Episode 295 - Sexcast, sex in non adult comics
Oct 10, 2016
This is the Awkardcast! Another take on the sexcast idea but this time we're looking at sex and sexual situations in strictly NON-adult comics. Sex performs a very different role in non-adult comics… You have a much wider audience with comics at the rating, but there are things you can not show, so of course you use sex for other reasons than the way you do in an adult rated comic. In an adult comic you can show all details of the entire act, all the genitalia in all their glistening, gory, gooey, hairy splendour, going in and out and around here and there and all over the place! Oh my! In Mature comics and bellow though, you simply can't, though you CAN have some non-sexual full frontal nudity in Mature comics and you can show bottoms in Teen rated comics. The ratings are similar to what you have with film ratings. In adult comics, like adult film, sex acts are more of the focus, they can still have a story but the sex acts are supposed to be enjoyed in their own right. In non-adult comics the sex has other purposes- subtle titillation is a part of it, comedy, teasing the viewer, furthering the plot, a culmination of a relationship or the establishment of one, etc- there's generally always another purpose to it, unlike adult comics where there sometimes is but doesn't need to be. And unlike adult film there's not much purpose to softcore non-adult rated porn in comics. That type of censored porn is done in film in order to get a wider audience on media that will otherwise not show porn, but on the net porn it's super easy to come by so there's not much reason to do softcore. There are a lot of challenges entailed in depicting non-adult rated porn! Certain positions don't work in well with the limits on nudity (we talk about this in the cast), but there are tricks you can use; symbolism (popping champagne corks, trains going into tunnels etc), strategic positioning of sheets, clever camera angles, fading out before the act and fading in again after, characters with mussed hair and uneven clothing, using dialogue to refer to what they just did, “off-screen” shenanigans, or shenanigans in the dark etc, it can be a lot of fun! Have a listen to how Tantz, I and Banes tackle the idea. The music by Gunwallace for his week was Firefly cross! A very mystical sound, with traditional, middle eastern style music mixed with dark techno fuzz, this one is intriguing!
Topics and Show Notes
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
FRED - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/FRED
Daniel by Sarah M - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Daniel/
The faction by PeiPei - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/The_Faction/
Putrid meat by PitFace - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/PUTRID_MEAT/
Without moonlight by Tantz Aerine - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Without_Moonlight/
Pinky TA - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Pinky_TA/
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Banes - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Tantz Aerine - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine
kawaiidaigakusei - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
Featured music:
Firefly cross - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Firefly_Cross/ by Dragonsong12, rated E.
Episode 284 - Writing Dialogue pt2
Aug 15, 2016
Well this is the SECOND part of our Quackcast on Dialogue! As with last week, this Quackcast is based on a thread in the DD forums discussing different approaches to creating Dialogue in webcomics. This time we have an additional guest though: the mighty Pitface joins, Tantz, Banes and I once more. We have a dialogue on dialogue, natter away and speak in different accents. We also tried using Google Hangouts for this Quackcast instead of Skype for once just to see if that made things any clearer… It did a little. Google Hangouts had it's own non-intuitive issues that we had to work through, but in many, many ways it worked better than Skype! Gunwallace's musical theme was Our little mental hospital. a crazy insane sounding Latin groove. Makes you want to salsa!
Episode 279 - Meet the Mutants!
Jul 11, 2016
Our very own heavily mutated Pitface put up a guest post about her fellow mutants, filling in for HippieVan while Hippy is away fighting the mutants in Japan wearing a tie-dyed sailor suit and riding a Volkswagen battle mecha, as you do in Japan… anyway, as a member of the anti-mutant police force, I had to drag in Pit for questioning! And that's what we did for this Quackcast. Banes and I interrogate Pit on the subject of mutants! Mutants are a forgotten race at the moment: Mutants are the zombies of SciFi in a way; a mob of anonymous monstrous minions who exist to menace the heroes and be gunned down in their thousands. But they're also so much more… Unlike zombies, mutants have a lot more personality and humanity, they can also be far more demonic and revolting than any zombie, they can be any shape, size of configuration. Mutants are so much scarier and adaptable than mere zombies, because unlike zombies they're not always degrading and falling apart, no, mutants are evolving constantly, they can get larger, gorier and more terrifying, i.e. The Thing. For mutant pathos witness the Mars mutants in the original Total Recall: There's a man with a baby in his chest and we feel for him and respect him. We have superhero mutants too in the form of the X-men. Can't forget them! But remember also that “mutants” are also a very real thing in this world, unlike zombies, in fact we are ALL mutants in one way or another, not just those special people with a conjoined twin or extra nipples or genitals or whatever, all of us have our own exciting DNA variation! I have a big nose, crooked lower teeth and pasty white skin myself, I'm practically a Morlock. So what is YOUR “mutation”?
Episode 278 - Maturity and the whisper game
Jul 4, 2016
Quackcast 278 is a strange bird! We have TWO things in it! TWO! Not one… but TWO. First we play the whisper game, inspired by Ms Pitface. So what we did was one of us said something into the camera with the sound down and then everyone else had to guess what we said. Out of all of us Banes was he best. I got ONE right, but as a general rule I was the worst at it. Pit and Tantz were ok… The fun of it was the silly guesses though. It's a great parlour game for your drawing room. The second part is where we talk about MATURITY. Banes has finally become a man and he shows it by dominating us all. The guy's a beast! Seriously though, there are some interesting lessons about being “mature”… it's not all about that quote “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things”.. no, this is more about how you deal with other people, not how you present yourself and what you do with your free time. Plenty of adults don't play with “childish things” but they're less mature than most toddlers. It's an interesting subject! Gunwallace's theme for Bruno Harm is an appropriate Rockford files style intro for a guy who thinks he’s Peter Gunn. Added comedy lines featuring Banes and me!
Episode 274 - development of main characters
Jun 6, 2016
Our Quackcast topic was a discussion about how our main characters evolved and changed over time, both in terms of characterisation but also artistically. stylistically and their own looks. Then we chatted about ways to help that along and accelerate it: How do you get to KNOW your character better? How do you help them grow? We toyed with some exercises but eventually came up with a cool one- Swapping a comic page/scene with someone else and redrawing it with your character in there instead of the original main character, and also have your character handling their new situation in the the way that best suits them, the way THEY would handle it. Link bellow… The music this week by Gunwallace was a theme to DELIA- it's a cold, thoughtful tune with a note of unease below, like an icily perfect woman.
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 272 - DD electric people, community meetup
May 22, 2016
State your business! Venerable Drunkducker Ayesinback suggested we have an open electronic meetup of DD people, so that's exactly what we did! We all met up in a long Skype session that lasted 10 hours- various DDers dropped in and out over that time and we chatted away about everything and nothing on videochat, meanwhile I tried on a never ending series of antique and novelty hats, one after another… It was really lovely to see old and new DDers all together, to see their faces and hear their voices. A big thankyou to everyone who took part! It was a big success! We will try it again and again in the coming months. The proposed date is the 3rd Saturday of every month, so the next one will be the 18th of June. The session starts at 11am New York time and runs for 10 hours until 9 pm New York time, so you can drop in any time during that! You can get Skype for free here: www.skype.com. It works on all computers, phones and tablets. It can even work just in your web browser alone! You just sign up and install it. Then make sure you add “ozoneocean” as a friend. Gunwallace's track this week was for Darklings. It's nice and long one with a good progressive rhythm. Some of the genius things we discussed: The measure of distance is time. Inbreeding leads to contagious genetic deformity. Direct democracy VS Harkovast. We beet the sugar! Pineapple and artichoke, why eat them?
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:
