We're chatting about the subject of musicals for this particular Quackcast. You might think this has nothing to do with webcomics but webcomic musicals popup from time to time, like The Black Parade on DD by Ashlee S. Musicals are a type of entertainment like any other, usually in the form of a film or stage play, they evolved from Operas and operettas. Their characteristic feature is that communication of scenes is at points stylised into the form of a song, often involving a dance with detaile...
Oct 24, 2023•59 min•Season 1Ep. 658
The art of the tease is what we're talking about here. It's something Banes and I work with on Bottomless Waitress and it's what you see in a lot of raunchy comedies, you also see it in other applications too, like in a slasher thriller where it's teased that a character will become a victim but they never do. My fave application though is the traditional sex comedy where there's never anything explicit even though that is the thing you're always led to expect is just around the corner. The art ...
Oct 17, 2023•51 min•Season 1Ep. 657
This Quackcast is a sequel to our Quackcast last week on alternative character growth, but instead of Star Wars this time we decided on Indiana Jones. It's a really interesting creative writing exercise, we think up a better, more interesting way of of growing and continuing an established character and their adventures. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a bit lame and Soviets didn't make nearly as good enemies as Nazis so that's where we started… We thought about what Indie would have done durin...
Oct 10, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 656
Last week we focused on character growth VS tropes to run characters but Tantz had the idea to look at alternative growth for characters who did NOT grow well (after the original trilogy). So in this Quackcast we apply that to various Star Wars characters. Tantz tackles an alternative path and form for Anikin and Darth Vader, re-imagining them as two separate people. I tackle Han Solo and Princess Leia, thinking of them both as a happy couple who adventure and travel together in the Millennium f...
Oct 03, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 655
Today we're chatting about characters who're mainly based on tropes VS those that grow. You see this difference quite clearly in a lot of British comedy VS American comedy where characters are set up in certain ways, e.g. the nerd, the sassy one, the mature one etc- in British stuff they tend to revert to type, which is their most important trait, while in American stuff they tend to change and grow based on interactions and experiences. There are MANY exceptions though and one way isn't inheren...
Sep 26, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 654
Today we're talking about STAR TREK! Star Trek is a pretty influential piece of pop-culture. Most interesting to me is that it's a future that is NOT a dystopia. It's a large scale vision of a future world where everything is NOT terrible and collapsing in on itself. You can count those on one hand. It's worth talking about just because of that. Instead of taking the boring, tried and true dystopia route the creators of this world decided to explore a premise of “what happens when a world actual...
Sep 19, 2023•46 min•Season 1Ep. 653
Our topic this week is making your characters individual, distinct and setting them apart through physical traits. In many mainstream superhero comics or manga the only difference between most characters is their outfit, hair, and skin tone. There are a few reasons for that but a big one is that it saves time if the artist doesn't have to change to much when they're drawing different characters. Professional arts work hard and have to work fast so things that make work faster and easier are need...
Sep 12, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 652
We're chatting about a couple of things today: the DD 2023 Awards which are in their completion faze now, and "strong" characters of any gender. The DD awards are finding up now and presentations will be happening so it's a good time now to be able to see who actually won and to be able to get a look at some really good comics you might not have seen before. The latter topic was inspired by something Tantz wrote about. There's a trend of people trying really hard to make "strong" female" charact...
Sep 05, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 651
There are a lot of things that only exist in fiction and really don't have any basis in reality and yet we THINK they do! It's just that fiction has done such a great job of making us believe this stuff and setting it up that it pretty much replaces reality. We focused on spies for our Patreon only video, and how the version we know from popculture in Kingsmen, Mission Impossible, James Bond, Chuck, and many other things is complete fiction. This Quackcast topic was inspired by a forum thread on...
Aug 29, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 650
When you're drawing people in a webcomic one of the common ways to indicate gender is by outfits, but why are clothes gendered at all and is that a constant? Gendered clothing clothing is influenced by many things like fashion, history, custom, occupation, class, culture, and religion, and much less so practicality or biology, contrary to popular belief. All these things have gendered components that have an influence on the clothes people wear and the way they present themselves. There are no c...
Aug 22, 2023•1 hr 42 min•Season 1Ep. 249
This week's cast was an experiment and if it works out we'll do more! We came up with the idea for discussing a comic live on air, the hard part was choosing it, for that we settled on our trusty Kawaiidaigakusei to help us. She chose “Up the Pyramid” by BUDLO. And this was her rationale: “A comic that I had already featured, but deserves a second run in the spotlight. There is a chapter specifically that would work for a Quackcast episode discussion titled, ”My Mother, Her Baby, & Mary Cass...
Aug 15, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 648
We're having a chat about characters that differ from the source material and turn out crap because of it. Characters where the people adapting them didn't care, understand, or even take time to read the original stuff because they thought they knew better. There are a lot of instances where characters are adapted from source material and get totally messed up because the writers either don't understand or care about the source material they're taking from. Were not talking about being exactly t...
Aug 08, 2023•59 min•Season 1Ep. 647
Drawing fight scenes is damn hard! One of the best ways to deal with this is to use references, but that's hard too because it's a pain to find the ones you need! So today we're talking about making your own reference pics for fighting because that's what I just finished for Tantz- I stripped shirtless and wielded some of my many antique swords in fight poses for Tantz to use in her new fantasy webcomic. You can also look at movie versions of stage fighting but those are pretty unrealistic usual...
Aug 01, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 646
We're chatting about the current state of AI, it's use, abuse, and the moronic way it's typically being utalised by mid-level businesses to screw over creative people and save money in the short term. “AI” is the current big thing on the market, specifically “generative” AI that's been illegally trained on copyrighted datasets like chat GTP, Mid-Journey, Stable-Diffusion and more. This sort of AI could be extremely useful IF used in the correct ways: things like sifting through masses of data to...
Jul 25, 2023•54 min•Season 1Ep. 645
We're talking about the pop-culture myth of psychopaths and sociopaths and other stuff like serial killers. Yes those conditions do exist, well sort of (not exactly with those names), but the pop-culture versions we know from the media are mostly myths. The real things aren't as exciting or flashy as the versions we know and love/hate from movies, comic, books, TV shows and podcasts. In fact even though people with antisocial conditions we know as psychopathy and sociopathy are over-represented ...
Jul 18, 2023•1 hr 21 min
With the release of the new Indiana Jones film comes some questions… We haven't seen it yet but we hear a lot of people don't like it and it's already being called a flop. But is that because it's actually bad, because people want it to be bad, or because it doesn't match people's expectations? What's the real story? It's hard to know at this point. That got me thinking about cult classics, which are usually things that don't find an audience right away and instead pick them up over time. And th...
Jul 11, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 643
Gatekeeping can be a pretty dickish practice… but not in every case. Generally we see it as a social pop culture trend where older established fans of something will try and put down new people and discourage them from joining a fandom. This can stifle a fan community and really kill discourse, not to mention shutting out new members and new perspectives which is actually what a fan community needs in order to flourish and grow. Where gatekeeping isn't a bad thing are fields where people need to...
Jul 04, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 642
Injuries, especially to the head can be extremely bad but people are hit over the bonce and knocked out in popculture all the time. In violent sports like boxing or MMA it's often a goal, it's a common thing in games too, the “KO” is a staple. In TV shows, movies and comics it's seen as a kind way to deal with an enemy, people will even do it to their very best friends to protect them from going through with some scary activity, often knocking them out and tying them up and then taking their pla...
Jun 27, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 641
We base our images of aliens in comics on aliens in TV shows and movies mostly, because those are the ones we all know. But movie aliens have been generally based on humans because it's less expensive, easier to come up with a costume and makeup for an actor, and it's also easier to make those aliens relatable. “Aliens” even THINK the same as we do, have the same motivations, wants, needs, prejudices, opinions… Almost 100% of the time aliens in media are US, just a weird version of us: distorted...
Jun 20, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 640
Today's topic is Nudity: Nudity in comics, censorship, self censoring, what you can get away with on DD, ratings, nudity on other platforms and how it affects the reach of your work, and more! There are a lot of reasons for using nudity in your creative work, it can be fun to draw, it catches audience attention, it can be quite dramatic or funny or shocking. Nudity is a useful tool, but it can really limit the reach of your work so you have to be very careful with it because ironically even thou...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 639
Beginners at webcomics make mistakes, rookie mistakes. In fact people tend to make a lot of the same mistakes and we're going to chat about some of those in the Quackcast, but there are certainly a LOT more! A few common mistakes of first timers: - They have too many comic panels so it takes ages to draw and artwork and text become too small. - They plan way too much, sometimes for month or even years before starting the actual comic. Planning is good but not when it prevents you from actually s...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 638
Rumours can be damaging stories deliberately spread to harm people, they can grow organically of their own accord. Salacious rumours replace truth and stick around in history, like the silly stories of Catherine the Great and horses, Nero fiddling while Rome burned, Marie Antoinette saying “let them eat cake”, or the famously wealthy Roman general Crassus dying by having molten gold poured on his head. All rumours and silly stories but they become stronger than real history. Then there's the not...
May 30, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 637
We're talking about swearing! Swearing in comics, types of swearing, the use of swearing, causing offense, taking offense, swearing used as a term of endearment, and some history behind various types of swearing. We barely even scratch the surface! We don't swear in the Quackcast if we can help it so we're talking around and about the language without using it, though we DO swear in our Patreon vid, which is free to all patrons, even the $1 level. Swearing can indicate a lack of maturity, it can...
May 23, 2023•1 hr 31 min•Season 1Ep. 686
We're talking about WAR here! Trying to leave out politics, though that's really hard with war because it's basically ALL politics but on fire. So we're talking mainly about depictions of it or at least aspects of it, in art and the media. Both Tantz Aerine and myself work on war comics, Without Moonlight and Pinky TA respectively (plus Tantz also does Brave Resistance with Pitface), so we have some knowledge of the subject from a creator perspective. There are a lot of approaches you can take f...
May 16, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 635
Generational tensions are a cultural constant. It's popular to pick on the young and say they're lazy, irresponsible, stupid, changing things in silly ways etc, but it's also just as popular too defend them and debunk myths associated with younger people, we don't have that with older people and I find that a bit sad and disturbing. This cast tackles the myths associated with “boomers”. The idea is that “boomers” are all wealthy, they're out of touch, they ruined the environment, they own everyt...
May 09, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 634
Asterix and Cleopatra VS Netflix… We were initially inspired by the furious reaction over Netflix's new series on Queen Cleopatra, a purported “documentary” and it's seeming focus on fantasy rather than history, but then we started thinking about the brilliant comic Asterix and how it handled history… It didn't pretend to be accurate, it's a comedy afterall, and yet it managed to retain a great level of veracity without taking too many liberties. Fantasy and conspiracy documentaries on Netflix b...
May 02, 2023•1 hr 32 min•Season 1Ep. 633
We finally gave in to temptation and just started chatting about Star Wars. For our Patreon video we were talking about the idea of pivotal pop-cultural landmarks that changed the cultural landscape in various ways. Star Wars definitely qualifies… but instead of finding other examples we just decided to indulge in a Star Wars only cast. We didn't do more than scratch the surface unfortunately though. It's a cool cultural phenomena and it's something we always refer back to when we talk about sto...
Apr 25, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 632
What rights are people actually entitled to? That question is a lot bigger than you think! The Quackcast today is sequel to last week's about entitled people, this one is about actual entitlements- what people SHOULD be entitled to. i.e. rights and such. It's a topic that Banes and Tantz really wanted to do and my purpose was to link it to writing and comics (not just theory and politics), which I think I did ok. This topic turned out to be very interesting. Why are entitlements important? Well ...
Apr 18, 2023•59 min
The Quackcast this week is about entitled bossy Karens. In fact it was originally going to BE “the Karencast” but the whole “Karen” thing is a bit sexist and pejorative. So why a Quackcast on overly entitled people then? Well aside from we stealing it from Tantz's newspost on Friday, those kinds of people make great minor villain characters. They can be comic relief baddies but they can also be deceptively dangerous when they really DO have connections to back up their arrogance! We also talk ab...
Apr 11, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 630
Have you ever watched a series devotedly then lost touch with it for some reason for a while and then gone back to it a couple of years later and tried to get into again but this time you look at it with a very different perspective? Or maybe you loved a movie when you were young and decided to watch it again as an adult to see if it holds up? Reevaluation can be quite interesting! You see stuff with new eyes. Sometimes it holds up fine, sometimes you see new things and appreciate it in a whole ...
Apr 04, 2023•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 629
