The Drunk Duck Quackcast

Looksmaxing is a stupid made-up concept designed to be used to market appearance based scams at young people, mainly males, the way the beauty industry has been doing to women for decades. What it actually consists of is immature, undeveloped young people using plastic surgery, cosmetics, and digital filters to fake the features of a 30-40 something adult: prominent jaws, brows and cheekbones, thi...

What's your process? We all come up with ways of working that are better for us but one of the traditional issues for webcomics was always "digital Vs analogue". That's ALWAYS been more complex than it seems because no matter how analogue your working method is, it will HAVE to be digital at some point if it's a webcomic because the comic has to get online somehow. So there are zero fully analogue...

Drunk Duck has been around for 24 years now and in that time we've been the home for thousands of creators. We're a happy collaborative community that celebrates people's personal creative efforts, all for free, though we do super appreciate people's support through advertising and Patreon. Above all we are egalitarian and community driven, we support diversity of style, talent, and since it's pri...

This week we're talking about whether it would be ok to live in the world of your webcomic. This was a fun idea proposed by Takoyama in the DD forums and we thought we'd explore it! Then we expanded it to various cinematic universes. Would you like to live in your own webcomic world or someone else's and if so, which one? And which cinematic world would you like to live in? Out of all our own webc...

We're chatting about The Imposter Syndrome! And then that bleeds over naturally to the Dunning Kruger effect… Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome in your comicing or professional life? I think it's one of those things that we all have at one time or another. It's the feeling of "I don't belong", "people are relying on me and I really don't know what I'm doing", "they're going to find out I...

What are some of the future things you anticipated back in the day? For me it was a bunch of technological stuff to make my art easier and thankfully some tech people had the same idea and actually made that happen! I remember when I was an art student back in the early 90s and we were asked to design our ideal studio. For me it was a room with the typical stuff you need as a visual artist: big wi...

We're chatting about Content Vs Art! In the world as it is now we have a distinct content creator economy online, that's changing and maybe going away but for now we still have it. "Content" is anything people produce in order to be consumed by others and its generally used to make money or maintain or increase the popularity of the creator. There's no need for quality, production is the important...

Catchphrases are things that can be used to make characters more recognisable and instantly familiar. It can really help them connect with audiences! But when used badly it can make them cloying, irritating or even hateful. This quackcast was inspired by Banes' use of a catch phrase on his latest page of Continuity Falls: "Ah'll be Gosh-Durned!". We also chat a bit about how content creators in ge...

The DD comedy promotion month is coming to a close so we're having a Quackcast focussing on comedy in general this time. Tantz, Banes and I talk about comedy, how it works, and what makes something funny, and ironically that's one if the least funny things you can talk about! There are a lot of different kinds of comedy: puns, slapstick, cruelty based comedy, taboo based humour, humiliation based...

This is the second part of our Manipulation focussed Quackcast, and we have a special guest: Gunwallace! This time we're talking about manipulating your audience to think or feel certain things that you want them to in order for your story to have a greater impact. Gunwallace was here to help us with the humour aspect because getting people to find things funny is a challenge all in itself! It cou...

Taboos are generally things that are considered "forbidden" by society for various reasons, but what we start with are personal taboos rather than at the society level, but we do talk about that too. Taboos for me in humour are animal cruelty, sexual violence, racism, sexism and ableism, all to varying degrees but animal cruelty is the main one. I really hate it when a joke involves killing or har...

We're talking about the changing depictions of sexuality in media over the years. A big misconception is that trends are purely linear, so a popular belief is that things started out all very pure and safe and gradually degenerated into a kind of sexy free-for all… which is not true. Humans have always been the same, sex is a massive part of our cultures, since the first media existed sex was a pa...

Tantz developed an idea to promote DD creators by doing themed months. DDers were asked to come up with themes that fit various months and when those came around we DDers were asked to nominate creators and their comics to be promoted as part of that themed month. March was chosen to be the Women in Comics month to coincide with Women's History Month. So in this Quackcast we're celebrating our fem...

This topic is about manipulation and manipulators. This is a super broad topic because manipulation is everywhere: not just unscrupulous people but in normal communication, advertising, story writing, art etc. for good, evil, and purely neutral objectives. But for the purposes of this cast we got Tantz to use her expertise to limit it down to mainly focus on people. So what IS manipulation? It's g...

Many times in your writing you reach a point where things just peter out and you can't seem to move beyond. We're not really talking about a traditional writer's block here though, it's more like running out of puff, "out of steam" so to speak… You get your story and or characters to a point and then "what now?". Maybe it's because the content of the current story no longer fits with the script yo...

This Quackcast was inspired by a remark about a certain character trait in fiction and not meeting anyone like that in reality. It stuck a chord with me because people often complain on the internet about fictional tropes that "don't exist in reality", and yet in my lifetime I've frequently met representatives of most tropes in the real world. So I thought we'd chat about popular character tropes...

Our Quackcast this week was inspired by a post I made in the DD forums asking about songs that had a big impact on people in their formative teen years. This sort of thing is such a pertinent subject in 2026 when stupid people are thinking they can replace creativity with the soulless pastiches created by AI- Real humans are the sum of their creative influences, jumbled into a gooey mental soup as...

We're doing a cast on background colouring. There are a million was to do colour for your backgrounds, the only important thing is the finished result, it really doesn't matter how you get there, as long as it's not with AI, but learning how others do things can always be helpful. For myself I got where I did by looking at the great work of others and trying to get the same results, plus a LOT of...

This Quackcast was recorded on the 14th of February so our cast was about Valentines day and romantic love stuff! A day named after a martyred Christian from the latter days of Rome who was beaten and then beheaded. Apparently he advocated for the right of Roman Legionaries to marry so that's where the love and romance association comes from… Which is interestingly ironic to me because the true me...

Myths and legends are a massive part of our culture. We have the original versions of them that still stay with us, mostly intact, but because of how important and well known they are we're always getting new versions of them that are changed and added to to reflect our contemporary culture. Big stories like King Arthur, Robin Hood, Beowulf, the Odyssey, The Journey to the West and many other stor...

Today we're talking about bad feedback. This was inspired by Tantz's newspost about the webcomic management site Hivemind two weeks ago that used belittling tactics and bad feedback to break down and control the webcomic artists who were managed by the site. Bad feedback can be extremely harmful to a creator. We're not talking about harsh criticism, we're talking about useless criticism who's only...

We're doing another Quackcast on the separation of the art from the artist, which was inspired this time by Gunwallace's Thursday newspost about the death of Dilbert comic artist Scott Adams. I can usually separate the art from the artist and I used to really enjoy Dilbert but he seemed to have a sudden personality change into strange politics and conspiracy thinking during the 2016 US presidentia...

We're talking about the glory of war, or rather the hollowness of it. Not just war though but the symbols of power and violence associated with any kind of conflict, from something like a sword or pistol, all the way up to fighter jets, tanks and warships. These are all objects that viscerally symbolise power more than anything else, whatever appeal they have is rooted in their ability to enable t...

Murder mysteries are a very popular genre, in fact they're one of the main fiction genres and probably one of the biggest. They generally consist of one or more murders, people who try to find the identity of the mysterious murderer, their motive, method, and weapon, and a few red herrings to hopefully keep you guessing till the denouement (the big reveal), at the end! There are a lot of different...

We commonly think of conflicts as being good guys versus the bad guys, especially when we look back at history. When we learn more about them we see that things are in shades of grey rather than black and white, and clever war fiction will include quite a bit of that greyness. But the funny thing is that when it comes to real world conflicts, people involved in them often do not have the luxury of...