Category: Writer’s Blog

And if so, why aren’t they dreaming of electric cows? And what’s with the electricity, anyways?

Okay, so I’m making a lame play on the title of Phillip K. Dick’s seminal novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which the film Blade Runner was (very loosely) based on. One of the purest subgenres of science fiction to me is the exploration of what it means to be human through the lens of advancing technology, particularly the concept of artificial intelligence. Once we create an entity that can think, what does that mean for our own existential state? What would intellect be like freed from the necessities and constraints of the human body? Would a computer develop emotions? Would a machine born out of simple “on” or “off” instructions be able to figure out our world of “maybe”? Assuming there is such a thing as a soul, would it be considered to have one? Where does programming end and independent thought begin?

That last is a particularly interesting question. Okay, so is the soul one, but in light of today’s concerns over nature versus nurture and brainwashing techniques, it’s tempting to wonder if we aren’t just spending our own wet, meaty lives adding to, altering, following and/or resisting a set of instructions and parameters. This is the metaphor that lives at the heart of AI science fiction, and it’s a powerful one, most visibly and recently exemplified in the movies by the film Ex Machina. And now we have an entire television series that looks forward to exploring the concept in an even greater, and potentially more disturbing, depth.

It also involves the trappings of the Old West, so you know, sign me up at that intersection.

If you’ve seen the original Westworld, you may not understand what the big deal is about a remake of a Michael Crichton-scripted tale of technology gone murderously out of control: basically, Jurassic Park with androids. Or since Westworld came first, I guess it’d be fairer to say Jurassic Park is Westworld with dinosaurs. They’re even both set in the backdrop of a theme park. The comparison is not subtle, and neither is any moral or philosophical messaging.

Westworld, the new HBO series, keeps the basic trappings of the premise — a futuristic theme park where extremely realistic androids recreate and populate historical settings for the pleasure of rich tourists (up to and including acts of sex and murder) — but so far looks to be intending to take a much deeper look into the underpinnings of identity, memory, and thought along the lines I mention above.

Interestingly enough, in the original movie there were other parts of the theme park shown such as one based on Ancient Rome. So far the new series dispenses with this in favor of focusing on the particular setting of its title, and it occurred to me in my musings over this article that there are few better choices that you could make than to match up the wild, unexplored frontier of AI consciousness with the frontier exemplified by the the American Old West. I’ve talked before about how a huge part of the Western genre lies in the shifting lines between civilization and savagery, and now I think: isn’t that something that could also apply to our brains, in that struggle between our higher and lower natures? Throw robots on the verge of Singularity into that mix, and pardners, that’s a real heady alchemical concoction you’ve got brewing. I’m ready and willing to drink some more down.

I’m a bit of a history buff. I feel like it’s a good trait in a writer, and not just if you’re someone looking to set your tale in a former time and place. I think it’s good research into human nature itself.

Does that sound strange? Maybe so, if your experience of history is defined as “that class that put me to sleep in school.” Someone rattling off lists of events and the dates they happened so you can regurgitate them onto a test every so often isn’t precisely compelling stuff. It’s much more compelling if you go beyond the dates and get into the details, and the trials and tribulations of the men and women involved. “What happened?” can be an interesting question, don’t get me wrong. “Why did it happen?” tends to fascinate me more. What was in the particular psychological makeup of a Robert E. Lee or Catherine the Great or Archimedes that, combined with the happenstances of the Universe, made things turn out the way they did?

Of particular note here are the failures. The decisions of notable people which we, looking back on them from our Comfortable Armchairs of Hindsight (+3?) , find to be logic-defying and, not to put too fine a point on it, just plain dumb. This is where the writer’s mind, or at least my writer’s mind, starts to speculate. In the absence of pure practicality, what motivators could have been in play to cause Robert E. Lee, a man up until then famous for not throwing away the lives of men under his command, to order a suicidal frontal charge on the Federal position at Gettysburg?

Certainly Shakespeare was no stranger to the idea of dramatizing the lives and key events of historical figures, to where their motives made internal sense to the play even if the motives he came up with happened to be completely fabricated — Richard III was no more a deformed hunchback than Napoleon was a midget, and yet to this day we’ll nod knowingly when someone looks at a power hungry guy who happens to be short and states, “he’s got a real Napoleon complex.” That’s the kind of guy who thinks he can invade Russia successfully in the Winter.

But it doesn’t have to be on that global a scale, does it? Micro begets macro and vice-versa. It’s well known in the annals of psychology that a certain smell might evoke feelings of happiness in one person and dread in another, based on past associations. Going further than that, think about a smell such as chocolate which tends to be considered pleasing by humanity at large. Having a character in your story who remarks on how pleasant they find the smell of chocolate is not nearly as interesting a moment as a character who has a bad reaction to it. The latter defies our logic, or at least our “conventional wisdom,” and so we’re naturally intrigued at the anomaly.

Well, I am, at least — and hey, they’re always saying that you should write the things you want to read. So I like weaving up those skeins of the past for my characters and letting them surface every so often in the form of behavior that doesn’t quite seem level-headed. You have to of course establish a baseline first, but sometimes it’s the inconsistencies in their behavior that actually brings them to life.

When Dawn read the script for this week she came to me with some confusion. She didn’t understand Frank bringing up Suzie’s dad. What prompted that?

“Ah,” I replied. “In the previous panel Suzie is talking about how Eustace might still be alive, and she’s needling Frank about not being willing to go after him.”

“But what’s that have to do with Suzie’s dad?”

It was one of those moments where I realized I needed to back up a bit with my explanation. Except backing up in this case was a reminder of where we’re headed to. Dawn and I had talked over the subject before, on more than one occasion, but… when was the last time? A month? Two? And with all that’s been happening this year, yeah, even my co-conspirator might forget some of those details that we haven’t yet “shared with the class,” i.e. you the readers.

On the audience end, the details surrounding the fate of Jonathan Zane have been kept deliberately obscure, and this latest heated exchange between Suzie and Frank is another example of that. It’s there to be speculated on. Eventually I intend the patience at finding out answers to pay off.

On Dawn’s end, I’m really glad she brought up her confusion because I don’t mean for her to be in the dark, too! I know there are productions out there so secretive and/or so on-the-fly that actors get their scripts and do their scenes a page at a time. They just know that they’re angry at so-and-so. Why? That’s classified.

Seems insane, although I guess with enough talent and judicious editing we oftentimes don’t notice, even though the actor may not actually find out they’re angry because Character A betrayed Character B until much later on.

But that’s not my intent. Dawn is my production designer and director of photography and also in a sense every actor, responsible for conveying ranges of expression. If she doesn’t know (or in this case, doesn’t recall) crucial underlying bits for motivation, that’s going to make her job much harder and might well impact the end result.

So yeah, I have to remind myself to keep her refreshed, like the “previously” segments of a TV show but for stuff that hasn’t actually been produced yet. Otherwise the subtleties of what’s happening may be lost on her, and if they’re lost on her that’s going to have a lot of potential to cascade through and lose the readers as well.

I mean, like I said above sometimes the obfuscation is intentional and a certain level of reader confusion and intrigue is what I’m looking for. But keeping the behind the scenes communication as clear as possible is what I think separates today’s confusion from confusion that persists even later on once all the answers have come forth. If and when the reader goes back through the comic, there should be more “Aha!” than “Huh?”

Keeping the artist reminded (and mindful) of not just present but future is, I think, the key to that.

Technically I might have wanted to delay this blog, for reasons that we’ve hinted at over the course of the comic but are due to bubble to the surface again soon. But hey, the aspect of generations is on my mind. In Zombie Ranch, it’s at a core of Suzie’s character as she struggles to live up to the legacy her daddy left behind. In the just released Luke Cage on Netflix, the legacy of parents and guardians (or sometimes the lack thereof) echoes down to the present, whether it’s in the full-on flashbacks of the Stokes family or a throwaway exchange between Misty Knight and Claire Temple after they beat up a bad guy:

“You got skills.”

“Likewise.”

“My father.”

“My uncle.”

Makes me realize I’m not exactly bucking the trend with the heavy implication that Suzie learned not only how to fight but most of the rest of what she knows from her dad. It’s rare in fiction to get the mom in the role of passing on the more rough-and-tumble sort of legacy.

I mean think about it — how many times in fiction have we seen this happen:

1. Female character displays skill with firearm.
2. Surprised male character comments on this.
3. Female character explains that her father or some other older man in her life taught her.

Now, I’ve seen variations on that exchange in stories a hundred years old or more. Hell I think it’s even been in a drama from Ancient Greece (with the gun instead being a sword or bow, of course).

See, I was going to go forward with my personal thoughts that right now the Geekosphere is going through a period of transition where some of the daughters whose dads loved Dungeons & Dragons and comic books are growing up and inheriting that love, and are starting to have kids of their own… and so maybe now mom will be the one passing that on to the third generation.

But will she? What keeps happening where that exchange I refer to above, at least in fiction, keeps reoccurring? Shouldn’t at least some of those ladies whose daddies taught ’em to shoot be growing up and teaching their own sons and daughters (or nieces, or cousins, etc.) how to shoot in turn? It’s like those genetically engineered seeds that are only good for one planting (which is going to make things really, really fun if an apocalypse ever does occur).

Maybe it’s a cultural thing where throughout history most of the fiction ever written, at least the surviving fiction, is from a male viewpoint, and the idea of a woman warrior seems to always be treated as an anomaly. Just think about how, regardless of whether he’s supportive or antagonistic to the idea that a woman can shoot straight, the male character is almost inevitably surprised that she can.

This is one of the subtly positive features of Mad Max: Fury Road that I kept hearing women I know bring up — Max never questions the idea that Furiosa can fight. Hell, he’s even extremely cautious around the Wives. Furiosa might even qualify as someone who learned to fight from the matriarchs of the Green Place before she was taken away.

But who knows? I don’t think it inherently makes a story any weaker to have the learning of skills come from a male or female mentor. But I wonder if, given another generation, the age old dialogue will continue unaltered… or we might at last start to see some more badass moms and aunts and other lady elders of fiction passing on their fightin’ legacies alongside the men.

We don’t wear enough pith helmets these days.

I’m not advocating more Steampunk cosplay, though if that’s your thing, fine. But after two years in a row wearing my pith helmet to Wasteland Weekend, Disneyland and other outdoorsy locales, I must sing its praises. This thing is awesome.

Perhaps geeky and funny looking (the hat I mean… I know I’m a lost cause even without my Wasteland Weekend gear on) but I’d argue that’s because nowadays it’s so rare to see one worn. If you’re old enough you by now know the nostalgic embarrassment of looking back at the clothes and hairstyles that were popular when you were a teen. If you’re a teen? That day will come, I promise you. Coolness is in the eye of the beholder, and so in the end, an item of apparel must be rated on how well it performs its intended function.

In this sense, in the category of keeping one’s head protected from the sun and heat, the humble pith helmet (or appropriately enough, “sun helmet”) remains a masterpiece of design. It is lightweight, and fits to my head comfortably but because of its high crown leaves a spacious, ventilated interior that I just don’t get with a baseball cap or boonie hat. Heat beating on the outside does not transfer inside, and heat from my scalp disperses out. The wide brim shades face, neck, and ears. With the pith helmet on I find I don’t sweat as much as I would with any other headgear, or even no headgear at all. What sweat does occur tends to be swiftly absorbed with no nasty discolorations on the exterior.

That absorption effect actually brings up what is possibly the most interesting feature of the helmet, and one not generally known to today’s populace — the option of water cooling. You don’t want to try this with a cheap costume version, but a true pith helmet still retains an ability that was much appreciated by troops and civilians alike wearing them in the 19th and early 20th Century. Immerse it in water, let it soak, and as a trade off for a bit of extra weight you now have your own air conditioning system to carry around on top of your head. I experimented with this in the 100 degree heat of last year’s Wasteland Weekend and can confirm how nice that is. Hell, that interior I mentioned above had enough space I once even put ice cubes in it, re-donned the helmet and let them melt while I marched. None of this ended up staining or compromising the helmet in any way, which explains why it was so popular back in the day for not just enduring the sun but the hot rains of tropical climes.

There is one big admitted drawback to the helmet, which I suppose might explain why it has fallen out of fashion, and that is you can’t scrunch or collapse it. It’s much lighter than you might expect, but I ended up not taking it to Hawaii with me because of the bulk, which does not mix well with the baggage premiums of modern plane travel. Also despite its designation as a helmet and past military use, it was designed to stop weather and not bullets or swords… though I have twice been hit pretty hard while wearing it and while I felt the impact, the only damaging result was a dent that I easily popped back into place. Better that than my skull!

Now to close out this post, I’ll say that I originally bought my helmet because I do like how it looks and fits, and (as you may have noticed from past pictures) am not an overly fashion conscious individual. The practicality and functionality was a pleasant surprise. If you’re going to be outdoors in Sol’s embrace and are not afraid of a few funny looks, get one! They may laugh at first, but once the heat is on they will all be jealous of your quite literal coolness.

And just so I’m not too off topic this week — cowboy hats are awesome, too.

I’m an unabashed fan of continuity in my entertainment. I like that immersive feeling of something that happened in an earlier installment coming back to importance in a later one. I like that Bojack Horseman has been dwelling in “Hollywoo” (including everyone in the series calling it that) ever since an ill-conceived escapade involving vandalism of a certain famous sign halfway through Season 1. I like that the ’90s cartoon version of The Tick had an episode where a villain tries to carve his name on the moon, and not only does the moon have his partial name on it from that point on, it much later becomes a plot device which then leads to a chunk being bitten out of it (long story).

And yet I am also an unabashed fan of Mad Max: Fury Road, a film which plays merry hell with the established details and order of events portrayed in the first three films of the franchise. What gives?

Well, it helps most that Fury Road is just an awesome movie, but George Miller had a great take when asked about the inconsistencies — that Max is more mythic figure than man. Stories involving him are not so much to be considered history as tales around a post-apocalyptic campfire, much like the oral traditions before our modern era of codifying–some might go so far as to say calcifying–our heroes and villains and plots in written form.

While that might seem on the surface like a convenient excuse to ignore continuity, in Miller’s case it’s backed up by the framing devices through which both The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome are presented: they are straight up being told to you as the remembrances of something that happened in the past when the narrator met (or at least claims to have met) Max. In Road Warrior the narrator (who is eventually revealed as the Feral Child of the story) goes so far as to admit openly that what he’s about to say may be unreliable: “My life fades. The vision dims…”

Continuity could be argued as the recent anomaly of human storytelling, stacked against centuries of purely oral myth. Did the audience in Ancient Thebes care if the guy speaking of the Labors of Hercules established a timeline that didn’t make sense compared to the guy who earlier came by and wove a tale including Hercules as being part of Jason’s crew on the Argo? Or how one Hercules might have been more gregarious while the other displayed a certain moodiness? Let’s hear about wine drinking, monster punching and the lifting of very heavy objects!

That’s not to say you can’t prefer one telling over another–or to mix our myths, prefer the Mel Gibson Hercules to the Tom Hardy Hercules. We say the Joker is definitively Cesar Romero. Then he’s Jack Nicholson, for sure. Then he’s Heath Ledger. All these remakes and reboots that are such sacrilege to us at times are, if you think about it, just par for the course where a popular fictional character is concerned.

And then for all that people have talked for decades about superhero comics being our “modern myths,” I don’t see enough corresponding thought that this is exactly why we maybe shouldn’t get so upset when our favorite bad guy puncher is turned over to a new writer we don’t like, or gets involved in a plotline we don’t feel is appropriate, or even just is drawn a different way. Superhero comics these days with their countless crossovers and reboots and retcons are about as close as it gets to those free-for-all days of campfire tales, aren’t they? I mean, I suppose fan fiction does it one better, but I can’t think of any other worldwide medium where it’s so accepted that characters and even entire universes can have colossal variations in their behavior within just a few years’ time, all of which is fully documented and can be looked back on, sometimes with nostalgia and sometimes with incredulity. Film still tends to wait about a generation before doing a reboot, though where films about comic book characters are concerned that’s bled over and we’ve gotten three entirely different versions of Spider-Man within 15 years. Meanwhile in comics my friends and I will get outraged about this or that and then one of us will remind the others, “Hey, if you don’t like it just wait twelve months.” Mind you that also means that when we’re feeling everything’s going awesome and it’s the perfect representation of that character we love, it’s always in the back of our heads that it won’t last.

But unlike the old days of myth, we’ll still have the record of the version we liked to go back to. Which is probably what pissed me off about the “Special Edition” Star Wars movies more than anything else–George Lucas not only messed around with continuity, he tried to go back and change the stories we already had and get rid of anything that didn’t fit his new vision.

Big myth-take. And beyond the sad fact that we still don’t have a Blu Ray version of the original trilogy because of the lingering effect of his shenanigans, ultimately futile.

Tomorrow I’ll probably be back to the old man yelling at the bling-toothed cloud of the Juggaloker, but for today I ponder this broader view–that even in our modern times, popular stories and characters want to morph and evolve and uh, uh, find a way. The only real difference is that we have those evolutions and mutations on record. But which record is the correct one?

Maybe none of them. Maybe all. In the end it’s probably whichever version speaks most to you.

Dawn linked me a cartoon recently that I now can’t for the life of me find, so I’m going to do the worst thing possible and try to describe it to you from memory.

A comics writer and artist team are hosting a panel at a convention. In the first panel, the writer talks about how much freedom he has in the medium versus his previous work in television and film because comics “have no budget”.

In the second panel, he goes on to give an example of how he could write that an armada of 200 uniquely designed alien spacecraft are dropping out of a wormhole in hyperspace, and how in most media the expense of showing that would be prohibitive, but in comics it’s totally possible.

In the third panel, the artist (who has been silent but steadily growing more and more agitated) is leaping across the table at the surprised writer and screaming “I’LL KILL YOU!!”

If you haven’t worked collaboratively on a comic, you may not get it, but I’d wager every comics writer who is not also an artist goes through that phase where they think “comics have no budget” and whatever they can dream up is totally possible. There’s no actors to hire, no sets and props to build, no locations to rent. Especially if the writer comes from a background that previously had all those complications, then one guy or gal doing some drawing seems like the simplest, cheapest thing in the world.

And that’s when you send your artist the “two hundred ships” script and they start plotting your painful death, assuming they don’t just laugh in your face. There is indeed a budget for comics, and it’s based around how much your artist can feasibly get done in the amount of time allotted. If you’re working with a career artist who has no other job, is solely dedicated to your project, and has a team of inkers, flatters, and colorists backing them up, then congratulations! That’s a nice, big budget to work with. You might just be able to get that gigantic, ultra-detailed splash page of your dreams.

If, on the other hand, your artist is, say, your wife, and she’s got side projects and she has a day job and has to do all the penciling, inking, flatting and coloring herself, your comics budget is considerably more restricted and you should probably keep that in mind when plotting out your epic battle scene. Even if you can talk her into doing it, you should be prepared for it not to necessarily live up to the vision in your mind’s eye.

Now I’m not saying this has happened– oh, who am I kidding? This absolutely happened. I had to learn to manage my expectations, even though I was living in the same house and was witness to everything she went through in the process of producing the illustrations. Sometimes your budget fluctuates at this level just because of basic human being stuff, like an unexpected illness or family emergency cutting into the time and energy available. Maybe you end up having to go back to your script and figure out a way to tell the same story at a lower “cost”. Maybe you even have to just skip a week, easing off the throttle so the whole engine doesn’t break down. I suppose that last is arguably a mixed metaphor but you get the idea. Hell, I was just reading today that Marvel’s Civil War II event comics which were supposed to finish up in Summer are going to have their end delayed until December. Such delays are not all that rare for books of even the major comics publishers, and those are the guys operating with what you would presume to be the biggest budgets.

Now to be fair, I’m not advocating that the artist needs to be completely coddled. Even if it’s a second job for them, it’s still a job and there are certain expectations that should come with that. But a little understanding can go a long way, and it’s seductively easy to write “A big, epic splash page! 200 spaceships pour out of hyperspace, lasers and missiles firing!” and forget the effort and time it’s going to take for your partner to draw all of that. Remember the budget — even if it means you can’t get all those nifty special effects you want, it’s better than an insane artist trying to throttle you in front of a convention full of fans.

Have you ever heard of the old series of comic strips known as Goofus and Gallant? If not, you may have at least run across any number of homages and parodies based on it, such as the Dimwit and Duke cartoons in Bioshock Infinite. The basic structure was simply that the boy named Goofus, positioned on the left, would always be doing things the wrong way, while the boy Gallant, appropriately positioned to the right, would approach the same situation with the proper actions and/or attitude. Goofus grabs, Gallant asks. Goofus mocks, Gallant empathizes. Goofus rebels, Gallant obeys. So on and so forth.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Maybe even too simple? Aren’t there, after all, situations where a bit of rebellion might be the correct choice? I think Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, could make a case for that.

When Dawn read the script page for last week’s comic, she laughed at the last panel and said, “Lacey has a point.”

“I like to have Lacey score a point every so often,” I responded. “Keeps things interesting.”

Having a Goofus and Gallant dichotomy where one character is always good and right and one character is always wrong and bad? I mean, hey, I liked He-Man as much as the next kid when I was a tyke, but my tastes are a bit more sophisticated these days in terms of both receiving entertainment and creating it. I like that occasional indulgence in the trope of “Jerkass Has a Point“. It keeps both the characters and the audience engaged, evaluating what they’re experiencing. Perhaps even more importantly, it keeps you as a creator doing the same, preventing the far more unfortunate occurrence of “Strawman Has a Point” where whatever you were trying to say on a more thematic level goes horribly awry.

Now of course, the rightness or wrongness of my characters at any given moment does not mean you have to like them any more (or less). Lacey does seem on the whole to be more Goofus than Gallant, doesn’t she? Yet I’ve heard people express that they find that endearing, feeling like those flaws make her more relatable. Those same flaws have led others to really, really not like her. But if she was made up of nothing but flaw, that would be as boring after awhile as it would be if Suzie were a shining paragon who never stumbled.

Good drama lies somewhere in the middle, I reckon.

Just around this time last year, I mailed off the required deposit copies of our Zombie Ranch trade paperback to the U.S. Copyright Office, seeking at long last for a formal registration. I figured with all the other milestones the production of the trade represented, why not?

Hoo boy.

Now I’ve talked at length about copyright in the past and how these days they get established by default without any actual need to register them — the registration just comes into play if you ever feel the need to sue someone for infringement and collect damages. In our case I’m not really hoping that case ever comes to pass, but I wanted to go through the experience of doing a registration. Plus your work gets to be filed in the Library of Congress for posterity. That seems pretty cool.

So first warning: I filed my application and paid my $55 fee electronically on August 22th, 2015. My priority mailed deposit copies arrived in Washington, D.C. on August 31st, so if you’re reading this on the Wednesday of its publication that marks exactly one year. The filing is, at this time, still pending.

Now part of that glacial pace is just the turnaround time of the office, which lists a standard frame of 6-8 months for an e-filing (longer for pure paper applications) and specifies that any inquiries into status will only be answered once the tail end of that timeframe has passed. In other words, I needed to wait a minimum of 8 months before I could even ask what has happening and expect a response. Gubmint, amirite? But whatever, they assure you that once everything is finally squared away, your copyright will be appropriately backdated to the time of submission.

So I calculated that 8 months would be the end of May of this year, and once June rolled around with no certificate in my mailbox and an online status that still read “Pending” just as it had since the beginning, I sent that status inquiry… and to someone’s credit, a clerk responded within about a week apologizing for the delay and promising to expedite the process and that I should receive my certificate in a few weeks. Woo!

Of course that was right around the time we got our late confirmation for San Diego Comic-Con and ended up in a mad scramble of preparation, followed by post-con exhaustion. August came and no certificate arrived, and it was perhaps sheer serendipitous chance that I checked my junk email folder around then and found the copyright office had followed up on July 19th, only to be unceremoniously shunted to spam. And unfortunately, it seemed there was a snag. My declaration on the trade paperback that it collected “Issues #1-7” had been noted and it was declared that material previously published was not eligible for registration. If there was new material it could be eligible but would have to be specifically itemized.

Of course that wasn’t nearly as bad as the notice at the end of the email: “…if we do not receive a response to this message within 20 days, we will close this case without processing your registration or notifying you further…”. It was Saturday, August 6th and by my calculations 20 days would be August 8th. Yikes.

I was not happy — though mostly not happy with myself. Still, I composed and sent off a response. First off the groveling apology for almost(?) missing the deadline. Then the admission it was our first time doing this, so please bear with our ignorance. The issue content in question had been touched up, resized and relettered for the edition, did that count?

The answer came quickly enough on that Monday: no, it did not. Only previously unpublished art and text would qualify, and again would need specific declarations of inclusion and exclusion from the application. In addition, they noticed the Introduction page read “by Justin Robinson”. Was I claiming material provided by another author? If so, a work for hire agreement would have to be declared and filed.

Again also the ominous 20 day notice, and here I was due to leave on vacation in two days. Oy. Well, with the clock reset I decided to deal with all that when I came back, and so I have, with what should have been about six days to spare.

So yeah, this all so far has been a slower and more complicated process than I could have imagined, though of course some of that slowness is my fault, and since the whole point of formal registration is potential use in legal actions, I suppose I should have expected there would be a lot of exacting requirements. I await further response, and in the meantime you better believe I’m keeping a close eye on that stupid junk email folder.

It’s a weird feeling, going on a pure vacation trip after so many instances where travel was basically “for business”, i.e. hauling our stuff off to some convention or other. Only two bags each? One of them small enough for carry on? What was this madness?

But here we are back again… and oddly enough, despite the beauty of Hawaii’s scenery and my obvious wardrobe predilection towards tropical wear, glad to return. Of course, between jetlag and just the sheer physical toll of two sedentary nerds being outdoors and active for several days, we were exhausted, and it didn’t help that the final leg of our return was a SNAFU that left us stranded in the fumes of our home airport for several hours longer than expected. Oh LAX… this is why we always use Burbank Airport to fly…

I returned to my day job starting today and that was like going right back in the deep end, particularly because no one had been checking in on my workload like I warned should probably happen. As a result my arms are about ready to fall off, and so I’m going to end this here. Come on by next week and I’ll hopefully be more “talkative” again.

P.S. in an unexpected turn of events, returning to my favorite local sushi spot here in Pasadena proved to be its own slice of paradise. Okay, stopping now for sure.

Okay, technically I’m not sitting on the beach as I type this. It’s right across the street, but for the moment I prefer the sanctity of closed doors and air conditioning.

Hawaii in August is not suffocatingly hot on the scale of, say, the Gulf Coast, but there’s less offshore breeze than I might have imagined, and for being on the so-called “dry” side of the Big Island it’s still quite humid. Just sitting around on the lanai (balcony) can make you break out in a sweat, much less walking or hiking. The portion of my family who usually live in Washington State have had some rough times adjusting.

I would venture to guess that the best mix of weather might occur in the Fall and Winter months, but being tropical islands surrounded by water means the average temperatures really don’t fluctuate all that much. Right now today’s high is forecast at 88 degrees Fahrenheit and the low will be 73 degrees. Wikipedia’s chart for the Kona area says average February temps are about 81/68. I can’t personally say, the only other time I was here I was on Oahu and it was early September.

Right next door to where we’re staying, a house is under construction, which is another reason for me to be buttoned up indoors as the pounding of a backhoe’s piledriver is not particularly conducive to relaxed writing. So in some ways, not a perfect experience…

…but let’s face it, Dawn and I are in Hawaii. Poor us, right? Yesterday morning I was reef snorkeling with sea turtles, an experience which I would be doubting today as a dream but for the mild sunburn that worked its way onto my pasty hide despite my trying to shield it with several strata of sunblock. We, are, as stated, sleeping in a rental house directly across from a beach, which has both a rare sandy section and the more common tortured landscape of pumice and other old ancient lava flows providing some fascinating tide pool exploration opportunities. You really have to work at it to stay miserable here for long. All I have to do is think of my day job and L.A. in August and any annoyances are suspended. Heck, we even found a couple places here with decent alcohol prices, and the tax rate is so low compared to California I thought at first it was a typo.

That said, there’s another reason I’m fine being indoors and typing on the Internet today and that’s that my 40-something body is a bit of a wreck right now after pushing its usually sedentary self through near daily activities. I don’t have good feet to begin with and they are keen on pulling me aside and having a serious talk about this hiking and wading business, and yes Clint even though we weren’t being stood upon during the reef swim, flipping your swim fins still puts a strain on us.

To which my only real answer is, look, if — and I do mean IF — we ever have the opportunity to be out this way again, I could be 20 or 30 years older. My dad the ex-Airborne Ranger who has kept himself in good shape all his life can get away with snorkeling as a septuagenarian but I’m just a pudgy nerd. The rest of the older generation of my family already had to opt out of such things due to injury or just general ill-health. This could be my last chance while my knees or back or what little stamina I possess can get me over to see personally witness fresh lava steaming into the ocean. And that’s ignoring the fact so many people who would love to be here never even get to be here at all.

And yeah, I just got the word that the volcano visit is happening today. So come on, feet, let’s do this. And let’s hope I don’t accidentally sacrifice my iPhone to the Gods.

[WARNING: MILD SPOILERS FOR “STRANGER THINGS” AND CURRENT MARVEL COMICS FOLLOW]

You’re watching a long-running television show, or reading a book or comic full of well-established, beloved characters, and suddenly there’s an episode (or chapter or issue) where they start dying. By the time the second or third shuffles off the mortal coil, the shock subsides and you settle back waiting for the inevitable smash-cut to someone waking up from a nightmare, or Uatu the Watcher’s bald, entoga’ed visage holding forth dramatically on the many twists and turns taken by alternate Earths. In any case, you’re not really worried that what you’re seeing is going to stick, unless perhaps Joss Whedon or George R. R. Martin is involved. Then again I’ve talked before about how their particular proclivities can arguably lead to more exhaustion than tension over time.

Still, if you’re writing novels in a setting where an element of deadly danger should be present, sooner or later you have to face the question of what you’re willing to do (or not do) to preserve that theme. More importantly, how are you going to do so in a way where your audience actually gives a crap? The original Star Trek series had their infamous “red shirt” security details whose sole purpose was to die horribly on an away mission in order to establish the deadliness of the threat being faced without harming one of the command crew, but over time that became such a joke that to this day “redshirt” is a slang term for a disposable character. They hardly ever had names, either, unless you count Kirk yelling a concerned “Johnson?!” as their gargled scream erupted from the commlink. Poor ol’ Ensign Expendable. We hardly knew ye.

On the other hand, we don’t tend to like it when someone suddenly joins in with the cast we know and love and gets focus, because often they’re still going to be gone soon. It just means that instead of being a victim they might be the murderer/saboteur/etc. But what’s the alternative? Are you really prepared to permanently mess with Spock, McCoy and/or Kirk? Are you prepared to receive death threats over having Captain America declare “hail Hydra” or having Hawkeye kill the Hulk? Even though comics fans more than anyone should know that everything will be retconned within a few years?

Sounds like a lot less trouble to kill off people no one cares about — but even then, there can be surprises…

If haven’t watched Stranger Things yet, too bad, you had your spoiler warning at the start of this blog. But that’s Barb, and Barb dies. Barb in fact is last scene being dragged off by a monster at the very start of episode three in an eight episode series. Up to that point, I don’t imagine that her total amount of scenes measures more than five minutes of screen time. She was just Nancy’s nerdier, more grounded friend, there mostly to be sacrificed to the plot, but with just enough character to her that we would hopefully feel a twinge of something when she meets her fate.

In Barb’s case the showrunners unexpectedly did their job too well and inspired an obsession of such fervor that people are unironically calling for Barb-centric spinoffs and criticizing the Duffer Brothers for their mistreatment of a beloved icon.

Lest we forget: FIVE MINUTES.

Now yes, this means Barb is the very definition of a “gold minor”, but because of how Netflix works her fate was sealed the moment Season 1 became available, for better or worse. She’s that dream of having a character you devoted so little time to managing to have an impactful demise, but also that nightmare of fans giving you a huge amount of grief over it that you couldn’t in your wildest imaginings have suspected.

I remember wrestling over just this sort of problem way back when with Zeke in our first chapter, but thankfully when he met his end it seemed to achieve that hoped for balance of people commenting “that’s messed up” or “aw, I liked him” without getting too legitimately torn up about it. Of course, that might just be a function of having a much smaller audience. I admit the other McCartys since then have much more served a role of cannon fodder where I didn’t expect a whole lot of reaction to their fatal encounters, or in cases like Muriel or Cousin Bob a reaction of “about time!”

But should I have let Brett die rather than just be injured? Has my treating most of the McCartys as background characters/antagonists lessened the effect of the Huachucas sticking their heads on pikes and doing heaven knows what else? I haven’t yet revealed what’s happened to Darlene or Eustace, and I know at least a few of you have some investment in the answers to that. In any case I reserve the right to do something really upsetting, because… Huachucas.

Or maybe a couple weeks on a Hawaiian beach will mellow me out. We’ll see what impact is in store.

I am a child of the 1980s. I remember rotary phones, cassette tapes, televisions with “rabbit ear” antennae (and no remotes), and the freedom of a good bike to roam the neighborhood. I remember also a time when movie studios kept pumping out awesome flicks starring kids much like me, insisting that little boys might very well befriend an alien from beyond the stars, or build a spaceship in their backyard, or find a lost secret pirate cave beneath their sleepy little town, dodging everything from gangsters to the U.S. government along the way.

With that in mind, the new Netflix original series Stranger Things hits me right between the eyeballs. It’s a love letter to the early ’80s of my boyhood, both real and imagined. It also owes a substantial part of its DNA to the works of Stephen King, except that King was writing in the ’80s about being a kid in the ’50s, while Stranger Things jumps that forwards to cross-pollinate with Carpenter, Spielberg, Cronenberg, Joe Dante, and the other luminaries of the pop culture Reagan era.

It works surprisingly well, and not just on a nostalgia level — although there is certainly a half-cringing joy in seeing those green and yellow striped athletic socks and tousled haircuts again, or my completely shameless joy at hearing X-Men #134 namechecked or seeing the blue cover of the D&D Expert Set that lo, I once did own. No, Stranger Things works because it goes beyond merely aping the aesthetics of early 1980s America and its films, it captures the ineffable spirit and charm of them as well. Stranger Things remembers that there was an era where child actors were not just tolerated in a cast but were the leads, and we loved those films because of them, not in spite of them. At the time I’m sure it helped that I was just about the same age as the protagonists of E.T. or The Goonies, but the kids of Stranger Things are relatable little cusses that you can’t help cheering for, able and willing to display a wide range of emotion to satisfying effect. The teenage and adult cast are no slouches either, and allow a full gamut of era-specific tropes and imagery to be run through as their seemingly separate stories all weave into one at the end.

Simply put — if you like ’80s things, you’ll like Stranger Things. And even if you don’t or you’re ambivalent, I’d still tell you to give it a try, because it has good performances and a good, slow-cookin’, creepy story, the kind I’d expect the regular readers of Zombie Ranch to appreciate.

Hell, the Duffer Brothers who created the series were born in 1984, one year after the setting of their fictional tale, but you wouldn’t know it. You don’t have to be personally nostalgic to appreciate what the show offers. It just helps.

And so it has come to pass — after five long years of trying, your humble proprietors were finally able to make a return to the Big One, the San Diego Comic-Con, not just as attendees but as exhibitors. Each year since our first go in 2011 we’d experienced a mixture of relief and disappointment as we were passed over, though the rejection was admittedly particularly harsh this year after we’d finally had our gorgeous-looking trade paperback to submit for consideration to the jury of the Small Press Pavilion and it seemed to make no difference. We’d be free once again to just enjoy the show on our own time, and party with friends in the evenings and wake up as late as we wished, but this time around we really did want to roll up our sleeves and celebrate our milestone by taking all the lessons we’d learned since last time and seeing how we did behind the sales table as veterans instead of newbies. This was us in 2011:

And this was us now:

Some things very much the same, other things different. Of course, since we were called off the wait list with barely over a week to prepare it’s not surprising that we went with designs we already had on hand and didn’t try any particularly fancy setups. The Small Press tables at SDCC are a mere six feet long and you don’t even get a tall backdrop the way you do at WonderCon, so I counted us lucky our rearward neighbors had nice tall banners that made for a makeshift one. We also had to jury rig a spot on the edge for our plush Zeke mascot who usually gets to occupy a more central position. I suppose we could have left him off entirely, but he was first brought to us at our 2011 outing so… I guess call us nostalgic?

Well, nostalgia didn’t guide all our decisions. If you take a look at my 2011 blog I linked above, you may note my sheer terror at dodging forklifts on the exhibit floor during setup, or my surprise at the lack of air conditioning during that setup, or my report of how dead it was on Preview Night. None of these things had been tinted with rose-colored vision in the time since, but I am pleased to confirm that having even just that one year of prior experience (as well as years of experience with other conventions) made a lot of difference. For example, this time around we decided to use Preview Night as our opportunity to trade off walking the floor — 90 minutes for Dawn, 90 minutes for me. Did we manage to see everything? Oh hell no. But it went a long way towards us not feeling like we missed out, and there were some things we scouted that we were then able to return to on later days as part of a quick break.

Dawn has been suffering from some hip problems in the last few weeks making it difficult for her to use stairs and ramps, much less push and carry heavy items over distances. This made us take a chance this time around on SDCC’s unique, free “Materials Handling Assistance Program” for smaller exhibitors, and I couldn’t be happier that we did. It meant arriving on Tuesday rather than Wednesday, but after getting our badges, we pulled our car around to a marshaling lot at the rear of the Convention Center and within twenty minutes had signed in and had all of our heavier booth materials palletized and securely shrink wrapped for forklift transport by exhibit staff personnel. The drawback? Due to the volume, the estimated time of arrival to our table would be about three hours. The plus? We didn’t have to wait there for it. So we checked in to our hotel and then went out to an early dinner (including happy hour!), and when we came back around 7ish in the evening there was our stuff at P-14, ready and waiting. Tuesday setup then lasted until 9pm, in which time we were able to get a lot of the initial layout and grunt work done, secure in the knowledge that we’d then be able to return to our hotel, shower off the sweat, and get the remaining pieces in place on Wednesday (as well as getting Dawn’s art hung up at the Art Show).

So while there was still some sweat, stress, and exhaustion, it wasn’t nearly on the scale of 2011. Heck, even the forklifts seemed less dangerous and at one point on Wednesday with the table all but ready I cheerfully took myself on that pre-opening tour I had fantasized about previously but never actualized.

It doesn’t seem I mentioned it in my 2011 report, but back then we had an unfortunate problem on Sunday of running out of food to eat, coupled with everything in or near the Convention Center also being out of food to eat. We might not even have had a cooler and were just relying on people bringing us things or booth sitting so we could go to lunch. Our bellies still remember the gnashing desperation of that time. This time there was a cooler at our setup which we made sure to restock each day with fresh things from our hotel mini fridge. We made sure not to go to bed too late and get up early, with whomever happened to be ready first heading for the shuttle and the other joining later. On the final day, Dawn headed down to open while I finished packing and checking out of our hotel.  It was a good tag team effort that minimized rushing about and fretting.

But one final test remained: the load out. Yes, materials handling got us in, but would it get us out again? Was this where it would all fall apart? Fortunately, the worst part of this turned out to be trying to grab an empty pallet, which my fellow exhibitors were descending upon like starving dogs on steak every time a new forklift load was delivered. Next time (if there ever is a next time) I will make pallet acquisition an early priority rather than waiting until everyone is trying to get them. The exhibit staff provided me ID stickers and a roll of shrinkwrap, so this turned out to be much more of a DIY situation than loading in, but we’re pretty used to DIY. So after what we felt was an appropriate amount of mummifcation, we got our loading pass and once again drove around to the marshaling lot. We had to stay with our car this time, but thankfully the wait was more like forty minutes than three hours, and that only because the driver had trouble finding someone to direct him to P-14 (we may have been the only people in Small Press who took advantage). Our stuff arrived safe and sound and we packed the car, and by 9pm were on our way to a late dinner and then Los Angeles. Sweet.

So the logistics all worked out grandly, partly due to us being desperate enough to try something new and partly because of us accounting for the old. But what about the sales? Was it our most successful convention ever? No, that honor still belongs to WonderCon 2013. But we came close, and we certainly made a lot more money than we did in 2011. Most importantly, I’m now satisfied that even with barely any lead time and some bum anatomy, we are up to the challenges that exhibiting at SDCC has to offer. We have no more guarantee of a return than we did last time, but the existential dread of approval is gone.

As we broke down our displays, the guy at the table next to us thanked us for being great neighbors. “I hope you guys get to come back and do this next year!”

You and me both, pal. You and me both.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that I’m all for portraying ladies as badasses, or comic relief, or any number of character types that we still to this day don’t see very much of in mainstream media in female form. “Male as default” is a powerful, deeply ingrained trope, so much so that any attempt to portray women in what would be traditionally considered male roles often gets labeled as an agenda.

The most recent example of the phenomenon has finally debuted this past weekend, after many months of controversy:

Now before we get down to business, I’ll establish some context. The original 1984 version of Ghostbusters is and remains a thing of joy to me, perpetually in my top ten films of all time and certainly my favorite comedy of all time. Dawn loves it, too. Any doubts? She’s the one who had this done to our convention-going car several years ago:

So what was our reaction to the news of Paul Feig doing a maybe-reboot-remake of the concept, this time with four ladies instead of dudes? Hm. To be perfectly honest, it was cautiously supportive. Then that first trailer dropped, and to be even more perfectly honest, it had both of us pretty worried. I still don’t think it deserved to be the most downvoted trailer of all time on YouTube, that was the obvious work of a certain group of people with an–ahem–agenda. But it cooled me down some despite the talent involved and that we’d enjoyed Feig’s previous films like Bridesmaids and The Heat. Several of my friends had become angry enough over the past couple of months to delcare their intention to see it opening weekend just as a backlash to the backlash, but shelling out the cash for a movie in a theater remains expensive enough to be a commitment, and I wasn’t sure if it was worth doing so on mixed feelings. Waiting until the comfort of a home viewing, with beer and no extra financial commitment would probably be the better strategy, wouldn’t it? After all, the circumstances can matter. Especially once we got the last-minute news of being able to exhibit at SDCC, taking time out for the movie in the middle of stress prep sounded like a bad footing to start with.

I reckon fate had other ideas:

Last week someone anonymously put a $20 AMC gift card on the Ghostbuster car. We didn’t have to use it on the movie, but…

So in the midst of our whirlwind of activity, we dared to take some time out on Thursday night to watch, and you know what? I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wasn’t expecting to hate, nor was I expecting to love, but in our final opinion it’s nowhere near the disaster we feared (and some would have you believe). We still had to fork over some cash beyond the gift card but it felt well worth having gone.

The next few weeks will tell the story of how much or how little the general public agrees, and how much this might or might not advance or set back the cause of more prominent women’s roles in big screen entertainment, but it’s certainly no Catwoman, and deserves to exist a lot more than that Robocop reboot ever did. So if you’re on the fence, you might consider giving it a chance, whether or not you have a gift card all but fortune-cookieing your ass into a theater. We still don’t know who put it there, but we thank them.

The original is still tops, by the way, but this new iteration easily floats into place above Ghostbusters 2. Now excuse me, I’ve got a Ghostbuster car to pack so we can still fly the colors proudly on down to San Diego.

I was in the shower on Monday when I heard Dawn start shouting. I couldn’t make out what she was saying but she sounded very agitated, and I shut off the water in a slight panic wondering if she’d seriously hurt herself or the cat had suddenly dropped dead or something equally worthy of me needing to immediately spring to action, regardless of towel and moistness status.

“Booth! Eeeeee!” There she was in the bathroom suddenly, thrusting my cellphone at me.

“What?”

“Booth!” She played back the voice message from the Small Press coordinator of San Diego Comic-Con on speakerphone. He’d had a last-minute cancellation and wanted us to sub in, and please contact him by the end of the day if we were still interested in exhibiting.

To what I like to think is my infinite credit, I finished my shower before responding yes. This meant we had a little over a week to suddenly kick into gear for exhibiting at the biggest Comic-Con in North America.

Insane? In 2009, I would agree with you. That’s when we had a month to prepare for the much more modest Long Beach Comic Con but had little to no clue what we were doing and no tools to do it with.

But now? A couple weeks back I’d piped up and sent a “what the hell let’s try this” message to the Small Press guy reminding him that we were on the wait list but had our new trade volume which was such a milestone for us and we really really were hoping to exhibit this year and did we mention we already were planning to attend and already had a hotel and it would take very little warning time for us to seize any opportunity he might be able to provide? Hint hint?

Dang if he didn’t call our bluff on that. But honestly I don’t think it was a bluff. We have six years of acquisition and streamlining of booth materials under our belts, with bins still mostly packed from our last convention outing. We have suppliers of art prints and business cards that we were able to get orders placed with within a few hours of getting that Monday confirmation worked out, and the products should be here before we leave. We’ve developed a good relationship with our Comic-Con hotel such that they were perfectly willing to extend our reservation so we could arrive one day earlier on short notice. Our California Seller’s Permit for 111 West Harbor Drive has been sitting primed and waiting since our last foray in 2011, ready to be dusted off at need. I know exactly what paperwork Comic-Con International needs and how to find it, and I had it emailed, faxed and/or submitted through their online system by day’s end. We’re still even intending to get today’s Zombie Ranch page drawn, lettered, and published on schedule.

There are certain things that the late substitution has put beyond our control. We won’t be listed in the printed program guide. We have no way in hell to reserve parking at the Convention Center for the load-in or load-out. Yet still, there are workarounds for these that we feel confident about in such a way that would have had us in absolute panic back in our “rookie years”.

We can do this.

I hope.

I hesitate to use the word ‘miracles’, but truly we live in an age of convenience. Even people like yours truly who are old enough to remember not having a cellphone or even a television remote — or mail order being a rarely used option where you waited 6-8 weeks for delivery —  have now succumbed to the mental state where sometimes having to wait any noticeable length of time between desire and acquisition is anathema. 30 seconds for a website to load feels like an eternity, doesn’t it? And yet a scant 15 years ago I remember being overjoyed to get more than 1KB/sec with my Internet connection. I did my digital surfing with a book in my lap.

Last week I mentioned I’d finally dipped my toes into digital comics services like ComiXology and Marvel Unlimited, and while 99% of the time it has worked better than I could have imagined, there is the occasional frustration of selecting to read a comic and getting stuck watching a loading screen that has no Pavlovian progress bar to stare at. 10 seconds pass… 20… maybe 30? All I know is it feels like forever and I inevitably have backed out to try another comic that’s more cooperative.

Of course that pales in comparison to my occasional Netflix depressions. I get it in my head to watch a particular film, head excitedly to the Stream, and… it ain’t available. Oh sure, we pay extra a month for the DVD option and I could queue it up there, but that means at least one agonizing business day of wait. What am I going to do right now? Is there a more pathetic sight than a 40+ year old man slowly sinking into his couch, frowning as he browses title after title in an ultimately vain attempt to find something which would scratch the itch in his head that a distressing lack of instantly viewable Ant-Man has caused? And it’s not just me… Dawn recently wanted to binge on some Harry Potter movies only to find all our streaming services failing to provide. Such disappoint.

Such are the crazed perspectives of our crazy heads. Movies and comics right at our fingertips, and yet the bummer sets in at just the thought that we might have to use some extra effort and/or wait a little longer before we enjoy them. 15,000 archived Marvel publications spanning half a century waiting for my eyeballs and here I am sighing in anger and stabbing at the READ NOW button because the particular Doctor Strange I wanted to check out is having technical issues.

Now I’m paying for these services, true. This isn’t me haranguing a webcomic author for being a few hours behind with their latest page or giving some micro-business grief for not using ultra-fast shipping options I had no interest in actually giving them money for. But man, even if I’m not jumping on the forums to complain my brain DOES NOT LIKE IT when the free-to-play online game I set aside an evening to enjoy has a temporary server outage. And instead of going and doing something else, the brain’s first instinct is to just sit there stewing and hitting refresh over and over. Recreational targets had been planned. How dare the universe fail to cooperate.

Fifteen years ago — even five years ago — a lot of these services and conveniences didn’t exist, or weren’t widespread enough to begin to take for granted. It occurs to me I should be amazed that technology has even provided me with the capability to be disappointed that, on occasion, I can’t just log in and play a game in real-time with someone on the other side of the Earth.

Perspective on these things is important to maintain.

In the meantime, I’ll probably be mashing that refresh button at least a few more times.

Ironic title is ironic. Long time readers of this blog will be aware of this great irony: that one Clint Wolf, writer of the Zombie Ranch webcomic, actually prefers reading his comics in print — at least where traditional comics are concerned where it’s published in print first and foremost.

I’ve been especially suspicious of newfangled ideas like ComiXology’s Guided View, where comics are broken up panel-by-panel in such a way that the overall layout is lost, and thus, arguably, an essential part of the grammar of comics is lost as well.

“You can turn that off and look at the whole page” I had been told, and while that’s all well and good in theory, the page would become far too small for my aging, squinty eyes to take in properly on a mobile device. Sometimes even on a desktop screen. Nossir, I didn’t like it. Bah, humbug. Etc.

Ahem. Anyhow, Dawn got us a free trial of ComiXology over my apathetic shrugs, and while I was sick in bed last week — bored and unable to sleep — I lowered myself to actually attempting to read a comic digitally.

There was one big difference this time around. We have inherited my late aunt’s iPad, and lo and behold, it turns out the dang thing is the perfect size for me to comfortably hold in bed and “flip through” a comic book with, with each page being big enough to make out details and words without strain or zooming. The interface for reading was also much improved from what I remembered from previous tries. What’s more, at least where more modern comics are concerned the digital version looks quite excellent — probably since it was finished and colored digitally to begin with.

Now mind you the library of titles was limited, and then often just the first trade volume or first issue in a series was readable for free, but it sure was fun to finally get my hands on a few comics I’d been meaning to read for a long time since I don’t get out to the comic store much anymore and more and more at conventions I find myself stuck behind a table or wondering if I really, really have space for 5 more trade paperbacks at home regardless of how much of a discount is being offered.

Perhaps the most insidious thing is how the experience scratched my Marvel Comics itch, but in such a way that it just made the itch worse. Titles like The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and Astonishing Ant-Man and Loki: Agent of Asgard were very, very fun to check out, but alas I wanted more and getting more seemed to mean micro-transactions even if you paid for a ComiXology Unlimited subscription. Bah. Now, Marvel had its own digital subscription service called Marvel Unlimited, but it was $9.99 a month or $69 if we committed to a year…

Then it hit me. One of our good friends is a professional video game writer, and because of that he gets to write off the video games he buys as tax deductions. Research, don’t you know? Well, hell, we already deduct comic conventions from our taxes, why not a subscription to a comics database? This isn’t me being entirely weaselly either, there are plenty of times Dawn and I haul out print comics in our collection for inspiration and guidance. Imagine the convenience and space-savings of having a database of them at our fingertips? That seems worth a chunk of change.

Plus I get to read the rest of Loki: Agent of Asgard. I think there were something like 18 issues available, which would have been far more than $69 to buy. And then find space for. Spoiler alert: we have no space.

So yeah, I guess I’ve finally gone digital. All it really took in the end was the proper platform.

Visual Evil 101 is to never show the faces of your badguys. That’s why Stormtroopers had those helmets — it’s a dehumanizing effect. Not only is it more intimidating, you feel less of a twinge when the hero starts killing them off en masse. Hell even changing someone’s eyes has a distancing effect… remember in the animated movie Aladdin when the Genie comes under the control of the bad guy? His pupils disappear. When he breaks that control and becomes friendly again, his eyeballs once again become fully functional.

Anyhow I kind of went over this before when discussing the Huachucas. Yes, it’s easy and effective to keep your baddies in shadow and/or behind masks. Yes, we continue to do so with the mysterious Exec. But now in addition to the Huachucas, we’ve gone ahead and given some faces to the people operating the Cambots. Part of that was as a way to sneak in further fulfillment of high-level Kickstarter rewards, but I also felt it was about time to stop being so mysterious about at least some aspects of the company.

After all, one of our themes has always been the mundanity of the bizarre, of people becoming jaded to everyday occurrences that would seem insane to us. Visual Evil 101 keeps all the cambot operators away from the eyes of both characters and audience, but the advanced class is the one that shows the faces, and shows people who might not be so different than you and I — but their empathy still seems as deadened as one of those faceless servants of the Empire. They’re not gunning down the Jawas or unarmed moisture farmers, but they might very well film it happening and be thinking of nothing more than when their shift ends.

I still don’t know whether or not the Western might see another period of resurgence anywhere near the scale of its cinematic dominance from the 1930s through the 1960s — although the sheer length and scope of that dominance is something that should give solace to the purveyors of today’s superheroes against the prognostications of bubbles ready to burst. The Western and superhero genres actually have something in common as well in the sense that I believe both have the capacity to embrace several sub-genres, which possibly explains the longevity since you can change up the overarching trappings in order to tell different kinds of stories. A Western could also be a romance, or a heist, or a thriller…

…or a horror film.

That’s not necessarily some big revelation, particularly if you’re a long time reader of this blog who remembers my mentions of The Missing. Heck, there’s the not insignificant handful of zombie-themed Westerns to be found out there, though most are in the realm of low-budget camp rather than anything truly creepy. The Missing didn’t involve zombies, but was definitely creepy. And now, courtesy of a friend’s review, I can add Bone Tomahawk as another example of a Western that might leave you with some nightmares.

Bone Tomahawk, in fact, features antagonists who might well give the Huachucas nightmares. I highly recommend clicking that review link above if you want to know more, but there’s a stellar cast involved including Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, and a nearly unrecognizable (to me, at least) Matthew Fox. He’s not under a ton of makeup, just doing a superb job playing a character a long way off from his role on Lost.

It’s also a very slow burn in its pacing, free from the emotional manipulation of background music even when it’s putting the most horrific violence on display. The decision to be mostly silent beyond the sounds made by the characters, their actions, and the desolate landscape gives the film a certain veritas which leaves you with the uneasy sense something like what you’re watching might actually have happened back in the untamed days of the frontier, no matter how outlandish it gets.

Oh, and there’s an old-timer in the group that runs his mouth almost as much as Chuck does. So if you’re spoiling for your Zombie Ranch fix this week, you could do worse than sticking Bone Tomahawk in your Netflix queue (or equivalent) and giving it a look. There’s no cambots to speak of, but atmospherically it’s definitely got the kind of feel I hope I’ve captured in our darker moments, both in pages past and pages to come.