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Oh, you can complain, or quit reading, or both, but it isn’t really grounds for a lawsuit. What am I babbling about? Mood whiplash: when a work of fiction veers between emotional extremes so quickly it can leave your head spinning. One of the more well-known variations is the laugh spot that’s followed immediately by something calculated to make you scream instead, such as the infamous “come down here and chum this” scene in Jaws. That’s an example of it being done well, while the climax of The Phantom Menace was such a confusion of scenes that even those who worked on it admitted the emotions being evoked were flitting so fast as to become close to white noise.
I think I’ve touched near this topic before when I was writing about what makes a horror comic, particularly in observing that so-called “camp” horror has a long and bloodily brilliant pedigree in comics like Tales From The Crypt or films such as Brain Dead/Dead Alive. It seems like a good portion of us enjoy laughter mixed with our terror and don’t have much of a problem switching the two up, or even feeling joyful and scared simultaneously. If that weren’t true, amusement parks probably wouldn’t invest in fun houses, much less rollercoasters.
Zombie Ranch is a much more low-key affair for the most part, in terms of both horror and humor. Arguably it’s more of a matter of serious vs. comedic, and from the start my intention was to swerve back and forth over the line between the two; sometimes gently, sometimes sharply. I hope I laid the seeds for that tone with the very first Episode/Issue, mixing enough light and dark so that no reader would get past that first arc without realizing what they’d be in for in the future. I think Dawn’s art also helps with this, since it’s not overly gritty while also not being cartoony (except of course, when we’re doing those TV cartoons).
Have we succeeded? Well, according to the comments on various pages we’ve evoked all sorts of reponses, and they’ve usually been the emotions we were aiming for, whether it was sorrow, or laughter, or even a mix of both. Heck, evoking any response at all is something of a victory for an artist, but it speaks much better to your meager skills if you’re not desperately backpedaling and claiming your piece is meant as comedy when it clearly wasn’t .
Zombie Ranch was never meant to be comedy or drama, horror or humor, but something that hopefully allows for all those aspects to co-exist and tell an interesting story. If you’re still reading I can only guess that you’re appreciating that mix. But hold onto something–the last few pages have been pretty light, and it looks like Muriel’s decided we’re about due for a dark turn…