The QuackCast

Today we're talking fans! Isn't it great to have them? We're all fans of something, but as webcomicers having fans means they're a dedicated audience who care about your creative output and send their love and appreciation to you- this really helps you stay motivated and inspired to keep on creating and producing new work. Here we talk about our experiences with fans and of BEING fans. It helps that we're fans of each other. But we also chat about some of the things we're fans off. What...

In the year 2020, the world had been devastated by a global pandemic, life had changed forever… It's 2021 and our 4 unlikely heroes have banded together, a topic borrowed from the wise and gracious Emma Clare… My fave “infodump” in fiction is the narration by Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona. My least fave is the massive long description of fish and how submarine equipment works in 10,000 leagues under the sea by Jules Verne (the novel). What are you most fave and least fave...

Gina Carano who plays Cara Dune in the excellent Star Wars franchise Mandalorian has been fired, as we all know by now… It's a great series, really one of the best incarnations of Star Wars since the original trilogy, and Cara's character was pretty cool. Though I personally didn't really like her lunk-head costume- Fully dressed characters in SciFi with bare biceps always look stupid to me for some reason. Doesn't matter if they're men, women, anthros etc, it's just ugly, especially when...

Weird one this week! A monneyless system in a working Scifi utopia. This was based on an idea Banes came up with talking about Star Trek and how the federation has “evolved beyond money”, We discuss if this is possible, why it is and how it is. That means no need for money substitutes like credit or barter either. It's a really interesting topic and a brave choice for a world setting. The most common type of scifi world by FAR is a dystopia so the fact that Star Trek is a working utopia (at...

Pitface asked people how doing webcomics has helped to shore up your teetering mental state this past year. We got some responses to that and we also added our own thoughts to it. It's an interesting question though isn't it? This is a webcomic focused site, we're all creative people so webcomics tend to be a big outlet for us. How does having personal control over something YOU create and that YOU are responsible for, help you stay stable and centered when the rest of the world has seems...

This Quackcast was inspired by Pitface, who is concerned out the mental health of her fellow webcomicers. She even started a thread about it in the forums. The cover image is a reference to the cover of “Metal Health” by Quiet Riot. Tantz is a qualified psychologist, so she's uniquely qualified to talk about this subject! People are having difficult times coping in this time of isolation and global pandemic so we thought we'd address that and mental health in general. Tantz is extremely wise...

When our jobs are shown in fiction they usually get it wrong. We talk about HOW they get it wrong here… Pit tells us all how she's basically Indiana Jones and Lara Croft rolled into one LOL! …or the opposite of that, I can't remember. How does YOUR job differ from what they show in movies and TV? Special… -SEE the led Zeppelin shirt Pit harangues me for in our Patreon vid Next Week's topic: Mental illness Quackcast - anhedonia, narcissism, depression, dysmorphia, trauma etc! The...

The Mandalorian is pretty unique in that he keeps his face hidden almost the whole time. This is very rare in TV and movies, the rule is that we HAVE to see the actor's face, so they rarely even keep on hats let alone remain fully masked! Yes, there are examples of it but they're few and far between. It's very cool that they've allowed the character to remain hidden for most of the show and he's much cooler for it because it allows the audience to fill in what he really looks like or just...

Happy 2021 everybody!!!!! For this fun first of year Quackcast We do a commentary and reaction to the Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta classic sword and sorcery animated movie from 1983, Fire and Ice! Tantz and Banes have never, ever seen it before so it was a new expereince to them and maybe to YOU as well? Fire and Ice is a simple fantasy story about evil prince Necron who wants to rule over all the lands using his control of a huge glacier. Brave Princess Teegra, Larn (mullet head), and...

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!! Blame Mr Banes for this one, he's also the man responsible for the great cover art! Haha, he originally came up with the Quackcast topic: How do you build tension in a scene? There are a lot of ways! We talk about some of them here… Time limits on a scene, impending deadlines, a character dying but they can still be saved, misunderstandings, something the audience knows but the characters don't, decompressed scenes, closeups of faces, weird...

This is the time of year you typically spend your money on other people… but we wanted to talk about what we spend our money on when we're spending on ourselves and indulging our own passions… just because this is the time of year we can digress and get a bit less serious about things. I talk about my passion for collection unusual vintage hats and antique sabres from the Napoleonic era and on. Tantz talks about her vintage 1940s era newspapers and the history behind them. Pitface talks...

Escapist fiction Vs Gritty and real style fiction… Furwerk-Studio made an interesting post about this subject. They were annoyed at people who dismiss escapism as something lessor or inferior to more gritty and realistic work, so we decided to tackle both sides and take some extreme views on the subject, both for and against! A few years ago Simon Peg made some comments related to this very subject and got a bit of backlash (links in the notes). The idea is that escapist stuff keeps us...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...