Category: Writer’s Blog

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…

The start of Episode 15 comes with the reminder that The Exec is still watching, and that he (well, technically ClearStream) has a satellite. A perk you don’t often see in post-apocalyptic zombie fiction. The fact ClearSteam has access to one still in operation is a pretty big indicator of the power they wield.

Of course its presence would beg several questions, such as whether there’s still some sort of space program going on somewhere. Texas certainly is no slouch on those terms in our modern era, but the easier answer I always went with is that it launched shortly before everything went to hell. This might also beg the question both of timing, and just why a communications satellite has high-resolution spy cameras on it.

Or if knowledgeable people wanted to get really pedantic on me, they could point out that the maximum “life expectancy” of even a geostationary satellite is around 15-17 years… so if this particular specimen launched prior to the Zombie Wars, how is it still functioning? Sure, I’ve kept exact timelines vague, but given Suzie was born a post-war Repop and is now an adult, that’s pushing it, right?

Now in theoretical response I could just say “shut up and enjoy the comic, nerd” — but being a nerd myself, I would rather weasel about until I find some answer that works, even if it working depends on making shit up. You know: the Star Trek method. This is where having your setting be in “the future” even before the apocalypse happened is a huge plus, because what we’ve seen with the camera drones alone requires a level of active camouflage, anti-gravity and long-lasting portable power that doesn’t quite exist yet (as far as we know). True, the AAVDRO units were debuted after the Wars began, but does that mean their tech wasn’t already developed in secret?

Now with satellites, the operational life is measured as a matter of fuel used for repositioning, which is why those lower in the atmosphere have much shorter “lives” as they have to burn fuel from time to time just to prevent orbit decay. The higher up ones like the communication sats don’t need to do this but still need to change orientation occasionally — other than that, the lenses and electronics involved are considered to have a much longer life expectancy than a couple of decades, barring unforeseen malfunction. So hey, if you solve the fuel problem, then it would follow that with a little luck and foresight, two decades of operation isn’t so out of the question anymore. Therefore, with just a little applied phlebotinum we are back on track and I am satisfied. All of this in the background of course since in terms of the story, well… us nerds should probably just shut up and enjoy it.

And yes, The Exec seems content to use this technological advantage to fiddle around with a handful of ranchers. I suppose that says a lot about him, too, doesn’t it?

One of our aisle neighbors at San Diego Comic-Con this week said he was doing forty conventions this year.

Man. I don’t know if I could have managed that in my twenties, much less now. I suppose it’s something you just get used to, the way people gradually work up their altitude tolerance over a period of months before they attempt the summit of Mt. Everest. True, Dawn and I have been exhibiting now at various shows for almost eight years, but I think the most we’ve done in a year is… six? And the farthest we’ve traveled is Seattle, and after a couple experimental years of that we had to scale back to local shows. Not exactly an intense training regimen, and this year we skipped out on Free Comic Book Day so hadn’t really done the public appearance thing since WonderCon.

Therefore, despite the logistics of our SDCC outing going pretty much flawlessly, we still came back exhausted, which is hopefully just a matter of tired and sore rather than any inklings of dreaded “con crud.” We had an economy-sized bottle of hand sanitizer at the booth for the express purpose of trying to avoid such, after all. Dawn’s still having her chronic hip issues and I have my foot problems, but nowhere near what we were dealing with last year. Also with far greater prep time and a full exhibitor hotel discount we were able to add an extra day on both ends in order to space out the physical strain. I can’t begin to tell you how nice it was to be able to check out on Monday and thus on Sunday only have to worry about packing up our merch and display whilst looking forwards to a night’s sleep before driving home.

Meanwhile we took advantage of SDCC’s free Materials Handling Assistance Program for the second year in a row, and if anything it was an even better experience. Heck there wasn’t even as much swearing and smoking this year and the Freeman staff handling the freight was constantly checking in to make sure everything was being handled speedily and efficiently. I don’t know if that was fallout from the Mile High Comics kerfuffle a couple weeks ago claiming massive incompetence, but this year for both arrival and departure they had us processed and on our way in under an hour. Having our exhibitor badges mailed out to us beforehand also made a big difference as there was no need to find parking and sort that first.

So yeah, I could go on and on about details but the tl;dr of it is that things went about as smoothly or even more smoothly than I could have hoped, and yet here we are recovering regardless. I suppose five straight days of exhibiting, three of which are basically 10 hour shifts, will do that to ya no matter how well things work out for the beginning and end.

All I can say is I’m glad we have nothing but a blog and cover to do this week, and next week isn’t another convention. Just the start of Episode 15, which we can thankfully, literally, just work on from home.

On to Episode 15!

Death comes for us all. Even guys who pioneered an entire genre about people not staying dead.

And while it’s impossible to analyze the “butterfly effect” of what our world would be like without George Romero having existed and having co-created Night of the Living Dead all those years ago, I think it’s safe to say this comic wouldn’t exist. Not in its present form, anyhow. H.P. Lovecraft may have arguably been the first guy to write about people returning from death hungry for human flesh in his story of Herbert West, Re-Animator, but it was NotLD and later Dawn of the Dead that cemented our modern culture’s ideal of the zombie as an infectious, cannibal ghoul, and the resulting zombie subgenre of horror being a place where thought-invoking social commentary could lie in the wake of the shambling hordes.

Mr. Romero passed away July 16th, at the age of 77, after what was reportedly a relatively brief but intense struggle with lung cancer. His family was with him and his favorite song was playing as he died in his bed, so as these things go I suppose it was as good as it gets. He had a long life and a beloved cult following, and speaking as someone who has experienced two close relatives dying from it, cancer is definitely something that is better to be briefly experienced. I’m sure it doesn’t make it any less devastating for the loved ones, of course. My own aunt passed from lung cancer just a few years ago under what I imagine were similar circumstances.

I’ve had my criticisms for Romero’s most recent zombie efforts, but one thing that’s clear is he always had ideas, whether or not he was fully cognizant of how to realize them. A lot of NotLD could be said to arguably be a happy accident, including the Civil Rights era parables, but Romero rolled with the social commentary aspect and the rest is history. Now to say he single-handedly gave us this subgenre is false, but his partner John Russo meanwhile went more down the path of blood and boobs and camp with the Return of the Living Dead series. Russo also gave us the whole “zombies eat brains” schtick that was never baked in from the beginning but is now an instantly recognizable trope.

But this isn’t the Russo reminiscence hour, this is the time to reflect on the legacy George leaves us, and it’s a legacy that shambles on to this day, reinventing itself again and again to stay relevant. George has plenty of other films in his works besides those “…of the Dead,” but certainly zombies are going to be what he’s most remembered for. As I’ve discussed in a previous blog, that legacy may not have even happened had he and Russo not screwed up their copyright and rendered NotLD into public domain, but then again maybe it would still have occurred and he’d have been a multi-millionaire. Regardless, Romero always seemed famously good-humored about it. In fact I don’t think you could have asked for a kindlier patriarch of the zombie realm, always encouraging to up and coming talents who wanted to make their own (tooth)marks. Fellow travelers as diverse as Zack Snyder, Stephen King and Guillermo Del Toro all acknowledge their debt to his vision and have made their statements of remembrance. And for what it’s worth, here I add mine.

As an ending note, Romero supposedly has elected for cremation of his remains. One last wink from the master? In any case, godspeed, George. And thank you.

Around this time last year we were in a crazy whirlwind of preparing for exhibiting at San Diego Comic-Con due to a last minute cancellation. I mean not literally last minute, but close enough. I blogged about it. I expressed confidence despite the short notice. And hey, I was right! It went really well!

Then, for the first time ever, last December brought us the notice that we’d been approved for a return outing for 2017. Oh, the sweet luxury of not being on the wait list, right? Months to prepare, rather than weeks or even mere days.

So of course we procrastinated.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that bad. We’re ready to go. I mean last year we proved to ourselves we could pick up and go in a week, so I suppose it’s more accurate to just say we scaled back ambitions and decided to be somewhat zen about things. There’s only so much you can do with a 6×2 table space and a height limit (table included) of six feet, after all. Small Press at Comic-Con is not a place you bring out all the bells and whistles, for fear of a floor manager instructing you to put the bells and whistles away — and then you brought all those bells and whistles for nothing. Also you may have aroused the ire of your neighbors, and that’s another thing about Small Press at SDCC… the placements tend to stay the same, or at least the same a lot more than at other cons we’ve experienced. Getting into a bad blood situation with a neighbor at SDCC is not good because you’ll more than likely be seeing them again next year. That or someone pesters the con staff for a move, but the last thing you want to do is be too much of a nuisance to the guys who have a huge list of people waiting for an opportunity for any space to open up… if you get a bad enough rep they might move you, sure… right out of the convention!

I’m pleased to say that our neighbors last year seemed happy enough with our presence, and we want to keep it that way. So we’ve got some new product, including Dawn’s “duckiecorn” pins and a print run of Issue #11 that just came in! Slowly but surely catching up, there. Issue #12 print for sure by the end of this year, and maybe more depending on how our sales do for reinvestments.

In the meantime, calm. Preparation, but calm. The storm comes soon enough.

So I mentioned the Secret World Legends launch in last week’s blog, and not to be ones to encourage everyone else to run off the cliff while I stay back, Dawn and I spent a bit of quality time with it. She pretty much was able to recreate her character from the old version of the game, but while I was happy enough recreating the appearance of my own former character, the new gameplay for his concept was frustrating. I found myself falling back on the side vanity project where, noting that SWL has but one body type for ladies and it’s a pretty skinny one, I tried my hand at creating Suzie. And then Suzie ended up proving more fun to play, and since running multiple alternate characters in SWL still isn’t all that great (and with some of the new free-to-play modifications is arguably worse), well, there I was guiding our intrepid zombie rancher through killing a ton of zombies. Not as much of a buyer’s economy for zeds in The Secret World.

A nice feature of the revamp though was that Funcom does seem to have followed through on their pledge to make content more accessible, insofar as allowing for more solo or small group play. They’re not even calling it an MMORPG any more, instead opting for the term “shared world action RPG”. SWARPG? (‘Scuse me.)

Belching jokes aside, what this meant in practice is that Dawn and I were able to team up and finally successfully run through a “dungeon” scenario we’d never been able to get through before because frankly we’re just antisocial like that. And that was pretty damn cool, because we got to watch this happen (and you’ll get to listen to Dawn’s commentary):

Don’t worry, Suzie survived that crash and proceeded to shoot that overgrown octopus in the face.

Now it’s not really Cthulhu, the game calls it an “Ur-Draug” and it’s actually a fairly small specimen of one… yet ’tis still impressively large and intimidating to fight, and it’s kind of cool that the game will insert your custom character into dramatically rendered cutscenes like the above.

Uniquely mind-shattering? No, but that’s cool, too. If a game allows you to customize your character then personally I think one of the joys it should be providing is getting to watch that character fight and explore and, yes, occasionally try not to get eaten by Cthulhu. It’s of course fun of a different sort to play, say, Geralt of the Witcher series, and they might all still call you Shepherd regardless of how you look, but I wonder if y’all out there are of a mind with me that customization can definitely add something to a game experience? And if so, what are your tendencies? Do you try to create yourself? Someone you know? A favorite fictional character, whether your own or another’s creation? Just something as weird as possible? And do you hold with a similar choice across various genres and settings, or do you change it up?

Meanwhile, if you’re curious Dawn has uploaded the entire “dungeon run” to her Twitch channel, though just as a warning it’s about an hour long and not always riveting — in particular she ends up a distant spectator through about half of the final battle, which was unfortunate as you will only occasionally be able to see Suzie shooting Cthulhu–err, the Ur-Draug–in the face. You’ll also only rarely be able to hear me since I wasn’t on mic, just talking to her from across the room. But there’s plenty of seaweed-strewn undead and other nasties to give you a taste of how SWL plays.

Twitch TV video – “Dead in the Water”

So this week I thought I’d just signal boost a public service message for any of you that might be interested, on account of being fans of stories involving the supernatural and perhaps also not having a lot of cash to throw around, and that message is The Secret World has finally gone free-to-play.

What’s The Secret World? Well I more or less summed up my first impressions five years ago in a blog I wrote for The Satellite Show. It is (or was) a modern-day MMORPG set in a shadowy world where conspiracies are truths and monsters lurk just out of sight. I was middling in my first reactions, but about two years ago it had a steeply discounted Steam sale that had Dawn buying us both copies, and despite still having some of the shortcomings I mentioned it’s a great, well-acted storyline full of maturely-oriented mystery.

As of this past weekend Funcom has relaunched the title under the name Secret World: Legends, providing approximately the same storyline experience but streamlining and simplifying it, and while that does mean some of its unique elements have been lost and we’re back to classes and levels, the most important thing here is that all the content now has an entry barrier of free, and that may be the most important consideration of all for a lot of us. You can download it, have a look, maybe while away some of these Summer nights. Maybe you get hooked, maybe you don’t.

Now the new version isn’t integrated into Steam just yet, so you might want to wait for that (supposedly sometime in the next month) if you don’t want to run it independently, but I do highly recommend giving it a whirl. It’s probably about as close as an MMORPG has ever gotten to effectively presenting a horror/suspense game, and supposedly some features of the relaunch are geared towards making that more prominent, such as helping out solo play and limiting the amount of other players in your particular area at any given time so things feel a little more isolated. That said, don’t go in expecting the level of scripted atmospherics you get in games like Dead Space, Silent Hill or the better Resident Evils. But it definitely has its moments, and remains a unique entry in a genre mostly still chock full of fantasy.

Website: Secret World Legends

I remember back when the original Red Dead Redemption released, I had plans. Here was a big open world game set in the Old West, with all sorts of settings and characters, and more than that a possible answer to a problem we were already experiencing: I’d want a certain angle for some panel and Dawn would request references to base a drawing from, and what I thought would be a simple image search would become a nightmare. For crissake was there no photo in creation of someone shooting a rifle that way? But now I could set my own angles, take a screenshot, and blammo! References!

Now mind you I quite enjoyed the game as well, which was probably a good thing since those other plans ended up shelved due to things like transferring a screenshot from my Xbox to my PC being more complicated than I anticipated, up to and including running into some godawful version of copyright scrambling. I’m sure professional or even enthusiastic amateur gamers had their ways to do it even back in those ancient days of 2010, but between that and not really having good free camera options I could figure out, I gave up. Dawn eventually got some posing software on the (relative) cheap and we accumulated a collection of realistic enough toy and Airsoft firearms to supplement that with live pictures when we could.

But fast forward to recently when I once again found myself stymied. I wanted two Huachucas firing their rifles, shooting up at Suzie, and had a clear image in my head of how I hoped it would look. But that top down angle… Dawn needed some help. She could try mocking it up in her 3-D program but we’re getting close to SDCC and time is getting crunchy. And of course, Google imaging failed at the time, even though now it’s mocking me just now by returning at least one image that would have been close enough on what I swear is the exact same search terms.

Sigh.

Anyhow, frustrated, I fired up Fallout 4 on my PC to clear my head with some mutant shooting, and had to use a console command for something, and it suddenly hit me that Fallout 4 has a free camera feature and AI pausing features and setting-time-of-day features, etc. etc., and taking a screenshot through Steam is as simple as hitting F12. Oh and I could modify the look of my character on the fly to approximate the image(s) in my head.

It still wasn’t entirely simple since I had to take two separate screenshots at as similar an angle as possible (something that at least the vanilla Fallout engine doesn’t make easy as far as I know) and composite together a reference in Photoshop, but at the end, an hour or so’s work got me something usable. Not something I’d want to be doing on a regular basis, but 2010 Clint is no doubt decidedly jealous.

That title clickbait-y enough for y’all? Well, in this case I’m referring to the latest reports from the box office*, where Wonder Woman‘s domestic box office take fell only 43.2% from its first weekend to its second. To say “a movie has legs” in box office parlance means that the projections are it will continue to do well even after its opening, raking in a significant amount of extra cash by way of good word of mouth and repeat business. And while a 43.2% dropoff might seem high at first glance, as blockbuster superhero movies go it’s all but unheard of. The Avengers? Just over 50% The Dark Knight? Mid-50s. Only Batman Begins from more than a decade ago is in the same bracket, and only the original 2002 Spider-Man beats it. As far as more recent DC fare goes, its far and away the winner, with Man of Steel being the next best at a 64.6% cooldown.

Now, does this tell the whole story of a movie’s commercial success? Not necessarily. If you clicked on the link above then you might have noticed both Thor and Doctor Strange beating out The Avengers, and when the dust settled neither of the former were close to the latter in terms of gross receipts. This method of calculation can sometimes be kinder on those films who have humbler opening weekends and harsher on those with bigger ones. Wonder Woman‘s domestic opening gross of ~103 million, while eminently respectable and most certainly exceeding Warner Bros. original estimate of ~65 million, does not exceed Man of Steel‘s ~$117 million take and definitely doesn’t come close to Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice at ~166 million — but because of its frontloaded worldwide opening combined with not-so-great word of mouth/reviews BvS had nowhere to go but down, and its second weekend was a near 69% dropoff to a ~51 million second frame. If we look at the stats for two weekends (source) we get this:

Man of Steel: 116,619,362 opening + 41,287,206 second = 157,906,568

Batman v Superman: 166,007,347 opening + 51,335,254 second = 217,342,601

Wonder Woman: 103,251,471 + 58,520,672 second = 161,772,143

These calculations also do not count weekday totals or the vitally important foreign box office, so there are all sorts of statistics that could be massaged and interpreted, but there you have this particular snapshot: last place in terms of opening weekend but first place in second weekend, with a lot of positive vibe suggesting momentum moving forwards. I know my feed has been alive with plenty of friends declaring their intent to go see it again a second or even third time.

Also whatever your take on the politics surrounding the movie, there’s little doubt it struck a chord with the female audience, who made up what I believe is a genre-first majority of 52% of the demographic on opening weekend and are certainly amongst its most enthusiastic supporters. And here’s the thing about the ladies, to go by previous outings: you strike that chord successfully and they’ll keep coming back. Remember James Cameron’s Titanic? Sure we’re talking 20 years ago and a different genre, but still its opening weekend was less than 30 million, and even adjusting for inflation that seems low by today’s blockbuster standards. Yet Titanic was one of those films that didn’t have a second weekend drop-off, it had a ramp-up, +23.8% between weekends one and two, and it kept on keeping on for months after until it closed out with just over 600 million domestic and over 2 billion dollars worldwide. And I can all but guarantee you it wasn’t the 18-35 male demographic keeping it afloat for all that time (pardon the expression).

Mind you I don’t think any movie makes money by excluding a demographic, either, but Wonder Woman seems to be the kind of film that just about everyone can enjoy, unless you’re really prejudiced against superhero films in general. So my feeling is she’s going to stay in the theaters for awhile even with some stiff Summer competition coming up soon between a new Transformers movie and a new Spider-Man.

And yeah, I realize this post doesn’t have much to do with Zombie Ranch, but for obvious reasons we always take a keen interest in the zeitgeist involving female action leads. Also it’s been a long-running conceit of mine that Supergirl, Catwoman and Elektra didn’t fail because they were women-led, they failed by being terrible movies. Wonder Woman has finally seemed to emerge as living proof of that, so along with the rest of the film industry I want to keep an eye out and see where it ends up in practice to all of my theory.

(*She does have some fantastic legs, though.)

So, Wonder Woman premiered in the U.S. and many other countries last week and it’s naturally generating a lot of thinkpieces, particularly after defying both the low expectations plaguing the idea of a woman-led action movie (much less a superhero movie) and the bad-to-lukewarm critical response to the DC Cinematic Universe so far.

I know I was one of those with those low expectations, having been thoroughly unimpressed by Man of Steel, Batman V Superman, and most especially Suicide Squad, where my viscerally negative reaction surprised even myself since I went into it not really caring about any of the characters involved, and didn’t watch it until weeks after its release so thought I was prepared to be underwhelmed. But enough about me nearly breaking my television… the track record contributed to a degree of skepticism where despite my support for the idea of female-led superhero films, I just couldn’t bring myself to commit to making the theatrical exception.

But then the early reviews and word of mouth started coming in, from people who could hardly be described as shills or even just overly enthusiastic fans, and so in the end I counted myself among those contributing to WW’s historic 100+ million opening weekend.

Did it deserve it? I believe yes. Far worse movies have pulled in far more dollars, after all, and Wonder Woman is a genuinely well put together movie with a talented director at the helm who had a vision and something to say. Now, what message you took away from Patty Jenkins’ opus will vary from person to person. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was not reduced to tears of joy like many of the grown, professional women who watched. Perhaps more surprisingly, Dawn did not tear up even though she sure as heck did when Rey caught the lightsaber or when Holtzmann two-gunned her way through a horde of ghosts.

But despite this both of us agree there is a sincerity of emotion and effort permeating the movie. And, I believe, an amazingly healthy take on men and women in the form of the lead characters Diana Prince and Steve Trevor. I mean, I was never a big fan of Wonder Woman, and Steve Trevor was just an absolute cipher to me until Chris Pine brought him to life on the big screen. There is a rare alchemy here. An equality of, if not power level, of spiritual importance. Some have compared the relationship to that of Superman and Lois Lane in the first 1978 film, and that seems to be a fairly interesting nexus because it’s part of the period that gave us the two other comparisons rattling around in my brain: Han Solo/Luke Skywalker & Princess Leia, and Indiana Jones/Marion Ravenwood. I always enjoyed those ladies because even if the movie wasn’t theirs, they acted like they didn’t know that, and their own demonstrations of verve, morals and resourcefulness elevated the film. There was an egalitarian flair to the proceedings. Not always, of course, but hell, I was pretty goddamned freaked out just watching the Well of Souls sequence on a movie screen so I didn’t much hold it against Marion that she, too, became a shrieky mess for its duration. Other than them, what have we seen since? I think we’d have to go further back instead to the era of Katharine Hepburn and such. Maybe this phenomenon has to go in 30-40 year cycles? I hope not.

But I’ve always wondered how it would feel being a woman and watching Leia or Marion onscreen, very plucky and capable sidekicks but sidekicks nonetheless. I think in Wonder Woman‘s Steve Trevor, I might at last have my answer, and it was quite satisfying. Mind you, I’m a white dude and so have gotten to see my identifier in the lead plenty of times, which might make this easier. I’ve seen some grumbling that Steve might be *too* developed, enough that he unjustly overshadows the rare leading lady in her own film. But it’s not just me taking the other perspective. To really go into it more would be to delve into spoiler territory which I want to avoid this early on, as I hope some of you who haven’t seen it yet will be moved to give it a go. I believe Patty Jenkins truly did achieve a balance whereby she elevated womankind without having to tear down mankind to do it, and that alone is worth tossing some hard-earned cash at. And Diana Prince throws tanks. Let’s not forget the tank throwing. Superheroes done right are awesome, no matter what’s under the hood.

Courtesy of a friend who works at one of our FLCBS’s (that’s “Friendly Local Comic Book Store” if you’re unaware) Dawn brought home a few English-translated trade paperbacks of the classic French sci-fi comic Valérian et Laureline. I wish we could claim to be more worldly and knowledgeable and say we knew of it “before it was cool”, but the truth is that we came at it out of curiosity over the upcoming Luc Besson film premiering in the U.S. this Summer.

But all that is an article for another day. What I wanted to address today is letters (see what I did there?). Or more specifically, lettering. You see, in the U.S. comic book industry there are all these rules that professional letterers are supposed to adhere to, rules I eventually started trying to emulate even though it didn’t (and doesn’t) always work out in practice. The unspoken judgment on your work otherwise would be that you were a hopeless amateur, right?

Well, imagine my confusion to start reading Valérian et Laureline and notice it seemingly breaking all sorts of these rules, despite the international comics community holding it in high esteem. Was it a function of the translation into English? Did the balloons get all screwed up by an uncaring adapter? With the power of the Internet, I researched and soon had my answer: nope!

Holy crap. The unrepentant white space. The rectangular (or nearly so) word balloons. The wavy balloon tails in panel 2 (which in America would tend to denote the speaker being sick). The complete lack of a word balloon for the dialogue being spoken in panel 3.

These are the kind of lettering sins which could get a webcomic snubbed as hopelessly amateur by mainstream American standards. I mean sure, it’s still readable, but what the heck? Do they have different rules or something across the pond?

Oh. I guess yes, maybe they do. Or at least different traditions. And open-minded as I like to think I am, sometimes it’s useful to have a reminder that all these conventions and rules we’ve come up with here might, in the total sum of things, be absolutely arbitrary when it comes to actually conveying a comics story, regardless of the genre.

Something that’s common practice (or at least used to be) in the webcomics world was the idea of “mirroring” your comic, i.e. voluntarily hosting your content on several different sites for the purposes of maximum exposure, as if you were casting several fishing lines with the same bait into a lake.

That might not be a perfect analogy, so let’s get more literal. Let’s say I have a comic named Gorblunk which I host on my website at Gorblunk.com, but in order to try to get as many eyeballs as possible I also decide to host it at Comixcapacitor.com, which I register a free creator account at and in return receive a subdomain of “gorblunk.comixcapacitor.com” to work with. I set things up so that I automatically or manually repost new pages of Gorblunk on the Comixcapacitor site as well as my home site in hopes that Comixcapacitor’s own promotional efforts and potentially far larger userbase will help Gorblunk become a known thing. Meanwhile those who choose to read Gorblunk on Comixcapacitor are helping Comixcapacitor also be a thing.

Of course as an independent creator I am very concerned about my intellectual property, so before registering I make sure to check that the Terms of Service I’m agreeing to do not grant any rights to Comixcapacitor beyond that necessary to duplicate the content I’m posting. The copyright, etc., remain my own, and nothing is notated as exclusive. I can continue to post Gorblunk at my home site. In fact I could also register at Comixcavalcade.com and host my content in all three places. Mirrors, mirrors, everywhere, with no strings attached. Everyone wins.

So if you were paying attention to the little subculture of webcomics creators this past week, you might begin to understand the blow-up that resulted in several creators deleting their comics and accounts from the hosting site Tapas. The bone of contention was, to my knowledge, first publicized via Michael Kinyon’s Twitter and spread rapidly from there, concerning an unannounced addition by Tapas to their Terms of Service:

If user desires to sell, license, exercise or otherwise dispose of, indirectly or directly, any rights or any interest in any content posted on the Platform (the “Offered Right”), then the user shall give written notice to Tapas Media of such desire. Commencing upon Tapas Media’s receipt of such notice there shall be a 30 day period in which user will negotiate in good faith with Tapas Media for Tapas Media’s acquisition of such offered rights. If by the end of 30 days no agreement has been reached or if at anytime Tapas Media declines interests in the offered rights, then the user shall be free to negotiate elsewhere with respect to such offered Right.

This sort of contractual clause is better known as a “Right of First Refusal,” and in practical layman’s terms it would mean that if I was approached by Nickolodeon to do a Gorblunk cartoon, I would not be able to say yes to that deal unless I first contacted Tapas to ask if they were interested in making a Gorblunk cartoon. Then they have thirty days to negotiate their own offer with me. If I did not do this and arranged the adaptation rights with Nickolodeon regardless, Tapas could then sue for damages.

It’s not uncommon as a contract clause and is less binding than it might seem (all the creator basically has to do is run out the clock saying “no”), but it’s unusual to include in a Terms of Service for the free section of a hosting site, particularly one that otherwise assures creators that their copyright is retained (though remember my warnings on that). More than that, this was a clause inserted post-launch, after many, many creators had already signed up, and it doesn’t seem like the change was publicized with an opt-out offered. Just about every company reserves the right to change their TOS at will, but this globally modified a relationship between creators and third parties that was not part of the original agreement. What was weirder was that when Tapas got called on it, their official response was as follows:

The purpose of the Right of First Refusal is not to take any rights away or steal your content. The purpose is to help you. We’ve witnessed multiple creators on Tapas accept unfair, uncompetitive deals and sign away their rights for far less than their work is worth. Creators who should have been paid 10x what they were offered agreeing to terrible deals because they either did not know their market value or did not have any competing offers.

We have connections in traditional publishing, merchandising, tv, and film.  Our intention is to work with creators to bring additional offers to the table, and to create competition in the market so individuals get the best deal possible.

Now that sounds great, but if the purpose was education and protection, why was it so surreptitious? It seems like the kind of clause a creator who had signed up with Tapas mirroring three years ago would only find out about when Tapas sued them for signing that (indeed possibly terrible) Nickolodeon deal, which they didn’t even know they needed to check in about. This is baked in to the idea of Right of First Refusal: the aggrieved party has no legal power to undo a deal after the fact, only receive damages.

Even if you accepted Tapas’ rationale, the backdoor change could certainly give pause as you’d wonder what other sort of silent changes (for your own good) Tapas might make in the future. But a TOS isn’t really the same thing as a signed contract, so there was one easy way out for anyone made uneasy: cancel your registration and delete your comic from their site, and many (including Brad Guigar) ended up doing just that. Tapas later removed the offending clause, but the damage was done.

There was a share of snark from certain quarters that creators were overreacting or that in most cases the IP in question was worthless anyhow so why bother being so protective of it? Well, I imagine you can imagine my response to some self-righteous butthole telling me Zombie Ranch is worthless. Do I make a living off of it at this time? No. Might that change in the future, at which point I would sorely regret not being more protective? It might, and not just webcomics but the entirety of the creative arts are littered with horror stories empirically backing up that scenario. Even something as seemingly innocuous as letting your buddy film a movie based on your IP in his backyard could severely impact chain of title and tank potential deals years or even decades down the road.

It’s easy to go overboard in the other direction, of course, like the people so afraid for their million dollar idea they want you to sign on to their comics project without telling you what it is, but the idea of due dilligence where it matters — and where terms limiting the potential future interactions of one or more parties are involved, it always matters — should never be scoffed at.

Perhaps the Tapas controversy is a sign that the happy-go-lucky age of free mirror hosting is ending. We never really indulged in it ourselves, mostly since it never seemed worth the effort in our case. But whatever else, it’s a reminder to closely review your TOS agreements with hosting sites — and now, unfortunately, to check in on those agreements from time to time and make sure that your mirror hasn’t gotten darker while you weren’t looking.

Occasionally some of you first hear about a thing because I mention the thing. This is fine. I like to teach as well as entertain, blah blah etc.

On the other hand, good lord above please never depend on me for your breaking news, because somehow, some way, I either had forgotten or completely managed to miss that Robert Khoo of Penny Arcade fame resigned his position with the company almost a year ago after nearly 15 years as “President of Operations and Business Development.” Here, then, is my belated take.

Now if you don’t know the significance of what I just typed, Robert Khoo is something of a legend, especially amongst webcomickers aspiring to make their hobby into a living. Khoo did more than that for Penny Arcade. He made it into a business empire. PA is certainly not the only webcomic whose creator(s) have developed into something that pays the bills, but for all their success people like Brad Guigar are still those who exhibit and speak at conventions, while Penny Arcade runs conventions. Several conventions. Nationally and Internationally. And perhaps most importantly — since I have often belabored the point that anyone can *try* to put together a convention, often to disastrous result — successfully so.

Now this is not to discount the efforts of the original creators of the comic, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. They were doing the strip for four years, building their audience, before Khoo came on board. But I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say Khoo was and remains a goddamn unicorn. He was a fan of the strip who also happened to be a business genius, and in late 2002 came to them with a business plan and an offer to work for them free of charge for a two month trial period as he built their brand to the next level. Let me repeat that, for those of you fellow creators out there who are regularly inundated by those bots posting to your contact forms who pretend to be real people but just use your naked URL and a bunch of vague generic platitudes and promises to “get leads” (which is not exactly webcomics talk). Robert Khoo, an actual long-time fan of Penny Arcade, offered to take over all the headaches of business management from Mike and Jerry with no money required up front, promising… well, I’m not sure precisely what was promised, but he seems to have delivered. In a world full of horror stories of artists being taken advantage of by business partnerships, Robert Khoo elevated everyone and his resignation was universally reported as a friendly affair where he just decided that after enough miracles worked it was time for some time off.

A benefit of me being late to this party is that I can observe that in the months since, things have not collapsed and everyone still seems quite amicable. What Robert Khoo did for Penny Arcade is what I’m pretty sure most webcomic creators have dreamed about at least once, although I also think most of us would be happy just being able to live comfortably without dreams of anything beyond that. Did Mike and Jerry dream of empires?  Next year mark’s Penny Arcade‘s 20th Anniversary, and so why don’t we take a moment to look at their very first strip, which was published in November of 1998 on loonygames.com:

There it is, comic sans font, typos and all. In fact I almost wonder if even this was touched up at some point, since a later strip from mid-1999 doesn’t even have word balloons.  A quick scan of their wikia page for 1999 also seems to show that, although certainly prolific, there was a time they did not hold hard and fast to their current M-W-F schedule, such as this comic (suggesting a vacation?) that immediately precedes a 16-day gap. They also had sketch days while attending conventions!

So at that point did they dream of empire? Maybe, maybe not. But from those humble beginnings they stuck with things, migrated to their own site, and by the time the Age of Khoo dawned (no, seriously, in this 2004 article they already refer to the early years as “B.K.” or “Before Khoo”) were already a known commodity, working as full-time comic creators and making a living off ads and reader donations. They made their own names, but Khoo is unquestionably the one who took them to the heights they’re at now.

One of my recurring topics over the years has been observations of creators burning out on their stories, an all-too-common occurrence especially in the field of webcomics. There have been more than a few abrupt endings that I personally witnessed, and many more noted in passing, to the point where Zombie Ranch seems to be something of a rarity as we find ourselves in the midst of its seventh straight year in production. Now of course that’s not as impressive as it might sound given that we’re a once-a-week gig that even then has taken its share of pauses for life instances or holidays, but never without some sort of notice, and I believe our longest hiatus was the month we took off after we finished Chapter 7 (at least part of which was spent in early planning and production for the trade paperback and its Kickstarter).

We’re still chugging along, and that counts for something, but I’ll admit that it’s tempting at times to want to just take one of those indefinite hiatuses that many of our peers have ended up doing. What stops me is that an indefinite hiatus more often than not just ends up a way that a comic dies without the creator officially pronouncing it dead. Because who wants to do that? But if it’s gotten bad enough that you want to just walk away and aren’t sure when you’ll look back, would it be better to make that final pronouncement rather than leaving everyone hanging?

Thankfully this is not a stage we’re at, which I credit to our slow pace and the accompanying patience of our readers. Nothing accelerates burnout like fans posting semi- or outright abusive demands to a creator if they feel unsatisfied with the pacing/quality/whatever of their free entertainment, ironically making sure to kill the thing they loved as something that doesn’t generally pay well (or really at all) turns from a joy into a nightmare for the artist(s) involved. That’s usually when the ultimate version of burnout occurs — the unannounced hiatus where without warning the comic just stops updating, because even the effort of communicating something to their fans has become too much and they’d rather figuratively slip out the back than face what seems to be already a largely hostile crowd. It’s an understandable behavior, but a result the Internet is full of once vibrant comics whose last update page is dated from a few years ago, with the occasional commenter asking, “Is this ever coming back?”

This, more than anything, is the outcome I seek to avoid. But what would happen if, say, Dawn were offered a full-time job doing storyboard work for an animation studio? Could we keep the comic going? If not, would we be willing to pronounce it dead? Should we? After all, not every comic that has gone on an extended hiatus has died. It would give an (unsatisfying) closure to shutter the doors early, but should we truly extinguish all hope?

In any case this all remains hypothetical and I suppose the best answer is to just deal with it if and when it comes to that, but I do like to take into account that our readers are a patient bunch and many of them are already used to just doing the occasional binge catch-up rather than reading week-to-week. That says to me that even should the worst(best?) circumstances happen and we felt like we couldn’t continue Zombie Ranch for the foreseeable future because of them, it wouldn’t rule out a possible resurrection (heh) down the road.

After talking about dire circumstances I should hesitate to compare the current comics situation to our marriage, but there’s a certain parallel in that Dawn and I have been together for over a decade now. The whirlwind zest of our early years has long since settled down into a more routine, low-heat situation, but it’s a comfortable kind of heat. The kind of heat that should hopefully never burn out.

First off, hey, no writer’s strike after all! The agreement isn’t completely finalized yet but that’s just a matter of formalities at this point. For better or worse, the T.V. landscape shall continue as normal.

Anyhow, when you think “art scam”, what comes to mind? Unscrupulous souls passing off the work of old masters as the real deal? While that sort of thing can and does happen to this day, art scams come in far more shapes and sizes than defrauding the wealthy through an auction house. Just today one hit far closer to home in the form of a contact Dawn received through her gallery website:

Greetings!

My name is john glenn from SC. I actually observed my wife has been viewing your website on my laptop and i guess she likes your piece of work, I’m also impressed and amazed to have seen your various works too, : ) You are doing a great job. I would like to receive further information about your piece of work and what inspires you. I am very much interested in the purchase of the piece (in subject field above) to surprise my wife. Kindly confirm the availability for immediate sales.

Thanks and best regards, john.

An email like this wouldn’t necessarily raise red flags since we’ve gotten legitimate contacts in the same manner that also offered compliments and sales inquiries, but the immediate suspicion here is how this wording is as flattering as it is vague. If this was an email about the Duckiecorn pins Dawn just listed on Etsy, why wouldn’t it mention that? Oh, apparently the piece in question was in the subject line, so I asked Dawn what the subject line was.

It was simply, “Other.” And no, Dawn has no piece of that name.

Welp, I find when there’s any question of legitimacy, one of the best things to do is just copy a few lines of the email verbatim and paste them into a search engine and see what comes up. See, one thing scammers and spammers have in common is the laziness of whatever program or bot they use, which tends to send the exact same message, poor grammar and all, to hundreds of different recipients, with only the name and email varying. If I found the same message from “john glenn” reported by another artist, or perhaps even more damning, the same message but supposedly sent by “Henry Cameron” instead, then we can safely discard the message as illegitimate. Lo and behold, one of the top hits on the search engine led to this article: How to Recognize an Art Scam.

And the most recent comment at the time, as of yesterday? A report of “My name is Henry Cameron from Ohio. I actually observed my wife has been viewing your website on my laptop and i guess she likes your piece of work, I’m also impressed…”

Scrolling down the comments I saw the pattern repeated several more times as well. It’s all pretty blatant once you know what to look for. Needless to say, “john glenn” is not getting a response.

If you’re an independent artist, it’s important to be able to spot these scams up front, because just like with the classic Nigerian 419, the first mistake is starting a conversation at all. Even if you use a fake email address of your own and intending to troll them back, you’re still wasting time I’d argue is better spent elsewhere. If you don’t use a fake email, or even worse have other contact information in your email, that’s trouble. The original contact will usually be done by a spambot of some sort, but after that you’re going to get the attention of a real live asshole who may never stop bothering you even after you start to smell a rat.

What do they get out of this? Well, this particular version we got didn’t get too cheeky up front, but I have no doubt that they would soon be asking for our detailed contact information so they can “send a check” ASAP. Contact lists are valuable stuff in this day and age and for many independent artists their home and business addresses are one and the same. Now even if you renege on the rest of it, they have something to sell for their trouble.

But that’s not the ultimate goal. The ultimate end is that after they waste your time getting you to send them images of your art (which… weren’t they on your site?), they’ll mail you a cashier’s check (often international but sometimes appearing otherwise) for some amount more than agreed upon, often $1000 extra. If you attempt to cash this it may seem to go through, but here’s the rub: cashier’s checks are something that your bank credits you for on the spot, but it’s a phantom credit. Especially for a check that originated internationally, it can take a few weeks to confirm legitimacy, and if it happens to bounce at the end of that, the bank will just reverse the deposit.

That means you, the depositor, end up on the hook for any of that phantom money. If you spent any of it you may even be in the red now. But again, that’s a few weeks down the road, and those weeks are the magic time for the scammer. Somewhere between then and now, you will be contacted with an apologetic note that the check was accidentally written for a larger amount than intended, and your “buyer” will ask either that you refund the difference to them or forward the difference on to a shipping company the buyer contracted for the shipping and handling fees. The shipping company is, of course, a fake front. Ideally they want you to now do this by wire transfer since those are non-reversible, non-refundable transactions, and by the time your bank lets you know the first check was a fake, your real money is in their hands.

To sum up: You and your “buyer” agree to, say, a price of $1000 for artwork. They send you a cashier’s check for $2000. You inform them (or they inform you) of the mistake, and they say to please return or forward the extra $1000. Then, too late, you find out that $2000 check is worthless, but your $1000 “refund” was all too legitimate. You’re out all that time, that effort, your personal contact information, that money, and possibly even some artwork if you shipped it off. But at that point count yourself lucky if they just disappear, rather than continuing to harrass you or passing your information off to someone else who will. You already proved an easy mark once, right?

And that started just because you responded to what seemed like a very friendly and innocent business opportunity.

This is, of course, all highly illegal, but it’s very rare for law enforcement to be able or willing to do anything other than make sympathetic noises and suggest you be more vigilant in the future.

Well, for most independent artists, that’s not something we can afford. So be vigilant now, because just a few minutes of research can save a lot of heartache in the future.

So if you didn’t know, there’s a big thing potentially going down within the next week. No, not involving North Korea or Syria — this one’s closer to home and maybe not being talked about quite so much. The Writers’ Guild of America is about to go on strike again.

The last time this happened in late 2007, it cost the industry an estimated 2.5 billion dollars in lost revenue, but more than that had cascading effects on several television shows of the time, up to and including delays and cancellations. Look at that list and you’ll see how most of the late-night talk shows went to re-runs for the duration, and there’s no reason to doubt it won’t happen again. The strike is, rightly or wrongly, credited for both killing off the momentum of the promising Heroes series and cementing the ascendancy of reality television, which got around the strike by professing to be “unscripted” (for a given definition of unscripted, anyhow). It also is pointed to as a period where web-based series and shows started to get a lot more eyeballs as people hungered for content that the boob tube wasn’t delivering and writers… well, I know my share of professional writers and much like Dawn gets antsy if she hasn’t drawn anything in awhile, writers gotta write. If you’re a fan of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, for instance, you could consider the upside.

But they’d also like some health care, which is the current sticking point of negotiations, and the Studio argument they can’t afford to help out is dimly looked at in the face of revelations like the head of CBS getting multi-million dollar bonuses for 2016. If you’re interested in the whys and wherefores of both sides, this article has a pretty good rundown.

It’s not yet a done deal that the strike will happen, but if it does, and it lasts at least as long as the last one, I wonder what the impact will be this time around? Will it accelerate the exodus from network and cable television that the 2007 strike arguably started? Will it hurt services like Netflix and Hulu, or help them? Will any feature films still in early development be affected, like the upcoming Captain Marvel movie? And will anything currently running suffer a Heroes-esque meltdown?

We’ve often heard the past several years described as a “Golden Age of Television,” but I don’t think it’s understating to say a strike now certainly has the potential to end that. But don’t worry, for Zombie Ranch at least it will still be creation as usual. Just be prepared, especially if you’re a fan of late-night talk shows, because in about a week the re-runs could begin…

In fiction writing tropes, there’s the concept of the asspull: a moment when the writers pull something out of thin air in a less-than-graceful narrative development, violating the Law of Conservation of Detail by dropping a plot-critical detail in the middle, or near the end of their narrative without Foreshadowing.

As you might guess from the description, this is something supposed to be avoided since it tends to annoy the audience — or at least any audience that’s halfway paying attention. As an oft-time audience member myself, I agree, and yet, here I am in this week’s comic suddenly having Rosa using a device we haven’t seen before to do… something. What’s my excuse?

Implication.

Or I guess I could say, this is something that hasn’t been directly foreshadowed but could be considered “in the toolbox” (or in this case quite literally the toolbelt). This is why we don’t throw up our hands and quit the theater in disbelief when Luke Skywalker can pilot a spaceship he’s never flown before down the Death Star trench. He drove a landspeeder, right? His father was “the best starpilot in the galaxy,” right? He used to bullseye womp rats in his T-16 back home, and does anyone watching Star Wars for the first time have any clue what a T-16 is? Nah, but it sounds right. Kid’s a natural. Roll with it.

If Frank suddenly pulls out a beeping device and starts scanning things, I’ve got a lot of explaining to do, but Rosa? For the sake of narrative shorthand, I’m making the bet here that the audience will no more question her having certain electronic diagnostic tools than they would her having a wrench or screwdriver. I’m thinking that from my point of view, that would just make sense to me based on her presentation so far. In fact I daresay the readers are properly primed to not blink if she hops into a helicopter and flies it, though they haven’t seen her doing so before. It’s her talents and resources that have been properly foreshadowed, and those can be riffed on now without having to account for every last thing, so long as (and this is important) those things wouldn’t have come in handy for solving a situation prior to this one.

Tl;dr — if you have a character who’s a cop in, say, Los Angeles, you shouldn’t need to show that they’re good at driving fast in traffic or shooting a gun (unless they happen to be really, really good) because that’s part of the presumed skillset. This is where Law of Conservation of Detail actually favors leaving those details out, and implication is enough to move the story along.

Well the Thor: Ragnarok trailer dropped recently and I’m quite enthused about that, but before that happened a different film had its place in my heart for at least a few days. Aw heck, it’s not like I stopped loving it. Kong: Skull Island is unequivocally the best time I’ve had at the movies since Mad Max: Fury Road, and when I sort through any number of reasons for that I keep coming back to one factor: enthusiasm.

And that, friends and neighbors, is the main reason it’s my blog topic this time around — aside from maybe trying to convince a few of you to shell out the cash for a viewing before it leaves theaters. That toxic, entrenched attitude that genre fiction is somehow inherently inferior, which I talked about a couple weeks ago, is something that still occasionally sabotages movie adaptations of “geek” properties, even though you’d think by now that Marvel Studios would have shown that a policy of embracing your source material can be quite profitable. I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising since Pixar’s overall track record has not changed that many animated flicks still come out offering little more than fart jokes, and make money despite that. If you’re a movie executive that’s not really interested in your job beyond what money and perks it can give you and you can make just as much money not trying as trying, why bother trying?

That’s why a movie like Skull Island, for all that it’s basically about a giant ape who smashes things, is so important. Because if you’re a fan of the IP involved, “why bother trying?” is not even a question that enters your head. You want the people bringing an adaptation to the big screen to be as excited as you are, where it’s not just a job but a labor of love.

Now mind you, words alone aren’t always the greatest indicator of this. Ben Affleck and M. Night Shymalan both professed to be big fans of Daredevil and Avatar: The Last Airbender, respectively, and those productions turned out… not so great. Listen to K:SI director Jordan Vogt-Roberts talk about rebooting King Kong by way of Apocalypse Now and it sounds like a potential misfire/disaster on the scale of Josh Trank’s doomed reimagining of the Fantastic Four. But Trank, I contend, is someone who didn’t embrace his source material, to the point he wouldn’t let any of his cast members read the comics. Similarly, Zack Snyder is on record as not understanding Superman or why people might like him, and as a result gives us a Man of Steel that not many people like.

Vogt-Roberts sat down in the director’s chair for Skull Island with a strange vision. I wasn’t really interested in the film, at least not enough to shell out for a rare theater viewing. Even after friends started reporting it was a decent popcorn flick with lots of giant ape action, meh, gotta have standards. But as fate would have it, Dawn and I ended up needing to get out of the house for a few hours and neither of us were in the mood for something heavy, so we gave it a shot. And we loved it.

Kong: Skull Island is a movie by fans of monster movies, for fans of monster movies, but more than that is just a great action movie, period. You don’t even have to turn your brain off to enjoy it, because the plot holes and mystery motivations are at a minimum, and there’s a cast of A-list actors keeping the human element interesting in between money shot after money shot of kaiju battles. Possibly the best kaiju battles I’ve ever seen on film, and by the end of it I was actually excited for Legendary Pictures attempting to put together a “Monsterverse” with Kong vs. Godzilla slated for 2020 or thereabouts — which by the way, if you do give it a go, stay past the end credits.

Vogt-Roberts embraced his sources with knowledge and enthusiasm, and would seem to have been able to infect his crew and actors with a similar sense of doing something special. I think the film not only succeeds because of that but is going to be the sort of cult classic fans are still watching 30 years from now, up there with the likes of Aliens. I’m not going to go so far as to blaspheme and say it will still be watched nearly a century later like the original King Kong — I don’t think even Vogt-Roberts had any notions of that level of hubris — but this is the kind of genre production that should be encouraged. It’s good for the geeky soul, and Skull as well.

Well, I must admit that so far it hasn’t been a great year for us at conventions. The Long Beach Expo seemed to have very little in the way of people buying, and then the bottom line similarly dropped out on WonderCon, which for the last four years has been rock solid for us from a sales standpoint.

We weren’t the only ones to suffer a surprising setback, and sometimes, when it’s five o’ clock on a Saturday and you’re at half the total you made at that same time last year (and you hope Sunday will somehow make up for it but you know that’s not going to be true) — sometimes the only comfort you get is the shared disappointment of your peers reporting they’re not doing so well either. Meanwhile you square your shoulders and just have to hope the next show will be better.

Theories will fly at these times. Is the local economy just down for some reason? Were the admission and parking fees so steep people had no money left for purchases? Is the market for what you’re offering saturated? Was your booth in a bad place? Or maybe your entire section of booths?

But unless a convention is so bad as to have no crowd, period, there’s usually at least someone who does okay. Or even phenomenally. I didn’t see it until I got home but two exhibitors I know (but didn’t get around to saying hi to at the show) posted that they’d had their best WonderCon ever, complete with exclamation points.

Were they exaggerating? Were their previous outings so bad as to make 2017 look great by comparison? I mean it’s true, we still sold quite a few things, enough so our total would have been quite decent or even excellent for, say, a Long Beach outing. But on a WonderCon scale by our past experiences, it was bizarrely low.

There’s of course a third option. I talked to one peer where the bottom dropped out of WonderCon for them last year, which didn’t happen to us. There were reports of an Artist’s Alley table being swamped with people seeking its product while the ones on either side were idle, and it wasn’t due to that middle table housing George Perez or some other luminary. Big booths and small reported feeling things were off, but there were probably still some of the big guys that won the jackpot or at least achieved their usual sales goals.

Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense, like how tornadoes have been known to destroy one side of the street and leave the other side perfectly intact. Sometimes people call tornadoes “the finger of god” because of this phenomenon, like some unknowable higher power is guiding them according to an algorithm mere mortals can’t understand, and would go insane trying.

When Artist’s Alley becomes Tornado Alley, there’s not much you can do in the face of what feels like human consumer habits rendered into a force of nature. Hard sell, soft sell, it doesn’t seem to matter. You just have to ride out the storm and hope that next time, the good side of the street is the one you happen to be on.

I feel like I should be reserving this title for one of the story pages, but it applies so perfectly. If you’re not familiar with the idiom, here’s the definition. Basically, it refers to the mess that can be created if you’ve committed to a complicated course of action but then change your mind partway through.

I mean, there’s certainly something to be said for remaining flexible. If the horse you’re on is about to keel over and leave you in the drink, you might as well get wet on your own terms. But where fiction is concerned, well, this kind of example burns my britches:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/westworld-season-2-plot-reddit-storyline-jonathan-nolan-details-news-a7651506.html

The link there is an article about a recent panel held by the creators of the Westworld TV show, which I’ve written about previously and which prides itself on keeping its audience guessing about its many mysteries and twists.

“Reddit has already figured out the third episode twist, so we’re changing that right now…” 

That’s the quote from co-creator Jonathan Nolan regarding the development of Season 2. Now it’s not clear how much of the season has been plotted out at this point, and certainly I myself reserve the right for a creator to make changes they feel are for the better, even up to the eve of debut (though that last is far more doable in a webcomic than a TV production). But I take exception to this idea that because someone on social media happened to guess your plot point, you’re now going to change your course. Or horse, to get back to the idiom.

I’ve had people guess what was going to happen in Zombie Ranch. So what? One person’s obvious telegraph is another’s complete surprise, and if they’re involved enough in discussing what’s going to happen to be making these guesses, should you really be cheating them out of the satisfaction of following the clues you’ve dropped by yanking or altering your planned conclusion?

I feel like this is the ultimate toxic end result of a pop culture that cherishes surprises above all else and finds stories worthless if they are “spoiled.” Now even the writers are falling prey to that mindset.

And we all will most likely just end up a lot wetter and unhappier as a result.