Episode 725 - Your fave comics as a kid
Feb 3, 2025
We're chatting about the comics you liked as a little kiddo this week! The topic was inspired by a thread in the DD forums. This is always a fun topic and I always have to mention Asterix because it was so amazing. This week Tantz had to bow out but we have Gunwallace to replace her, and Banes is back! Gunwallace is a fellow Antipodean, that means he and I share many of the same cultural touch stones, particularity the comic Footrot Flats. (Tantz is still on the Patreon only video)
Topics and Show Notes
Footrot Flats is a newspaper comic by the New Zealand creator Murry Ball. It's about a working sheepdog called “Dog” who lives on a farm owned by Wal, a single guy who works hard, drinks beer, and loves rugby. It's a comic that Australians saw as very “Australian” because it played into the mythological rural, working class image that we invented for ourselves, New Zealanders who have a similar history and felt the same, hence the shared popularity of this amazing very classically Kiwi comic from New Zealand.
Footroot flats comics be seen in many great collected works as well as an awesome animated film from the 1980s called “Footrot flats: The Dog's tale”. I fondly remember it for the hit theme song sung by New Zealand singer Dave Dobbin, “Slice of Heaven” which is one of my favourite ever songs. Gunwallace has even designed a cocktail inspired by it. I will list the recipe here and I urge to try it while listening to that song!
Cocktail recipe!
Slice of Heaven
— Dave Dobbyn & Herbs
50 ml Beerenburg jenever herbal gin
20 ml Drambuie
2 dashes bitters
Half-fill an Old Fashioned Glass with ice, pour ingredients into glass.
Add dashes of bitters. Stir gently. Garnish with a slice of orange.
We used : Sonnema Berenburg, Drambuie, Peychaud’s Bitters
-New Zealand Music Cocktails by David Tulloch & Michael
Sutorius
The comics you enjoyed as a kid are determined by what was available to you at the time. For me what I recall most are the newspaper strips like Modesty Blaise, Mandrake the Magician, Wizard of Id, Crock, B.C., Footrot Flats, Hagar the Horrible, Peanuts, Blondie, Denis the Menace (British version), Andy Cap, Torkan,The Far Side, Garfield… The comics I actually bought were the Commando war comics, Scrooge McDuck, Mad Magazine, and The Phantom, which was very popular in British Commonwealth countries. I loved Asterix but would only get those from the library. Looking back a lot of those comics were quite influential on my art style and even my outlook on the world in some cases. My character Pinky has a LOT of modesty Blaise in her look, and I can see that I thought of myself as Torkan!
Which comics did YOU like as a kid, which can you say STILL influence you now?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Snake in the Office - Chaotic, sexy, rocking, snake charming to layers of groovy electric guitar and a piano tiptoeing around with a charming little tune tying it all together like a fine Persian rug! A sinuous synth clarinet impersonates a snake charming flute while giving us a lovely 1920s feel.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Slice of Heaven, theme song to Footrot Flats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0pWejAnLUQ
Featured comic:
Rebellion the monster inside us - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/jan/28/featured-comic-rebellion-the-monster-inside-us/
Featured music:
Snake in the Office - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Snake_in_the_office/ - by Athorist, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 724 - America's Plutocratic classism
Jan 26, 2025
Is there a culture of plutocratic classism in the USA? I'm inspired by Trump's America and how people think that people like Elon Musk and him are above the law because they're rich, while conversely the lowest rank in society are the homeless and the poor. But what do I mean by “Plutocratic classism”? A plutocracy is a society where people's position is determined by their wealth, classism is our tendency to discriminate based on social class, put that together and you have people determining social value by how much money a person seems to have.
Episode 723 - Changing tech and design
Jan 20, 2025
We're talking about how technology and design changes so much over the years and how that can change things with plot in story and it can also help pinpoint the date of something sometimes better than other things like fashion. The biggest one we talked about were phones, which have changed so much over the last few decades. Universally connected smartphones mean huge story changes- characters can all look up whatever they need at any time, communicate with people instantly, entertain themselves, take photos and videos etc. That can massively affect plots!
Episode 722 - Main characters with main character syndrome
Jan 12, 2025
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 should bend to their whim, and normal rules don't apply, like a main character in a fictional story.
Episode 721 - A plot B plot
Jan 4, 2025
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 drives the story and the B is where you put other interesting junk like character development, villain stuff, comic relief, love interests etc. But it can get a LOT more advanced than that and you can have far more than simply A and B.
Episode 720 - Happy New Year!
Dec 30, 2024
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 comic collection, A Flock of Dreams (linked bellow), in which your Quackcast hosts collaborated on a comic together! We were really proud of that, Key of Dreams, our story was a real work of love, and you can read that in the anthology.
Episode 719 - Merry Christmas!
Dec 22, 2024
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)
Episode 718 - Dumbarses
Dec 15, 2024
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.
