How and why does your creativity change over time? It “evolves”. Evolution is often wrongly thought of as a process that leads to a goal, like the idea that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, or that we will “evolve” into something better and “more superior”, or that there is a “next level” of evolution… All of that is just silly comic-book nonsense and terrible sci-fi. Evolution has no goal or direction, it's simply how we describe change that occurs over time. Creatures don't get “better” d...
May 21, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 688
This isn't really a special episode! It's a Quackcast about them. Not PSA episodes though. Our topic was inspired by those weird special non-sequitur episodes in anime and manga like the famous bikini episode where all the characters head off to the beach, water park, hot springs or something and get into their bathing suits. It doesn't usually forward the story too much, if at all, but it's a chance to have fun with the characters, outline and explore any underlying love themes, and show off sk...
May 14, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 687
We recorded the Quackcast on the 4th of May, which of course means that it was “May the fourth”, the Star Wars celebration date! So we decided to talk about Star Wars, but instead of our usual rants about what we think could be done better we kept it to mainly positive stuff, focussing on what we loved about the films, mainly original series, which are the best ones. My fave version of Luke is the first one with the shaggy hair and wild eyes. I Love the mecha, the costumes, the armour, and the s...
May 07, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 686
“Passing the mantle” is an interesting phrase. Many claim it comes from a biblical origin; the prophet Elijah was said to have passed his mantle to Elisha when he ascended to heaven, thereby symbolically transferring his authority… but honestly that seems a little silly and elaborate of an origin story, the sort of thing bad bible scholars in America loved to come up with in the 19th century. Mantles of office were commonly worn by kings, statesmen and even lord mayors today and the passing of t...
Apr 30, 2024•57 min•Season 1Ep. 685
What happens when the hero dies? Especially when it's early on in the story… do things fall apart or does someone else take over? Our topic is about a story style where you establish that a character is the hero or chief protagonist, only to do a bait and switch and swap them out with a less likely character like a sidekick. This makes the audience rethink the way things are going, instead of sticking to an expected formula you force the audience to wake up and wonder what will happen next. This...
Apr 23, 2024•56 min•Season 1Ep. 684
This week it's a short cast because my computer broke and we wasted time trying to fix it! We're chatting about teachers in fiction, a topic inspired by Banes' newspost on the subject. There have been many memorable teacher based fictional stories, To Sir with Love most famously, The Sound of Music, Blackboard jungle, Goodbye Mister Chips, Assassination Classroom, Educating Rita, My Fair Lady, the Mighty Ducks, Dead Poets Society, Kindergarten Cop, Welcome Back Kotter, and so much more! What are...
Apr 16, 2024•34 min•Season 1Ep. 683
Tantz came up with this week's topic: Exposition! It's because she's well on her way into starting her latest comic, Verdant, and working out ways to introduce the story, the world, characters, culture, magic systems, religion etc without doing a massive text dump, which people generally don't like too much. So how do you exposit in a good way? One popular way is through a dialogue; characters give overly verbose and entirely unnecessary explanations about how things work during ordinary convers...
Apr 09, 2024•46 min•Season 1Ep. 682
Today we're talking about swords and armour, the reality of those things and their use in fiction. I've always had a bit of an interest in swords since I was a little kid because I loved them in fairy-tales, comics and fantasy: The Three musketeers, puss in boots, Zorro, the Narnia books, Robin Hood, Errol Flynn movies, King Arthur, Conan, Asterix and more. I only started seriously collecting them as an adult though when I needed the correct costume sabre to go with the hussar uniform I put toge...
Apr 02, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 681
Today we're talking about the depiction of “intelligence” in fiction! There are a lot of ways this shows up: the genius detective who can understand any clue and uncover any lie, the amazing doctor who can understand any disease, the computer nerd who can do ANYTHING with computers, the genius savant with Asperger's, the crafty serial killer with plans within plans… Mostly though these depictions are absolutely fictitious, simply based on tropes, like the action-man James Bond/Jason Bourne type ...
Mar 26, 2024•47 min•Season 1Ep. 680
The phrase “Correlation doesn't equal causation” is something associated with science and statistics but it really applies to EVERYTHING and that's important to understand. But was does it mean? If a bunch of things happened at the same time, those things aren't necessarily related or causal. An example Tantz gives is that statistics show in the summer there are more drownings and that people eat more ice cream. That means that those two things are correlated. We know they aren't causal though: ...
Mar 19, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 679
Banes did a really interesting newspost about panel order and how we read comics- not just left to right or right to left but which panel flows to what and how you get the reader to go in the right direction when something isn't intuitive. We're all comic people and we host a comic site so this was perfect for us to tackle! And as we talked it out we realised that clever panel layout can be employed to assist in true nonlinear storytelling. Film and TV attempt to do non-linear but can never ever...
Mar 12, 2024•57 min•Season 1Ep. 678
I remembered that a promised Quackcast was AI: slavery for artists and creators. This is an important subject to cover especially from this angle. It's slavery because it uses our creative products as fuel for it's database training for free and then uses our work to make money for their creators, essentially exploiting us for free. This isn't just about the image generators, it includes crap like chat GPT too: that system steals and repackages the creations of others without credit, payment or ...
Mar 05, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 677
Oh baby it's cold outside… That's a tricky song, well it's not really but a few years ago the silly pop-culture warriors on Twitter started acting as if the song was all “rapey” with the male in the song trying to pressure the woman into sex. The problem was they were absolutely ignorant of the correct cultural context in quite a misogynist way. In the era the song came from women could not be seen as openly actively wanting sex so they had to play flirting games like the one displayed in the so...
Feb 27, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 676
It was Valentine's Day last week so let's talk about lurv. Love makes the world go round, love solves all problems, love heals all, love is eternal, love is all you need, all you need is love… Well those are all the typical and utterly meaningless pop culture platitudes but they sound good. Why meaningless? Because “love” isn't defined, it's a very vague term that can mean a lot, far too vague to be used the way it is in those phrases. Love can involve lust, friendship, patriotism, affection, ye...
Feb 20, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 675
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. Fashion in ...
Feb 13, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 674
Here we're fulfilling the promise of Quackcast 671 and examining what the art can tell us about the artist! Can certain themes, an art style, choice of imagery, jokes, humour, character opinions, colour choices or anything else tell us anything about the artist? This can be pretty subjective though a lot of stupid and dishonest critics pretend it isn't and tell us great long stories about how this director is “deeply misogynist” because of certain repeated themes - I once watched a youtuber focu...
Feb 06, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 673
A fun topic this time. We decided to chat about our fave fantasy creatures. Mine was elves, Banes' had the bigfoot and Tantz had dragons! We chat about where our love started, why we think we like the creatures and a bit about the creatures themselves. For me it was because I always identified with the elves I read about in Tolkien and Brian Froud's book on fareies because I was slim and slight, with long hair and sharp features. Banes loved bigfoots because he liked that it was a local monster ...
Jan 30, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 672
Art VS the artist! Can you infer something about the creator from their creation? Do you think the art is an accurate reflection of the artist? For THIS Quackcast I wanted to tackle the idea of whether you could judge or infer the mind of the artist from their creation and how wrong some people have been about that, but instead we got all turned around and misdirected and talked mainly about separating the art from the artist when the artist is discovered to have done something horrible, or is a...
Jan 24, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 671
This Quackcast is about using influence wisely! I had a DD comic creator come to me, apparently a bit distressed at some of the things we'd said in our last Quackcast about drawing adult comics- they had decided to delete their entire webcomic. I checked on google and it turns out they deleted it everywhere, not just DD, even down to their twitter! I've since talked to them some more and got more of the story and made sure they were ok but it was pretty alarming at the time nevertheless. That go...
Jan 16, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 670
The number of the Quackcast is 669 so that means it's time for sexy stuff again! But despite the topic this isn't an adult cast and we keep things to a respectful tone. We chat about how drawing sexy characters can be a lot of fun but they don't have to be realistic or anatomically correct to be sexy; stylised, simplified, or abstract forms can be just as alluring and get the pulse racing, it just depends on the setting, story, and other themes in there. And conversely, a perfectly realistic for...
Jan 09, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 669
Happy new year. Happy 2024! We're doing a year in review show this time because what else do you talk about in the last recorded thing/first presented thing of the year? We chat a bit about the progress of Drunk Duck's massive update and we each talk about what we personally achieved with our own webcomics- Tantz with Verdant and finishing Without Moonlight, Banes with Kaiju Valentine, me with Pinky TA and Bottomless waitress with Banes, and our new 3 way group comic called Key of Dreams, which ...
Jan 02, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 668
Merry Christmas! Today we interviewed John Celestri, a new member of DD and a very cool person. John has worked as an animator on some of the coolest shows in the 70s and 80s. He was the guy behind Boba Fet on the Star Wars Christmas special, he animated She-Ra, He-Man, Rock and Rule, the video game Dragon's Lair and more! He's a true legend. We're making our weekly DD Patreon vid free for everyone to see as a Christmas present, so go check it out: https://www.patreon.com/DrunkDuck John is a tru...
Dec 27, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 667
We're up to number 666 Quackcasts so our topic this time is evil! Evil is a complicated subject, we all think we know what it is but we really don't, there are just so many aspects to it so it's very hard to fully encompass. Broadly “evil” can be something very subjective: anything that runs counter to our own well-being as individuals- people, things and situations that do us harm. You can expand that to your property, your family, friends, acquaintances, pets etc. As that definition gets bigge...
Dec 19, 2023•58 min•Season 1Ep. 666
This week our talk is an art one: eyes! We talk about how to draw them, adding meaning and expression, the way different cultures use them, different styles for doing eyes, reflection, shadow, focus and a million other things! Eyes anchor a face, they're THE most important landmark because humans are instinctively drawn to them as are most other creatures because eyes are an ancient thing that connects most animals, not just mammals but birds, reptiles, fish, crustaceans, arthropods, arthropods,...
Dec 12, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 665
We're talking about parody and its evil twin satire. There are good parodies and bad ones but we feel the better parodies are the indirect ones that make fun of and exaggerate the theme or the vibe of something rather that simply doing a direct copy but with jokes; For example, Austin Powers and Kingsmen are indirect parodies of spy films, Blazing saddles is an indirect parody of Westerns, The Princess Bride and Shrek are indirect parodies of fairy tales, Galaxy Quest and the Orville (first seas...
Dec 05, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 664
This Quackcast tackles the issue of AI comics on Drunk Duck. We're discussing either a ban or rules that would enable them to be posted under conditions. We also talk about AI generated imagery and the issues with it and well as its future and the relationship between it and artists. This is a very complicated and much misunderstood subject. First, there are two main types of generative AI: we'll call them ethical and non ethical. Ethical AI is trained using licensed and copyright free material....
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 663
Webcomic communities have different cultures, but why and where do they come from? DD's culture is pretty chill, we're reasonably neutral and accepting of a wide range of ideas and perspectives, we're egalitarian to a very high degree, we don't do cliques, we don't exclude, we don't tend to jump on culture wars… We don't like tribalism of partisanship. So why are we like that? Well the culture of DD is strongly tied to our distant origins in 2002 back when we were formed, 21 years ago in the ear...
Nov 21, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 662
Stakes are a part of a story. What does a character want? What means the most to the character? What are they after, what do they care about? Stakes can be really subjective like that and they can also be objective and more universal like death, debt, a threat to a home, nation, planet or even the universe. The most important thing though is that you can communicate the value of those stakes to the audience! It doesn't actually matter WHAT the stakes are as long as the audience understands that ...
Nov 14, 2023•59 min•Season 1Ep. 661
Multiverses are really popular in fiction right now, eg. Dr Strange into the mouth of Madness, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Flash, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Rick and Morty, and The Loki TV series (which I love). So what is a multiverse and why is it used? Basically when multiple universes coexist at the same time, either there are a few and they're widely different or they are infinite and every possibility exists. In the real world the idea of multiple universes is purely the...
Nov 07, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 660
Happy Halloween! The time of spookiness and ghosts. Spooks messed up the cast so the sound quality is really bad I'm afraid, I tried to do what I could to fix it though. This week Banes, I, and Tantz are chatting about Halloween and related subjects like scary movies and things. I personally only like comedy horror, or whacky horror films where things are taken too far so I don't identify with the characters and feel bad because of it. I find I identify with characters in film far too much (if i...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 259
