Episode 430 - Good beginnings!
Jun 10, 2019
At the beginning of a story how do you grab and KEEP your readers? This comes from the Friday newspost by Emma Clare. Her advice was pretty brilliant. From my own perspective it's generally characters that grab me first before anything else. Great art and a fantastic cover can hook your eyes, but without a great story or interesting characters there's zero to keep you there.
Topics and Show Notes
Info dumps explaining the entire premise can scare people away but so can dumping the reader in a complex world and complex situation without explaining anything… One technique is to ease people into the world by starting them off with a familiar and identifiable situation and then building up from there, maybe having the weirdness and complexity being new to the protagonist as well? This is how we start off in The Hobbit (the book, not the crappy films), Magician by Raymond E Feist, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Quasi and Psudo - Waves of contemplative strings, like huge feathered fans slowly wafting in air, thick with importance and potential at the imperial court. The musical atmosphere is rich and heavy… A cheeky clarinet takes up the theme of the deep bass cello, performing a twirling pirouette, before sinking away and ceding to the cello once more. Spikes of harp strings glint like gold reflected from the richly decorated furnishings…
Topics and shownotes
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Featured comic:
QUASI and PSUDO - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2019/jun/04/featured-comic-quasi-and-psudo/
Featured music:
QUASI and PSUDO - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/QUASI_and_PSUDO/, by 1rd2th3st, rated E.
LINKS
Emma's newspost on Beginnings! - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2019/jun/07/starting-your-story/
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Pit Face - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
Episode 317 - Hannagrid Wright Interview!
Apr 3, 2017
Today we interview Hannagrid Wright aka 5thezombie! She's the creator of the great Sci-Fi webcomic To The Galaxy And BACK! -featured by Kawaii last year. To the Galaxy and back features Kat and Zoey, two girls that have been drawn together by fate, across the universe, to have all sorts of adventures in outerspace. All Zoey really wants is to get back to her dad, but having a dashing adventurer alien companion is going to make the ride a little more fun. Hanna is a cool person, she's just starting out on webcomics and already she has a nicely pro art style. She's mastered an efficient method of storytelling that's compelling, perfectly balanced for frequent updates, and makes her comic very easy to consume! Pit and Banes did a marvellous job in interviewing Hanna with me! I hope you read her comic (To The Galaxy And BACK!) and then listen to the interview! The music of Gunwallace this week is Sedna: A warm, deep blue, liquid, viscous, underwater outerspace world of wonder, joy, and luminescent glowing alien creatures…
Episode 307 - The jerks
Jan 23, 2017
Jerky, jerk, jerks! Let's talk about this type of character… This topic is based on Banes' newspost from Thursday, he based it on characters like Reggie from the Archie comics. Jerks can be pretty good characters in their own right. They can be villains, heroes, antagonists or protagonists, they can even be unintentional jerks like Scrappy do from Scooby Do, Alf from Alf, or Jar Jar Binks from that horrible movie he was in. My favourite jerks are Flashman from the Flashman novels by George MacDonald (you should read them!), Blackadder (particularly the second season), and Zaphod Beeblebrox who I'm cosplaying in the cover pic. Who are your fave and least fave jerks? Gunwallace's musical theme was for The Epic of Blitzov. It's Riff based hard rock, driving beat, heavy, distorted guitars layered over and over with a thunderous yet lyrical lead floating over the top. Orange and black sound.
Episode 283 - Writing Dialogue pt1
Aug 8, 2016
Dialogue is a key part of any comic, it pushes the story along, keys the reader in on things that would be otherwise ambiguous, hints and foreshadows at future happenings, creates humour… well, it's just a big part of comics, that's all! And that's what we're chatting about here in this Quackcast! The topic stems from a forum thread I posted a while ago asking people about their approach to creating dialogue and how people go about it; is it heavily scripted in advance or is it one of the last things you come up with? People had some very interesting responses! Gunwallace's musical theme was Magical Misfits. The sound is magical, classical, threatening, yet full of adventure! Love those creeping cellos, the violin and clarinet sound like a humorous dialogue between the wittier members of the party.
Episode 186 - X-men of the galaxy wintersoldier
Sep 29, 2014
No more pre-recorded Quackcasts... Ozoneocean is BACK from Europe! For this Quackcast Banes and Ozone chat about 3 superhero films... well, more like two because BANES bloody didn't see Guardians of the Galaxy! The bastard. Anyway, Ozone and Banes have a bit of a talk about these films and give them a rating out of five. They were all good films pretty much, some better than others, Banes and Ozone talk about the things that worked best, the things that didn't work, and which films were their faves. SPOILER- the film starting with G was THE best out of the 3 by a looooong way!!!!
Episode 160 - SciFi spectacular
Mar 31, 2014
While out on a routine survey mission in the Asimov Nebula, space-Captain Ozone and security officer second class Stanley Banes find themselves face to face with a drunken rampaging mutated alien duckmonster! Join our spacefaring heroes as they ramble about some of their favourite SciFi and discuss some of the best and worst features of the genre. But more importantly; will they get out of this predicament alive and will they ever get their booze back?
Episode 126 - Mobile Digital Art
May 20, 2013
This is another of our technical Quackcasts, this time Banes and I are talking about my own mobile digital art processes. The tools I currently use for that are a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet and Sketchbook pro by Autodesk is the software. It's a bit of a rambling discussion but hopefully we managed to impart a bit of sensible info! I even drew a a picture using this equipment during the Quackcast and you can see that in the links bellow as well as links to some of the other stuff we talked about! Regarding the tablet and software though, as a digital artist I highly recommend it to everyone!
Episode 97 - Snotmunkee Brings the News
Oct 2, 2012
This Quackcast is a grab-bag of things. Mostly newsy stuff and chats with Skoolmunkee! We talk about how Wowio is dying to promote DD artist's stuff through all sorts of social networking stuff like Twitter, a Youtube vid chanel, tumblr, Facebook, Google + etc, HUNGRY for user news!!! We also talk about this new thing we want to try with DD: Hangouts on Google+ with DD people- basically video get togethers that will be broadcast at the same time on Youtube, we can all draw, do comics, learn, teach, whatever. AND we want vids for the Wowio-Duck-Popgalaxy Youtube channel. They could promote your comic, be a short tute on your methods, a comic review, anything DD comic related.
