Episode 422 - Positive promotion and controversial characters
Apr 15, 2019
The entire gang comes together today for two topics that were taken from recent newsposts: Emma Clare's Positive self promotion, and Tantz Aerine's Handling Controversial Characters. First up we chat about why it's always a great idea to sell yourself positively, NOT be arrogant or douchey, but rather by talking enthusiastically about what you genuinely love about your work and using that REAL and SINCERE enthusiasm to infect others with your love of what you do. Emma was mainly talking about the way you introduce your comics to friends and family but it definitely applies more broadly to self promotion in general: Don't try and get sympathy through self depreciation (oh, it's not very good…), and don't be an arrogant ass (My stuff is AWESOME!), rather you should just be honest about what you love about it (This story was so FUN to write!).
Topics and Show Notes
There are exceptions. “READ HARKOVAST” become a great catchphrase for the author of that comic ;)
Next up we talk about Tantz's subject of handling controversial characters: Real controversial characters and established characters in fiction that have very different interpretations and views about them can be tricky to use in fiction. WHICH of the popular interpretations do you choose? - The one that says they were an insane dictator or the one that says they're a hero of their people? Whichever you do you'll have audience members who're angry about it in some way. Examples are characters like Jesus (comics linked bellow), and Mother Theresa. Jesus obviously means a lot of things to different people, there's around about 2000 years of culture focussed on him and people during the time he was meant to have lived would have regarded him very differently to the later worshippers. Mother Theresa during her lifetime was almost universally regarded as a living saint, her name was common shorthand for being extremely caring. After her death opinions changed and fractured desperately. To many she was either a monster, a scheming witch, or a stupid naive backwards woman who was used as a promotional tool. Which approach do you as a writer take?
This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Tusk. Fast tribal beat that makes you want to shake your hips, stamp your feet, wiggle, twitch, and vibrate all over! A nice, stompy, vibrating rhythm booms into the centre and slows things down for a change of pace. This is the ultimate dance track. Get hot, sweaty and show off your crazy moves as best you can. Put the other dancers to shame!
Topics and shownotes
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Featured comic:
Breached - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2019/apr/09/featured-comic-breached/
Featured music:
Tusk - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Tusk/, by Fallopiancrusader, rated T.
LINKS
Positive promotion newspost by Emma Clare - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2019/mar/30/talking-about-your-comic-to-others-and-why-you-should/
Controversial characters newspost by Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2019/apr/12/handling-controversial-historical-characters/
READ HARKOVAST - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Harkovast/
Holy Bible the Albino Ginger version - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com /Holy_Bible_the_Albino_Ginger_version/
Jesus 2016 - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Jesus_2016/
Look who's back (movie) - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4176826/
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/banes
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Pit Face - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
Episode 416 - Making cuts
Mar 4, 2019
The entire team is here this time, no one was cut… So we're chatting about CUTTING, as in cutting out scenes to make a story cleaner, leaner and less flabby, but also NOT cutting because in a webcomic you don't have to, and when you cut badly you end up with a “D movie” effect where story scenes don't follow, don't make sense and plots seem to go nowhere or happen for no reason.
Episode 414 - Bad Hollywood
Feb 18, 2019
Hollywood has a tendency to simplify or completely alter stories to make them more mainstream and appealing to their idea of a popular audience. In this Quackcast we thought it'd be fun to run with that idea and re-imagine our works for “Hollywood”.
Episode 412 - Hiatusssss D:
Feb 4, 2019
A huge thank you to the fantastic Amelius, creator of Charby the Vampirate! We mined her great newspost on the topic of the comic hiatus for this Quackcast. When you're reading a comic and it goes on Hiatus it's an awful thing… suddenly all progress stops and you don't know for how long it will be gone for. Some authors are great, they'll reach a point where they can't work anymore for some reason or they'll take a little break, but they will tell you they're going on a hiatus and when their comic will return- and Lo, it comes back exactly when they said it would. Crappy authors will say they're going on a hiatus and never return.
Episode 408 - The imitation game
Jan 6, 2019
Happy new year! This is the first Quackcast recorded in 2019! Pitface is back too, can you believe it? In this Quackcast we chat about Imitation, based on Amelius's newspost from last Sunday. How do you know if someone has copied your work, just been influenced by it or influenced from the same sources as you, or has actually stolen your work wholesale? And what do you DO about it? Is imitation or someone doing the same thing as your “original” idea, always a bad thing?
Episode 406 - Amateur Vs Pros Merry Christmas DD!
Dec 23, 2018
Merry Christmas one and all! And all that stuff. This year our release date falls exactly on the 25th! It was a busy year for us, lots happened. But in this Quackcast what we chat about is something rather different: the difference between pros and amateurs, specifically when it comes to comics. There's this common misconception that an amateur is a novice that will produce work of a lower quality, while a professional is an experienced person who knows what they're doing and will always produce things of the highest quality… The REAL story is more complex than that.
Episode 405 - Escape from Tumblr!
Dec 16, 2018
On the 18th of December people who post things with nudity on Tumblr will be kicked off the site. That means all the adult bloggers, comicers and things that made that journalling site stand out above the rest of the vast sea of blog sites and image hosts are being screwed out of what they helped build up! The reason of course is to make the site more attractive to advertisers and so it can more easily fit the standards of puritanical companies like Apple and Google who have taken it upon themselves to scrub the world clean of anything that defines us as adult human beings.
Episode 403 - Eat yer serial!
Dec 2, 2018
This Quackcast was inspired by a newspost by Tantz. There seems to be this prevailing idea at the moment that serialised storytelling is better than episodic style stories. Tantz informs me that it's one of the many Twitterverse controversies! So let me explain what I mean here: Episodic story telling is when most of the story you're telling can be parcelled into the course of an episode: you can have a strong beginning, middle and satisfying conclusion in the course of your episode, whether that takes the form of a comic chapter, a page, a strip, or a half hour TV show. The Serial style has things stretching over multiple chapters or TV episodes. What we talk about in this Quackcast is that it's an utterly false dichotomy: You do not have to have either or, in fact most projects have elements of BOTH at the same time and it's a little foolish to think that one style could possibly be inherently superior to the other since they're just tools for telling a story. It is up to the creator to pick which one is right for their own work and the context in which it's going to be shown.
