Episode 658 - Marvelous musicals
Oct 23, 2023
We're chatting about the subject of musicals for this particular Quackcast. You might think this has nothing to do with webcomics but webcomic musicals popup from time to time, like The Black Parade on DD by Ashlee S.
Topics and Show Notes
Musicals are a type of entertainment like any other, usually in the form of a film or stage play, they evolved from Operas and operettas. Their characteristic feature is that communication of scenes is at points stylised into the form of a song, often involving a dance with detailed choreography. I personally love musicals, some people don't, which is fare enough.
But one of the silliest complaints about musicals is when people say “I don't get it, why are they suddenly bursting into song and dance”, they tend to say that this isn't “logical”, among other things.
ALL forms of entertainment are highly stylised and mediated, there is no such thing as literal reality in entertainment, nothing even approaching it, no matter how much we fool ourselves. Singing and dancing in musicals is actually no less realistic and no less valid than a super serious crime drama like Breaking Bad or The Wire, these all have heavy stylisation and artificial forms of communication in order to get their point across. You just have to get used to it.
Remember- before we had TV we were limited to comics, books, and silent films. Before that it was operas. Before that it was puppet shows, stage plays, and oral histories told in rhyming verse as epic poems and all those things were easily understood by audiences and able to fully communicate the feelings, emotions, tragedy and the plot for thousands of years- which is something to think about next time a person says they can't get their head around musicals. Taste is one thing, being ignorant is another.
Anyway, do you like musicals? If so, what are some of your faves?
This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Gaia Comic - Delightful, mysterious, evocative, and gentle. This is an interesting mix of styles, with a woody percussion, pizzicato on violins and a mournful chorus of cellos.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Musical webcomic - The Black Parade https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/The_Black_Parade/
Featured comic:
Alpacomics - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2023/oct/17/featured-comic-alpacomics/
Featured music:
Gaia Comic - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Gaia_Comic/. - by Novil, rated T
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
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Episode 646 - FIGHT! Drawing and references
Jul 31, 2023
Drawing fight scenes is damn hard! One of the best ways to deal with this is to use references, but that's hard too because it's a pain to find the ones you need! So today we're talking about making your own reference pics for fighting because that's what I just finished for Tantz- I stripped shirtless and wielded some of my many antique swords in fight poses for Tantz to use in her new fantasy webcomic.
Episode 643 - Cultcast
Jul 10, 2023
With the release of the new Indiana Jones film comes some questions… We haven't seen it yet but we hear a lot of people don't like it and it's already being called a flop. But is that because it's actually bad, because people want it to be bad, or because it doesn't match people's expectations? What's the real story? It's hard to know at this point.
Episode 601 - /rant
Sep 19, 2022
If something affects or disturbs you so much that you want to respond to it through a story that you write, that can be a pretty powerful form of inspiration! But it depends on how you handle it. For example, Stephan King's acclaimed novel Misery was inspired by nasty interactions he had with fans after he published a fantasy novel. This story was very well received and even turned into a popular movie. And then there are other ways to handle it…
Episode 600 - AI is bad at art
Sep 12, 2022
here's a lot of buzz about so called AI generated art at the moment using programs like Dall-E, Neural blender, Dream studio lite and so on. People use text prompts, i.e. “flying clockwork fish balloon” and the AI generates “art” based upon that. It usually does this by using actual art and photography created by real people, and visually mixing them to create a new image. Some results are much better than others.
Episode 599 - Badaptations
Sep 5, 2022
Source material is something that we can love and respect, but it's just as often disregarded, degenerated, and denigrated, especially these days where it seems like everything you see is an adaptation or even an adaptation OF an adaptation or worse. I think it's important to go back to the sources so you can see what was truly great about the original to begin with. It can help you see what was lost in the adaptations and to discover new and important meanings and ideas that you never would have guessed at.
Episode 597 - Revelations!
Aug 21, 2022
Today we're talking about a technique in storytelling that we're calling the “revelation”. Inspired by Banes doing an article on the weird trope in movies of having a character discover newspaper stories about the villain that suddenly reveal the true stakes of the story and kick things into high gear. There are other types of revelation in stories though and they're used in different ways.
Episode 596 - Leadership!
Aug 15, 2022
Leaders are not born, they're created… literally in the case of fiction, created by creators of comics, books, movies, and other media! For this Quackcast I was inspired by two things: a video on Leader Characters by the satirical YouTube channel Terrible Writing Advice, and the Disney movie Lightyear, in which the lone wolf classical hero figure learns how to lead.
