Keeping things straight (when it’s all crooked)

I remember when we first started Zombie Ranch, my ambitious intent was to use camera footage and “media interludes” for any and all instances of storytelling that were outside of the present timeline (as far as the comic’s world goes). We would freely roam through locations but any flashbacks, etc. would be through the gimmick of something filmed.

This proved to be more boring and limiting than actually clever, and so I abandoned it in favor of more flexible methods, particularly after discussions with some friends and fans indicated that no one much cared about the method of delivery so long as they weren’t confused. And let’s face it, the weekly format leaves plenty of time for the average reader to forget things that in “comic time” would have happened five minutes ago, because in our time it’s been two months. Heck, many’s the time I’ve seen someone in the comments refer to a character by the wrong name.

Don’t get me wrong, that last bit’s not a complaint, or at least not a complaint I wouldn’t be entirely hypocritical in making considering my own track record of forgetting names. But in any case, the past few comic pages have been an example of me really pushing things in a time-and-space sense. I’ve jumped us around from place to place before, probably most notably in Episode Six and Seven as the McCarty intrusion was going down and people were in all sorts of different spots doing different things. Those shenanigans I’m pretty sure I got away with. Now, though, I’m not only jumping around from place to place but jumping in time, and gambling that there’s just enough in the way of visual cues and captions for the reader not to become completely lost. Or at least not lost once all this is properly put together in a contiguous, “page-turnin'” fashion. For example, getting back to the camera gimmick, I wrote page 356 to be presented entirely through the lens view of Camera 7, as a recording of the past. But page 357 abandons this and introduces narrative voice-over captions even though the location is still the same. Partly because I felt the constant “CAMERA 7” labeling and TV Lines were growing a little bit much (my exact note to Dawn was “we know where we are now”), partly because panel 3 goes back to a reaction shot of present-time Suzie, and mostly because panel 4 would make absolutely no sense unless a parallel universe Camera 7 had intruded to take the story of Zombie Ranch interdimensional.

And now this week is another time-space jump sans camera gimmicks, hurtling back to where we left off with Rosa and Chuck in the last episode. Out of control, man.

Or is it?

I guess if people can wrap their brains around Doctor Who–a show I like to describe to people as “perfectly enjoyable once you accept the idea that a master of time and space has to rush to get somewhere”–they can wrap their brains around this. Or perhaps I’m just getting away with it for the moment because I keep you all in such perpetual confusion about what’s going on that additional layers of such are functionally imperceptible.

I don’t intend the latter and I think for the most part people have been following along just fine so far, but I admit I’m getting pretty crooked with the narrative right now and not necessarily always using the helpers I perhaps should be.

Maybe I need to start thinking about sepia tones again.

Time will tell.