Episode 715 - Apocalypse
Nov 25, 2024
This is the third in our weapons trilogy and it's about what happens AFTER the ultimate weapons have done their work: Apocalypse! The end of all things… This term comes from the bible, with the Book of Revelations which talks about what happens during the end of the world, but aside from the myth it's a pretty real concept- there are a LOT of ways the world can end and has indeed ended for various civilisations throughout history.
Topics and Show Notes
If you want to go riiiiight back there were the different mass extinction events that ended almost all life a few times on this planet. In the history of humanity we have the fall of Rome, an event that was felt for almost 1000 years in Western Europe! It ended technological development, scientific research, the progress of culture, communication, trade, and production were shut down. Development atrophied and technology reversed and reverted. Meanwhile in Northern Africa, the middle east, South America and China advanced empires flourished, but that didn't stem the rot in Europe because there was little contact, communication or trade. There are other examples of this but that's the main one that comes to mind.
Modern fiction is replete with a lot of different apocalypse and post apocalypse stories in many different forms (both natural, man made, and mythological). After the second world war the major influence was the idea of nuclear annihilation. A famous early example was On The Beach, a chilling film about American sailors on a submarine who survive the initial Apocalypse. They come to Australia in the Southern hemisphere and try and rally because life seems almost normal there, but when they travel back to the US to find survivors they learn everyone is dead that and the nuclear fallout will eventually even kill the people in the southern hemisphere down in Australia. The whole planet has an inescapable death sentence so all that's left is to choose how and when they will die.
20 years later 1979 famously gave us Mad Max! Which was a beginning of a whole genre of crazy low budget ultra violent deiselpunk post-apocalypse SciFi with muscle cars and torn leather. In this first movie it's pretty tame, we assume that society is slowly breaking down after an apocalypse but people are still keeping things going nevertheless. Max is a leather-clad highway policeman with a wife and child. Pretty soon though a road gang ends his little slice of normalcy and the Road Warrior is born. After that the world of the Mad Max films becomes more and more chaotic and alien, totally divorced from any connection to our present day society. This spawned many imitators, usually terrible but sometimes strangely amazing.
What are some of your fave stories in the genre? The cover of this Quackcast is inspired by the 1985 Canadian film Defcon 4 (an image originally created in 1976 by Angus McKie). A Canticle for Lebowitz is a seminal story in the genre, about the preservation of culture and technology after an Apocalypse and how that can help rebuild things and that humans will inevitably repeat the same mistakes… Hell comes to Frogtown is an amazing and fun take on the dieselpunk post-apocalypse genre and definitely a fave of mine. But I think my faves would have to be The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham. Often thought of as “cozy catastrophes” because even though the world as we know it ends and the characters have to re-adapt they do it in a very level-headed way and they find a new normal- that is actually one of the very few absolutely accurate and realistic takes on what happens during and after a real Apocalypse which is why I appreciate it so much: life goes on, it's not the same but you do what you can to make it that way.
What do you think? A fan of Waterworld, Fallout, Terminator 2, The Walking Dead, The End, Radioactive dreams, Don't look up, something more fun or more depressing?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by The KAMics - Relaxed, the coolest of the cool. Kick back and let go to this breezy, slow track with a killer, bopping beat! You could listen to this forever, it’s so soothing and calming.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Plague Rat - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/nov/18/featured-comic-plague-rat/
Featured music:
The KAMics - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/The_KAMics/ - by Kam, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 706 - wrong
Sep 23, 2024
Being right on the internet is Sooo important… Being right in life and at all times is essential too! At least that's how a lot of us tend to think. Being told we're wrong, especially on the internet, can be so embarrassing and shameful that we try and avoid it at all costs. But realising you're wrong and being able to admit it and to learn from your mistakes is actually more empowering, powerful, and fulfilling than any amount of rightness can ever be.
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?
Episode 661 - Steaks... stakes
Nov 13, 2023
Stakes are a part of a story. What does a character want? What means the most to the character? What are they after, what do they care about? Stakes can be really subjective like that and they can also be objective and more universal like death, debt, a threat to a home, nation, planet or even the universe. The most important thing though is that you can communicate the value of those stakes to the audience! It doesn't actually matter WHAT the stakes are as long as the audience understands that they're important.
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 628 - Cover me!
Mar 27, 2023
We're talking about the importance of a good cover in this cast. Another technical comicscast! I love making coves, they're one of my fave things because I get to stretch my artistic muscles and get a little more flashy and creative with my art and graphic design. They can also be pretty dread things to work on when you've used up all your creative powers on your actual comic and have nothing left over…
Episode 600 - AI is bad at art
Sep 12, 2022
here's a lot of buzz about so called AI generated art at the moment using programs like Dall-E, Neural blender, Dream studio lite and so on. People use text prompts, i.e. “flying clockwork fish balloon” and the AI generates “art” based upon that. It usually does this by using actual art and photography created by real people, and visually mixing them to create a new image. Some results are much better than others.
Episode 597 - Revelations!
Aug 21, 2022
Today we're talking about a technique in storytelling that we're calling the “revelation”. Inspired by Banes doing an article on the weird trope in movies of having a character discover newspaper stories about the villain that suddenly reveal the true stakes of the story and kick things into high gear. There are other types of revelation in stories though and they're used in different ways.
