Episode 624 - Comic panel creation
Feb 27, 2023
HPKomic is a great guy, he's been on DD since almost the beginning. He alternates the Friday newsposts with me, he focusses on the intricacies of comic panels. This time he asked people to talk about their own processes though and I thought this would be a good topic for a Quackcast! So on this comic podcast we're finally talking directly about making comic pages, who would've thought?
Topics and Show Notes
Tantz, Banes, and I all have our own methods and it was fun to talk about the differences. The key method I learned early on is to have one “sexy” panel and anchor the page around that. It could be a sexy character, an exciting scene, a giant mecha, a cool establishing shot or whatever, just as long as it grabs the reader focus and make them really want to look at the page and find out what it's all about. I anchor all the other stuff around that. It also means you can get away with less imaginative art and angles in other panels if you like.
It was also interesting to chat about how the long scrolling format has enabled artists to be more creative with storytelling but has meant the death of some of the more artistic traditional techniques of panel structure from traditional pages- which I really like to use. How do you make your comic panels?
This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to American Pantheon - Down grimy stairs, duck your head into a dark basement dive bar. Blue smoke curls lazily up towards the dusty, slow moving ceiling fan. A grizzled, craggy faced man with shadowed eyes sits alone nursing a glass of whisky, a battered pork pie hat on his head. He throws you a gap-toothed smile, clears his throat and lets out a racking cough…
Cool, slow jazz…
Topics and shownotes
Links
HPKomic's newspost on comic panel creation - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2023/feb/24/panel-by-panel-let-me-ask-you-something/
Banes' newspost on the differences between writing comics and prose - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2023/feb/22/prose-v-comics/
Featured comic:
Sell Outs - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2023/feb/21/featured-comic-sell-outs/
Featured music:
American Pantheon - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/American_Pantheon/ - by Serg19, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/banes
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
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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 535 - the teachcast
Jun 14, 2021
Webcomicers need to learn to draw and write in order to become webcomicers. There are many other skills and also different ways to make webcomics, BUT most of us draw and or write. Here Tantz and I talk about terrible teachers of these skills and better ways to learn :) (Also, Jason from Friday the 13t is a big fat buttface)
Episode 534 - Biting off more than you can chew
Jun 7, 2021
Taking on more than you can handle - i.e. James Cameron and JJ Abrams are good directors and writers but neither could handle the demands of a complex Sci-Fi project that needs full world building and internally consistent logic etc (Avatar and Star Wars). They're great with more simple SciFi that's based on 21st century earth and simpler stories, but epic SciFi was clearly a long way beyond the capabilities of either. We're talking about when WE have been caught taking on stuff we couldn't handle, how we dealt with that and also how other creators dealt with it too.
Episode 507 - Say my name again!
Nov 30, 2020
Coming up with character names isn't easy. It can actually be really, really hard! Tantz did a couple helpful Newsposts about it and we decided to spin that into a fun Quackcast about naming and names! The names behind stuff often has interesting stories, the Quackcast itself is no exception. When Wowio told us we had to do a podcast back in the day we tossed around a few names and the one they came up with was “Quackcast”, because of the whole “duck” theme we have going here. I protested because there was a highly regarded skeptical medical podcast with that name already run by Dr Mark Crislip, but I didn't have any real say and so the name stuck! When I DID have the power to change it, it was already way too entrenched.
Episode 421 - Dreamcast
Apr 8, 2019
Today we're talking about all the ways nightmares can be used in stories. This is based on a newspost by our very own dreamboat Tantz Aerine. Nightmares are great for foreshadowing through premonitions, forcing characters to confront things and change their minds, ratcheting up tension in a story and all sorts of other useful things that you'd never consider.
Episode 325 - walk the line
May 29, 2017
In this Quackcast we cover the Importance of good linework in comics and different line techniques such as Herge's Ligne claire, the traditional thick line for characters and thin for everything else as exemplified in the work of Mucha, variable line widths as in Manga, solid blacks like in American comics, and complex lines like Durer or Hyena Hell. I really seriously thought I could get an entire Quackcast out of the concept and techniques of linework, but honestly I was struggling… Okay, so linework constitutes the skeleton that most comics are built on, with the notable exception of painted comics, photo comics, 3D and vector comic among others… But for most comics line is a pretty essential element. There are a lot of different techniques involved in the use of lines. Herge popularised “ligne claire”, which means that all lines have the same thickness and that there's no line shading. A popular style that I was taut was to have thick lines around characters and overlapping elements, with thin lines for internals and backgrounds. This is popular in a lot of manga, US comics and famously the work of Alphonse Mucha. Part of my technique on Pinky TA involves making my lines grey, so that when I set the line layer to “multiply”, the lines take on some of the background colours beneath them and don't show up as darkly as traditional black lines. The work of Hyena Hell on the Hub is interesting for her use of very complex internal shading line to build up texture and shapes, this can also be seen in the works of Albrecht Durer. Manga is notable for its extensive use of very stylised shading, crisp lines and the use of variable line widths for outlines, while American comics make heavy use of solid blacks for areas of shadow, basically extending the width of the line as far and as solidly as it can go. How do YOU approach your linework? The music for this week by Gunwallace is for The Wallachian Library. It's a dark, black future sounds, neon glows, pulses of energy and ideas, vectors and virtual circuits.Sorry, no link to this comic, the user deleted it from the site.
