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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!

Magic helmets

Posted on January 27, 2010 by Clint
This week’s comic puts a few more tidbits of zombie-related information out there for you readers, or at least starts to. Chuck tends to ramble on some. It’s probably all that drinking before noon. I have to admit, every time I actually get around to presenting more of what’s in my head (and in my notes) to the public, I feel a certain amount of nerves. Even in the case of a bizarre setting like Zombie Ranch, I want to keep a level of consistency to things; and so, once a concept is out there, then I’ve moved past the point of consideration to the point where it’s “in production”, and I can only hope it continues to make as much sense as it did when I was mulling it over. Gotta get things written sometime, though, or you might as well not be writing at all. If all else fails I can always pull a dream sequence trick like the 8th Season of “Dallas“, right? I kid, I kid. In truth, I suppose I can count my blessings this is a two-person operation. I don’t have many people to bounce ideas off of, but there’s none of the issues that could crop up if someone else was writing the comic next month, or even next week. Anyone who’s a fan of long-running TV shows or comic book characters knows how much of a 90 degree turn can happen as creative teams rotate in and out. Sometimes it’s a right turn (ho ho), but a lot of other times the continuity goes haywire so badly that things either shut down on a sour note, or the next creative rotation has to resort to have someone waking up from a bad dream. Sometimes that can happen even with the same people involved on the creative end. The Star Wars prequels are a fine example of that, and I’m still trying to pinch myself awake from that particular bad dream. It’s probably the single greatest pitfall of any fantasy/sci-fi world: that world can have whatever screwball justifications and pseudoscience it wants to come up with, as long as it then makes the effort to stick to it. Call it internal logic or what you will, it just boils down to not having Hobbits fly in the second book if they didn’t in the first, unless you have a very, very good reason. Otherwise your audience will likely get confused. Possibly angry. Or if I may borrow an apt phrase we use in the bad movie viewing club my friends formed: “Wait, what?” Some media properties play more loosely in tone than others, so you can give them more slack and just enjoy them for what they are. Since I’ve started writing regularly, though, I sometimes feel like one of those former film students who notice every time someone in a movie has a handkerchief in their pocket in one shot and is missing it in the next. I also know just how hard it can be to communicate clearly with a creative partner, even if you happen to live with her (cough, cough)… so I then wonder if it’s really the writer’s fault, or some wires got crossed between the script and the final. Case in point, I watched an old episode of Farscape recently where the hero knocks a couple of guards out with a shovel. Now, Farscape is definitely not on the “hard” side of science fiction, and is something you should in general just roll with and not try to analyze; however, the guards the hero knocks out are both wearing thick steel helmets that cover their entire skull and neck area. So part of me is now thinking of the writer seeing the finished result, and cursing the names of the director and the costume designer for putting those helmets on the guards. I highly doubt the helmets were called for in the original script. Maybe the shovel wasn’t either. I will probably never know, but the end result is magic helmets that give no actual protection from concussion. “Wait, what?” Anyhow, very minor on the scale of things that don’t make sense, and from a show that never really made much pretense about making sense in the first place. But I’ll probably think about it again next time I see something similarly strange, and I still hold out the  hope of minimizing any magic helmet issues in my own works. Oh, and my apologies to anyone who thought this blog might be about Elmer Fudd singing opera. I only advertised magic helmets, not spears.