UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

5 thoughts on “Issue 22 Cover”

  1. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    Ooohhh … He looks – desperate.

  2. Zombatar

    No hat. He lost his hat. Which had a lot of his personality. Alert! Alert! We have a Lost Hat emergency! This is Not a Drill! Alert! Alert!

  3. Scarsdale

    Hang in there, I’m a retired fireman, and those pictures/videos have me sweating… The closest thing to a forest fire I ever fought was when a stupid tried to burn raked leaves on a windy day. 4 houses! Mostly grass and bush fires but, yeah.

  4. Clint

    Good news, we are back at home and there was a home to return to. It’s been a crazy week and a serious near miss seeing as several other homes on our block burned. Terrible stuff but the Ranch persists.

    1. Honzinator

      Welcome back.
      My mom’s whole town, Monrovia, seems to have survived so far, too, but it ain’t over yet.

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Issue 22 Cover
Posted on January 8, 2025 by Dawn

Traditional post-issue comic cover! Episode 23 is currently TBA but we're hoping to have the first page out on January 22nd so as to not leave y'all hanging from the proverbial cliff for too long.

[1/9/2025 NOTICE: Some of you may know we live in the Greater L.A. Area and if you've heard about the wildfires here: yep, we're currently evacuated from our home and still unsure as to its fate. We grabbed our computers and backup drives so whatever happens we still have our files, but definitely expect some delays and cross your fingers that the worst we're going to end up having to do is throw food out of the fridge due to power loss.]

[1/11/2025 UPDATE: Good news, we are back at home and there was a home to return to. It's been a crazy week and a serious near miss seeing as several other homes on our block burned. Terrible stuff but the Ranch persists.]

Implied foreshadowing…

Posted on April 19, 2017 by Clint
In fiction writing tropes, there’s the concept of the asspull: a moment when the writers pull something out of thin air in a less-than-graceful narrative development, violating the Law of Conservation of Detail by dropping a plot-critical detail in the middle, or near the end of their narrative without Foreshadowing. As you might guess from the description, this is something supposed to be avoided since it tends to annoy the audience — or at least any audience that’s halfway paying attention. As an oft-time audience member myself, I agree, and yet, here I am in this week’s comic suddenly having Rosa using a device we haven’t seen before to do… something. What’s my excuse? Implication. Or I guess I could say, this is something that hasn’t been directly foreshadowed but could be considered “in the toolbox” (or in this case quite literally the toolbelt). This is why we don’t throw up our hands and quit the theater in disbelief when Luke Skywalker can pilot a spaceship he’s never flown before down the Death Star trench. He drove a landspeeder, right? His father was “the best starpilot in the galaxy,” right? He used to bullseye womp rats in his T-16 back home, and does anyone watching Star Wars for the first time have any clue what a T-16 is? Nah, but it sounds right. Kid’s a natural. Roll with it. If Frank suddenly pulls out a beeping device and starts scanning things, I’ve got a lot of explaining to do, but Rosa? For the sake of narrative shorthand, I’m making the bet here that the audience will no more question her having certain electronic diagnostic tools than they would her having a wrench or screwdriver. I’m thinking that from my point of view, that would just make sense to me based on her presentation so far. In fact I daresay the readers are properly primed to not blink if she hops into a helicopter and flies it, though they haven’t seen her doing so before. It’s her talents and resources that have been properly foreshadowed, and those can be riffed on now without having to account for every last thing, so long as (and this is important) those things wouldn’t have come in handy for solving a situation prior to this one. Tl;dr — if you have a character who’s a cop in, say, Los Angeles, you shouldn’t need to show that they’re good at driving fast in traffic or shooting a gun (unless they happen to be really, really good) because that’s part of the presumed skillset. This is where Law of Conservation of Detail actually favors leaving those details out, and implication is enough to move the story along.