Category: Writer’s Blog

WARNING: Very, very minor spoilers for The Last Jedi referenced below. In fact so minor I wouldn’t even bother with this warning except people have been threatening to flay each other alive over revelation of any content and I like having my skin where it is.

So there’s this biological concept known as parallel evolution, which basically boils down to the idea that similar characteristics can develop among species that have no common ancestors, or at least no recent ones. Bats, for example, evolved wings to fly in much the same way birds do. When the ancestors of modern cetaceans gave up on this whole “walking on land” schtick and returned to the ocean, they went back right back to fins. Certain configurations just seem to be gravitated towards as the best solution without any conscious imitation going on.

Similarly, I like to think variations on this happen in fictional circles. I mean nowadays it’s hard to imagine anyone being ignorant enough of Superman to come up with a super-strong flying dude and truthfully maintain they did so without any influence of previous archetypes, but we’re often all too quick to cry “rip off!” even in cases where it’s entirely possible that two similar characters or stories could be created by people who had no knowledge of the other work. Ideas blooming in parallel. After all, even if a bat resembles a bird and a dolphin resembles a shark, there are clear differences when you take a closer look.

So case in point, The Last Jedi debuts a new character named “Rose” who is a non-skinny lady in green utilitarian garb with a toolbelt, a medallion that’s important to her, and technical know-how. Whoa, right?

Except okay, she’s Asian. And more importantly, not particularly sneaky in manner. And…

I mean if you took Rose and combined her with the attitude, ethnicity and mannerisms of Sombra from Overwatch, that’d be getting a lot closer to Zombie Ranch‘s Rosa, but still there’s that idea of parallel evolution. Legally speaking, copyright law says that ideas cannot be copyrighted, only the expressions of those ideas… which is why you can publish comics featuring nigh-invulnerable super-strong guys that fly so long as they don’t stray too close to the Big S. How close is too close? Well, that’s why lawyers and courts exist, and people tend to have much stronger cases if they can prove, for example, that Big Studio A had Script B in their possession for an amount of time before passing on it but then producing Movie C which was suspiciously similar. It’s all very messy and usually ends in the Studio paying the aggrieved party a “shut up and go away” settlement which they might or might not deserve.

But anyhow, although shady rip-offs do happen, I feel that in most cases when someone comes up with a character or concept similar to yours, it’s best to give them the benefit of the doubt, especially when the differences are enough it’s a real stretch to say you would have even inspired them. At a certain point it borders on hubris. And hell, I long ago admitted that Rosa’s character was inspired by Tuco from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, but she’s come quite a ways since then, enough that I’d hesitate to describe her just in that configuration. She’s evolved, in parallel or otherwise.

If your understanding of irony is limited to 1995 Alanis Morrisette levels (or backlash thereof) you may not be aware that there are actually different subsets of the concept. At its base concept, irony is a matter of unexpected outcomes or juxtapositions: for example, the song’s line of “10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife” does not by itself fit the basic definition. However, if you went to an International Knife Convention and all the displays were about spoons, that would be highly ironic. I have personally been to “comic conventions” where the offerings of comics are sparse to non-existent, and that is ironic. Putting a convicted embezzler in charge of your corporation’s finances is ironic, and also very probably not a good idea.

But anyhow, once you understand the basics of irony, you learn there are flavors of irony beyond the basic, one of which is dramatic irony. I may have discussed it in one of my previous blogs, but for discussion’s sake I’m bringing it up again. Dramatic irony is a tension caused in fiction by the audience knowing something the characters do not, like an oblivious Character A being alone in a room with another character who we know is The Murderer(tm), especially when Character A brings up some crucial piece of evidence and The Murderer asks that age-old loaded question, “Who else knows about this?” and we’re now screaming at the book or screen for Character A to answer “Uhm… everyone! Told lotsa people, yep! Got a tape set to go live on the news at 6pm tonight if I don’t key in the secret code!” but no, Character A answers “just you and me” and they’re not long for this mortal coil.

Dramatic irony can be torturous to suffer through, especially if the writer cannot resist things like a lady on the deck of the Titanic shouting, “Oh darling, this ship is to die for!” But the unspoken compact is that it will eventually be smoothed out and brought in line — the characters at last also knowing what we know — and that provides some level of catharsis, ideally a powerful enough catharsis to justify all of our squirming. Stories with happy endings and tragic endings both indulge in dramatic irony and it really just comes down to a matter of timing: do the characters realize what the audience knows in time, or a moment too late to stop something irreversible? If Iago’s perfidy is uncovered before Othello kills Desdemona, if Romeo gets the crucial message that Juliet is only faking her death, then those plays end very differently. Then again there’s the example of Oedipus Rex where the irreversible actions (kill father, marry mother) have already occurred before the play even begins and the whole thing is just us waiting for the horrific realizations that will come to pass as Oedipus investigates the murder of the previous king Laius. The Greek tragedies are hardcore like that.

Sometimes dramatic irony smooths itself out in catastrophic fashion, a crashing wave after a steadily rising tide, like the climax of Hamlet which leaves the stage infamously strewn with both dead bodies and confessions. Sometimes it happens in smaller stages, puzzle pieces slowly clicking into place. With Zombie Ranch I’ve been erring towards the latter method, and additionally keeping some details held back from the readers so that reader and character ideally might make some discoveries (or at least confirm suspicions) in a simultaneous fashion. It may or may not work out depending on the reader in question but some of my personal favorite moments in fiction aren’t just outguessing (or “outknowing”) the character(s) but “being there” with them as the puzzle finally becomes clear. I gasp, they gasp, and hopefully there’s enough time left to avert tragedy (since despite all possible appearances to the contrary, I remain a sucker for happy endings). But even if it all ends in blood and tears like those Delphic foretellings so often did, achieving those moments where the dramatic irony collapses in a moving way sure does make for a good story.

Where “booking” in this context would be in the sense you might use it in, say, professional wrestling, i.e. “laying out in advance the general storyline…to include what the eventual outcome will be.”

Trundling further along that comparison, there is the mystery component present in all manner of fiction. Whodunnit? How’dithappen? Etc. A writer tends to have these answers “booked” even though the particular event might have occurred far in the past of the story’s timeline, although just like in wrestling there might be wriggle room for happenstance and improvisation depending on the circumstances. Like the concept of Schrödinger’s cat, even the most defined backstory remains in a state of flux until observed by the audience. If the truth is the answers have been left more nebulous (like say, in the TV Show Lost) then things might morph. But at some point the reveal has to occur, the box has to be opened…

…and that’s the scariest part, I think.

When the writer or writers open up the proverbial box and say, “Ta-da! The butler did it!” or “He was dead the whole time!” or “The girl was actually a guy!” — that’s nerve-wracking, especially if your fiction has been leaning heavily on the answer. For several seasons Twin Peaks asked us “who killed Laura Palmer?” and the honest truth was even they didn’t know until a botched camera job captured a random production staffer in a shot and birthed the idea of Bob.

I like to think I have a more solid grasp on my boxed-up cats than that, but even if you have it all rigidly plotted from the start, what’s to stop your “Ta-da!” reveal from being met by your audience with disappointment? What if they had it all figured out before even you did? Does their satisfaction with being proven right outweigh their lack of surprise? On the other hand, changing things up for the sole purpose of surprising people can just lead to disastrous inconsistencies, which are their own kind of let-down. I personally come down on the side of staying the course in that situation, where even if the reveal is met with disgruntlement (or worse, yawns) at least I can console myself that I’ve had months (or even years) to think it all through. If you have a suddenly deceased or departed actor you have to scramble to write around, that’s one thing, but a webcomic doesn’t worry about such matters.

So anyhow, here I am this week, opening the Zeke box and showing at last the precise circumstances that led to his fatal accident. It doesn’t seem like it’s been weighing that much on people’s minds, though, so I’m not feeling a huge bite of nerves. But it’s always been an important piece of the puzzle to me so it’ll be interesting to see the reaction, if any, as it takes a final form.

Well my Turkey Day binging didn’t go quite as comprehensively as planned, though I did make it all the way through The Punisher and all the episodes of Runaways so far. I found myself actually grateful to Hulu that they don’t follow the Netflix model and only dumped three installments on the public with the rest to be parceled out weekly. I just don’t binge well, after three or four episodes at most I need a break!

All that’s a long-winded way of saying I didn’t get nearly as far into Godless as I hoped I might when I brought it up last week, though what I’ve seen so far certainly hasn’t turned me off from continuing. It’s got a very classic Western pacing to it, that “slow burn” feeling that at least one person has also said of Zombie Ranch during its first arc (and I felt it a great compliment).

It’s not the same as nothing happening, though there are certainly people who see it that way and tune out in favor of more immediately rewarding fare. The slow burn is never just churning its wheels — there’s some over-arching tension, like a storm cloud on the horizon, which even if the characters aren’t aware of the audience most certainly is. In High Noon for example it’s the clock ticking down to the imminent arrival of Frank Miller. Unforgiven is interspersed with periods of quiet and violence but everything finally comes to a bloody head in Big Whiskey’s saloon as a vicious storm breaks both literally and figuratively.

Godless has its own storm on the horizon in the form of outlaw gangleader Frank Griffin (sheesh, between this and High Noon and Once Upon a Time in the West the Franks really get a bad rap!), who is portrayed as a force as deadly and destructive as one of the plagues from the Bible he’s obsessed with. You learn why he’s so obsessed with religion by the end of Episode 2 and it’s a bone chilling twist where he discusses his past and agrees with the accusation of his latest victims that he is a godless man after all, but that’s because the West is a godless country.

It’s a hell of a speech, and obviously of enough significance that the showrunners decided to title the whole series for it. In any case, I still have five episodes to go. Then I can share more of my thoughts on how this particular storm plays out.

It’s almost Thanksgiving here in the States, which also goes by the perhaps less controversial moniker of Turkey Day because yeah, celebrating the Native Americans and Pilgrims coming together a few hundred years ago has some problematic overtones considering what’s gone down between then and now. This is a case where it’s likely for the best to just embrace the modern pop culture view of the holiday as a time for getting together with family and friends and bingeing, both in a food and a media sense.

Even before the rise of Netflix, this was a time for television marathons, whether that came in the form of several concurrent games of (American) football, or episodes of The Twilight Zone, or perhaps most near and dear to the nerdy hearts of Dawn and myself, MST3k.

Which isn’t to say services like Netflix haven’t changed up the game even more, since hey, the traditional four-day weekend is a pretty opportune time to catch up on Stranger Things 2, or The Punisher, or even older show blocks that you never finished or even started. There is a fine-tuned degree of control to such bingeing that the old ways of just tuning in to an ongoing marathon cannot match, though such must ideally be balanced against the food comas or semi-comas many of us will be slipping into. Too much thinkin’ goes against the grain of just wanting to hibernate on the couch or easy chair.

But still, especially given the timing, I’m tempted to give Godless a go. At the time this blog publishes (or shortly thereafter) the episode dump of its premiere season should be live and it’s been a while since I’ve properly immersed myself in a Western. The scuttlebutt on this one so far sounds promising and the gimmick of a frontier town literally “unmanned” by a terrible mining accident, leaving the womenfolk in non-traditional roles as they deal with outsiders, has me intrigued. I’m betting there’ll be a Suzie-esque sort in the bunch. Perhaps more than one. Dare I hope for a Rosa?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMUiRYoc76A

In any case, if you’re living in one of the many nations out there for which this week has no particular significance then you’ll have a tougher decision to make on the use of your time. You also may be able to go out shopping without fear of dying, since Black Friday for me is another wonderful reason to just wrap up in blankets and stay the hell home. Alas, we do have to emerge long enough to drop off and pick up Dawn’s art pieces from LosCon — though perhaps not so alas if enough of them sell. We’re not exhibiting, but be sure to check them out in the Art Show if you happen to be there!

I remember when we first started Zombie Ranch, my ambitious intent was to use camera footage and “media interludes” for any and all instances of storytelling that were outside of the present timeline (as far as the comic’s world goes). We would freely roam through locations but any flashbacks, etc. would be through the gimmick of something filmed.

This proved to be more boring and limiting than actually clever, and so I abandoned it in favor of more flexible methods, particularly after discussions with some friends and fans indicated that no one much cared about the method of delivery so long as they weren’t confused. And let’s face it, the weekly format leaves plenty of time for the average reader to forget things that in “comic time” would have happened five minutes ago, because in our time it’s been two months. Heck, many’s the time I’ve seen someone in the comments refer to a character by the wrong name.

Don’t get me wrong, that last bit’s not a complaint, or at least not a complaint I wouldn’t be entirely hypocritical in making considering my own track record of forgetting names. But in any case, the past few comic pages have been an example of me really pushing things in a time-and-space sense. I’ve jumped us around from place to place before, probably most notably in Episode Six and Seven as the McCarty intrusion was going down and people were in all sorts of different spots doing different things. Those shenanigans I’m pretty sure I got away with. Now, though, I’m not only jumping around from place to place but jumping in time, and gambling that there’s just enough in the way of visual cues and captions for the reader not to become completely lost. Or at least not lost once all this is properly put together in a contiguous, “page-turnin'” fashion. For example, getting back to the camera gimmick, I wrote page 356 to be presented entirely through the lens view of Camera 7, as a recording of the past. But page 357 abandons this and introduces narrative voice-over captions even though the location is still the same. Partly because I felt the constant “CAMERA 7” labeling and TV Lines were growing a little bit much (my exact note to Dawn was “we know where we are now”), partly because panel 3 goes back to a reaction shot of present-time Suzie, and mostly because panel 4 would make absolutely no sense unless a parallel universe Camera 7 had intruded to take the story of Zombie Ranch interdimensional.

And now this week is another time-space jump sans camera gimmicks, hurtling back to where we left off with Rosa and Chuck in the last episode. Out of control, man.

Or is it?

I guess if people can wrap their brains around Doctor Who–a show I like to describe to people as “perfectly enjoyable once you accept the idea that a master of time and space has to rush to get somewhere”–they can wrap their brains around this. Or perhaps I’m just getting away with it for the moment because I keep you all in such perpetual confusion about what’s going on that additional layers of such are functionally imperceptible.

I don’t intend the latter and I think for the most part people have been following along just fine so far, but I admit I’m getting pretty crooked with the narrative right now and not necessarily always using the helpers I perhaps should be.

Maybe I need to start thinking about sepia tones again.

Time will tell.

I don’t honestly see myself as a writer who takes pleasure in cruelty to readers, and yet here we are with Darlene dying and Eustace revealed as accomplice to her murder.

I mean, for some of you this may well invoke joy. For many others, ambivalence. But at least a few of you have admitted to finding it gut-wrenching.

And honestly, I share that pain.

“Well in that case,” one might ask, “why don’t you not write this nasty fate for these characters? Why you gotta go all darkest-timeline-George-R.-R.-Martin on us?”

Well. That’s a damn fine question, and one I’ve pondered myself when a story I’ve been enjoying takes a dark turn. I find myself quite short-tempered if I feel like it’s unjustified, even with a creative property widely hailed as a classic such as the movie Chinatown.

Oh yes, I’m quite miffed at the ending of Chinatown, even with the movie telling me to “forget it.” That final line is based in the theme that bad things happen and bad people succeed and there’s nothing you can really do to stop them, but it’s all based on the main character, who has been portrayed all film long as a smart, cynical, experienced professional, surrendering himself and his only piece of hard evidence into the clutches of the antagonists for… well, no reason I’ve ever been able fathom really, excepting that the director wanted his tragic ending. Then again knowing what we do about Roman Polanski these days, maybe he didn’t consider that ending a tragedy…

Anyhow, I desperately hope my own fiction feels a little more justified on analysis, and I’m heartened whenever I see someone in the comments puzzle things out — like for instance that Eustace, for all that he seems like a nice guy, is unfortunately rather spineless when it comes to standing up to a forceful personality ordering him around.

It’s a tragic weakness, but a consistent one.

So more thoughts on language, holding to my promise from last week. As usual I should issue the warning I am in no way formally qualified to be holding forth on linguistics. I’m no Dr. Mark Okrund, I won’t be inventing Klingon anytime soon. Klingon is actually a great example leading into this next bit, though, as Okrund deliberately excluded a very common feature of human languages: the polite greeting. The blunt and confrontational Klingons have no time for the time-wasting social niceties of hoo-mans, and therefore the closest to a greeting Okrund put into their language is the word “nuqneH” which translates skips “hello” or “how are you?” and goes straight to “what do you want?”

Similarly, there is a humorous “how to speak Klingon” tape out there which starts off contrasting human and Klingon culture with the example of a human entering a Klingon’s shop.

Human customer: Nice day, isn’t it?

Klingon shopkeeper: I do not care! Buy something or get out!

Terribly rude from our perspective. Of course, from the Klingon perspective it’s the human being terribly rude. The implication of course is that this conversation would have to take place in a human language in order to be asking the rhetorical question in the first place. Or perhaps there are the famous Star Trek universal translator devices involved, but while they might be able to approximate words, they can’t bridge the cultural divide.

But Klingon is a made up language, right? Real languages don’t have these issues!

Don’t be too hasty. One example I find fascinating is that when Dawn was taking a class in Japanese, she mentioned how a lot of statements were… non-targeted? By contrast, the English language seems to want to wallow in the blame game. Where the Japanese phrase might be “the cup has broken,” considering that the most important information, English always wants to know whodunnit. “Greg broke the cup.” We don’t really think about it, and there are more or less polite ways to phrase it, but taken as a whole English comes off as much more accusatory. It’s not enough that we express the chicken is burned, even if it’s obvious by implication who burned it. Nope, we want to hear you say it, Greg. Say, “I burned the chicken.”

There is a popular hypothesis in the linguistics world that the way we speak influences the way we think, and vice-versa, and if true I can’t help but wonder if this phenomenon makes native speakers of English less efficient in terms of problem-solving. We have to struggle past the blame game before we actually address the key issue that the cup is broken or the chicken is burnt. Perhaps that’s why the Faceless Men in Game of Thrones adopted their peculiar dialect where, for example, “a girl has no name.”

I mean, on the flipside you certainly wouldn’t want to just declare “My wallet has been stolen!” if you know who did it and that guy is currently fleeing down the street. Precious seconds for onlookers figuring out the context would be a detriment compared to you pointing and shouting “That guy in the green shirt took my wallet!”

Again, I’m no linguist so take all this with a grain of salt. Even linguists are divided on the concept. But it’s certainly food for thought if you’re writing interactions between Klingons and humans, or elves and dwarves, or even something closer to home.

When you’re a writer you tend to pay attention not just to words but the way people say them, and unless you’re some kind of filthy, futile prescriptivist you also should have a fascination with the way that such things evolve over time. Don’t get me wrong, Strunk and White have their place in terms of setting up some common protocols for communication, but outside of formal settings I think it’s an enormous mistake to get hung up on split infinitives and sentence-ending prepositions so long as the meaning remains clear. Writers can certainly benefit from editing, but they also need room to play. And use fragments. Sometimes.

However, back to the subject of verbal evolution, of which one of my favorite examples is the English farewell term of “bye.” The meaning has not changed but the original form was “God be with ye,” which then eventually contracted to “God bye ye,” then “Godb(w)ye,” then our modern “goodbye,” and finally down to the monosyllable noted above.

Similar to this, in Spanish there is still the phrase “vaya con Dios” (literally translated as “[you] go with God”) but that’s a mouthful and “adiós” is much more common. Some argue that the latter has never had anything to do with deities but considering the very similar French “adieu” and that the original Latin for “to God” or “by God” would have been “ad deus,” I don’t buy it.

In any case, were I to try to invent my own language I would no doubt fail drastically, but it would be hard to go wrong by having my informal farewell be short, to the point, and either referencing or deriving from a reference to deity or some form of “until we meet again.” The latter is what “hasta luego” and “auf wiedersehen” basically translate to, in case you were wondering.

This sort of “phrase archaeology” is a really good thing to practice if you’re coming up with slang, though. Spoken language is where evolution of language take place first, and in general spoken language likes to simplify for efficiency’s sake. Today’s slang then becomes tomorrow’s prescription.

More on this topic next week.

I’ve been accused at times of being cruel and unusual in the fates I inflict upon the characters in this Weird New West of Zombie Ranch, and not without cause. But oh, I’m still working the bunny slopes in comparison to stuff like Game of Thrones, right?

Or for that matter, I recently finished the main story of Fallout 4 — and it is gut-wrenching. The scuttlebutt I always heard was that the story was weak or poorly done, and perhaps that’s true insofar as it’s easy to lose track of your quest for your kidnapped son in favor of building and tweaking settlements or any number of umpteen other options available to you. This is the curse of the open world game, I suppose, where pacing and motivations can die an unmourned death unless you deliberately keep a laser focus on the primary quest line. Even then, though, refusing to get sidetracked by side content could end up leaving you woefully unprepared and unable to progress just because everything’s hitting you too hard. The proverbial Beef Gate. In fact I believe some games–maybe even including Fallout 4–go so far as to put missions into the main line where the goal is just “Reach Level 30.” I’m not 100% sure it was Fallout that did it since I had left off any kind of real progression for several months and so if that happened it was at least several months ago.

But anyhow–whoof–I finally got on to what I suppose would be Act 3 of the game’s arc and it’s pretty devastating if you’re the kind of person who likes to buddy up to various factions. I will refrain from spoilers since it’s more than possible there are other Johnny-come-latelies like Yours Truly who either haven’t started the game yet or possibly have just had it on the back burner while life or other games took priority. Let’s just say that Fallout 4 is a Post-Apocalypse game that no matter what route you choose will end in a more-or-less appropriately apocalyptic fashion, with nothing that could truly be called a “clean” victory. You may feel a bit cheated at times, like the game is forcing you down certain paths with no option but desolation, but I can’t deny that such darkness fits the genre.

On the plus side, if anyone remembers that I had declared I made a FalloutRosa as my player character… I revisited her looks and, after much tweaking, morphed it to something that isn’t perfect but I’m fairly happy with. Dawn agreed that it at least has something of a proper Latina visage, which feels good after all my blogs of the past few weeks on the subject of character appearance.

Just for kicks, here’s a side-by-side of Fallout 4‘s default female look and my Rosa Mark II:

Not too shabby for a non-artist, right?

Okay if I’m wrong don’t say it. It worked well enough to let my brain imagine the rest.

Ah, the age of streaming video. October brings with it more than the usual glut of what I’ve (fairly or unfairly) come to call “Netflix Horror” and its rows after rows of not-quite-but-almost-amateur productions; not that I’m throwing any big stones here in my glass house, but get ten minutes into most of them and it’s just the same old boobs and blood and foolish behavior from well-heeled stereotypes. If you’ve just smoked a bowl or three and that’s what you want, more power to you, but one of the biggest pitfalls for any creative endeavor is this: if you’re not doing anything original, you better do it really, really well or you’re already going to be on a back foot with regards to standing out from the rest.

But I digress. In addition to films that are obscure for the reasons above, there are films in the catalog that might be obscure for other reasons. Or perhaps I shouldn’t use the word “obscure” since some of them were quite famous and successful in their day…

I’m speaking of silent movies. Scrounge around on Netflix and you’ll find a selection of them, both Made in the USA and not. Now it’s a feat in itself that these prints have survived nearly a century, but are they all classics for that? Not necessarily, but still, it’s an interesting exercise to check them out.

And here’s where I come around to my thought for the week: this is not only an interesting exercise for the aforementioned bowl-smoking session, it’s interesting from a comics perspective. Because moments.

Moments in comics are just what you might think: the “freeze frame” that’s presented in a given panel. The moment is something our imaginations fill in on either side, completing the action presented… comics never show the entire punch being thrown, but in our mind’s eye we see it happen. The choice of the moment is crucial, though, which is why 99% of the time a thrown punch will be drawn at or just after the point of impact. You usually don’t want to draw the guy cocking his arm back because unless there’s a purpose for that it’s just quite literally wasting time and space.

So film, including silent film, is a full-motion medium that doesn’t really need to worry about those economics, but silent film is an intriguing beast because of the necessity to insert those breaks displaying the dialogue in print form. With these intertitles the director had to make the decision of where to momentarily interrupt the visual flow… or sometimes they’d just have someone talk and gesture and never use an intertitle at all, just counting on the communication to be clear enough without…

Well, let’s call it a word balloon, right? They’re a form of word balloon, those intertitles. That was my thought, at least. When you’re creating a comic with dialogue, part of your choice of moment has to pay attention to which “freeze frame,” which moment, is going to best accompany the words being said. What’s the key emotion? What will best flow?

Those early silent movies were in a way struggling with similar concerns. So if you find yourself watching one, you could do worse than pay attention to the director’s choice of where to cut for those intertitles, and whether that choice seemed good or bad for the story. Moments of silence. No tragedy required.

Last week I was discussing how I think the greatest roadblock to being an artist is our natural tendency to not really see what’s in front of us, and how much that figuratively bites us in the ass when we go trying to reproduce it. Even when we have all the tools available that might get around having unsteady hands, the conceptual roadblock is there. I brought up the example of video game character customization: here you are with a model that a professional artist has already done the work creating, often with a selection of pre-made features to “plug in” on the face, and as time goes on they’re getting more and more nuanced and featured until it feels like you should be able to accomplish a faithful recreation of anything. They don’t have a preset for an “African” face? No problem! You’re a black person yourself, or you know black people or can at least get plenty of picture references of black people… with all the morphs and sliders, this should be easy!

And then it’s not. And it’s worse when you’re trying to recreate someone in particular, and worst of all if you’re trying to recreate your own face and fall short. Does the poor craftsman proverbially blame their tools at that point?

Well, maybe. For instance Black Desert Online has a much lauded creation engine, and yet when Dawn and I tried it out back in the day it seemed to suffer from frustrating limitations despite the range of sliders available. I seem to remember, for example, that there was no provision for making a female character that looked older, or that if a certain class preset started with a Caucasian face vs. a more Asian face, it seemed obnoxiously difficult to morph one into the other.

Of course for me, part of the problem is it turned out I had stunningly vague ideas of what makes a European and Asian face look different from one another, and how both are different from the face of someone with African origin. And heck, this is well before even trying to, say, make a character with Korean features versus Vietnamese. Ask me to recreate “Wild” Will Nguyen in a game and that’s gonna be rough.

Having studied anatomy and life drawing, Dawn is of course far more aware of these matters, but what comes naturally for her (or more naturally due to her observational training) often ends up a train wreck for me. I clearly remember trying to make a black character for Dragon Age 2 and ending up with someone who looked more Pakistani. Again it might have been the tools provided but I gave up and just rolled with it at that point since at least I had achieved “definitely non-white” and had already spent several hours of not getting to the actual game.

But every so often a new game with customization comes around and I get curious again about what even a schmoe like me might be able to accomplish. I’ll check out sites like this, which start from the Golden Ratio and posit a theoretical “beauty mask” for humankind that can then be morphed to represent generic ideals of gender and ethnicity. The concept of beauty is an inherently problematic one, but proponents of “the mask” are careful to emphasize that no one race has any more claim than another to being an ideal, and that there are of course innumerable variations beyond that. But from an artistic/recreation standpoint it is immensely helpful for me to have some guidelines to consider when trying to select or morph together an Asian eye. In fact, even though you might think such a resource would promote caricatures and stereotypes, in practice it seems to help me avoid it because caricatures and stereotypes are basically the shortcut symbols I’m trying to avoid anyhow. No black person really looks like those awful thick-lipped caricatures of certain 1930s comic strips, but then again neither do they just look like me with a dark skin tone. And heck, here I am with a half Mexican wife and still I have trouble trying to recreate Rosa or even someone generically Latinx. Oh how she judges me.

But I’ll keep at it, because it feels like good training and maybe also a good way to recognize just how much variation and beauty there is in all faces of humanity.

I am most certainly not the artist of this pairing. My storyboards should be proof enough of that. A few years back I dared to dream that I was getting better, but facts are facts: I can still look at a picture I drew when I was six and a picture I draw now and find them functionally indistinguishable.

Luckily, Dawn is adept enough at interpreting my scrawlings that something good can still come out of it, but occasionally some unsuspecting child still comes by at a convention and asks me for a sketch, despite my dire warnings. I do what I can. For free, naturally. At Long Beach a couple of weeks ago I changed things up and risked a stick figure prospector with a big stick moustache instead of my usual stick zombie. I think it worked well enough from a symbolic viewpoint…

But that’s the big trick, isn’t it? I’m reminded of a drawing class I took in college where we used a text called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Still in print to this day, it would seem. The premise of the book was that everyone has the potential for rendering lifelike scenes and portraits, and the major hurdle is not so much the precision of our hands as it is the formatting of our brains. That humans are naturally wired to not really, truly “see” what they’re looking at, instead using shortcuts and symbolism — great when you’re just trying to get through the day, gathering food and avoiding dangers, not so great when you pick up a brush and try to recreate the image of the saber-tooth tiger that was trying to eat you. We recognize our good friend Phil on sight, of course, but when it comes to drawing Phil most of us fall short, even with Phil sitting right in front of us.

Why? The theory, again, is shortcurts and symbols. I can picture an AK-47 perfectly in my head, and then when I try sketching it out I get something that’s kinda sorta like it. Huh. If there’s a picture of one in front of me, that’s better, but I still find it oddly difficult and frustrating to get anything better than an approximation.

The solution of the book was various exercises to try to break your brain out of its symbolic habits and get you to draw what you’re actually seeing, not the symbolic shorthand your mind is relaying to you. One lesson that I recall was to take someone’s photograph and turn it upside down or otherwise reorient it so that your mind didn’t automatically go “someone’s face” and you instead would just be reproducing the various curves and lines. A few years ago when I was still painting wargaming miniatures this trick happened in a concrete fashion for me as I wanted to put the image of a handprint on a figure’s apron. Looking up handprint images online gave plenty of examples but every time I tried to put that into practice it didn’t look right. The only way I finally made it work was to stop thinking “handprint” and instead just go “oval here, and little blob here, and here, and also here…”

Once I broke it up into those component parts, independent of any larger concept? Poof, success. But it was definitely a struggle, and you have to respect artists who have made it their life’s work to embrace that struggle. Even those that are masters of a more “cartoony” style still have to deconstruct what they’re trying to represent, mastering the symbols rather than being slave to them.

Here’s a more modern example of the phenomenon… video games with character creation and customization features. Ever tried to recreate a celebrity? A friend? Yourself? Yeah, even your own damn face can get really tricky, and while part of that can be chalked up to the limitations of a game’s engine, every year they get more and more robust and realistic and a lot of us feel more and more inadequate by comparison, especially when you get one of those engines with the free range sliders that should theoretically be able to produce any shape and size of nose you need. So why doesn’t your nose look right, dammit? Is it because you’ve never really seen it?

Okay, bad example since without reflections and photos and such we really wouldn’t ever see our noses. But you get the gist. Instead of “my face” we might be better off reproducing the collection of lines, curves and blobs that compose it.

Sometimes it’s said that good artists really just don’t think or see things like the rest of us. Well, when it comes to drawing, that may not only be true, it may be their greatest skill.

Dawn and I have been wrestling with terrible head colds this week. We wanted to make sure the comic was as good as we could manage since we’d been building towards this emotional sucker punch as we returned to Darlene and Suzie, so spent our limited energies in that direction, part of which means I don’t really have a lot of deep thoughts left to coherently blog about.

I will say that being sick left time to binge through the new series of The Tick that I mentioned a few weeks back and it’s everything we had hoped for and more. Just brilliant stuff and a wonderful example of everything I’ve been blathering about regarding stoicism and absurdity and humor and drama and, well, all of that. If you have Amazon Prime or know someone who does and will let you borrow their login, I highly recommend a watch.

A couple of weeks ago I talked up the praises of inserting the occasional stoicism in your absurdity, and vice-versa. I brought up the TV trope phenomenon of Mood Whiplash, where the tone shifts abruptly, and how when done right it enhances emotion and storytelling. One famous example of this is arguably the biggest scream moment in the movie Jaws, where Brody is crankily shoveling chum into the ocean, mumbling a disgruntled laugh line just before the giant shark surges out of the water, clearly showing us (and him) its titular pearly whites for the first time. It’s a shocking moment and any laughter chokes immediately into stunned horror. And then it’s right back to a laugh line, but a much more somber one, clearly one delivered because Brody’s mind just can’t think of any goddamn thing else to say as he backs up slowly to the false safety of the wheelhouse: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

Another prime example that has stuck with me comes from the pages of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. Moore retooled the origin story into something existentially horrific: up until those moments, the Swamp Thing was a mutated Alec Holland, a human being still under all that plant matter. Then Moore flipped the script, using the analysis of a cold-hearted scientist discussing the once-held belief that living flatworms seemed to absorb the knowledge and memories of a dead one that they ate (heck that’s been the premise of some zombie stories, too).

The reveal of all this is that the Swamp Thing was not, indeed, ever Alec Holland, but a product of mystical/mutant plant matter that fed upon Alec Holland’s murdered remains and regenerated itself based on a memory, a lie that it had lived as a man. The swamp thing does not take this well and has brutally murdered the scientist by the end of the issue.

Where’s the whiplash? The barbecue.

In truth I can’t remember if it was the same issue or the next, but ST suffers what can only be classed as either a dream or a psychotic break, if plants-that-think-like-men can be said to be capable of such. What he sees is a backyard grill manned by human-sized flatworms, one of which is wearing a chef’s hat and a “KISS THE COOK”-style apron as he looks at ST and enthusiastically shouts, “Eats! Come getcha eats!”

It’s a height of absurdity, something that made me laugh out loud at the time, and a brilliant example of wielding that whiplash to great effect because it’s happening smack in the middle of all that aforementioned existential and physical horror. Much like Martin Brody couldn’t wrap his mind around the size of the shark and the realization of what deep shit the three men on the Orca were in, the Swamp Thing’s consciousness is trying to process a concept of absolute madness, and so resorts to absolute madness to visualize such.

And here we are with Zombie Ranch, where this current run of the “cartoon dramatization” is perhaps my most ambitious attempt yet to intermix absurdity with what is in actually a deeply disturbing, defining, and tragic moment of the past. Time to see if I can get that whipcrack to work, or if I just end up hitting myself in the eye.

America used to be described as a “melting pot,” supposedly as a metaphor for a place where all races, colors and creeds could mix and flow together in order to create something far greater (and stronger? tastier?) than they could separately.

YMMV on how well that’s panned out. Let’s talk about the idea of a mixing pot instead, like the kind you might use (appropriately enough in this case) for paint or ink.

This past weekend Dawn and I were once again hawking our wares at the Long Beach Comic Con, and since LBCC is not nearly the sort of wall-to-wall hustle that SDCC is, we made time for ourselves to switch off for periods of what we like to call “walkabout.” Which is just what it sounds like: one of us gets out from behind the booth and goes walking about — looking at stuff, saying hi to people, etc.

So it was that I found Dave Gibbons all alone at his table at the Hero Initiative booth, with no line, and got to talk his ear off for several minutes. Yes, that Dave Gibbons. One-half of the creative team that brought us the greatest superhero graphic novel of all time. Well, technically a trade paperback since it was first serialized in individual issues, but you get the idea.

As far as I know Gibbons still lives in England, so I’ve got no idea how Long Beach got him out as a guest, but after a quick double-take I thought, “Self, yes, you’ve seen him before and that is Dave f’ing Gibbons right before you. Go get you some quality time.” After he didn’t immediately run me off, I eventually got around to asking him just how detailed Alan Moore’s script for Watchmen was. How much was already there, how controlled was the imagery and symbolism… I think he got the gist of my blathering because he interrupted to say that it was really a combined effort. “Do you know I came up with the happy face idea?” he asked.

No, I replied, I did not. He explained how at first Alan was picturing the character of The Comedian in military fatigues, but that seemed just sort of boring, so Dave switched it up to black leather and then threw in the happy face button as a contrast. Moore loved the little seemingly incongruous touch, and then had the brainstorm that they could start out the first panel with a close-up on it, and before you know it the two of them had excitedly figured out, together, that it represented a main theme and the whole series could revolve around it and the blood spatter marring its image.

The rest is history, but it just goes to show how collaborative an art form comics can be and how the mixing of writer and artist can produce something greater than either might dream up on their own. Out of that mixture can come magic.

Ben Edlund may not be a name you’re familiar with, but you may know of his most famous creation: The Tick. From humble comic shop beginnings in 1986, the satirical superhero franchise grew to a national and then international following, then an animated series and two live-action small screen adaptations, the most recent of which has debuted on Amazon recently to what seem to be good reviews so far.

I haven’t seen the new series yet but it’s good to hear that Edlund has apparently lost none of his edge, as detailed in this interview. An excerpt of which I found very interesting, since in his discussions of what makes the superhero genre, well… tick… Edlund brings up Westerns:

“What explains the Westerns? World War II, I think,” Edlund says by way of comparison. “Where does the wounded fucking guy who can’t tell his pain to anybody — where does that come from? Where does emptiness, peace, and quiet as a fantasy come from? What is the story of all that shit?” 

This put me in mind of a documentary called Five Came Back that Dawn and I watched not too long ago, which spent some time on famous Western filmmaker John Ford and how his military service in WWII informed his postwar work. You need only watch Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956) back-to-back to see a fairly gaping tonal difference even though the superficial elements are the same (including John Wayne being the star). Westerns of course predate the start of World War II, but it’s only after the war that you really start getting that genre feel of the lone man or small band of men on their own, often struggling to deal with a world that no longer seems to understand them or have a place for them. I’ve talked up George Stevens’ Shane (1953) before as the arguable ur-example of this, and wouldn’t you know it, Stevens was on the frontlines of WWII as well.

What also struck me about Edlund’s quote was thinking back to how The Searchers unabashedly interrupts its dark existentialism towards the end for an absurdly staged, lengthy fistfight at a wedding party, complete with one of the guys involved all but calling a time out while he gets someone’s abandoned fiddle out of the way before the next punch. It goes on for so long and is so comically bizarre that the only comparison I have is the similar scene in They Live where two grown, burly men are fighting over one of them putting on a pair of sunglasses.

And yet that’s the thing, isn’t it? Catch-22 and other works like it certainly prove that darkness and absurdity can walk hand in hand. Stoicism and absurdity are also aspects that can go together… The Tick isn’t really a stoic sort but if you’ve never seen the movie Airplane!, the performances of Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves and Robert Stack in that movie are perfect specimens of how being oh-so-serious can be oh-so-funny. The idea of “deadpan humor” is entirely built around this phenomenon, and in the world of Zombie Ranch Frank is probably my best example.

The Tick has similarly flirted with a dark side to its humor that doesn’t undercut it so much as throwing it into greater relief. It can be a fine line to walk to avoid figuratively breaking your audience’s neck with the mood whiplash, but if you can get it right a bit of contrast can really add up to more than the sum of its parts and (bizarre as it is to say this) actually give a sense of verisimilitude over a piece that is relentlessly on one side or another.

Yeesh. Not two weeks down the road from my post on the marital crash-and-burns of two geek icons, we get what could possibly be the biggest wreck of them all. Joss Whedon’s ex-wife has held forth on the infidelities that led to their divorce, and the picture it paints is… not kind. If you’re a fan of his work, this may be yet another case where you’ll have to be able to separate the art from the artist. Whedon’s longest-running fansite doesn’t seem prepared to do that, though, and is shutting down after 16 years of operation.

Assuming the allegations have at least some truth to them, that line from The Dark Knight once again comes to mind: “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” It also puts me in mind of a blog I wrote a few years back along regarding geekly inspirations of my youth that I felt had fallen from grace personally, professionally, or both. You may read it here: The Fallen Lords of the ’80s.

I admittedly haven’t been keeping up with my zombie fiction lately. I haven’t watched The Walking Dead in many years, for example, and while stuff like Train to Busan is on my list I keep forgetting to fire it up at an opportune moment. It’s not a situation like Stephenie Meyer where she didn’t want to read or watch about horror, it’s just circumstance.

But anyhow, with that backlog weighing on my mind, I got around to checking out the pilot episode of a zombie series one of my friends had been talking up — Z Nation, a SyFy show whose first season is now on Netflix.

So far I’ll say this: if the pace of TWD is too slow for you, Z Nation will probably be right up your alley. The pilot barely stops to breathe as it keeps piling on the zombie attacks (and zombie tropes). By the end of it, I hadn’t really gotten much of a sense of the main characters or why I ought to care about them — in fact I joked to Dawn something along the lines of “Oh hey, all the PCs are together now.” And no I’m not really kidding about that, one character in particular pretty much joins up by shrugging and climbing into the back of the truck after they say “Hey you’re a good sniper, come with us.” The rest of the story is one you’ve probably seen before… zombie outbreak, America As We Know It has fallen, last outposts are trying to find a cure, and eventually a ragtag band is set up to make their way across the wasted nation.

So the show so far is not what I’d call particularly innovative or insightful, but if you want to see a lot of people get eaten and zombies get bashed/shot you’ve come to the right place. It’s fun to watch for that, even if we weren’t particularly compelled at the time to see what happens next. If any of you out there have watched more episodes I’d be interested to hear your take, does it stay with my first impressions more or less or go somewhere a little less traveled?

If you haven’t heard the news yet, this week Chris Pratt and Anna Faris announced they’re breaking up after several years of what the general public had by and large considered a happy, nay even adorable marriage. The general public did not take it well.

I mean, so what? It’s a Hollywood marriage, aren’t those doomed to failure? But I suppose this was meant to be the exception to the rule, with both people involved being so gosh darned likeable.

Shortly before this, I belatedly learned that Dan Harmon (the man behind Community, co-creator of Rick and Morty, etc.) had gotten divorced from his wife about a year ago. And so here’s two cases where I can absolutely envy the talent and success of Chris Pratt and Dan Harmon in their careers, but their personal lives didn’t work out so well. Both men’s careers really took off in the past handful of years… is that related? Are success and marital happiness mutually exclusive, and Dawn and I should thank our lucky stars we remain relatively obscure in our efforts?

I’m sure there’s a middle ground to be sought and had, and there are Hollywood marriages out there that defy the stereotype. Also neither breakup seems to point towards a scorched earth scenario so much as just “creative differences”… but then again there’s Harmon’s old studio production card and his new one this year:

Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here counting my blessings…