Episode 412 - Hiatusssss D:
Feb 4, 2019
A huge thank you to the fantastic Amelius, creator of Charby the Vampirate! We mined her great newspost on the topic of the comic hiatus for this Quackcast. When you're reading a comic and it goes on Hiatus it's an awful thing… suddenly all progress stops and you don't know for how long it will be gone for. Some authors are great, they'll reach a point where they can't work anymore for some reason or they'll take a little break, but they will tell you they're going on a hiatus and when their comic will return- and Lo, it comes back exactly when they said it would. Crappy authors will say they're going on a hiatus and never return.
Topics and Show Notes
The sad fact is that all webcomics end eventually and most don't have a proper end, they just peter out. Sometimes they return from the dead, but if a comic hasn't updated for 3 years it's generally finished. It's a good courtesy gesture to your readers to give them closure in some way: don't end with an indefinite hiatus, rather you should tell people flat out that you're not doing anymore work on the comic and maybe post a link to any current projects you have instead.
This week our theme from Gunwallace is Mediocrity Simulator: Life in the big city is a slow, dull crawl… the gears of capitalism grind on inevitably regardless, crushing all that falls between their cold, uncaring mechanical teeth. Grow up, go to school, get a job and become a part of the machine. Days stretch to infinity.
Possible topic for next week: Stories that subvert expectations: Good or bad?
Topics and shownotes
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Featured comic:
Space Repair Garage the Comic - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2019/jan/29/featured-comic-space-repair-garage-the-comic/
Links
Amelius's newspost and reader comments - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2019/jan/27/the-dread-hiatus/
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/banes
kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
Pitface - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Featured music:
Mediocrity Simulator - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Mediocrity_Simulator/, by FunctionCreep, rated A.
Episode 411 - The Right to Copy!
Jan 28, 2019
Copyright is a huge thing! It allows us to make money from our creations and stops other people from stealing them. But culture isn't about a series of billions of totally original ideas invented from nothing- absolutely NOT. Culture grows from ideas that are recycled, reiterated, and reinvented. It's all quite derivative and mixed. So there has to be a balance between respect for rigid copyright and some flexibility to work with existing ideas.
Episode 410 - Say My Name
Jan 20, 2019
Coming up with character names can be a real challenge because once you settle on one they can define the character just as much as their personality and looks! Names also affect how you name other characters: are they too similar, like Betty and Barney? Will it be an unintentionally meaningful combo like George and Washington? There are so many things to consider, it can be daunting. In this Quackcast we talk about some of the methods that duckers have used to come up with character names. It's pretty novel and interesting, anything from using friend's names, names that have special meaning to them, names that have inerrant meaning, names that deliberately have NO meaning, place-holder names, names from the phonebook and more. Your options, methods, and reasons are endless! Tell us what's behind YOUR character names!
Episode 409 - Meaning, Intention, and symbolism
Jan 14, 2019
The topic we discussed in this Quackcast was looking for symbolism, meaning and intention in comics: The English literature approach! Deeper meanings and all that. It's fun to do actually and sometimes you really can hit upon the intentions of the creator, uncover NEW meanings, or just do it to entertain yourself. We used our own comics for an example and talked about things beyond the superficial for a change. For example: Banes' comic Typical Strange is a sitcom set in a video rental store, staffed by a group of characters that make up the cast. Why is it set in a place that is clearly decades out of date and relevance? A video rental place is an anachronism in this time. Is it saying that the characters themselves are stuck in time? It's a sitcom comic so situations often reset or rewind back to the status Quo, so that interpretation would seem to fit… Of course that wasn't Banes' deliberate intention but it's fun to think about that way.
Episode 408 - The imitation game
Jan 6, 2019
Happy new year! This is the first Quackcast recorded in 2019! Pitface is back too, can you believe it? In this Quackcast we chat about Imitation, based on Amelius's newspost from last Sunday. How do you know if someone has copied your work, just been influenced by it or influenced from the same sources as you, or has actually stolen your work wholesale? And what do you DO about it? Is imitation or someone doing the same thing as your “original” idea, always a bad thing?
Episode 407 - Regrets & Resolutions!
Dec 30, 2018
Happy new year!!! All of us on the Duck Webcomics, AKA Drunk Duck, thank you for all your support over the year! DD has grown and flourished because of all of you! It was coming to the end of the year when we recorded this, the time we traditionally mull over regrets of the year gone past and come up with resolutions for the new year to come! Tantz, Banes, and I chat about what WE think about resolutions and regrets.
Episode 406 - Amateur Vs Pros Merry Christmas DD!
Dec 23, 2018
Merry Christmas one and all! And all that stuff. This year our release date falls exactly on the 25th! It was a busy year for us, lots happened. But in this Quackcast what we chat about is something rather different: the difference between pros and amateurs, specifically when it comes to comics. There's this common misconception that an amateur is a novice that will produce work of a lower quality, while a professional is an experienced person who knows what they're doing and will always produce things of the highest quality… The REAL story is more complex than that.
Episode 405 - Escape from Tumblr!
Dec 16, 2018
On the 18th of December people who post things with nudity on Tumblr will be kicked off the site. That means all the adult bloggers, comicers and things that made that journalling site stand out above the rest of the vast sea of blog sites and image hosts are being screwed out of what they helped build up! The reason of course is to make the site more attractive to advertisers and so it can more easily fit the standards of puritanical companies like Apple and Google who have taken it upon themselves to scrub the world clean of anything that defines us as adult human beings.
