Episode 362 - Triumph der Ente
Feb 19, 2018
In this Quackcast we chat about all the different options for hosting your webcomic. At the moment it seems the fashionable new young kiddies on the block are Webtoons and Tapastic, but they're certainly NOT the only choices for webcomic hosts out there and certainly not the best choices. I think we make a good case here for why Drunk Duck is a better choice in many ways, but we also bring up other host sites like twitter, comic fury, comic Genesis (used to be Keenspace), Tumblr, Deviant Art, Smack Jeeves, Fur Affinity, self hosting on a Word Press site etc. In the early days of the millennium there were just two hosts for your comic: Drunk Duck and Keenspace. Drunk Duck was a better choice for most since it was a lot easier to customise and it had a friendlier, smaller community. Keenspace had a two tier system: the picked comics with all the best stuff were in their “keenspot” site while the rabble were stuck with the slower hosting and slower updates. The main thing they had going was a gigantic member base. But they even changed the site's name from “keenspace” to “comic genesis” to further separate KeenSpot from the rabble, which left a sour taste in the mouth. By contrast Drunk Duck was always dedicated to being fully egalitarian. One of our main strengths is that we accept all without stigma: manga, furry, adult comic, sprites, American style, superhero, slice of life comedy, photocomics, professional published comics or stick figure amateur work and we welcome them all the same with the same level of enthusiasm. The big young Webtoons and Tapastic have some of the same issues Keenspace used to have: a big community where you will be lost in the crowd. And no site has as solid and safe programming and hosting as Drunk Duck does. Plus we're community run so you're same from corporate oversight and interference in the content you're allowed to post. You can read more about comic hosting sites in Emma Clare's news posts linked bellow. This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Odd Days. Sometimes you just have one of those days… or many of them in a row! Odd days. The sound here has a positive, optimistic theme overlayed with a harsh zigzag of electric guitar. This tune does well to illustrate the twisted euni, the off-balance and askew takes on everyday life and situations dealt with in this slice of life, humorous comic.
Topics and Show Notes
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
Flesh and Wires - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2018/feb/13/featured-comic-flesh-and-wires/
Emma Clare's webcomic host newspost 1 - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2017/dec/05/mirror-mirror-part-1/
Emma Clare's webcomic host newspost 2 - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2017/dec/14/mirror-mirror-part-2/
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
PitFace - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Tantz Aerine - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
kawaiidaigakusei - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
Banes - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/banes
/>Ozoneocean - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Featured music:
Odd Days - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Odd_Days/, by Nightmarelunatic, rated T.
Episode 361 - Primordial Creations
Feb 12, 2018
Today we talk about where our characters began, not their origin stories or why we started writing them but rather what they used to look like! Pitface was inspired to create a thread based on this idea by Emma Clare's newspost series of origin stories. So we just HAD to have Emma Clare along with us to discus this too! Pit, Tantz, and Emma discuss their bishie origins and talk about maybe doing a bishie DD calendar… We HAVE to make them do that! Emma Clare of course does our Friday newsposts as well as the comic Puppets and Strings and is the artist on Constellation Chronicles. What did your character look like when you first started? This week Gunwallace has given us the theme Wolf Moon - A slow, rich acoustic beginning lulls you calmly, then we roar into a rough, electric feast, a veritable tidal wave of sound washes over you and carries you out to sea.
Episode 355 - New Years cliffhanger!
Jan 1, 2018
Happy 2018 everybody! Another year passes and a new one has just begun. We recorded this Quackcast on the 30th of December so it was the very last Quackcast of 2017. Pitface was drunk and very entertaining, drinking beer from her new drinking horn, you can hear her entertaining ramblings at the start of the Quackcast. Tantz, Pit, Banes and I all chatted about cliffhangers since the new year is the ultimate cliffhanger! It was based on Tantz's newspost of the other day. Cliffhangers are a great way to make a story compelling. But try not to abuse them… Lets see, the only other thing is our Indiegogo drive to raise many for the latest improvement to DD: Comment notifications! We know that everyone wants those. This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to Slither and Friends. It's down home, dirty, scratchy groove. Feel the outdoors and the sound of the country in this one. Cool, full bodied, and natural.
Episode 353 - Beautycast
Dec 18, 2017
This is the Beautycast. We decided to have a chat about beauty. What IS beauty? is it universal? I would contend that it's not and that's what we tended to agree in the Quackcast. Beauty is a highly relative concept dependent on many factors like symmetry, rarity, ethnicity, time, geographical area, economic conditions, exoticism, what you're used to, aspiration, age, clothes, hair, health, fashion etc. Add to the fact that it's not really just based on what a person looks like but what they look like in relation to others around them. There's also the much derided old aphorism that “beauty comes from the inside” or that it's based on personality. We discus the fact that this is surprisingly actually quite true! Personality, expression and the way a person conducts themselves hugely influences your perception of their beauty or lack of it. This was a very interesting and enlightening discussion. This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to Mercenary Bound: This one has a slightly disco, early 1980s feel to it. It pumps along with the nice easy pace of a trained fighter, with a hint of threat and a touch of danger, like the music to a level of a side scrolling beat-em-up videogame. —————————————————————————— Don't forget our campaign to give YOU comment and reply notifications so that you can see who has commented on your comic pages easily, you can respond to them right away, then they'll KNOW you replied and they can respond back and so on. But before we can do that we need to raise money via Indiegogo to pay for it. YOU will be helping to pay for a feature that you want. That's how the site works these days, it's our site: yours and mine.
Episode 352 - Help make DD better! Comment notifications! More play
Dec 11, 2017
n this Quackcast we cover a few different things! FIRST up is our latest campaign to give YOU comment and reply notifications so that you can see who has commented on your comic pages easily, you can respond to them right away, then they'll KNOW you replied and they can respond back and so on. But before we can do that we need to raise money via Indiegogo to pay for it. YOU will be helping to pay for a feature that you want. That's how the site works these days, it's our site: yours and mine. In the next part of the Quackcast we have a series of short plays that we act out. They're based on comics here at DD. We start out with custom scripts written by Tantz Aerine for Without Moonlight and Brave Resistance. And then we have a go interpreting comic pages of The Epic of Blitzov, Bottomless Waitress, Typical Strange, and Pinky TA. Which brings us to our next thing: One of the perks you can pay for to help us out with our campaign will be a custom script based on your comic. WE will write it and act it out. YOU don't have to do anything but donate. Finally we have a note from KAM that we read out, informing us of the experience of adapting his comic into a script structure and we talk about that ourselves. If you'd like to write a script for us to act out on the Quackcast, just PQ me and I'll tell you where to send it. :) This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to Bram and Vlad: Welcome to the mysterious, echoing notes of a celestial funhouse. Then settle down to a demonic, yet friendly game of cards accompanied by a jaunty, yet cheeky tune on the piano!
Episode 348 - Action Talking
Nov 13, 2017
Special treat at the start of this Quackcast, a Spang news announcement from the oooooold days of DD! This week's Quackcast is on the interesting notion that talking CAN be action. It's based on a newspost of Tantz's. I'm not quite bright enough to fully explain it here so I'll quote Tantz: “Often in making webcomics, creators may try to have more action than discourse, as it tends to make the comic more visually interesting and give opportunities to avoid ‘talking head’ scenes. However, I think that sort of conundrum is a potential trap that might prevent creators from truly making use of all the potential their story and characters have- because if done right, everything on the webcomic page IS action. Discourse or discussions between characters have a natural dynamic and pacing that has to be tapped in, in order to make the scene itself dynamic and powerful even though the character’s aren’t physical with each other.” Basically, even the talking IS action, not separate from it. The talking give the action meaning and context after-all! This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to Energize: Serious beats, plodding purposefully, harsh guitar, flashing like the pulse of a police light, eclectic electric rock, flavours of early 80s ska and post-punk create an unusually tasty mixture!
Episode 346 - Existential horror
Oct 30, 2017
It caaaammmmme from outerspace… An unimaginably gigantic multi-tentacled green horror, Banes'thulu'Ary'lth! We only caught a glimpse of his heaving, slimy, scaled bulk but our minds couldn't fully comprehend what we saw and we were all driven insane! In this Halloween Quackcast we discuss Bane's newspost subject of Thursday: Existential cosmic horror! We also Made a Halloween Quackcast VIDEO - https://youtu.be/TvIGQqCbRAk, so check that out and see Tantz dressed as a beautiful black widow, me as a black clad gravedigger, Banes as a hellhound and Pitface as the invisible ghostgirl! We talk about the stories of HP Lovecraft, biblical horror in Revelations, The Path by James Riot, the stories and the writing of Guy de Maupassant. This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to The Sunless Children: Flute, violins, and kettle drum stitching together a complex tapestry of melody, weaving a fantastical visual saga though music alone, leading us down an exciting and dark path… till the climax in a clash of bright silver cymbals!
Episode 342 - Seen unseen
Oct 2, 2017
What is the best approach to make a scary story? To directly show the monster, the horror and the gore, or to hold off on that and let the audience fill in the blanks and guide them to imagine something far more awful and real than you could conceive of yourself? That's what Banes and I talked about in the Quackcast that comes out on the first day of the month of October, the scariest month… the month when my Tax return is due! OOooooooo nooooooo! o_O But it's also the month when Halloween comes around and people like to think about scary things… And THINKING about them is often more scary than seeing them. Or is it? This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to KAYN KOURAGEOUS! Groove on down to the funk! Let’s go back to the 1970s, chow down on some fat tasty bass, a lick of catchy repeating riff, the music of the streets; hot, fresh and savoury!