Zombie Ranch

Folks, I tell you: 13 years and 500 story pages of comics and sometimes you still feel like a complete newbie. Though now that I think on it, newbie might be the wrong term. Oldbie might be more accurate. We are weary veterans who have been through many scenarios at this point, and watched peers ebb and flow and even burn out completely. This comic has never been something sustaining us financially and probably never will be — but that’s okay. We just acknowledge that we still have a story to tell and people who want to listen, even if that storytelling has become intermittent. If you’ve happened across us at a recent convention you’ll know that a lot of gray has crept into my hair since 2009. I’m approaching nearly half a century on this planet and there’s no question that I don’t have the sort of energy reserves I had back when we started. Dawn is younger but as she likes to point out, she’s burdened with enough pre-existing conditions to feel a similar state of low-key chronic malfunction. It’s not great, and it’s not always easy to react to crises and changes, the latest of which was the website’s comic theme framework finally going haywire beyond fixing. We had been throwing around ideas for Comic 500 like doing a (non-realtime) AMA session where we’d take your posted or emailed questions and respond, and then all of a sudden our framework we’d been using more or less since we started went kaput and we had to seek out a new one. Fortunately Dawn found Toocheke, which was good to its word of enabling a simple migration from ComicPress/ComicEasel with data intact. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that simple (is it ever?), and since the changeover we’ve been having to figure out how to mimic some features and layouts we had with the old that don’t seem to exist in the new. Toocheke’s support people have been helpful but the process is ongoing and some of it is just going to be plain busywork, like just today I noticed all our character and location tags are missing. That means at some point I have to go through 500 comics and add them all back in, which leaves me wishing I had a personal assistant (don’t we all?). But hey, the comic is readable as intended again and we got that new page up for y’all, and Dawn and I are headed up to San Luis Obispo to see The Warning live in concert, even though there’s no way in hell I’m going to bounce around like I would have in my 20s. But I’ll be there and listening to a great band perform some great music. tl;dr: getting older sucks, but do your best with the energy you have, and even if all seems downhill, remember there are good things still to experience and do your best to enjoy the ride.