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This week’s comic puts a few more tidbits of zombie-related information out there for you readers, or at least starts to. Chuck tends to ramble on some. It’s probably all that drinking before noon.
I have to admit, every time I actually get around to presenting more of what’s in my head (and in my notes) to the public, I feel a certain amount of nerves. Even in the case of a bizarre setting like Zombie Ranch, I want to keep a level of consistency to things; and so, once a concept is out there, then I’ve moved past the point of consideration to the point where it’s “in production”, and I can only hope it continues to make as much sense as it did when I was mulling it over. Gotta get things written sometime, though, or you might as well not be writing at all. If all else fails I can always pull a dream sequence trick like the 8th Season of “Dallas“, right?
I kid, I kid. In truth, I suppose I can count my blessings this is a two-person operation. I don’t have many people to bounce ideas off of, but there’s none of the issues that could crop up if someone else was writing the comic next month, or even next week. Anyone who’s a fan of long-running TV shows or comic book characters knows how much of a 90 degree turn can happen as creative teams rotate in and out. Sometimes it’s a right turn (ho ho), but a lot of other times the continuity goes haywire so badly that things either shut down on a sour note, or the next creative rotation has to resort to have someone waking up from a bad dream.
Sometimes that can happen even with the same people involved on the creative end. The Star Wars prequels are a fine example of that, and I’m still trying to pinch myself awake from that particular bad dream. It’s probably the single greatest pitfall of any fantasy/sci-fi world: that world can have whatever screwball justifications and pseudoscience it wants to come up with, as long as it then makes the effort to stick to it. Call it internal logic or what you will, it just boils down to not having Hobbits fly in the second book if they didn’t in the first, unless you have a very, very good reason. Otherwise your audience will likely get confused. Possibly angry. Or if I may borrow an apt phrase we use in the bad movie viewing club my friends formed: “Wait, what?”
Some media properties play more loosely in tone than others, so you can give them more slack and just enjoy them for what they are. Since I’ve started writing regularly, though, I sometimes feel like one of those former film students who notice every time someone in a movie has a handkerchief in their pocket in one shot and is missing it in the next. I also know just how hard it can be to communicate clearly with a creative partner, even if you happen to live with her (cough, cough)… so I then wonder if it’s really the writer’s fault, or some wires got crossed between the script and the final.
Case in point, I watched an old episode of Farscape recently where the hero knocks a couple of guards out with a shovel. Now, Farscape is definitely not on the “hard” side of science fiction, and is something you should in general just roll with and not try to analyze; however, the guards the hero knocks out are both wearing thick steel helmets that cover their entire skull and neck area.
So part of me is now thinking of the writer seeing the finished result, and cursing the names of the director and the costume designer for putting those helmets on the guards. I highly doubt the helmets were called for in the original script. Maybe the shovel wasn’t either. I will probably never know, but the end result is magic helmets that give no actual protection from concussion. “Wait, what?”
Anyhow, very minor on the scale of things that don’t make sense, and from a show that never really made much pretense about making sense in the first place. But I’ll probably think about it again next time I see something similarly strange, and I still hold out the hope of minimizing any magic helmet issues in my own works.
Oh, and my apologies to anyone who thought this blog might be about Elmer Fudd singing opera. I only advertised magic helmets, not spears.