Episode 155 - A Moment with Modest Medusa
Feb 24, 2014
After a terrible bathroom flooding incident Modest Medusa was born. That's sort of the beginning of the story of Modest Medusa, but also how the comic began too! In this Quackcast I interview Jake Richmond, the creator of the very successful and popular Modest Medusa: a pretty amazing webcomic success story. Starting out at Drunk Duck with his comic in 2011 he's been able to quit his main day job and work on his comic full time! He does some freelancing and teaching as well, but his comic is his main source of income. That's awesome! And this wasn't by luck either, or “being in the right place at the right time” that many have leveraged much of their success from, Jake got there though hard work and dedication to his readers. A real webcomic inspiration! This is the goal that every webcomicer should be aiming for and his success shows that it IS acheiveable! - Only IF you can put in that work though. It's not easy, no short-cuts.
Topics and Show Notes
Featured comic:
Diexemor - http://theduckwebcomics.com/Diexemor/
Jake’s Links:
Modest Medusa on DD - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Modest_Medusa/5366559/
Modest Medusa Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/232860137/modest-medusa-season-3
Jakes Recommended reading list:
Split Screen by Jaymz - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Split_Screen/
Patreon - http://www.patreon.com
Episode 144 - Bold New Experiment with the Top Ten!
Dec 2, 2013
For this Quackcast it's just Ozone aaaaaand HippieVan! We're discussing various things, the most important of which is the Top Ten rating system for the front page of DD. It has been frozen solid since the site stopped tracking stats about TWO years ago. Hopefully we'll restart hat when we figure out how to code it up, but for now HippieVan and Irreverent came up with a good idea: The Top Ten comics will be based on how many "likes" they have. This will be calculated every week by HippieVan. So now comics have the ability to get into the top ten if they can get enough "Likes", so start campaigning people and you'll have a spot on the front page! Unfortunately we're not including Adult rated comics in that list because those can't be seen by people who aren't signed into the site so would just look like blank boxes on the front page. Never fear though, Adult comics are still ranked proudly on the comic search page in their true like order.
Episode 139 - Telling Gender From Comic Styles
Oct 28, 2013
For Quackcast 139 Banes and I were joined by Kawaiidaigakusei, who had an amazingly interesting subject to talk about: “Telling Someone's Sex By the Way They Draw". Kawaiidaigakusei says:This has been a subject matter that is of great interest to me since college, and I am sure a lot of people who draw webcomics can relate. The early periods of Western Art have been mostly dominated by men. Female artists were rare during the Baroque Period with the exception of a key figure, Artemisia Gentileschi, whose dark interpretation of Judith Beheading Holofernes can be read with psychoanalytic overtones of a woman asserting her dominance over a man by decapitation. The twentieth century welcomed an influx of women artists during the Feminist art movement that began in the late 1960s. In the present day, with the introduction of webcomics and the Internet, women and men now have a level playing field to showcase their art to the public. Now the question remains–Is it possible to tell a person's sex by the way they draw?
Episode 130 - The Art of Comicbook Movies
Jun 24, 2013
Banes and I talk about some of our fave comic book movies! That is, comics that have made the creative transition to the medium of film. We missed out a LOT but what can you do? It's a popular field. We discuss many modern superhero comicbook films like Watchmen, Batman, The Phantom etc, as well as non-superhero comicbook films like Brenda Starr, Modesty Blaise, Ghost in The Shell, Tank Girl, Asterix, Conan the Barbarian and so on. We talk about the different approaches they take to represent a vast comicbook cannon in the short space of 1 and a half or two and a half hours that a film goes for: sometimes they go for the origin story approach, sometimes they'll spoor the character, sometimes they'll depict a normal everyday representative adventure to show, and sometimes they'll show a condensed version of the entire story.
Episode 124 - 60 Challenges in 60 Minutes
May 6, 2013
With ozoneocean away having fun this week, it falls to Banes and skoolmunkee to pick up the slack! Our chosen topic is "Challenges" - those longer-term thematic projects you see around, meant to get you off your drawing/writing duff and doing stuff that makes you better. They can be fun though! From the simple DeviantArt meme sheet to the gruelling Pokemonathon, we mention all kinds (although I'm not sure we mention sixty different ones...) for drawing, writing, and even a few for comic-making. Some are more famous than others, and some you might even just make up on your own! We do agree it's more fun to do them with other people, though. Don't forget you can find lots/get good ideas by searching for a likely challenge and adding 'tumblr' to the search.
Episode 118 - The Industry Standard
Mar 25, 2013
In Quackcast 118 Banes and I approach the subject of Photoshop, attempting to give a quick intro to the dark, mysterious, primordial creator god of webcomics... in our own rambling way, well in MY own rambling way since I'm the on bumbling through pretending to know what I'm talking about while Banes asks sensible questions to prod me along onto the correct lines again. We chat about layers, setting stuff to "multiply" and what that means, mention short-cuts, pallets etc. One of the conclusions we come to is that good old Photoshop is such a gigantic behemoth that as a webcomic artist you don't really need it anyway since it's massive overkill and there are many specialised art programs that are more streamlined and more clearly focussed on the art skills you need, BUT if you really MUST have a pro photo-editing tool like Photoshop hopefully this gives you at least some brief info on it- as much as you can without screen-shots and stuff. :)
Episode 116 - Bravo in the Valley of the Dolls
Mar 11, 2013
This week Banes and I speak to the dangerous, paranoid, recluse known ONLY by the mysterious call sign: Bravo1102. We tracked this fearsome wildman down, deep in a dark forest, living alone in a lonely lone shack, feeding on squirrels and noodle flavoured earthworms. It was from this flawed mastermind that we gained fascinating insights into creating comics with photography, plastic action figures, painstakingly constructed sets, and hand built models. For Banes and I it opened up a whole new world... but at the end we realised that we'd only barely scratched the surface, so next week we plan on retracing our steps back to the lonely shack in the deep dark forest and once again confronting Bravo1102 and pumping him for all he knows!
Episode 101 - Horror Mark II: Part 1
Oct 29, 2012
For Quackcast 101 and the coming of Halloween, Banes and I thought we'd return to horror yet again. This time we opened the subject to the DD community to get their thoughts on the subject: What are your fave horror stories, What do you find scary, How do you go about writing horror, What makes good horror, Bad horror? People's responses were quite varied and very interesting! This week Banes was our editor and musician, adding all sorts of special horror SFX.
