Episode 694 - Consistency
Jul 1, 2024
Is your work consistent? It's hard to maintain consistency but it does pay off: consistency in art work, style, character, writing, humour, updates and every other factor. To aid consistency in commercial works they come up with a “bible” which has drawings of character from all angles, all their colour swatches, their outfits, accessories, weapons, vehicles, floor plans of buildings, etc, as well as descriptions of their characters and the story style. That sort of thing is a huge help and especially useful when you have teams of people working on the project and need to hand over to other people.
Topics and Show Notes
For a webcomicers a “bible” is usually overkill and involves as much work as several chapters of the comic itself. Some creators find them very useful, but for most of us it's wasted work. It's a good idea just to just a rough page of profile images to refer to because if you base your references on previous pages that's a great way to compound errors that are made earlier in the comic- believe me I know because I do that all the time.
The very most important aspect of consistency though is style. If you have a characteristic style and a specific style of doing characters it does not matter ONE JOT how “good” your art is, and perfection is irrelevant. As long you draw it the same way each time people will be able to understand it and see that it's a deliberate choice. It will make your work look honed and professional.
How do you go with maintaining consistency? I definitely have my own style but I'm not good at consistency as the images of my main character in the cover image shows.
Today we reissued Gunwallace's theme to - Charby the Vampiriate - A classic comic on DD and a very classic theme by Gunwallace featuring a very Vampiric organ (from Quackcast 173). Charby the Vampiriate is a real poster-child for consistency! Although the comic and style have evolved a LOT over the years, Amelius manages a frightening level of stylistic consistency with a massive ensemble cast of different characters.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Pipeline Lizards - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/jun/25/featured-comic-pipeline-lizards/
Featured music:
Charby the Vampiriate - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Charby_the_Vampirate/ - by Amelius, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 692 - Benevolent racism and other isms!
Jun 17, 2024
Benevolent racism, sexism, ableism, and whatever other “isim” is an interesting aspect of those otherwise negative things. It's not as obvious in its negativity, it's well-meaning and yet quite misguided. So what is it? The term “Benevolent” makes it seem nice and harmless and that IS how people mean it, but that's because they're a bit clueless and ignorant. Benevolent sexism, ableism, and racism is basically using a “positive” stereotype to characterise someone based on their ethnicity, gender rather than as a real person etc, like “all black people have natural rhythm”, or “women are more sensitive and in touch with nature”, or “blind people have all their other senses massively heightened”.
Episode 690 - Mister V, Dozer Manifesto
Jun 3, 2024
Mister V, aka Arborcides is our guest today, doing an interview with us about his huge project “Dozer Manifesto”, now finally completed! You can read the entire thing here on DD. It's about a fellow called Marv Heemeyer, resident of the Colorado town of Granby, and his decent into craziness, resulting in him creating an armour-plated, armed bulldozer, designed to be invulnerable, so he could crush the town and destroy his enemies with impunity. You might have heard of it being call the “killdozer”.
Episode 688 - Artistic Evolution
May 20, 2024
How and why does your creativity change over time? It “evolves”. Evolution is often wrongly thought of as a process that leads to a goal, like the idea that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, or that we will “evolve” into something better and “more superior”, or that there is a “next level” of evolution… All of that is just silly comic-book nonsense and terrible sci-fi. Evolution has no goal or direction, it's simply how we describe change that occurs over time. Creatures don't get “better” due to evolution, rather environmental pressures influence changes that make creatures fit in and cope with those specific pressures better. And many factors influence evolution, not just environmental pressures.
Episode 686 - May the fourth be with you
May 5, 2024
We recorded the Quackcast on the 4th of May, which of course means that it was “May the fourth”, the Star Wars celebration date! So we decided to talk about Star Wars, but instead of our usual rants about what we think could be done better we kept it to mainly positive stuff, focussing on what we loved about the films, mainly original series, which are the best ones.
Episode 684 - The hero is dead?
Apr 21, 2024
What happens when the hero dies? Especially when it's early on in the story… do things fall apart or does someone else take over? Our topic is about a story style where you establish that a character is the hero or chief protagonist, only to do a bait and switch and swap them out with a less likely character like a sidekick. This makes the audience rethink the way things are going, instead of sticking to an expected formula you force the audience to wake up and wonder what will happen next. This can be very effective!
Episode 682 - Exposition!
Apr 8, 2024
Tantz came up with this week's topic: Exposition! It's because she's well on her way into starting her latest comic, Verdant, and working out ways to introduce the story, the world, characters, culture, magic systems, religion etc without doing a massive text dump, which people generally don't like too much. So how do you exposit in a good way?
Episode 680 - Intelligence in Fiction
Mar 25, 2024
Today we're talking about the depiction of “intelligence” in fiction! There are a lot of ways this shows up: the genius detective who can understand any clue and uncover any lie, the amazing doctor who can understand any disease, the computer nerd who can do ANYTHING with computers, the genius savant with Asperger's, the crafty serial killer with plans within plans…
