UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

5 thoughts on “Issue 22 Cover

  1. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    Ooohhh … He looks – desperate.

  2. 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. 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. 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. 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

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.]

[1/22/2025 UPDATE: In the post-fire chaos we forgot to mention, no comic this week. Things are intact but there's still cleanup of smoke and ash to do, insurance to wrangle, etc. We had a really close call.

Since we're between issues anyhow we're going to push the start date of Episode 23 back to February 26th. Gives us some room to breathe (literally!).]

What goes around comes around…

Usually the above phrase is used in strictly karmic terms, such as a politician passing harsh anti-drug laws getting arrested for possession. I am here to report a much happier and more literal interpretation. This last weekend was, of course, WonderCon 2016, and we had some good sales. Mind you, we had a great sale last month at the Long Beach Expo when Amanda Conner bought a copy of our Zombie Ranch trade, but one particular WonderCon sale was interesting for different reasons. We had a flyer sale. What do I mean by that? Well, over the course of our exhibiting existence we have given out hundreds — no check that, thousands — of postcard-sized flyers advertising the comic and website. We’ve taken them to parties, dumped them on freebie tables, and always make sure to have a stack at our own booth. They’re quite nice looking — good color on good cardstock, laminated — but the price per card is low enough that we can afford to spread them around in semi-frivolous manner. I say semi-frivolous because there’s still money involved and I like to have some discretion in where to “spend” them, for instance I probably won’t ever bother with the San Diego Comic-Con freebie table again, where you have to go through an application and approval process, at the end of which 1000 cards can go bye-bye in a single afternoon and it’s highly unlikely they’re going to stand out amongst the dozens of other swag items that will end up in someone’s bag by the end of the day. Which is assuming they ever got placed out at all — all I know is I handed over the box on Thursday morning and Thursday evening there were none around, with the staff shrugging when I asked. Since there was no appreciable bump on site visits that day or any of the days in the next week following the convention, all I could tell was that it didn’t seem to work out. Maybe if we’d handed over 10,000 flyers? But okay, at that point even when you’ve got cards costing less than a nickel a pop, that’s too much for a small outfit like ours to pour into a “maybe”. Still, it doesn’t mean there’s no point at all, because there was a man at WonderCon who walked up to our table and introduced himself, saying he’d successfully “found us”. No, he didn’t pull a gun at that point to erase us from the timeline. Instead he allowed that he’d seen one of our flyers. At a convention? No, at his school, Riverside City College. His memory wasn’t precise since it had been a few months before, but he thought one of his instructors might have had a small stack. He picked one up and thought Zombie Ranch sounded pretty cool, and found the site, and then a few months later while walking WonderCon decided to see if we might be there and spied our banner (banners… there’s a post for another day…). And then he bought a copy of our trade. Funky how in this digital world, some of the older analog methods can still pay off from time to time. What goes around comes around, indeed.