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Pasadena Comic Con
Dates: May 24
Location: Pasadena Convention Center, 300 E Green St, Pasadena, CA 91101, USA ( MAP)Details:We will be at the Pasadena Comic Con on January 26th. See some of you there for this one day event!
Purchase tickets online at here: https://www.tixr.com/groups/pcc/events/pasadenacomiccon-pasadena-comic-con-2025-115248
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San Diego Comic Con: SP-N7
Dates: Jul 23 - 27
Location: San Diego Convention Center, 111 Harbor Dr, San Diego, CA 92101, USA ( MAP)Details:Clint & Dawn Wolf will be at San Diego Comic Con, as Lab Reject Studios. We will be at booth N7 in Small Press.
6 thoughts on “541 – Graverobbers”
Crazyman
“Oh, *that* kind of grave robbing? Lead on, Chuck!” 😈
Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)
What? I say “What”?
Keith
Heh, this is going to be fun. Tradition says you need to drink at least one bottle of MD 20/20 before going to the graveyard.
Honzinator
At first I was thinking of something like a potato battery … nope!
Scarsdale
If you take a dead “D” cell battery, take out the carbon rod from the center, cut a strip of galvanized sheet metal about an inch (2.7 centimeters), take a small jar for canning, suspend the rod in the center and the strip on the side, pour in drain cleaner, you’ll get 1.2 to 1.4 volts DC. 10 of those connected to an inverter will give you 120 VAC at 0.5 amps. Do NOT keep them in the same area you live in however, the fumes will burn your lungs. Just something I learned in chem class in high school. You’d have to top-up the jars every few days, however. Any type of acid will work, even salt water. I think the teacher was a survivalist…
nbaldbiz
Scheffler, Hovland and Conners Share the Lead at P.G.A. Championship
Jordan Spieth, who needs a victory at Oak Hill to complete the career Grand Slam, and Justin Thomas, who won last year’s tournament, just made the cut at five over.
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541 – Graverobbers
WonderCon 2025 is coming soon, so the next comic is planned for April 9th.
In the meantime, relevant previousness for this week's page:
https://www.zombieranchcomic.com/comic/223-surrounded-by-film-end-of-episode-9/
https://www.zombieranchcomic.com/comic/483-solar-systems/
A little back-and-forth discussion
“Steven Forbes turned me on to the following rule of thumb that was supposedly given to Alan Moore by his editors at DC comics. (If it’s good enough for Alan Moore, it’s good enough for you.)
– No more than 35 words per panel.
– No more than 25 words per word balloon or caption.
– No more than 120 words on a page.”
Now anyone who has read From Hell knows Alan Moore eventually wiped his Northampton-born arse with those dictates, a good example of which is the page shown here. But I understand why the dictates are there. Writers—even experienced writers—get too wordy and suddenly there’s no room for the art, or you’re unnecessarily repeating the visuals in textual form. If you’re self-editing, it’s worthwhile to keep things like this in mind. They may seem arbitrary (and they are), but they will keep you honest about whether or not you really need to wax loquacious at a given time. Then there was this:“One word balloon contains one concept.
1. Something’s been scaring the cats lately. Miffles hid under the bed all morning.
2. Plus, I keep hearing these weird rumblings at night.
Punctuation goes a long way towards capturing the nuance of speech. Consider the difference between “Get in here” and “Get. In. Here.”
Both of these are great points, especially the first if you happen to be someone who is regularly struggling with where your word balloons should begin and end. But have you ever considered how word balloons and captions are themselves are a form of punctuation in comics? Think about the definition of a paragraph: “…a group of sentences with one topic.” That sounds an awful lot like “One word balloon contains one concept”, doesn’t it? I would go so far as to declare a good rule of thumb would be that if you would start a new paragraph in prose, you should be starting a new word balloon in a comic. Mind you, the reverse notion doesn’t hold as true for me. There are times where I feel that a prose version of “Yes. I am.” would be better served in a comic by separate word bubbles, depending on just how much I want those words to have weight to the reader, and trying to fit some of Charles Dickens characters’ speeches into a single word bubble seems like an exercise in eye-squinting insanity. Comics can and should be able to break apart (and reduce) textual paragraphs in the service of a greater visual understanding. I’m not done talking about all this by a long shot, but for now I leave you with an example of just how much the choice of how word balloons are placed and structured can affect a comic, from the pages of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3. We3 was something of a take on those old Disney “lost animal” movies like The Incredible Journey, where a group of somehow abandoned pets have to survive danger on a long trek to safety— but in this case, the “pets” are escaped secret military experiments given limited sentience and wired into powered armor suits. The dog, known simply amongst the group as “1”, has been leading them “home”, and at this point in the narrative the skeptical cat, “2”, finally presses him to define what exactly “home” is supposed to be, since the dog doesn’t seem to have any actual destination in mind. 1’s (quite beautiful) response? “Home? Home is run no more.” Or that’s at least how it might appear in prose. In the original comics, here’s how it’s presented (click to enlarge):Calendar
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