The Mandalorian on Disney Plus is a very popular series, it's particularly known at the moment because of the “fanservice”, i.e. fan rewards in the second series. a couple of Clone Wars characters are in it now… but we won't spoil that. Tantz, Banes and I chat Fan Service! What IS Fan Service and why is it a thing? When did we first learn about it? For me it was Neon Genesis Evangelion. At the end of each episode one of the characters would preview the NEXT episode and then finish by promising “...
Dec 08, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 508
Coming up with character names isn't easy. It can actually be really, really hard! Tantz did a couple helpful Newsposts about it and we decided to spin that into a fun Quackcast about naming and names! The names behind stuff often has interesting stories, the Quackcast itself is no exception. When Wowio told us we had to do a podcast back in the day we tossed around a few names and the one they came up with was “Quackcast”, because of the whole “duck” theme we have going here. I protested becaus...
Dec 01, 2020•55 min•Season 1Ep. 507
Today we chat about fight scenes! This was spurred by a post in our forums about how bad fight choreography can spoil a film. Our Patron vid was mainly about fights in our comics, while the Quackcast is more about fights in movies. One of the things about REAL fights is that they're usually very fast, ugly, stupid looking, and not very exciting. It's important to remember that boxers and UFC fighters are entertainers and sports people, those people are performing for an audience - their fights a...
Nov 24, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 506
Character trajectories are really interesting- in terms of character alignment, like a good guy that slowly turns into a bad guy through a whole bunch of bad decisions and incidents. A great example from popular media is Walter White from Breaking Bad. He starts out as an ordinary guy, but soon sets out on a path that takes him down the road to becoming a super-villian. Characters can start out bad and go good or even good, go bad and then redeem themselves... Star Wars has a lot of character tr...
Nov 17, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Season 505Ep. 1
For our Patreon video I decided to dress as the WW2 Captain America (from the movie, Captain American the First Avenger). That and the very de-compressed nature of the US election led us to chat about what was going to happen! It wasn't till JUST after the video that we heard that the US officially had a new president! So you can see me pictured bellow in my costume or become a Patreon and see the vid :) This Quackcast is all based on Bane's newspost from Thursday about decompressed stories. We ...
Nov 10, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 504
An old man tries to explain modern culture to an even older man… Attitudes change! Things don't stay the same, culture moves on and when we try to hang onto old ideas we can look like idiots, and even worse than that we can hold up cultural progress and hurt people. That's what we're trying to talk about… To put it simply, back in the day conformity to one central idea was king, one way of being: Pretty much white focussed, straight, binary, masculine, nationalistic, obedient. If you fit into th...
Nov 03, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 503
What is the most definitive version of your character? Where does it pop up in your comic? What part of your work most defines your main character and why? What about TV, movie, comic, and story characters? For example, Pinky from my OWN comic, Pinky TA, is best characterised by her version in Chapter 6. Looks-wise the prime Pinky is the orignal from the first couple of pages of Chapter 1, but the version in Chapter 6 is best defined in her thinking and attitude due to her direct interactions wi...
Oct 27, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 502
We are the Pretty Things That Live in the House! We all dressed up for a Halloween themed cast today! You can see our weird looks in our Patreon video ($5 and up subscribers). Pitface was a yellowfaced corn vampire with amazing teeth (very midwest), Banes was an old, oooooold terrifying baldy vampire, Tantz was a beautiful, big eyed doctor vampire, and I was an 18th century Vamp (Lestat/Varny), with a face messy with the blood of my victims! And I had in rubber fangs held in by chewing gum, just...
Oct 20, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 501
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. Featured in our cast was MegaRD...
Oct 13, 2020•1 hr 36 min•Season 1Ep. 500
What is the worth of human life in your stories? This isn't something people often consider, we just tend to have a fairly accurate guess based on our experience of the real world, but sometimes stories get it really wrong and that can harm suspension of disbelief. A few prime examples are gritty SciFi stories, westerns, war stories, and hospital dramas. The first three dramatically undervalue human life so it doesn't make logical sense within the world it depicts: In deep space human life would...
Oct 06, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 499
This week we're talking about cultural appropriation, cultural adaption and adoption, also stereotypes and all sorts of related stuff. It was inspired by a newspost from Tantz discussing the recent live action Mulan movie by Disney. Cultural appropriation is when you take an aspect that is sacred or important to one culture and own it yourself: decontextualising it, stripping it off it's meaning, making a cartoon version of it, commodifying it, commercialising or cheapening it in some other way....
Sep 29, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 498
Today we're talking about the idea that entertainment aimed at kids can only be enjoyed by kids and the reason that adults often don't like kids things is because adults just don't “get” them. I contend that everyone, of all ages should be able to enjoy General or kid rated media and the true reason we don't is not because it “isn't meant for us”, it's because it's simply badly written - specifically, it's not the content that's annoying, it's the structure. The reason why some kid's shows are s...
Sep 22, 2020•52 min•Season 497Ep. 1
Titles are surprisingly important for your comic! We don't often realise that when we first start them, but a title is one of the very first ways people come across your work. You have to sell it to them and give them an idea of what to expect in only a very few words. You can take a lot of different approaches to that, like teasing and intriguing them with a title that suggests something interesting or mysterious, character names are great for that. You can me completely literal and obvious. Yo...
Sep 15, 2020•53 min•Season 1Ep. 496
Fanfiction is a massive subject, there are so many aspects to it, from the bad stuff with the Mary Sues, rampant shipping, author inserts and wish fulfilment etc to homages and great works that extend the story and characters beyond what they were in the original and add interesting and fun aspects to fan favourites. There are many good reasons to do fanfiction: It's fun, you're inspired and want to use that inspiration, all the characteristics of the story are readymade so you don't have to do ...
Sep 08, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 495
Does a story always need an antagonist embodied in the form of an active character? I don't think they do! We chat about examples of stories without antagonistic characters that work just as well, if not better than the reverse! This is based on Bane's newspost from last Thursday (link in the notes). Tantz and I have a long argument about what the main antagonist in Wall-E was! I think that a lot of the better Pixar movies don't have their main antagonising force embodied in characters- Inside O...
Sep 01, 2020•54 min•Season 1Ep. 494
First up… HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO TANTZ! This Quackcast is about the topic of whether it's right to change an established character just to fit with the ideas and styles of a new creator or change them in accordance with an idea or political position you want to explore, OR should you instead create a whole new character or story to do that with? Bane's newspost gave the example of the ersatz justice league created for The Boys, where Homelander =/= Superman. The series was made to look at the dark si...
Aug 25, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 493
DD member Furwerk Studios posted in our forum about how annoying it was that movies try and do an 80s retro thing often get things totally wrong and end up looking dumb because of it: Not just superficial looks-wise but stylistically too in terms of the kinds of shots they do, lighting and story structure. I thought that'd make an interesting topic for a cast! Why do people often mess up retro stuff? We're not talking about historical accuracy here, that's slightly different, what we're talking ...
Aug 11, 2020•59 min•Season 1Ep. 491
This Quackcast is about the impermanence of online services and the lie that services are provided for fee and providers have no responsibility to the creators and viewers that use them. Hushicho posted in our forum about Tapas newly restricting nudity in comics which suddenly disenfranchises hundreds of creators who've built up followings on that site with comics that were well within the the Tapas content rules. With that one change these comics have been wiped out, destroying all the hard wor...
Aug 11, 2020•44 min•Season 1Ep. 492
Aren't genres great? They're so useful for categorising what we like and selling our work. Today we're chatting about all the genres that are popular in webcomics now, that we know of. Back in the day webcomics were mainly defined by TWO genres: slice of life, and gaming. And out of those two gaming was king! Actually a lot of comics combined the two. The biggest were things like 8 Bit Fantasy, PVP, Penny Arcade, and Ctrl Alt Delete. But things expanded pretty quickly. Now a lot of sites are spe...
Aug 04, 2020•55 min•Season 1Ep. 490
It's just Banes, Tantz and me today, chatting about the important topic of continuity! How do you maintain it, what continuity errors have you made, what continuity errors have you noticed in media? What's the difference between character continuity, story continuity and chronological continuity? - Something you notice when you watch or read a series in chronological order that was were NOT produced or meant to be viewed that way. A good example of that is the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett...
Jul 28, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 489
This week the brilliant Damehelsing (aka Agiebun), comes on to tell us the details of the DD anthology! Last week Boundbun gave us a general overview but now we're having a look at exactly HOW it's going to be done and how YOU can contribute to it. We'll have details and discussion on the DD Discord server as well as in our Twitter and on the forums. Currently there are 5 themes that we're deciding between: Urban fantasy, Noir, Community, Horror and Halloween. We'll have to decide which of those...
Jul 21, 2020•58 min•Season 1Ep. 488
Boundbun joins us to talk about the plans for the upcoming Drunk Duck Anthology that the proud people of the DD Discord (Aggie and Mel), are talking about. It hopes to be a true mammoth of a project at something like 130 pages! So if you'd like to get in on this and have your work actually published then join the Discord and navigate to the correct chat. You can have your say on what form the anthology takes. We also chat about anthologies in general. Drunk Duck has produced a few different prin...
Jul 14, 2020•57 min•Season 1Ep. 487
Today we chat with BoundBun, Damehelsing, and Bluecuts34. Who are they? Well they're 3 Drunk-Duckers and they manage our Discord server! Yes, we do have a Discord! You can visit it and chat with them in person! - or become a patron and see them on video ;) Forums are a great way to interact but these days people like Discord a bit more. What IS Discord though? It's a bit like a cross between a form and a chatroom- real time chatting with voice and video capability plus a record of all the posts ...
Jul 07, 2020•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 486
Do you make work that no one will ever see? Do you do that so you can mess around and experiment without consequences, for practice, for testing out an idea that you MIGHT show later, or just so you can have fun? This was inspired by a newspost from Banes who used to draw figures on chalkboard and erase them as the story progressed. We chatted a lot about this and then moved on to talk about how we've each written or drawn porn that no one will ever see. Have you drawn or written secret porn in ...
Jun 30, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 485
Backgrounds are part of a choice you make about to best show off your characters and how to present your comic. Plain white backgrounds aren't a very good choice for most comics but they are for some. Random, sketchy lines, pixel art tiles, fully drawn highly detailed landscapes, copy and pasted photos, halftone dots, speedlines etc, the choices are endless but it's important to know what works for you own particular comic! That's what we're talking about this week. Yes, an actual ART based subj...
Jun 23, 2020•50 min•Season 1Ep. 484
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 creati...
Jun 16, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 483
Tantz's newspost on Saturday about the problems of second guessing yourself and the issues that can arise from that was the inspiration for this week's newspost. Second guessing yourself can have GOOD possibilities and negative ones. The good: it forces you to hone your creative work and improve it, you don't just put things out there, you evaluate them and improve them! The bad: you can get stuck in a loop where you keep on thinking your stuff is not good enough, you might get hung up on one li...
Jun 09, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 482
Today we're chatting about using historical stuff in your story and knowing how to use it right! Sometimes it's good to change stuff and sometimes it's not. The thing is that you should ONLY change it if you know what you're doing and why you're doing it. A good example is A Knight's Tale- It has a historical setting and there are a lot of deliberate historical anachronisms in it, and they're all very obvious, they do not pretend to be anything but what they are. A Bad example is the Vikings TV ...
Jun 02, 2020•1 hr 34 min•Season 1Ep. 481
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. For myself, I sort of just fell into my style, it wasn't something I planned. It's just a sort of stylised realism, mostly made up of all the errors, mistakes and incorrect assumptions of how r...
May 26, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 480
My original idea for this Quackcast was: “Genre fiction is the best place to explore ideas, straight fiction doesn't do it as well” What I meant was that diverting from straight reality in fiction makes it easier to conceptualise, simplify and explain complicated ideas to a general audience for a whole number of reasons. There was some disagreement between Tantz and I because I expressed myself poorly so she'd thought that I was saying it was much easier to write SciFi and fantasy (Genre fiction...
May 19, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 479
