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!).]

Spring cleaning

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Clint
A couple of years ago I made a blog post about the practice of creators going back and “renovating” their webcomic, basically fixing up their early work with a new coat of polish matching their later efforts, and the pros and cons of doing so. It remains a controversial subject, and man, sometimes it’s really tempting to revisit our earlier chapters, but our biggest worry is that dwelling on the past to that degree will impact our present and future. Now that we’ve got our Kickstarter underway it’s even more tempting. If someone comes to look at our work, will they be turned off from pledging money towards the print volume because the first pages have a rougher look, particularly in the lettering? Possibly. People familiar with webcomics would probably understand, others might not. But trying to fix that is a bigger undertaking that it might seem. So, insane man that I am, I announced my intention to at least rework some lettering for the print volume if we’re successfully funded. The art will still stay mostly the same because Dawn’s going to have all sorts of fulfillment to have to deal with, but now that everything will be collected together in one discrete package I want to give the reader a better sense of consistency. Lettering can be an important part of comics storytelling, as I’ve also previously discussed, so this isn’t something to be done lightly,  but on those occasions where I’m looking to change more than just the font involved, I’m hoping to change things for the better. For instance, it was only comparatively recently that I learned how to do a nice looking curved stem for word balloons, and because of that there are a lot of panels where the stems are “elbowed” at sharp angles. I want to preserve those angles for any electronic dialogue like the cambots or walkie-talkies, but as I go through this touch-up process I’m trying to make it so people are always speaking with the more organic feel of the curved stems. There are also cases where, because of need to meet deadlines or whatever, the flow of the dialogue isn’t as optimal as it could be, so I’m having a look at those pages as well. It’s a time consuming process, so in a fit of optimism since the project is over 80% funded now, I’ve actually already started. Ideally I want to be done by May 10th or shortly thereafter so there’s no extra time wasted in moving on to the printing/rewards stage. It may seem masochistic, but honestly I’m finding it an oddly soothing and rewarding exercise. I think it’ll be a nice feature for the TPB. Will we replace the online pages with those new versions as well? That I’m not so sure about. They stand as one version of Zombie Ranch, our previous print issues another, and the trade volume will be a third. Can’t tell how far you’ve come if you lose sight of where you’ve been, right? We’ll see if that still makes as much sense to me then as it does now.