Episode 384 - Brandcast, PR
Jul 23, 2018
You may have read about how a conspiracy theorist dug up some 10 year old tweeted jokes by director James Gunn and got him fired from Disney… Well that incident inspired this Quackcast, which is a re-take on the whole personal brand idea that we discussed in Quackcast 289.
Topics and Show Notes
We all increasingly live our lives exposing a good portion of ourselves to the internet: through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google, Apple, accounts on forums, blogs and all sorts of websites all over the place! Most of us do it mainly under one or two names so it's not too hard for people to connect all sorts of activity to us, especially thanks to the policies of Facebook and YouTube to force (or strongly encourage) you to use your real name.
We webcomic artists we are all especially vulnerable to this: we have to manage our online brand (ourselves) more carefully than ever before. Your work IS you and your ARE your work. It can work both ways, your comic could reflect poorly on you depending on the subject matter you deal with so you have to be careful to separate that from the everyday “you”, or like James Gunn YOU could reflect poorly on your work so you have to keep your everyday self separate from IT!
It doesn't really matter if you take your work seriously or not, it can still affect you. This reminds me of George Orwell's famous book “1984” and the quote “Big Brother is Watching”. People think “Big Brother” is the government but that's not the case: “Big Brother” is your friends and neighbours. That's who did the watching and informing in communist countries with totalitarian systems.
One idea is that we should behave online as we do offline and there will be no issues… Unfortunately that idea is a North Korean fantasy. No one behaves like perfect, polite, innocent angels offline all the time so it's ridiculous to expect them to behave in that way online. The big problem though is that things online are more public and will likely be remembered and visible for decades to come or even forever, so you HAVE to be more careful.
This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Electricity is her element. You’ll get a buzz out of this shocking soundrack! The sound of spacewhales, distant quasars and pulsars, coronal mass ejections of highly charged plasma suspended in a magnetic flux, photons shooting out into the distance… this music with set off flashes of light in the darkness of your mind.
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
Stop Watchers - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2018/jul/17/featured-comic-stop-watchers/
Links:
Quackcast on managing your personal brand - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/quackcast/episode-289-managing-your-personal-brand/
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Tantz Aerine - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
kawaiidaigakusei - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
Pitface - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Banes - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/banes
Ozoneocean - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Featured music:
Electricity is her Element - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Electricity_Is_Her_Element/, by Caliway, rated E.
Episode 362 - Triumph der Ente
Feb 19, 2018
In this Quackcast we chat about all the different options for hosting your webcomic. At the moment it seems the fashionable new young kiddies on the block are Webtoons and Tapastic, but they're certainly NOT the only choices for webcomic hosts out there and certainly not the best choices. I think we make a good case here for why Drunk Duck is a better choice in many ways, but we also bring up other host sites like twitter, comic fury, comic Genesis (used to be Keenspace), Tumblr, Deviant Art, Smack Jeeves, Fur Affinity, self hosting on a Word Press site etc. In the early days of the millennium there were just two hosts for your comic: Drunk Duck and Keenspace. Drunk Duck was a better choice for most since it was a lot easier to customise and it had a friendlier, smaller community. Keenspace had a two tier system: the picked comics with all the best stuff were in their “keenspot” site while the rabble were stuck with the slower hosting and slower updates. The main thing they had going was a gigantic member base. But they even changed the site's name from “keenspace” to “comic genesis” to further separate KeenSpot from the rabble, which left a sour taste in the mouth. By contrast Drunk Duck was always dedicated to being fully egalitarian. One of our main strengths is that we accept all without stigma: manga, furry, adult comic, sprites, American style, superhero, slice of life comedy, photocomics, professional published comics or stick figure amateur work and we welcome them all the same with the same level of enthusiasm. The big young Webtoons and Tapastic have some of the same issues Keenspace used to have: a big community where you will be lost in the crowd. And no site has as solid and safe programming and hosting as Drunk Duck does. Plus we're community run so you're same from corporate oversight and interference in the content you're allowed to post. You can read more about comic hosting sites in Emma Clare's news posts linked bellow. This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Odd Days. Sometimes you just have one of those days… or many of them in a row! Odd days. The sound here has a positive, optimistic theme overlayed with a harsh zigzag of electric guitar. This tune does well to illustrate the twisted euni, the off-balance and askew takes on everyday life and situations dealt with in this slice of life, humorous comic.
Episode 308 - Hyena Hell
Jan 30, 2017
Today on the Quackcast we interview Hyena Hell! You might remember the bombastic, punkrocker HyenaHell for her comic The Hub She used to be very active on all of DD (forums, comics, everything), before life issues took her away from DD. But she was still a prolific poster on social media after that when she wasn't creating comics, posting interesting and thought provoking blog posts about art, life as an artist, and living in a changing New Orleans… She has a unique art style- highly detailed, carefully inked drawings, which are quite similar to her work as a printmaker. You can see a great example of that in The Hub. We have sad news and hap[y news… The wonderful Hippievan has retired from doing Friday newsposts on DD. The happy news is that HyenaHell is going to dive into the driving seat of this out of control juggernaut! HyenaHell has a long history with DD and an amazing personal perspective on art and life that I think would be good for the site. It's always good to listen to a new and interesting voice! In the mean time, listen to Banes, Pitface, TantzAriene and I interview HyenaHell, who tells lascivious stories and her and I going into, Lipstixxx a stripclub in New Orleans… Gunwallace's featured music for today was: Mechaniko - it's the sound of nodes on a neural network firing, connecting, and cascading with shared knowledge: Multilayered, technological robo-future rock!
Episode 284 - Writing Dialogue pt2
Aug 15, 2016
Well this is the SECOND part of our Quackcast on Dialogue! As with last week, this Quackcast is based on a thread in the DD forums discussing different approaches to creating Dialogue in webcomics. This time we have an additional guest though: the mighty Pitface joins, Tantz, Banes and I once more. We have a dialogue on dialogue, natter away and speak in different accents. We also tried using Google Hangouts for this Quackcast instead of Skype for once just to see if that made things any clearer… It did a little. Google Hangouts had it's own non-intuitive issues that we had to work through, but in many, many ways it worked better than Skype! Gunwallace's musical theme was Our little mental hospital. a crazy insane sounding Latin groove. Makes you want to salsa!
Episode 265 - Drunk Duck updates and the future
Apr 4, 2016
For Quackcast 265 I wanted to steer the direction toward the idea of future fixes and features for Drunk Duck! We talked a bit about the 2nd wave of fixes that will be happening now- HippieVan worked to gather people's suggestions for the most important bugs that needed fixing (with our limited funds), and features people want added, and then did a survey to find what people though were the highest priority. It was a lot of work and took a few weeks to come up with the results. Bellow is a summery of what she learned:
Episode 213 - What makes a good character? Part one
Apr 6, 2015
After several interesting discussions about Mary Sues, we'd like to talk about characters a little more. We asked people to let us know their thoughts on what makes a well written character VS a poorly written one. People talked about their favourite and least favourite characters in fiction and why they dug or don't dig them… as well as their own characters and how they put them together! Banes and I blather on a lot so this will be a multi-parter as we talk about what makes good characters. And as usual there's the great theme by Gunwallace! This time a classical number for the Adult comic Tina's Story.
Episode 182 - Biggest mistakes made in starting a webcomic
Aug 14, 2014
This Quackcast came about in response to an article that was supposed to be about the biggest mistakes in starting out with a webcomic, I felt it was incredibly superficial and that it was mainly focussed on someone who wanted to go straight for the “pro” side, jump right in and make it BIG right away… The trouble is that there's WAAAAAAY more to the subject than that! Hence this Quackcast on the subject. I've seen thousands of webcomics come and go over the years, most fizzle out in the first few weeks or months for a whole lot of reasons, but even the ones that have staying power still run into many issues at the beginning. Here we cover a lot of the big mistakes webcomic creators make early on. We've also got some great contributions too!
Episode 159 - Shades of DAJB
Mar 24, 2014
In this Drunk Duck webcomics podcast Banes and I interview DAJB, a long time Drunk Duck regular! We talk to him about his work on the long running webcomic "Shades". This is especially interesting since DAJB approached this comic as a professional work; as the writer but also the producer of the project, interviewing and hiring artists to work with him on the full production of the comic. Shades is a very British superhero comic, featureing a number of interesting characters such as the Celtic warior queen Boadicea, or "Boo" as she's affectionately known, battling the forces of darkness in the modern UK. It's very exciting, fast paced and well written! Give it a read if you haven't seen it already :) *I have to apologise for the sound issues here; it seems it recorded my (ozoneocean) voice with a delay so the conversation seems slightly out of order.
