Category: Writer’s Blog

There’s at least one of my friends working as a professional author who will reflexively rage shudder if you mention the word “likeable” to him.

It’s not the word itself. I mean, perhaps there are people out there prepared to scuffle over whether the spelling should be “likeable” or “likable”, but the dictionary accepts both and I haven’t met any. No, it’s just that he’s just gotten too many feedback notes over the years on his novels and attempted screenplays where the gatekeeper executive has asked for his protagonists to be “more likeable”.

There are a few problems with this particular note. One is that it’s rather vague. If you question the person involved on what they mean, there will more often than not be some hand-waving and “Oh you know… not so much of… well, you know…. more likeable.” It becomes circular and generally boils down to some gut, subjective reaction.

For helpful critique purposes, it would be far better to get into specifics such as “This protagonist keeps talking about how they value all life and then casually murders people. Did you mean for that disconnect to exist? Because hypocrisy on that scale can be a bit of a downer.” But even there it doesn’t mean a property won’t sell with an unlikeable protagonist attached to it. Look at Twilight. And anyone who thinks that was a cheap shot just proved my point about likeability being subjective. I hate, hate, hate Bella Swan as a protagonist and could write many specific paragraphs on why, but legions of people don’t agree with my assessment, or at least don’t care enough to stop them from being fans of the book.

Another problem with the note is that, while it might cross my mind that an author deliberately intended to imbue their protagonist with unlikeable qualities, the people providing an “unlikeable” note often seem to be genre blind. They’d turn up their nose at the asshole qualities of a Snake Plissken or Mad Max, despite the post-apocalyptic setting and an author’s protests of “that’s the point!” I don’t know, maybe that’s why Mad Max ended up having a pet dog when he seems barely capable of feeding himself. This is probably the aspect that caused my friend the better part of his twitch response, since his zombie apocalypse manuscript gathered dust for years until he could finally find a publisher willing to accept that his main character wasn’t much of a traditional hero.

And as bad as the situation can be with male characters, I ponder also if the “likeability” note is given more in response to a female character with negative qualities. I don’t have the statistics on that, but certainly in the political and business worlds we as a culture seem far more obsessed with successful women being “not nice” or even “not pretty”.

Dawn and I have the luxury with Zombie Ranch of not dealing with any gatekeepers, just a direct audience, and so I have never experienced any personal frustrations on this level. We get to present our characters in all their sordid glory, without worrying about theoretical appeal to the masses as funneled through the opinions of a single person or focus group.  The masses are already here, making up their own minds… and wouldn’t you know it, people have found things to both like and dislike about the characters without it necessarily making them stop caring.

Your characters can be complete saints or total jerks or anywhere between, but someone’s got to give a damn about what happens to them next. That’s probably a better indicator of a successful story than likeability ever was.

I’ve talked about the concept of point of view in storytelling before, but as this week’s page prepares to go live it’s on my mind again. Have you ever considered how much of good writing is information management? Not just in the sense of the information being given or withheld from the audience, but in the sense of what the characters in the story know at any given moment.

The need for effective information management in the story has been with us since some of our earliest surviving examples, hasn’t it? Oedipus Rex wouldn’t go much of anywhere if the title character finds out Jocasta is his mother before all the murder and incest happens. The audience knows full well, but he doesn’t have a clue. Sure, there’s a mandate of fate involved, but Sophocles thankfully didn’t use that as an excuse for lazy writing. Shakespeare was another scribe who took great pains to make sure that characters knew and acted on only the information they had available to them. Othello certainly doesn’t work if Iago’s many monologues detailing his evil plans are somehow overheard by the other dramatis personae, but his bond villain tendencies are confined to the folks watching the play, until of course it’s too late.

Have you ever been watching or reading a work of fiction and suddenly asked, “Wait, how did they know that?” or “Did they forget about that?” Well, I have, and unless a good explanation comes forth at some point, I’ll often feel let down. This management of character knowledge is something that I feel is at least as important to the immersion and suspension of disbelief in a story as Frodo Baggins not suddenly gaining the ability to fly like Superman.

Sometimes it’s rough to be faced with it, like in the aforementioned tragedies where you might want nothing more than to get between Desdemona and Othello and shout, “Just calm down and talk to each other!” You end up hating Hamlet for what he does to Ophelia, even though from his perspective he thinks she’s just another spy for his uncle and his co-conspirators, perhaps even worse than most because she’s trying to play on his past affections. She for her part has been told that Hamlet’s acting very strange and her father has implored her to try to use that past affection to try to find out what ails the poor boy. And it’s tough to watch it all play out in the tragic way it does, but damn if it doesn’t make sense.

Zombie Ranch has been going on for almost five years now, and I’m hoping I’ve still got a good track of who knows what at what time, and how that’s coloring their interactions. Like I said, I feel it’s really important. But I also recall seeing this current page and thinking, will readers react negatively to Suzie angrily telling Frank to back off from making Clearstream out as villains? From our more omniscient perspective, yeah, there’s some shady, shady stuff going on. From Frank’s point of view, he has some suspicions but nothing really concrete, beyond his predisposition to not like their presence. Then there’s Suzie, under stress from all angles, suddenly having to have *this* argument again not long after Frank agreed to back her up.

It’s a confrontation that doesn’t happen if the characters know what the audience knows (or for that matter, what the writer knows), but since they don’t, drama ensues. And as long as that makes sense from their perspectives, then we can love or hate them as we wish but still be satisfied with what’s occurring. True omniscience might make living their lives easier, but it’d pretty much put guys like me out of a job.

One thought I failed to cram into my ramblings on culture and character last week is another hypothesis that was cooking up in my brain about how to avoid shallow stereotyping. I mean, if that’s your goal. It’s not lost on me that people might read these posts and then look at the presentation of the McCarty clan and feel that I might not quite be practicing what I preach. Fair enough. For the most part, they’re there as “mooks“, and I’ve admitted as much in a past blog. I may advocate for certain methods of producing good characters, but if that seems hypocritical to anyone I’d just have to point out I never advocated that every character in a story must be deep and meaningful. It’s perfectly possible to me to have that theoretical homeless woman in Bangladesh I mentioned last time be someone who just asks the hero for some spare money or food in passing, and is then forgotten by the story beyond the purpose of defining the hero by their reaction to that request.

Mind you, overthinking writers might later revisit that moment and decide to follow her branch of the story instead, at which point she might not seem so shallow anymore. Grant Morrison once did something like that with a random mook in The Invisibles who was gunned down without a second thought by the protagonist King Mob; in a later issue, Morrison went back and told that guy’s story up until the moment some bizarre, remorseless freak in a mask shot him dead, which is doubly twisted when you consider Morrison is on record that King Mob represented his idealized self-insert. Basically, Morrison intentionally painted his own Mary Sue as a monster and a “faceless” security guard’s death as a tragic loss, just by the simple experiment of moving the audience’s viewpoint. Pretty fascinating, isn’t it? Well, all right, it’s fascinating to me. I’m an overthinking writer.

Let’s get back to the spectre of stereotyping, though, and that thought I had. Assuming I’m intending to have some level of focus on a character of a different culture (and yes, I think this applies whether the culture in question is real or fictional), the thought is to establish a “baseline” or standard and then determine how the individual character deviates from that. That’s what we should already be doing with whatever characters are part of our default culture, right? Now mind you I don’t think I’ve ever run into a perfect representation of baseline American culture, because what is that, really? Mom and apple pie and cheeseburgers and baseball? Is the standard or norm in this case just another word for stereotype, and that’s why we need to figure out how an individual character doesn’t connect with it?

Then there’s that opposite potential problem when a character deviates too much. I’ve lost count of the roleplaying character concepts over the years that basically boil down to “I’m a/n <insert exotic race here>, but I reject all their culture and I’m outcast from my people so it’s basically just an excuse for me to be a moody loner archetype, which would have worked just as well if I were human but humans are boring.”

By the way, the moment you find yourself making a character into an alien because “humans are boring”? Delete and try again. I’m not going to judge much because I went through that phase myself, but it’s a toxic thought to start from, don’t you think? I know familiarity breeds contempt, but for the sake of your writing, step back and find people interesting again, or it won’t matter how many half-Drow half-Dragon half-Vampires you pump into your tale, it’s going to feel ultimately empty. Not to mention you’ll have been making characters whose origins are mathematically questionable.

Somewhere in between “completely represents their culture” and “completely rejects their culture” is, I think, everyone on this Earth. Platonic ideals are possible in fiction, so we could potentially have a character who is “America” who fights his arch-nemesis, uhm… “UnAmerica”? But outside of propaganda or parodies, that doesn’t sound particularly interesting. Yes, there is a Captain America, and he’s one of my favorite comic book characters of all time, but that’s because he possesses an individual identity and nuance that lets him be compelling even when he’s not dressed up like the Stars & Stripes and punching Nazis. There are humanistic deviations from I AM A WALKING FLAG. This is important.

Now, maybe my hypothesis has a fatal flaw in that it can be next to impossible to establish the standards of a real-world culture, even for one you grew up in, but if a writer’s at least thinking about it (and in the case of a different culture, doing their research), I feel like that’s on the right track. If it’s an imaginary culture you made up yourself, then you’re the one determining those baseline values and it perhaps becomes a more useful exercise, but you potentially have even more work in front of you unless you’re doing something like “the dwarves in my fantasy world have a culture akin to the Three Kingdoms period of ancient China”. In which case you might be right back around to having to research the cultural norms of the Three Kingdoms period.

And don’t forget subcultures, either. Suzie is a Repop, but exactly how much does she have in common with those giggling girls in the Safe Zones? Enough they apparently see her as a kindred spirit, but I doubt she’d find much to say to them at a party.

Whew. Complicated. But people are complicated, they only seem simple in passing. If my story is touching on them in passing, fine, I’ll keep it simple. I’ll stick to the archetypes and standards. Otherwise, I’m going to roll up my sleeves and figure out just how deviant they’re going to be.

A longtime reader of this blog (yes, those exist!) had some communication with me after last week’s article, asking my thoughts on the idea of writing for people not just of different genders but different cultures. The problem they kept running into was a sect of their writing peers who were of the notion that no one should be writing a character from another culture unless they themselves as writers had grown up in that culture. Now mind you there’s already a problem with that line of thinking since if you grew up in a culture, then it’s not going to be “another culture” to you, but I suppose the basic gist of the matter stands… are you allowed to write an Inuit character if you weren’t raised in an Inuit community? Should you?

There is an intense paradox at the heart of questions like this. The unspoken part of the argument is that in media representation we’re operating from the default of mainstream, Amero-Eurocentric culture, usually with an added rider of focusing on white people and white people problems, and sometimes with a further rider of focusing on the problems of straight white men. Given the ongoing output of Hollywood and E3, I’m not going to deny that, since it seems to be that only by continually pointing fingers at the issue does it even register as an odd thing.

Anyhow, here’s the paradox I spoke of. Minority groups often express a wish for more balanced representation, or sometimes any representation at all, in media. Which is absolutely fine. But pairing that with a blanket prohibition that, say, only Japanese people should be allowed to write characters from Japanese culture seems to me as self-defeating as saying only women should be allowed to write female characters.

Now arguably you can say that’s a problem of the majority of the writers at the top echelons of media being straight white men (and that’s not even counting the straight white men at the not-so-top echelons, like me). If we had more women in those positions, if we had more native Japanese, etc. etc., we could… well, what? Divide up the characters in terms of writing tasks, like so many poker chips? Would that really work even for a collaborative effort like a TV series? What about a novel? You know, those generally single-author things that a great number of TV Shows and movies are developed from? I really, really want to say no to the concept that we can’t possibly understand other human beings unless we’ve lived lives exactly like theirs.

That’s not to say there aren’t potential pitfalls and problems. I’ve talked up some of them before, and they’re issues even a black man writing black characters can have (as Dwayne McDuffie testified): that once you get out of the unspoken default, the character is in danger of becoming a symbol rather than just being seen as a human being. And yes, it gets more and more terrifying the further you get from shared circumstances. It’s true I spent the past couple of blogs arguing that we’re all the same when stripped down to our cores, but it would also be willfully blind of me to declare that once you start layering on circumstances of race, gender, and culture, everyone will have the same life experiences. If I create a character that’s an elderly Muslim woman living on the streets of Bangladesh, I believe I could figure out the core principles of what makes her tick and how she ties into my story, but getting the details right (or at least, not horribly wrong) will present a challenge. I might just need to do a bit of research on that score, as opposed to writing a middle-class white man from the Greater Los Angeles area.

We’re dealing with a legacy of years and years of hackneyed and insulting portrayals in media that’s continued to this very day, even if it’s gotten slightly more subtle than the times of the minstrel shows or depictions of the “yellow peril“. But I don’t think the right response is to pull up the ladders to our respective tree houses and declare our culture clubs closed to all outsiders. Let’s be more courageous than that.

And yes, you may now get the Boy George jokes out of your system, you karma chameleons, you.

Let’s talk some more about writing good characters. Last week I talked about stripping a character down to a core, free of any trappings of race, gender, and upbringing, and then building them back up. I think that’s one useful exercise, but here’s another thought to ponder.

You can’t write a good character if that character remains fundamentally Other to you.

Some of you might recall a best-selling book that was published several years back by a man named John Gray: Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. I have not read it, so I probably shouldn’t talk too much trash regarding its contents or its value as a guide to relationships, but its basic premise is certainly that men are men and women are women and never the twain shall meet. We will never understand each other, and can at best just try to get along by respecting our differences and, I suppose, agreeing to disagree.

Gray’s view is hardly an outlying one, which is why comedians and sitcoms get such mileage to this day from playing on gender stereotypes. Hell, I have a lot of women co-workers at my day job who often throw up their hands and declare in exasperation that they’ll never understand men, or that men are this way or that way in their behavior because, well… men, amirite? Toy aisles are divided into boys’ and girls’ sections, because why would a boy ever want to play with Barbie or a girl want to play with Batman? Any deviance from these “givens” is ignored or rationalized away, which might be why there’s still a real struggle for the LGBT crowd to be acknowledged as existing, much less accepted. Certainly John Gray didn’t bring them up. It would have complicated things. Better to just keep it all nice and simple and compartmentalized. Plenty of people live and die happily on just those terms.

Well, if you want to write interesting characters who aren’t self-inserts, I believe you don’t have that luxury. You’ve got to climb out of your own skin and do your best to relate to a person outside your own experience, and the only way you’re going to do that successfully is by determining what you share with that person that’s similar, not by getting hung up on what’s different. You might find out that you’re not so different after all.

Crazy? Well, I suppose writers are crazy sorts, but… here, why I don’t I let Olivia Wilde tell a little story:

Now if you didn’t watch that whole thing, the most interesting part for me is where she talks about a reading she did with fellow actors where they took the script of American Pie and gender swapped all the characters, and it wasn’t nearly as weird to do that as might be expected. Well, at least from the womens’ perspectives; the men having to read the female roles got bored after awhile with how bland their parts were. That surprises me because I can recall thinking American Pie was a lot better than most raunchy sex comedies in terms of the presentation of the women (I remember laughing out loud in particular at Natasha Lyonne’s line of “It’s not a space shuttle launch, it’s SEX!”… and of course there was Alyson Hannigan’s pervy stories of band camp), but still I suppose the lion’s share of the story arcs and good lines did, as usual, go to the gents. You’d expect that as only natural from a coming of age story written by a man, but swap it around and it was apparently just as effective as a coming of age story for women… and yet still written by a man.

Olivia Wilde also brings up that the part of Ripley in Alien was originally written for a man, but that’s not precisely true. The story goes that Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett did write the characters from a generic male standpoint, but (and this part is definitely documented) a note in the script reads, “The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women.” Because of that I contend that the notion they wrote from a “generic male standpoint” just means they wrote without any sort of agenda beyond their “truckers in space” concept. They didn’t start from any idea of this character needing to be a man and this one a woman, that came later, after all the core elements were in place. And boom, Sigourney Weaver is cast, Ripley’s first name becomes Ellen, and the world is gifted with one of its most iconic science fiction heroes. Who just happened to also have boobs. And that didn’t seem strange at all.

So yeah, if you’re a man trying to write women or a woman trying to write men, or if you’re getting even more complicated than that with your depictions of the Other, the first, hardest, and most important hurdle is to stop thinking of them as Other. Ripley doesn’t resonate as a human being just because she’s tough, she resonates because she’s a working woman who, like most working women, would like to do her job and get paid. A motivation that most working men also understand, but all too often society seems to want to go out of its way to insist that we’re irreconcilably different. So if you’re a writer who is having trouble representing women/minorities/etc. as more than flat stereotypes, whether idolized or vilified or just plain bland, there’s my thought: find the common ground. It’s there. Stop thinking in that mode of “men do this, women do this” and think instead, “this particular character does this”. The former might be okay for stand-up comedy, but if you want to go beyond the surfaces as a writer, it behooves you to treat Mars and Venus as the dead planets they are, and concentrate on everyone just being from Earth.

Last week I discussed my challenges in presenting Suzie as not only a complex character but a believable leader, and how I seem to have succeeded with that by starting “inside out”, i.e. building her through personality and actions before any acknowledgement that yes, she has boobs. In a visual medium like a comic book that would go without saying from the first frame she appears in, but thankfully Dawn’s art style isn’t in the highly sexualized mode still prevalent in a lot of comic book art, where it can be difficult sometimes to get a sense of a lady character because her chest keeps getting in the way. Again, in the interests of fairness, there are also men who suffer from a bunch of muscles getting in the way, although to be a really fair comparison there should be huge, clearly outlined dong bulging in their spandex.

That there is not, while women are still often drawn with breasts bigger than their heads flopping about bearing pertly erect nipples ready to put an evildoer’s eye out, speaks volumes to me about the old argument that men in comic books are drawn just as unrealistically as the women. Comic books are escapist power fantasies, runs the argument, and if men aren’t complaining that the Juggernaut doesn’t appear capable of scratching his own ass, women shouldn’t be complaining that Black Cat looks like she’s going have a wardrobe malfunction mid-fight and break her nose with her own teat.

The problem is that, while I’ll be first to admit I’m not a woman and probably couldn’t even pass for one in dim light after you’ve had your fifth whiskey sour, I have consulted with several women over the years and have yet to find any whose escapist power fantasy coincided with fighting in a bodysuit so tight you can clearly see camel toe. I’m looking at that image and imagining Superman punching through the wall with a similarly vacu-sealed pillar and stones, and, well, it ain’t about the punching any more at that point. There’s a line between escapism and objectification that I think we still struggle with in terms of women characters. Sure, you can argue most women fantasize about being more attractive, but does that necessarily mean ginormous boobs and stiletto heels? Is the first impression of this character someone who you might want to be (at least in your less rational, “wanna punch something” moments), or someone who seems primarily to exist more as a pin-up to be ogled? I guess that could be seen as a female fantasy considering there are definitely girls out there who aspire to grace the pages of Playboy when they grow up, but superhero comics aren’t Playboy, they’re “let’s save the world!” adventures.

Again there is the thought that what they’re doing is more important than what they’re wearing. I agree with that, as long as their appearance isn’t so crazy that my suspension of disbelief breaks wide open. For example, have I mentioned that I don’t really mind stiletto heels on a woman who can fly? I still like to see more practical footwear, but yeah, if you’ve already conquered the forces of gravity, go right ahead. Supergirl wants to fight in tassel pasties and a g-string? Okay, that doesn’t really fit her character, but from a purely logical standpoint there’s really no reason she or her cousin Superman have to wear any clothes at all. They bounce bullets off their eyeballs. In fact I’m surprised Garth Ennis hasn’t pitched a story yet where a being of Superman-level power comes to Earth and hangs around saving the world while completely naked. I guess the closest we get to that would be Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen, but I picture someone being far more friendly and social and matter-of-fact. You know, like Superman. Just naked.

And I wonder if somewhere along the line in reading that comic, if we got past our initial shock and giggling, it would start not to matter so much anymore. Ennis maybe isn’t the best choice for that since he’d keep shoving it in our faces (heh), but talk about at least some riff on a power fantasy: that nightmare where you find yourself naked in front of the entire school, except that you realize that even naked, you’re still invulnerable, and everyone is listening raptly to what you have to say, not judging what you look like.

In today’s mainstream culture, a naked man tends to be played for laughs, and a naked woman for titillation. Game of Thrones gave us an entire scene of the Red Priestess Melisandre walking around butt naked as she talks about things she just as easily could have talked about clothed, which was pretty amazing, although it would have been better if the camera didn’t start with a slow pan up her thighs and ass, a shot tantamount to “Woo check it out, she’s NAKED!”

I know I’m speaking of a text-only medium here, but in the original Edgar Rice Burroughs stories featuring John Carter of Mars, here’s a strange fact: everyone’s nude. Oh they have harnesses and cloaks and such, but not one mention of a loincloth ever crops up. That pulp artwork showing John Carter and Dejah Thoris with their naughty bits barely covered? Actually a case of TOO MUCH CLOTHING. And not only is everyone naked whether going to war or sitting down to a formal dinner, it goes so unremarked upon that you, the reader, tend to forget about it, even in a scene where John and Dejah are sharing a saddle atop a giant ambulatory beast. It just ain’t no thing.

Of course, try to bring that into visuals and there’s no way an American audience (and I include myself in that number) is going to get past the alarm bells in their heads going DONGDONGDONGDONGDONG. I don’t even count myself as particularly phallophobic, I’ve just been raised in a culture where a penis is treated as something that can’t even be shown in softcore porn, much less more standard entertainment. It’s the freak in the basement, the secret shame that can’t ever be shown… although according to my spam email it should still be as big as possible. If John Carter’s giving a rousing (sorry) speech to the troops with Little John visibly standing to attention, I’m… yeah, I’m probably not going to hear what he’s saying. It’s not you, John, it’s me. Even though I see a variation on what you got in the mirror every morning, it’s still going to register as a bizarre anomaly if I see it on screen, especially in IMAX 3-D.

And then again, even though Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique is wearing barely anything more than blue body paint, I view her very differently than I did when Rebecca Romijn did the same. In a reversal of what I said at the beginning about struggling sometimes to see character past an artist who keeps drawing a woman with boobs aforemost, I expressed it as “I felt like I should be objectifying her, but her talent kept getting in the way.”

It makes me wonder about the John Carter thing. About the Naked Superman/Supergirl thing. If there was enough time and skill and good writing/performance involved, could I get past my initial knee-jerk reaction and just enjoy watching a great character doing awesome things? Could a wider audience?

Well, philosophy aside, I think there’s a core writing thought to take away from all this. There’s no denying that costuming can reinforce character (Darth Vader cuts a much more terrifying figure than Anakin Skywalker), but ideally I think even if you start with a pre-drawn person like I did with Suzie, you want to go back and figure out what this character is like when you strip away all the trappings, including those of gender. You can add those layers back on later, but at least now you’re not falling into the problem of writing someone first “as a woman” or “as a man” or even “as an Asian”. Those aspects inform, but should not define, who they are.

So strip your characters naked. Strip them beyond naked. Strip them beyond objectification and perhaps even identification, and then once you have that unadulterated core, you can start putting back on all the details, all the bells and whistles (and yes, even genitalia) that might take them in different directions in your story. Your readers might never see past the surface, but at least you’ll know the depth is there.

You know what I’ve been inordinately pleased about? In all my years of writing this comic, I have never once heard any complaints from readers about the fact that Suzie is (as Oscar would put it) the “big boss” of the Z Ranch.

Oh, her decisions have been questioned from time to time, but that’s fine, because I’ve never gotten the sense that a man in her position wouldn’t get the same amount of criticism or praise. True, she may have inherited the ranch from her pa (and all the Zanes before him), and she may be young and have some reckless tendencies, but these are all character notes separate from any gender issue.

Now, could we fall afoul of the complaint that she exhibits a lot of traditionally “masculine” traits in order to seem “strong”? I suppose, but once arguments like that crop up Dawn and I always start scratching our heads and wondering what exactly is being clamored for in a lady protagonist… she fights crime by night and knits and volunteers at a day-care center by day? That actually sounds like a fun idea, but once we get down to the idea that a female character should be defeating the bad guys with hugs and understanding, I feel like we’re getting a bit lost. Couldn’t a male character do that? Don’t we even have real-life historical examples such as Gandhi and Boudica to show us a man solving his problems non-violently while a woman led an army on a roaring rampage of revenge?

I think the real complaint about the stereotypical “strong female character” who seems like little more than boobs and bloodlust is just that: she’s not really a character. That same complaint could be applied to her male counterparts in the shallow end of the character pool, except she has the further problem that she’s often scantily and inappropriately clad and (if in a visual medium) often presented from the Male Gaze viewpoint, suggesting someone not to be identified with so much as ogled.

Even then that little girl reviewing New 52 Starfire wasn’t as disappointed with what Starfire was (or wasn’t) wearing or how she was being drawn, as she was with her lack of activity and her lack of doing anything cool. I think that really cuts to the heart of the matter. I admit, there are still certain aspects of a female character’s look that immediately turn me off such as expecting me to buy into an expert martial artist who runs around fighting in stiletto heels; I can’t take that seriously. But the fact Black Widow is dressed in a tight jumpsuit in the beginning of Captain America: The Winter Soldier doesn’t immediately make me scoff and write her off as empty eye candy like a depressingly large amount of reviewers did. That’s not helping. She showed a lot of agency, smarts, courage, and, dare I say, character during that film, and even manages to have her own character arc (and for my money a better one than Mako Mori did).

Anyhow, I may have gotten way off my original topic by this point, but what I suppose I’m trying to say is that I’ve tried very hard to present Suzie as someone who, while not perfect (perfect is boring), and not necessarily entirely sensibly dressed, still  believably fills the role she’s in. That we’re not just telling you she’s in charge of the ranch, we’re showing you, and more importantly showing you why. I think that’s more important in the end than any matters of appearance or gender, that core of being a person who seems to fit their circumstances and react in what (for them) is an appropriate fashion.

Still no high heels, though. Even if she went to a dance Suzie’d probably just tuck on her best boots.

Sometimes I wonder if I would have an easier time writing this story if it were told exclusively, or almost exclusively from a single point of view; say for instance if Suzie were narrating the whole thing in a series of Batman/Wolverine style monologue captions.

I might. But that also sounds awful, and not just because I still have it as a thing that the best Westerns always featured protagonists who never precisely told you what was in their heads. It’s also a point of view that doesn’t lend itself well to the idea of the “docudrama”, reality television aspect of Zombie Ranch. Suzie is our main character, but in the way that Leslie Knope is the main character of Parks and Recreation. She can tell us about herself and others and the place she’s at, but she’s not the only voice able to do so. We’re just as likely to get Ron Swanson’s take on the same situation, and it might be wildly (and usually quite entertainingly) different.

So sometimes in the comic we follow this character, and sometimes we follow that one, and the latest couple of pages are reminding me that I have all these bits regarding Lacey I still want to get into beyond just the broad strokes of her being a bit lazy and slow on the uptake. Except there’s still plenty of unanswered questions about everyone else, too, right? In a comic titled ‘Batman’ it’s fairly obvious where the focus is going to be, so it doesn’t seem weird if everyone else comes off as supporting cast or even just bit players. Or to get closer to home with a Weird West theme, we could go with ‘Jonah Hex’. This comic is not titled ‘Susannah Zane’ or even ‘Susannah Zane: Zombie Rancher’, and that’s intentional, but an ensemble piece presents its own challenges.

This article on what went wrong with the Street Fighter movie is fascinating in many ways, but one part that stood out was where Stephen de Souza tried desperately to convince Capcom that there should be a limit on how many characters were included in the film. He temporarily succeeded by asking the meeting room if anyone could name all seven dwarves from Snow White. No one could.

“There’s a reason there’s seven dwarves,” says de Souza, “There’s a reason there’s seven wonders of the worlds. There’s a reason it’s the Magnificent Seven, which is a remake of the Japanese movie The Seven Samurai. Seven is the number of characters an audience can keep in its head at any time.” So the writer set seven as a compromise, and Capcom, persuaded by the parlor trick, agreed to the limit.

de Souza may have pulled this argument out of his ass, but it’s entirely possible he was on to something, especially where a movie is concerned. Alien was able to give us seven distinctive characters. Aliens begins with many more but quickly whittles down to a more manageable level with only Hudson, Hicks, Gorman, Vasquez, Burke, Ripley, Newt, and Bishop surviving the initial encounter (and Bishop is sent away about the same time Gorman wakes up from his concussion, as I recall). The movie roster for the Avengers is helped out by all the establishing solo films that preceded it, but still confines itself to a core team of six heroes.

A classic group structure, as noted in TV Tropes, is of course the Five Man Band, so seven major characters could indeed be stretching attention spans. Forget naming the seven dwarves in Snow White, can you name the thirteen dwarves of Thorin’s company featured in The Hobbit? Hell I can’t even remember if the movie did feature all thirteen of them, I just know that it felt like too many to really keep track of or get invested in.

A serial/series allows for more leeway because you have a lot more time available, or at least that should be the theory. In practice I’ve got a lot of character moments on the backburner still, some of which might never make it across the gulf to the audience. At least I’m not in the situation Game of Thrones is in, where even in the books I almost felt like George R. R. Martin kills off characters like he does as an auto-immune response to having written too many of them into his story. In the TV Show they have the books to use as a pattern and have streamlined some things and combined some characters, but there are still enough that even with a “Previously…” introduction a lot of viewers are still left wondering who the heck they’re watching and end up just clinging back on to a Tyrion appearance like a life raft. It doesn’t help that they’ve had to recast actors on occasion, although arguably that’s a case where the audience being overwhelmed might work in their favor.

When I talk to people about Zombie Ranch, they often can’t name names of characters. I used to think that indicated a problem, until I realized that I did the exact same thing with a lot of fictional properties I really, really liked, but was not quite obsessed with. Writers are almost by definition going to be obsessed with their own material, so of course I’ll have all the names to hand in a discussion even as the person across from me is snapping their fingers and going, “My favorite character right now is the lady with, uh, the… the one who likes her bike a lot…” I’ve been in exactly that predicament on the other end, and so I hope any creator will react as graciously as I do and politely prompt, “Rosa?” Even geeks have a limit to how many things they enjoy as true obsessions, so if someone actually does remember my characters’ names, or heck, even if they start picking out inconsistencies, I reckon a large part of me is highly flattered they feel it’s that worthy of paying attention to.

But yeah, there’s no way I’m going to get away from Zombie Ranch being an ensemble piece at this point, nor do I want to. If I’ve got to juggle a bunch of characters, so be it. Sooner or later I hope they’ll all have the opportunity for moments, and maybe even enough moments to become memorable, or even reach that high pinnacle of name recognition, but I also never want any readers to feel that a character is being shoved down their throats for that a la Jar Jar. Even after all these years, I still feel like I’ve just scratched the surface of this cast, but while the comic runs, you can bet I’ll keep digging.

So there’s an entire entry over at TV Tropes entitled Gratuitous Spanish. I am muy aware of it, and have been since before I threw caution to the wind and decided to have Rosa’s first ever lines consist of a rather colorful expression in her native tongue. Sprinkling your “foreign” character’s speech with non-English words and phrases can be a tricky business, right up there with that issue of writing characters from different cultural and racial backgrounds than you might be familiar with. How much is too much? Is the only way to win not to play?

I’m fortunate enough that I don’t have to theorize about what Latin-Americans and bilingual English/Spanish speakers might be like, since I’m around multiple individual examples on a near daily basis. Many of my friends, and for that matter my half-Mexican wife, barely speak any Spanish at all much less use it in casual conversation. On the other hand, a former supervisor of mine not born in the U.S.A. spoke quite fluent English but loved to pepper her speech with bits from the Old Country, particularly when she wanted to mutter something impolite under her breath. On the other other hand, the bilingual gentleman whom I often consult for idiomatic purposes sometimes has to further outsource to his neighborhood buddies because in his own household he learned really quickly to swear exclusively in English lest he earn a smack from his Spanish-speaking mother.

Pretty complicated, no? While Dawn still operated under her maiden name of Sanchez, she would regularly get telemarketing calls in Spanish, and she’d barely be able to understand why they were bothering her. It was just assumed she’d speak Spanish, and to point out just how ludicrous that idea is, it’s like calling up every Weiss in an American phone directory and trying to sell them something in German. Yesterday’s immigrants are today’s natives. Two or three generations in and the kids are going to sound indistinguishable from everyone else in whatever area they happened to grow up; any knowledge they have of the language Great-Grandma spoke may well be a memory, and something they’d be struggling just as much to learn in school as any other kid who doesn’t have that ancestry.

But let’s get back to the issue of gratuitous use. It seems to me that the major objections to writers putting non-native talk into a non-native character’s mouth are rooted in that concept of symbolizing and short-cutting your way to a form of characterization in an ultimately lazy way. Oh! This guy is French! I will convey that to my audience by having him shout ‘Mon Dieu!’ a lot and having him say ‘le’ in place of ‘the’.  This line of thinking can pose serious problems even for a joke character, much less one you’re supposed to take seriously. For instance, one of the related problems documented by TV Tropes is Poirot Speak, where the foreign character will use their foreign versions of simple elements of speech but has no problem with far more complex words or phrases in their non-native tongue. At that point the mode of speaking becomes a bit unrealistic and artificial to the audience and they start questioning why, and if it’s not a plot point then the unsatisfying answer is usually laziness on the part of a storyteller wanting to convey “foreign” without really thinking about it.

Where Rosa is concerned I’ve thought about it. I don’t know if that makes the end product any better, but I do like occasionally having her bust out with some Spanish, especially when she’s alone or frustrated. For that matter I’ll stick occasional Spanish into the mouths of my white folks, because that’s kind of just how things happen near a border or similar cross-pollination of cultures. I myself use phrases like “de nada” in my everyday speech, because for my money it sure rolls off the tongue easier than “don’t mention it”. My very white, very Republican granddad who lived in Texas wasn’t what you’d call a fluent Spanish speaker but certainly knew enough to get by on his trips south of the Rio Grande, and he’d spice his speeches with Spanglish delivered with such gruff matter-of-factness that I never really questioned if he was getting his grammar or pronunciation right. Back in the realm of fiction, Chuck probably wouldn’t pick up on “Me lleva la chingada” except through context, but ‘claro’? Bueno! And Suzie certainly knows enough to roll her eyes at the idea of someone proclaiming themselves to be named “Rosa Amarilla”.

For her part, Rosa is sometimes slipping into Spanish/Spanglish when she wants to mutter privately, sometimes when she wants to impress, and even once I’m pretty sure she called Frank “amigo” just to get under his skin after he brought up cojones. As long as it’s coming from a place where it seems to make sense for the character and no one’s usage seems stupid (unless it’s meant to be), I feel I’m on solid ground.

Besides, if you really think about it, I can’t exactly ignore the elefante in the room. So many words we consider classically “cowboy” come straight out of Spanish, albeit with somewhat butchered pronunciation. Rodeo. Compadre. Lariat, from la reata. Or my favorite, ‘buckaroo’ being an oh-so-Texan mangling of the Spanish word for cowboy, vaquero.

English and Spanish shook hands across the border long before I came along, and not just in one direction, as evident from Spanish phrases like ‘el pet shop’. I’m still no proponent of Rosa shouting “Dios Mio!” every other page to remind audiences of her Mexicanosity… not just because that’s obnoxious, but if you’re surrounded by English-speaking people and trying to ingratiate yourself amongst them, it wouldn’t make much sense to keep loudly reminding them you’re an outsider. You’re only going to do that around them when you slip up, or perhaps have some reason to make an exception.

When those exceptions occur, does it come off as gratuitous? Hopefully not. Gratuitous in the context of storytelling really just means “unnecessary”, so like any story element I’m ultimately gambling on my experience and instinct that its inclusion is worthwhile. Well, that and making sure to consult sources beyond just Google translate if it’s getting beyond the basics. Those are all the tips I have to give. De nada.

What’s the  image that first comes to mind when you think “comic book fan”? Is it something approximating this guy?

That’s pretty much the stereotype, isn’t it? Some fat balding white guy (technically yellow here but you know what I mean) in their late 30s or beyond, probably still dwelling in their parents’ basement. Do people still buy into that image? Well, there’s that infamous anecdote from Paul Pope regarding DC editorial, where they as much as told him they weren’t interested in any comics that wouldn’t appeal to 45 year olds. “Straight white male 45 year olds” was not specifically mentioned, although possibly because all those attributes are just assumed. The offerings of DC’s New 52 era by and large seem to back up that demographic assumption, even though the reboot was (very ironically) touted as being something to attract new fans. How else to explain what they did with Starfire, who with the Teen Titans animated series could have served as a gateway drug for an entire generation of girls? Yes, historically speaking Starfire in the comics showed skin and liked her some sex, but given how comic characters mysteriously morph to resemble their cinematic versions in the wake of a successful movie, a reboot would have been a perfect time to change things up. Give those girls (and women) the continuing adventures of the character they fell in love with and it’s basically a license to print money, right? But present them with dull, stripperific sex dolls, and… well, suddenly it doesn’t seem too welcoming to anyone but those middle-aged men.

Which is funny, because as a fat straight white man who just turned 40, I didn’t find it too welcoming either. I couldn’t understand the thinking, but then, I’m not a professional marketing strategist. I don’t get out to my local comic book store all that much. If the only real paying audience for comics is 45 year olds, then I guess that’s the end of the story, even though it seems like a market that’s going to, forgive the phrase, die out eventually. That’s a depressing thought, isn’t it? All these superheroes we love disappearing as the industry collapses because there just aren’t any more customers?

But here’s the thing. Dawn and I were guests this past weekend at Player’s Dugout Comics & Cards in Riverside, California for Free Comic Book Day, and despite its name, from my observations over the years FCBD tends to see a lot of people spending money on comics as well as picking up the freebies on offer. This outing was no different.

You know what else I observed? Families. Women. Children, including (gasp) girl children! Caucasians weren’t even close to being in the majority, either. Now sure, maybe out in the rural midwest you’re not going to see so many fans of color, but according to the stereotype demographic this shouldn’t be happening at all. And yes, some of the little girls wanted sketches of Hello Kitty! or a Disney Princess, but others wanted Supergirl, thankyouverymuch. I believe there actually was a Hello Kitty! comic available amongst the FCBD offerings, and more power to that because comics aren’t all about superheroes. Hell, as a kid I started out on Archie digests long before I stumbled across the X-Men.

I looked at that excited crowd of all ages and races and genders packing a comic book store, and it gave me hope that comics does indeed have a future. If we’re just willing to acknowledge it.

Several months back I wrote a blog about the “sounds of silence”, where I explored the way creators choose to portray (or not portray) sound effects in comic pages. I won’t rehash that entry here (that’s what the link is for, after all), but as today’s comic goes live with its whumpings and bumpings and ble-e-e-gh, the subject is on my mind again.

For instance, how do you spell the word ‘okay’? The way I just did? Or are you more of an ‘o.k.’ or ‘ok’ person? Or are you Raymond Chandler who always insisted on spelling it ‘okey’, and screw you if you didn’t like it? Do your characters say “damn it!”, “damnit!” or “dammit!” ? Do they just “sigh” or do they bust out with an Alan Moore-style “huaaaaauuugh!” ?

It occurred to me how much these little variations can mark stylistic differences between one creator and another, similar to the way a handwriting expert examines how someone loops their signature. For instance if you know about Chandler and a dude offered you a “lost manuscript” of his where ‘okey’ was spelled differently, you might get very suspicious. If you picked up an Alan Moore comic which was chock full of ‘ZOT!’ and ‘KA-POW!’ and people weeping with word bubbles of ‘Sob!’, it would seem like something was very off… like a Rob Liefeld drawing displaying realistic anatomy and a lack of pouches.

But so long as a creator is alive, there’s also certainly no prohibition against them trying different ways of doing things. Not every Moore comic has that same sound effects moratorium that Watchmen or V for Vendetta had. Moore even penned a “Writing for Comics” guide in 1985 that he nowadays disavows as crap that should be forgotten rather than studied… just as an example of how people can change their thinking, even on matters they seem quite adamant about for the moment. Hell there’s stuff in this very blog series I can go back and read and scratch my head wondering what “that guy” was thinking.

There’s also the possibility where comics are concerned that the writer isn’t doing their own lettering, which could mean you’re looking at the stylistic preferences of another person entirely. But if they are doing their own lettering, all the choices they make from bubble structure to font to bolding to even how they choose to convey expressions and sounds can get pretty individualistic. And there’s really nothing wrong with that, so long as the story gets told effectively. I think it’s actually part of what makes comics fun, especially in the independent scene.

Plus, you have no idea how long it took me to come up with a visual way to express the sound a goat makes, funky font and all. This is my onomatopoeia, mm hmm. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Sit back, compadres, and let me spin you a little tale.

Y’all already know how I feel about the “hard sell” and its place at comic conventions. If you don’t, or don’t remember, here’s the harsh language rant, and here’s the kindler, gentler version. If you don’t have the time or inclination to read those, the summary is that–nossir, no ma’am–I don’t like it. I believe you can sell your product without getting in folks’ faces about it, and while some level of assertiveness and engagement is a good thing to have, and there are probably decent debates to be had about where the lines can be drawn between “active” and “overbearing”…

…pardners, there are some times when the behavior in question just unquestionably crosses the line.

Let me take you back to last Friday, the first day of WonderCon Anaheim 2014. Dawn and I have finished setting up our table in the Small Press area, which by happy chance has ended up on the corner of two aisles. True, this year the Small Press area has been moved to the furthest back corner from the entrances, but I remind myself that I thought our placement last year was terrible and yet we ended up having our best Friday ever. Patience. Our displays are up. Dawn’s artwork is ready to catch wandering eyes. 3-day badges have sold out (and apparently Friday-only badges did as well, at least by day’s end). We are pleased to note steady foot traffic almost from the beginning. Maybe last year was a fluke, but maybe not. We’ll let those who are interested come to us, check us out, and…

“DO YOU LIKE COMICS?!”

Like a lightning bolt in an otherwise clear summer sky, a high-pitched voice rent through the background noise. I sought the source of this disturbance and spied a woman out in the middle of the aisle, accosting passerby repeatedly with this question. If they answered in the affirmative (which, c’mon… you’re at a COMICS CONVENTION… this is like someone at a Farmer’s Market shouting “DO YOU LIKE VEGETABLES?!”) then she would corral them over to a table in the midst of our row, pulling them past all the other vendors, whereupon the man there would offer them free comics and candy, and (I’m guessing) a sales pitch. Rinse and repeat.

Now mind you, I’m also observing a percentage of people who are visibly shying away from her when she suddenly inserts herself into their path and barks her inquiry. They flee, and as long as she’s there they probably won’t be back. This is not good. The only times people are walking down that big aisle in peace are the times she’s playing pied piper to those who said yes (or probably in more than one case, were just too afraid to say no). If this intrusive hawking was happening from their paid table space, I would still be annoyed, but the fact she was repeatedly leaving it and going out not just to the middle of our row but to the main artery intersection leading to it? The fact she was herding people past several of her neighbors, who had also paid for their tables? My teeth were starting to grind. A lot.

Still, I’m not a naturally confrontational person, nor is Dawn. We, and our friends at the table next to us, suffered in silence, wondering how many people we were missing out on that might have browsed our wares (and possibly bought things) had they felt comfortable doing so.

Maybe that would have been the sad state of things for the rest of the convention. Except then it got worse.

Two people were right in the middle of checking out Dawn’s art display when the woman barged in with her pitch and ran them off.

Could someone seriously be this oblivious to exhibitor etiquette, or was this on purpose? Either way, I’d had enough, but first I went to ask some veteran exhibitor friends if that kind of behavior was merely rude or actually against the convention rules (I vaguely recalled some sort of prohibiton against operating outside your booth). They agreed it sucked from an “empathy towards your fellows” standpoint but weren’t sure, and suggested I bring it up to the WonderCon staff.

So, for the first time ever, I found myself seeking out the folks responsible for keeping order on the exhibit floor to express my concerns about another exhibitor. You may say I should have directly confronted her myself rather than doing this, but really, I figured at worst all they’d do is warn her to stop, and I wouldn’t have created an awkward atmosphere between us personally for the rest of the weekend. Also I wasn’t even sure I had grounds for complaint, but the moment I said what was happening the staff, to their credit, were quite sympathetic and informed me in no uncertain terms that it was against Con rules, and a floor manager went out there and then to see if it was still happening. According to another text I’d gotten from Dawn, not only was it still happening but another exhibitor in our row had now joined in hawking his wares in the aisle, perhaps feeling it was the only way to compete.

So then, you may ask, why was I talking up being a vigilante in this blog title? I went to the proper authorities, and they took care of it, right?

Well, no, I’m afraid not. I don’t know if the floor manager never made it over there or what, but when I got back to our table it was still happening. 30 minutes went by, and it was still happening, with no sign of official intervention…

…and then suddenly there the woman was, close enough to reach out and touch,  fully blocking our table as she was pitching her table to the latest group to come by.

That was the last straw. I waited until she returned once again to that main aisle way, got up, went over, got her attention, and politely explained to her that what she was doing was not permitted, and furthermore was really unfair to the rest of us. Her response was telling… no argument, no protest, except to wave towards the other guy now handing out bookmarks and demand “Well you better tell him, too!” And you know what? At that point, in for a penny, in for a pound– I had no problem going right over and doing that (though I felt like I was the adult at a playground having to say “I don’t care who started it, it’s going to stop!”). His response was more along the lines I expected, basically that he figured anything that drove more traffic “our way” was a good thing… which ignores that both of them were driving traffic specifically to their tables, when they weren’t just driving people away from the area entirely.

I never touched either person, nor raised my voice, nor uttered a harsh word. It’s possible, however, that because of my natural largeness, I did loom. It’s possible that my politeness came across as the barely restrained rage that, admittedly, it was. I was past caring about anything except both the offending parties returning immediately to their tables and staying there for the rest of the evening. Which they did.

Well, okay, I later spied the woman up and about again, handing out flyers down the way where she maybe hoped I couldn’t see her, but at least she was no longer walking people past us, or accosting them while they were very obviously trying to browse another exhibitor’s wares. I guess at that point, I figured I’d done all I could be expected to do, and since our sales had finally starting picking up (go figure!), that was enough.

Still, that night in our hotel I pondered how it was going to be for the next two days. Would the people I’d confronted resent me? Or worse yet, lapse back into more of the same behavior? I didn’t regret my actions and felt them more than reasonable under the circumstances, but I’d certainly have to deal with at least some awkwardness as a consequence.

Or not. Friday night was the last I saw of either of the people I’d had a word with. When we set up on Saturday, the woman was nowhere to be seen, and the other table was entirely empty (later bearing a note that they’d moved to a booth elsewhere on the floor). And Dawn and I proceeded to have our best single sales day ever in our entire history of exhibiting.

I don’t know enough to claim I had anything to do with the vanishing acts. The man running the table the woman was leading people to was still around, but I didn’t talk to him. If he resented my interference, so be it, but it seemed like he ended up doing just fine getting customers without her help. For all I know he never really wanted her to be doing what she did. Maybe she decided it was a hostile environment? Or maybe she had only planned to be there for one day, anyhow? As for the other folks, if they were dissatisfied with their position and took the opportunity to move? More power to them.

Maybe my speaking up made the difference, and maybe it didn’t, but whether their behavior was born of ignorance or a misguided sense of competitiveness, I do feel better that I confronted it rather than just stewing and letting it slide. I don’t really consider myself the Batman type, but at least just this once, a little bit of courage in my convictions seemed to go a long way.

The comic before this one shows Chuck opening a bag of Jolly Ranchers, which are fairly readable on the bag as being such (not to mention Chuck joking about it in the comic before that). I had mentioned in the script that maybe we shouldn’t go so far as to have the name on the bag be readable, but wires got crossed and there it was. Should we blur it out? Make it generic? If I was that afraid, why even write the joke in the first place? Most importantly, what did it say that I even have to ask these damn questions?

I mean, it’s technically illegal to use anyone else’s trademarks or intellectual property without their permission… except when it’s not. I remember companies in commercials used to be limited to comparing their product to a vaguely suggested “leading brand”, but then that changed so you could, for example, show a bottle of Tide detergent, trademarked logo and all, as long as it was for comparison purposes. And really, trademark law is supposed to apply only when there is the possibility of confusion, especially when one brand might be unfairly profiting from that confusion. As an example you could start up a company selling “Wrangler barbecue sauce”, but if you’re marketing anything to do with clothing, especially jeans, you’d be in some hot water.

Assuming anyone bothers to try and enforce it, of course. I look at a company like TeeFury and still scratch my head over its continued existence, with a business model built almost exclusively on profiting off products featuring unlicensed IP’s of popular culture. TeeFury claims they’re protected by the parody clauses of fair use, but really when you get down to it “Parody” and “Fair Use” are concepts that are still nebulous at best and subject to the whims of how much money and how many lawyers people are willing to throw at them. For all that I might hate what George Lucas did to the Star Wars franchise with the prequel movies, I’ll admit he always took a very lenient attitude towards the fandom in regards to allowing them to produce derivative works without interference. Now that Disney owns the rights, though, who knows?

Look at the average convention artist’s alley and you’ll see unlicensed fan art being sold everywhere. Etsy and Ebay, too. Enforcement of IP in the Internet Age probably seems like an unwinnable game of Whack-A-Mole to legal departments, particularly when any crackdowns tend to result in PR backlashes. Remember the whole Firefly “Jayne Hat” controversy? No? Well, you can read here if you wanna. When people first started making and selling them Joss Whedon himself was reported as more overjoyed and flattered than anything, then a few years later (and as some makers argued, after their hard work had created a demand) the official licensing deals came in and the Cease and Desists started.

How many parody (or even non-parody) Dungeons & Dragons webcomics are there out there? And yet Order of the Stick to my knowledge has never been hit with a C&D, while Rusty & Co. had to shut down for several months and work out a settlement with Wizards of the Coast that included the creator having to change the name of a character (including all previous references) from “Yuan-Tiffany” because WotC had “Yuan-Ti” trademarked. If you’ve ever read Rusty & Co. (and you should, because it’s a good comic), it’s about as clear-cut a case of parody–and for that matter affectionate parody–as you can get. Riddle me that one.

Dawn used to have a Zazzle store for her personal artwork. Then one day, she got a notice from them they’d wiped her whole site because of an infringement claim. Not suspended. Wiped. Why? Fender, the guitar manufacturer, said that this image used their trademarked style of guitar head without permission. For that sin, not just that offering but all the offerings on her Zazzle account were now gone, and while she could have remade the site from scratch without the offending artwork, can you blame her for not bothering? After all, next time she might unwittingly draw someone’s tennis shoes as looking too much like Nikes, right?

And yet Homestuck flat out uses Betty Crocker’s name and logos with no changes, as well as casting the corporation as an evil empire, and no one blinks. The company is aware of it and just shrugs and considers it fun, or perhaps even free advertising. Gunnerkrigg Court at one point featured very recognizable action figures of Spider-Man and Batman in someone’s room. I’m not sure if the Archaia’s published print version still had them, but if it did, I submit it as further evidence of how maddeningly random all this still is.

It doesn’t seem to matter how known you are, or how you’re using it, or anything else that should matter in a sane world. So we’re living a bit dangerously, except we run this site ourselves so I figure the worst that happens if we do get some C&D from the powers that be behind Jolly Rancher or Spongebob Squarepants is that we’ll have to go back and change an image or two. We have that technology, and while it would still be annoying since I sincerely doubt we’re profiting in any way off of their inclusion in our comic, it’s not a difficult fix. I don’t plan to hinge any plots around them. I’m also not going to fight against it since I don’t have a legal department like ThinkGeek does that can take the time to spar over concerns about unicorn meat slogans. And people should have something of a say on when and where their creations appear, if it’s reasonable. But it’s gotten so sensitive these days, and sometimes I just get so damn tired of watching movies and TV shows where everyone has to drink “Beer brand Beer” or is only allowed to drink, say, Schlitz. Or Duff. I know, I know, it’s not crucial to the narrative, but it does occasionally lend an air of the surreal to the proceedings.

This from a man who created “ClearStream” as a thinly disguised take-off on “Clear Channel”, right? But would calling the candy “Happy Ranchers” have had the effect I wanted? Or showing a statue of Blandy Beaks, the bubbly bird friend of SquishBill SphereShorts? Tying into an air of nostalgia doesn’t work very well if the audience doesn’t get what they’re supposed to be nostalgic about. Perhaps one day we’ll be called upon to replace them with products of our imagination instead of products of our recognition. Perhaps that day will be tomorrow; but for today, at least, we will show them as they’re meant to be.

One of my favorite moments in Jaws has nothing to do with a giant shark attacking people. It’s a slow, quiet scene in a dining room between a police chief who’s had a really bad day, and his young son responding to his father’s brooding by imitating his oh-so serious countenance. Eventually the father notices and a bit of a game plays out, and by the end Chief Brody might not be entirely cheered up, but you can see him remembering and contemplating that there are still good things in the world.

There are no explosions. There is no blood. There is only the most tangential relation to the main storyline. Nothing earth-shattering is revealed about anyone… a father and son care about each other? The mother watching on is charmed by their antics? Big whoop. And yet Spielberg recognized that cutting it would have been a criminal act. It’s somehow magically both completely off-topic and yet completely crucial to the narrative.

I don’t claim to possess anything approaching that level of instinct, but somewhere along the line I composed a scene where Chuck tries to share his stash of old sweets with Rosa, and it felt right. A reader might well ask what the hell this has to do with zombie ranching, perhaps even going so far as to declare their time is being wasted with inconsequential padding. Well, maybe. Come to think of it, I may have gone over this exact same argument before, when I brought up the idea that not every Chekhov’s Gun has to fire.

That entry is getting on towards three years old, now, and oddly enough predates some of the “guns” that have gone off, such as the lawn flamingo playing a role in the Zane/McCarty confrontation, the Z Tracker, or the thought of the siege house moat being filled with zombies. Does that mean Chuck’s jar of honey will be playing a vital narrative role in the months to come? I’ll let you speculate if you want, but I wouldn’t think too hard on it. Right now it just stands as some more (hopefully entertaining) interaction between Chuck and Rosa, and I’m content to offer that up since I’m still of a mind to think it serves a purpose. It might seem off-topic, but Jaws made moments like these work, I think precisely because they possessed a certain organic feel that gets an audience invested in the characters as real people rather than just human-shaped enablers of plot.

That and the whole honey thing is pretty fascinating. So thanks, Chuck, for again serving as my human-shaped enabler of factoids. When you’re involved it seems like nothing’s off-topic at all.

So here’s a thing that happens sometimes in fiction. You have a character who’s a young teenager, but a writer who’s in, say, their thirties. If said writer isn’t careful (or perhaps just flat out doesn’t care), you can end up with a 13 year old girl talking and acting like someone much closer to that writer’s age. Alternately they could end up as the author’s vague memory of what being a teenager was like, or perhaps a crankily rendered stereotype of “those damn kids” that the author is certain they were never, EVER like in THEIR youth, uttering all manner of unintelligible slang when they don’t just have their noses buried in their Twitters or Instaspams or whatnot.

I may have mentioned this before, but I went to Junior High School (not sure foreign equivalents here but think around ages 12-16) in the Valley. Not just any valley; the San Fernando Valley. THE Valley that brought the phrase “Valley Girl” to the world, with all of its attendant “ohmuhGAWDS” and “totally tubular to the max”‘s and “gag me with a spoon!”s. Except… I don’t really remember any of my peers at that time actually talking like that, except when they wanted to make fun of the TV shows and such that insisted we did. The male equivalent was the surfer dude a la Jeff Spicoli, and to go by the media of the day, all us damn kids at Walter Reed Junior High should have sounded like that. We didn’t. Well, not all of us. All stereotypes do have their elements of truth, after all.

Is this a terrible thing? Perhaps not. I doubt I should be casting too many stones when I’ve made a conscious decision to have most of my characters talkin’ like twangy cowpokes (y’all), even though many modern day Texans don’t sound too different from, say, Californians, barring certain pronunciations of words and names for things. What can be more jarring to me is a 13 year old in 2014 who suddenly starts ranting about how the Star Wars prequels are so inferior to the original trilogy. Or rattles off a multi-page statement on the dichotomy of Church and State in America. Or instantly recognizes and starts gushing over a Snake Plissken figurine.

I’m not saying it’s impossible for a 13 year old to be capable of any or all of these things, but as they are things my 40 year old self is totally capable of I feel a certain alarm and closer examination might be in order before they go live in the mouth of a character who could be being reduced to little more than a mini-me sock puppet.

It’s a challenging thing, perhaps, to put yourself in the shoes of a generation different than your own. You can find far more webcomics characters nostalgic for Super Nintendo and Gargoyles than you can find ones nostalgic for the Apple II and Johnny Carson. Even more challenging, though, is to put yourself in the kicks of the younger generation (it is “kicks”, right? Damn kids). What are the things that they’ll be pining for 20 years from now? And looking back at my own youth, I have to admit, my fondness for the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival comes straight from my dad… so it’s not *just* the new stuff that kids might end up carrying through to adulthood.

According to his bio that I myself wrote, Uncle Chuck scavenges “pre-plague memorabilia”. Well, what’s that mean? License plates and coca-cola signs, the kind of vintage stuff you might see on a show like American Pickers? That’s the memorabilia of *this* day and age. There’s no reason he can’t since he very well might have watched that show as a kid, just like he watched Deadliest Catch. Obviously I have at least one nod to the 1980s in his love for ZZ Top (a band which itself cultivates an even more retro image with its classic cars, etc.). ZZ Top is still touring to this day, but maybe might be considered “old people” music? Still, like I said, I’m all into CCR and they broke up before I was born. I think the ZZ Top vibe is one Chuck would similarly appreciate, especially since they’re Texas boys.

You know who else is Texan? Sandy Cheeks from Spongebob Squarepants. So yeah, her presence amongst Chuck’s acquisitions is my speculative nod to future nostalgia, the kind even a zombie apocalypse won’t be able to fully extinguish. Or considering how much would have been lost, maybe it would just make it all the more keen.

A lot of times when a work of fiction creates some sort of extreme group as antagonists, there’s not necessarily a lot of thought devoted to how they actually function or fit into the world. Where did the Gayboy Bersekers and Smegma Crazies of The Road Warrior get their gasoline? Obviously their main interest in besieging the refinery camp was to get more, but in the meantime were they just rationing what was left from the last place they overran? How long have they been at this particular business model, which given the apparent wasteland state of their surroundings doesn’t seem likely to be sustainable in the long run?

The easy answer is to say that they’re wasteful crazies just living day to day with no real thought for tomorrow, and this is the archetype most such antagonists follow. They are the raiders, the plunderers, the brigands, sustaining themselves through a purely parasitic existence… less human beings than prairie ticks. The hard-working villagers grow the harvest, and the villains come and take it — at least until the heroes arrive to stop them. We don’t tend to question it much as a concept because I think we’re all hard-wired at some level to not really think of *why* the bullies are taking our lunch money, only that they are and thus the only thing we really need to know about them is that they are bad. It’s so ingrained that it scales flawlessly in fiction from individuals all the way to nations and even entire intergalactic empires.

So why, then, did J.R.R. Tolkien bother to write one of his appendices on the subject of Middle Earth explaining how Mordor feeds all of its forces of Darkness? Sure, you figure supernatural beings like The Nine are able to subsist on the despair of their victims or something like that, but orcs gotta eat, and the volcanic wastes surrounding Mount Doom don’t seem very conducive to crops or wildlife. Tolkien doesn’t bring it up during Lord of the Rings, but he did think about it, and thus, Nurn exists. Nurn was the South part of Mordor, a part the interloping Hobbits never witnessed, a semi-arid but fertile place that Tolkien claimed was enough to keep the Armies of Evil fed.

Is Nurn enough? Debatable, and it does take away some of the dark mystique of Mordor to imagine that it has farmers or engages in any sort of trade not based on bellowing trolls bashing down your gates, but I found it fascinating that Tolkien made the effort. He wisely left it out of his actual narrative, but I think he made that effort because he really wanted his fictional world of Middle Earth to have some sense of reality to it despite all the fantastic elements. And the reality is that bullies and even entire “rogue states” exist, but they’re more complicated than we might ever usually see or consider. Why is that crazy bully taking your lunch money? Because it has value in whatever economy you and he are both a part of. Yep, both of you. If that bully was truly just a rabid animal doing it for the evulz, why would he care about the coins?

Think about it. North Korea is about as close to cartoony supervillainy as it gets in the modern world, but they still have a lot of individuals and even some countries willing to do business with them. Blackbeard and other pirates always had one or more ports o’ call who wouldn’t ask questions about where they were getting their goods as long as they weren’t paying taxes on them. The mobs of the Prohibition era and modern day drug smugglers all still had buying and selling of goods to do at the end of a day of murder and extortion, and plenty of trading partners willing to take the risk of dealing with ruthless and quite possibly unhinged criminals for the promise of profit.

And so there we are. The Huachucas may be a crazy, bloody cult with all manner of bizarre beliefs, and certainly not above engaging in raiding, but would they have lasted for over twenty years if they just killed and tortured everybody they came across? It occurred to me early on that based on some facts of my world, people like them can occupy a really nasty but profitable niche:

– Zombies are a profitable commodity.

– Zombies come from people.

– It is considered morally repugnant (and illegal) to intentionally get a person infected. It is, in fact, considered murder. Letting them die from that infection like the Huachucas do is just plain sick.

But so long as that murder isn’t happening in front of you, aren’t your hands clean? And aren’t you getting your zombie for a much lower price than a reputable trapper would charge? I mean, who’s to say it’s not just a wild zombie they found, right?

People can rationalize nearly anything if it benefits them, even dealing with the Devil. And if the Devil then takes the gold he earned and walks into your bar and demands to buy a bunch of booze, are you going to refuse him? At least he’s paying rather than torturing you and your friends and family and just taking it, right? Given his reputation, do you really want to make him angry?

Not every fictional property needs to contemplate these things, much less show them occurring, but I do find it a fascinating phenomenon that repeats itself throughout human history, and one that can be no less compelling to showcase. The renegade Brujo of The Missing was leading his band down to Mexico to sell the girls they kidnapped into slavery. Hans Gruber of Die Hard was, in his own words, “an exceptional thief”. They and their cronies killed and tortured, sometimes in very sadistic ways, and yet seemed all the more distressingly real because behind all the mumbo-jumbo and creeds their motives were ultimately profit-based, something I dare say most of us can understand.

Mind you I’m not saying our Brujefe has money first and foremost in her heart… there are always some outlaws who seem to be in it for sheer sociopathic joy, shunning the morals of society in favor of their own code. Those who decide to trade with them had best hope they have the luck and/or force necessary to keep the dealings… if we might use the term here at all… honest.

It was always my intention to portray the Huachucas as a sort of egalitarian concept of nastiness. It didn’t matter what race or gender you were, only that you were willing and able to do some very despicable things to your fellow human beings. Perhaps this week’s comic is not being subtle about pounding that idea home, but given that mostly so far when we’ve seen Huachucas clearly they’ve been “Huachucas of color” engaging in the kind of rituals that wouldn’t be too far off Hollywood or pulp depictions of, say, “darkest Africa” or hoodoo voodoo? Well, sue me for deciding an anvil or two might want to be dropped.

This is not merely some desire for political correctness on my part. You might recall me confessing that one of my biggest inspirations for the Huachucas was the Street Thunder gang from the original Assault on Precinct 13. They were also a multicultural mix of white, black, and brown, all united in merciless aggression against their targets. Was it realistic? Maybe not, but one thing that struck me was that by having all of them together (and similarly having a mix in the group under siege) John Carpenter removed race from the equation in terms of “good vs. evil” and let it be a matter of purpose and actions taken. Although Precict 13 was inspired by the Westerns of yore, in this film it was not as simple as bloodthirsty Indian savages attacking a fort full of innocent, good-hearted white people… the bloodthirst remained, but the white gangsters were there shooting children and taking blood oaths along with all their darker-skinned peers. The lesson was clear, and it’s a good one to keep in mind, if a little chilling: that we as humans are capable of terrible deeds regardless of race, color or creed.

And if Street Thunder seems far-fetched as a concept, there are certainly actual historical examples of groups who were egalitarian in some ways and awful in others. My current gaming fixation is Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and it reminds me how pirate crews of the Spanish Main were often democratic in organization, provided for the health care of their members, and even took on escaped slaves to help with the ship (not often making them full, armed accomplices, but sometimes… and still likely providing a better life than the plantations). Now there’s something to be said of the time and place where there were those brutally run slave plantations and men crewing naval ships were often pressed into service against their wills and suffered under autocratic commanders, and some of the stories of pirate cruelties were no doubt exaggerated (probably sometimes by the pirates themselves if they were the kind of stories that might make a foe surrender without a dangerous fight)… but there are enough documented accounts of cold-blooded murder and worse to not be dismissed entirely. Some pirates were slavers, for example, fully willing to vote on matters concerning the ship with their fellow white men while still chaining their dark-skinned “cargo” below decks.

Anyhow, I’m not here to preach my own views on morality, particularly in regards to historical and cultural contexts, but in making the Huachucas a group comprised of people of many different origins, and showing their rituals drawn from many different sources (and even then, those rituals are being twisted from the originals or even wholly made up to suit their own ends), it’s my intent to keep the focus of their villainy where I intend it to be: not based on any accidents of birth or upbringing, nothing that can be easily excused or rationalized… nothing but the deeds spawning from their own callous hearts.

Dawn and I have different ways we like to work. I tend to prefer to compose in silence, without distractions, while her sweet spot for drawing is to find something to put on the television that provides some background noise without being particularly compelling viewing. This, I hope, is the only real explanation for why an entire season of Toddlers & Tiaras graced our airwaves, although I think I eventually complained in that case because some of it was just too wretched for me to shut out, and we do not live in a large place.

Occasionally though, the pendulum swings in the other direction and something we figured was going to be ignorable noise proves impossible to resist. It still kills our productivity, which means more than once we’ve had to stop something if we’re on deadline and take a rain check for later, but then there are those times where we do have the opportunity to just set our work aside and get immersed in something surprisingly fun.

Yeah, so, the image to the right probably spoils which something I’m referring to. With Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters I expected just  another formulaic, overblown, impactless PG-13 offering on par with Van Helsing.

I think it was about at the ten or fifteen minute mark as some dude was getting bloodily torn apart by a tree that I put that opinion to rest and closed down the word processor in favor of a comfortable spot on the couch.

Oh don’t get me wrong, we’re not talking deep cinema here, but suddenly realizing this movie had an ‘R’ rating and was going to take gleeful advantage of that was a strangely refreshing concept in this modern era where Hollywood executives are relentlessly pushing that PG-13. Our action movies have by and large become, literally, bloodless things, or when there is blood it’s often rendered with CGI effects that never have a proper suspension of disbelief to them.  There is no impact. I caught the ending of the recent A-Team movie not too long ago and it was painfully obvious the actors were running from and reacting to nothing more dangerous than a green wall. The worst of all is the now cliche sequence of the gigantic armies charging at each other to meet in a crushing melee, except that in the end there’s no real contact, and thus no real point and no real drama. I’m not saying people should actually be killing each other, but Braveheart had real folks at least shoving each other and it makes a difference.

But I’m getting off track with that rant. The Hansel & Gretel movie is not devoid of computer effects, but it mixes them with practical effects, particularly in the bits where things get a little gory.  Is it realistic for a head to splatter like that? Well, probably not, but at least something real splattered. The director obviously seemed to be taking cues from Sam Raimi or early Peter Jackson. This was confirmed when I looked it up and found that said director was Tommy Wirkola, who all but wore his Raimi/Jackson worship on his sleeve when he filmed Dead Snow. You remember Dead Snow, don’t you? I mentioned it here awhiles back, but two words sum it up: Nazi zombies.

Wirkola is a director still having immense fun with having the opportunity to make movies, especially making movies in the mold of his heroes. If you liked Army of Darkness, I’m fairly certain Hansel & Gretel will float your boat, especially if you miss that old school, ridiculously balls-to-the-wall sort of gory, comedic action/horror. It’s everything Van Helsing should have been, and while superficially they may resemble each other, there’s a feeling of sincere commitment rather than cynical marketing at play. For me, that made all the difference.

Where alternate history settings involving Earth are concerned, I have a bit of a compulsion, and I’m not sure how many others share it.

One of the first things I do is look and see what happened to my hometown.

Now since my hometown happens to be Los Angeles, I can often be assured there will be some mention of this, unless it’s something like Castle Falkenstein where the focus is elsewhere (there may have been a supplement later, I don’t know). Certainly in any of the recent run of “worldwide disaster” movies of the last decades there will be some celluloid time devoted to the destruction of the City of Angels, occasionally getting rather nasty since although a lot of screenwriters live here, a lot of them are originally from out of town and despise the place.

In any sort of sandbox game set in Los Angeles I’ll happily ignore the mission prompts in favor of driving down the developers’ version of Hollywood Boulevard to see where it’s accurate and where things differ. Sometimes you can tell the closest they ever got to L.A. was a postcard. Sometimes you get the sense they do know the place and would love to be more detailed but can’t do so due to memory constraints. I’ve heard that even if all the rest was sorted out, using actual storefronts and houses would require written releases from each owner before they could be represented in a virtual environment; which seems nuts on the one hand, but on the other we do live in a world where a movie character can’t be shown drinking a can of Budweiser unless you have a product placement deal with Anheuser-Busch.

I’ve seen my hometown innacurately represented or just outright wiped off the map so many times that it may seem bizarre I’d continue to be curious over its fictional versions, but I have to admit that no matter how crazy the representation might get, there’s still a strange sense of anchoring that comes from having your martians invading a place called Los Angeles versus them invading, say, Metropolis. It grounds the situation, and as long as you’re not getting too far-fetched and are hitting the right stereotypes and landmarks, most of the world will never know nor care that the La Brea Tar Pits are not located in Santa Monica. For that matter even I probably won’t care if you’re entertaining me properly and being somewhat creative.

Welp, I hope that last holds true when I go out and start writing places like San Antonio (Santone) and now Fort Huachuca into my fictional world. I’ve said before that one of the reasons I love the Fallout games is the ability to visit their versions of real world locations, even if as a non-native I can still tell there’s a good deal of artistic license in effect even given how funky the Fallout aesthetic already is. If I can tab over to Google Maps and more or less follow along with it as my character wanders, I’m pretty giddy about that, and if you’ve played Fallout New Vegas, here’s a trivia tidbit for you: the starting town of Goodsprings, including the Saloon and General Store, straight up exists and could be visited on a roadtrip. That’s kind of cool to consider. I bet they’ve got some gamer tourism out of that. Considering at least one guy dedicated an entire site to his New Vegas inspired tourism, I wouldnt bet against me.

San Antonio and Fort Huachuca probably don’t need my help in terms of tourism, and that’s probably for the best considering I’ve turned one into a corporate-dominated police state (though at least for the Inner Zone, a very nice looking police state) and the other into the breeding grounds of a very nasty bunch of outlaws. That’s the downside of using real places beyond just possibly getting them wrong, there’s always the possibility people could take offense at a negative portrayal, fictional though it might be. Again, living in Los Angeles I’m numb by now to such things, but for a less represented community, who knows? Did the people of the town of Nipton get bent out of shape over its representation in FNV? If they did I never heard of it. Maybe they were just happy enough to be on the map.

I’ll take the risk though, because having those anchor points is cool. The Zombie Ranch world is not our world. It has diverged from what we know in a big, shambling way… and while I may never get around to describing the situation in, say, Oslo, and I’ve still kept the exact location of the Z Ranch deliberately vague, I still like the occasional opportunity to use Earth and all its history as my jumping off point. It’s the richest backstory for fiction there is.

As you might be aware if you’ve ever checked out our creators page, Zombie Ranch is pretty damn close to what would be termed a “mom and pop” operation. If our computers have trouble, I’m the IT guy who fixes them (and does our backups). If our websites have issues, Dawn is there combing over the code to see what happened. I take care of all our permits and licenses and taxes, while she figures out our booth setups and transportation. She’s the sole artist for the comic, while I’m both writer and editor.

Oh yeah, and then there’s the lettering.

I have a feeling that for most people producing their first comic or webcomic, the lettering is a low-priority thing, if not almost an afterthought. I see a lot of first efforts out there that will just have blocks of text with no balloons, sometimes with a thin line indicating who might be speaking, and sometimes not. There are comics out there, particularly in the case of editorial cartooning, which thrive in that format, but mostly I think it’s less of an artistic decision than one of either not thinking on it much or just plain not knowing any better.

We weren’t much different when we started. I actually just delegated the lettering to Dawn along with everything else, and she did her best, but it took a long time before we even decided on a consistent font, and it was longer than that before I finally started taking on the burden of getting all those words and sound effects properly presented on the page. I like to think this was less a matter of laziness on my part as lack of confidence in being able to “do it right”, or at least to do it efficiently… but in the latter case we’re right back to that situation of the lettering being that afterthought, that red-headed stepchild you have to deal with once all your prettier and more important kids get attention.

I’ve come to the realization over the years of producing this comic that treating lettering as a throwaway aspect is not a great way to go. It’s sort of like the soundtrack to a movie in that for the most part, if you’re doing it right, people won’t even consciously notice it’s there unless there’s certain moments you want them to… but try to think for a moment how Star Wars would have been as an experience without the music of John Williams?

Not a perfect analogy, and (as with many things I often preach here… I know…) we’re still not consistent at living up to the ideal. But thinking from a writing perspective, what better way to get your words onto the comics page in the way you imagined than to figure out this whole lettering business and start taking care of it yourself? In fact I noticed this actually seemed to be a trend in creator-owned comics with a writer-artist team, such as the critically acclaimed Chew: Rob Guillory does all the artwork, but John Layman does the lettering in addition to the scripts.

I’m not to Layman’s level yet (I’m sure there’s a joke to be made about “layman’s work”, just as I’m sure he’s probably heard it)… but I’ve definitely tried to step up, taking the work off Dawn’s hands and hopefully retaining if not expanding upon the quality.

And if you haven’t noticed except where we want you to? Well, I’ll take that as the best compliment.