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!).]

Order and chaos in creation

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Clint
The creative process can be a funky beast. I remember reading one of Alfred Hitchcock’s storyboards for North by Northwest where he detailed the famous cropduster chase scene right down to weird little things like Cary Grant’s leg flying awkwardly upwards just so on one of his dives for cover (as you’ll see in the 89th panel shown in this presentation). Creators like Hitchock and Stanley Kubrick were well-known for being nearly tyrannical in their attention to detail and insistence on the finished product matching the vision in their minds. You might argue their films were finished before they even started. Was there any room for improvisation? For changing circumstances? In Kubrick’s case there had to be, since there was no way in hell he could keep a lid on someone like Peter Sellers,  and in point of fact it seems he didn’t even try. The rest of the production might have been tightly controlled, but whatever Sellers said or did while the cameras rolled tended to make its way retroactively into the script, as if there were spots there marked with the cinematic equivalent of “This Space Intentionally Left Blank”. It’s funny because Kubrick’s far from what I might think of as an adherent of “seat-of-your-pants” storytelling, but clearly he had some tolerance and even encouragement for it under the proper circumstances. Hitchcock I’m less familiar with, but film productions are such complicated things that surely he must have had to bend at times? (cue cameo appearance where he steps out and gravely informs me not to call him Shirley). I find it impressive when someone has that level of drive and vision, birthing worlds and stories whole cloth right down to the smallest minutiae. Conversely, there are several classic films and classic moments in films out there that were more immediate and organic in their development, and yet no less enjoyable as an end result. Rutger Hauer’s final monologue in Blade Runner. The ‘shoot the swordsman‘ scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Pretty much the entirety of Casablanca. Somewhere in this tug of order versus chaos lies all art that ever was created and all that ever will be created, but at each point of the spectrum there are examples of greatness. The creative process may be a funky beast, but it takes all comers, and that’s a fairer shake than most things in this existence of ours.