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.
Topics and Show Notes
Topics and shownotes
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Featured comic:
Project Prince - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2017/dec/12/featured-comic-project-prince/
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
PitFace - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Banes - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Kawaiidaigakusei - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
Tantz Aerine - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Ozoneocean - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Featured music:
Mercenary Bound - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Mercenary_Bound/, by Angelajal91, rated T.
Episode 349 - Bad Gods
Nov 20, 2017
This is the Quackcast where I get things wrong! Haha, I DO love to imagine that I know everything but fortunately Tantz and Pit are there to correct me! For this Quackcast I was thinking about the way we assign villains when there's a religious theme or anything influenced by mythology really. You know the way Hel in Thor Ragnarok and Hades in the Disney movie Hercules are cast as villains just because they're in charge of death, even though in the mythology they're not supposed to be bad guys at all. Perhaps it's our modern Christian influenced culture that makes us wrongly associate death with the bad guys…? Our topic meanders a little but it's mainly about how our interpretation of mythology and legend in modern pop-culture is influenced by our modern ways of thinking, which causes things to be quite drastically changed. This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to Puppets and strings - a sepulchral, hollow, sombre theme, yet also grand and portentous! Stirring, melancholic, epic.
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 347 - Psychopomps and Death Personified
Nov 6, 2017
A psychopomp is a physical manifestation of death. These are of course impossible in reality since death is a process, not a force or anything that can be personified, but culturally death has very different meanings and resonances! Most cultures have a psychopomp in one form of another, like Valkyries and Charon the boatman to name two, and there are even more in literature and movies. In this Quackcast we go back to Kawaii's great Halloween newspost where she asked people about their fave psychopomps and we talk about a few of our own. ^_^ This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to The Constellation Chronicle - In the cold, blackness of space, suddenly a twinkle appears, bright light shoots out, supercharged particles race on their path into the void at the speed of light, travelling through glowing, spidery filaments as thick as a sun that make up the frozen explosion of a giant nebula, bending their course towards the radioactive chaos of an event horizon, to take a deep dive into eternity, towards the mysterious singularity within.
Episode 344 - Active/Reactive characters
Oct 16, 2017
Some characters are active and others are reactive. Reactive characters mostly only react to things rather than make them happen so they can be very boring if not done right! Active characters are the ones that drive events by doing things and making stuff happen, these characters grab your interest. This idea was based on Tantz's fantastic newspost, we talk it out, coming up with some good examples of each character type. Our epiphany for this Quackcast was that if you want a “strong” female character what you REALLY want is an “active” female character. The mistake people made with the trope was that they thought the female character had to be either a main character or a kick-arse masculine style character, when in reality neither is required. Make your character “active”; making decisions, causing things to happen, having an impact, causing OTHER characters to react etc and they will be a “strong” character. She could be a minor character who never lifts a sword or fires a gun but still be the strongest character in the story if she's the most active. ;) This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to Boys Land - This one surprises you, sneaking up with a gentle beginning, then it hits like a bomb bursts of rainbows and warm breezes! Beautifully, the same tune is repeated in many different forms, there’s even a bit of Primus type bass in there. It finishes as it begins, with a gentle acoustic guitar.
Episode 340 - Reviews
Sep 18, 2017
In this Drunk Duck Quackcast we chat about the importance and the process of reviews! Good ones, bad ones, why they all matter, and also why they often don't! ;) Reviews are an interesting animal, they're a parasitic form of entertainment. They rely wholly of other forms of entertainment for their existence, while those forms do not require reviews at all! But reviews also serve a good function, they tell us what's bad or good, what fits with our tastes and emotions, and lets us know what we may be interested in seeing. They can also save us from wasting time on horrors. Sometimes though they can drive us away from something magical… Here we discuss all that and more! Gunwallace's theme this week was for Reversion, This is a really dreamy, evocative tune about warm, faraway places, it’s squinting into the distance down a long dusty deserted highway and sighing.
Episode 338 - Shared DNA of ideas
Sep 4, 2017
The saying goes that “Good artists copy, great artists steal”, it's attributed to various luminaries such as TS Elliot, Picasso, Tantz Aerine etc, but the important thing is the true meaning: there are very few original ideas, culture is built up out of inherited inspiration that is built on and developed by successive generations, many artists will just repeat ideas though (“copy”), without adding much of their own flavour to them, while clever artists take the ideas as influence and inspiration and reinvent them in their own individual style. It's best when an artist brings ideas together, like the shared DNA of two parents, to produce something new and marvellous! This goes for artists, musicians, webcomics, everyone! We reference Penny Arcade, Ctrl Alt Delete and PVP which were the super popular me-too gamer webcomics, we bring up music and cover versions, and my favourite example: the AT-ST from Return of the Jedi and all the other similar two legged mecha like the Zentradi battlepods from Macross/Robotech, the mecha from Mechwarrior, Ed 209 from Robocop and of course my very own Trompers from Pinky TA ^_^ Super Impact High was the theme for this week by Gunwallace. This track really calls to mind the modern, frenetic style of the artwork on Super Impact High. It’s wild, high energy, off balance, and aggressive! This should really get you in the mood for the story.
Episode 337 - Interview with AmeliaP of Kings Club
Aug 28, 2017
This week we interview the artist and creator of the comic Kings Club, AmeliaP! Her comic was featured and Gunwallace also gave it a theme tune that was featured in Quackcast 335. AmeliaP is a talented professional comic creator and game designer. We couldn't interview her directly because she's not confident enough in her spoken English, so what we've done instead is read out a written interview that I did with her especially for this Quackcast. Amelia has some surprising and valuable insights for comic creators. You can read the full text of her interview bellow. Gunwallace's theme for the week was for Abejitas - This tune bounces in like a wild thing, spinning and buzzing crazily, full of black striped yellow techno sweet honey madness and rapid wingbeats of energy, this will sting you into full awareness!
