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!).]

Celebrity mush

Last week was pretty rough for a lot of people. Both David Bowie and Alan Rickman passed on, and that caused a lot of emotion. Me? I looked at it as both having had long, awesome careers, and the thought that 69 years old is a respectable age to check out. Could they have done more? Sure. But I shed no tears. I didn’t know either man personally, so why should I? My aunt’s death last year, of course that affected me deeply. I knew her. I knew what she meant to me and our family, and that she had just retired that year but still had so many plans and things she wanted to accomplish. Most of all, I couldn’t help the grief in my gut which would well up occasionally even weeks or months afterwards. But celebrities? Even ones who created works that really affected me, or seemed to be snatched away while they were still young, leaving that void where you feel like they gifted us with maybe only a small fraction of what could have been? I don’t think I’ve ever had a deep reaction to their deaths. Howard Ashman (the lyricist of Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, etc.) was a guy I considered a genius who was unfairly snatched away by AIDS at the age of 40 — younger than I am now — and so suddenly that the libretto for Aladdin had to be completed by Tim Rice. I remember being upset about that in 1991, wondering why a guy like Ashman was dead while Dan Quayle persisted in drawing breath, but I didn’t break down weeping in public the way I saw people do when Princess Diana died in 1997. I guess it’s the idea that sometimes these people become our role models or affect our lives deeply enough that their departure hits us in emotionally gooey centers, even perhaps years or decades after we stop keeping track of them. We don’t know them. We never really knew them. We may never have even met them in person, or if we did, it was while being one of thousands at a concert or shaking hands and exchanging a few words in an autograph line — hardly the stuff of intimate familiarity. Yet the symbol of who they are in our heads and hearts remains a powerful thing, powerful enough to move many to tears even if my own ducts remain dry. Perhaps that makes me the weirdo. In any case, the work of people like Rickman, and Bowie lives on, and what good work it is. I may not get mushy about it, but I admit I may have queued up and listened to “Under Pressure” a few times last week — and if there’s an afterlife, it’s cool to imagine Bowie and Freddie Mercury finally getting to do another duet, while Rickman gives one of his serene half-smiles in appreciation.