Episode 300 - 3rd DD meetup!
Dec 5, 2016
We finally did it! We got to 300 Quackcasts! We've been doing these non-stop for SIX years! Wow… That's pretty incredible. We couldn't think of anything clever do do so we had another DD electronic meetup. The 3rd DD meetup on the 3rd of December on the 300th Quackcast. So the DD family got together, which is what families do around Christmas, well a few of us anyway! In this Quackcast you can listen to an hour of our blather and carrying on and vicariously experience what it was like if you missed it or listen again if you were a part of it. It's always a blast to have the DD community together, we're spread out all the way across the planet so this is really the only practical way for us to come together. We tried doing it with DD hangouts this time instead of Skype, which was interesting but there were way too many hoops to jump through for people to get into it. We could only have 10 people on the call at the time, With Skype we could have 10 people on video chat and others with voice only and chat was so much better… So NEXT time we will go BACK to Skype. Screw you Google hangouts! It was so nice to see people! I tried to stay up for 10 hours from 11am EST (New York time), to 9pm, but I didn't make it. I fell asleep 2 hours short. :( Gunwallace's musical theme was for Lady Unlucky: a minimal white landscape, furnished with electronica, hints of piano and subtle grandeur.
Topics and Show Notes
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
Dude In Distress - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2016/nov/30/featured-comic-dude-in-distress/
Newspost:
3rd DD Meetup! - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2016/dec/03/3rd-dd-meetup-is-on/
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Tantz Aerine - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine
Pitface - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Kawaiidaigakusei - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
Banes - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
HippieVan - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/HippieVan/
Plymayer - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/plymayer/
Ayesinback - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ayesinback
Skreem - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/skreem/
usedbooks - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/usedbooks
Fallopiancrusader - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/fallopiancrusader/
VinoMas - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/VinoMas/
Magicalmisfits - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/magicalmisfits/
Featured music:
Lady Unlucky - Lady Unlucky - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Lady_Unlucky/ by Whirlwynd, rated M
Episode 296 - What came before?
Nov 7, 2016
Tantz Aerine, Banes and Pitface join me, Ozoneocean, to talk about back stories, histories and all that extra knowledge you can come up with when creating your story. It can inform your comic story in a really clever way… but don't be tempted to vomit all that knowledge out on your unsuspecting audience! They'll hate you for it. It' a really great idea to come up with a detailed history and you can be really proud of it too, but you have to know how to present it to your audience, i.e. through your character interaction and the flow of your story. Gunwallace's featured music for this week was… THE LAST PICK UP ARTIST! This has a nice dry, rock feel, heavy guitar. This is music for cruising in a muscle car.
Episode 289 - Managing your personal brand
Sep 19, 2016
This time we're talking about the weird notion of managing your online brand: what name do you publish your creative works under and how do you go about curating that? It's an idea I had after a great artist friend of mine known as Hyena Hell lost her online presence on Facebook, the main venue for publishing her artistic projects. Both her her private and public creative lives had been merged into the persona that is known as “Hyena Hell” because the act of creation was very personal to her, it was her brand as well as herself. But after a nasty little scum sucking piece of excrement loser arsehole rectum faced coprophagiac reported her name she lost her right to have that as her personal account. Rather than challenge it or compromise she retired her creative persona from Facebook, and it was a shame because we lost a vibrant artistic, thoughtful presence from there. But many of us also have an online brand/persona/nom-de-plume of some sort that our work is collected under and that's the topic of discussion! Gunwallace's theme this week is for Urthe, featuring lashing cymbals and electric guitar that blasts out like a deadly raygun! This is hard rockin’ goodness!
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 237 - The Songcast
Sep 21, 2015
For Quackcast 237 we asked people about the songs that inspire them when they do their comics, which songs go with which parts of their comics, what would be the ideal comic movie theme, what songs or music get you in the MOOD to do your comic, and finally; just how great are Gunwallace's fantastic comic theme tunes? And speaking of theme tunes, the masterful Gunwallace has given us a Salsa theme for Taco El Gato!
Episode 233 - Formulas Forever!
Aug 24, 2015
Here we go again, back to formulas! This time we got some external input. Fellow DDers had a say about their idea about the utility of formulas and how they use them in their writing and comics. It's important to understand formulas in writing so you know what works and why it works, it can help you in your own work. And when you need to and you've got the ability you can create your OWN writing formula. But remember: the formula is just the bare skeleton, you have to add all the meat and flesh to it with the rest of your writing, don't let the bones show through! Listen to Gunwallace's beautiful theme for Brave New World! Oh, and one last thing… HAPPY BIRTHDAY TANTZ AERINE!!!!
Episode 209 - lurv triangles
Mar 9, 2015
Around about Valentine's day, HippieVan's mind turned to thoughts of love... and she conceived of a great newspost idea that was very popular with people! Love triangles are very good for generating drama in your writing without having to worry too much about forcing that through external events. And because they're primarily driven by you characters as well as affecting them it's a great way to build on your characterisation through the drama. In HippieVan's words we outline a few notable love triangles in fiction, both classic, and contemporary, then we include the contributions the DDers who were good enough to add their two cents to the subject.
Episode 205 - What about bodyshape?
Feb 9, 2015
This week Banes and I were inspired to talk about body shape in the depiction of figures in comics, inspired by some famous images from photographer Howard Schatz's 2002 book, Athlete. In it there are photos of many athletes who're at the peak of their sports and yet their bodyshapes are vastly different, subverting the idea of an "ideal" bodyshape or what it means to be a top athlete or even fit. too often bodyshapes in comics follow a very narrow range, not getting much past what we think of as the current popculture ideal. We all know that idealised model shape is a problem and yet we all still perpetuate it, most of the time you can only tell most "realistic" characters apart by their hairstyle or costume, especially in superhero comics. And that invents a second problem: the myth of the "normal" shaped body as opposed to the ideal- there IS no such thing as normal, and even the ideal is always changing throughout the ages. There's even a lot more to body shape than the famous categories: Mesomorph, Ectomorph, and Endomorph, or Skinny, Pear, Athletic, Hourglass and Apple. We also have a beif mention of how stylised characters (Sponge Bob, Calvin and Hobbes etc) are exaggerations of these shapes and differences.
