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.]

[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!).]

Timey-wimey

Posted on February 3, 2016 by Clint
Several of my good friends are pretty obsessed with the TV series Doctor Who, from whence comes the partial quote titling this blog where the titular Doctor tries to explain how time and determinism work.

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually — from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint — it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.”

If that sounds like nonsense to you, well, yeah. In fact my quick summation of the premise behind Doctor Who is that “it’s about a master of time and space who is always rushing to get somewhere.” I’ll let that sink in a moment. My second summation of Doctor Who is that it’s one of the most successful framing devices ever created, which is why I feel it’s lasted and entertained generations of people in one form or another for more than half a century. Aside from a few constants, a writer for Doctor Who can dream up basically any story, set in any time and place, with any characters they choose. Why does the Sonic Screwdriver work on this door but not that one? Why is there any dramatic urgency in getting back to the T.A.R.D.I.S. “in time” to travel to a spot ten years in the past? Please, people. You are just prisoners of your linear, subjective viewpoints. Sit back and enjoy the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey ride. In other words, seeking a sense of canon and continuity in Doctor Who is a good way to drive yourself mad, especially since the show itself cheerfully doesn’t give a damn. Writing for the show must be an exultant sense of freedom. I’m honestly not sure I could handle that much freedom, in fact. But the fans of the show are so used to just accepting the idea that pretty much anything can happen at any time. Zombie Ranch, on the other hand, is a much more down to earth setting where (media interludes aside) the locales tend to be local and time progresses in linear fashion. The occasions I’ve gone “out of sync” with it have usually been through the device of a camera showing “recorded earlier” type footage. Today’s comic marks the culmination of me messing around with something a bit more risky, where I ended the last episode on the morning after the McCarty departure, then spent the pages of this episode so far rolling back and filling in the blanks of the night, until finally it’s come back around once again to Suzie spying the smoke. I didn’t really give any caption hints about all that until now, and it’s theoretically such a big departure from the usual progression that I risk confusing everyone. But theoretically, it’s also pretty fun to try something different. I haven’t abandoned the idea of cause to effect — though presented out of order to the reader, things are still in order to the characters — but it was time to see how timey-wimey I could get.