Episode 302 - the agendacast
Dec 19, 2016
Today we talk about works of pop-culture that have an obvious political agenda, so obvious that t not only gets in the way of the entertainment but also dictates to the audience without letting them have a chance to come to their own conclusions: forcing you to see things only one way. Even when we agree with the agenda being presented it can still strike a sour chord, often more-so since they're preaching to the choir and usually just throwing a badly simplified version of the philosophy at you, which can feel insulting. So that's what we chat about. Those views can come from ANY political persuasion, the right the left, communism, fascism, socialism, libertarianism whatever. No one has a monopoly on ideologues. We became overtly political towards the end… Sorry for that. HAHAHA. Do we practise what we preach? HELLS NO! I have to apologise again for the terrible sound quality of my voice recording. I thought I'd fixed the settings from last week, but I was wrong. I HAVE now though. Gunwallace's musical theme was for Grunk - cocktail bar samba played on a church organ. The music of heaven! Cheesy heaven. You can imagine fat angels in hawaiian shirts swanning about drunkenly and spilling their margaritas.
Topics and Show Notes
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
E X T I N C T - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2016/dec/13/featured-comic-e-x-t-i-n-c-t/
References:
Elysium - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1535108/
Logan's run - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/
In time - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/
Snow piercer - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/
Synoikia to Oneiro - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0196995/
Terry Pratchett - https://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/
Piers Anthony - http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8516.Piers_Anthony
The wooden Swords - http://rights.patakis.gr/pandelis-kaliotsos-wooden-swords
Ghostbusters 2016 - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1289401/
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Tantz Aerine - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Featured music:
GRUNK - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/GRUNK/ by mg78, rated E.
Episode 301 - Let it snow!
Dec 12, 2016
Banes and Pitface live in a parallel world to me where this time of year involves water falling from the sky in the form of fluffy white crystals. When it hits the ground it piles up on top of itself into huge white piles! Freaky, I know, but they tell me this actually happens. For me December is a time for heatwaves and the beach. So Banes and Pit enlighten me and all you out there on the beauty of snow. The idea for this Quackcast was based on a newspost by Banes. He talked about the use of snow in comic stories as a plot device. We talk a bit about that here, along with all the different visual aspects of it and how you can use it in imagery. I apologise for the sound quality here, something strange happened with my microphone settings. Gunwallace's musical theme was for Man Bun: Heavy, bass driven funk rock, with dark chocolatey, bluesy lyrics. Classic, cool, and hot!
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.
Episode 298 - When death comes
Nov 21, 2016
This Quackcast was based on Tantz Aerine's newspost from two Saturday's ago: Death in comics. We lightly expand t to death in all pop culture in the Quackcast. It's an interesting topic! Not the one we were originally going to do though… We were supposed to all have pizza and interview VinoMas's Princess January, but no one got pizza except me and I gave Vino the wrong time so he didn't show up, hahaha! So that idea… died. Death in comics can be used a whole lot of ways; a promotional technique as in Superman, a way to get rid of superfluous characters, to show gore and a massive body count, to create tragedy and pathos, the create comedy and laughter, and more! We give examples from our own artwork as well as mainstream comics like Maus, Judge Dredd, Superman, When the Wind Blows, nd even great webcomics like Charby the Vampirate. Banes could not show for this Quackcast. He is NOT dead… not yet. Gunwallace is right there back in action and the theme he's given us this week is Ectopiary! It's darkly threatening and vaguely classical, a creeping, scary exploration of dark places.
Episode 295 - Sexcast, sex in non adult comics
Oct 10, 2016
This is the Awkardcast! Another take on the sexcast idea but this time we're looking at sex and sexual situations in strictly NON-adult comics. Sex performs a very different role in non-adult comics… You have a much wider audience with comics at the rating, but there are things you can not show, so of course you use sex for other reasons than the way you do in an adult rated comic. In an adult comic you can show all details of the entire act, all the genitalia in all their glistening, gory, gooey, hairy splendour, going in and out and around here and there and all over the place! Oh my! In Mature comics and bellow though, you simply can't, though you CAN have some non-sexual full frontal nudity in Mature comics and you can show bottoms in Teen rated comics. The ratings are similar to what you have with film ratings. In adult comics, like adult film, sex acts are more of the focus, they can still have a story but the sex acts are supposed to be enjoyed in their own right. In non-adult comics the sex has other purposes- subtle titillation is a part of it, comedy, teasing the viewer, furthering the plot, a culmination of a relationship or the establishment of one, etc- there's generally always another purpose to it, unlike adult comics where there sometimes is but doesn't need to be. And unlike adult film there's not much purpose to softcore non-adult rated porn in comics. That type of censored porn is done in film in order to get a wider audience on media that will otherwise not show porn, but on the net porn it's super easy to come by so there's not much reason to do softcore. There are a lot of challenges entailed in depicting non-adult rated porn! Certain positions don't work in well with the limits on nudity (we talk about this in the cast), but there are tricks you can use; symbolism (popping champagne corks, trains going into tunnels etc), strategic positioning of sheets, clever camera angles, fading out before the act and fading in again after, characters with mussed hair and uneven clothing, using dialogue to refer to what they just did, “off-screen” shenanigans, or shenanigans in the dark etc, it can be a lot of fun! Have a listen to how Tantz, I and Banes tackle the idea. The music by Gunwallace for his week was Firefly cross! A very mystical sound, with traditional, middle eastern style music mixed with dark techno fuzz, this one is intriguing!
Episode 292 - Separating the art from the artists
Oct 5, 2016
Separating the art from the artist, the message from the messenger… Can you do this? You know, when you find out an actor, musician, comic artist or whatever is an arsehole or says things you disagree with or is a criminal, can you separate that from their work and STILL manage to enjoy it? Or does it taint everything they've ever made? I've thought about this a lot. I think I can usually separate the art from the artist and I DON'T think that consuming the work of that artist in any way legitimises what I disagree with about them personally or endorses their criminal behaviour unless the art is specifically about that. But it can really depend on how personally you're affected by whatever it was about the artist that offended you; A Jewish person could have a far more negative reaction, understandably, to the watercolours of Adolph Hitler than most other people, to use an extreme example. What about you? Can you separate the message from the messenger, the art from the artist? The comic chosen for a marvellous theme THIS week was Cybertech. You'll hear the sounds of apocalyptic destruction and burning plasma in a dark future, epic world.
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 286 - Offence, walking on eggshells
Aug 29, 2016
Do you worry about offending specific people with your writing? Where's your line between honest expression and regard for other people's feelings? This was Bane's brilliant idea for a Quackcast. We touch a little on the idea of a “culture of offence”, where it seems that people look for things to be offended by, perhaps on behalf of others, but also about things that really CAN cause offence and how to avoid that. On one hand you have people complaining that everything is too “PC” these days, but on the other it's really not OK to be a dick to people just because you like to cling to the old days when it was fine to put down people on the basis of ethnicity, skin-colour, gender, or sexuality… But we can also cause offence accidentally, unintentionally, unknowingly… Should you compromise your vision to appease people, or should you forge ahead regardless? Keep in mind that some things that are fine for SOME audiences are offensive to others, so rather than fight with your audience or appease them perhaps it's better to try and actively direct your work at the CORRECT audience it's intended for? - speaking in terms of sex scenes, politics, etc. Listen to the theme Gunwallace concocted for us THIS time! Geminni: Get down to the bad sounds of this classic funk rock tune! Danceable!
