UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

4 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.

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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.]

It’s dialogical, Captain…

Posted on September 9, 2020 by Clint
So I believe I’ve mentioned that Dawn’s been (off and on) trying to write some comic scripts of her own, and this is where I’ve discovered certain faults of mine as a coach. Writing, especially writing dialogue, just seems to come naturally to me, and any time that’s the case it can be difficult to explain to someone else for whom it’s not as simple. I want to equate it to how it would be if I asked Dawn to teach me to draw faces. But then again any pro or semi-pro artist I’ve ever talked to, including Dawn, will tell you that drawing isn’t a matter of talent but of lots and lots of practice. Is it the same with writing? I’ve been in love with words nearly all my life but it’s not like I’m going through every paragraph I type over and over… Except, just now I backspaced and retyped that sentence about three times, and also realized it’s not really a sentence but evaluated the use of ellipses and decided to give a middle finger to Strunk & White because hell, it’s still a perfectly coherent thought being communicated. That’s a lot of thinking about a few words, isn’t it? I also have a habit of going back and editing things as fleeting as Facebook posts as I think of better ways to get my point across. Meanwhile one of the big reasons I never got into Twitter much was the inability to edit after the fact. Everything on Twitter is a first draft. It can be figuratively crumpled up and deleted (assuming no one has screenshotted it in the meantime) but it can’t be revised. I just went back and edited that second paragraph because on re-reading it I felt it had one too many uses of the word “over.” These blogs are something I consider highly informal, even disposable. Now try to imagine what I do with a composition I feel needs to be as perfect as it can be. The more I think about it the more I realize what an immense lifetime’s worth of prose I’ve composed, even if most of it will never see publication. Before the advent of graphical MMORPG’s I was an active participant in text-based multi-user roleplaying and I’ve recently poked at some old log files of play all the way back in 2002, and you know what? They hold up. I’m impressed with that Clint guy’s writing, much of which was improvisational and needed to be typed in real time within the span of a couple of minutes so that your scene partner(s) didn’t get horribly bored with you. I was having a great time, too, but now I’m wondering if it’s part of why I can rattle character dialog for Zombie Ranch off my keyboard with nary a hesitation. No secret method. Just practice, practice, practice.