Episode 736 - Resurrection
Apr 21, 2025
Happy Easter! Well that was Sunday, but happy Easter anyway. In honour of that yearly and ancient ritual holiday that has its roots in the rebirth of spring in the northern hemisphere our Quackcast is on the theme of resurrection! The idea that people can come back to life in realty is pure fantasy but it is an essential part of all different kinds of fiction.
Topics and Show Notes
In classic time-loop stories like Groundhog Day, Palm Springs Meet Cute and others everything tends to reset at a set point. People can die and they will all come back regularly to repeat their day again. It's a very regular and understandable for of rebirth, just like spring! Contrast that with the way monsters are randomly reborn for horror movie sequels; they're killed in all sorts of ways but still tend to come back and varying points with no rhyme or reason, more like a random natural disaster.
The place where resurrection has truly found a home is fantasy Isekai stories, usually in manga and anime. The reason for this is because extra lives and resurrection are a key part of game mechanics, originally platform games but later RPGs: you need extra lives in order to complete the games, without them it's just all too hard. Isekai stories already BEGIN with a resurrection because the protagonist usually dies crossing the road to save a kitten, small dog, young child, or schoolgirl in a short skirt, and is reborn in a fantasy land as the new hero. But now that almost all fantasy Isekais are based on the mechanics of fantasy RPGs most include regular resurrection whenever characters die IN the story. Their friends just go to a temple with some gold or a special item and bring them back.
An honourable mention for the regular rebirths in Marvel and DC comics… They usually make use of alternative dimensions but nothing is off limits in those crazy stories. What's your fave sort of resurrection trope? Vampires? Different dimension versions? Cloning? Paying at a temple? Cyborgs? Virtual life uploads? Or magical rebirth?
This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by Geist Gears - Follow the flow into the machine! Clunking and zapping as you traverse the circuits and electric doors inside, swelling capacitors, glowing diodes, flashes of deadly plasma from arcing conduits! It’s deadly but exciting.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Tantz's back from the dead newspost! - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/apr/19/back-from-the-dead/
Featured comic:
Turtle House Comics - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/apr/15/featured-comic-turtle-house-comics/
Featured music:
Geist Gears - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Geist_Gears/ - by Emma_Xross, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
VIDEO exclusive!
Become a subscriber on the $5 level and up to see our weekly Patreon video and get our advertising perks!
- https://www.patreon.com/DrunkDuck
Even at $1 you get your name with a link on the front page and a mention in the weekend newsposts!
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Episode 519 - Infodump
Feb 22, 2021
In the year 2020, the world had been devastated by a global pandemic, life had changed forever… It's 2021 and our 4 unlikely heroes have banded together, a topic borrowed from the wise and gracious Emma Clare… My fave “infodump” in fiction is the narration by Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona. My least fave is the massive long description of fish and how submarine equipment works in 10,000 leagues under the sea by Jules Verne (the novel). What are you most fave and least fave infodumps?
Episode 500 - Celebration!
Oct 12, 2020
Finally we got to the five hundredth Quackcast! Wow! That's so many. We've been doing these for 10 years now. That's a long running podcast! To celebrate we invited our DD members aboard. We had a great fun time, lots of laughs and a really good chat. We even had time to introduce special cotributions from the people who couldn't be live with us. I'm making our exclusive patreon video of this week's cast free for all to view! Just click on the youtube link bellow.
Episode 483 - Burnt out
Jun 15, 2020
Emma Clare posted about avoiding burnout on Friday and we thought we'd steal that subject to chat about it. Burnout is something that can affect all of us, most especially when you're stuck at home with lots of time to create, funnily enough. When there's a lot of pressure on you to create it often makes you STOP creating. But there are a lot of ways to void burn out and when it actually does happen to you there are a lot of ways to come back from it and rekindle those exhausted flames of creation. How do YOU come back after being burnt out? What was your longest burnout?
Episode 480 - In Style!
May 25, 2020
Styles are a very individual thing. Emma Clare did a great newspost on them last week featuring a pic of Sailor Moon that she drew in her own style. The cover image here features my own version. Pit, Tantz, Banes and I had a good long chat about all the different aspects of style and how you develop them.
Episode 430 - Good beginnings!
Jun 10, 2019
At the beginning of a story how do you grab and KEEP your readers? This comes from the Friday newspost by Emma Clare. Her advice was pretty brilliant. From my own perspective it's generally characters that grab me first before anything else. Great art and a fantastic cover can hook your eyes, but without a great story or interesting characters there's zero to keep you there.
Episode 426 - Sidekicking
May 13, 2019
Inspired by Emma Clare's Friday newspost about supporting characters, today we're discussing sidekicks! Sidekicks are a useful character type that are used in so many different ways. They can be a specialised type of supporting character that are also a main character or they can be the main protagonist in some cases. In comics sidekicks came in during the early days as a way of giving juvenile readers their own insert character who they could identify with… Bucky Barnes, Jimmy Olsen, Robin etc. They had other functions like giving the hero someone to save, providing commentary, reaction and exposition. Later when that kind of sidekick fell out of favour they became superheroes in their own right.
Episode 425 - Pay-off or rip-off?
May 6, 2019
In this Quackcast we chat about set-ups. pay-offs, and rip-offs. To make your climaxes and endings more satisfying you have pay-offs for audience expectations: set them up in the story and pay them off at the end. If you fail to pay-off then you get a rip-off, it's pretty simple. Your audience will be really disappointed. That's not to say disappointing and unsatisfying ends to stories are wrong, not at all! Often those are fully intended. We're just talking about satisfying audiences, not “good” endings.
