Category: Writer’s Blog

Have you ever considered how much of our reactions to entertainment are based not only on subjective experience, but pure outright chance?

Think about it. A person who got little sleep, had a terrible day and then a terrible time getting to a theater is far more likely to find their moviegoing experience unpleasant than someone who is relaxed and happy and ready for a good time. That’s not just theory, I’ve heard even professional reviewers admit that on a second viewing they found a film to be better than the first time, because their first time occurred while they were already in a grumpy mood. It can happen in the other direction as well, where an amped up crowd and things like free beer may get people raving about a movie they saw at a sneak preview, and then a year later they watch it again and wonder why the hell they insisted it was fine cinema.

When we approach entertainment with high expectations, we have a higher chance of disappointment if it doesn’t measure up. When we go in with low standards, a mediocre offering might end up putting a smile on our faces just for being “enjoyable” or “not as bad as they said”.

And sometimes it goes beyond the emotional. Case in point: the first time I viewed Captain America: Civil War I was way up in the back row of the theater. I read reviews afterwards criticizing the overuse of “shaky cam” in the opening action scenes and occasionally unconvincing CGI and couldn’t understand what those people had been smoking. Did we watch the same movie?

Well, turns out… maybe we didn’t. Not entirely. You see, my second viewing, we ended up way in the front of the theater with the screen towering at a steep angle above my head, and with that change of perspective and close-in detail, suddenly I was noticing the shaky cam and occasional computer-aided effect. I was also noticing how many face and neck blemishes Chris Evans was sporting despite portraying the pinnacle of human potential, and that’s a petty critique I doubt anyone in the back or even middle rows would have understood.

So yeah, that’s like the cinematic version of my contention that reading a comic electronically panel-by-panel and reading it when you’re able to see the whole page make for two extremely different experiences, and it’s a bizarre added layer to consider as an artist, where no matter how carefully you craft your piece there will be circumstances beyond your control which may distort the experience when it reaches the consumer.

Does the movie/play/comic suck? Or did you have a stomachache? Or the lighting wasn’t good? Or some kid kept kicking your chair? It’s enough to make me consider that everything deserves a second chance.

But then again, I ain’t got time for that. It’s enough for me to consider that again, when someone’s going on about loving things or hating things regarding a particular piece of entertainment and you disagree so vehemently you wonder if they’re existing in some parallel dimension — maybe not. Maybe you’re both just victims of circumstance.

So… I watched X-Men: Apocalypse this past weekend and was underwhelmed.

A lot of critics and fans are not disagreeing with me, but I’m not going to just begin and end with some ultimately subjective and unhelpful statement like “it sucks”. In analyzing my feelings and reasonings as to why I emerged from the theater with an ambivalent reaction, one thing kept coming up in my mind, which is that if this film had come out in 2007 I would probably have found it awesome.

Okay, awesome may be an overstatement, but since the movie itself can’t help but take a swipe at 2006’s X-Men: Last Stand, let’s go there. Man did I hate (and still hate) Last Stand. Some critics have gone so far as to declare Apocalypse worse than Last Stand. They are wrong. Again, had Apocalypse released just one year later, I probably would have hailed it as the savior of the franchise. A fresh start ready to right all the wrongs, and damn the continuity. As a longtime comics fan, I am quite inured to the idea of retcons and reboots if it promises that mistakes will be addressed.

No, the main issue with X-Men: Apocalypse is that it did not release in 2007, one year after Last Stand — but more importantly one year before The Dark Knight and Iron Man. It has released now in 2016, in a much altered landscape where it seems as lost as its titular antagonist, and just like him ultimately fails to be relevant despite the power at its disposal. Just a scant few weeks after Captain America: Civil War where the presence of twelve different superheroes was successfully juggled, with each given character arcs and memorable moments, along comes a movie with the same unresolved problems X-Men films have had in the past, where a good number of the onscreen mutants end up little more than snazzy window dressing. Are you one of the people who complained Ant-Man or Spider-Man seemed shoved into Civil War for no reason and to no good purpose? Oh boy, they seem downright mission critical compared to Jubilee, Angel or even Storm.

And hey, you know, before I saw Civil War… or hell, Avengers, that would have been fine. I would have been content in the idea that you can’t feature a team of superheroes and have them all feel important. Of course you’d have to structure it as Xavier and Magneto (and some other guys), or Wolverine (and some other guys), or Mystique (and some other guys). Of course I’d have to wait sixteen years for a barely related movie that didn’t even have the X-prefix to give me an actually memorable Colossus. Let’s not get crazy here, right?

Welp, there’s the big problem. Now I’ve seen it done. Now I’ve seen just about everything Apocalypse had to offer, already done, and arguably done in superior fashion. Hell, sometimes in a previous X-movie. Sometimes just in movies, period. I suppose I won’t get into spoilery specifics, but man, there are some hoary old tropes resurrected for Apocalypse, and — okay, spoiler — the X-mansion blows up, which just a few months ago was a Deadpool punchline.

My parents who paid for our tickets enjoyed Apocalypse, and some friends enjoyed it, and if you enjoyed it, too? No worries. But from my standpoint, I can’t help grading it on the curve and feeling like Bryan Singer is still stuck in the ghost of comic book movies past no matter how much his characters mess around with the timeline, still recycling the same old character relationships and conflicts when there is so much more of a vast universe of X-Material out there that Fox has the catalog rights to. It was excusable back in the day when the superhero genre was still figuring out how to best present itself, but now? That’s probably why something I might generously rate a solid B minus is coming off to a lot of folks like an outright failure.

I linked to my previous “symbols and characters” article just a couple weeks ago when talking about The Falcon, but I want to reference it again because it’s where I brought up the idea of plurality as an effective way to avoid the dangers of tokenism and superficiality in the case of minority characters. Put simply, it was the idea that while one woman in a group of men may end up defined first and foremost by the difference of her gender, and one black character in a group of whites may end up defined by their skin color, once you include more than one of them in your ensemble the audience will naturally begin to look deeper and suss out reasons why someone is interesting beyond just the fact that they stand out visually.

I included a quote from the late, great comics writer Dwayne McDuffie on the struggle that occurs when plurality is absent:

“My problem… and I’ll speak as a writer now… with writing a black character in either the Marvel or DC universe is that he is not a man. He is a symbol.”

McDuffie wasn’t saying he was incapable of writing a black character who wasn’t reduced to a symbol for all his race, he was  I can’t help but think that if Dwayne McDuffie were alive today, he would have been delighted with the most visible example yet of plurality with black characters in the Marvel universe, which is of course the now billion dollar plus phenomenon of Captain America: Civil War. Not one, not two, but three black superheroes are present as key parts of the narrative, not the least of which is the Black Panther himself, warrior king of the technologically superior African nation of Wakanda. Adilifu Nama was fascinated by The Falcon as a kid because he was a black man who could fly. T’Challa the Black Panther and Wakanda represent a vision of a highly advanced, independent black culture that never suffered the yoke of European Imperialism. Heck even speaking from the standpoint of a white dude that’s a pretty fascinating concept to flesh out, and I can only imagine how cool it stands as escapist fantasy for the folks T’Challa more physically resembles.

More importantly though, if you happened to be a young black kid looking for reflections of yourself in the media, CA: Civil War gives you more than one hero to choose from. The quippy, quick-thinking Falcon, the stoic War Machine and the regal Black Panther are all present, and wonder of wonders they even have conversations about things other than being black, which has got to pass one of those Bechdel-esque tests Hollywood so often fails to clear the bar on. Early on in the film Sam Wilson (Falcon) and James Rhodes (War Machine) even debate each other on different sides of an argument, which is something that shouldn’t register as a significant thing but because of the last 100 years of film, it kind of is. Also significant was me going beyond the idea that two black men could disagree in a major studio production (that wasn’t all about being black) and thinking that both men were military veterans but were still coming to different, reasoned conclusions on the same subject due to their specific personalities, friendships, and life experiences. You know, like people would do.

Again, that really shouldn’t be a revolutionary thing, but here we are. Plurality has enabled three black characters to compare and contrast with each other and, by doing so, to show the person and not just the symbol. A lot of credit here is no doubt due to the influence of producer Nate Moore, who fell in love with characters like Falcon, Black Panther and Luke Cage back in his comics nerd youth and campaigned to bring them, fully realized, to the big screen. Who could answer the white screenwriters who questioned (as I would have) if people really cared about The Falcon with a resounding YES, and who, at least for this shining moment, has helped solve McDuffie’s riddle on symbol vs. character.

The example of Nate Moore also shows the importance of getting some diverse voices in the production staff and writing rooms. It’s not about shoving political correctness down our throats, it’s about enabling plurality, and by doing that better enabling the characters to show forth and letting the fantasies of humanity have a fuller spectrum of experience.

Now Zombie Ranch being the two-person team it is, I’m not necessarily able to practice what I preach here, but I will say that Dawn has occasionally provided some valuable input from the feminine side which has helped me write the ladies of the comic. Beyond that I just keep it in mind and try to do the best I can, but I’m glad to see more and more examples of plurality working out in practice on the larger stage.

So in the first seven episodes of Zombie Ranch I mostly stuck to a system of 24 pages per chapter. Mostly. Episode 1 had 23 pages, and Episode 3 and 7 had 28 pages. In practice I’m guessing no one really noticed, since we don’t number the pages in the print versions and online we just use a consecutive numbering system. Still, it was fun for me when it happened to work out that Episode 4 and 5 ended and began in such a way as to be numbered story comic 99 and 100, respectively.

That was almost the case again as we approached the end of Episode 12. This time around I’d been pretty good about planning our storytelling to the 24 page mold. What with no real bosses or advertising to account for that’s still a completely arbitrary number, but it’s just come to feel right. Gives some division and structure.

I’ve always reserved the right to break it again if I felt the need. And lo, it became pretty tempting to do just that as I realized that if I extended Episode 12 for four more pages it would have an online number of 299, with Episode 13 starting on 300. Neato!

Except the circumstance I brought up of Episode 4 and 5 was a happy accident. Episode 1 being a page short and Episode 3 being four pages longer were both done because that was where it felt right to end them. This time? There was an interesting argument going on but it seemed like everyone in my notes and roughs was going to have their say and extending it might end up in a boring “get on with it!” situation. I could have cut away to check in on what the Exec or the Huachucas were up to but that didn’t seem right either, like any of those reveals really should wait for beyond the break. But oh, that 299-300 option was tantalizing.

In the end I spoke up about it to Dawn and she seemed surprised there was any question — she’s not really into keeping track of the “24” thing the way I am, but she declared that what was going on for comic 294 had completely felt to her like the penultimate page before we would end the episode and dragging on beyond 295 would be awkward at best.

So there we had it. Sometimes you just need that second perspective for — well, perspective. With that vote I sat down and finalized Suzie’s speech as the capper to the chapter and left the rest for next time, and I’m pretty sure that was the right call. When the story and the numbers come together naturally, it’s great, but that time I was being tempted to force it to fit for no real good reason. The numbers aren’t everything.

I have to admit, I’m a little bit in awe. Full disclosure — Captain America: Civil War did not end up supplanting Captain America: The Winter Soldier as my favorite Marvel Studios movie, just because I still feel the cinematography and pacing of the former was superior — but in terms of difficulty level going in, there is no way the former movie should have worked as well as it did. A 150 minute movie that manages to juggle 12 superheroes and tell a coherent story while giving each of them memorable moments? That’s a concept born of masochism. That’s the writer equivalent of attempting a Dragonforce song in the Rock Band video game on Expert setting.

Now your mileage may vary (heh) on how well the screenwriters and directors did, but from where I’m sitting? Pretty damn impressive. Beyond that, I’m not sure how far I should go in this blog, since in the States the movie only just premiered and even outside the States it hasn’t been out too long, thus it reasonably remains within my window of consideration for spoilers. But I’m going to tread a little bit dangerously as I address my fringe topic. Fringe because everyone wants to talk about Spider-Man and Black Panther and such. I’d rather talk about how this guy, born out of the comics of the 1970s…

…evolved into this guy for a 2016 major feature film (I’m using the collectible figure image since the movie still selections are still being a bit stingy):

The Falcon was never an important superhero to me, though I know that was not the case for everyone. I like to think Adilifu Nama has been over the moon for the past few years, at least since Anthony Mackie first donned the wings for Winter Soldier. Actually he may not have even needed the movies, since on the comics side of things Sam Wilson actually ended up taking on the Captain America mantle.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe didn’t go that far (yet?), but Sam made a great impression on me (and many others) in his Winter Soldier debut, both as a character and as an action hero. I was never really interested in Falcon because eh, he was just some dude who could fly and talk to birds. But by that metric, my much beloved (and maligned and dismissed by the masses) Hawkeye is just some dude who shoots trick arrows.

The MCU continues its upward battle to make Hawkeye cool to the mainstream, which I appreciate, but with Falcon I’ll argue they’ve now succeeded. In the MCU he started off as a cool guy who then basically turned out to be The Rocketeer with machine pistols. Not bad, but still fairly limited and relatively drab in appearance. Comparisons to Wesley Snipes as Blade were made. What I forgot — what, perhaps, I didn’t even expect — was that the next time Falcon appeared, there would be upgrades. Although his time in Ant-Man as the ill-fated defender of the Avengers’ storehouse was brief (sorry, Ant-Man is well past my spoiler expiration date), his costume now had a lot more color to it and his goggles did more than just keep off the bugs (pardon the pun). “It’s okay, he can’t see me,” brags Ant-Man, and the Falcon almost instantly responds, “I can see you!” Sitting next to me in the theater, Dawn states, “Well duh, Falcons have good eyes.”

Mind kinda blown at that connection. Probably shouldn’t have been, but it was. Suddenly Falcon wasn’t just the guy with wings, he was the guy you couldn’t hide from. Run through the tall grass all you want, little mouse (ant), he’s still gonna getcha.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIrsOg9Wqp8

Falcon loses the fight in the end, but doesn’t do too badly for facing a completely unknown quantity.

Still, it took Civil War to make me a true believer. Civil War has reached a fever pitch of Falconosity where he’s doing things that are so cool and yet so obvious at the same time you wonder why no one thought of them before. Okay, perhaps that’s not fair since the original concept didn’t have metal feathers, but Falcon is hands down the best flier in the MCU right now and… augh, I really can’t say more without venturing into spoiler territory, but they’ve brought back basically all the elements a Falcon fan could probably wish for and then some, just imaginitively adapted for a new era. He’s a great character, he has a unique and badass fighting style, and even if Markus, McFeely and the Russos aren’t the biggest Falcon fans in the world, you’d never know it with the amount of thought that’s gone into presenting that while still preserving the essence. Non-Falcon partisans like me walk out fans, and I can only imagine the high any existing fans would have.

And yet none of it is at the expense of any other character, or the story itself.

That’s a damn good adaptation. And just damn good writing, period.

I was (and still am) a great aficionado of tabletop role-playing games. What are those? Well, the most well-known example is still Dungeons & Dragons, although that example still occasionally suffers from someone who thinks of teenagers in black cloaks gathered in secluded areas to perform sacrifices to Satan. The truth was always closer to a bunch of teenagers in t-shirts gathered around a dinner table to roll dice and stuff their faces with junk food.

Also, even back when I was a kid there were more games around than just Dungeons & Dragons. In particular there was a game called Champions, where you could create and play super heroes! I even did a retrospective article on the game, if you’re interested. Regardless, it remains to my knowledge the first game system with a baked-in feature where along with figuring out how strong or fast your hero was, you also had to specify weaknesses. Flaws, which could range from physical ones like the poisoning effect of certain space rocks, to purely psychological conditions like a fear of the dark or a refusal to kill. You could theoretically create a character who had no flaws, but if you did that you wouldn’t have as many points to spend on cool stuff.

This system was perhaps my first real experience with the greater concept that a well-rounded, memorable character is defined as much by what they can’t do or have trouble doing as what they’re awesome at. I believe this is at the root of a lot of the nerd protest regarding recent Batman and Superman re-imaginings, where for decades they’ve been defined by a “no kill” policy — perhaps arguably to their detriment, but it’s also arguably a big part of what makes them interesting. Characters with no drawbacks get boring, and boring gets forgotten.

But you don’t want to just do the proverbial blind throw at the dartboard for character flaws, either. They should make sense to who the person is and what they do and what their past has been like. For instance, Frank in our comic has had a history of expressing himself poorly when he’s stressed, so in this week’s comic when he tries to indulge in some wordplay it doesn’t go well. Rosa possibly could have made the line work, but Frank just gets crickets and confusion and comes close to blowing his top as a result.

A character like Frank can have the danger of seeming “too cool for school”, so it’s good to take him out of his comfort zone on occasion and remind the reader that there’s a beating heart under that stoic exterior. Meanwhile some characters like Chuck and Lacey can seem more flawed than competent, but just like those Champions characters I used to make I like to pretend that the scales balance out, and if someone seems more or less capable at the moment it tends to be a matter of circumstance and perspective rather than objective worth.

Pretty much anyone I know — certainly including myself — has had moments where they felt out of their depth. Letting those same kinds of moments happen in fiction is an excellent way to keep your audience connected and invested, even when the character in question is some otherwise absurdly competent being like James Bond, Indiana Jones or Ellen Ripley. Or a full-on superhero. But at any level of power, I keep that mental character sheet of strengths and weaknesses in my head, ready and waiting for the circumstance of the narrative to bring them out.

One of the most famous sketches ever presented by Monty Python’s Flying Circus is the “Argument Clinic”, which at least for the time being you can watch in its entirety right here via the magic of YouTube!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y

The hapless customer in the sketch eventually leaves his argument session in dissatisfaction at the perceived lack of quality.

“This isn’t an argument!”

“Yes it is!”

“No, it isn’t, it’s just contradiction!”

“…No it isn’t.”

One wonders if he might have been better off seeing if they had a “Debate” category. In any case, it’s a good consideration for fiction writing where characters are going to have an argument. People just shouting yes, no, yes, no at one another gets old fast even in real life, much less in the realm of fiction where conservation of detail (and dialogue!) comes into play. On the other hand, if you get too fancy they’re going to sound less like people and more like talking points.

This is where it becomes vital to remember who’s involved and why they’re arguing, not just what they’re arguing about. Also important are the skills and “weapons” they bring into play. What’s an argument, after all, but another kind of fight scene? An uneducated character usually isn’t going to start eruditely quoting Aristotle in support of their views — that’s not a weapon in their arsenal. If there is, it’s usually a case of someone outside the fight “handing it to them” — say, some TV pundit they were watching — and even though they’re using it they won’t be particularly skilled and will be in danger of a swift parry and riposte by someone better trained. On the other hand, they may be stubborn enough not to care, or to possibly change the fight into something more actually physical. Which brings up another point: if someone’s physically superior, then you as the author have to figure out why they wouldn’t take advantage of that to get their way and instead are fighting a possibly losing battle in the realm of emotions and words.

As the author, it’s good to set the scene towards the outcome you need, but then I’d say “let them fight”. Let those debate points and insults and wheedlings fly from their lips according to the individual(s) in question, so that the conflict itself feels natural to the audience. If that leads down an unexpected path, then perhaps a reset (rewrite) is in order, or maybe your plot itself is what needs to give a little if the characters keep veering off script. And yes, that’s a weird concept considering you’re in process of writing the script. But you shouldn’t ever have to feel like your hammering your characters back into the shapes you demand, like they were so many nail heads sticking up from the otherwise smooth board of your story. It’s conflict, after all, and conflict by its very nature isn’t smooth. It might be better to work with the bumps.

Your Mileage May Vary.

A useful bit of idiom born originally out of the American automotive industry where that disclaimer was added to any estimate of a given vehicle’s gas efficiency. It has since become shorthand for “this was the case for me, but your own experience may be different”. I’ve used it a lot in this very blog, because I do talk a lot about topics that are ultimately subjective matters of opinion. TV Tropes has an entire page category for each of their work entries so as to allow for the quite possible happenstance that one fan’s “Moment of Awesome” is different from another’s.

I bring this up because a fun thing happened a couple of weeks ago. One fan of the comic piped up with the notion that they really were starting to hate our character Lacey. Not long after that, another fan piped up with the notion that they really were starting to like Lacey. Both had read exactly the same pages and come away with two different opinions.

And where a character is concerned, I think that’s great! It’s very, very rare that I intend to present anyone in Zombie Ranch as being “in the right” or “in the wrong”. Instead, I try my best to write them according to their personalities, circumstances, and motivations. It’s fair to say that I would perhaps give some side-eye to anyone who declared they really liked the Huachucas because “human flesh tastes awesome, you guys!”, but I’m not necessarily out there with an agenda of, say, always presenting Suzie’s decisions as the best and wisest. I feel like the author siding explicitly with a character can lead all too easily to a work degenerating into an author tract, or worst of all the specter of the Mary Sue. Then the situation can be compounded by the author feeling personally attacked when even one audience member offers criticism of that character, much less outright hatred. Even if you do largely agree with your protagonist’s perspective, I think it’s more useful and better for the story as a whole to keep a bit of distance for perspective. For instance, because of the author’s known political outlook you might expect Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta to be firmly on the side of its anarchistic, anti-establishment protagonist, and yet the story itself presents a much more nuanced take where V is shown at times to be as much a monster as those he fights. Admittedly, sometimes an author just shows that anyhow by complete accident in the course of trying to show how their hero is the bestest thing to ever best, but that’s a dividing line for me that’s the difference between something that makes me think and something I just laugh at.

No matter how much you try to skew the presentation, if your fanbase is big enough there will always be at least some people who will be rooting for The Empire. But as long as that’s not because the majority are finding your heroes or story unintentionally dull, such should probably be taken as a compliment on how great your antagonists are. Your fans’ mileage will always vary. Your job as a creator is to make it a memorable trip.

My name is Clint Wolf, and as I writer I have sinned.

Maybe.

It’s about this and last week’s comics, where Suzie is going over all the little bits and pieces of information that got lost in the shuffle, in much the same way the detective in the climax of a mystery novel might go back over the crime with all the suspects gathered. Conclusion: trouble. Huachuca-sized trouble.

By itself I would completely excuse the scene as necessary, not only for the characters involved but for the readers who have been watching this all play out over several years of real time and can’t reasonably be expected to keep everything in memory. Even the aforementioned mystery novels find it a quite helpful trope to summarize the events and evidence that have collected throughout a book which a fast reader might devour in a single evening.

No, the questionable element is that in this very episode we already went over some reminders of this information in the form of Frank’s talk with Lacey and Suzie’s later confrontation with them. In our “live” schedule these conversations played out over a month ago so might still justify a refresher, but once people are doing archive guides or reading a print issue, will it seem like a weird, redundant waste of space? Yes, some members of the crew didn’t have the whole story, but since the audience did, would it have been better to just cut to Suzie saying, “…and that’s what we know so far.”?

I chose here to go with the redundancy because of one thing that comics have over something of pure print prose, and that’s the imagery that accompanies the words. We can mix and match subtext beneath the text, showing different character reactions to the news and each other. Different connections can be drawn, and reminders can be shown beyond just the raw data. For instance in this week’s installment it’s no accident that Chuck (destroyer of tractors), Frank (withholder of firearms) and Rosa (who spied the staked doll long before Suzie) are all featured as the bits of the tale relating to their particular decisions are told.

Perhaps it’s a bad example since the series has long since recycled the bit to the point I stopped caring (or watching), but those first few times in Supernatural when Sam or Dean had a secret from the other that we knew and they didn’t, there was a wonderful tension to be experienced both in their conversations and their eventual confessions. They weren’t saying anything in those confessions that we didn’t already know, and sometimes we’d watched them already made those exact confessions to someone else, but there was still a fresh story being born out of that particular iteration.

It might be that in the course of time I will look back and decide I’ve sinned after all — but for now, I will remain stalwart in my belief that Suzie’s briefing is not nearly so redundant as the surface might seem.

So before we get started, let’s get a couple of disclaimers out of the way. One, if you’re not caught up on AMC’s The Walking Dead through its current season finale, I suppose I’ll be spoiling something. Or… not spoiling something? That uncertainty ties in with my second disclaimer, which is that I haven’t been following TWD since about midway through its second season. It also ties in with how the show is only on my radar again right now by proxy, because my social media exploded with fans upset by the end of Sunday’s season finale to the point of declaring they’ve had enough and they’re bailing out.

Speaking of bailing out, that should all have been vague enough that you’ve had time to hit the back button or otherwise click away if you’re a slowpoke fan operating on a “news blackout” basis.

Okay, so the context on this is everything, and the context is apparently that for several months the PR for the show has centered around the debut of a new villain named Negan and that by season’s end he would be killing off one of the primary protagonists of the series. These events had already been depicted in the comics, but the showrunners have made several major deviations from the comics so there was still some suspense on whether it would be the same victim and circumstances. Lots of hype. Nerdist even had a speculative lead-up video which ended with their declaration of a giveaway contest based on people who called in to them with the right answer. I presume they’re now feeling a bit embarrassed that they won’t be giving away that Rick figure for several months. Why? Well, this is how the episode ended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZvlEXEyjkk

Oof.

I don’t even really have a dog in this hunt, so to speak, but that does seem like a fascinatingly awful way to give your faithful audience the “reward” of waiting all over again for the promise of seeing something you already promised them back when the season began. Also like I said, I haven’t watched in years but it seemed like TWD never deviated much from the naturalistic camera style it established back when it began. This sudden breaking of the fourth wall, POV, blood on the lens stuff hearkens more to The Evil Dead than The Walking Dead, does it not? More than one reviewer has also snarkily remarked on the sense that by framing it this way it’s the audience that feels like they’re being bludgeoned into oblivion.

Yet on the other hand, when all’s said and done how many of the people claiming right now to be abandoning the series will be back at their televisions in October? And for all the fans who were deeply, vocally upset, there are many others who are taking it in stride or even supporting the decision. Word has it TWD has already pulled shenanigans on this level or close to it in the past and the ratings haven’t dipped as a result, so I’m guessing the showrunners are just as confident this won’t hurt, either.

Although… man, the way they did it is still very weird. Maybe it’s a test to see if the audience will accept things getting a bit stranger in presentation? I myself have played around with that. I’m still debating if and how I might eventually bring in the idea of a flashback sequence that’s not a “recorded earlier” scenario. After six seasons of a more-or-less naturalistic shooting style, do they want to shake things up a bit and change–if not the story itself–the scope of techniques they use to tell it? Is that laudably ambitious, or just jarring?

Or as the most vocal quitter talk goes, was it the last straw in a long spiral of declining writing and cynical, ratings-driven manipulation? Could some sort of derailment have even happened behind the scenes, where they really did plan to kill someone off (like Daryl Dixon as Nerdist speculated) but then at the last minute–just as rampant unfounded speculation–the orders come down from on high that “You can’t kill off Daryl Dixon, we have way too much Daryl Dixon merchandise to sell!” Or on a similar but less monetary note, “You can’t kill off Michonne or we’ll spend our entire break dealing with the social media fallout of killing a black woman. Also we just recently released her video game tie-in.” (Okay, so I guess that one came back to money again.) Did that leave them scrambling because now they had to figure out a different victim whose death wouldn’t derail future plans, so they just decided to postpone the decision while still fulfilling their season-long promise in a purely technical manner?

Point is this whole debacle has me interested as a writer because I’m as curious about the reasonings and reasons behind it as I am about if it will actually have any effect on whether people keep watching. Will it be looked back to down the road as the proverbial Jump the Shark moment? Has that moment already happened and this is just one more twitching symptom of decline? Or will all be forgiven once season seven shambles on in this October?

I presume at least some of you reading this are still current fans, or maybe even more specifically you’re one of the fans who just hit the breaking point. Any thoughts?

Usually the above phrase is used in strictly karmic terms, such as a politician passing harsh anti-drug laws getting arrested for possession. I am here to report a much happier and more literal interpretation.

This last weekend was, of course, WonderCon 2016, and we had some good sales. Mind you, we had a great sale last month at the Long Beach Expo when Amanda Conner bought a copy of our Zombie Ranch trade, but one particular WonderCon sale was interesting for different reasons. We had a flyer sale.

What do I mean by that? Well, over the course of our exhibiting existence we have given out hundreds — no check that, thousands — of postcard-sized flyers advertising the comic and website. We’ve taken them to parties, dumped them on freebie tables, and always make sure to have a stack at our own booth. They’re quite nice looking — good color on good cardstock, laminated — but the price per card is low enough that we can afford to spread them around in semi-frivolous manner. I say semi-frivolous because there’s still money involved and I like to have some discretion in where to “spend” them, for instance I probably won’t ever bother with the San Diego Comic-Con freebie table again, where you have to go through an application and approval process, at the end of which 1000 cards can go bye-bye in a single afternoon and it’s highly unlikely they’re going to stand out amongst the dozens of other swag items that will end up in someone’s bag by the end of the day. Which is assuming they ever got placed out at all — all I know is I handed over the box on Thursday morning and Thursday evening there were none around, with the staff shrugging when I asked. Since there was no appreciable bump on site visits that day or any of the days in the next week following the convention, all I could tell was that it didn’t seem to work out. Maybe if we’d handed over 10,000 flyers? But okay, at that point even when you’ve got cards costing less than a nickel a pop, that’s too much for a small outfit like ours to pour into a “maybe”.

Still, it doesn’t mean there’s no point at all, because there was a man at WonderCon who walked up to our table and introduced himself, saying he’d successfully “found us”. No, he didn’t pull a gun at that point to erase us from the timeline. Instead he allowed that he’d seen one of our flyers. At a convention? No, at his school, Riverside City College. His memory wasn’t precise since it had been a few months before, but he thought one of his instructors might have had a small stack. He picked one up and thought Zombie Ranch sounded pretty cool, and found the site, and then a few months later while walking WonderCon decided to see if we might be there and spied our banner (banners… there’s a post for another day…). And then he bought a copy of our trade.

Funky how in this digital world, some of the older analog methods can still pay off from time to time. What goes around comes around, indeed.

If you’ve been keeping up with my last couple of blogs you know I’ve been blah-de-blahing a lot on the subject of tolerance. I ended my soapbox stint of last week with a bit of an “I’m not perfect” disclaimer, specifically with a mention about still not quite being able to see eye-to-eye with people who prefer the Star Wars Prequels to the original movies. I probably shouldn’t call it a joke because I’m not sure it is, though I also recognize there are matters of degree here. You saying The Phantom Menace is the best Star Wars movie is not the same as Pol Pot’s callous pogrom of genocide. The former is annoying. The latter is something that should never be forgotten or forgiven, and if there is a Hell I hope the people responsible have their own special place in it.

But let’s get away from that level of real world nastiness and just talk about the level of pop culture. If you’ve followed me on Facebook and/or Twitter, then first of all: I’m sorry. Second of all, you’re no doubt aware by now that I have my share of declared loves and hates in regards to nerd media, and I can sound pretty darn prejudiced with my hates. For instance I am one of those horrid, horrid people who has condemned the upcoming Batman v Superman movie without viewing and without trial, refusing to give it any benefit of doubt. That’s like, the very definition of intolerance, right?

I have to have this argument with people from time to time, and it can be a bit exhausting. As noted above, this is not about human rights issues, this is about whether I feel like it’s worth three hours of my life and movie theater prices to watch a slice of entertainment I have very strong misgivings about based on previous experiences with the filmmakers in question. Some people may have enjoyed (or been indifferent to) Man of Steel, which I similarly did not see in theaters, but even as a home viewing I found it excruciating — a term I use with the full irony of the rampant Superman = Jesus imagery Zack Snyder was shoving into the film. Sucker Punch was a movie I similarly found tone-deaf and godawful, but let’s be clear that though I am given these days to roundly criticize the gulf between what he thinks he’s presenting and what he actually shows us, I am not some sort of anti-Zack fanatic. The Dawn of the Dead remake he directed was one of my first experiences with him and was so good that I actually had a reservoir of goodwill and benefit of the doubt towards him it took years to run dry. I don’t somehow retroactively hate that movie now, but the more recent track record is such that no, I’m not inclined to look at BvS with an open mind, free from prejudice. And with allowances that prejudice does skew perspective, nothing I’ve seen from the trailers or press releases has moved me to change that.

There’s another segment of Internet opinion out there along similar lines which likes to put forth the “Marvel Zombie” argument, where those expressing lack of enthusiasm towards BvS must be mindless drones who happily and uncritically lap up all movies involving Marvel Comics characters while blindly hating all things DC.

This is a weird one, because it requires the person on the receiving end to craft a much longer response full of nuance, and nuance doesn’t seem to have much place in Internet arguments. One of the complications is that the Marvel movies have the complicated rights situation meaning there are three separate studios that have been churning out movies featuring Marvel characters in the last decade and a half. So does being a Marvel Zombie mean you loved Fox’s F4ntastic?  Ew. No, most likely there’s an unspoken nuance on the accuser’s end that they refer specifically to Marvel Studios and its groundbreaking (for better or worse) Marvel Cinematic Universe. Then I guess on the other side we’re lumping in the Nolan Batmovies? Except BvS seems to be deliberately rebooting that, so strictly speaking we’ve so far got one not-so-good Snyder directed movie stacked up against a lot of Marvel movies of varying quality, some of which I do indeed count among my all-time favorites but some of which I’m decidedly less enthusiastic about — looking at you, Age of Ultron. I don’t outright hate Age of Ultron but I found it enough of a hot mess that it makes me actually skeptical about Civil War despite it being helmed by the same creative team that gave me Winter Soldier. Since Winter Soldier stands as my absolute favorite superhero movie I should be giving them benefit of the doubt (particularly if I was a Marvel Zombie) and yet it looks so crammed with characters I’d prefer to at least wait until some word of mouth starts circulating from people whose opinions I put stock in.

Now if the word of mouth for BvS turns out to be really positive? I admit, that might still not get me into a theater, particularly since at least one positive early review stated “If you liked Man of Steel you’ll like this.” I’m also a bit leery because of rumors that Warner Bros. was picking and choosing which reviewers they allowed into their early viewings, so I’m curious about how the reaction will be after this weekend.

If the box office predictions are accurate, Zack and WB won’t be missing me — so yeah, I’m entirely comfortable with the limits of my tolerance here in taking a pass. I’m not stopping anyone else from going. Despite my misgivings, I do hope that Wonder Woman’s first live-action outing on the big screen will go well enough and lead to her own movie doing well, and thus keep the ball rolling for more female leads in action, fantasy and science fiction, but I can’t bring myself to buy a ticket just based on that hope.

David Goyer reportedly got tossed off the project (yay!) and his script may or may not have been majorly rewritten by Chris Terrio, so there’s a wild card in the mix. Also we’ve now got some DC/WB movies in production like Suicide Squad and Wonder Woman where neither Goyer nor Snyder will have direct influence (I think?) and those are the ones I’m curious about, not the least of which because we’ll finally be able to start having a real conversation about MCU vs. DCCU once the DCCU finally gets out of its starting gate.

In the meantime I’ll be over here with my prejudices and preconceptions. But hey, the writers of The Flash  managed to bring me back from my stance on Iris West being The Worst Thing Ever. If that can happen, I’m not ruling anything out.

Still haven’t quite got Zootopia out of my thoughts. I think Dawn is considering me obsessed at this point with how I keep bringing it up in our conversations, but so what? It was a good flick with a surprisingly mature moral message that adults can and should take to heart as well as kids.

I’ve heard some criticisms that a message of “prejudice is bad” is something most of us don’t need beaten into our heads, or is muddled by the heroes of the movie themselves engaging in problematic behavior. But that’s exactly why I’m impressed, because the muddle is fully intended by the filmmakers. The film is not afraid to purposefully assign negative traits and actions to its protagonists, but how they deal with being confronted with their screw-ups is a big part of what makes them the good guys in the end. “Change begins with you,” Judy Hopps declares in her closing speech.

I won’t go into many more details than that since the movie still hasn’t been out for long and a lot of you may not have seen it yet (though if you can afford it and have the time, I strongly recommend). Don’t worry, it’s not as preachy as I may be making it out to be. Sometimes it tells, but more often it’s wise enough to just show and let the audience see what they see and take what lessons to heart that they will based on their own experience, as evidenced by my blog of last week. Prejudice takes many forms, and we have to guard against it in ourselves at least as much as we look for it in others.

Zootopia doesn’t advocate perfection. In fact it rejects the notion and presumes (quite realistically) that we will all have our slip-ups from time to time. Even the nicest of people are capable of the occasional dick move. And that more than anything is where the criticism that the film is not telling you anything you’re not already aware of — because you’re an enlightened person who is never, ever prejudiced — breaks down.

Case in point, at least one person on my Facebook feed talking about how much they loved the movie but then almost in the same entry making a nasty, denigrating joke about furry fandom. For that matter there was controversy leading up to the film regarding Disney reaching out to the subculture, a subculture even most nerds have traditionally looked down on. Even then, the org chart at that link does distinguish between “Furries” and “Erotic Furries”, a distinction lost on many who see someone dressed in a fursuit and automatically assume whoever’s wearing it likes to keep it on during sex.

Is there a certain percentage of that fandom that does like that? Sure, but applying it globally makes about as much logical sense as assuming your average superhero cosplayer likes to “get their spandex sticky”, so to speak. And even so, let him or her without fetish cast the first fuzzy handcuffs, right? We all have our kinks, and if they’re going on privately between consenting adults, then — pardon the pun — what’s the fucking problem? The fact I or anyone else finds it deviant or weird shouldn’t apply.

And yet a younger, less self-critical me would probably have been right there also making the erotic furry jokes right in the wake of watching a movie about tolerance, and thinking nothing of the irony. Conventional wisdom is that you’re supposed to get more closed-minded as you get older, but I’ve been finding the opposite to be true. I used to think it was impossible for two people to be married and in love while maintaining an open relationship — such a setup was doomed to failure, and anyone claiming otherwise was deluded or a fool. But now, I know a couple who has been happily and contentedly doing just that for over a decade, and in the face of that evidence I felt I needed to re-examine my prejudice in the same way I’d hope someone unconvinced about male-female platonic friendships would when faced with my own experiences.

What does this all have to do with the subjects this blog usually covers? Eh, I might be arguably off-topic. But then again, haven’t I written before of the importance of empathy in writing? Expanding your worldview, fighting past the blanket reductions and knee-jerk reactions to find common ground with the “other”, is an ongoing process and a difficult one. And being the opinionated bastard that I am, you better believe I stumble or lose patience from time to time. I’m still not sure I’ve found my common ground with those who prefer the Star Wars Prequels to the Original Trilogy.

Failing, including failing on interpersonal relationships, is just part of being human. It’s how we learn from the failures that counts.

So I caught a showing of Disney’s Zootopia this past weekend, and really, really liked it. I wanted to see it based on the world-building alone, but then it blew away my expectations. I’ll be unpacking everything this movie made me think and feel for awhile, and while I’m not alone in that, a lot of the thinkpieces and reviews so far have been focused on the racial or feminist metaphors. But in the midst of all of that (and a great, entertaining story), there was an aspect of the film even more special to me. Spoilers may follow, sort of…

Zootopia is a buddy cop movie featuring intergender buddies.

Technically, I suppose Nick and Judy (pictured above) are interspecies buddies, but there we are with the metaphors again. These are an identifiably male and female character who by the film’s end have bonded and shared intimate moments — but only intimate in the pure platonic sense that they have chosen to share otherwise private details of their lives. Though there is a brief exchange where the word “love” is used, it’s used without any romantic weight to it, the tone played as banter between friends. It’s more Murtaugh and Riggs than Anna and Kristoff.

That’s my interpretation, anyhow, which I believe is shared by the filmmakers — and I highly appreciate it seeing an example of it in a movie for kids. Not that I have anything against romance per se, but in a movie with themes examining preconceptions and prejudices, forgive me if I’m happy that it happens to feature two adults that happen to be different genders who can hug and cry on each other’s shoulders without it leading necessarily to kissy kiss — and even more importantly without it being a big deal.

Yeah, we’re talking an animated rabbit and fox here so maybe imagining a romance between them is the weirder option, but again — this is metaphor time, fable time — where these characters are stand-ins for humans and human issues. And one of the human issues I find personally frustrating is the ingrained cultural idea that male and female relationships are defined first and foremost by a biological imperative to “bump uglies”, as it were. That left to their own devices, an unsupervised man and woman will swiftly get down to screwin’ regardless of whether either or both are already in committed relationships with others or maybe even just don’t feel like it.

I was lucky enough to have the example of my father who did have a long-term friendship — and never anything more than that — with a (married) woman who wasn’t my mom. I myself was quite platonic best friends with a woman for several years, who in fact ended up being my best (wo)man at my wedding to Dawn. It can happen.

But I’m aware there are a distressing amount of people out there who don’t believe it can. Ever. A married man or woman meeting someone of the opposite gender for lunch? Even a business associate? This will inevitably lead to them having an affair. Maintaining cross-gender friendships while in a relationship? No! They must be renounced or your love is in danger!

Now are there people who cheat on their relationships? Certainly. But chalking that up to biological inevitability is problematic in more ways than one — not the least of which is, say, a message to girls that the only reason a boy would ever want to hang around with them is because that boy desires them sexually.  And how does all this conventional wisdom factor in boys who are attracted to boys, girls attracted to girls, etc.? Doesn’t this idea of gender separation based on romantic urges start to seriously fall apart at that point?

The parable of Nick and Judy in Zootopia stops short of showing them having a platonic partnership while also committed romantically to outside parties — which I’m fine with, I have Agent Carter for that — but it’s still nice to see Hollywood acknowledging that the “heterosexual life partner” aesthetic has the potential to exist even when the heterosexuals in question happen to be a man and a woman, and communicating that message in a mass market, all-ages film.

Nick and Judy’s friendship isn’t perfect, and goes through some rough spots as even their own prejudices aren’t so easy to shake in moments of stress or inattention, but in the end a deep bond, trust and mutual respect has developed that ends not in a wedding scene but a car chase. You can still “ship” ’em if that’s your bag, but leaving that aspect up to us to interpret is a big step forwards for me. And Disney of all sources — the very home of the Princesses and the Love Songs and the Happily Ever Afters — is the one who took it.

Excitingly, this past Saturday I figuratively chained myself to my computer and did my best to put together our tax information for 2015, in preparation for our upcoming meeting with Our Guy.

I may have mentioned in a previous blog that I always did our own taxes up until a few years ago, when we somehow ended up with a nasty result of needing to pay more instead of getting the refund we’d always enjoyed. It was at that point we got in touch with a tax professional who had the stamp of approval from several of our friends, and although we do have to pay him for his services, his cut has always come out of the refund he gets us and we’ve yet to regret the trade-off. It was with his help that we finally got Lab Reject Studios set up as a valid entity for deductions, which is very, very important considering how much money we invest yearly in conventions, supplies, and other expenses.

And now, especially, I’m glad we have his help figuring out how our Kickstarter figures in, representing as it does a quite significant income spike. I remember asking him last year what his advice was and he just confidently replied, “Raise as much as you can.” Still, I think it’s a good sign that once I sorted through my Saturday session, the amount of money we raised for the project and the amount of money we spent on it were extremely close — first because it indicates we did a good job with our budget estimates, and second because all that spending should cancel out the spike. This is why it’s a very, very good idea to try to have your Kickstarter (or other crowdfunding project) happen earlier in the year, and do your best to fulfill everything by December 31st. Otherwise, even if you do eventually end up spending everything you raised on valid business expenses, you get dinged because you didn’t spend it in the same year you raised it.

Our Guy will have the last word on this, of course, but it seems like this is the best possible result we could hope for. Keep it in mind if you ever go for it yourself!

I still wonder sometimes whether Zombie Ranch has “succeeded”.

That’s weird, isn’t it? Especially for a story that by its very nature isn’t complete. I start wondering then how I’m even trying to define success. Notability? Critical reaction? Monetization? Some combination of all three? I feel like last year’s successful Kickstarter and the trade paperback resulting from it were definitely milestones and accomplishments for us, but it’s not like it magically made us household names, even within the comics or webcomics community. Big news sites aren’t busting down our (virtual) door demanding interviews. Strangers don’t line up to buy the book at conventions, and those conventions don’t offer us free airfare and hotel stays just to hear us speak. Our major motion picture deal has not materialized.

But I’m not going to cry myself to sleep over that. Because this happened:

That’s Amanda Conner. In October 2009 she was gracious enough to trade a sketchbook of hers for one of Dawn’s and our first crappy ashcan Zombie Ranch preview, as mentioned here. Then about a year later we were lucky enough to get to be Artist’s Alley neighbors with her, as I also documented. But since then we hadn’t had much contact, beyond a quick hello here and there. Did she even remember us?

Well, if she didn’t, she faked it really damn well when Dawn spied her walking down our aisle at the Long Beach Comic Expo this past weekend and we waved. On a slow Sunday morning, away from the usual pressures of her commission/autograph line, she stopped and chatted with us and reminisced about past and present, and when I mentioned that the ashcan from all those years ago had blossomed into a TPB, she pulled out her wallet and declared that she needed herself a signed copy.

We were in such a tizzy I didn’t even think to take a picture until she was already on her way back to her own booth, but fortunately I managed to scurry over and snap the above photo for posterity before the crowds found her. Then I came back and Dawn and I just sat and smiled. The strangers may still have not been lining up to buy our book, but one of our idols had just coughed up thirty bucks of her own free will so she could own a copy. I didn’t demand or even expect that, but given the history of it all, after the fact it sure felt right.

I guess sometimes the feel of success is measured by when a whole bunch of people want what you’re offering. And sometimes, all it takes is one.

This past Friday night, Dawn and I bought tickets at our local AMC multiplex, nipped over to the Dave & Buster’s bar across the way for a few drinks, and then settled back to catch a showing of Deadpool, which we’d been tentatively excited for ever since that leaked test footage spilled onto the Internet on the last day of San Diego Comic-Con 2014.

Without that leak, the source of which remains most likely (but not provably) the star, the director, and/or the two writers, the movie might never have been made. Director Tim Miller has gone on record as saying 20th Century Fox in 2011 was prepared to just sit on the script and quite literally told him, “We don’t get it.”

Fast forward to the footage leak exploding the Internet as nearly everyone who saw it cried, “THAT is the Deadpool I know! Put him in my eyeballs and take my money, Fox!” Yet I did use the qualifier “tentatively” above. Because it really would be too much to hope that a couple minutes of coolness could actually translate into a worthy feature length film, right?

Fast forward to now, and Friday night was a nice lean (for this day and age) 107 of laughter, enjoyment, and most of all a feeling that I was watching a labor of love that got their adaptation right. Then in the nower now, well, holy crap, a lot of other people liked it, too. 150 million dollars over four days indicates a far larger audience than just comics nerds and young men. The screwily awesome marketing campaign embraced the idea of Deadpool being a Valentine’s Day date movie, but in the end that became more than just a joke. Couples went to this and loved it. Normal couples, not just us.

I should mention here that the Wade/Vanessa romance depicted in Deadpool is raunchy and quirky and R-rated and yet somehow more sincere and heartfelt and grounded than any other superhero romance I’ve seen. Perhaps even just most movie romances I’ve seen. In fact there was a weird, electric undercurrent of honesty and loving care to the whole production despite all the decapitations and dick jokes, like Ryan Reynolds and his cohorts were exposing not just their asses to us but their hearts.

Is that why it was so successful? Oh man are there a lot of thinkpieces and theories already, as happens anytime in Hollywood when a film wildly overperforms compared to expectations. Guardians of the Galaxy is probably Deadpool’s closest spiritual and financial cousin in that regard, and James Gunn has already weighed in with some opinions. Will Hollywood take the wrong lessons to heart?

Well, that’s the rub. What lessons can you take from a labor of love? It’s easy right now to laugh at those 2011 Fox executives who were so out of touch with what the world wanted, but if all it took was love and passion and dedication to make a good, successful movie, wouldn’t The Room have been a box office titan on its release? And actually good, rather than just a glorious train wreck? There are lessons to be learned from it, sure, but not in the sense that you’d want to set out to emulate what Tommy Wiseau produced out of ballsy, narcissistic ignorance.

I would like to think that Deadpool and a lot of the Marvel movies succeeded (and the Fantastic Four films flopped) because of how closely or distantly they adhered to what made the characters famous in the first place. But if that were universally true, shouldn’t 2012’s Dredd movie have found an audience? It was very authentic to the character and spirit of the comics — far moreso than that terrible Sylvester Stallone outing of the ’90s — yet it flopped into obscurity. Deadpool means we can’t say that was because of the R rating, or the relatively small budget. Was it not marketed properly? If more people had turned out to give it a chance, would it have connected?

I feel these are the kind of thoughts that keep executives awake at night, and keep them gun shy from supporting labors of love no matter how passionate the creatives behind them are. It’s not really a matter of taking the wrong lessons away from a success or failure, so much as how do you even tell what the right or wrong lessons are? At the end of the day there’s no true pattern or blueprint, and there are millions and millions of dollars and entire careers on the line, every time.

Makes me glad I don’t have to worry about that. I can just be thankful for the occasional confluence of fate and passion that brings me a movie that I thoroughly enjoy not only the first time I watch it but anytime I’ll watch it in the future, and I don’t even have to have it make a whole bunch of money for that to be true, just so long as it makes it to a DVD or Blu-ray. Dredd can sit next to Winter Soldier and Robocop and Unforgiven and Jaws on my shelf. Deadpool may well end up there, too. The only common thread in them is that there was a passion to their production — and to be perfectly honest, a passion that fits to my passions, like Wade and Vanessa’s puzzle piece metaphor.

What’s the lesson there? Who cares. Just hand me the remote and the popcorn.

Perusing a recent article on the geek culture site Bleeding Cool, I was reminded of past ramblings of my own on the subject of schedules and sanity. Actually I was just reminded of the past (and present, and future) period.

Now first off, I immediately recognized the article was for what it is: an adicle. Is that a word? It should be a word. For me, an “adicle” is a thinly disguised writing piece centered around promotion of a current project, in this case a Kickstarter the author currently has underway to collect his independently published comics into a book. You know, just like we did last year. I’m fairly certain Rivenis (the author in question) would cheerfully admit this if pressed, and furthermore would just be ecstatically happy we linked to him no matter what I said about his work. At least, that’s how I would feel. When you’re running a Kickstarter you’re scrounging for any scrap of recognition you can get — even a negative post could get people curious enough to go look, and they might end up disagreeing with the referrer and supporting you!

But I’m not negative. I refuse to look down on the idea of the adicle, at least where an independent creator is concerned, and especially here where the piece is about being an independent creator and the points he lists are something a new hopeful will find good to keep in mind and an old hand will nod knowingly at — and even feel comforted by. Because it doesn’t matter how many fits of depression you end up having in your creative career — there will always be room for another, and depression loves company. So to speak. I don’t mean that literally, I mean that it’s good sometimes to talk with or even read from a peer and get the reminder that they go through the same cycles. They have similar experiences, and joys and fears. You learn that even some of the more well-known folks have to struggle every day with introversion and self-doubt as they promote their work.

The adicle is one of the pinnacles of that struggle, where you’re basically requesting space on a popular website to do some form of thinkpiece that also happens to be an arm-waving “Hey! I’m here! Check me out!” to any of the masses that might happen by. If you’re not a card-carrying narcissist, that latter half can be really tough to come to terms with, so I’d say in that sense it’s actually easier when you combine such shenanigans with content you think might be interesting to at least a certain segment of people. It’s also far better when you’re writing for a site not to just think that you and your work alone would count as some sort of news.

Anyhow, all in all I’d hold up Rivenis’s article as a good example of balancing an adicle between content and promotion. Sure you could claim that if you’ve read one article about self-publishing you’ve read ’em all, but as I said above, I’m going to respectfully disagree with that notion because human beings need the occasional refresher. Also, even though we have similar experiences it doesn’t mean we have identical ones, and I found it interesting to hear about Rivenis being able to turn out more comics *after* he relaxed his production schedule, because the more reasonable pace lessened the dangers of burnout.

And no, he didn’t ask me to write this, nor do I know the guy. This week he just gets to be the beneficiary of my good will and good karma, perhaps in support of his point that indie comics creators are by and large a cooperative and upstanding bunch. On the other hand, this may end up being a rare case of outright altruism where I’m not expecting him to be aware of this post, much less talk about our comic in return. Usually there’s an unspoken quid pro quo to these things, just because we’re all aware how hard it can be to get the word out. But our own Kickstarter’s over and eh, he reaps the good fortune of timing in moving me to discussion.

Plus that comic of his looks pretty damn cool.

Several of my good friends are pretty obsessed with the TV series Doctor Who, from whence comes the partial quote titling this blog where the titular Doctor tries to explain how time and determinism work.

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually — from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint — it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.”

If that sounds like nonsense to you, well, yeah. In fact my quick summation of the premise behind Doctor Who is that “it’s about a master of time and space who is always rushing to get somewhere.”

I’ll let that sink in a moment.

My second summation of Doctor Who is that it’s one of the most successful framing devices ever created, which is why I feel it’s lasted and entertained generations of people in one form or another for more than half a century. Aside from a few constants, a writer for Doctor Who can dream up basically any story, set in any time and place, with any characters they choose. Why does the Sonic Screwdriver work on this door but not that one? Why is there any dramatic urgency in getting back to the T.A.R.D.I.S. “in time” to travel to a spot ten years in the past? Please, people. You are just prisoners of your linear, subjective viewpoints. Sit back and enjoy the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey ride.

In other words, seeking a sense of canon and continuity in Doctor Who is a good way to drive yourself mad, especially since the show itself cheerfully doesn’t give a damn. Writing for the show must be an exultant sense of freedom.

I’m honestly not sure I could handle that much freedom, in fact. But the fans of the show are so used to just accepting the idea that pretty much anything can happen at any time. Zombie Ranch, on the other hand, is a much more down to earth setting where (media interludes aside) the locales tend to be local and time progresses in linear fashion. The occasions I’ve gone “out of sync” with it have usually been through the device of a camera showing “recorded earlier” type footage. Today’s comic marks the culmination of me messing around with something a bit more risky, where I ended the last episode on the morning after the McCarty departure, then spent the pages of this episode so far rolling back and filling in the blanks of the night, until finally it’s come back around once again to Suzie spying the smoke. I didn’t really give any caption hints about all that until now, and it’s theoretically such a big departure from the usual progression that I risk confusing everyone. But theoretically, it’s also pretty fun to try something different.

I haven’t abandoned the idea of cause to effect — though presented out of order to the reader, things are still in order to the characters — but it was time to see how timey-wimey I could get.

Nervously, the cherubic little girl inched her way through the darkness of the old house on the hill. Somewhere along the way, she had become separated from the others trapped with her: the old professor, the little boy, the jock, and the bookworm co-ed.  She’d pulled a dusty spirit board out of the cobwebs, though not without something unseen and vicious trying to bite her. Where was everyone?

Then there was a call of triumph from the distance. The bookworm had uncovered one of the two artifacts needed to allow the rightful heir of the Romanescu family to reclaim their heritage. Too bad. It was, after all, a heritage the little girl’s family had usurped centuries before, and would kill to keep. The hired assassins she had already stationed throughout the rooms and corridors would see to that, ending the heir and any of the other fools who presumed to meddle…

The above represents a somewhat dramatized version of the first half of one of the games of Betrayal at House on the Hill that we played this weekend after impulse buying it based on watching this video. Dawn and I clicked on it just by randomly seeing Ashly Burch’s face, since we like the cut of her jib, but then the game began and we were intrigued. B-movie horror theme? Modular game board, built as the players progress so that it’s different every time? A massive twist at some point where one of the players turns out to be a traitor out to get the others?

Sure, plenty of other games have traitor scenarios, but two things intrigued me here. One, that depending on an intersection of how the twist is triggered, one of fifty different horror/suspense scenarios would be played out, with hidden victory conditions for the heroes and the traitor. Two, that the traitor doesn’t know they’re the traitor until it happens. In the game above, I was just an innocent little girl exploring a scary house, and then suddenly I was a schemingly ruthless Master of Assassins bent on killing the rightful heir to my family’s fortune before they could realize their destiny. Meanwhile my wife and the other players now had to try to conceal which of them was the heir while staying alive long enough to help them… well, I had hints and thoughts of what they were trying to do but in some ways I was as in the dark as they were, even though I didn’t share their terror of taking every step as if it might be their last. For the professor and co-ed, it was, and they died to knives in the dark, but the accursed little boy and the jock (the heir) lived just long enough to foil me!

It was probably just as well or the forces of Evil would have had a clean sweep, after the redneck torture zombies and werewolves had their way in our previous games. It meant I was on the losing side each time — *fist shake* — but the game lived up to its potential as a great storytelling exercise, a journey into the unknown as full of wonderment as it was full of terror. We have but barely scratched the surface of those fifty haunt scenarios and I can’t wait to try out more. And I love that unlike most games’ traitor scenarios, you are quite literally on the side of the angels… until you aren’t.

Because of its somewhat random nature on what the house looks like, what items are out and when the haunt begins (and what the haunt is), not every game of BaHotH is going feel balanced — the werewolf, for example, sprouted early and thus made chewtoys of us in short order. But the saving grace is that playing time tends to be manageably short and the mechanics and possibilities have enough lure that a not-so-satisfying game means you just play again and something entirely different happens.

In short, I do not regret a penny of our impulse buy, and if such things intrigue you as well, I’ll just close out by saying that as of this writing Amazon still has it on sale. Happy haunting!