Episode 725 - Your fave comics as a kid
Feb 3, 2025
We're chatting about the comics you liked as a little kiddo this week! The topic was inspired by a thread in the DD forums. This is always a fun topic and I always have to mention Asterix because it was so amazing. This week Tantz had to bow out but we have Gunwallace to replace her, and Banes is back! Gunwallace is a fellow Antipodean, that means he and I share many of the same cultural touch stones, particularity the comic Footrot Flats. (Tantz is still on the Patreon only video)
Topics and Show Notes
Footrot Flats is a newspaper comic by the New Zealand creator Murry Ball. It's about a working sheepdog called “Dog” who lives on a farm owned by Wal, a single guy who works hard, drinks beer, and loves rugby. It's a comic that Australians saw as very “Australian” because it played into the mythological rural, working class image that we invented for ourselves, New Zealanders who have a similar history and felt the same, hence the shared popularity of this amazing very classically Kiwi comic from New Zealand.
Footroot flats comics be seen in many great collected works as well as an awesome animated film from the 1980s called “Footrot flats: The Dog's tale”. I fondly remember it for the hit theme song sung by New Zealand singer Dave Dobbin, “Slice of Heaven” which is one of my favourite ever songs. Gunwallace has even designed a cocktail inspired by it. I will list the recipe here and I urge to try it while listening to that song!
Cocktail recipe!
Slice of Heaven
— Dave Dobbyn & Herbs
50 ml Beerenburg jenever herbal gin
20 ml Drambuie
2 dashes bitters
Half-fill an Old Fashioned Glass with ice, pour ingredients into glass.
Add dashes of bitters. Stir gently. Garnish with a slice of orange.
We used : Sonnema Berenburg, Drambuie, Peychaud’s Bitters
-New Zealand Music Cocktails by David Tulloch & Michael
Sutorius
The comics you enjoyed as a kid are determined by what was available to you at the time. For me what I recall most are the newspaper strips like Modesty Blaise, Mandrake the Magician, Wizard of Id, Crock, B.C., Footrot Flats, Hagar the Horrible, Peanuts, Blondie, Denis the Menace (British version), Andy Cap, Torkan,The Far Side, Garfield… The comics I actually bought were the Commando war comics, Scrooge McDuck, Mad Magazine, and The Phantom, which was very popular in British Commonwealth countries. I loved Asterix but would only get those from the library. Looking back a lot of those comics were quite influential on my art style and even my outlook on the world in some cases. My character Pinky has a LOT of modesty Blaise in her look, and I can see that I thought of myself as Torkan!
Which comics did YOU like as a kid, which can you say STILL influence you now?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Snake in the Office - Chaotic, sexy, rocking, snake charming to layers of groovy electric guitar and a piano tiptoeing around with a charming little tune tying it all together like a fine Persian rug! A sinuous synth clarinet impersonates a snake charming flute while giving us a lovely 1920s feel.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Slice of Heaven, theme song to Footrot Flats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0pWejAnLUQ
Featured comic:
Rebellion the monster inside us - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/jan/28/featured-comic-rebellion-the-monster-inside-us/
Featured music:
Snake in the Office - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Snake_in_the_office/ - by Athorist, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 723 - Changing tech and design
Jan 20, 2025
We're talking about how technology and design changes so much over the years and how that can change things with plot in story and it can also help pinpoint the date of something sometimes better than other things like fashion. The biggest one we talked about were phones, which have changed so much over the last few decades. Universally connected smartphones mean huge story changes- characters can all look up whatever they need at any time, communicate with people instantly, entertain themselves, take photos and videos etc. That can massively affect plots!
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 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.
Episode 703 - Cross Cultural Influence
Sep 2, 2024
Cross cultural influence is a marvellous thing and very enriching to creativity! It's lovely when you can see multiple cultural influences in things, whether comics, movies, art, fashion, music or anything else. It's inspiring and leads to new and more interesting things. I picked promo images from some recent Pixar movies Turning Red, Encanto, Coco, and Moana, because they're good examples of the process and what it can result in.
Episode 698 - the Haircast
Jul 29, 2024
Hair is a weird thing isn't it? It's just a bunch of thin filaments that stand out and hang from the body, most visibly from the head. Everyone is bald as an egg underneath this coating of head-fur, but the floof on top takes on a life, body, and shape of its own even though the truth is that it's just thin threads all buffed up with a lot of air. Hairstyles can indicate class, status, wealth, occupation, style, coolness, lack of cool, age, date, and any number of other factors about a person and where and when they fit in society. We also have strong reactions to hair: love, hate, revulsion, or disgust. It can indicate whether a person belongs to a community, a society, a religion or a sect.
Episode 689 - One Big Passion and Influence
May 27, 2024
What was one significant inspiring piece of pop-culture that a massive influence over your creative endeavours? All of us have had many, many different influences over the years but that's certainly NOT what we're interested in here, what we're talking about is that one thing you can remember that had a huge effect on you, why, how, and when.
Episode 674 - Fashion
Feb 12, 2024
Do you change your style to go with current fashions or do you stick with your own thing and stay independent of changing trends? This is complicated by the fact that most people's styles are often influenced by an earlier fashion they just stuck with, but certainly not always, and some fashions reach a point where they become fully developed and eternal (like Art Deco), so it's worth sticking with those rather than changing to reflect ephemeral trends that are never properly formed.
