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Ozoneocean at 7:42PM, Oct. 1, 2024

@PaulEberhardt - Bud Spencer & Terence Hill films are a tip LOL!

Ozoneocean at 7:40PM, Oct. 1, 2024

@Marcorossi - generally I think narrative is the most important part of a fight in comics, then the exciting visual stuff. Not so much realism because it's hard enough for us to know what's going on from pics anyway, so we can't notice realism? In full motion stuff like film and TV though I thing realism is better.

Ozoneocean at 7:36PM, Oct. 1, 2024

@Marcorossi Fighting is hard coded in us as one of our standard ways of interaction, I think it probably goes back to our fishy ancestors or the little lizards they became on land haha! Because it's one of the common instinctual things that all creatures have- to do with defence rather than dominance.I agree, culture does repress it, in order to keep us safe and civilised. I notice that even my cat suppresses his need to fight by sheathing his claws when he plays and giving me gentle pretend bites.

PaulEberhardt at 8:26AM, Oct. 1, 2024

Fight scenes are tricky because most of us don't usually get much reference in their everyday lives - thank God! My favourite fight scenes are those in the legendary Bud Spencer & Terence Hill movies, which are probably best known in Germany because of the, erm, improvements on the dialogue made by the dubbing staff. Irrespective of that, though, the brawl and fight scenes are works of meticulously choreographed art, almost like a crazy anti-ballet, that manage to sneak cartoon violence into a live action movie without making it seem odd in any way. I've used one or two of these scenes as an inspiration before.

marcorossi at 8:15AM, Oct. 1, 2024

OK I'm here again after listening to the whole quackcast and I have two more things to say: (1) the kendo styled duels in the first (episode 4) Star wars were much, much better than the later ones!!1! and also (2) Miyagi's fight scenes in Karate Kid were acted by Fumio Demura ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumio_Demura ) a pretty impressive karateka who was 6th dan at the time (and later became 9th, that is freaking high for those who don't know), so yeah these scenes were awesome.

marcorossi at 4:05AM, Oct. 1, 2024

I'll finish this TLDR blurb of mine by saying that I try to keep my fight scenes reasonably realistic (e.g. I have "strong" characters doing armlocks and wristlocks on the fly that would be extremely difficult to do in reality, but not mechanically impossible), but I suspect that most readers do not really appreciate this (but I still do this because I do appreciate this). Also I think that drawing a realistic fighting in a way that is understabdable is much more difficult than drawing the extremised ones.

marcorossi at 3:59AM, Oct. 1, 2024

Those tendencies lead to combat scenes that often are very unrealistic, and even when they aren't they have subtle unrealisms: on the one extreme you have Dragonball and other combat mangas where people directly fight through energy beams (total unrealistic), and on the other you have Rocky where apparently you have realistic boxers but they do exceedingly opeh hook punches because they look cooler on movies, or the karate kid move that overall is comparatively realistic but the level of violence is significantly higer than what is allowed in a teen karate tournament in reality. Once upon a time there were super-unrealistic wuxia movies, but currently in action movies there is a trend towards realistic but exaggerated moves (compare the latest Star Wars jedi duels with the ones in the original trilogy, that were based on kendo moves). [continues]

marcorossi at 3:51AM, Oct. 1, 2024

The problem is that, IMHO, people like the idea of fighting because we have some repressed fighting instincts in our baboon brain (probably due to alpha-maling instincts, not due to an urge to kill everyone). But, on the one hand most of us likely have very scarce experience of real fighting, on the other we really want the feeling of being badass and the adrenaline, we don't really care for the mechanics of actual fighting, on the third hand a realistic fighting is less readable than a fake one with flying kicks and energy beams that come out of "chi" (because those are more visible), and on the fourth hand we really expect the fighting to be determined by moral charachteristics instead of physical ones: e.g. the hero wins because he's brave, not because he is 12 pounds heavier than his opponent, this is what villains do because it's unexciting; but in reality a fighting depends on physical things and only very indirectly on "moral" things. [continues]

marcorossi at 3:44AM, Oct. 1, 2024

In all of my comics I have 2 or 3 fighting scenes: although I'm not doing "combat manga" or even action stories, I'm still writing adventure stories, where this or that fight is often an highpoint of the story (in all my finished comics the big final scene is a combat showdown between protagonist and antagonist). However, I don't like to have extremely complex and unrealistic choreographyes. When I was an high schooler or in my early 20s I was a big fan of beat-em-up videogames like Street Fighter; however later I picked up martial arts and my interest in those games fell: on the one hand I scratched my itch for fighting in other ways, but on the other I realized how stupidly unrealistic beat-em-up videogames and often comics or movies are. [continues]

Ozoneocean at 1:06AM, Oct. 1, 2024

I love vega. Next to Cammy and Chun-Li's thighs, he's my fave character haha!

kawaiidaigakusei at 12:37AM, Oct. 1, 2024

Favorite fight scene: Vega vs Chun-Li in the animated Street Fighter movie.