Category: Writer’s Blog

As you might imagine, it’s a pet peeve of mine when comics are categorically dismissed as an art form or as having any merit beyond the purely commercial. This attitude has seemed to soften in the 21st Century with works like Watchmen earning literary recognition, but traces of it linger, as I was reminded just recently by this article in the Irish Times.

The dismissed parties in this case are not comics authors, they are authors of prose crime fiction, but the details are all too familiar. In the midst of a sprawling essay by a former professor of English at a prestigious university praising one of his unsung proteges of creative writing, there is a sudden, almost non-sequitur lashing out:

“But authors make mistakes, too. Very few non-commercial writers know how to successfully advance their careers. Michael was no exception. He changed agents, publishers, gave up writing short stories – a critical mistake in this country, if you want to continue to be noticed as a literary writer – and attempted to jump into the crime genre to entice the vagrant reader. If bestsellers were easy to write there would be more of them. Michael, unfortunately, had, has, too much talent to succeed as a crime writer. He doesn’t possess the fatal lack of talent required. He asks too much of a reader. America really doesn’t possess enough of a literary culture anymore to maintain a writer like Michael.”

The article I linked above was a response to this portion, which in the original essay is truthfully only one paragraph out of many. And yet, what a terrible, bitter thing to write. What a sadly unchallenged view it still is, in certain circles of academia, that entire genres of fiction are somehow inherently inferior, a view often based in a few bad examples or just outright ignorance based on nothing but inherited or imagined prejudice.

And as I thought about it, I thought how that seemed eerily familiar.

Dismissal of genres (or in the case of comics, an entire medium) as inferior is nothing more or less than literary bigotry, with no more merit or justice to it than if you were to similarly discount say, certain minorities. Or women. Speaking of which–just in case you think I’m reaching with that comparison–the original essay had this to say as well regarding Michael Collins’ career success problems:

“One difficulty is that Michael, unlike the three writers mentioned above, is not a Dead White Male (a category anathema in US literature departments for the last 30 years), but a Live White Male, not a demographic entity that is much in fashion these days. Though globalised in actuality, Michael is not globalised by background or genetics.”

As a Live White Male myself, I will admit to not being much in fashion — at least in the sense that I love aloha shirts to what is, arguably, a fault, and have taken to wearing a pith helmet in the rain. But I halt well short of any implications that I am being unfairly passed over, and were it me being referenced in the paragraph above I would have to thank the professor for his efforts on my behalf, but ask him to stop “helping.”

Anyhow, I’m not so bitter yet as to apply Sturgeon’s Law to people, but where literary criticism is concerned, literary bigotry is easily avoided by remembering that ninety percent of all fiction is crud, regardless of medium, genre, source or marketability. And keep in mind that they all also have that remaining ten percent which justifies the rest.

When I was studying Theater in my college years (shut up, it’s totally a thing), one of the texts that was part of the curriculum was Aristotle’s Poetics, widely regarded as one of the first known formal studies of drama and dramatic structure. Interestingly enough, when I went to look it up for purposes of this blog I discovered that there’s some controversy I never knew about regarding the exact concept I wanted to reference, that of catharsis. Did Aristotle actually write about it? What did he truly mean by it?

Well dammit this was not supposed to be a blog about that, so I’m going with the way I learned it; in layman’s terms, catharsis is the power of tragic fiction to put the audience through a wringer, leaving them feeling emotionally and even physically drained at the end but somehow richer for the experience.

Or in terms of this article, I can just define catharsis as:

A couple weeks ago I may have had to stretch to fit Subnautica into the scope of this blog, but Logan needs no such finagling. This movie is unapologetically, unequivocally an apocalyptic Western in the guise of a superhero film. Shane (which has its own entry in my archives) is blatantly referenced and quoted, but the ashen grit of Unforgiven is here as well, as the aged warrior faces his mortality and the thought that he might well be the best there is at what he does — but if that happens to be killing folks, what kind of legacy does he leave behind?

Logan differs from these films in literally offering its title character a legacy opportunity in the form of a young girl named Laura, who (I suppose spoilers) has a crucial difference from the young boy in Shane or the Schofield Kid… she’s already a killer, and quite a competent one. The only thing that remains to be molded, perhaps, is what sort of killer she’s going to be. Throw in a dangerously senile (but occasionally still all-too-lucid) father/grandfather figure in the form of a Professor X suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and the ensuing journey across a dystopian near future America takes on meaning at once epic and personal, in the best mold of the Greek tragedies Aristotle might have experienced.

But it’s undeniably got that Western feel, which makes the taciturn silence of Laura for much of the film not feel out of place.  Actress Dafne Keen has a magnetism to her that eludes many adult actors, able to tell stories with her eyes alone, and Logan is a movie that can sustain those moments of quietude punctuated by howling, bloody action.

Logan, above all else, is catharsis. It is not, I think, relentlessly dark, but any hopeful message at the end is up to intepretation. The poster above should serve as all the warning needed — not only is this the sunset for our hero, but he has turned away from it — as if rejecting even the notion that he should be allowed the traditional ride into its embrace.

It’s not a movie where you applaud when the credits roll — but if your experience is anything like mine, you’ll still feel like you got your money’s worth.

Anyone remember my no-doubt-crushingly-boring rant about my email spam problems several blogs ago? A couple of you commented so I presume so. Interesting now to look back at that and consider my main problem being the filters on my forwarded accounts being too strict. As if the universe heard me, it was around that time that things really started kicking into overdrive and I started getting dozens of messages a day on the work host site, always with entirely randomized email addresses right down to the domain names. Now it wasn’t so much the annoyance of important messages not making it through forwarding, it was becoming nigh impossible to parse them out even at the source.

In an admission of defeat I enabled the SpamAssassin filtering feature on the host with a middling setting, crossing my fingers nothing legitimate would be blocked. There were no worries on that score, though, because it seemed like the assassins were rather sleepy so everything was still being let through. I got so desperate I went so far as to put up my anti-virus and no-script shields and follow one of the links on the spam emails promising to let people unsubscribe, on the offchance these people who kept changing all their source information were somehow caring enough about anti-spam laws to follow them. You had to enter your email, but that made sense, right? I mean they obviously already had my email or I wouldn’t be getting the spam in the first place. It couldn’t get any worse, right?

Well, of course, never ask that. Entering my email seemed to just encourage whatever automated evils were going on and now I got to get everything twice. Whee.

But how do you block or filter out a sender that keeps changing shape? Did I have the time or energy to maintain a whitelist and/or blacklist? As things escalated, could I afford not to?

Well, recently as I was slogging through yet another slew of crap trying to see if I had any housing updates from Comic-Con, I noticed something that the ever changing spam did actually have in common, which also wasn’t common at all. They all had email addresses ending in “.us”. This happens to be the domain server country code for the United States, so I’d never really thought about it… except it dawned on me that I shouldn’t be seeing the designation since I was located in the US, and so is my host. It’s possible I’m wrong about that, but searching for “.us domain spam” led me to posts about a new plague of abuse regarding “top level domains.” Top level domains are the ones you see at the end of an email address or URL… the proverbial dot-com (.com, short for “commerce” or “commercial”), or some of the other classics like .edu (for educational institutions), .org (non-profits), .gov (government sites), etc. There used to be only a few and they were always three letters long, no more and no less.

Now, though? All those old domains are filling up, especially at the hands of cyber squatters buying every variation of .com they can think of with no intention of use except to resell them later (no zombieranch.com, I’m not looking in your direction at all, why do you ask?) — so in an effort to keep the Internet an open prairie, ICANN, the international organization which maintains these regulations, decided a couple of years back to start rolling out new “generic” top level domains. So now instead of having to go with zombieranchcomic in order to get a .com that wasn’t taken, in this brave new era we could theoretically register a domain name of zombieranch.art, or zombieranch.rocks, or hey even get zombie.ranch if we applied for a new gTLD (though the $185k price tag is a bit out of our reach on that).

But who’s regulating all these new gTLD’s? Well, that seems to be the crux of the problem. The open prairie can be a lawless place, right? So this relaxation of standards which was meant to benefit the latecomers to the frontier benefited the bandits and outlaws as well. Perhaps even first and foremost, in some cases. That $185k pricetag I mentioned above is hefty, but after that it seems to basically be entirely up to the purchaser to police whatever customers they choose to sell their gTLD subdomains to, and some are either uninterested or unable to do that. As noted in the link above, the .science gTLD is estimated to have a whopping 92.8% of its registered domains in the hands of spammers, malware distributors and other bad actors.

Now .us is not on the current top 10 list of badness ratios, but that didn’t change that I had hundreds of messages from that domain in my Lab Reject Studios inbox and not one — not a single one — was from a legitimate source. I had a good share of .science messages obviously from the same source as well based on subject line and content, even if the rest kept morphing.

And so, I filtered it. It’s a semi-nuclear option, I admit. I suppose there’s a remote chance that at some point in the future, I’ll miss out on some business contact from a .us email address and that’s potentially tragic, but I’m not an ISP or a multinational conglomerate. Most people I’m ever going to talk business with are other vendors and creators who tend to just use gmail, or if they have their own domain it’ll be one of the classic TLDs like .com or .org. I may write a comic about a wild frontier, but some frontiers are just too problematic right now. The barbarians have been weaseling their way through my gates and I reckon at this point it’s better to just brick that entrance up until a little bit more law and order arrives.

Welp, I was finally able to tear myself away from Fallout 4. Except that was because another game took its place.

At first glance, you might wonder why I’d be talking about a game like Subnautica on my Zombie Ranch blog. Maybe at second glance, too.

Fair question.

Best excuse I can come up with is that beneath its veneer of crystal blue waters, this is arguably not just a survival game but survival horror. Hey don’t take my word for it, at least one reviewer on Kotaku agrees. So hey, some of y’all are into survivalism, some of y’all are into horror, and I’m betting a good handful of you are into both. Thus, relevant to interests!

But yeah, I’m mostly just an exploration junkie in my gaming and Subnautica feeds that habit in three dimensions. I should mention that it’s currently still an Early Access title, which normally would be a huge red “stay away” flag for me, especially with a price tag attached, but Dawn bought it for me as an anniversary gift and I have to admit it already feels more complete and more worthy than a lot of release games I’ve played that have had a far higher buy-in. It’s not all roses, of course — there are lag and crashing issues, bugs, and the main storyline is only partway completed, with some missing textures and progression from phase to phase not necessarily being a smooth process. Updates happen every month and as part of them things may change behavior or be added or removed entirely. But honestly, compared to some of the crap I’ve seen vomited up as “early access” with expectations of payment, Subnautica is very playable, especially in early going, and already evokes several fantastic moments of both wonder and terror as you “immerse” yourself in it (har, har). If you do take the plunge (har de harrrrrr) you’ll probably end up looking up things online sooner or later as you wonder what to do next or deal with something that might not be working as intended, but take my advice and try to do that as a last resort so you don’t spoil the surprises.

At this point I believe I’m just about done with what they’ve developed so far, but for $20 I’m well satisfied, and there are more updates to look forwards to, including the actual release. Much like some of you do with Zombie Ranch, I can probably stay away for a few weeks or even months and then come back to see what’s up. It might be a whole new game by that point, although I hope they don’t stray too far from what they’ve got now, because I think the developers have a winner on their hands here. With some more content, balancing and polish before release, I would go so far as to say it may join the annals of the true classics. I’m glad Dawn enabled me to dive in.

So this article floated across my Facebook feed a few days ago. At first glance it was just another disgruntled exhibitor ranting about the latest failure in the comics convention circuit, but since I have a stake in keeping abreast of such tidings (as well as being given to the occasional rant of my own) I clicked through to have a read.

The introduction the author chose is interesting, equating the stand-up comedy boom of the early 1990s with today’s boom of comics and pop culture conventions. Truth to tell I wasn’t really aware there was a stand-up comedy boom in the early 1990s, but then again I was still a teenager at the time and probably wasn’t paying much attention to the nuts and bolts of such things. Honestly I’m surprised he didn’t make the comparison to the boom/bust cycle of comics that happened right around that time as well, but his main point was that a particular avenue of pop culture was seeing success and so he felt the bust came because a bunch of people piled on trying to echo that success, many of whom weren’t prepared or talented enough and so dragged everything down. He believes the same cycle is occurring now with comics conventions, as shows like San Diego have become so successful that every town wants its own version of Comic-Con, but so many of those are ending up failures that it may burst the whole bubble. The bandwagon’s axles are creaking under the strain.

Is he right? Well, there’s no question that a whole bunch of new shows have sprung up or greatly expanded in recent years, and a fair portion of those haven’t made it to year two, sometimes in disastrously public ways. A few weeks back I wrote about one of the more recent local ones, and this past weekend I got to hobnob with creators who attended another local failure a month before that, and heard about yet another start-up on the docket that I don’t have high hopes for based on knowing of some of the people involved. So I think the evidence points to definitely being correct that running a successful convention is no easy task. Heck, just running one that doesn’t dissolve into utter chaos seems to be beyond the capabilities of a lot of the hopefuls who put them together, and even experienced veterans can slip up.

I think the blog author is certainly onto something where advertising is concerned. A lot of the flak about Comic Excitement Con centered around that $10,000 cosplay prize they touted for a convention that reportedly hardly anyone showed up to. The author’s own target of ire which he refused to outright name (but did a poor enough job of lining out in one screenshot that I could sleuth it out as Brazos Valley Comic Con) apparently did a great job of advertising its special guests… to people already following the convention on Facebook. It’s happened more than once that Dawn and I have gone out for a post-convention beer and had our server be surprised that a comics convention was happening just down the street — and that’s sort of heartbreaking to contemplate, isn’t it? Not everyone who hears about a convention is going to show up, and not everyone who shows up is going to be spending money, but if you’re an exhibitor or guest faced with an empty hall all weekend, you can’t help but ponder how much advertising $10,000 could have bought.

Even a well-known, long-running convention can’t necessarily get away with running no ads, because the dates are always moving and the average person in the area isn’t going and checking on it and just has a vague idea of “Oh, that happens in September I think…” SDCC is SDCC and if you’re anywhere near the San Diego bayfront or Gaslamp District you’re not getting away from the fact it’s happening, but its sister show WonderCon is all over the radio and Internet in the weeks leading up to it.

Now all the ads in the world aren’t going to work if your show infrastructure is a complete mess, but yeah, when I think back on all my experiences, the most successful cons, or at least the ones that seem able to keep going from year to year, are the ones that consistently focus on getting the word out that they’re happening. No matter what guests you can land or what grandiose plans you have, that seems to make the most difference between earning a comfy spot on the bandwagon or being just another afterthought ground under its wheels.

Fight scenes are a staple of fiction, the end expression of conflict that has escalated to the point of actual violence. By that view, they represent something that has gone completely out of control… yet the fiction creator doesn’t have the luxury of just “letting it happen.” In any medium there are boundaries that have to be observed, and comics are no exception. Two guys sitting on a couch debating the latest videogame controversy is arguably rather easy compared to portraying those same two guys rolling around the room trying to bash each other’s heads in.

Sure, there’s something to be said for a fight being naturally exciting compared to talk, but it’s still something that requires thought and effort in presentation. I don’t do storyboarding for every page of Zombie Ranch but fights are something where it feels like a mandatory part of the process, because here you are trying to get this conflict across in a limited, bounded space, and you’re trying to get the action and storytelling beats you need presented in a way that the audience can not only follow but impart a momentum to them. The “gutters” and the concepts of closure come into stark focus as you struggle to find that Goldilocks balance somewhere between too much and too little, and do what you can to guide the reader’s eye so that Punch A is clearly understood to happen before Reaction B.

For instance, in the western mode of reading we go top to bottom and left to right, and so adhering closely to that format will hopefully lend itself to proper order and sense of momentum. Going against it can look odd. Originally I wanted Oscar to get tackled off to the left of the wagon, with an impact marker as they hit the ground that would point downwards to the next row of panels. Fancy. But you put that on a page in a sequence and, because of the left-to-right default, it might look weirdly like they were rising back onto the wagon instead. Switch it around, and the impact marker now points to the bottom right instead of bottom left where it should. So, we ended up abandoning that. Sometimes you can play around with the paneling — for instance more and smaller panels tend to punch up the sense of urgency, and skewed panel borders impart a sense of imbalance that can be usefully dramatic — and sometimes you just end up playing it straight, whereupon I have to remind myself that Watchmen was able to present several memorable fight scenes without ever straying from its grid pattern. If getting too fancy is getting in the way of the storytelling rather than enhancing it, well, I’ve learned to swallow pride and let a more plain layout carry the day. Fights are messy. But it’s up to you and your creative partners to try not to make a mess of them.

A few weeks back I wrote about how creators shouldn’t necessarily buy into every convention or appearance opportunity that comes up. Now if you’re lucky enough to be offered a free table, or even the full VIP treatment where some show actually puts up the money for your travel and hotel stay, that can make a huge difference. The latter isn’t a place we’ve reached, although people who are at that level sometimes have to take a pass on an appearance regardless — though usually if the offer is generous enough it’s no longer a financial matter so much as one of time. Nathan Fillion could most likely get comped by any geek show in the U.S. that could afford to do so, but he’s got that fame as a result of being a hardworking actor and could easily have a shoot scheduled the same weekend, or a charity ball, or maybe even a geek show in Canada that booked him first. And then there are the conventions that end in debacles so bad that the special guests end up not being reimbursed or comped for their expenses like they were promised, so in those cases — assuming the event doesn’t just fold up and die — they’re not going to be inclined to go back no matter how sweet the promised deal.

But anyhow, for most creators you’re footing some or all of the expenses yourself and that’s the major consideration, and conventions do seem to be trending more and more expensive as time goes on. If sales are lackluster, there’s only so many times you can justify being “in the red” as being worth it to get your name and product out there, and I know several peers who have tried out certain shows and had to abandon them even though they had no complaints about how the show itself was run. Heck, we ourselves had to scale back to more local offerings after ranging out of state a few times — the shows themselves were fine and the sales would have been good enough to compensate, but we had all the travel overhead tacked on. I know one webcomic gent a few years back who went further than that and had a video he posted where he went down his entire list of conventions and concluded that they were just a losing proposition and he was therefore not going to do them any more.

But here’s the thing… although I just got done saying there’s a point you can’t justify pure promotion as an excuse, there’s another factor that’s not necessarily quantifiable on a spreadsheet, and that’s just live contact. I say this mainly because as of this writing Dawn and I haven’t done a convention since last September and I’m feeling a bit… antsy? Disconnected? It could be because things are in some turmoil right now in these United States, but I believe I remember feeling it in previous years when we’ve gone a few months between live appearances. Conversely I wouldn’t want to be trying to do a show every weekend, but it’ll be good to finally get back in the groove starting with the Long Beach Comic Expo on President’s Day weekend. Then it’ll be WonderCon, and Free Comic Book Day, and San Diego, and probably somewhere in there I’ll start complaining about too much people interaction. But for right now, I’m looking forward to being out and about.

Listen, there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world right now. Let’s not lose sight of some potentially very important events, like the debut of what would appear to be a game combining aggressive taco truck entrepeneurship and the Apocalypse.

Full disclosure: I have not personally played Gunman: Taco Truck. I did, however, watch Jim Sterling play it, and while he had some concerns over the controls it looks quite fun.

Also like Jim Sterling, I didn’t realize until I looked into the game that it was conceived by John Romero’s then nine (now twelve) year old adopted son. If you don’t know the name John Romero, you might at least recognize that he along with John Carmack and a bevy of other talent at Id Software was one of the people responsible for bringing the landmark original Doom video game to the world in the early 1990s.  If you, like me, were obsessed with PC gaming during that era, you also might know Romero rapidly got a rep (deserved or not) for massive ego and that all came home to roost with his ill-fated later pet project Daikatana. If not, enjoy the history lesson of those links.

Romero kind of dropped off the map for me after that, so it was intriguing to see him back in the game in a way, fostering a new generation in the form of a kid that, while admittedly having some great help, also had an arguably great idea for a game. It doesn’t hurt that the kid’s mom and Romero’s current wife is the woman who was a lead designer of the Wizardry franchise.

Wizardry not ring a bell? Have another history lesson. Or just know that the computer role-playing game as we know it today pretty much owes all its basic DNA to those games. It’s a big deal.

So the kid’s got a good pedigree. As for the game, it just released and currently has a pricetage of $11.99 US on Steam, which I’ll admit is a bit pricey for me based on what I’ve seen so far — but if one of you has taken or will take the chance, though, I’d be interested to hear your experience!

Dawn and I have now been exhibiting at comics conventions for seven years and counting, and we’ve learned a lot since we began. Possibly the most important lesson is this: not every convention is worth being part of.

Sometimes a failure blindsides you, and the blame can be laid more at your own feet than any fault of the organizers. Dawn and I never tried to go back to APE after our seriously unfortunate virgin outing in 2011, but I can’t say it was badly managed or dead on arrival in terms of a crowd… it just wasn’t a crowd that seemed at all interested in what we had. On the other side of the equation, Pasadena Rock’n Comic Con was a disaster which was only good as a showcase of what not to do when trying to put a show together. I look back at that blog which I wrote in the aftermath (on a different site than this one on account of me feeling a need to turn the air bluer than PG-13, language-wise) and I see a lot of me hedging along the lines of “we’re inexperienced, BUT…”

Well now I’d say we’re fairly experienced, and experienced enough to spot a potential stinker before we’ve sunk money and time into showing up. Every so often we get contacted by a new show in our area (or sometimes even not in our area) that’s looking for exhibitors, and we have to make the decision on whether to give it a go. In some cases it’s just too far or we end up with an unfortunate time conflict on some opportunity that otherwise looks promising. Other times, I’ll be puzzling out an email that’s composed of more enthusiasm than grammar and is promising big things, and my warning bells go off. Such was the case with Comic Excitement Convention, which wanted to be a new entry into the Los Angeles scene but had a lot of factors stacked against it:

• It was going to be taking place at the L.A. Convention Center, which although close, is far from our favorite locale in terms of exhibiting.
• It was further going to be located in Kentia Hall, which we are unfortunately acquainted with and is what I like to call “a glorified parking garage” in the basement of the Center. Lots of pillars. Not a lot of ventilation.
• The organizer had never run a convention before. Everyone’s got to start somewhere and he did declare he was talking with lots of people with experience so that he didn’t make mistakes. Or at least that’s part of what I puzzled out from the contact.
• The date set was for mid-January. Now it doesn’t always shake out this way but time of year can play a big factor into attendance and also sales. People in January tend to still be going through the Holiday gifts they received, and their wallets are still smarting from the gifts they’ve given.
• Coupled with the above, CEC wanted nearly $200 for an Artist’s Alley table, for a two-day show, for a first year convention. And to get in as an attendee? $30 for one day as a pre-reg, or a whopping $40 at the door. These are fair to middling prices for an established convention with some good programming and guests, but especially in the case of potentially attendees, it’s not going to encourage a “curiosity visit.” For all that I have my ongoing doubts regarding the Show-Formerly-Known-As-Comikaze, they did well to subsidize for the first couple of years and keep their prices low (or even free).

Anyhow, with all that in mind we decided to pass. And now that the first annual CEC has come and gone, do we regret our cynicism and cold feet?

Not so much.

Heck, until I read that article I just linked there I wasn’t even aware they’d double-booked the weekend with an anime convention in the area, which normally wouldn’t be so bad except for the emphasis on cosplay. Whosoever won that $10,000 top prize will be happy, at least. I mean, presuming that’s actually followed through on. When a show goes down the tubes a lot of promises can go with it.

tl;dr — if a new show is giving all the warning signs you’ve learned or heard about from past failures, chances are you’re not going to be pleasantly surprised if you buy in anyhow. Choose wisely.

I’m going to confine myself to a shorter blog since it’s Dawn’s birthday this week and she worked hard getting the comic done early so she’d have opportunity to relax and be treated to a nice dinner and I suppose I’d best not hold that up with too much blah-blahing.

You may have noticed on a readthrough (or re-readthrough) of this comic online that our lettering style has evolved over time. Oh, we settled fairly early on a standard font for the dialogue, but the spacing of the dialogue has gone through some changes. Noticeable changes if you happen to be looking out for them. Our print volume collection represents when I went back through and standardized everything for consistency’s sake, whether or not anyone may have consciously been aware of it. But here, when I have the occasional bit of “flashback” or “previous footage” of someone saying something, it will occasionally cross the borders between a previous lettering stage and the current one.

In these cases I’ve elected to leave things alone and let the older version of the spacing, etc. nest itself within the new page. It’s supposed to be something ripped out of time anyhow, right? Might as well let it look a little off to set it apart. I’ll probably bring it all back in line again for some print version down the road where the original moment can be reformatted as well, but for the moment it never seems to be so jarring as to need an immediate overhaul, and might in fact be more jarring if I mucked about.

I’ve talked before about trying to help the audience keep their footing in a long-running narrative. This may then be a redundant blog, and so I indulge in a redundant title. Anyhow, TV shows these days will often spend a good 30 seconds or more doing a “Previously…” segment, sometimes extending that into several minutes for a Season Finale or Season Opener. By doing that they’re just continuing a tradition pioneered by radio and print serials before them, including the serial adventure and drama comics of newspapers past of which Zombie Ranch is a spiritual (if not literal) descendant. Sure, there are fans out there whose encyclopedic knowledge of their particular entertainment obsession at times can put even the creator(s) to shame, but for most of the audience these little reminders of what’s been happening are greatly appreciated as a means to remind them of what’s about to happen.

Webcomics, however, don’t tend to do this, and we’re one of them. I’ve discussed before that I figure this is a consequence of easily accessible archives, and in our case coupling that with a “comic blog” under the weekly offering that we often use with links to relevant past events, because when you’ve got over 300 pages in your archive like we do now (whew) even I sometimes have to search a bit. Is it enough? I think it has to be, because dedicating the storytelling real estate every week or even every Episode to a “Previously” segment, despite tradition, seems like the worse option. I’ll do so at the start of one of our print comics (and have!), but not here online.

Still, what that means is I can play a bit — like the beginning of this current episode (#14), where I’m using the technique not so much for reminders as for dramatic effect — theoretically not really wasting the storytelling space. True, it serves the reminder purpose as well, but I figured we’d keep things interesting by mixing it up a bit visually, and of course the end part is a reveal we hadn’t shown before. Cool? Well, time and posterity will be the ultimate judges, but for the moment, I’m liking our little deviation into the past before we get on with the present and future.

So I promised some more thoughts on Fallout 4, although I suppose I can append “whether you wanted them or not” to that. It’s been out over a year, after all, so anyone who had any interest has already played, right?

Well, I hadn’t, and I’m willing to bet there are some others out there who haven’t had the pleasure yet, whether they wanted to wait for Bethesda to work through their inevitable release bugfest or just didn’t have the time or money. For me, it was mostly a matter of money. It’s still $59.99 on Steam as a regular price but during Thanksgiving and Christmas the sale price was under $20, and there’s no reason to suspect it won’t happen again as the game gets further and further from being the new shininess. But man, this is one of those rare AAA titles I think I would have been okay paying sixty bucks for. That I got it for a fraction of that just increases my love.

Now, does the “vanilla” game (as is, with no user-content mods enabled) rate a $60 buy? At this point you’re asking the wrong guy, since even what I intended as my vanilla playthrough has its share of add-ons. I blame True Storms, really… because Jesus Thunderstorming Christ is True Storms amazing. The vanilla game has its share of atmospheric weather effects but True Storms turns that shit up to eleven and I was hooked from the moment I had to defend one of my settlements from a sudden raider attack in the midst of a howling, nearly blinding dust storm. If you’ve got a few minutes to kill, the mod author put together a taste of what he’s brought to the game world:

I mean he even overhauled things so that when you run into a building the rain sounds change and the occlusion detection is generally good enough that during a heavy storm you can see the drops pouring in through the holes in a roof. One thing no one’s quite been able to nix yet is that you get the “wet” effect on your character’s head and clothes regardless of what roof you might or might not be under, so that’s unfortunate, but aside from that this is just so immersive.

Not that the vanilla game isn’t. Could it be better? Sure. Some items in the environment are destructible but most aren’t. You can’t shoot a missile launcher at the base of a sniper’s tower and have it fall over. On the other hand, if you have any enemies foolish enough to take cover behind or near one of the copious abandoned atomic-powered cars in the landscape, it’s glorious to teach them the error of their ways with a few well-placed shots to the hood.

That’s a holdover from previous games, but I don’t know what to say, it just feels more tactical and satisfying, as does throwing grenades and Molotov cocktails. And the world feels so huge compared to previous installments, so much so that it’s just about overwhelming to an exploration junkie like myself. Add in the settlement building aspect and let’s just say I really haven’t progressed far in the main plot. Besides, progressing in the settlement quests gets you the ability to call in artillery strikes and oh my God you just want to stand back and salute while hellfire rains, maybe singing a bit of Star Spangled Banner or arranging a few screenshots of your character silhouetted dramatically against the flames and smoke.

The battles are just great, so great I think people might do themselves a disservice to play everything in the near-pause version of V.A.T.S. that slows down time, but I do understand because it can get really chaotic — plus I’m playing on Normal difficulty so can take a few hits from an enemy I can’t quite seem to get a bead on. That said, one of my standout moments was meleeing a robot to death under the influence of just about all the drugs, including the one called Jet which slowed down time enough that I was able to barely backpedal away from the huge explosion as its reactor went up, like an action hero but facing the wrong way.

But just to tie this in a bit to the Ranch, let me talk about the ghoul situation. Fallout’s version of zombies are called ghouls, which are former humans who have absorbed too much radiation. They become effectively immortal to aging, but their skin wrinkles, their noses fall off, and it’s just otherwise not conventionally pretty. Now despite their condition, some of these ghouls are still perfectly able to function in what passes for post-apocalyptic society, but out in the wastes are the so-called “feral ghouls” whose brains have deteriorated into an animalistic and, uh, hungry state.

They have always been a part of the games, but in Fallout 4 feral ghouls have graduated from nasty and creepy to full-on terrifying. They’re still technically alive, and while normally they hobble about, when they come after you they are fast. Not only that, but they love to home in on gunshots, so shooting one suddenly attracts a whole horde to your position. This video has some V.A.T.S. slowdown and inventory pausing but you can get the idea:

Now imagine being in dark, confined quarters searching out a pack of these monsters. When I got hold of some power armor I was having Space Hulk flashbacks. Best/worst thing? They play possum. Basically just like I envisioned my own zeds doing, they go dormant with no food around, seeming dead, and then you walk near them and they wake right up. You’ll be wishing you were a cambot.

It’s crazy stuff, and crazy good. If you’re more on the Romero spectrum I can understand you wanting more of a, say, Dead Rising or Resident Evil experience, but if you’d like to feel the experience of trying to survive a more 28 Days Later outbreak, go ahead and take a wander through post-apocalyptic Lexington. Just keep your shotgun handy. Preferably a fully automatic one.

We have some folders stuffed with old papers. More importantly, we have hard drives and cloud storage that are the digital equivalent of the same. Dawn and I try to make sure that a good portion of the stuff we’ve produced over the years for Zombie Ranch exists somewhere in a recoverable format that’s either a high resolution image or something that can be scanned to produce one. It came in very handy when producing our trade paperback. Heck, it came in handy just this week for presenting our filler piece, which originally was hand-drawn by Dawn over six years ago.

Old storyboards, scrawled notes on script printouts… we don’t save everything, but I try to keep enough around to provide glimpses of where we’ve been, in case it proves of eventual interest to ourselves or others. It’s not too weird of an instinct, as anyone who scrapbooks (or has a relative who does) can attest, but when you’re working on a project like this it takes on a whole other level, because hey, there might just be a group of strangers out there who have a real interest in your progression — if not now, than somewhere down the road in a place and time you may not even be able to foresee yet.

Call it nostalgia, perhaps even call it borderline hoarding… for purveyors of fiction, I contend that hanging onto the keepsakes of your past is just good business.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a preliminary reaction to the video game Fallout 4 (which I’d finally gotten around to purchasing and playing) and in the course of that wondered if anyone out there aside from me had ever fashioned up a Zombie Ranch character as an avatar in another fictional world. One of the respondents mentioned that they could perhaps see doing so for a game without roleplaying elements, for instance some straight-up shooter where appearances are purely for cosmetic reasons, but they felt that as of yet they didn’t have a good enough grasp on the characters to confidently take them into some realm where decisions and interactions needed to be made, with attendant consequences. They needed more backstory, more of a sense of where they came from in order to get an idea of where they might go.

I’m hoping that this doesn’t reflect badly on myself as a writer, since at this point I’ve been presenting some of these characters for over seven years. I of course feel like I have a good sense of all of them, but a comment along the lines of the above is still totally fair given that I possess the ultimate insider perspective. Sometimes it’s helpful to remember to try to keep the audience perspective in mind. I’m wondering, in fact, if it might be of benefit, or even possible, for me to read back through the archive and try to approach it from a surface angle where all I know is what’s on the page. How much of a sense of Suzie would I end up with? How much would be open to interpretation?

And while I think getting bogged down in too much backstory is a mistake for fiction, I have to admit I’ve been teasing and then pulling away from tantalizing details on several occasions, and you readers have so far been very patient about that. Portraying character through dialogue and action may in the end only go so far and perhaps I should be considering indulging in a flashback or two (or some similar device), letting the audience in on certain matters that are so far only explicit in my head and notes. I don’t normally like to second guess myself on such things but ideally by now people should have a decent idea of how Suzie, Frank, Rosa and Chuck might handle different situations, right? If not, it may be time for some revisions to address that balance.

Something for me to mull over during this Holiday break, anyhow. I did already plan for one major revelation regarding Suzie to be resolved in the coming issue which will probably put some “puzzle pieces” in place, as it were. Honestly everyone’s got such interesting pasts (to me at least) that I think it’s been more of a struggle over the years *not* to indulge, and right now it might be too awkward in the midst of the current Huachuca and network shenanigans, but we’ll see what can be done. It’s at least good to keep the perspective in mind and remember that all the teasing should get around to some rewards.

Ugh, spam. I have a “work address” for the comic and another one for Lab Reject Studios stuff that are both separate from my personal email which was long ago compromised by spammers. But sooner or later, they find you.

That’s not the really bad part, now. Sure it’s not great to pick out important contacts and convention information from stuff about Dr. Oz’s latest miracle skin cure or hot Asian ladies in my area wanting to talk to me now, but the real problem I’ve been finding within the last year or so is rooted in the solutions.

Email forwarding exists as a way to consolidate all these different accounts into one space, right? And that was great, I actually had all the accounts feeding into the abovementioned personal email, which, over the years, had actually started getting less and less spam.

Then, unfortunately, it was getting less and less of the good stuff as well. I’ve started having to a direct log-in every few days to the hosts of my other accounts because hey, lo and behold Comic-Con sent me an important notice but it was nixed by a spam filter. You’re supposed to be able to “whitelist” certain addresses and domains but it doesn’t always work — nor does it help if, say, the source address of the important message changes. The spam filter on my personal email account is so stringent that half the time I don’t even get those ‘click to confirm’ messages when I sign up for a message board… and yet even so the occasional viagra crap sneaks through somehow. I can’t even get it to go to a ‘Known Spam’ or ‘Suspect Email’ folder, it just flat out never reaches me, most recently in the case of not notifying me about legitimate comment responses on this very site. Sigh.

Anyhow, I’m not sure what the solution would be other than moving to a new personal email platform. I’ve had this one almost 20 years and it’s daunting to try to think all the places I’d have to contact to inform of the change. Also there is one benefit in that since it’s not a Yahoo! or Gmail no one bothers with the hacking that makes Dawn have to reset her passwords or have other security issues constantly.

But yeah, if you use multiple accounts from different hosts, be sure you’re checking them at the source from time to time. Sorting through spam you don’t want sucks, but missing something important sucks worst of all.

We already mentioned it on the comic blog for this week but I know there’s a few of you out there who only mosey by to see what’s spilled out of my brain here week-to-week, so I’ll reiterate: we’re headed back to San Diego Comic-Con’s Small Press Pavilion for 2017!

Now it’s true, we’ve managed to get in twice before in the last six years or so of diligently applying, but in both those cases we didn’t make the first selection cut, instead getting the opportunity to sub in because someone else had to cancel. This year marks our first occasion of outright approval, and that’s not only one heck of a nice feeling, it also solves a big looming problem we were going to have to deal with because our usual hotel was undergoing renovations next year and was going to be unable to accommodate us. We always expected that might happen sooner or later because every year was a special favor from the manager to rent us one of their few rooms that was available outside the Comic-Con hotel block. We paid through the nose for it, naturally, but the peace of mind always felt worth it. In 2017 though they’d have nothing to spare, so while I thanked the manager for her early warning (and her bringing up that hopefully in 2018 they could help us out again) we were going to be in the regular scrum for 2017, a scrum which we’d dipped our foot into this year just out of curiosity and learned that the “downtown” hotels go bye-bye within less than three minutes of reservations opening. Seriously, for people that qualify for pro status it’s not the tickets that are the problem these years, it’s finding somewhere to stay.

But that’s the general scrum. There’s an earlier hotel scrum that occurs that’s only open to Exhibitors for the show, which makes sense when you consider they’re the people with the most stuff to lug and also the ones providing most of the products and entertainment. The problem with getting called up off the wait list is that both times we were, that scrum was long over. Fortunately, as noted above we had alternate arrangements in place. Those arrangements went belly up for 2017, but by timely chance, or maybe us getting better, or just sheer dogged persistence, our first-round approval means that we might be able to snag our favored hotel regardless… and at a much lower rate!

It might be premature to be excited about this, but I have a good feeling. We’ll see how it goes.

Yes, I finally got my mitts on a copy of Fallout 4. And yes, I know this game has been out for over a year, now. Aren’t you supposed to wait awhile for fallout to settle before you chance roaming into it?

I mean really that question applies to both the nuclear event and Bethesda games in general. Bethesda is notorious both for the ambitious scope and sophisticated storylines of their open-world games like the Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises, and the terribly buggy state those games are inevitably released in.

Don’t believe me? It is known.

Fallout 4 was reported to be no exception, up to and including an “unofficial patch mod” being put together and maintained by fans once the studio itself decided to stop fixing things post-launch, same as happened with Skyrim.

Why is this tolerated? Even rewarded, to the point where the pre-orders of Fallout 4 (not to mention the day one buys) were quite healthy? Well, because of the aforementioned scope and ambition. I’ll lay odds quite a few gamers were just as impressed as I was the first time a dragon randomly attacked a town they were wandering through — not a cutscene, not a scripted event, a true random encounter that nonetheless had the dragon landing on various rooftops and wrecking face while you and the townsfolk and guards tried to fight it off. Or for that matter you could just sneak off and let whatever was going to happen, happen, even if that meant a few people you’d gotten to know were fried corpses next time you came by. It’s one thing for a game to do big setpiece fights under carefully controlled circumstances, but Bethesda took the chains off and it was a glorious experience. In the face of that, I’m willing to forgive a few bugs.

Well, that, and by having patience I get both less bugs and a lower price. Also more mod options — and Bethesda can be credited for being far more supportive of a thriving mod community for its games than other major companies like EA or Ubisoft, who at times seem totally antagonistic to the idea of marshaling the love of their player base to do cool stuff. I guess this is again where Bethesda’s “chaos over order” prioritizing works out. I’ve only barely started the vanilla game so haven’t really felt the notion for too much experimentation, but I did grab a highly recommended one called “True Storms” which seems to be quite stable so far and takes the already impressive weather effects to a next level of immersion. Trying to fight raiders in the midst of a blinding, swirling dust storm, or even just watching rain fall realistically through the holes in a building’s roof, really brings the wasteland to life for me.

Of course the biggest reason I’ve barely started the game so far is the first-time ever built-in feature of Settlements. Yeah, you get to build and manage a post-apocalyptic town. More than one, eventually. If you’re any kind of interested in such features, it’s pure cocaine, and best of all you finally have a use for all the junk lying around as you salvage it for parts. Seeing as the character generation now has a bodyslider feature for the possibility of a more heavy-set protagonist, I was sorely tempted to restart the game with an Uncle Chuck amalgam, but I decided to stick with my original go at making a Rosa. Building generators and such? She’s good with that stuff.

Say, there’s a question. Have any of you out there made any Zombie Ranch characters for a game, on or offline? I have a habit, at least where post-apoc or science fiction settings are concerned. It’s probably fortunate in a sense that we aren’t *too* widely known — occasionally I’ve pondered how much it would suck if you were, say, J.K. Rowling and wanted to play Harry Potter on an MMO, where at best you might be able snag xxHarrrreePotter156xx as a character name. Not that J.K. Rowling is an MMO gamer (that I know of), but then likely also once you get that big a name you don’t have time to play much, or would just as soon be playing some other character than the ones of yours everyone knows and demands.

In the meantime: Fallout 4. Liking it a lot so far! More thoughts probably at some point down the radiation-and-rubble-strewn road.

By now a good chunk of folks in the United States are aware of the controversy surrounding our VP-Elect attending a performance of the musical Hamilton, and what happened after. It’s one of many controversies in the wake of Donald Trump winning our presidential election, but truth to tell it’s pretty far down my list compared to stuff like this, or our incoming Attorney General being on record as saying “good people don’t smoke marijuana” (Dawn has a legitimate medical need and our state of California has long recognized that, but the Feds under Jeff Sessions may very well not. I would love to interpret that he’s only against smoking and is okay with edibles, but I doubt he even knows that’s a thing).

Anyhow, I don’t want to turn this blog into “real-world political hour”, but it did ping my radar when someone criticized the Hamilton cast for bringing politics into entertainment. I mean, we’re not talking Garfield here (ironic Presidential name check aside) — Hamilton itself is a production very deliberately making a political statement, starring a cast of politicians, all about American politics past and present. It’s like watching The Passion of the Christ and getting upset that it’s religious.

Now mind you, as far as I know Mel Gibson didn’t stand up in front of the theater after his film to ask, say, Richard Dawkins to please keep mindful of Jesus (also Richard Dawkins wasn’t in line to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency). But I would venture to say that where art is concerned, stuff like Garfield is a rare exception. Even an ostensibly fluffy newspaper strip like B.C. couldn’t help but occasionally bleed through a comic or several expressing creator Johnny Hart’s Christian ideology.

Zombie Ranch hasn’t gone out of its way to avoid the occasional political commentary of its own, whether it’s an arguably premature declaration of victory or some elitist media darling making jokes at the expense of their guests. But it’s also important not to read overly into things. I know many people who retroactively consider Ender’s Game some kind of hardcore Mormon tract after finding out about the political views of Orson Scott Card. I don’t agree. Alan Moore is a self-admitted pagan anarchist in his personal life, and yet V for Vendetta represents for me a surprisingly nuanced take on the subject of order versus chaos, with the title character occasionally shown to be just as topped off on ruthless madness as those he fights. They are both, at heart, excellent stories and commentaries on human nature above all else.

If they seem occasionally muddled in their message, well… that’s what makes them most interesting to me.

That’s not just politics. That’s art.

That’s life.

In America, it seems like the days are long past where you could start your career with a company and then, after years of loyal service, retire from that same company decades later. Nowadays it’s all about “At Will” employment, which is usually sold as the freedom for an employee to quit and seek opportunity elsewhere at their discretion, with no notice needing to be given, but in practice tends to favor the employer who can terminate the employee at any time, for any reason. It doesn’t matter whether said employee has worked at the company for three months or thirty years–the axe hangs ever over their head, ready to fall at a moment’s notice, and today’s job market often isn’t all that great in terms of alternative opportunities.

Ideally of course, a person’s experience, job record and loyalty should all be taken into account, but the larger and more dispersed the organization, the more likely it is that such things are reduced to mere numbers on a spreadsheet. It used to be a given that the decision makers at a company would know that company and that company’s culture. For all his faults as a man, the auto workers employed under Henry Ford had a confidence that their boss was someone who understood and valued the cars being made. The newspapers were run by men who, as the saying goes, “had printer’s ink in their veins.” Now CEO’s take their MBA’s and flit from company to company horizontally, knowing how to make stockholders happy but potentially little else about the lives and products in their charge. Investing in people must seem like a losing proposition when you yourself don’t really care about cars or journalism at all and are already eyeing the next hop on your journey.

I don’t mean this as a political screed so much as an observation of cause and effect–that any institution growing or morphing beyond a certain point can lose that personal element where the loyalty and commitment of individuals matters.

And so it is going, I fear, with pop culture conventions. Since San Diego Comic-Con became such a big deal in the last decade or so, numerous other shows have blossomed in its wake. Now SDCC has certainly had its share of heartbreak amongst long-time fans and volunteers who felt squeezed out and forgotten, but at its heart it remains a non-profit organization, staffed by people who care about comics.

No, seriously, stop laughing! Yes, the outward trappings don’t seem to give that impression, but I believe that–perhaps ironically–it remains one of the most professional-friendly conventions out there, and actually does have a points system for its exhibitors whereby you get consideration for having been there consistently for a long time.

Does that help newcomers? Well, I suppose that’s the potential downside. But I have to compare that to the reports I’m getting about next year’s Emerald City Comicon, where people I know who depend on their livelihood for shows like this have found themselves wait-listed for the first time in years. Darker testimony has them being bumped for such thematic replacements as a local brewery. Darkest testimony of all was their conversation with the exhibits staffer where it was apparently strongly implied that if they forked over the cash for a booth upgrade, there would be no problem getting them in…

ECCC had a great reputation amongst exhibitors, which we ourselves got to experience firsthand in our two forays up to Seattle back in the day. We’d stopped going because we couldn’t quite cover our travel expenses on top of hotel, table, etc., but aside from some layout issues I had no real complaints with how it was run.

But it got too big for the small group of enthusiasts who had been putting it together, and so in January 2015 it was sold to burgeoning corporate convention giant ReedPOP. To be fair(?), word was there was trouble in paradise even before that point, and all the testimony I’d heard from my friends and peers was that ECCC 2015 went off without a hitch, so… welcome to the new corporate overlords, right?

Now, though, I have to wonder if we’re not seeing the first signs of that impersonal touch. As conventions continue to become big business, here comes big business to oversee them, with all the accompanying baggage that may entail.

Mind you I’m not arguing that comics & pop culture conventions were perfect before. In fact, perhaps it could be argued the touch was a little too personal in some cases. A business where everyone knows everyone else can be hell if you (rightly or wrongly) piss off the wrong person, the same way an indiscretion committed in a small town echoes far larger than it does in a major city. But I can’t help being a bit depressed to think we may be reaching a point that honest and loyal commitment to a convention may ultimately come to nothing because you’re no longer a face but a statistic, and even if the “boss” today has your back, the boss tomorrow may not know or care.

Worst of all, perhaps, is the thought that maybe the new people in charge won’t give a shit about “nerd stuff” and instead it’ll all be about just profiting off of it.

I suppose the tide is inevitable at this point. We’ll see what happens.

So, a few months ago I posted this blog entry: The Copyright Chronicles. In it I detailed my ongoing frustrations with what should have hopefully been a fairly straightforward process of officially registering a copyright with the U.S. government.

I mean, yeah, I brought it on myself. I’ve talked many times about how copyright protection is automatically established as soon as a given work is produced in “fixed form.” You really don’t need to do anything beyond the act of creation unless you imagine that someday you might be suing someone for infringement and hoping to get monetary compensation out of the decision.

Do I think that will happen with Zombie Ranch? To be perfectly honest, I hope not, but some deep-seated masochistic urge led me to delve into the experience of formal copyright registration. It was supposed to be a matter of electronic filing, a $55 application fee, and a wait of 6-8 months for processing, at the end of which we would receive our certificate. I think it would have if we weren’t trying to register our trade paperback collection, but because we were our filing tripped over the problem of “previously published material.”

Now in terms of formal registration, there still appears to be no clear consensus on whether publishing artwork and text digitally counts as prior publication, which is really weird when you think about just how many major magazines and newspapers have gone 100% digital in this age, much less webcomics. But regardless the fact is we published seven individual issues in print before gathering them in the trade. So… yeah, that’s rather unequivocally a “previously published” situation. Even though we never pursued formal registration for those issues, it disqualified the content from being formally registered now, even in the circumstance of the alterations we made such as resizing and relettering. If there *was* previously unpublished material in the collection, that could be registered, but I would have to itemize and specifically detail what to include and exclude in the scope.

So, while I briefly toyed with the notion of just giving up, I eventually did knuckle down and do exactly what they asked, going through every last bit of the book and noting what parts had not previously seen print publication. And while the back and forth turnaround on that still took several weeks, as of last week I was finally informed that the registration was approved and we should receive our certificate within two months.

Two months?!

Well, after over a year of waiting and wrangling, I suppose what was a few more weeks? And yet, in a strange departure from the previous pacing, we instead received our certificate in two days. It’s not as impressive as I imagined it would be, but it’s official. And heck, there it is online, searchable and everything!

Not sure this is ever worth going through again, but Zombie Ranch: a Tale of a Weird New West now at last has its spot in the Library of Congress archives.

Cool.