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Last week’s comic represented a bit of a rarity for us, in that we actually went ahead and showed a person with his face half chewed off. For a comic named “Zombie Ranch”, we really don’t have much of a gore quotient, do we?
Well, it’s one of my pet theories that constant gore gets desensitizing after awhile. If you want blood and guts to have an actual impact on a reader, you dish them out sparingly. So we do. It’s not that we’re morally against showing horrible violence, so much as trying to find ways to make that violence be memorable when we want it to be.
Beyond even that, we make copious use of the so-called “discretion shot“, hoping to suggest things well enough to harness the power of your imaginations rather than Dawn just outright drawing throats being slit or people getting blown away by gunfire. Or Rosa vomiting.
Does it work? Well, honestly, implying rather than showing does run the risk of confusion, and we’ve fielded our share of comments over the years from readers who were left scratching their heads, or even outright misinterpreting what went on. It’s hard to tell just how big a problem that represents, since we might get a handful of such feedback at most, compared to a silent majority of hundreds of regular readers who never say anything. Did they fill in the blanks in the way we intended? If they didn’t, they probably didn’t feel a need to chime in with another “I don’t get it!”. If they did, they were probably similarly reluctant to post something like “Yeesh, come on, this is obvious.”
Zeke’s demise was probably our biggest example of this, and while I never expected anyone to figure out exactly what happened “offscreen” at the time, I reckoned by the time we got ’round to the glamour shot close-up, the clues would all be there to be pieced together. Yet the confusion still occasionally bubbled up, including people who thought Zeke had been shot. I just couldn’t understand that one at all, since Frank had very deliberately put his rifle away (on Suzie’s orders) and pulled out a Bowie knife.
But, you know, my first instinct is always that it’s somehow our fault. I didn’t set things up right, or maybe Dawn didn’t highlight some detail or other enough. Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to be subtle at all, that we’re just plain not good enough to pull it off properly. Less was not more, it was less.
Dawn usually takes the opposite tack and insists everything from our end is fine, and if a few people happen to miss out on what’s being implied, oh well. You’ll notice I’m almost always the one jumping into the comments with some explanation or clarification if people seem genuinely lost— most recently in, well, last week’s comic. Sometimes I feel like I’m explaining the joke I just told, which, again, feels like failure to communicate. The audience shouldn’t need creator commentary to understand what’s happening, right?
Dawn’s probably right, and I make a bigger deal out of this than I should. The comic comes out slowly, and for a lot of you is hardly the only comic you read. Many of you who responded to the poll about that indicated you’re regularly following a dozen or more. That, more than anything, is the likely culprit for people not catching fiddly details or remembering sequences of events that in real-world terms “happened” months or even years ago. Hell, I constantly run across people (both online and in person) who get the characters’ names mixed up or can’t remember them at all… which I could possibly be upset about if I didn’t do the exact same thing with other people’s comics, even ones I really like. It doesn’t indicate lack of love, so much as lack of RAM. We think about a lot of different things from day to day. I happen to think about my comic a lot. Other creators no doubt think about their comics a lot, and yeah, I’ve most definitely been on the other end of the awkward conversation that goes more or less like this:
“Oh man, I love your comic! Especially the funny old guy, uh… uhm…”
“Mr. Snoozle?”
“Yeah! Mr. Snoozle! He’s great.”
From that point of departure, the creator probably figures the chances of discussing his subtle foreshadowing of Mr. Snoozle’s fall to the Dark Side with you might be slim. Last year I got the opportunity to ask Jaime Hernandez if his lady superhero group the Ti-Girls was pronounced “TEE” or “TYE”, and he proceeded to point out that every single founding member had a “TYE” in their name. He graciously did not add, “Duh!”
I ponder if he didn’t do that, not just because he’s a nice guy (which he was), but because at that moment, part of him was wondering if my confusion was his fault. I’m pretty sure it was mine. It’s one of those things that just seemed so obvious in hindsight that part of me wanted to crawl away and hide, and another part was chortling “You were baffled people thought Zeke had been shot, eh? NOW look at you!”
But, you know, I think even though obsession and geekdom go hand in hand, it’s actually rare for a fandom to be more invested in something than its creator(s), at least if it’s that creator’s personal project. And the fans becoming that involved is a definite double-edged sword, if you listen to all those creators complaining about feeling like they’ve lost control and that people are focusing on minutiae to the detriment of the actual story.
Well, we still bull on ahead with the idea of showing less instead of more. It’s just the way I like to tell things, and if we really are bad at it, then my hope is we’ll eventually get better. I was gratified recently by hearing from someone who read through the comic again and picked up on a lot of little things they missed the first time. In my wildest dreams I even hope that one day, someone will notice a certain subtle feature of Issue/Episode 1 that we put in… but I can’t even really hint at what it is without potentially spoiling the joy of a natural discovery. And on top of that, it could also be not half as clever as I think it is. It’s probably easiest to see in the print issue.
Ugh, even that might have been too much of a hint. It’s possible I’ll live and die with not a single reader ever finding it, much less letting me know they did. That’s all right.
But I won’t deny it would be damn cool. And no, before you ask, it’s not a sailboat.