Fools are an iconic character trope and I wanted to explore them. They're a lot more varied and interesting than is readily apparent. There's a LOT more too a fool than what something like TV tropes suggests, unless you get into the subtypes… And that's what we explored in this free-form discussion. I introduced the idea in the Patreon only video where Tantz, Banes, Pt and I try and get a handle on the idea for the first time, so that's a good behind the scenes insight into what goes on! We work...
May 12, 2020•54 min•Season 1Ep. 478
Today on this glorious date we chat about that part in stories where everything turns to crap for the protagonists, just before the run up to the climax where they find their inner strength again and regain their powers so that the climax is even more effective than it would normally be… just BEFORE that moment. Everything is finally going well for our characters, their relationship is amazing, they have all the money they need to keep the clubhouse open, they're going to win the big game, they ...
May 05, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 477
How does where you grew up influence your comicing? This idea interested me, so I posted about it on the DD forums and asked other people. I didn't really know about it myself: how did my childhood environment influence my later comicing? The conclusion I came to was that since my childhood experience was so alien to the worlds depicted in the media I enjoyed so much most of my comicing and creation was based on imagination out of necessity: Historical fantasy set in mountainous, cold, hazy Euro...
Apr 28, 2020•54 min•Season 1Ep. 476
Certain tropes or stylistic ways of telling a story can get really, really popular and trendy very quickly and it seems like they're everywhere! Suddenly many story are all told with the same sort of stylistic flourishes. The first few times it's done that way it's clever and meaningful but after that people just use the same thing without understanding it properly and consequently usually do a really crappy job! My biggest bugbear currently is the stories that are split across multiple timeline...
Apr 21, 2020•57 min•Season 1Ep. 475
OMG we're all still stuck inside forever and ever. So what are the shows we're all watching? We all get together to have a bit of a chat about the great things that we're all into right now. Pitface Joins us once again! So cool to have her along :D Tantz and Banes are are the stalwart members as usual ^_^ Shows keeping you sane and entertained… What's doing it for you right now? The musical feature this week that Gunwallace has given us is theme to Hyperbolic Fabrications Presents: A journey of ...
Apr 14, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 474
In this Quackcast we talk about the differences between genre and setting and what genre really is. For instance: Fantasy and SciFi aren't genres, they're settings… Mostly. It's complicated but they both pretty much USED to be genres, now they're mainly just settings for genre stories to take place in. What does that mean? Well, Fantasy wasn't even considered a genre back in the day, not really till after the success of Tolkien. Later on a lot of writers began using that same style and consumers...
Apr 07, 2020•55 min•Season 1Ep. 473
In this strange time of global pandemic it'd be crazy NOT to acknowledge what we're all experiencing together, so that's what we're talking about today: How the virus stuff is affecting us. Pitface joins us once again so today the quartet is complete: Pitz, Banes, Oz, and Tantz! This global pandemic is affecting all of the world, all humanity at the same time, wherever we are. It's a really unique experience for us all. We're lucky we had the internet when this struck us! Imagine if we got a pan...
Mar 31, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 472
Today we're having a chat about fantasy fiction! Mainly books and the fantasy writing that inspired us and that we love! Faves like Tolkien, Fritz Leiber and Piers Anthony! Just to define, we're talking swords, elves, armour, dragons etc, in a “medieval” context, generally European. As a subset there's native, Arabian, Asian, Mayan etc, also high fantasy, low fantasy, sword and sorcery, historical fantasy and even mythology…. And then techno fantasy, contemporary fantasy, steampunk, fantasy cybe...
Mar 24, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 471
For this cast I'd thought we'd go through with our promise of last week and talk about things that have made us have a reaction as a creator. This expands on “The Cartoons that Date us” from last week. So today we're talking the creative media that gave you a reaction: Books, movies, comics, TV shows… Not what specifically inspired the comics you do now, but what drove you to create and why. When I was young for me it was things like Ed-209 in Robocop, the design of the fighters in Robotech, and...
Mar 17, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 470
We're talking about the cartoons that made us! This was inspired by kawaiidaigakusei's newspost from last week about Daria. Daria was a really cool cartoon from the late 90s. It was influential to her, to me as well, and I thought it would be a great idea for a Quackcast to talk about the other cartoons that were influential to us at certain points in our lives. There were a lot that were part of forming my ideas… Early on it was action stuff like Robotech, Starblazers, Kimba, AstroBoy, Inspecto...
Mar 10, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 469
The nature of online communities and making connections with people you meet in them is quite different from what happens with “social media”. The connections are deeper and longer lasting while social media is more about communication, staying in contact, and finding out what's popular at the time rather than sharing creations and forming strong bonds. The topic of today's conversation was triggered by learning that one of our valued members, Lonnehart, had died two years ago. We always loved h...
Mar 03, 2020•46 min•Season 1Ep. 468
The process of adaptation is quite interesting. Stories go through all sorts of changes when they're transferred from one medium to another. A lot of the time we bemoan that as “not staying true to the original” or “the book was better”, but there are many times where the adaption is really interesting in its own right, even though it's quite different from what it started out as. A straight out bad adaptation (in my opinion) is Peter Jackson's “the Hobbit”. Instead of simply transforming the st...
Feb 25, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 467
What happens to characters after the big action scene or climactic moment? This could be anywhere in the story but it's usually close to the end. Do they process any of the things that have happened to them to lead them up to that point or do they just forget about everything and simply act as if nothing except the last 4 seconds matter? The later seems to be the trend in a lot of badly written fiction, and it's a notable trope in 80s style action films. Death of family members or lovers are irr...
Feb 18, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 466
There are a couple of approaches when it comes to making a big creative project: planing it all out or working things out as you go i.e. flying by the seat of your pants. Well in reality it's a spectrum and those are the two extremes. Most of us work somewhere between those two, sometimes with more or less planning etc… I've tried a lot of different mixtures myself! Improvising as you go can be thrilling, it can really keep the creative juices flowing. It works best when you have a really good i...
Feb 11, 2020•59 min•Season 1Ep. 465
I recently had to upgrade my main computer because Windows isn't supporting Windows 7 any longer and I don't want to install Windows 10 on the perfectly functioning old one in case it ruins it and my main programs can't run any longer… SO I had to get a new PC. This got me thinking though: The barrier to getting into digital art is lower now than ever! Back in the day it was hard to get into and very expensive! Getting a powerful enough machine with all the programs and hardware wasn't cheap. Ba...
Feb 04, 2020•59 min•Season 1Ep. 464
Sexpostion is sex plus exposition, it's exposition with sex on the screen. Tantz Aerine addressed the topic of sexposition in an article last year, but what we're doing here is talking about the reason it even exists, why it isn't a new trend, and why it probably won't last. Basically, movies and TV shows always get more and more sex and nudity in them when broadcast standards are relaxed. Sex and nudity draw in viewers so they're always popular tools. Back in the 20s during the early days of Ho...
Jan 28, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 463
Today we have a special guest! Jessica Schab. Jessica works for Mainframe entertainment in Canada, one of THE premier digital animation companies! Before things like Pixar they were THE CGI animation people! Behind the Video for Dire Straights' Money for Nothing video back in the 80s, Transformers Beastwars, Octonaughts, Babrie, and my personal fave: Reboot! Jessica is an interesting person. She's in charge of production design on an upcoming show for Dreamworks, which involves a particular kind...
Jan 21, 2020•57 min•Season 1Ep. 462
Today Banes and I chat about our top tips for doing a great comic page: What is most important? I mainly focus on art and Banes is talking about page design and writing tips. Bellow are our top 5s for ways to make better comics! We expand on these and explain them in the Quackcast. Banes' tips for making a comic page: 1. Page layouts 2. Economical wording 3. Vary the camera 4. Don't always hide things you can't draw 5. Don't eat the ink off your brush! Banes writing tips: 1. Avoid too much expos...
Jan 14, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 461
Happy 2020 all you lovely people who listen to us! What we're talking about today are tropes in fiction that bother us because they don't exist in reality: they ONLY exist in fiction pretty much. In the cover pic we have an image from The Witcher: he has two big longswords on his back. In fantasy people always carry longswords on their backs. This is a trope that only exists in fiction because you can't draw a sword longer than about 60cm from your back. So people just didn't carry swords like t...
Jan 07, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 460
It's been a great year! DD has continued to grow bit by bit, we've been stable and a great host for many many webcomics. DD is one of the only truly independent community focused webcomic hosting sites left. Most of the rest are commercial hubs that are not community centered. Part of our commitment to the community on DD is showcasing our best webcomics every week, which we've been doing for 17 years now, and I've personally been doing that for about 13. Kawaii and I continually search for new ...
Dec 31, 2019•2 hr 31 min•Season 1Ep. 459
Hey! Merry Xmas! Happy Hanukkah! Merry Kwanza! Merry Festivus! Happy Yule! Happy Saturnalia! Winter Solstice and all the rest ^_^ In this Quackcast Banes, Tantz, and I chat about our fave Christmas stuff, from films to music, to what we like to do on the day and the popular Christmas traditions of our parts of the world- Australia for me Greece for Tantz, and Canada for Banes. What is your fave xmas movie, music, or activity? What's you fave things to do at this time of year? Do you have any rit...
Dec 24, 2019•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 458
2 weeks ago we discussed the topic of religion in fiction: basicaly how we use real world religions to inform the perspectives of our characters and make the worlds more real, how we use religion in fiction, and how we make up religions for our worlds. We had so many great responses to this in the forum and about the Quackcast that we thought it'd be great to feature and chat about them! DD is a community after all and we love our community members to be a part of the Quackcast! This week Gunwal...
Dec 17, 2019•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 457
Smack Jeeves has been sold out from under its community to a Korean mobile content provider company NHN. The same company approached us last year but the deal didn't go through because we were too strict on retaining control of the site and protecting our community, SJ apparently didn't have those same concerns for the people that made the site so special and that is a huge shame. What's happened now is that NHN is streamlining the site, minimising the creative members who host their comics ther...
Dec 10, 2019•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 456
We're talking about how religion is portrayed in fiction and a bit about WHY. This was a surprisingly fascinating topic. I came up with the idea while watching the old 2000s SciFi series Andromeda: one of the alien characters there is sort of a space Buddhist, and I felt like that was a pretty common thing in American TV Scifi, so I wondered about what other kinds of religious tropes exist in contemporary fiction, fantasy and other SciFi worlds. It turns out that there are many approaches, from ...
Dec 03, 2019•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 455
This week we look at the famous quote by respected film director Martin Scorsese that “Marvel movies aren't Cinema” and also the quote by fellow director Francis Ford Coppola that Marvel films are “despicable”. We try and look at the proper context of these remarks outside of the twitter garbage and social media outrage to see if either had any point or whether they're way off the mark and deserving of criticism. We've linked to the video where you can hear the full quote from Scorsese in its pr...
Nov 26, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 454
Where does your main audience come from? And how do you change your work to accommodate them? For a lot of us it's north Americans (mainly from the USA), which is interesting, especially for those of us outside of there because our cultures are slightly different. We THINK we totally understand each other but there ARE differences. So to make ourselves properly understood with the original intent of the story we often have to translate things slightly (much more in Tantz's case!). This goes doub...
Nov 19, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 453
Storytelling styles change over time for various reasons: fashion, audience expectations, competition for audience attention due to increased choice and availability of media, technological limitations and abilities, and culture. We chat about the reasons for the changes and how styles have changed. Technology is the easiest factor to point to: with the rise of Netflix offering binge watching more and more TV series turned to long story arcs and minimised the episodic aspects. This in turn influ...
Nov 12, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 452
“Toxic fans” is a bit of a catch cry now and that has seemed to turn into the idea that any fan who is critical of something or doesn't like it isn't a “true fan”, fans must should love everything. I find this a dangerously silly notion and one clearly driven by business interests with only a limited relationship to reality. It's quite similar to the idea that you're “either for us or against us”, the twisted idea of “patriotism” that says you must agree with and love everything your country and...
Nov 05, 2019•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 451
Tantz is dressed fabulously as a queen and I'm a skull faced monstrosity… I'm also wearing a costume, hahaha! Which you can see in our Patreon video ;) Queen Tantz Bathory and prince of horror Banes join me to talk about Horror movie franchises, what makes them work and what doesn't- as franchises rather than just a stand alone movie. The problems facing a movie series about horror are different from other genres and focus more on formula than just characters the way they do in most other types ...
Oct 29, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 450
As promised we dive right into the second half of the Star Wars chat! We cover all the Star Wars stuff besides the original trilogy and the new trilogy. There's a lot to cover and we only touch on most on it: Solo, the Star Wars Christmas special, Droids, the Ewok films, Clone Wars, the games, the books, comics, Solo, Rogue One… For October we're having a look at various popular film franchises because understanding of them has a lot to offer webcomic creators. Last week we looked at the origina...
Oct 22, 2019•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 449
