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!).]

Mining the metaphysical

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Clint
I suppose it’s a writer thing, but I can be downright entertained by multiple meanings. For example, the verb “mining” could refer to the extraction of valuable resources, or it could refer to setting explosive booby traps ready to blow up in someone’s face. As anyone who’s been around the Internet is no doubt aware, bringing up religion and/or spirituality is one of the most sure fire ways to set off a (figurative) explosion. And yet such matters are so intrinsic to the human condition that it’s a rare storyteller who doesn’t set foot in that minefield sooner or later. To go back to the other meaning, there are valuables there to be mined and brought forth. Judeo-Christendom alone has provided countless strikes of metaphorical bounty for writers throughout the centuries, not even counting instances of outright fan fiction like The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost (and those in turn have inspired quite a few spin-offs of their own). Shakespeare all but strip-mined Greek mythology for his plays, and now in latter days we strip-mine Shakespeare and posit “What if Puck was some rich dude’s executive assistant?” Now would an Ancient Greek who believed in the Gods and Goddesses and lived their life accordingly find those representations of Puck blasphemous?  Better yet, would they have been offended by, say, how Homer represented Zeus and Poseidon?

 “Unlike practical Greek religious observance, Homer’s portrayals of [deities] suited his narrative purpose, being very different from the polytheistic ideals Greek society used. To wit, the Classical-era historian Herodotus says that Homer, and his contemporary, the poet Hesiod, were the first artists to name and describe their appearance and characters.“

Sounds a lot like what we do to this day when someone decides to represent God as George Burns or Morgan Freeman. I like to think that the reactions are similar, where a minority might take offense but the majority will recognize it as fiction and have no more problem with it than a professional computer programmer does with the average Hollywood hacking scene, unless it’s particularly insulting. Anyhow, I don’t even want or need to bring personifications of myth or religion into Zombie Ranch, but I did feel that sooner or later I would want to touch on religious topics in a world-building sense, after establishing early on that Christianity in some form had survived the apocalypse. The easy mode most zombie (or apocalypse) stories seem to default to is splitting the world into two camps: atheistic amoral hooligans, or bloodthirsty religious fanatics — with the heroes caught somewhere in between, usually too busy trying to survive to really consider any theological questions. Now do extremists exist? Sure. Do they get more traction in times of crisis? By the lessons of history, absolutely. Are they the whole story? Absolutely not. Cults like the Flagellants during the Black Death came and went, but the core Catholic Church endured. And because endurance in the face of disaster is one of my biggest themes, it was a more interesting answer to me that institutions like the Catholic Church could and would endure the zombie apocalypse, and a couple decades and councils later would have discussed and resolved some of the theological issues that the walking dead presented. I find the Catholic doctrine of spirit (or “rational soul”, present only in man) versus the material soul which motivates plants and animals to be a fascinating concept, and one which I could easily see being applied to the riddle of the zombie. I lay no claim to being a theologian, but I believe the Church skewing in the direction of incorporating the new facts of life (or unlife) in the Weird New West–with as little change to existing doctrine as possible–to be a plausible outcome. Hopefully that doesn’t blow up in my face. If it does, well, them’s the breaks of mining, I suppose.