A1 sheets of paper of a Tank covered in different incarnations of sexy Tank Girl inspired women. I was an art student at the time so I was very familiar with the alt culture depicted. At it's core the imagery of a funky dressed, sexy woman, with an aggressive DGAF attitude, paired with heavy, custom modified and decorated military hardware is what sticks with you and has been one of the core influences in my creative pursuits from then on. There have been many others of course, but this was A significant moment. The image in the art for this Quackcast is the drawing I made back then. I took it to class the next day and my lecturer just said that to her it just showed an “arrogance in drawing ability”, which I was a little shocked by, but this was the mid 1990s and drawing ability was NOT a priority among artists at the time. I am very serious- most 1990s fine artists lacked even rudimentary skill. It was a weird time. Can you tell us about any significant creative influence exposure events?
Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS The pic. Click to see a full size - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/media/users/Ozoneocean/assets/tank-girls.jpg
Direct download: Quackcast_687_-_one_big_passion_and_influence.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 21 May 2024
How and why does your creativity change over time? It “evolves”. With creativity the evolution influencers are things like age, experience, taste, style, family, friends, technology, culture… As you get older you have more experience but less time to spend on things because of the pressures of work, relationships, and increasing responsibilities. Your tastes change, you get smarter, you get more skilled, you change what you work with, your ideas and interests change. You begin with the influences of your parents and early childhood exposures to culture, then you break away from that and form your own ideas of popular culture in your early teens, then you try to desperately fit in with various subgroups till your mid 20s and then you mainly stick with the cultural influences you were exposed up till then as your main influences from then on -still picking up new things from time to time, but not having as big an effect. In the professional world creators get more power and less oversight so they often produce worse stuff because they have more control and don't listen to people as much, have less collaborators and less influence by producers and editors to fix their bad ideas… that's not always the case but it's proved true all too often with musicians, film makers, and writers. Wider environmental factors like technological change (the internet, digital photography, AI etc), culture change, and political change, all have major effects on people's creativity. Then there are internal factors like puberty, depression, happiness, grief, and more. All these things leave their mark and alter the course of our creativity over time. And THAT is why most bands aren't producing the same good stuff now as they did when they started out, hahaha!
Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Direct download: Quackcast_688_-_Artistic_Evolution.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 14 May 2024
This isn't really a special episode! It's a Quackcast about them. Not PSA episodes though. Our topic was inspired by those weird special non-sequitur episodes in anime and manga like the famous bikini episode where all the characters head off to the beach, water park, hot springs or something and get into their bathing suits. It doesn't usually forward the story too much, if at all, but it's a chance to have fun with the characters, outline and explore any underlying love themes, and show off skin. There are other kinds of special episodes like the festival ones, Christmas etc. In American stuff Christmas and thanksgiving are popular for that, also new years. And this is reflected in comics too! On Drunk Duck we have our Secret Santa tradition where we do special Christmas art for people but we also often incorporate that into our comics. Probably the most import special episode art we do though involves our annual comic awards! At the moment people are already submitting art for the red carpet intros. On this subject, one of our own DDers was a part of one of the most famous of these things ever: the Star Wars Holiday special. He actually helped introduce the world to Bobba Fet via the animation work he did on that project. That was the first the world ever saw of Bobba Fet, so specials are good for something afterall! Do you like non-sequitur episodes centred around special events and things? (they're not always non-sequiturs). How about the infamous beach bikini episodes? Love ‘em or loathe ’em? This week Gunwallace made up a theme inspired by The Magpie - Such weight! This electronic piece weighs down heavily with the super powered gravity of a neutron star, crushing down with the mass of its brilliance and beauty. Topics and shownotes Links Red Carpet news https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/may/10/roll-out-the-red-carpet/ John Celestri - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/JohnCelestri/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Direct download: Quackcast_687_-_a_very_special_episode.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 7 May 2024
We recorded the Quackcast on the 4th of May, which of course means that it was “May the fourth”, the Star Wars celebration date! So we decided to talk about Star Wars, but instead of our usual rants about what we think could be done better we kept it to mainly positive stuff, focussing on what we loved about the films, mainly original series, which are the best ones. My fave version of Luke is the first one with the shaggy hair and wild eyes. I Love the mecha, the costumes, the armour, and the ships, especially the awesome Star Destroyers. My fave characters are the original Boba-Fet (not the modern fat, bald version), Darth Vader, Lando Calrission, Han Solo, and C3PO, Gand Moff Tarkin. My fave Star Wars films in order are: The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars (it wasn't called :new hop or episode 4 till years later), ReTrun of the Jedi, Rogue One, Solo, Caravan of Courage, and Battle For Endor. And I love the Mandalorian series.
Direct download: Quackcast_686_-_May_the_fourth_be_with_you.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 30 April 2024
“Passing the mantle” is an interesting phrase. Many claim it comes from a biblical origin; the prophet Elijah was said to have passed his mantle to Elisha when he ascended to heaven, thereby symbolically transferring his authority… but honestly that seems a little silly and elaborate of an origin story, the sort of thing bad bible scholars in America loved to come up with in the 19th century. Mantles of office were commonly worn by kings, statesmen and even lord mayors today and the passing of those symbolises them gaining office and authority. It's a very ordinary, commonplace secular tradition. But why am I even talking about it at all? Well it's a way of transitioning to a new protagonist, often with the same role and traits as the previous one, but not always. It's a great way to retire an older character and reinvigorate things with a younger successor. The greatest example I can think of in comics is The Phantom. He's one of the oldest superheroes, predating batman and superman… The Phantom (in the story), comes from an unbroken lineage of heroes dating back to the golden age of piracy when his ancestor was betrayed and shipwrecked on an African coast. He was taken in by the local people, nursed back to health and taught their secret ways, becoming “the ghost who walks”. Ever since then the sons have taken that role from their farther. You can see a similar theme in a lot of older stories or stories set in the past, like Zorro, the pirate Doctor Syn, even The Dread Pirate Roberts from the Princess Bride. These people don the disguise of their forebear and BECOME the same character. Modern superheroes play a little with that too, though they usually revert back to the old characters again and just use the mantle passing as a sneaky way of introducing a new character. But it's been popularly done with characters like Antman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Captain Marvel, Spiderman, and many others. In the Quackcast we have a discussion about how this method would have been a better way of introducing Rey in the Star Wars sequels and maybe a good way to fix Indiana Jones (though I disagree). Do you have any fave examples of a passed mantle? The Phantom still wins for me. This week Gunwallace made up a theme inspired by Old Dogs - The burning of an old fire, glowing red hot amongst the black coals and charred, ashen, grey wood. This is a gritty ode to grizzled, aged, experience and time. It’s prickly, with a taste of rock and bourbon, like a good BBQ sauce. Topics and shownotes Links Banes' mantle newspost - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/apr/25/the-mantle-theory/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 23 April 2024
What happens when the hero dies? Especially when it's early on in the story… do things fall apart or does someone else take over? Our topic is about a story style where you establish that a character is the hero or chief protagonist, only to do a bait and switch and swap them out with a less likely character like a sidekick. This makes the audience rethink the way things are going, instead of sticking to an expected formula you force the audience to wake up and wonder what will happen next. This can be very effective! Some notable examples of this trope are “the Other guys”, the anime “The legendary hero is dead” (cover pictured), and Mystery Men but there are many others. The seemingly main hero doesn't even have to die, they just need to be replaced by a character you wouldn't expect for the role, as in My Hero Accademia where Almight is replaced by Deku at the beginning, of Steve Rogers in the first Captain America film becomes the hero even though his friend Bucky Barnes better fits the hero architype. Have you ever used this trope? What are your fave examples? This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Animal Society - Don’t cross at the red light… traffic signals flash. Make way for the zebra at the zebra crossing! This is a flashy cityscape sound with a touch of the jungle. Topics and shownotes Links Tantz Aerine's newspost on sidekick heroes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/apr/17/the-understudy-hero/
Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 16 April 2024
This week it's a short cast because my computer broke and we wasted time trying to fix it! What are your faves? This week Gunwallace made up a theme inspired by Curse of the Office Werewoman - This is a cool cruise into the bright sunlit waters in the south Mediterranean where warmth and calm abide, sipping a cocktail on the lido deck while dressed all in white, soaking up the sun and drifting off into a pleasant dream… Topics and shownotes Links Banes' teacher newspost - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/apr/10/top-five-tales-of-teaching/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 9 April 2024
Tantz came up with this week's topic: Exposition! It's because she's well on her way into starting her latest comic, Verdant, and working out ways to introduce the story, the world, characters, culture, magic systems, religion etc without doing a massive text dump, which people generally don't like too much. So how do you exposit in a good way? One popular way is through a dialogue; characters give overly verbose and entirely unnecessary explanations about how things work during ordinary conversations, telling people things that they would already know from childhood, just so the reader can be informed in a “natural” way, which isn't natural and it actually really terrible, eg: “Hello my friend David Prowse who I have known since high school but have had a big falling out with since you slept with my wife. Could you hand me the energy cell please? Of course you know that all machines now are powered by energy cells which are miniaturised nuclear fusion reactors, so that we have unlimited, cheap power always.” Another way is to have a character in a classroom, being taught particular concepts like history or politics so they and the reader “learn” together. This can be terrible but it can also be pretty good if you handle it right. Even text dumps can work ok if they're done correctly, but that's rare. The best way to do exposition is to introduce the audience to only the concepts they need to know for now, in a basic way, with plenty of context in ways that are fully and easily relatable. Like showing a small, slow stakes scene that introduces key concepts and shows the character's reaction to them. If most of the stuff is easily relatable then the audience will focus more on the few isolated weird new things you introduce and they can learn about them from seeing how the characters react to them and how they fit into the context of the world, that way you don't need to explain them. A great example of this is the new comic by Marcorossi, Bunyan Mk7, it's a perfect example of quick, minimal exposition through story. From here we started talking about how in anime often an entire first season of 13 episodes is devoted to this sort of expository introduction, which I find extremely pleasant because the focus of that kind of storytelling is not “conflict” but instead “progress”, which is something not well understood in modern storytelling anymore. The interest the audience gets from the story isn't that a character wants something or needs to fight to get it or resolve an issue, instead it's the linear consumption of knowledge that builds to the goal of finding out more about something. You specifically don't care about resolving anything, rather the learning is fun for its own sake. “Progress” can also be anything that builds towards a goal. I find people still like to rationalise this as “conflict” but you need to stretch the definition too much that it makes the concept useless and no longer logically understandable. How do you do exposition? With a text dump? Via dialogue? A classroom? An introductory prologue? Or do you just throw the audience in the deep end and expect them to sink or swim? That said, the more familiar and relatable the story offering is, the less work on the exposition you have to do. This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Cafe Strange - A melancholic jazz revere on times past and times yet to come. Off-time percussion, a gently plucked double bass, evocative piano and an electric violin play a tune of loneliness and possibility.
Links Exposition examples in comics:
Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 2 April 2024
Today we're talking about swords and armour, the reality of those things and their use in fiction. I've always had a bit of an interest in swords since I was a little kid because I loved them in fairy-tales, comics and fantasy: The Three musketeers, puss in boots, Zorro, the Narnia books, Robin Hood, Errol Flynn movies, King Arthur, Conan, Asterix and more. I only started seriously collecting them as an adult though when I needed the correct costume sabre to go with the hussar uniform I put together. I started with replicas and very quickly moved to buying expensive antiques. So I have a collection of real military sabres now, some over 200 years old and I've learned a lot about swords in general in the mean time. A sword is a long piece of sharp metal with a handle at one end, it's ancient technology that's been constantly updated over the centuries. Most cultures developed their own versions, starting with bronze and then moving to steel. Swords are heavily symbolic of power, royalty, command, control, action, chivalry, and nobility. There are many sword myths: A popular modern internet myth is to say swords were always “secondary weapons” or “side arms” in history while pole-arms with the “primary” weapon. Which is a silly simplification, the use and importance of the sword was always context based, they were “primary” weapons in many instances and situations; on the battlefield by Roman legionaries, by Hungarian hussars, Landsknechts and their giant swords, sailors and their cutlasses, by any solder who fought in a confined space, and the sword was the main civilian weapon for centuries. Another silly myth is that Japanese katana swords were the best, lightest, sharpest, most sophisticated swords, of course none of that is true. Swords are much the same the world over with none being really better than any other, they're just better for their own particular geographical, cultural and historical contexts. “Folding” the steel in a katana is just a clever yet primitive solution to reducing the concentration of impurities in the metal, there are other, easier, better ways to do that but that method stuck because it became a tradition. And no, “European” swords were not heavier, clumsier or blunter. Then there's the modern myth of swords being worn on the back for use, which was never done in history because any sword the size of your arm or longer is impossible to draw from the back, unless you do weird things. Swords with worn on the hip, waist, or carried on a horse generally. it looks cool but it's useless. Another myth is that the straight swords that knights used were called “broadswords”. That term came about much later when skinny swords like rapiers, smallswords, and spadroons were popular It was a way of differentiating swords that were a bit wider than the more popular thin swords, and they usually had basket hilts. I could nerd out much deeper and talk about pattern welding, Ulfbert swords, crucible steel, Damascus swords, tempering, differential hardening, tangs, grips, guards, rapiers, sideswords, pala, Kilij, small swords etc, but I won't! What is your favourite sword or favourite swordsperson? My fave has to be Nothung, the sword of Beowulf, just because it has such a cool name. And my fave swordsperson has to be Inigo Montoya This week Gunwallace made up a theme inspired by Soulmates by SirMollington - A contemplative, dreamy, floaty, trip through clouds of muted colour, in a world of quiet stasis against a slow, jazzy background. Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Tue, 26 March 2024
Today we're talking about the depiction of “intelligence” in fiction! There are a lot of ways this shows up: the genius detective who can understand any clue and uncover any lie, the amazing doctor who can understand any disease, the computer nerd who can do ANYTHING with computers, the genius savant with Asperger's, the crafty serial killer with plans within plans… Mostly though these depictions are absolutely fictitious, simply based on tropes, like the action-man James Bond/Jason Bourne type “spy” trope which doesn't exist in reality and yet that's how we always think of spies. They're generally exaggerated to the point of silliness. The depiction of an “intelligent” person in fiction often involves wearing glasses; dropping quotes (usually Shakespeare); an obvious odd quirk that makes them not fit in well with others- being nerdy, dressing badly, talking weirdly, shyness, meanness; and they're almost always a polymath, in that they know about EVERYTHING, not just the field they specialise in. Recently I've been binging the series Bones. It's about a group of scientists who perform special forensic tasks for the FBI. They're all super geniuses, especially the main character “Bones”, Temperance Brennan, who all the other charters frequently acknowledge as super brilliant. The dumbest person in their team is Angela, the artist, who's main role is to do sketches and reconstructions of the dead and provide an intuitive counterpoint to the cold scientists. Ironically she'd have to be by far the most intelligent person in their group and one of the most intelligent people in the world because while the others have very narrow specialties she's a genius at computer programming, mechanical engineering, code breaking, and and makes intuitive leaps that are impossible for normal people. It's a very silly show in its depiction of and understanding of intelligence, with the “smartest person” (Bones) actually being the dumbest in the group while the dumbest one (Angela) is the smartest. Two of the main bulwarks of intelligence in fiction are Sherlock Holmes and serial killers, which are actually related. Sherlock is from a late 19th century stereotype of an intellectual superman. He's aware of the smallest detail, has a clinical, analytical mind, he drops quotes, he's classically educated, he has “no time for fools”, doesn't relate well to others, and is prone to obsession. His relationship to the modern depiction of the fictional serial killer is his rivalry with the character Moriarty, on which serial killers tend to be based- not on the character but the battle of wits. In reality serial killers and psychopaths are never very intelligent, the trope seems to be based on Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dalmer having reasonably high IQs but neither ever came up with fiendish plans or devised clever clues or plots, their crimes are simply gross, evil. and absolutely selfish, but in no way clever. This has resulted in the fictional serial killers typically matching the intelligence of detectives in an evil, dark reflection. The trouble with depicting intelligence in fiction is usually that the writers don't know very much about it so they trick us by having other characters react to their genius character as if they're amazing, or showing the genius by having the character perform some massively exaggerated act like solving an incredibly hard puzzle, or creating one, dropping random quotes, or just telling us that the character is smart. Some of my favourite intelligent characters are Abby from NCIS, Egon from Ghostbusters, Nero Wolfe from the Nero Wolf Mysteries, Daria, Sherlock Holmes, the Villain behind glasses from Log Horizon, John Crichton from Farscape, Doctor Who, and Mr Spock from Star Trek. This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Gamma Blue Smoldering of Creel - Heavy rocking fire. This is a hammer forging red hot steel on an anvil, rhythmically pounding it into shape, slamming into it with thunderous blows, drawing out the metal into a brutal sword of pure rock! Topics and shownotes Links
Featured music: Special thanks to:
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Direct download: Quackcast_680_-_Intelligence_in_Fiction.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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Tue, 19 March 2024
The phrase “Correlation doesn't equal causation” is something associated with science and statistics but it really applies to EVERYTHING and that's important to understand. But was does it mean? If a bunch of things happened at the same time, those things aren't necessarily related or causal. An example Tantz gives is that statistics show in the summer there are more drownings and that people eat more ice cream. That means that those two things are correlated. We know they aren't causal though: ice ream doesn't drown people and people drowning don't cause people to eat more ice cream… the third hidden variable is that it's summer: it's the rise in temperature that causes people to want more ice cream and to swim more, which increases the chances of drowning. I was thinking of the correlation causation fallacy when I was musing on the topic of history. There's this idea that if you know a lot about history it will give you a lot of information on current events, but this is heavily flawed by our tendency to create artificial connections between events, we come up with stories that sound good and plausible and make us feel better for why things are connected. Think of all the pop-science and pop-history books that come out and easily explain world events and complicated things in history. They're all pretty much bullshit because they fall for the causation fallacy: this happened which caused this, that and this, rather than things all happening at the same time for other reasons. This is also related to the hindsight fallacy, where we look back at events and incorrectly think a conclusion should have been obvious because we can see how things ended. Because of this, while knowledge of history is very useful, that use is more limited than we think so it helps to know current events too, especially from an outside perspective so that we're not as fooled by false connections and mistaken causal relationships. It even affects things like self image: are we influenced by the images we see or are the images we see influenced by how we want to look or are there other factors? A key example we mention in the Quackcast was a pop-science story about how the use of lead in fuel made people dumber and lead to more violence. A truly moronic conclusion, very easily debunkable and yet people as esteemed as pop-sceince communicator Veritasium were fooled by it. I realise I fall afoul of it every time I come up with a story for what influenced me to do comics, photography, or cosplay- I have at least 5 different stories that explain anything I do, all of them make sense and seem perfectly true to me at the time, but in reality they're a product of the hindsight bias, the causation fallacy and being selective with data and variables. Can you think of a time you've fallen afoul of this? If you can't you're probably not thinking hard enough ;) This week Gunwallace did not have time for a new theme but he suggested that we put up the theme to PleaseRewind again because it's a great comic that is currently being reposted! PleaseRewind - Quiet threat, creepy, seeping, strumming, thrumming, coming CLOSER, inside, peering around, waiting to begin. This is a quiet track filled with an undertone of urgency suggested by the constant quick rhythm and lonely guitar. Topics and shownotes Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS next Quackcast: Intelligence in fiction
Direct download: Quackcast_679_-_Correlation_doesnt_equal_causation.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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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 PST
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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:
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Direct download: Quackcast_676_-_Baby_its_cold_outside_cultural_context.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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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:
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Direct download: Quackcast_673_-_By_their_deeds_you_shall_know_them.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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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:
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Direct download: Quackcast_672_-_Fave_Fantasy_Creatures.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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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:
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Direct download: Quackcast_670_-_Wise_use_of_influence.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
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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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The QuackCast features Ozoneocean, Banes, Tantz Aerine, and Pitface, talking about writing, movies, webcomics, art, politics, philosophy, sexuality, and everything else! We're the hosts of the oldest webcomic host on the net, Drunkduck.com, aka theduckwebcomics. 20 years this year!
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