The Drunk Duck Quackcast

Main characters with main character syndrome? What is main character syndrome? Well the way we're dealing with it here it's normally a snide criticism you level and someone who seems to think the world revolves around them, like social media "influencers", selfish self centred people, that sort of thing. Popular figures like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are great examples: they imagine the world sho...

A standard thing in stories is to have multiple plot lines. In short stories or when you're just starting out as a writer you tend to have a single line, the A plot, but as soon as you get a bit more experience and write longer stories you'll find the plots tend to branch and multiply, even if you don't always fully intend it. The usual is to have the A and B plots: the A is the main one that driv...

It's not the new year yet but this is the final Quackcast of 2024 and it's coming out on New Year's Eve! In this Quackcast we do a bit of a year in review. A bit happened this year… DD reached its 22nd year online being one of the oldest sites on the internet and definitely one of the very oldest free comic hosts next to Keenspace which doesn't really exist now. We released another DD anthology co...

Happy Christmas eve! In this penultimate Quackcast of the year we decided to have a free day and just chat about any subject that interested us at the time. Next week will be our final cast of the year when we'll do a year in review. We even went back to our roots and did some silly accents, mine were of course A-mazing! (they were pretty crap TBH) We touched on many subjects from the Adams family...

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 i...

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 e...

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 af...

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...

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 kind...

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...

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 g...

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 ye...

-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...

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,...

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 N...

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 h...

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,...

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 fo...

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 attac...

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...

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...

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 shou...

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...

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 m...

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, occ...