Category: Writer’s Blog

Creating comics can be rewarding, but also stressful. Even in a relatively low-impact environment such as a free weekly webcomic, Dawn and I feel that pressure to perform, to deliver on the unspoken contract we have with our readers. Occasionally, such as this week, we just can’t manage to put out a new page of comic. Last time it was a result of my aunt’s death— this time, a more amorphous confluence of affairs came together. Nothing too dire, mind you (don’t worry!), but enough that it became another circumstance of weighing just how much we felt able to push ourselves. There was much stress. Dawn left it ultimately up to me, so I suppose I bear the responsibility for hitting the proverbial emergency release valve and stopping production temporarily.

I’ve talked in the past of how I’ve watched several webcomics die because of creator burnout. We’ve done our best to avoid that, and I think a very important part of the process has been a willingness to bend so that we don’t break.

I don’t want to end up like Dave Sim, pushing himself to do a page of Cerebus every day until he wound up having a breakdown and being checked into a psychiatric ward. And speaking much more recently, there was the matter of Roc Upchurch being arrested for domestic abuse.

I’m not going to weigh in on the morals of the case, there’s been plenty of talk on that. It’s  a tragedy for everyone involved, and I might be talking out of my ass to say so, but I would venture to say that from reading the statements from Upchurch and his wife, Roc… might not have been handling his sudden success well. Would the marriage have frayed regardless of Rat Queens becoming a critical and popular success? It’s possible. But as far as I know Upchurch was the sole artist on the book, meaning he would have been in the same position Dawn is, responsible for penciling, inking, coloring, backgrounds— every page, every panel— but instead of a page a week, he’s having to provide that work on a book that comes out on a monthly or bimonthly schedule. Sure, a lot of comics put out an issue a month, but they’re worked on by entire teams, and still most don’t measure up to the level of quality Upchurch was consistently providing. Your mileage may vary, but for my money it was pretty sweet stuff, easily comparable to the best the Big Two would be putting out with far more staff involved.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like keeping up with that jibed well with being a husband and father of three kids, especially once the book became a hit and brought with it the requisite convention appearances and signings. It doesn’t really excuse what happened, especially since there are some people who seem to be able to handle it fine, but not everyone has that kind of ability.  In Upchurch’s case there was a cost, and that cost included being taken off the book by his co-creator, writer Kurtis Wiebe. Wiebe released a statement saying the comic will continue, but it’s clear Rat Queens won’t ever and indeed, can’t ever be the same. This is a shame, but it pales in comparison to real people hurting each other. Wiebe weighed his decision and made it, and Upchurch now has some downtime. Perhaps much too late for anyone’s good.

There’s no schadenfreude to be had, here, just sadness. As a creator, some amount of stress is inevitable, and even necessary. But this is just the latest incident to drive home to me that constantly pushing yourself or your partner(s) past the breaking point does no one any good in the long run. So better to bend from time to time, instead of letting pressure build up until someone snaps.

I once went to see the Eisner awards ceremony at San Diego Comic-Con and it seemed like every other person getting up on the stage was being introduced as “the hardest working wo/man in comics”. I’ll probably never have someone say that about me without a heavy dose of sarcasm attached, but under the circumstances, I continue to be okay with that.

I’m a member of a few different webcomic communities, and it seems like not a week goes by that someone will speak up about feeling how they’re feeling depressed with the state of their creative efforts. Sometimes it’s tied in with asking for advice on how they can get more readers, or more exposure, or somehow make some money off of this thing they’ve been pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into. Sometimes it’s just a cry for help and commiseration, seeking solace from fellow travelers who might understand the craziness of spending week after week, month after month, even year after year hurling a story out into the blind void of the Internet. “How do you keep going?”, comes the refrain, and no matter how many times it’s asked, the question is answered with compassion and patience. I suspect this is because we know we might be wailing that question ourselves before long, even if we don’t necessarily post it on Facebook. If we’ve already thought it through and answered it for someone else, then that answer will be there, echoing back to us, when we need it most.

Oddly enough, this is similar to a technique used by professional psychiatric counselors. “Doc,” the patient will say, “I feel my sibling is overstepping their boundaries with me when they put their hands in my pockets, tear out my phone, wallet, and keys, and throw them into the swimming pool, but I feel bad confronting them about it.” Now the doctor could just tell them what a damn wuss they’re being, but they’re already in a bit of a sensitive state— plus also paying for the session. So instead the doctor will ask something akin to, “What advice would you give to someone that was happening to?” Whereupon the patient answers, “Oh. Hmm. Well doc, I reckon I’d tell them to choke out that sibling like Anderson Silva on fight night.”

I don’t know if there’s any specific sociological or psychiatric term for this phenomenon, but it doesn’t seem like rocket science to observe that people are far more able to comment on and analyze situations that they’re not hip deep in the middle of. You know that bad relationship your friend is in, and you and all your other friends can totally see it but they can’t? Perhaps you’ve been that friend in the relationship? Remember when things finally fell apart and everything was a house of cards and you wondered why no one ever told you, and then you realized that all the signs were there and your friends had tried to warn you but you just ignored everything until it was too late?

Where was I? Oh yes. Basically what I’m getting at is that sooner or later everyone making a webcomic is going to experience that existential time of frustration and depression where they wonder what it’s all about and whether they should keep going, and when it hits, you’d best believe digging yourself out of that hole isn’t just a matter of turning on the “positive thinkin'” switch, because the positive thoughts are going to be hard to come by. Unless those thoughts are already out there, waiting to bounce back to you. If you’ve helped others, if you recognize that what you’re going through is not unique, you may be better equipped to step back and ask yourself “How ya doin’?”, and give a more honest accounting of that than you would otherwise.

Or if you’re really lucky(?), you could be The Tick.

The Tick (seeing a giant statue of himself) Whoa! What is that?
Tick’s Mind: Oh, sure. Now you wanna know. Tick, this is your self-image.
The Tick: Hey, I look pretty good.
Tick’s Mind: You can ask it only one question.
The Tick: Uh, what question?
Tick’s Mind: The “why are we here” question!
The Tick: Oh, right. (to statue How ya doin’?
(statue gives a thumbs-up)
Tick’s Mind: That’s your big question?
The Tick: Hey, thumbs up! We’re doin’ good!

I’d leave it at that, though, or little blue men might jump out to hit you with fish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3lPhq0Ky_M

Dawn and I have now been exhibiting at various conventions for over five years. We’ve come a long way from where we started, and learned a lot, but I still have to admit this:

I have no idea how we’re going to do, sales-wise, at a given show. Even if it’s the exact same show and just a different year.

It’s possible this is because we’re not being meticulous enough in tracking our data, or just still don’t have enough data to work with, but if you look around at the veterans of the independent press circuit, you’ll often notice that it’s not just comics that they have for sale. There will be art prints, postcards, mugs, jewelry, buttons, t-shirts, plushies, etc. etc., all in a variety of price ranges. The net is cast wide, and although their brand is incorporated into the merch, it is hardly ever the primary selling point. You’re selling to people who like steampunk, or zombies, or unicorns, and while you hope the pendant they just bought might serve as a gateway drug to them getting into your brand or at least becoming a repeat customer to your table, for the moment it’s enough that they’re helping fund you being able to get a repeat table.

Sometimes they’ll want to buy the comics. Sometimes prints. Sometimes t-shirts. Sometimes Dawn will have to turn away people wanting sketch commissions because she’s already too busy with them, sometimes she goes an entire convention without anyone even talking to her. And this, my friends and neighbors, is why we diversify our selection. Even the types of prints people might be buying can vary wildly, sometimes with no apparent rhyme or reason. You can sit there and theorize all day, but in the end the only safe bet seems to be to spread your bets out as much as possible.

And well, sometimes even the safe bet isn’t safe. Sometimes you get bad placement at a show, or people just plain aren’t in a buying mood. And you will lose money on those. But as one of my fellow travelers told me: “We keep at it, and hope the good shows make up for the bad ones.” They’d been at it for over ten years at that point, and though they had a rocky start (as it seems we all do), in recent times have always ended the convention year more up than down.

So if you’re going to be an exhibitor, or are one already and have had some rough times, just keep that in mind.

Every so often I think that I posted something in these blogs that, on further research, seems to be a figment of my imagination. For example, it does not appear that I ever talked about WonderCon 2013, or at least my experience of finally, *finally* meeting Jim Steranko and getting his autograph, something I’d been trying to do for years. As a general rule, I don’t like standing in lines, and I’m also reluctant to meet anyone whose work I admire in person, because hey— sometimes they turn out to be assholes. Steranko is one of the few that I felt was worth both the time and the risk.

Alas, it turned out the particular collection of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD stories I had brought for him to sign dredged up some bad blood. It turned out to be something Marvel screwed him on, using a loophole of publishing in Europe so they didn’t have to pay him any royalties. I had no idea. Thankfully, he still signed it for me, but only in exchange for a charity donation. In the case of some others I’d seen interact ahead of me, he asked for five dollars. In my case, he spread his arms wide, grinned and declared, “For you? Ten!”

I paid it, because Steranko. Also because he’d just let me talk his ear off for several minutes while other people were still queued up behind me. It’s entirely possible that as I left him with my signed poster and book in hand, his judgment of me was “What an asshole.”

But hey, he could have turned me away completely. He could have told me to shut the hell up and move along. Instead he sat there spinning me cool anecdotes like how he convinced Stan Lee to run his famous four-page splash illustration of a SHIELD/Hydra battle (“Stan! To be able to see this in its proper form, they’ll have to buy *four* copies!”).

As we talked, people would occasionally come up and snap photos. Steranko would hold up his hand, and sometimes they’d think he was waving, and wave back and scurry off. He wasn’t waving— he was trying to block his face, and grumbling every time he failed. He was taking cash for his posters of Captain America as donations to charity because I think for legal reasons he wasn’t allowed to be selling them for profit. Little aftershocks of an idealism long since sacrificed on the altar of the comics business.

The one time I truly saw him enjoying himself was when a young boy and his dad made their way to the front of the line. Steranko’s face lit up, and however long he talked to me, he talked to that kid longer, even inviting him behind the table to watch while he did a free sketch of the hero the kid wanted. No charge. But eventually, it was back to business and the signings, a lot of which would no doubt be ending up on Ebay.

My poster didn’t end up on Ebay, though, it’s in a nice place on my wall. Look, maybe meeting Steranko wasn’t nirvana, but like I said, I accepted the risk ahead of time. When dealing with potentially grumpy old men, sometimes just some quality time is all you can ask.

So, I’m intending this to be my last blog entry inspired by Wasteland 2. We’ll see if I keep to that, but like Carter J. Burke told Ripley in Aliens: “That’s the plan.”

You may or may not have noticed that Zombie Ranch has never given any fixed timeline for what year the Great Plague began. It’s not too far in the future from our own world, but so far I prefer to leave it deliberately vague. After all, according to Back to the Future Part II, next year is supposed to be the year we have flying cars and hoverboards. Awkward.

I briefly mentioned in my last blog how Wasteland 2 presents a sort of “stopped clock” vision of a world-as-we-know-it that ended in the late 1980s. This sounds perfectly reasonable considering the idea of a worldwide nuclear apocalypse, but for one niggling detail: the background material makes it clear that the missiles started flying in 1998.

You will not see any real-world technology from 1998 in the game. In fact, at least one bit of flavor text references a certain famous real-world theater and declares that the very last movie that premiered there before the bombs fell was Ghostbusters 2. Assuming you’re too lazy to click that IMDB link, that film was released in 1989. To take that at face value means that no more movies were released, or at least released to that theater, for nine years before civilization officially ended. Again, awkward.

So why not just declare the apocalypse happened in 1989? Well, to keep continuity with the original Wasteland, the apocalypse has to happen in 1998. That’s what was stated, and since this is the same world, that’s what’s set in stone. The problem being, of course, that 1998 was a speculative future during the 1988 release of Wasteland, but is over a decade in the past for us now in 2014. We know that a lot of interesting things happened between 1989 and 1998, but somewhere along the line the call was made by the development team to just pretend the real-world breakthroughs and events of those nine years never happened, but preserve the fictional stuff like killer robots, power armor and man-portable energy weapons. Meanwhile despite the presence of super advanced artificial intelligence, flavor text on a recovered hard drive oohs and ahhs over its massive 20 Megabyte capacity.

Now you might say that this is small potatoes when you shine a light on Fallout, which preserves a pseudo-1950s aesthetic even though the apocalypse didn’t occur in that setting until the year 2077. Even the most cutting edge technology firms whose ruins you root through have tiny computer monitors with text-based monochrome screens, and if that seems jarring now, wait until the real year 2077 rolls around. I mean, assuming anyone can still play the game at that point.

I know what the point of the timelines is. Dates have a grounding effect on us, and it’s a rare post-apocalyptic game that doesn’t have you running across old journals and logs that would look odd if they didn’t have dated entries. The nuclear apocalypse also is such a powerful concept of sudden collapse that you kind of want that “The Day Of…” specified. Maybe even down to the precise moment, to homage the chilling images of frozen time from Hiroshima. The literal “stopped clock”.

But there are those drawbacks to fixing a point in time, where your audience may just have to end up ignoring that detail to prevent them from being taken out of the setting instead of drawn into it. Sort of like how you can do what you want with a fictional location, but once you start playing with a real-world location you’re going to run into possible discrepancies between what you need for your story and what people who actually live there know as fact. I’ve risked that already. I’ve blogged about it. So why am I still gun shy of announcing a Date of Doom, if I’m okay with stuff like Santone and Fort Huachuca? Well, for one thing I could argue that there are relatively fewer people who live in a certain locale than there are people who live through a specific year.

For another, I’d say that the zombie apocalypse and the nuclear one are different breeds. The nuclear apocalypse always seems to want that year, that day, that moment where everything changed in a flash. The zombie apocalypse is a more nebulous thing, a gradual avalanche. It doesn’t matter so much the exact time when things changed, just that they changed. Either it’s a “now” or “tomorrow” scenario where the people involved are trying to survive as it happens, or there’s the trope of someone waking from a coma or returning from some sort of isolation to find the dead are a-walkin’.

Or there’s this story, where it all went down about twenty or so years in the past. That’s important, but the specific year? Not so much. Not too far from now, but not too soon, either. It gives us some flexibility, both in terms of real-world details and speculative, fictional ones, and I’ll never have to worry about someone poking me and asking something like, “Hey, it’s 2023, where’s the AAVDROs?” I still have a timeline, it’s just in terms of “this happened at z-minus-two years, and this happened at z-plus-six years”, with z remaining a variable. It’s not something that would work for all stories, but I still think for this one the best way to win the dating game for now is not to play.

So a funny thing happened while I was playing Wasteland 2. Like many CRPGs, there is various looting of defeated enemies, containers, etc. This is the same today as it was decades ago, and no doubt stems right out of the original pen & paper Dungeons & Dragons, which devoted no few pages to treasure tables for random generation of the shinies your party could look forwards to once the monsters were properly feathered, filleted, and fireballed. MMORPG’s often make a certain rare item the reward for an entire questline, and people willingly team up with up to 39 more-or-less strangers just for the opportunity for one person to maybe get the “drop”. We like our loot.

The fact that Wasteland 2 has loot is not surprising. What was surprising to me was the form some of it took, which was various bits of intellectual property that was not even a little bit disguised. We’re not even talking the paper-thin don’t-sue-us veneer of Fallout’s “Nuka-Cola” or our own “ClearStream”. Wasteland 2 presents a world whose clock stopped around 1988. Technically 1998, but I’ll talk about that discrepancy another time. It’s definitely a 1980s take on what existed before the bombs fell, and the various loot containers of the landscape are rife with Rubik’s Cubes, Cabbage Patch Kids, and Teddy Ruxpins.

I wouldn’t bat an eye if I were picking up Bubik’s Tesseracts, Lettuce Head Tots, and Reddy Tuxpins. But here they were, not only with their trademarked names but pictures and flavor texts identifying beyond a doubt the designer intent. It’s a Teddy Ruxpin. Likeness used (as far as I know) without permission. Yup.

I mean, it’s possible that InXile Studios went out and licensed the inclusion of all these, but that seems unlikely, especially since all of them are what’s considered “junk items”, with no real use beyond selling them off to the next trader you run into. Further complicating the issue are the occasions where the names do get changed, such as a bottle of “Hair and Shoulders” dandruff shampoo or a diesel locomotive with “UNINON PACIFIC” labeled prominently on its side. A cult based off one of Tony Robbins’ motivational books changes the book title slightly and takes care not to mention him fully by name. But then you pick up a Baby Ruth candy bar.

Now the probable answer here is that different people designed different parts of the game, and one or more of them were far less concerned with possible lawsuits. After all, a big part of trademark law depends on the idea of brand confusion or unfairly profiting off the inclusion of a trademarked item, and it’s hard to argue Wasteland 2 is selling any more copies than it would normally because it has a Sega Genesis as a loot item. Certainly none of the stuff detailed above is being used in the advertisement of the game, but on the other hand it’s not really being used for parody or satire, either, it’s just there.

Maybe InXile’s legal department knows more than I do. Or perhaps it’s just a straight up case of “flying below the radar” and being too small a fish to bother with, since really, most copyright and trademark cases are an issue of whether or not the person or company being allegedly infringed a) knows about it, and b) wants to bother. Wasteland 2 has made millions of dollars in sales, but it still hardly has the prominence of a Triple A title from a major publisher.

The continued existence of Artist’s Alleys at comic conventions is proof that operating below the radar works, but on the other hand I recall that time Dawn got this illustration (which had sold exactly zero times) pulled from one of her online stores because Fender complained the neck of the guitar resembled their trademark too much. Then again places like CafePress are notorious for crumbling and caving at the very whiff of a DMCA notice, regardless of its validity, so perhaps that example doesn’t prove anything except that CafePress has no spine.

The developers of Wasteland 2, by contrast, have some big brass balls, as I talked about last week. So maybe this rampant flaunting of IP is just yet another facet of them exercising the freedom of being crowd funded and answering to no one but their fans, and perhaps a commentary on how today’s corporate culture has gotten way too wrapped up in holding onto their copyrights and trademarks with twitchy death grips. Maybe that’s why they’re also mostly classified as “junk”.

Or maybe I’m reading way too much into a bunch of in-jokes and references whose only difference from most is just coming right out and calling a Nintendo Power Glove a Nintendo Power Glove. But even if it’s flying under the radar, it’s been on my radar, and it’s another interesting development.

In last week’s blog I started my jawin’ about the recent release of Wasteland 2, the long-in-coming sequel to 1988’s Wasteland — a game rightly regarded as the grandaddy of post-apocalyptic computer RPGs. It’s a trite thing for a company to release a product and say “Because you demanded it!”, and yet in Wasteland 2’s case this would be entirely correct. Without the millions of dollars donated to Kickstarter by Fans Like Me, the game would not exist. It just flat out couldn’t get a publisher in today’s climate of first-person shooter franchises and risk-averse gatekeepers.

I suppose you really can’t blame those gatekeepers in an era where a game like Destiny ends up spending $500 million on development, a figure almost twice that of even the most lavish major motion picture budgets. Where the Tomb Raider reboot can sell 3.4 million copies (at around $60 US each) and still be considered a failure by its publisher. There’s just no room for risk. And while a video game being rated M for Mature isn’t the death knell of profit the way movies can make or break based on the often arbitrary and fuzzy lines between ‘PG-13’ and ‘R’, having any sort of content that could get a game pulled from the Wal-Mart shelves is still a big no-no for a big, AAA title.

Now, if you consider games like the Grand Theft Auto series to be controversial, well — let’s just say back in the day, things were a little looser even than that. Have you ever noticed that in a modern game, children are completely invulnerable, even in sandbox games like Skyrim and Fallout 3 where you can kill all the adults around them and raze the place they live to the ground?

That’s no accident. You see, the ESRB, which controls the content ratings of all games in the U.S. and Canada, has a level above “M for Mature”, which is “Adults Only”. You’ll rarely see a game with that rating, because major retail chains like Wal-Mart won’t carry that game on their shelves. Online services like Xbox Live won’t distribute it, and in fact Microsoft and Sony just flat out won’t support any development for their consoles after it’s been judged ‘AO’. Trying to get around the ESRB is no good either, since unrated games are automatically excluded.

Where are the lines drawn between ‘M’ and ‘AO’? Good question. But something like 1990’s Escape From Hell probably would have had a tough time seeing wide distribution, don’t you think? You know who published Escape From Hell, with its happy-go-lucky adventure that saw you teaming up with Hitler and Stalin on a quest to defeat Satan himself? A little company by the name of Electronic Arts.

What’s that you say? Your appetite for irony remains unsated? Well, Electronic Arts also published the original Wasteland, but wouldn’t give Brian Fargo the time of day when he came back trying to get them to greenlight a sequel. I’m surprised he even got in the door. Brian who? You say you put us on the map in the first place with classics like Wasteland and The Bard’s Tale? Whatever, old man. Get lost, we don’t need your kind around here anymore.

That’s why Mr. Fargo eventually turned to Kickstarter. It’s probably also why Wasteland 2 allows you to solve a crisis by giving cigarettes to kids.

Yes, I’ve finally gotten around to the hint I mentioned last week. Wasteland 2 at times feels very much like a barbarian throwback rattling at the gates of modern, civilized gaming. Character creation actually asks you to choose the brand of cigarettes your character smokes (although “none” is an option). It similarly allows you to choose a religious affiliation if you wish. The juveniles you can give cigarettes to can be brutally killed as an alternate method of solving the issue. Your superiors in the Desert Rangers won’t be happy if you do that, but heck, if you’re tough enough you can just kill them, too.

I do presume the price of this horrible, horrible freedom is that you may render the game unwinnable, which is another throwback to days of yore. But the freedom is there, and it’s an interesting feeling after so many games where you don’t even get the option. You’re ostensibly supposed to be a force for good and order, but at least to an extent the game allows you to instead be a completely barbaric asshole, far beyond even the worst Renegade excesses of Mass Effect.

Is that a good thing? Well, consider this. The original Wasteland all but forced you to kill a child early in the game. It was a misunderstanding, and technically self-defense, but it’s still a rough thing if you’re trying play your guys as heroes. If, on the other hand, you want to engage in outright villainy, you can massacre an entire town of children.

I admit, I tried this option out on one of my playthroughs — but the crazy thing is the game developers actually expected it, and send some very strange and surreal karmic retribution your way that will roundly kick your ass if you’re unprepared. You are not prepared.

But then again, Wasteland was a free roaming game and you could restart it with the same characters (including their high levels and equipment) after you’d finished, so you could theoretically work it out that you were able to also deal with the retribution.

I did that. And the consequences of my victory were, well — chilling. The developers let you do it all, with no artificial limitations on your murder spree, and yet in the end I didn’t just feel bad, I felt downright horrified at what I’d inflicted on a bunch of low-rez pixels.

Some people probably wouldn’t. But true to its roots, Wasteland 2 again allows you to be a jerk. How much of a jerk, I don’t know, because a lot of the same writers are on board, and that experience from 26 years ago still haunts me enough I don’t feel like testing them.

Wasteland 2 did end up rated ‘M for Mature’, so I guess despite the cigarettes and potential for juvenile murder the content of the new iteration wasn’t enough for the ESRB to slap it down. But compared to most games these days, it still seems rather fearless. We’ll talk about some other aspects of that fearlessness that surprised me next time ’round, this time dealing with one of my repeated subjects in this blog: the issue of intellectual property. See you then!

In the annals of this blog I have made much mention of the Fallout game series (and even devoted an entire article to one of them). It’s one of the inspirations for many aspects of Zombie Ranch that I unapologetically wear on my sleeve.

But Fallout might never have existed were it not for Wasteland, and Wasteland hasn’t gotten nearly as much press from me despite being the first real post-apocalyptic Computer RPG I can remember playing, all the way back in my pimply teenage years of the late 1980s. That’s probably because it was, what, 25 years ago? As the film that arguably birthed this whole genre famously began — “…the vision dims. All that remains are memories…”. On the other blog site I used to regularly contribute to, I had a series of “Low-Rez Recollections” where I talked of the games of my youth and their impact despite the limitations of the technology, but Wasteland was one I never got ’round to. That also meant I never went through my “refresher course” on the game the way I did with others I featured, so all I could truly comment on for sure were the setting, a few memorable moments, and the fact it certainly left its mark on me.

How much of a mark? Enough for me to throw money at a Kickstarter for a sequel involving a lot of the same core team, and compose an article hoping it and projects like it heralded a new era for a gaming industry in danger of collapsing under its own bloated weight. Prior to Wasteland 2 I’d also pledged money to the as-yet-untitled Double Fine adventure game (now known to be Broken Age), and while Broken Age has only released Act I so far, it still for me had all that Tim Shafer magic to it, a magic I was able to share with my wife who missed out on the age of classics like Grim Fandango. I eagerly (but patiently) await the rest, and you know what, even if Tim Shafer blew all the Kickstarter money on drugs and hookers like some forum posters would end up claiming, I can’t really complain after drinking all his beer and getting a free GWAR concert at the Brutal Legend party at SDCC ’09. But nope, he and his team are still hard at work on Act 2.

Wasteland 2 meanwhile has finally released, and while my old-school boxed copy is still in process of being shipped, I’m doing just fine in the meantime playing it through Steam. Is it a perfect game? No. Are there bugs? Yes. But it has me very, very engaged, and has brought up a number of things for me to ponder concerning game and setting design. What was, what is, and what could be again. The Wasteland 2 project raised nearly 3 million dollars on Kickstarter, but the question I always had was, did that 3 million represent everyone who would ever be interested? Some few fanatics aside, I doubt there any many people who would want to buy the game twice, and that’s why hearing that the game had 1.5 million dollars in Steam sales in its first week of release alone was surprising and heartening. It seems to justify Brian Fargo’s bold declaration that he and his team no longer have to answer to Walmart.

But we’ll get to that whole Walmart thing in my next blog, where I’ll speak on the ways Wasteland 2 feels like a breath of fresh air. Although “fresh air” may not be the most apt metaphor for what I’m going to discuss.*

*Hint: cigarettes are involved.

So there was (well, I guess, is) this fictional setting by the name of Crimson Skies. Ever heard of it? Well, I always thought it was pretty cool. It started with the idea of its creators of transplanting a “Pirates of the Caribbean” feel to the early years of aviation, of “air pirates” in a more modern era. Not quite our modern era, though, they settled into an alternate version of the 1930s and got it all gloriously tangled up in the pulp fiction of that decade, the kind that inspired similar works like The Rocketeer.

Now you might say that having a world of crazy awesome airplanes and war zeppelins and pulp adventures and dogfighting duels doesn’t need any justification beyond the “Rule of Cool” I mentioned last week, but Crimson Skies does have a backstory to it. In much the same way as Deadlands takes a hard turn from history as we knew it circa 1863, Crimson Skies visualizes a post World War I America that begins to fall apart for various reasons starting with the 1918 influenza epidemic and culminating in the stock market crash of 1929, both of which are real historical events but end up being the falling dominoes that lead to a breakup of the United States into several different competing, and at times completely hostile nations. And being hostile, the roads that linked such nations fell into disrepair, assuming they weren’t sabotaged outright.

And that’s why planes and zeppelins are the primary mode of commerce and travel instead of cars and trucks.

Far-fetched? Well, that’s what I was hinting at last week when I mentioned that alternate histories can get a pass on anachronisms, but still have to ride a fine line of how far they can stretch suspension of disbelief. I bring up Crimson Skies in particular because it engages in a similar mode of “blah-blah-blah therefore airplanes” that I’ve done, except for my Weird New West it’s “blah-blah-blah therefore helicopters” — or I guess if we extend further, “blah-blah-blah therefore zombie ranches”.

As another example, there’s the setting of Car Wars, which required a post-apocalyptic, divided United States where cars and trucks were still a big deal but banditry abounds. Therefore despite the breakups and hostilities, the roads still somehow get maintained even if they happen to be rather unpatrolled. There are planes and helicopters but they’re not the focus, so the end result goes in a different direction.

That’s the beauty of speculative fiction. You can’t be wrong.

Okay, that’s not precisely true. When you’re dealing with speculative histories or futures, the less you have to stretch the bounds of logic and possibility to get your setting to where you want it to be, the better. This is where it helps to do your research. Even if you’re speculating on the future, you should be looking to the past. Humanity moves in cycles and, cliché as it may sound, history does repeat itself. Crimson Skies wasn’t off base in starting from the example of the Golden Age of Piracy. Competing nations, shifting alliances, sudden wars and even more sudden peaces leaving sailors and soldiers abandoned who know no real trade except how to fight? It’s a time-honored recipe for instability and chaos, the proverbial “Interesting Times“. And the romanticized, fantastical version of any period of interesting times is synonymous with an “Age of Adventure”, no matter if it has airplanes and air pirates or dragons and wizards. Start with the basics of human nature and human history and extrapolate from there, and it’ll give you a grounded base to fling your setting far afield while keeping it at least somewhat within the realm of your audience being able to say “Yeah, it seems crazy, but somehow it makes sense.”

That’s my theory at least. Hopefully it’s working out.

We mentioned in this week’s comic blurb how the Pony Express has an iconic status in the image of the Old West that far outstrips its actual impact and time of existence. They’re not a made up thing, but that just potentially makes it more complicated if you want them in your Western tale but don’t want that tale to be set in the tiny window of 1860-1861 when they operated.

Writers have a ready made escape for this, which is that most people don’t know or don’t care. A Western set during the American Civil War (1861-1865) will show characters using guns that didn’t exist until the 1870’s. Or they might carry a revolver model invented in 1851, but load metal cartridges in a day and age they’d still be limited to cap-and-ball and tied paper.

Does that impact the audience’s enjoyment of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly? Not by much. A small percentage would have the know-how to realize something is amiss, and even then only a small percentage of those folks will be bothered with more than a shrug so long as they’re enjoying the rest of the movie.

The US Army didn’t formally adopt the Gatling Gun until after the war ended? Bah! Gatling Guns are so cool that even today action movies will use nearly any excuse to shove one in to the proceedings.

And that’s how a lot of fiction operates. Why is the Pony Express in your 1872 Western? Why’s that shell-shocked Confederate veteran fresh from Lee’s surrender carrying a Colt Peacemaker?

For much the same reason Rambo can fire an M-60 from the hip. Rule of Cool. The way Hyperdrive works in Star Wars doesn’t matter, what matters is desperately trying to fix it so you can jump to lightspeed before the Empire catches you. Colt Peacemakers and Winchester Repeating Rifles are all things expect to see from a tale of cowboys and gunslingers, so in they go. It’s so pervasive that even in this tale set in the 21st century some readers presumed Suzie and Frank were armed with those particular weapons. I think Dawn may have even accidentally drawn Suzie’s revolver like a Peacemaker once or twice even though I explained it was a more modern frame.

Now in our situation such a choice would be even less of an issue because it would be more a case of 21st Century ranchers simply being unlikely to use such weapons any more for day-to-day needs, rather than it being the impossibility of someone in 1872 owning a Springfield bolt-action rifle. But it was interesting to see people actually expressing disappointment on finding out that Frank wasn’t using a Winchester, like I’d personally shot a non-thirty-thirty hole right through the heart of their cowboy mythology. In the struggle between historical accuracy and iconic genre elements in fiction, historical accuracy often seems like a thankless task only a few hardcore nerds will appreciate, while the presence of the Pony Express will go unquestioned because it’s just hard-wired into audience expectations. People want that classic image of King Arthur and Lancelot wearing shining (and completely anachronistic) plate mail.

Is that bad? Well, considering one of the recent King Arthur movies that tried to present itself as more historically accurate to the time period wasn’t all that great a film, you can’t just blanket condemn inaccuracies. Artistic license happens, and the only thing that annoys me personally is when fiction claims to be historically accurate and/or “realistic” but isn’t, especially if it’s obvious that the creators actually really didn’t give a shit. It’s also better for me if a creator can graciously nod and acknowledge, “I know this particular style of stagecoach wasn’t around until several years later, but it’s cool looking and iconic so we rolled with it”, rather than just going “Huh?”, shrugging, and shooting you the finger while snorting another line of coke off a hooker’s ass.

Or you could cunningly concoct an alternative future setting that deviated from the world we know some murky time in the past decades, so that your only conflicts of accuracy may be logical rather than historical. But *ahem* more on that next week, I think.

In popular fiction it often seems flying in a helicopter is a more dangerous prospect than off-roading in a Ford Pinto full of sweaty dynamite. There’s even a whole TV Tropes page dedicated to the phenomenon. Helicopters are the redshirts of the vehicular transportation world.

Zombie fiction is no exception, probably because the helicopter represents a free ticket to safety from the gravity-bound hordes, and we can’t have that or we have no tension for our survival scenario. Maybe the pilot becomes a zombie, or one of the passengers, or a zombie was hiding somewhere on board, or something even more contrived than that, but whatever, the important thing is that the easy salvation and hope go down in flames and our protagonists are left to cry variations on “Game over, man!”

But early on with Zombie Ranch, I knew we’d be telling a different kind of story, one where the world had been adjusting to the presence of the walking dead for several years, and more than that, still had a fair amount of resources and technology available. Roads in the Wild Zones wouldn’t be maintained and might still be choked with ruined cars; land travel wouldn’t be out of the question, but there’d definitely be dangers and delays.

The Pony Express got by in the Old West, but in this Weird New West, wouldn’t it be nice if you could just fly your delivery right over it all, roads, hills, and zeds be damned? Well, shucks, there’s something that can do that! Helicopters could fly between safe zones or even fortified Wild Zone towns, never setting gear on the ground until they needed to (and requiring a lot less real estate and development to do so than a fixed-wing plane).

I’ve been teasing hints of all this since Episode 2, so it’s fun to finally get a chance to dip into it more, this rotorhead culture of independent contractors running goods for the highest bidder. The High Road Couriers. When it absolutely, positively needs to be there on time, pay up — and up they’ll go!

I can’t remember the last time I didn’t write an entry of some length here. I could probably research that, but right now, I’ll just say if you’re interested in words from me for this week, please go read the comic page post.

I’m no pie-in-the-sky idealist. I know the world doesn’t run on rainbows and hugs, and oftentimes conventions are no exception. But damn if I can’t still be shocked sometimes when I hear about how certain shows are being run.

I won’t name the show mentioned, but it was an anime convention where the exhibitor who went posted a very odd thing; because she had craft goods for sale, she was not allowed to be in Artist’s Alley. In fact all the folks with non-“2D” artwork were segregated out to a different section of the convention. This was bizarre enough to me, but the craziest part was yet to come; when asked why this was happening, the convention organizers claimed that it was the 2D artists who had complained and demanded the separation.

I hope they were just making that up, because if not, well, what the hell? In five years of exhibiting at conventions, I’ve never encountered this sort of mentality. But for that matter, I’m used to conventions where as long as you register early enough and pay your money, you get a spot, and the artist’s alleys are an eclectic mix of all manner of goods. We’re not talking small shows, either. San Diego is in a class by itself, but shows like WonderCon, Emerald City and Phoenix have all gotten pretty damn big — yet I keep hearing of much smaller shows requiring jury selections, treating their exhibitors poorly, and otherwise seeming downright hostile by comparison. Is it just more mellow on the West Coast? Is it some cultural difference between the comic cons and anime/manga events? I mean, I’ve observed some aesthetic differences on that score before, but I’m absolutely floored at times hearing stories from the anime circuit for what the exhibitors not only have to put up with, but have accepted as just a necessary evil.

This artist segregation, though, is probably the worst trend I’ve heard yet, especially if it’s actually because Independent Artist A is looking down their nose at Independent Artist B purely because of the media each has chosen to express themselves in. Dawn does sketches and illustrations, but she also sews plushie zombie horses and makes jewelry pendants and there is no less effort and creativity involved in the latter.  And you can’t tell me it’s a matter of the displays not being uniform enough, because a) uniformity is freaking boring, and b) 2D artists don’t all do the same sort of table set-up anyhow, either.

It’s bad enough when it’s a “separate but equal” situation, but now some shows have taken it a step further. They’ve separated out the sewers and sculptors and then turned around and charged them a significantly higher fee for exactly the same size of table and space, just in a different spot on the floor. And it’s not even near the entrance. That’s just Grade A bullshit right there.

Like I said, I haven’t really come in contact with this myself, I just find it worrisome that it’s happening anywhere, and even more worrisome that there could ever be a culture where independent artists are segregating out “undesirables” from their ranks based on some bizarre caste system of what counts as real art or not. I would prefer to think that’s some nutball organizer’s idea and they’re just making up some silent majority to justify their personal prejudices. And most of all, I want to believe that if exhibitors come in contact with this sort of toxic attitude, they will stand up and make their voices heard that it’s not okay, and if the convention won’t listen, that convention will eventually be an empty place.

Am I blowing this out of proportion? Have any of you run into this phenomenon, and if so, do you think it’s worthy of concern?

Not too long ago I was one of many respondents to someone on a Webcomic Creators’ group who was interested in starting a webcomic and wanted advice from the veterans on possible pitfalls to watch out for.

Well, of course one of the responses was about making backup copies of your work. Almost goes without saying, right? Even if you physically draw your pages first and then scan them for upload, it’s good to have those digital copies preserved in a few different places to minimize any problems. If (heavens forbid) your house burns down, you’ve at least still got those Dropbox/Carbonite/etc. images. Hopefully in high resolution form.

But now, expand on that. What about the various promotional materials you’ve put together for websites or print? What about your tax documents? Your sales spreadsheets? All these are things that would be a serious bummer to lose, and if you’ve put together your operation over the years as piecemeal as we have, you may not have them all as consolidated as they perhaps should be. We still make the effort to ensure they’re preserved as much as the artwork is, and I would venture to say people by and large would still think of doing it.

And then again in our almost five years of production, there’s another matter that I never hear webcomic people talk about. It might be because it’s not as universal an issue as having good site navigation.

It’s about fonts. Ever heard the expression where someone’s a “font of wisdom”? Let’s talk some hard-learned wisdom of fonts.

Now first of all, if you hand letter your comics, this advice is completely irrelevant. But if you use any kind of digital lettering, even if you make your own fonts to use — in fact especially if you make your own — then every font you ever used in your comic’s production ought to be on the backup list along with everything else. You never know when you might need it again.

Seriously. You might be of the thought when a page is done, it’s done, but at least in our case, we’ve gone back and revisited old pages many times. Even if you never plan to change the lettering in any way, you might want to reuse a certain style of sound effect for consistency. You might be wanting to reuse part of a page as an advertisement.

This might also be a moot point if you’re flattening all your originals, but I really don’t recommend that. One of the whole points of going digital is being able to maintain the flexibility of a layered page. But the terrible thing is to go back to one of those pages with that font you really liked, and as it’s loading you get the pop-up that one or more of the fonts are missing. Where did you get them from originally? Even if you remember that much, is that site still there? Are the fonts still available? There could be years in between then and now.

It’s an easy thing to overlook, and I’m saying that because it’s a thing we overlooked. It’s only just recently, as we’re looking into putting together a trade collection, that I’ve really knuckled down and tried to track and consolidate and preserve all the fonts we’ve ever used. In that five year stretch of time Dawn has changed computers once and reformatted twice, and will soon be changing computers again. It’s my hope that we still have everything. Time will tell, since I have over 200 pages to review.

That brings up another point, which is that we’re not the only “team effort” out there. If you’re a solo act who does everything yourself on a single computer system, keeping track will be much easier than when multiple people with multiple computers are involved. You’ll need to work out a system where those mission critical fonts are kept up to date for everyone, because they don’t travel with the page.

This is not a big deal if you don’t want to edit or warp the text, because the program will usually still preserve it as an image,  but for instance on the comic page before the current one Dawn found a new font online to use for the sound effects in the final panel, and while it looked great, I didn’t have it and so when it came time for me to letter and I found a typo I had to call her back to her own system to fix things. It forced me to think how we had never put together a shared repository for such finds where I could just grab the font download, and that that might be something it was high time to change.

Now that’s just two of us working off two computers and it was still a headache. I can’t imagine the headache for someone who has a long-distance letterer on staff and then that letterer quits or goes AWOL along with all the fonts they used. It’s not as big a deal as having to redraw all the art but I imagine that would be a humungous pain in the ass.

So, long story short: keep track of the fonts you use for lettering, keep copies in a folder your whole comics team has easy and immediate access to for installation, and back that folder up along with all your other mission critical data. An easy, simple thing to overlook, but there may come a day that you will feel quite wise for doing so.

It’s a fundamental principle of economics. There is something people want (demand). Someone else has it or produces it (supply). A deal is struck, an exchange is made, and everyone walks away more or less happy with the result.

Recently there have been several dust-ups in geek circles about a systematic exclusion of female characters from media properties considered by their parent companies as “for boys”. If you’re not aware of this, you can search up hashtags like #ButNotBlackWidow, #WheresGamora, or the Disney Store controversy concerning the lack of Leia in their Star Wars section (which was reportedly on its way to correction after a #WeWantLeia movement).

I’m going to try not to delve too deeply into the politics of this since a lot of folk have done that. It’s not a particularly new phenomenon, either, since the toy line for mega-popular, gender-divide crossing cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender somehow never came out with the action figures for its two female leads, Katara and Toph, even as they were releasing figures for bit players whose only qualification for production and distribution to the public was that they happened to have penises; an irony considering that no mass-market kid’s action figure I know of is going to actually have a penis. To use a Zombie Ranch comparison, it’s like the toy company making a Forsythe action figure while there still aren’t any for Suzie or Rosa, right down to that I figure a bunch of you probably just thought, “Who the heck is Forsythe?”

I suppose what irks me most about the situation is that there is a quantifiable demand, but no supply, even after repeated incidents. There are responses in the case of #WheresGamora which will point out there are licensed figures produced available online or in specialty shops, but I feel like this is missing the point when you can grab a Star Lord figure off the shelf at Wal-Mart or Target; the exact situation most young kids are still going to be in when they go shopping with their parents. It’s also tougher to justify when an official t-shirt reading “Guardians of the Galaxy” omits Gamora from the team even though there’s a chunk of empty space where she could easily have fit (and even if she didn’t fit, then redesign it so she does, right?). Or how about that the current Power Rangers team is 40% female, but there’s official merch out there that features only the dudes, even though the slogan is “Power Rangers Unite!”? Power Rangers was after my time so I’m no expert, but can you Megazord successfully with only three Rangers?

Again, trying not to be political here, but the official(!) response to these complaints continues to be some variation on the idea that boys won’t buy girl things, or even merchandise representing a woman or featuring a woman on them, even if she’s one out of five. Because focus groups, I guess? Because statistics? And yet above and beyond all of this is just a simple matter of people wanting to spend money on products that aren’t being provided.

When I was a little boy growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was no question of a Princess Leia action figure being on that shelf alongside Luke and Han and Chewbacca. The 1982 version of GI Joe may have launched with a single female character out of the dozen or so in the first wave, but Scarlett was there and available and had her weapons and bio card like the dudes, and over the years Hasbro ended up expanding the female presence in the toy line (Lady Jaye, Cover Girl, The Baroness, Zarana…) rather than getting rid of it.  Did they really sell badly, or somehow sell worse than stuff that made sure feminine presence was absent?

Was I just an aberrantion for wanting my action figure team or the folks on my lunchbox to reflect what I saw on my television or the movie screen? I guess yes, and because of that today’s generation of kids aren’t even being given a choice. That’s where this situation utterly and completely breaks down for me. There’s a demand, but a stubborn and inexplicable refusal on the part of suppliers to meet it. At some point the decisions of whether a product is going to succeed have moved from the hands of the consumers to the whims of corporations, with us with the wallets having no say so in the matter.

Except that’s changing. Where the corporations and licensees fail, Etsy and Redbubble are picking up the slack by connecting demand with supply. As I talked about before, 3-D printers and associated “recipes” are becoming more common. I mean, if I want to take gender completely out of the equation, how about the massive ball that was dropped when Disney/Marvel had no “dancing baby Groot” toy ready to release from Day 1? Only a lurching corporate structure mired in dry statistics could have overlooked that, and even though now I’m sure there’s something in the works, it’s going to take months of focus groups and committees and licensing agreements before something hits shelves. Meanwhile a talented fan had a pretty damn good version crafted within ten days of release, and the inevitable cease and desist orders won’t do much against the tide of sheer demand.

No Gamora t-shirt in a women’s cut? She’s missing from the team? Here you go. What’s funniest is that some of the people trying to claim her absence from official merchandise was a lie and an exaggeration were pointing to fan-made merchandise and saying “See! There’s plenty if you just look!”. Indeed, and Disney’s not getting one penny out of the sales.

Illegal? Sure. But it reminds me of one of Lexi Alexander’s rants on piracy, how she would be more than willing to pay for the ability to watch local news feeds from her native Germany, but the only people willing and able to provide that to her are, ahem, “unofficial” parties.

I’ll go on the website of a German public TV channel in hopes of catching up on some (objective) news and up pops the message:

Sorry, the copyright for this program does not extend to the country of your current location.

Huh??? Are you going to distribute DVDs of German news programs to the US? Is there such a massive market for German programming in the world, that you must block all viewers outside your borders?

While it would be nice to think that the corporate culture could change in the face of all these protests, it probably won’t, any more than McDonalds will stop dividing its happy meal toys into “boy” and “girl” options. They’re making plenty of money with their current model, based on their current modelings, and see no pressing reason to change. I suppose it’s easy enough based on their statistics to dismiss any of these Internet protests as fringe groups who wouldn’t actually justify the expense of mass-producing Katara action figures or Gamora t-shirts (or even t-shirts with Gamora as part of them). And you know, maybe they’re right. Maybe there really isn’t enough demand out there to give women equal time, even if it’s just one of them who happens to be a crucial part of a team. Maybe that lurching corporate structure isn’t agile enough to deal with that section of demand and provide a corresponding supply; even if that demand runs into the hundreds or thousands, maybe they need confirmed millions before the creaky wheels get set in motion.

Welp, that’s when people start getting a lot less conflicted over buying a third party shirt or other merchandise based on a part of an IP said corporation flat-out refuses to market, especially when there’s really no way to release a statement like “we won’t make this because people like you aren’t interested” that doesn’t sound both presumptuous and insulting. One retail store was even more brutally honest: “The Guardians of the Galaxy shirt in particular is a boy’s shirt, which is why it does not include the female character Gamora.” Regardless of where on the supply chain that decision was made, them’s fightin’ words.

Look, Big Merch (or Big Toy, or whatever we want to call it), I personally hate that you use institutionalized sexism as part of your business model for success. Boys aren’t born thinking that “girl stuff” is bad or girls have no place among boys, they have to be taught that, and what you’re doing is feeding right into the problem. But fine, if you’re just responding to what we as a majority culture seem to want, and it’s not you but us that are terrible, and you can’t afford to cater to a “fringe element”? Well, fine, how about doing what Hasbro and Shapeways are doing, putting something together where smaller, more agile suppliers can, with your blessing, market fringe to fringe, and meet demand with supply.

Now mind you, it’s hard for me to stomach that in 2014 putting a female member of an action team on a t-shirt is considered a fringe desire, especially given my childhood where it was no big thing. But I guess that’s beside the point. If your corporate structure is such that you can’t make money off of meeting smaller scale demands (as you claim), then start working with someone who does, or kiss all that potential money goodbye because it will happen regardless. Or if you’re really convinced that there’s no money to be made, ever — if your statistics are that ironclad, and you don’t want to deal with the buzzing flies of the “fringe” — then at least do my brain the favor of not spending time sending out cease and desist notifications to the people making and selling the products you say no one will buy. You’re already being soullessly sexist and regrettably short-sighted, so maybe, just maybe, don’t add a steaming helping of asshole on top.

Dawn and I get solicitations on a semi-regular basis. Not the kind (alas) that would get us picked up by the Vice Squad, but the kind seeking to offer us all manner of services along the lines of printing, or gallery hosting, or search engine optimization, or other things we might be interested in as an independent artistic outfit.

Sometimes these are “cold” queries where they got our contact information through a third party or publicly available channels and it’s the first we’ve ever heard of them. Sometimes they’re folks who make the rounds of the artist’s alley or small press area of a convention, swapping sales pitches and business cards. Nothing really wrong with either approach; in fact where the latter is concerned it’s a rare convention where we don’t get at least one such contact that may or may not be followed up later. It might be hard to see through all the merchandising and celebrity panels and such, but networking such opportunities is one of the main reason conventions of all kinds exist, and comic conventions are no exception.

But here’s one thing that annoys me. Or should I say, us, since I’m certainly not alone in this amongst my exhibitor peers.

It annoys me when people get personal.

“But wait, Clint!” you cry (shut up, you’re totally crying it right now). “What are you saying? That all potential business relations should be coldly, clinically professional? You’re a mom and pop operation, they’re a mom and pop operation, you have faces, they have faces, you should totally be friends!”

No, I recognize that the face thing is true (at least in my experience so far), and there can be fun had while discussing mutually profitable dealings. The annoying part is when someone gets “fake personal”. That’s when someone comes by, makes a brief pitch, takes your business card, and then a week later you get a really chummy email informing you, you special snowflake, that they liked the cut of your jib so much they want you to come be part of their family.  They love you. YOU! Let’s keep those good times we had rolling!

Only it’s quite obvious even on a cursory read of these communications that it’s just a really informally worded form letter that’s probably been shipped off to everyone else on the artist’s alley roster, likely with the same single button click, perhaps even with a Mail Chimp tag still on it, just in case there was any doubt. “To whom it may concern” may be replaced with “Hey dude!”, but it bespeaks the same level of actual personal care.

At this point it’s hardly different from the SEO crap we get from “Donna Gabriel” or “Noah Jenkins” or whatever name the spambots cooked up this month that starts off informing us how “they really enjoy our blog zombieranchomic.com”. Zombie Ranch, folks. The name is Zombie Ranch. And despite the presence of this right here, I probably wouldn’t refer to it first and foremost as a blog.

But hey, at least they have something filled in, I suppose. The standard artist’s alley blast never mentions any individual names (how could they? That’s literally *dozens* of artists you’re talking about!). Sometimes it’ll at least mention a specific convention, which is at least a little bit of effort. But oh, they are quite, quite chummy. They’ll tell you all about their day, without you having even asked. They’ll describe the shirt they had on or some weird and distinctive accessory which might trigger your memory of having met them. Man, it was great to talk to you! Love your stuff! Here’s a link to my site!

Look, again, being informal isn’t annoying in of itself. I’ve sent and been sent follow-ups which might contain one or more or these things, especially because sometimes after a crowded convention weekend you really do need that stimulus of, “Oh, YOU were the dude in the Groo hat” in order to remember a conversation. The difference being that it doesn’t end there, it also includes some details backing up that the remembrance goes both ways. “I particularly loved the illustration of the sad astronaut boy who can’t get to his ice cream” or “I think your concept of ‘living dead livestock’ with Zombie Ranch is brilliantly insane” are still flattery, but a specific kind of flattery indicating we really did make an impact on you. A personal impact. This kind of contact puts as much of a smile on my face as the faux personalizations make me frown. Even if you’re just doing it so I’ll buy into your project, well, hell, you’ve done your research. Good on you.

It’s sad how quickly cynical the faux personal touch makes you as an exhibitor, but we notice. And unlike the SEO and other spammers who just depend on anonymity and casting as wide a net as possible, casing out convention exhibitors in this way can be as wise an idea as telling every woman in the same local bar that you find them the most beautiful. We do talk to each other. We learn to spot the red flags, even if you don’t make the mistake of telling someone “We met at your booth at SDCC!” when they didn’t have a booth at SDCC (and yes, we got an email like that, which is specifically why I’m ranting now).  You’re a small business and we’re small businesses, but that means even more that your first contact shouldn’t carry the whiff of bullshit with it.

Look, I know that sending a personalized message to every single exhibitor you talked to at a convention means a lot of work, and might still not give you much return, but I really do believe honesty is the best policy. Either you put in those details which indicate you truly do love what they’re doing, which in all probability should also mean picking and choosing a handful of exhibitors where that was true, or you cast the wide net — but if you’re casting the net, don’t try to get overly friendly with the squirming fish you didn’t really take the time to differentiate, or you can bet I’ll be giving you the fish-eye in response.

Yes, “I.P. Freely” is one of those names immortalized alongside compatriots such as “Ben Dover” and “Hugh Jass”. But I’m not bringing it up in prep for a prank phone call; I want to talk IP in its current sense of Intellectual Property. IP is a big deal in our current day and age, because it has the potential to make big money. It’s the stuff copyright and trademark lawsuits are made of. This very site has copyright notices plastered on it to inform that Zombie Ranch and its associated characters and trademarks and blah blah blah are property of Clint and Dawn Wolf. All Rights Reserved. I’ve turned down at least two requests to make a film based on Zombie Ranch because of the legal fustercluck that grant of permission could lead to were there ever more formalized interest down the road. I’ve decried in this very blog the existence of contests which require surrendering IP rights as a condition of winning, or in some very crazy cases, even entering them.

So, uh, this next bit is probably gonna sound weird.

I think IP as we know it is dying. Or at least the business model based on hoarding it is.

Don’t get me wrong, I still fully believe artists should benefit financially from their creative work, myself included. Mind you Dawn and I don’t benefit all that much so far, but the thought is certainly there that if someone were to start mass marketing Popcorn plushies, well, yes, we’d like to get some money out of that. But let’s haul this away from the mom n’ pop small fry operations with living, breathing artists involved, I’m talking big time. I’m talking the big corporate entities that exist to profit off of the intellectual rights to properties such as Mickey Mouse or Superman or Barbie. The ones who are throwing around the Cease & Desists and DMCA takedown notices and other legal actions when they find an unauthorized, unlicensed entity attempting to get a cut of the pie, no matter how small.

Now it’s understandable in the sense that if you don’t defend a trademark (for instance) you can lose it, as the Metropolitan Police famously discovered in their losing battle vs. Doctor Who. But it seems like more and more there are instances of IP crackdowns like the Jayne hat controversy where the litigants may be legally on solid ground, but rather murky, weedy, boot-sucking ground from a public relations standpoint. These aren’t seedy Taiwanese knock-offs being produced in sweatshops, they’re labors of love from the very fans who made your IP valuable in the first place, in some cases like Firefly, an IP that the corporation didn’t really seem to give a crap about. Perception here was a merchandising void that the fans filled, and once money started being made off it, the neglectful rights holder stepped in and started whacking everyone with the C&D stick. Disgruntlement ensued.

But what’s the alternative? Let everyone run willy nilly and profit off your hard won creativity? Well, let’s leave aside that copyright law is a tad out of control these days to the point where in many of these cases the actual creative person in question is long dead and the argument could be made that the people currently profiting have no more right to do so than the rest of the public. We shan’t get into that right now. Let’s just speak of practical matters.

The Internet exists.

Even more importantly now, the 3-D printer exists.

Now maybe not every home has a 3-D printer yet, but that day will come. And they’re going to go on the Internet and find schematics and customize them and oh heck why am I even speculating? It’s already happening.

This is a genie that is now out of its bottle, folks. More and more, fans who find themselves dissatisfied by the current merchandise offerings of a company are going to take matters into their own hands. Maybe they’ll try to sell the end products and maybe they won’t, but trying to hold back the tide will be like, well, holding back the tide — with a flyswatter.

So whither these corporations? Well, have you ever heard about how computer firms will hire hackers as security experts? This year Hasbro Toys put its finger to the wind and some bright bulb said, “Ladies and gents, here comes the storm. But don’t worry! I have an idea.”

There are other similar ideas emerging in places like the Everquest Next Landmark MMO, where the fanbase is empowered to create and market items to one another with the company providing the tools and serving as an enabler and broker for the transactions, but Hasbro’s Shapeways is the first I’ve heard of attempting to bring that model into the 3-D realm. And their Chief Marketing Officer made no mistake of the intent: “We are opening up our [intellectual property] and giving authors and designers an opportunity to create with us“.

Anyhow, I guess I’m calling it right here and now: I believe the big companies that are going to survive in the 21st Century are the ones like Hasbro that have decided to embrace and empower their fanbases rather than trying to police them as the enemy. There will be blood along the way, but the age of jealously protecting IPs is past, because sooner rather than later it’s just no longer going to be feasible to do so. If you’ve got 100 million fans, great! Make nice with them. Make them partners and fellow travelers, because otherwise? They’re going to end up as your competition, and hell hath no fury like a fanbase scorned.

Here we go again. Dammit San Diego Comic Con, you’re awesome, but you sure are a hotbed of plague.

Actually it’s possible San Diego isn’t to blame this time around, since both my mother and my wife were both wrestling with what seems to be my same symptoms before we ever packed our car for the convention. I was chowing vitamins in hopes of avoiding it, but then last Monday happened with my aunt and, well, that kind of stress and potential grief will do a number on your body. I’m guessing the virus took full advantage of that chink in the defenses.

As an update, my aunt is back at her home and stabilized for the time being. She still wasn’t able to go to the convention but we took lots of pictures and videos to share with her and the CCI staff let Dawn and I pick up the t-shirts she’d pre-ordered without any fuss. From a purely logistical standpoint this was probably one of our best trips, with little to no stress involved in our arrival or departure; a far sight better than some previous years.

On the other hand,  Southern California weather decided to take an uncharacteristically humid turn, feeling rather… what’s the word… swampy? We natives here can deal with heat by itself, but once you start adding water we can become rather soggy and miserable, as evidenced by last Friday night where pretty much everyone I knew called off their party plans in favor of just collapsing in the A/C of their hotel rooms. Meanwhile some dude from Louisiana was probably out there scooping up the swag and downing all the complimentary booze.

It was still quite fun, just had to be taken in small measures; though now that I think about it, I suppose that’s fair to say of any trip to SDCC. I just remember on Friday saying hi to some of our exhibitor friends and they had even more than the usual shell-shocked stare of Day 3, possibly because even the Exhibit Hall was feeling sticky that day; not quite “the A/C is out” but it didn’t quite seem to be compensating for the press of bodies.

I wonder how many infections I dished out? Hopefully not many, this is a miserable bug. When I think things like “I want to watch that movie but I’m not sure I have the energy to stay awake on the couch for two hours”, that’s pretty miserable. I was very, very glad we’d already decided to take the week off in terms of a story post.

Speaking of which, probably a good point for me to wrap this up and go have another lie down with some orange juice. Next week I shall hopefully be back at this spot with 100% less self-pity and 100% more something interesting to say. At least 50%. Yeah, that sounds good. I have to feel better at least in time for Guardians of the Galaxy!

In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams’ author insert character and narrator has a famous opening monologue to the audience, which starts thus:

Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

As a summation of what writers and other storytellers do, that’s about as good as it gets. Even the most outlandish fable has an underpinning to it that an audience of human beings can connect with. We recognize it. But perhaps even more importantly, even the most tragic story presented in the most realistic manner still has that pleasant disguise of illusion.

I write a story. It’s a story where people have died. Where people will die. Grief and how people handle grief is a big thing, in fact it’s been front and center for these last few comics. Then Dawn and I decided to put things on hold for a bit because we had some family issues to deal with in addition to preparations for San Diego Comic-Con.

As I stood by my aunt’s hospital bed yesterday, with no sound but the rattle and hiss of the respirator keeping her breathing, “family issues” took on a level of intensity we had not expected.

Yesterday the doctor had advised everyone that could make it to say their goodbyes. She was still awake when I got there, but couldn’t speak (obviously), and because of the sedatives could barely manage a hand squeeze. Then she went to sleep, and by the time we had to leave no one could still say if she was ever going to wake up again.

That kind of thing is, I suppose, like the difference between watching a natural disaster on television and being caught in one. It wrecked me. I really can’t remember the last time I felt such intense sadness. There was no pleasant disguise of illusion. This was happening.

It didn’t come entirely without warning. She’d been diagnosed with congestive heart failure a couple of months back and had to come to the extended family reunion on Sunday in a wheelchair, but she was awake and talking then, discussing with me about how she still planned to come to San Diego with us like she and my uncle have for the past few years, although we were looking up where to go for disability services since she’d still be wheelchair bound. Her doctor had given her the okay to go if she wanted, but she was scheduled for a biopsy Monday morning. Nothing huge. Probably would just leave her with a scratchy throat.

And then something went wrong. And suddenly not only was someone who (aside from my wife) I considered my #1 geek buddy in my family not going to make it to Comic-Con, there was every indication she Might Not Make It. Period.

Before I bum anyone out too much with this: in spite of all the negative prognoses she did wake up again as of today, and she’s off the respirator, and she’s talking and smiling and probably will be released to go home tomorrow. Not to Comic-Con, but she made sure we were still going and made us promise to send her lots of pictures.

But holy crap was that ever a close brush, and it made me think how paltry the efforts of even the greatest storyteller can be in trying to convey the whirlwind of emotions that encompass real tragedy. And how maybe that’s a good thing, like it’s one of those vaccines that contains a weak version of a virus that might otherwise overwhelm us.

Want to know the craziest thing? My aunt’s name is Suzie. We didn’t consciously name the protagonist of Zombie Ranch after her, but she was always tickled to share the moniker. It seems they definitely share some of the same stubborn fighting spirit, and thank heaven for that.

This is probably going to end up as another one of those “personal experience masquerading as wise writerly advice” posts I seem to gravitate towards. I’ll be honest, a lot of times when I put these posts together I have no idea if they’ll necessarily be helpful to anyone. In fact, I’m not sure it’s even my primary goal to be helpful, so much as that might end up being a side effect of whatever screed I happen to be spewing on any given week. My experience and insight are not on par with that of, say, a Neil Gaiman or Mark Evanier, so I hesitate to act like you should give me your hand and let me guide you down the perilous path. If you take my hand regardless, I feel it’s only right to mention that, while I don’t exactly feel like I’m completely blind, I may have misplaced my glasses.

But you know, I’ve read my share of advice snippets from all manner of authors far more published and successful than I, and what’s struck me is that the only thing they have in common is that they’re names I recognize. Everyone seems to have a different method, a different approach, a different style, and in the end all they can do is give you advice on how to be like them. The downside of this is that there appears to be no set formula, no one correct and proper method to being a good writer. The upside is exactly the same. You can cherry pick from all the words of wisdom and take as your role models those folks you feel are most in line with your own philosophies. You can even spend time reading what I write here, and if it happens to help you out, then more power to you. More power to us all.

Where was I? Oh yes, the title. It refers to a sticking point I got to in my script, in point of fact the script for this very week’s page. I had written it out originally as a dialogue between Suzie and Eustace where they were talking about ownership rights and restitution and blah blah blah. I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s important stuff, but I kept coming back to what I’d written and huffing with a sense of frustration. Just the act of re-reading it was making me, the writer himself, tune out of the scene. It wasn’t interesting. It was, in fact, f-ing boring, and even moreso because a lot of what was being said had already been covered, such as in the recent “A Moment With Suzie” pages. I get itchy with works of fiction that keep repeating the same stuff over and over unnecessarily, particularly in terms of things that could be categorized as exposition. The 2011 Green Lantern movie comes to mind as one of the worst recent offenders for me. Yes yes, we know this. Yes, we get it. MOVE ALONG ALREADY.

Well there I was, feeling that exact same way about something I myself had produced. But what could I do? Scrap the scene entirely? That’s always an option, and I certainly haven’t shied away from “offscreen” conversations before, but I’d been skipping around (and ahead) already several times this episode and I worried that had become a bit dizzying. Suzie and Eustace needed to talk, but any way I wrote that dialogue was straying awfully close to “As you know…” territory, which seemed like a really crappy use of a weekly installment. And poor Frank. Yes, he’s a stoic guy who doesn’t talk much, but here was another page where he’d just basically be standing in the background.

That’s when the epiphany struck. The me of two weeks ago that wrote a whole article about character perspectives moseyed up, knocked on my skull, and drawled, “Howcum you don’t flip it ’round and show this part from Frank’s point of view instead?”. Past me apparently drawls and moseys and is altogether much cooler than present me, although he’s still rocking an Aloha shirt.

But anyhow, damn if that didn’t work just fine. In fact, suddenly I had a way to bring the Zeke/Frank dynamic back into the picture, which felt far more interesting than Suzie and Eustace talking business. Let that happen over yonder, where we can clearly see that it’s happening but don’t actually have to listen to Suzie reiterating that all the McCarty zombies are legally her property, except for Zeke, because now Frank’s bought Zeke and is ready to gift him back to your family, and…

Sure, I suppose the Zeke/Frank thing could be its own measure of “Yes, Frank’s guilty and conflicted about Zeke, WE GET IT”, but… eh, I think it’s moved along now from the business in earlier episodes since we get to see Frank attempting unsuccessfully to rid himself of the “problem” in a way that would have perhaps satisfied his conscience as a good deed, only to be shot down by Eustace coming to the realization that he doesn’t really want or need a walking corpse that looks like a green, decaying version of his son.

Good try, Frank. And good drama for me, and hopefully the readership. In a scene that even I was feeling bored and unsastified by, flipping the perspective was all it took.