This Quackcast was inspired by world renowned idiot Robert F Kennedy Jnr. We decided to talk about writing dumb characters. I keep calling him John F Kennedy Jnr because I am also an idiot. Some context: he wants to remove approval for the life saving Polio vaccine and allow dangerous unpasteurised milk to be widely sold, among other things. He's a classic idiot. This put us in mind of fictional idiots. Some classic fictional idiots: Lil' Abner, Jethro from the Beverly Hillbillies, Breckinridge ...
Dec 17, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 718
Non-linear stories are a different way of telling a tale. There are many famous examples (Pulp fiction, Mulholland Drive etc), where the sequence of events isn't in strict chronological order. This style has gained a false reputation of being superior or more advanced or challenging to an audience than linear stories. That is of course false, the nonlinear style as been around since storytelling existed are more closely mirrors the way we think about stories and tell them to each other : We ofte...
Dec 10, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 717
Is it important to Identify with characters? This question occurred to me as I was watching a rather banal sitcom, Rules of Engagement. I love two of the stars, David Spade and Patrick Warburton, but it's not really that engaging a show, the humour is anodyne and a lot of it is based around traditional gender roles and expectations, but I forced myself to watch it anyway just to see more of the aforementioned stars. The only way I was able to get into it was because I somewhat identified with Da...
Dec 03, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 716
This is the third in our weapons trilogy and it's about what happens AFTER the ultimate weapons have done their work: Apocalypse! The end of all things… This term comes from the bible, with the Book of Revelations which talks about what happens during the end of the world, but aside from the myth it's a pretty real concept- there are a LOT of ways the world can end and has indeed ended for various civilisations throughout history. If you want to go riiiiight back there were the different mass ex...
Nov 26, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 715
Last week we had an overview of weapons throughout history and how it's a constant game of balance and oneupmanship. Now we're looking at future weapons and Scifi stuff! There's a lot of potential and a lot of interesting ideas you can use in comics and stories. We talk about a few of these and some of our faves, as well as our own inventions. Future weapons can take all different forms, many kinds of directed energy weapons, energy propelled projectiles, satellite based weapons, drone and robot...
Nov 19, 2024•46 min•Season 1Ep. 714
Today we have onboard with us our resident theme maker, our classic composer and musical genius! He does all the DD comic inspired themes that regularly appear on the Quackcast and has done so for the last 10 years! In that time he's done almost 600 musical themes. At the moment Gunwallace is the games-master of a Star Trek roleplay thing that Tantz, Banes, and I all do after the cast. He's based an illustrated story on it called “On the Edge” with art by Banes and Genejoke, and some by Tantz an...
Nov 12, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 713
This week we're talking the development of weapons, tactics and armour over the millennia. This is a fun little overview of everything from ancient stone weapons, to bronze, to iron, steel, guns, tanks, and jet-fighters and all the interesting stuff in between. Comic stories often involve literal conflict whether set in the past, the present, future, or fantasy and Scifi, so overviews are always good. There are a LOT of misconceptions when it comes to this stuff, we tried to address a few and co...
Nov 05, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 712
Halloween is on the way and we always do something different for it. This time we're doing a commentary for the 1987 vampire movie The Lost Boys! We even dressed in Lost Boys themed outfits for the Patreon vid which we will make available to ALL Patrons (even free ones), as a treat. The Lost Boys is an interesting comedy horror vampire film, it distils a LOT of really big 1980s style trends and yet it doesn't seem old fashioned or twee because it takes the viewer to the era and accepts you rathe...
Oct 29, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 711
-Cover image: female Sagittarius silhouette pic by Tantz that only took a moment to create but its impact was way larger! The fleeting greatness ducks of in the wind! This is a weird one based on a notion I had: Life and experience isn't typically based on long moments, rather it's all based on very short, lightning quick highlights: a song that lasts 3 minutes is massively striking and important and its impact can reverberate down through the decades, despite only lasting such a short amount of...
Oct 22, 2024•53 min•Season 1Ep. 710
Dragons are cool, aren't they? That's our subject for today, specifically the giant, monstrous beasties of myth, fantasy, and legend. They can be evil, they can be clever, they can be animalistic and wild, they can be friendly, they can be wise and all knowing, there's absolutely no common personality to dragons at all. There's this old idea that there are “Western” and “Eastern” dragons in myth, that is simply nonsense and just a relic of an older way of looking at the world. The truth is that ...
Oct 15, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 709
Cyberpunk is a cool genre we have never covered exclusively on a Quackcast before. But what IS cyberpunk? It's a subset of SciFi, it's usually near future, involves body modifications, grittiness, street level computer use, techno body modification, and hacking. At least that's the way it started. Formative influences on the cyberpunk genre were the first Tron movie, Bladerunner, and Escape from New York. Tron showed us what cyberspace was, while Bladerunner and Escape from New York gave us grit...
Oct 08, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 708
Fight choreography is tricky. We have it in comics, plays, movies and TV. When it's in full motion the trick is that you cant usually show things connecting so you have to work around the safety aspects in various ways. In comics you can show things connecting but how do you make the movement and the narrative believable and exciting just by using still images? It takes a lot of skill! Animation has to be the easiest way to depict fights because you can show the results of hits AND you can easil...
Oct 01, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 707
Being right on the internet is Sooo important… Being right in life and at all times is essential too! At least that's how a lot of us tend to think. Being told we're wrong, especially on the internet, can be so embarrassing and shameful that we try and avoid it at all costs. But realising you're wrong and being able to admit it and to learn from your mistakes is actually more empowering, powerful, and fulfilling than any amount of rightness can ever be. Being right in relationships is a much old...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 706
Today we're talking about setting the scene and communication through the art on the panel. It's a simple yet complex subject- how do you compose the scene to better communicate all the stuff like which character is more important, who's to be feared, if a person is coming or going, fight scenes etc. How do you compose stuff? Movie directors are a good thing to follow because it's a related art form. We mention the compositions of Spielberg, Sergio Leone, Wes Anderson and more. I came from a fin...
Sep 17, 2024•58 min•Season 1Ep. 705
The topic we're talking about today was inspired by my ruminations on Bullshido martial arts promo demonstration videos. These are the videos where a martial arts master shows off their skill in a patently fake demonstration, usually starting with breaking concrete slabs or wood and then progressing to a performance where they show how easily they can defeat all of their students who try and attack them. The really bad ones will pretend to channel “chi” (a fake energy) and knock down their stude...
Sep 10, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 704
Cross cultural influence is a marvellous thing and very enriching to creativity! It's lovely when you can see multiple cultural influences in things, whether comics, movies, art, fashion, music or anything else. It's inspiring and leads to new and more interesting things. I picked promo images from some recent Pixar movies Turning Red, Encanto, Coco, and Moana, because they're good examples of the process and what it can result in. The flip-side of that is “cultural appropriation”. That's where ...
Sep 03, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 703
Following on from last week with our Quackcast on faces, this week we're chatting about expressions, which is a very natural progression! expressions are a great way to enhance communication in comics. they can be fun to play with but tricky to master. Though when you get them right they really help lift your game. Exaggerated expressions are seen more in cartoony work rather than realistic styles but drawing good expressive faces still works well regardless, even if they ARE more subtle. One of...
Aug 27, 2024•57 min•Season 1Ep. 702
Drawing faces is one of the most natural things for us to do, and they're very easy for people to see that they're faces because animals are evolved especially to be able to see faces- people mistakenly think this is just a human thing but it's clearly something that happened much earlier. We're so good at seeing faces we see them where they don't exist (paradolia). So drawing them for comics should be super simple, should it? Well it is and it isn't. You can always get better at things and draw...
Aug 20, 2024•58 min•Season 1Ep. 701
We chatted about Greek Myths last week and found the subject so interesting that we thought we'd do a part two! So even MORE Greek myth stuff for Quackcast 700. There are just so many great stories like the myth of the Hydra and how it was so hard to kill because when one of its many heads were cut off it would just grow another one. Or the Minotaur that was trapped in a labyrinth under the palace of Minos in Crete in order to imprison him because he was a monster. The labyrinth was of course bu...
Aug 13, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 700
We're chatting about our fave Greek myths! Greek myths are foundational to a lot of Western culture, they're what superheroes are based on as well as all sorts of epic stories. Lots of scientific concepts and ideas are based on things from mythology. The stories resonate down through the millennia because they're so relatable and human- rather than being about stodgy perfect beings who live in a magical realm and guide their mortal charges like children, the Greek gods of myth have the same emot...
Aug 06, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 699
Hair is a weird thing isn't it? It's just a bunch of thin filaments that stand out and hang from the body, most visibly from the head. Everyone is bald as an egg underneath this coating of head-fur, but the floof on top takes on a life, body, and shape of its own even though the truth is that it's just thin threads all buffed up with a lot of air. Hairstyles can indicate class, status, wealth, occupation, style, coolness, lack of cool, age, date, and any number of other factors about a person an...
Jul 30, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 698
We present to you our latest Drunk Duck anthology comic: A Flock Of Dreams! This is an amazing collection of high quality comics by the members of our site, all connected by the theme theme of dreams. *It has a mature rating and is definitely not for kids! There is some nudity, violence and dark subjects. A Flock of Dreams features 166 pages and 13 different stories by our creators. They're sexy, comedic, mysterious, fascinating, dark, terrifying, and magical! We created this anthology in order ...
Jul 23, 2024•51 min•Season 1Ep. 697
We're talking about tropes that we like hate. Some we brought up were conspiracy theories, especially the ones that involve a whiteboard where all the info and photos stuck on there are connected by red string and the ones in anime where at the end of the episode a mysterious character looks at the action from a distance and says cryptically “ah, this is all going exactly to plan…” Others included Isekai, Life re-dos, power couples, Time loops, and 1930s style adventure. Oh, and one I hate is th...
Jul 16, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 696
Pop-Culture, and the way it's always changing… We fall in love with pop culture but it's constantly changing and new pop culture is always being created, which means that as time goes on less and less people will care about the same pop culture as you. And what you were into will become niche and obscure, even though at the time you fell in love with it, it was massively mainstream and all over the place! There are exceptions to this with things that are SUPER popular like Star Wars, DC and Marv...
Jul 09, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 695
Is your work consistent? It's hard to maintain consistency but it does pay off: consistency in art work, style, character, writing, humour, updates and every other factor. To aid consistency in commercial works they come up with a “bible” which has drawings of character from all angles, all their colour swatches, their outfits, accessories, weapons, vehicles, floor plans of buildings, etc, as well as descriptions of their characters and the story style. That sort of thing is a huge help and espe...
Jul 02, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 694
Betrayal is not a fave theme of mine in any media. I really dislike it, but it's so popular! We've talked about this one before but no one really remembers Quackcast 427 so we're having another crack at it! We talk about all the different aspects: political, love, country, loyalty etc and really have fun with it! What I dislike most about the betrayal theme is when a character lies to get into a relationship with another character, or betrays the trust of someone they're in a relationship with. ...
Jun 25, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 693
Benevolent racism, sexism, ableism, and whatever other “isim” is an interesting aspect of those otherwise negative things. It's not as obvious in its negativity, it's well-meaning and yet quite misguided. So what is it? The term “Benevolent” makes it seem nice and harmless and that IS how people mean it, but that's because they're a bit clueless and ignorant. Benevolent sexism, ableism, and racism is basically using a “positive” stereotype to characterise someone based on their ethnicity, gender...
Jun 18, 2024•58 min•Season 1Ep. 692
Thirst trap is the topic of today's Quackcast! What is a thirst trap? It's basically someone presenting themselves as very sexy in order to get attention for some sort of reason, rather than just happening to look attractive. So it's usually used for some sort of advertising purpose, to sell their OnlyFans, to get a date, or more conventional advertising. Today we're talking about it it terms of comics :) Years and years ago there ws an explosively popular comic on Drunk Duck called Craving Cont...
Jun 11, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 691
Mister V, aka Arborcides is our guest today, doing an interview with us about his huge project “Dozer Manifesto”, now finally completed! You can read the entire thing here on DD. It's about a fellow called Marv Heemeyer, resident of the Colorado town of Granby, and his decent into craziness, resulting in him creating an armour-plated, armed bulldozer, designed to be invulnerable, so he could crush the town and destroy his enemies with impunity. You might have heard of it being call the “killdoze...
Jun 04, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 690
What was one significant inspiring piece of pop-culture that a massive influence over your creative endeavours? All of us have had many, many different influences over the years but that's certainly NOT what we're interested in here, what we're talking about is that one thing you can remember that had a huge effect on you, why, how, and when. For me, I picked the time I saw the Tank Girl movie. It was all the way back in the mid 1990s. The movie didn't have much promotion so I didn't see it in t...
May 28, 2024•57 min•Season 1Ep. 689
