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Pasadena Comic Con
Dates: Jan 26
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
3 thoughts on “536 – Great State Of Tech Sass”
Anonymous
Amusing spam above … Things are about to get weird with Casa De Chuck!
Dawn
Ugh, I try to get to the SPAM quicker but we have a new kitty and I have been distracted. It is gone now. 😀
Anonymous
New kitty tops spam any day … and I enjoy getting to see it in it’s brief lifespan.
Latest Comics
#437. EPISODE EIGHTEEN
60 Jun 24, 2019
#436. 419 – The Doctor Is In (END OF EPISODE 17)
48 Jun 05, 2019
#435. 418 – Making Huachucas Cry
42 May 29, 2019
#434. 417 – Need Aid? Grenade!
46 May 22, 2019
#433. 416 – Secs And Violence
40 May 15, 2019
#432. 415 – Thudding Optimism
46 May 08, 2019
#431. 414 – Gun Control
41 May 01, 2019
#430. 413 – AK O.K.
43 Apr 24, 2019
#429. 412 – Apology Deflected
44 Apr 17, 2019
#428. 411 – Nope A Dope
43 Apr 10, 2019
#427. 410 – All Downhill From Here
46 Mar 20, 2019
#426. 409 – And Don’t Call Her Shirley
44 Mar 13, 2019
#425. 408 – Watching The Huachers
45 Mar 06, 2019
#424. 407 – Talk To The Ranch Hand
45 Feb 27, 2019
#423. 406 – We Interrupt This Broodcast
46 Feb 20, 2019
#422. 405 – Harsh Reality
45 Feb 13, 2019
#421. 404 – Greenscreen With Envy
45 Feb 06, 2019
#420. 403 – All The World’s A Soundstage
45 Jan 23, 2019
#419. 402 – Have Sword, Will Travelogue…
46 Jan 16, 2019
#418. 401 – Zoological Anxiety
43 Jan 09, 2019
Latest Chapters
Episode 22
Episode 21
Episode 20
Episode 19
Episode 18
Episode 17
536 – Great State Of Tech Sass
Welcome to Team Paranoid, Oscar! Spoiler alert: they really are out to getcha!
Next comic page planned for Nov. 20th. In the meantime, please accept this documentary evidence of new kitten Morgoth as he discovers the enigma that is the empty soda box.
Horror: a matter of intent
“Think of it this way: “occult” is a genre, “horror” is an intent. The former goes to subject matter, characters and settings. The latter goes to what the writer wants to happen to his or her audience. If they want them to be scared, that’s horror.”
Drawing that parallel back to humor again, this is a very, very succinct way to look at things. A gag strip could be set on a starship in the far future, or a fantasy landscape in the past, or just be focused on a group of Anytown, U.S.A. (or other applicable country) kids, but it all comes down to one thing: is the creator’s primary intent to make you laugh? Whether or not you actually find the jokes funny is irrelevant, the intent is what matters. Similarly, a work of horror’s primary intent should be to scare. Zombie Ranch, by Joel’s definitions, would be what he calls an “occult” comic, dealing in the trappings of the supernatural, but focusing on subject matter, character, and setting without necessarily wanting the audience to react in a fearful manner. In the comments on Joel’s piece (also worth reading), there’s some discussion on whether “occult” would be the proper term, but no matter what you choose to call it, the distinction has a lot of merit, especially because I agree with his premise that real horror is one of the more difficult things to pull off in a comics medium, and certainly rough to do in an ongoing serial with recurring characters. Comics, for example, make the “spring-loaded cat” moments so prevalent in horror movies largely useless gestures… the still page doesn’t provoke that visceral, instinctual recoil of shock that sudden sound and motion produce in us. It’s cheap, sure, but it’s effective. Joel names this, appropriately enough, “shock horror”. He then moves on to “disgust horror”, and argues that gore is also not quite as effective on the comics page as it is in film, or even books where the power of our own imaginations can be turned against us. But it’s the third type of horror that Joel does believe comics can do, and do very, very well. This is what he terms “creep horror”, and what I term “the horror of ideas”. This is the kind of horror that makes some of those old Twilight Zones so memorable, the kind that stays with you, keeping your brain churning with disturbing thoughts long after you turn off the TV or put the book or comic away. The kind that shines darkly in the best examples of comics like Hellblazer or Swamp Thing, such as when a character finds out she’s been having sex not only with the walking corpse of her husband, but with the walking corpse of her husband as possessed by the spirit of her twisted uncle. That’s stuff that still makes me want to take a bath to this day when I reflect on it. But it can be less graphic than that… it could be as simple as being the last man on Earth, finally having the time to read all those books you wanted to… but then you break your only pair of prescription glasses. I think it’s also entirely possible to delve into horror without it being your primary purpose, in fact it may arguably be the only way you can sustain a decent level of scare in an ongoing series of any kind… audiences need downtime or everything starts blending together and desensitizing, and desensitization is the worst enemy of scare. Would I consider the old Tales From The Crypt offerings to be horror comics? Absolutely! But they were collections of one-shots rather than a continuous narrative, constantly interchanging characters and stories. Maybe in that sense Joel’s definition is too strict, since not even a comic like The Walking Dead is trying to scare you all the time, nor should it. With Zombie Ranch, I’ve purposefully injected elements that I find horrific to contemplate, but after twenty years of it as their daily existence, the characters themselves have largely accepted it as normal. I’ve talked before about how resilient human nature can be even in the most horrible circumstances… somewhere along the line as the bombs drop and the bodies pile up, people decide it’s not really going to get better anytime soon and so just work it into their daily routines. The outsider asks, “How can you possibly live like this?!”, and the native responds, “Well, the war isn’t stopping. What else should I do?” On a smaller scale, you might think about how uncomfortable the idea of killing, gutting and skinning an animal is to a lot of modern day city dwellers. It might even be considered horrific. But if you live out on a farm, it’s just something you do. Is it sane? Is it right? Who sits in judgment of that? Horror, I still believe, is a very subjective matter. That’s why the intent of the creator is so important, and in my case, although there are times I’m writing Zombie Ranch with the intent to scare or disturb, I’m just as often looking to evoke other reactions out of you readers as I let the story ply its course. So is it a horror comic? Sometimes. Which, again, means it’s probably not really a horror comic at all, at least by my self-inflicted definition. But I can live with that. And hey, since you’re not expecting it, maybe you actually will jump when I throw the cat at you.Calendar
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