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!).]

Biological needs

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Clint
I remember the very first part of Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide was a chapter devoted to establishing the physical rules of his version of the zombie. Here’s what the zombie virus (Solanum)  does. Here’s how long, on average, it takes to incubate. Here’s what the motor skills of the zombies are like. On and on, and you know what? It’s fine and fascinating stuff, and further than that is pretty crucial to establish early on before the rest of the book seeks to give advice on how to deal with them. Zombie Ranch, by comparison, might frustrate someone who wants to know all the ins and outs of its version of the zombie as soon as possible. We got some of the more important bits (and bites) established in Episodes 1 & 2, but for all the media interludes and occasional narration by Suzie or Chuck, it occurs to me that I still have my share of “biology notes” left so far unshared with the audience. But this is a different kind of story, with different kinds of primary characters than the researchers and doctors that could hold forth in other zombie tales. As Chuck demonstrates in this week’s comic, he himself doesn’t feel it necessary to know everything there is to know about zombies so long as he knows what’s important for his purposes. He also brings up the disquieting implication that such knowledge might not be encouraged outside of the processing labs and a few specialists, meanwhile blathering about how he’s convinced zombies need a certain amount of sunlight. Is he crazy? Maybe. This is actually the part I love most about not having started off revealing every last detail of how zombies work in our Weird New West — the reader speculation that occurs as a result. The picking up on certain hints, like the scene with the goat in Episode 3 leading to people figuring out zombies were incapable of climbing, without us ever needing to explicitly say that. Meanwhile I’d like to think that the story has continued to successfully progress based on the information known. It probably helps that I really do have those notes, but at the moment it seems more fun for everyone and better for the narrative to keep them coming in small installments rather than a big dump.