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.]

Weathering the “finger of god.”

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Clint
Well, I must admit that so far it hasn’t been a great year for us at conventions. The Long Beach Expo seemed to have very little in the way of people buying, and then the bottom line similarly dropped out on WonderCon, which for the last four years has been rock solid for us from a sales standpoint. We weren’t the only ones to suffer a surprising setback, and sometimes, when it’s five o’ clock on a Saturday and you’re at half the total you made at that same time last year (and you hope Sunday will somehow make up for it but you know that’s not going to be true) — sometimes the only comfort you get is the shared disappointment of your peers reporting they’re not doing so well either. Meanwhile you square your shoulders and just have to hope the next show will be better. Theories will fly at these times. Is the local economy just down for some reason? Were the admission and parking fees so steep people had no money left for purchases? Is the market for what you’re offering saturated? Was your booth in a bad place? Or maybe your entire section of booths? But unless a convention is so bad as to have no crowd, period, there’s usually at least someone who does okay. Or even phenomenally. I didn’t see it until I got home but two exhibitors I know (but didn’t get around to saying hi to at the show) posted that they’d had their best WonderCon ever, complete with exclamation points. Were they exaggerating? Were their previous outings so bad as to make 2017 look great by comparison? I mean it’s true, we still sold quite a few things, enough so our total would have been quite decent or even excellent for, say, a Long Beach outing. But on a WonderCon scale by our past experiences, it was bizarrely low. There’s of course a third option. I talked to one peer where the bottom dropped out of WonderCon for them last year, which didn’t happen to us. There were reports of an Artist’s Alley table being swamped with people seeking its product while the ones on either side were idle, and it wasn’t due to that middle table housing George Perez or some other luminary. Big booths and small reported feeling things were off, but there were probably still some of the big guys that won the jackpot or at least achieved their usual sales goals. Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense, like how tornadoes have been known to destroy one side of the street and leave the other side perfectly intact. Sometimes people call tornadoes “the finger of god” because of this phenomenon, like some unknowable higher power is guiding them according to an algorithm mere mortals can’t understand, and would go insane trying. When Artist’s Alley becomes Tornado Alley, there’s not much you can do in the face of what feels like human consumer habits rendered into a force of nature. Hard sell, soft sell, it doesn’t seem to matter. You just have to ride out the storm and hope that next time, the good side of the street is the one you happen to be on.