Episode 715 - Apocalypse
Nov 25, 2024
This is the third in our weapons trilogy and it's about what happens AFTER the ultimate weapons have done their work: Apocalypse! The end of all things… This term comes from the bible, with the Book of Revelations which talks about what happens during the end of the world, but aside from the myth it's a pretty real concept- there are a LOT of ways the world can end and has indeed ended for various civilisations throughout history.
Topics and Show Notes
If you want to go riiiiight back there were the different mass extinction events that ended almost all life a few times on this planet. In the history of humanity we have the fall of Rome, an event that was felt for almost 1000 years in Western Europe! It ended technological development, scientific research, the progress of culture, communication, trade, and production were shut down. Development atrophied and technology reversed and reverted. Meanwhile in Northern Africa, the middle east, South America and China advanced empires flourished, but that didn't stem the rot in Europe because there was little contact, communication or trade. There are other examples of this but that's the main one that comes to mind.
Modern fiction is replete with a lot of different apocalypse and post apocalypse stories in many different forms (both natural, man made, and mythological). After the second world war the major influence was the idea of nuclear annihilation. A famous early example was On The Beach, a chilling film about American sailors on a submarine who survive the initial Apocalypse. They come to Australia in the Southern hemisphere and try and rally because life seems almost normal there, but when they travel back to the US to find survivors they learn everyone is dead that and the nuclear fallout will eventually even kill the people in the southern hemisphere down in Australia. The whole planet has an inescapable death sentence so all that's left is to choose how and when they will die.
20 years later 1979 famously gave us Mad Max! Which was a beginning of a whole genre of crazy low budget ultra violent deiselpunk post-apocalypse SciFi with muscle cars and torn leather. In this first movie it's pretty tame, we assume that society is slowly breaking down after an apocalypse but people are still keeping things going nevertheless. Max is a leather-clad highway policeman with a wife and child. Pretty soon though a road gang ends his little slice of normalcy and the Road Warrior is born. After that the world of the Mad Max films becomes more and more chaotic and alien, totally divorced from any connection to our present day society. This spawned many imitators, usually terrible but sometimes strangely amazing.
What are some of your fave stories in the genre? The cover of this Quackcast is inspired by the 1985 Canadian film Defcon 4 (an image originally created in 1976 by Angus McKie). A Canticle for Lebowitz is a seminal story in the genre, about the preservation of culture and technology after an Apocalypse and how that can help rebuild things and that humans will inevitably repeat the same mistakes… Hell comes to Frogtown is an amazing and fun take on the dieselpunk post-apocalypse genre and definitely a fave of mine. But I think my faves would have to be The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham. Often thought of as “cozy catastrophes” because even though the world as we know it ends and the characters have to re-adapt they do it in a very level-headed way and they find a new normal- that is actually one of the very few absolutely accurate and realistic takes on what happens during and after a real Apocalypse which is why I appreciate it so much: life goes on, it's not the same but you do what you can to make it that way.
What do you think? A fan of Waterworld, Fallout, Terminator 2, The Walking Dead, The End, Radioactive dreams, Don't look up, something more fun or more depressing?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by The KAMics - Relaxed, the coolest of the cool. Kick back and let go to this breezy, slow track with a killer, bopping beat! You could listen to this forever, it’s so soothing and calming.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Plague Rat - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/nov/18/featured-comic-plague-rat/
Featured music:
The KAMics - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/The_KAMics/ - by Kam, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 714 - Future Weapons
Nov 18, 2024
Last week we had an overview of weapons throughout history and how it's a constant game of balance and oneupmanship. Now we're looking at future weapons and Scifi stuff! There's a lot of potential and a lot of interesting ideas you can use in comics and stories. We talk about a few of these and some of our faves, as well as our own inventions.
Episode 713 - Gunwallace, Master Composer
Nov 11, 2024
Today we have onboard with us our resident theme maker, our classic composer and musical genius! He does all the DD comic inspired themes that regularly appear on the Quackcast and has done so for the last 10 years! In that time he's done almost 600 musical themes. At the moment Gunwallace is the games-master of a Star Trek roleplay thing that Tantz, Banes, and I all do after the cast. He's based an illustrated story on it called “On the Edge” with art by Banes and Genejoke, and some by Tantz and me, Ozoneocean.
Episode 712 - Guncast
Nov 4, 2024
This week we're talking the development of weapons, tactics and armour over the millennia. This is a fun little overview of everything from ancient stone weapons, to bronze, to iron, steel, guns, tanks, and jet-fighters and all the interesting stuff in between. Comic stories often involve literal conflict whether set in the past, the present, future, or fantasy and Scifi, so overviews are always good.
Episode 711 - Lost Boys
Oct 28, 2024
Halloween is on the way and we always do something different for it. This time we're doing a commentary for the 1987 vampire movie The Lost Boys! We even dressed in Lost Boys themed outfits for the Patreon vid which we will make available to ALL Patrons (even free ones), as a treat.
Episode 710 - Ducks in in the wind
Oct 21, 2024
The fleeting greatness ducks of in the wind! This is a weird one based on a notion I had: Life and experience isn't typically based on long moments, rather it's all based on very short, lightning quick highlights: a song that lasts 3 minutes is massively striking and important and its impact can reverberate down through the decades, despite only lasting such a short amount of time. Things like comics can take days, weeks or years to make and yet each page is consumed in no more than seconds! But even so, it can have a huge effect.
Episode 709 - Dragons!
Oct 14, 2024
Dragons are cool, aren't they? That's our subject for today, specifically the giant, monstrous beasties of myth, fantasy, and legend. They can be evil, they can be clever, they can be animalistic and wild, they can be friendly, they can be wise and all knowing, there's absolutely no common personality to dragons at all.
Episode 708 - Cyberpunk
Oct 7, 2024
Cyberpunk is a cool genre we have never covered exclusively on a Quackcast before. But what IS cyberpunk? It's a subset of SciFi, it's usually near future, involves body modifications, grittiness, street level computer use, techno body modification, and hacking. At least that's the way it started. Formative influences on the cyberpunk genre were the first Tron movie, Bladerunner, and Escape from New York. Tron showed us what cyberspace was, while Bladerunner and Escape from New York gave us gritty near future dystopias with cool tech, modified humans, and most importantly the punk aesthetic which was the gritty street youth fashion of the late 70s and early 80s.
