Episode 496 - titular titularity!
Sep 14, 2020
Titles are surprisingly important for your comic! We don't often realise that when we first start them, but a title is one of the very first ways people come across your work. You have to sell it to them and give them an idea of what to expect in only a very few words. You can take a lot of different approaches to that, like teasing and intriguing them with a title that suggests something interesting or mysterious, character names are great for that. You can be completely literal and obvious. You can use a pun… you can take an existing popular title and alter it in a slight way… There are so many things you can do!
Topics and Show Notes
Ema Clare made a newspost on Friday that had a lot of clever tricks to use to come up with a story title and that's why we picked this topic to discuss. There's also this clever game that was going around on Twitter where you give your comic two alternative titles: one that's a serious title that represents your comic and one that represents it in a humorous way. Like my comic for example, the title is Pinky TA, which is the name of the character, the TA is her initials and can mean many things (T&A), but also helps the name in internet searches because it makes “Pinky” less generic, an alternative “serious” name for it that better explains the comic would be “War in the 1920s with Dieselpunk Mecha and Sexy Girls”, a funny title could be “Mecha Strippers” :D
What approach did you use for a title and have you tried coming up with two alternative titles, one serious and one funny? It really helps you to come up with better ways to sell your work!
The musical feature this week that Gunwallace has given us is theme to the Lich Quing’s Tale. It's a slow march to the deep wooden voice of a cello, then we fall through the floor into something reminiscent of Quadrophenia and the break in Who Are You, classical strings and staccato electronica overlaying and weaving a colourful tapestry of light.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Em's newspost with tricks to make a good title - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2020/sep/10/insert-title-here-tips-for-titling-your-comic/
Featured comic:
Good Words with Sako The Beautiful Heart of a Steggo Girl - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2020/sep/08/featured-comic-good-words-with-sako-the-beautiful-heart-of-a-steggo-girl/
Featured Music:
Lich Quing’s Tale - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Lich_Quings_Tale/, by Wolva, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Pitface - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
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Episode 495 - A fan of fanfiction?
Sep 7, 2020
Fanfiction is a massive subject, there are so many aspects to it, from the bad stuff with the Mary Sues, rampant shipping, author inserts and wish fulfilment etc to homages and great works that extend the story and characters beyond what they were in the original and add interesting and fun aspects to fan favourites. There are many good reasons to do fanfiction: It's fun, you're inspired and want to use that inspiration, all the characteristics of the story are readymade so you don't have to do world building or character development, the work has a built in audience so you're going to have readers no matter what and hopefully some feedback, it can help make you more popular as a creator because of the fans of the original work, and you get to experiment because you can't sell the work or do anything serious with it so you may as well have fun and enjoy it!
Episode 482 - 2n Guess
Jun 7, 2020
Tantz's newspost on Saturday about the problems of second guessing yourself and the issues that can arise from that was the inspiration for this week's newspost. Second guessing yourself can have GOOD possibilities and negative ones. The good: it forces you to hone your creative work and improve it, you don't just put things out there, you evaluate them and improve them! The bad: you can get stuck in a loop where you keep on thinking your stuff is not good enough, you might get hung up on one little thing and never move past it.
Episode 466 - And then What?
Feb 16, 2020
What happens to characters after the big action scene or climactic moment? This could be anywhere in the story but it's usually close to the end. Do they process any of the things that have happened to them to lead them up to that point or do they just forget about everything and simply act as if nothing except the last 4 seconds matter? The later seems to be the trend in a lot of badly written fiction, and it's a notable trope in 80s style action films. Death of family members or lovers are irrelevant when you have a hot action star standing next to you!
Episode 465 - Planning Vs pantsing!
Feb 10, 2020
There are a couple of approaches when it comes to making a big creative project: planing it all out or working things out as you go i.e. flying by the seat of your pants. Well in reality it's a spectrum and those are the two extremes. Most of us work somewhere between those two, sometimes with more or less planning etc… I've tried a lot of different mixtures myself!
Episode 454 - Are Marvel movies "Despicable"?
Nov 24, 2019
This week we look at the famous quote by respected film director Martin Scorsese that “Marvel movies aren't Cinema” and also the quote by fellow director Francis Ford Coppola that Marvel films are “despicable”. We try and look at the proper context of these remarks outside of the twitter garbage and social media outrage to see if either had any point or whether they're way off the mark and deserving of criticism.
Episode 441 - Cooperation = cool
Aug 26, 2019
Cooperation Vs Competition. For decades the mantra was competition is good: it produces progress and makes things better… Well that's actually false. Competition is what you're forced into as a response to limited resources, so you do what you have to to win, which mainly involves losing everything that doesn't serve that specific objective. Competition is massively harmful to progress in general, it ONLY helps you excel in one small area to massive cost. Think of it in terms of an Olympic sprinter: they become the fastest runner in the world, but to what point? Only the artificial structure of a sporting event… they spend years training, exercising, eating right, wasting a huge portion of their lives, creative, and intellectual potential on that one meaningless goal, and IF they achieve it they might get a bit of fame and money and a footnote in history because someone else will inevitably take their spot. More likely though they won't achieve the goal and instead be forgotten.
Episode 440 - Character tropes VS characterisation
Aug 19, 2019
Today we compare and contrast two ways of making characters: starting with a pure archetype and building it with tropes, or creating a character organically through circumstance and interaction with other characters.
