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11 thoughts on “539 – A Knife In The Dark (END OF EPISODE 22)”

  1. Keith

    Why am I not surprised.

  2. Scarsdale

    Typical, it’s always someone else’s fault. Revenge is not just best served cold, but by stupid too. “This is all your fault!” Which is wrong, but in his head, it’s right.

    1. steelraven

      It’s also been heavily hinted he has already been brain washed by the zombie worshiping cult.

      1. Scarsdale

        Which, no doubt, made easier because of that under-lying feeling. People are always looking for a scape-goat…

    2. Clint

      I don’t know if you got my callback by intent or not, but it’s great to see almost the same words echoed! https://www.zombieranchcomic.com/comic/203-breaking-worst/

  3. RC

    Honestly, probably the first time he’s ever taken control of and done ever in his life. There’s a reason why they kept him. Give a dog that’s been beat all its life a whiff of conference and control, you got a problem.

  4. Crazyman

    Imagine his surprise when he stabs a pillow. 😜

  5. Zombatar

    He isn’t in control, RC – he’s probably drugged to the very dilated eyeballs, probably with Datura. Back on p.443, Eustace is shown holding a Mojave Rattlesnake on a stick while the Brujefe milks it into a glass. Mojave venom A is a paralytic neurotoxin, like tetrodotoxin. Tetrodotoxin was thought to be part of the legendary Haitian “zombie powder”. The other part was Datura, which contains scopalamine, which messes with memory and concentration, and is supposed to render victims docile and suggestible.
    The question is, where did he get his current dose, and did a little drone whisper in his ear?

    1. TKG

      Except Datura doesn’t do that. You’re thinking of the compound Scoplolmine (AKA the devil’s breath) which generally comes from a specific plant, Borrochero (Brugmansia arbora) that is native to Columbia that the gang in question probably would have had access to. It’s active compound obliterates free will, your conscious, you can function as normal but you are totally open to suggestion which is what happened to McCarty here. Datura just makes you trip mad balls and maybe die, but it does not make you a puppet.

  6. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    Me lleva la chingada !

  7. TKG

    I’m betting money there’s no one in that bed and it’s a ruse to get him caught.

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539 – A Knife In The Dark (END OF EPISODE 22)
Posted on December 25, 2024 by Dawn

Happy Holidays, all! That's a wrap (heh) for Episode 22 just in time for a Christmas cliffhanger! Hope we don't twist the knife too much...

See y'all in 2025 when Zombie Ranch continues!

The meat of the matter…

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Clint
There’s horror, and then there’s horror. Sometimes it’s the little things that bring the apocalypse home, as Douglas Adams knew when he wrote in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about Arthur Dent trying to wrap his brain around the destruction of the entire Earth:
England no longer existed. He’d got that — somehow he’d got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, had sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonalds, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. Arthur passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.
Comical? Yes. But also a recognition that horror and loss can be as subjective in their own way as art. Shortly after starting this comic, I posted a blog detailing some previous concepts of zombie ranching I had run across, like the game Zombie Rancher, and I mentioned how their idea of people eating the zombies as a delicacy made me look elsewhere for wrangling motivation. While there’s a fantastic dose of irony in the idea of people consuming zombies, out of respect for those who came before I chose from the beginning to move in a different direction, subverting the assumption that the “greenies” were being gathered for food. Admittedly I may have been too subtle about it, since at least one review of the comic proclaimed they were being gathered for food, and I remember on our first convention outing that Dawn was repeatedly stating to passerby “No meat like aged meat!” until I had to ‘splain to her that might give people the wrong idea (writers are such a buzzkill for artists). I’ve already said as much in my World FAQ a long time ago, but with this week’s comic, here it is at last out in the open. Zombies, whether they were once people, cattle, or prairie dogs, taste like utter crap… and the more I thought about that second part, the more I realized I’d created a rancher’s worst nightmare. Hell, it even kind of gives me the willies. Dawn and I both like our steak, and the idea that the last one I had might suddenly end up being the last one I ever had? Oh, sure, it wouldn’t kill me to go without, and for you vegetarians out there you’d give a collective shrug, at best, but that’s when we get back to the subjective horror thing, and you think about the impact on people whose livelihood for as long as they can remember has revolved around cattle. Not just them, but generations before them. That’s pretty damn personal. That’s the kind of thing that might have you sobbing for your mother. So yeah, civilization as we knew it went to hell, people died, people didn’t stay dead, and humanity pulled through only after some very, very bad years. But the crashing realization of a Texas without beef? Submitted for your approval, that for one Chuck W. Zane, that was horror, indeed.