UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)
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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!

I now pronounce you…(?)

Posted on December 16, 2020 by Clint
You know what’s wonderful about the Internet? You can type a word and “pronunciation” into Google and come up with an audio file of people speaking it. That’s not something I had as a kid, and oh how my reading and writing vocabulary often outpaced my ability to express verbally. It doesn’t help to be dealing with English, which even as a native speaker is a confusing mess where we pretend there are rules, but it seems like the only real rules are that there are no rules. Take for example the word “subterfuge,” which comes from the same root as “subtle” — the Latin “subter-” which as you might also guess is the root of “subterranean.” It’s all about being sneaky or unseen or underground (the last one literally in the case of subterranean). Alas, I first ran across “subterfuge” reading the Vampire: The Masquerade RPG in the 1990s and associated it more with subtle, thus for years pronouncing it with a silent ‘b’. It turns out that subterfuge and subterranean both quite vocally pronounce “sub” unlike subtle which sounds more like “suttle” when said out loud. You can kind of blame the French for this (as well as a lot of other weirdness in English pronunciation) since they took the Latinate word “subtilis” but somewhere in Old French -> Middle English it became the word “sotil,” discarding the ‘b’ sound and ensuring a very confused Clint hundreds of years hence. Unlucky King Harold took an arrow to the eye in the Battle of Hastings and the rest, as they say, is history. Anyhow, this phenomenon can present some unique challenges when you’re writing books or comics or such where the words are not spoken aloud. Hell, it’s even cropped up during get-together parties back in the day where I met people I knew from an MMO and discovered I’d been pronouncing their character name all wrong all this time, and vice-versa. Sometimes you’re dealing with foreign languages and your reader may be totally unaware that “Siobhan” is a gaelic name pronounced to sound sort of like “Shuh-VON,” not “SEE-oh-bon” like I sometimes hear in my head to this day. Sometimes you’re making up entirely new words or languages and hoo boy, that’s something a reader can’t even look up unless you yourself put out a pronunciation guide. Tolkien did, but how many of us read it? Well, Peter Jackson I suppose, and bless his heart for it. So Rosa first mentioned “specie” in passing back in Issue/Episode 3, and while that’s not a word I made up, it’s hardly in common use anymore. How did it sound it your head when you read it? Well, if you pronounced it as if it were the singular of “species” — SPEE-shee — you are correct! But species is always plural and refers to animals, while specie always refers to coinage. Same Latin root, “form or kind,” no French interpolation, and yet English breaks the rules yet again by having the meaning change completely depending on whether or not you stick an ‘s’ on the end. But at least the pronunciation is consistent. On the other hand, in the comic before the current one I had the cops shout out “freeze, speecer!” at the would-be thief of said coins. But it would be pronounced “speesher” wouldn’t it? Here’s where I’m in trouble making up a word and would have to be generous if someone heard it in their heads with a straight “s” rather than “sh” sound in the middle. Specier or specer or spesher all lost out in my composition raffle. Perhaps I will regret this decision in the future, but onwards we go. It is perhaps appropriate “specie” was first uttered in the comic by Rosa, whose own last name I am rather convinced a good portion of the readership hear in their heads as “am-uh-RILL-uh” when she uses the Spanish pronunciation of “ahm-uh-REE-yuh” and it does not help at all that Texas has an actual town called Amarillo which is pronounced the first way (with the “l” sound), because Texas. So if you hear it that way you’re absolutely forgiven, though I still reserve the right to joke about it in the comic at some point in the FYOO-churr.