The Drunk Duck Quackcast

Quackcast 748 - The Months

Tantz Aerine showcased LGBTQ+ comics and creators for Pride month in June with the help of Skyangel, Mainly on Bluesky. It went to so well that she came up with the amazing idea of doing more monthly features for other themes. She doesn't want to dictate to us what those theme should be though, she wants input into the idea so we can all come up with good themes together! The idea behind a month long showcase isn't to be socially conscious so much as having a reason to bring more promotion to cr...

Quackcast 747 - Novels

Novels are basically long stories. They tend to have a lot of different plots and things all happening at once, unlike short stories. When writing a novel you have a lot of freedom to tell really BIG stories, stories that spanning worlds and centuries if you feel like it. In this Quackcast Banes chats to Tantz about the art of novel writing and what makes a novel Tantz is a good person to talk about that with since she's published a few novels in her fantasy Art of Veiling series. And Banes is a...

Quackcast 746 - It's never too late

There's always time to start learning something new! If you think you're bad at art and people told you you lacked talent back in the day and that if you didn't start as a child then you have no chance to be good, please know that all of that is false- you can become an amazing artist whenever you start. In-born magical “Talent” is absolutely not required! Practise is ALL you need. None of this “10,000 hours” bullsh*t either, that's another myth. Just keep working at it over and over and practis...

Quackcast 745 - I was there

History is something big that happens in the past that you look back on and wonder about… ofttimes we only know about it from the pages of a book, old video footage, relics in a museum, or something like that, but there are also living resources for history in the memories of older people and indeed in your OWN head. This Quackcast was inspired by me thinking about musicians like Prince, Queen, and David Bowie- many younger people now are looking back on them as if they were musical geniuses, li...

Quackcast 744 - Over Qualified and Overplayed

Professions in fiction are usually always portrayed in very exaggerated, super fantastical expert versions of themselves. Like if it's a psychologist they generally know exactly what a person is thinking, why they're thinking a certain way, what all their issues are, why they have them and how to fix them. They can tell if a person is lying and the truth they are coving up by doing so! If it's a police detective and they're a main character they can generally solve any crime pretty easily with t...

Quackcast 743 - Lore vs reality

This is a weird one to encapsulate, but it was based on an idea I had while re-watching Star Trek the Next Generation and I had to explore it with my fellow Quackcasters, Banes and Tantz. I believe it's generally better to enjoy something in the order it was created rather than the chronological order of the story because you'll understand it so much better in terms of why things are as they are, the creative and aesthetic choices and cultural impact. Re-watching all of Star Trek the Next Genera...

Quackcast 742 - ex-special forces!

It seems like every single “badass” in TV, Movies, books and comics is “ex-special forces” or something like it these days. It's become a meaningless cliche. Writers use it as a shortcut to show a person is super tough and competent, able to handle ANY situation and also have a dark past. We chat about how silly it is to overdo the cliche and why “being ex-special-forces” doesn't really make a person better at being a “bad-ass” than anyone else. More likely it means they're probably a more burnt...

Quackcast 741 - Hooks

Sometimes you get hooked into things, you become a fan and you wonder how you got there. A while ago you were laughing at those dorky, obsessed fans over there and now suddenly you're one of them! That's what we're talking about in this cast, the things that hook you in and our own stories about what we were unexpectedly hooked into. The idea came to me as I was making a coffee and signing the words to XTCs Great Fire. It's a silly song with lyrics about a fire burning in Noah's Arc and also in ...

Quackcast 740 - DD Radio play 4 planning!

Do you like acting? Do you like being part of collabs or community projects? Do you like radio plays? If you answered yes to any of that the DD radio play is for you! Way back in 2011 we did our very first Drunk Duck Radio Play and NOW we're reviving the idea! We have a brand new DD Radio Play and we need YOU to be a part of it! In 2011 when we did our first play it was an amazing community project that so many of our great members participated in. Ally Heart wrote the script, many different peo...

Quackcast 739 - Deferring to Experts

Artwork from Key of Dreams When you're working on a project with other people, a comic collaboration for example, it's usually best to decide on different roles for everyone according to what they're best at (writer, artist, layout design, pencils, inks, colour, backgrounds lettering etc), and let them handle it. You don't micromanage and make decisions for them. Basically they're the “experts” on those things now so you wait and see what they do. The idea for this Quackcast came to me after som...

Quackcast 738 - Ensemble casts

Ensemble casts is the topic for today! But what do we mean by that? The way I'm defining it for THIS Quackcast is that you have a group of main characters where any of them can function in a chief protagonist role for part of the story, they're all on the same side and they can work together in smaller groups or in one big group. This is a common structure for modern sitcoms and a lot other things like The Avengers, Star Trek the Next Generation, or Lord of the Rings for example. They're not jus...

Quackcast 737 - Why take over the world?

People in stories, especially bad guys in stories usually want to take over the world, but why? What's really to gain? Even in reality it's a complex question. That's what we're talking about here. What's the real reason to want to be the boss of everything? Money isn't the objective because when you become the leader of everything money is irrelevant, you control all standards and commerce. Is greed a motivation? Well no because being the boss of everything eliminates the motivation for greed. ...

Quackcast 736 - Resurrection

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. In classic time-loop stories like Groundhog Day, Palm Springs Meet Cute and others everything tends to reset at a set point. People can d...

Quackcast 735 - Anime

Welcome to another DD Quackcast! We were going to discuss Ad Hoc rationalisations and also “what happens AFTER you take over the world” but both topics were waaaay too trumpish and we didn't feel like getting negative and ranty about that fellow's foolishness so we thought we'd talk anime instead! But what is anime? At its simplest it's just cartoons like any other but they happen to be from Japan. There's more to it though, most anime has a articular look to it: reasonably realistically drawn w...

Quackcast 734 - When love turns to hate

When love turns to hate… It's a common trope in fiction: partners split up and their once loving relationship turns to one of bitter acrimony! We see hate turning to love frequently too, that's another common trope, I saw both when I watched Willow again last night. Mad Martigan and Sorsha went from hate to love to hate to love again, and Sorsha and her mum Queen Bavmorda went from love to hate. It's a staple in fiction because it's a staple in reality. It's such a solid staple in reality that m...

Quackcast 733 - Watch again: Rediscovering

Watching, reading, and listening to things a second, third or even a million times can offer you a whole new experience. Why do we pick up the same thing to enjoy again? It could be nostalgia, it could be the need for comfort in the familiar, maybe it's research, or maybe you're rewatching the early episodes of a series so you can get more enjoyment out of new, later episodes that you haven't seen before? Whatever the reason it can be an interesting experience, especially when you notice a whole...

Quackcast 732 - Meet the Parodians

Parody and satire are a certain kind of humour. They're VERY easy to do because you just base them off real, already existing things, then you twist it a bit to add humour and make it ridiculous. But that's where it gets tricky! Satire is a parody of a real situation rather than fictional, it tends to have a harder edge. Where it usually goes wrong is that people mistake it for something straight, i.e. NOT satire, not comedy, not exaggeration or ridicule. The two main approaches to parody are a ...

Quackcast 731 - Contrariancast

Quackcast 730 - Lighting by The Doodler

Today we have on a super special guest, The Doodler! This is another on our technical series about art making and this time we're talking about lighting. Tantz suggested we interview The Doodler for this because she's Tantz's go-to person for lighting issues in scenes. It was great to chat with The Doodler about her lighting techniques and the different challenges presented by different scenes. The Doodler was much better at explaining the concepts than I could have been so it was a pleasure to ...

Quackcast 729 - The Feather report

The 3rd in our technical art-making series, we're talking hair, feathers, and fur today. How do you draw those highly complicated, textured things? Well the complicated, difficult way is to draw every single strand of hair, every follicle of fur, and every filament of feather… But that has a lot of disadvantages! So how else do you approach it? The simplest way is to draw the overall shape that the full thing makes up and just do an outline of the rough edges. So for a hair style that would be t...

Quackcast 728 - Skinship

Today we're going into another aspect of creating artwork for webcomics! This time it's painting skin, a topic that Tantz suggested. How do you render skin? It's a super common thing in comics and there are many, many ways to do it! We're not experts on all the methods so we just cover what WE do. We all have different approaches and you'll have to listen to the cast to see what Tantz and Banes say. I'll chat quickly about how I do it here. I have 3 main methods but first up it's important to kn...

Quackcast 727 - Painting Series: Sky and Sea

We haven't done anything about actual art-making for a while so we thought we'd start a series on technical stuff. Starting out we tackle painting sea and sky! These are key general background elements, they're the two biggest simple background features you can get, you don't always need them but it's good to understand these big features for outdoor scenes and how they work. Sky and sea can be super simple features in art, in the most basic version all you need is a horizon line and pretty much...

Quackcast 726 - Ego!?

Do you have a big ego? Do you know someone who has? This Quackcast is about utilising egos for comic characters for comedic purposes, to humanise character, or to make villains more unlikeable and or funny. Big egos are a sign of poor self esteem, people inflate their egos to cope with feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. For examples of that we have a certain prominent politician and also a tech billionaire as perfect representations of every facet of that concept. :) Personally I LOVE a pro...

Quackcast 725 - Your fave comics as a kid

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) Footrot Flats...

Quackcast 724 - America's Plutocratic classism

Is there a culture of plutocratic classism in the USA? I'm inspired by Trump's America and how people think that people like Elon Musk and him are above the law because they're rich, while conversely the lowest rank in society are the homeless and the poor. But what do I mean by “Plutocratic classism”? A plutocracy is a society where people's position is determined by their wealth, classism is our tendency to discriminate based on social class, put that together and you have people determining s...

Quackcast 723 - Changing tech and design

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...

Quackcast 722 - Main characters with main character syndrome

Main characters with main character syndrome? What is main character syndrome? Well the way we're dealing with it here it's normally a snide criticism you level and someone who seems to think the world revolves around them, like social media “influencers”, selfish self centred people, that sort of thing. Popular figures like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are great examples: they imagine the world should bend to their whim, and normal rules don't apply, like a main character in a fictional story. Th...

Quackcast 721 - A plot B plot

A standard thing in stories is to have multiple plot lines. In short stories or when you're just starting out as a writer you tend to have a single line, the A plot, but as soon as you get a bit more experience and write longer stories you'll find the plots tend to branch and multiply, even if you don't always fully intend it. The usual is to have the A and B plots: the A is the main one that drives the story and the B is where you put other interesting junk like character development, villain s...

Quackcast 720 - Happy New Year!

It's not the new year yet but this is the final Quackcast of 2024 and it's coming out on New Year's Eve! In this Quackcast we do a bit of a year in review. A bit happened this year… DD reached its 22nd year online being one of the oldest sites on the internet and definitely one of the very oldest free comic hosts next to Keenspace which doesn't really exist now. We released another DD anthology comic collection, A Flock of Dreams (linked bellow), in which your Quackcast hosts collaborated on a c...

Quackcast 719 - Merry Christmas!

Happy Christmas eve! In this penultimate Quackcast of the year we decided to have a free day and just chat about any subject that interested us at the time. Next week will be our final cast of the year when we'll do a year in review. We even went back to our roots and did some silly accents, mine were of course A-mazing! (they were pretty crap TBH) We touched on many subjects from the Adams family and Wednesday, even the Munsters (which I mistook for the Adams Family at one point… OMG what a dum...