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.]

The author is dead, long live the author.

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Clint
So there’s a new review of the comic out, courtesy of the fine ladies over at Girls Like Comics. I thought the reviewer had some interesting things to say, particularly the notion that Zombie Ranch could be thought of as one of the ultimate takes on the over-saturation of the zombie genre: the idea of the zombie being commercialized, mass-marketed, and ultimately tamed. There’s no question in my mind that back in 2009 when I started putting this story together, I was only willing and able to do so because I felt this particular take might have something new to say in the midst of what even then was arguably a crowded market. I had no intent of capitalizing on the trend, because trends are damned fickle things, not to mention they can be a double-edged sword (Alan Kistler  outright stated back in 2011 that he refused to look at any review submissions he got that had anything to do with zombies, regardless of other factors). Anyhow, whether the “zombie bubble” collapsed in a few days or a few years, I still figured we had something unique that could outlast it. That was important to me. But although I certainly haven’t shied away from a certain amount of social commentary in my writing, and I certainly had the notion that zombies were potentially being done to (un)death, I never actually had the intent of thematically equating the taming and processing of our zombie herds (for profit!) with the glut of zombies in popular culture. Does that make the reviewer wrong? Nope. Actually, it’s kind of a cool interpretation, and it didn’t stop her from recognizing some of the more intentional dramatic and satirical themes I’ve put in. It wasn’t that long ago that I brought up the concept of Death of the Author, where the creator’s intent is not the end-all be-all of a work. It’s a particularly interesting phenomenon in the context of serially produced webcomics, where a fan often is able to just up and ask the creator(s) what they meant a certain scene to convey or even give their own theories on why things are happening or what a character’s motivations are. I’m quite guilty of responding to more than one instance of this with a Word of God in the interest of limiting confusion, and sometimes I wonder if that’s a good habit or a terrible one.  Maybe I should be content to leave more things up to interpretation rather than speaking out with a voice of (potentially stifling) authority. After all, sometimes the alternate interpretations can be pretty interesting stuff.