Episode 602 - It's my turn now bitches!
Sep 26, 2022
What happens when the victim becomes the victor? Most of the time it's like the classic line from The Who “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss”, typically revolutions (and elections), that promise change don't really deliver, the new people use it as a chance to get revenge on their enemies, take advantage of things the same as the last guys, and do everything they can to cling to power. The true exceptions are rare and special, i.e. Vaclav Havel and the Velvet revolution.
Topics and Show Notes
We decided to apply this to fiction and characters- What happens when the underdog gets the upper hand? Do they use it as a chance to take revenge, are they gracious and magnanimous, do they become the bully themselves, do they betray their ideals? How they handle their power is very interesting and says a lot about them. There are characters like Walter white, a downtrodden highschool teacher, who rises to power and becomes a crime boss. A similar story is told in Scarface, 711 Ocean Drive, and The Godfather. The new Netflix series “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” has a smaller scale take on it with a bullied youth becoming a super powered cyber-warrior criminal. In these stories the character arc is well portrayed and it's interesting to watch their moral fall even as they rise through the ranks of evil.
However, it can become a little more muddy when a character is written as honourable and good and yet they still use their sudden power to get revenge in a petty way. This simple act can be a powerful indication of hypocrisy and moral weakness, or just really bad writing. Of course that doesn't apply to all acts of revenge, only when it betrays a character's ideals or is OUT of character.
How do your characters handle a turnabout in fortunes? Do they use it as a chance to take what they can get and bet the bad guy themselves, do they get revenge, do they throw away their ideals, do they stay true to their character, are they magnanimous?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme to Crimson Stars - A creepy, gothic horror techno landscape of winking red stars and the pale blue trailing lights of ion drives in deep space. This is a cold world of blackness, danger, and vampires! The music really sets the scene.
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
Dave Skunk Comic - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2022/sep/20/featured-comic-dave-skunk-comic/
Featured music:
Crimson Stars - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Crimson_Stars/ - by Commissar_Tarkin, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Kawaiidaigakusei- https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
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Episode 593 - Risky Business
Jul 25, 2022
The risks of online creative success We live in a wonderful time where you're able to turn your creative passion into a job that can support you just by using freely available online services like YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, Patreon, Ebay, Paypal, Etsy, Webtoons etc. You can start with nothing more than your computer or phone and end up with a thriving business based on your passion project. It's not easy, achieving enough success where you can quit your day job still tends to take a lot of work, but once you get there it can be amazing. However, that's not the end of the story unfortunately.
Episode 589 - AB positive
Jun 27, 2022
A and B stories… And C, and D etc. It seems that it's more popular than ever to have stories with multiple concurrent threads. This is when you have a main story and a bunch of other sub stories all happening at the same time. These might come together at the end of the story or they might peter out. We don't get many stories just made with just an A-plot and nothing else these days.
Episode 584 - Drawing gender
May 23, 2022
We start off with the idea of talking about art techniques, tips and tricks we've mastered and could help people with but the cast turned into a discussion about drawing male and female characters- also trans, androgynous, etc. There's an art to representing gender in imagery! It's super important to remember that the way we see gender in art is mainly culture based rather than an innate biological reaction and the perception of gender in art is different according to your cultural background. It's basically a visual language that everyone learns, but as an artist you have to learn to actually “speak” it, and that's not as straight forward as you think.
Episode 582 - Time travel
May 9, 2022
Let's go forward in time to the past so we can get back to the future and kill our grandfather and be our own ancestor while we step on a bug and change the course of evolution 200 million years in the future and doom the Morlocks to a date with Doctor Who, while Bill and Ted drive a Delorean in the Old West and save Fry's dog as it waits out the front of the Pizza place… Time travel is fun to talk about, but it's easy to mess up because paradoxes in plots pop up all over the place as timelines intersect and cross over and over, getting tangled and logically prevent events that have already happened from happening!
Episode 581 - David's always right
May 2, 2022
David's always right - Introducing Hpkomic! Hpkomic has been with DD since the earliest days, he's a comic artist, writer, English teacher, and podcaster. He even participated in the second comicbook challenge that Platinum held way back in the day when they controlled DD, and came second! He was part of many community events, like the Drunk Duck Civil War (the DD answer to the comic book Marvel Civil War) and DD VS Comic Genesis, which was the DC Vs Marvel of Webcomics! In fact he has the oldest post on this version of the DD forums! After the site was fully deleted at the end of 2005, he was the first person back who commented with an offer of help to get things back online again. Bonus points if you can find it.
Episode 577 - The Agony and the Ecstasy.
Apr 4, 2022
Creation is a process with a lot of ups and downs: Agony and ecstasy! The easiest way to think of it is a simple inverted parabola- you start of feeling good about your idea and its potential. As you work though you feel worse and worse about it till you get to the nadir of the curve, then things turn around and you start feeling better and better about it as it finally comes together and you finally manage to finish it!
Episode 573 - Join the cult?
Mar 7, 2022
Cults are weird. Unlike normal religions (from which many cults stem), cults are usually based more around charismatic individuals rather than simple doctrine. Which means the followers of cults can often get a little crazy because they're following the whims of an individual rather than boring old text from a book. And this is why religious groups with charismatic leaders (i.e evangelical Televangelists and hardline Imams), become crazy and cultish too.
