Episode 682 - Exposition!
Apr 8, 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?
Topics and Show Notes
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.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Exposition examples in comics:
Verdant, by Tantz_Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Verdant/
Bunyan Mk7, by marcorossi - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Bunyan_Mk7
Featured comic:
Prisoner of Paint - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/apr/02/featured-comic-prisoner-of-paint/
Featured music:
Cafe Strange - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Cafe_Strange/ - by Synwells, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 679 - Correlation doesn't equal causation
Mar 18, 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.
Episode 663 - AI and The Duck
Nov 27, 2023
This Quackcast tackles the issue of AI comics on Drunk Duck. We're discussing either a ban or rules that would enable them to be posted under conditions. We also talk about AI generated imagery and the issues with it and well as its future and the relationship between it and artists. This is a very complicated and much misunderstood subject.
Episode 645 - AI-cast
Jul 24, 2023
We're chatting about the current state of AI, it's use, abuse, and the moronic way it's typically being utalised by mid-level businesses to screw over creative people and save money in the short term.
Episode 638 - Rookie Mistakes
Jun 5, 2023
Beginners at webcomics make mistakes, rookie mistakes. In fact people tend to make a lot of the same mistakes and we're going to chat about some of those in the Quackcast, but there are certainly a LOT more!
Episode 622 - Whaddaya take me for?
Feb 12, 2023
This is when the writer leads you to think something big has happened in the story, like a character dying or falling in love or winning a big prize or something, only to have the character alive in the next part, or the prize or love never mentioned or addressed- this is “schmuck bait”. The writer gets you invested and excited for something but cops out, leaving the audience frustrated and cynical. This was common in older episodic things where the episodes are intended to be seen in any order, so the writers couldn't have continuing arcs and development across a season. It's also common in bad writing where the writer builds things up a lot for an events but then loses their nerve or just doesn't posses the skills to properly resolve things.
Episode 614 - Super groups!
Dec 19, 2022
Inspired by Banes we did a Quackcast on SUPER TEAMS! You know those groups like the Justice League, the Avengers, the Suicide Squad, or even Monkey, Pigsy, and Sandy from The Journey to the West (Monkey Magic is my fave version). These are super powerful characters on their own but together they're even more awesome because their strengths and weakness complement each other in interesting ways. DD had its very own super team in the form of the Heroes Alliance, where a lot of DD creators got together to work on a shared universe. And back in the 2000s DD had a “Civil War” even with Keen Space (AKA Comic Genesis), where a huge number of our creators and theirs participated in something like a DC Vs Marvel crossover battle.
Episode 611 - Doppelgängers
Nov 28, 2022
Doppelgängers was the subject of our Quackcast today. What are they? Generally they're evil duplicates of people. Originally if you saw one it was supposed to be a portent of impending doom, but they've since evolved through pop-culture to be mirror people who envy the originals and want to kill them and replace them. There are MANY other kinds of Doppelgängers too now: Future versions of people, clones, robots, virtual copies, alternate universe versions, spirits, demons, helpful lookalikes, and more.
