Episode 674 - Fashion
Feb 12, 2024
Do you change your style to go with current fashions or do you stick with your own thing and stay independent of changing trends? This is complicated by the fact that most people's styles are often influenced by an earlier fashion they just stuck with, but certainly not always, and some fashions reach a point where they become fully developed and eternal (like Art Deco), so it's worth sticking with those rather than changing to reflect ephemeral trends that are never properly formed.
Topics and Show Notes
Fashion in design concerns everything! We can talk comics: art style, panel style, lettering style, use of media, writing styles. We can talk clothes, product design, even the design of things that people mistakenly believe are driven by 100% practical concerns like firearms. Fashions in design are everywhere when you know what you're looking for.
Webcomics are a good example. They started in the late 90s as both sketchy graphic novel zines, and 4 panel newspaper gag strips. It wasn't till the early 2000s when they really took off and the first webcomic fashion started: gamer comics. These were comics featuring two slacker guys living together as room mates who played video games. These were EVERYWHERE. Since then a lot of fads have blown through webcomics from the rise of the fury comics, Boy love, the manga influence, Experimental comics, the infinite canvas vertical scrollers, fully digitally drawn and coloured comics and more.
What sorts of fashions have you noticed in webcomics? Do you follow them or do you go your own way?
Talk about any other fashions you feel like too if you want! I love a 1920s and 1930s influence to my clothing style for example.
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Bloodwing Fire Fist Angel - Heavy bass and a fiery guitar walk with slow, ponderous steps, shaking the world and burning it down. This is raw, thick, real, tasty, and slathered in BBQ sauce. I hope you like your comic themes well done!
Topics and shownotes
Links
Fashion discussion thread - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/179589/
Featured comic:
Curse of the Office Werewoman - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/feb/06/featured-comic-curse-of-the-office-werewoman/
Featured music:
Bloodwing Fire Fist Angel - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Bloodwing_Fire_Fist_Angel/ - by JohnCelestri, rated M.
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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Next week, possible subject
Copyright theft AI “art” (Mindjourney, Stable Diffusion, DallE etc), is digital colonialism: slavery.
Episode 665 - Eyes
Dec 10, 2023
This week our talk is an art one: eyes! We talk about how to draw them, adding meaning and expression, the way different cultures use them, different styles for doing eyes, reflection, shadow, focus and a million other things!
Episode 652 - Physical traits that set characters apart
Sep 11, 2023
Our topic this week is making your characters individual, distinct and setting them apart through physical traits. In many mainstream superhero comics or manga the only difference between most characters is their outfit, hair, and skin tone. There are a few reasons for that but a big one is that it saves time if the artist doesn't have to change to much when they're drawing different characters. Professional arts work hard and have to work fast so things that make work faster and easier are needed.
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 570 - Hair!
Feb 14, 2022
Time to chat about character hairstyles. Tantz did a newspost about them a few weeks ago and I spun the topic off into a fashion subject for a Quackcast, but something really basic and simple like hair has a lot of potential in its own right. There are lots of things you can consider…
Episode 556 - That's What She Said!
Nov 8, 2021
The other day Tantz Aerine wrote a newspost about an article critical of Squid Game. The crux of things was that the Squid Game creator had said their message was anti-capitalist, while this critic was saying that the author's message with the Squid Game was an anti communist critique and not a very good one at that. The issue here is that isn't how you do criticism. At all. You can give an interesting reading of something and tell us why YOU think it's anti-Communist, or tell us how it looks through the lens of post-colonialism or new wave feminism etc, but you can't say that is what the author is saying or what the work means, especially if the author explicitly says WHAT they are saying. This may seem like a small distinction but it's actually very, very important. Bad criticism often tells us what the creator is saying. Don't do that. Don't be that person.
Episode 552 - Tropes we like
Oct 11, 2021
Last time we covered tropes we hated! This time we're talking about clichés we actually like. It's quite a bit trickier because clichés are clichés for a reason (overuse) so it's not easy to like them, except in some cases… For me it's Isekai. That's a Japanese word for “another world”. This is a very old genre, it's basically a story where a person from our normal world goes to a magical world, we see this in ancient fairy stories, Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and many others. until the mid 20th century it was the default way of writing any fantasy story. It has always been around, the Japanese were just the first to come up with a popular name for it.
Episode 545 - tipping point to become a fan?
Aug 22, 2021
We're all fans of something, but when does that happen? When do we transition from just following and liking something into being full on fans and is there even a difference? I think there definitely IS a difference. I became a fan of Star Wars after watching the first film but I'm not a fan of The Witcher even after watching the entire show. Henry Cavill as Geralt is super amazing but the show itself is just blah to me. I've seen about 200 or so episodes of One Piece but I don't think of myself as a fan. I became a fan of Ghost in the Shell after seeing a poster from the Manga. I became a fan of Farscape after watching reruns of the series over and over.
