Episode 281 - The Joy of SFX
Jul 25, 2016
The Quantum theory of comics! Sound adds a whole new dimension to comics, enriching and enlarging the atmosphere, giving your mind a whole new path of stimuli to explore and queue you into things you just would not have been able to consider without them! Thanks to Ironscarf for his beautifully sexy and punny intro into the wonderful world of SFX, We made liberal use of his newspost in this Quackcast!. Indeed, SFX can be very tough to master in a lot of ways, it can be hard to make yourself use them too because they seem a little twee and unnatural, but once to get over that natural reticence they add a whole lot more to your work and give you many more options to explore. They're a very useful tool in your comic making toolkit! The theme this week was for Planet Chaser, you'll agree that it's bouncy, techno, mystical and danceable!
Topics and Show Notes
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
Pestilent - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Pestilent/
Links
Joy of SFX newspost by Ironscarf - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2016/jul/14/the-joy-of-sfx/
Wally Wood SFX parody - http://jeffoverturf.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/sound-effects-wally-wood-mad-mondays.html
Mecha and explosions in Pinky TA - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Pinky_TA/5396982/
Hangover and ship noises in Pinky TA - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Pinky_TA/4776698/
Blambot SFX fonts - http://www.blambot.com/fonts_sfx.shtml
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Banes - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Tantz Areine - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Without_Moonlight/
Ironscarf! http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Ironscarf/
Featured music:
Planet Chaser - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Planet_Chaser/, by ZeroGee, rated T.
Episode 273 - Promoting Side Characters
May 30, 2016
After last week's massive DD meetup (Next one is on the 18th, BE THERE!), we're back to the core group… me and my side characters, hahaha! Banes, Pitface, and Tantz Aerine join me to discuss the topic of promoting from within the ranks. I did a newspost about this last Thursday (linked bellow), the thrust of which was that when you need new main characters it's so much better and more fun to mine them from earlier in your stories rather than introducing them whole and new minted. This doesn't have to be an unplanned thing though- you can do like Banes or Amelius and have it all designed in advance. What they do is lightly introduce main characters AS side characters initially, knowing they'll be promoted to main status later on, either way it works the same- they fit better in the world of the story, the have more “history” and the audience finds them easier to accept, as we discuss in the Quackcast. Still though, when things aren't so planed, it can be so rewarding when creations grow and find their own voices. This week's theme by Gunwallace is for XTIN , it's weirdly Indian and mournful in a beautiful way that is PERFECT for Xitin!
Episode 265 - Drunk Duck updates and the future
Apr 4, 2016
For Quackcast 265 I wanted to steer the direction toward the idea of future fixes and features for Drunk Duck! We talked a bit about the 2nd wave of fixes that will be happening now- HippieVan worked to gather people's suggestions for the most important bugs that needed fixing (with our limited funds), and features people want added, and then did a survey to find what people though were the highest priority. It was a lot of work and took a few weeks to come up with the results. Bellow is a summery of what she learned:
Episode 255 - Drunk Duck Improvement Drive
Jan 25, 2016
We're trying to fix up Drunk Duck, adding the the comic statistics back in, fixing forums, adding notifications to PQs and MORE, but we need money to do it. In this Quackcast, Ozoneocean, Banes, and Pitface talk about the improvements we want to have on DD, and what YOU can do to help us out. Please consider donating to our Indiegogo fund-raising drive to help us pay our programmer: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/drunk-duck-webcomics-improvement-drive/x/4410947#/ There are a LOT of cool perks you can have including your own Quackcast interview all about YOU, original art from The creator of Modest Medusa, Charby the Vampirate and others, a 126 page Modest Medusa comic for only $10 and much more! If you can't spare any change, please consider spreading the word to your readers. Remember, these fixes are for everyone, by donating to DD you're helping yourself. :D
Episode 252 - Wish Fulfilment
Jan 4, 2016
Happy new year! In this first Quackcast for 2016 we have Banes, Pitface and Tantz Aerine along to talk to us about Banes' neswpost topic of Wish Fulfilment in writing. It can be a good thing in that it makes the writer more interested and passionate about what they're doing as well as creating a very relatable ideal for readers with similar tastes. The negative side is that they make their world too perfect and too specific to themselves so that the whole thing just looks like an exercise in boring, pointless ego stroking. Gunwallace's theme this time was for Professor Herbert and GEO, which was also the featured comic! It sounds a bit like the theme to an '80s cartoon, which exactly what the comic looks like it should be O_o
Episode 223 - Collaborating with the Aliens
Jun 15, 2015
On today's Quackcast I, the marvellous Ozoneocean am speaking to the equally marvellous Trevor Mueller of Albert the Alien! This fine chap is returning to the Quackcast (was on Quackcast 184), to chat with me about the process of collaborating from the point of view of a writer who's working with an artist. Trevor also he another Kickstarter for the second volume of Albert the Alien out now so please consider contributing to that. Trevor is a highly acclaimed writer of a fantastic and funny all ages comic and his artist on Albert the Alien, Gabriel Bautista, is an award winning successful comic creator in his own right. Trevor brings a LOT of experience to the topic of collaboration. Catch the great theme for The Ink by our very own Gunwallace!
Episode 212 - Gateway Comics
Mar 30, 2015
Tantz Aerine, Pit Face and Abt Nhil join Banes and Ozone to discuss the kinds of comics that are good intros into the medium for people who aren't into them: Gateway comics! You know the sorts of people; "Comics are for kids", that sort of thing. Well the idea here is to show them different! What comics would convince someone to give the medium a second glance? What comic or strategy could possibly convent people to the glorious cause of comics? Tantz, Pit, and Abt tell us what they think, we also read what HippieVan suggests (the topic creator), and the people who contributed to HippieVan's original newspost.
Episode 208 - Testing Your Writing
Mar 1, 2015
In this Quackcast Banes and I discuss some methods for testing your writing, well mainly your characters, to see how well you really know them. We use a comedic character creation template that we have found is perfect for testing and learning more about your established characters, no matter how serious they are. It consists of four interrelated elements: Point of view; Exaggeration of the point of view; Faults; Relatability / Humanity. We also talk a little about the dreaded dangers of the Mary Sue... you never want your writing to fall in that putrid, cancerous hole of smelly excrement where your main character is perfect and all the others worship them. And lastly the very useful Bechdel test for seeing how rounded your female characters are. There are 3 rules: You have to have at least two named women; They who talk to each other; It's about something besides a man. We were both a bit sad about the death of Leonard Nimoy. R.I.P. Mister Spock.
