Category: Writer’s Blog

WARNING: PERSONAL INDULGENCE AHEAD. AND SOME MUSH.

As I write this blog it is Tuesday, February 18th, and at the risk of invoking a heaping helping of “we don’t care” from the readership, I must mention this is a significant date. Nine years ago on this date, you see, Dawn and I said our marriage vows and signed the paperwork with the grand old State of California to make them official.

What does that have to do with the Zombie Ranch? Depending on your perspective, I suppose everything, or nothing. Some people plan (or at least try to plan) their lives out to a greater degree than others, but happenstance still has a huge part to play. Coins flip heads or tails, pebbles lead to avalanches, butterflies stir up hurricanes, and whether or not you believe in some force or fate that guides the outcomes, the end results still occasionally leave us wondering, for better or worse: “What if…?”

Heck, Marvel Comics used to have a whole series titled just that, and there have been plenty of other works exploring the concept, such as Run Lola Run where we see the events of an afternoon end up in three very different ways just because of tiny variations like what exact second a car pulls out of an alleyway. People live or die because of those moments.

Or in our case they meet, and start dating, and move in together, and get married, and eventually start a comic. The last bit might have been the most predictable outcome, even though it still took us four years to get around to it. There was an artist searching out a writer, and a writer who had forgotten about trying to write… not exactly a shocker twist ending. But the beginnings? All sorts of decisions both big and small, all sorts of circumstances–you might say two lifetimes’ worth–jumbled together to get us where we are today.

I look at my life and can certainly see room for improvement. I absolutely have my share of regrets and bad decisions. But give me a time machine and I’ll give it right back unused, because all that happenstance, good and bad alike, conspired to hook me up with the woman I love. And I ain’t ever messing with a single butterfly of that.

That title sounds like something Buffy Summers or one of her “Scooby Gang” would have said back in her vampire slaying heyday, but basically I’m just feeling pleased to hear feedback from several readers that the Huachucas are freaking them out. I think any kind of creative artist gets a certain smug satisfaction out of manipulating their audience successfully in the way they imagined, even if we don’t admit it…

Wait, did I just type that out loud?

Okay, well, please don’t get some image of me cackling and shouting “DANCE, PUPPETS, DANCE!”. Unless I look really awesome. In these days of thinning hair and getting tired before midnight, I can’t really afford to pass up any chance to look awesome. And be sure you stick Dawn in there, since she’s the one translating my concepts to unsettling visuals, as well as adding creepy touches of her own.

I’m sure not everyone out there is equally unnerved, assuming they’re even scared at all. I still have the thoughts that real horror is challenging to pull off in a comic format, and that horror itself can be very subjective. I still figure that Zombie Ranch isn’t first and foremost a “horror comic”, even though I did declare horror to a matter of intent, and did come at these last couple of pages with an ambition to frighten. I truthfully had no idea if that would succeed, though. Zombie Ranch has been noted by more than one critic as not being very scary. Could I manage it if I tried?

To be sure there are things you can do to try to evoke the proper response. You can play on the more universal fears of humankind, such as darkness and the unknown, which we’d been doing with the Huachucas up until now. They were a barely glimpsed, shrouded Other, known only by the whispers and shivers of the protagonists.

They also had a silly name that sounded like someone sneezing, which may have undercut the menace. In my mind, though, I liked to think it heightened it, because none of my characters who knew of the Huachucas wanted to joke about them. I imagined them giving someone who did make jokes the same wide-eyed stares of fear and disbelief people would give the new guy at Doctor Doom’s cabinet meeting when he wonders aloud “Why are we listening to this tin can in a cloak?” It’s like being a newly minted NFL running back in the late 1960s and laughing at Dick Butkus for his name. Sure, it’s a ridiculous name. It’s a ridiculous name borne by a gigantic man who is just looking for an excuse to smash you into the ground. If Admiral Ackbar was around he’d be shouting his iconic warning of “It’s a trap!”.

One of the reasons I always figured Zombie Ranch didn’t come off as being all that scary is because of the casual attitudes the main protagonists have towards things and situations we’d consider horrific. It’s just everyday routine to them. But precisely because of that, I think it becomes powerful when those same people lose their cool at the thought of crossing up the Huachucas. When Batman (or another iconic badass of choice) tells you he doesn’t want to mess with something, then we mere mortals have to wonder, “What the hell would make Batman afraid?”

Suzie’s faced down an entire horde of zombies without batting an eye, and ordered Zeke’s throat cut with no more than a weary sadness… but the Huachucas make her shudder. It’s good to know she’s not alone.

I struggled for some time with a strange question, something only writers of fiction ever have to consider: should I have the Huachucas talk?

So far in the course of the comic, they had been presented as a silent menace. Half-glimpsed nightmare figures, in their own way as frightening or more frightening than the zombies. That had been intentional. One of the original inspirations for them was the “Street Thunder” gang from John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, whose members remain eerily silent throughout their entire reign of terror on the police station and its surroundings. The name Huachuca is a loosely translated native American word for “place of thunder”, and just in case that wasn’t an obvious enough homage Suzie even noted that “Desert Thunder” was something else they were called.

There was also the thought of contrasting the very talkative antagonists we’ve presented so far in Muriel and “Mr. Clean” (as the fans have named our shadowy executive… and I kind of like that nickname since it not only applies to his bald exterior but his removed state from the dirty proceedings he oversees). But in the end, Dawn and I talked it over and decided that continuing the silence of the Huachucas and their Brujefe probably wasn’t as necessary or powerful a concept as we originally imagined.

For one thing, I think such a thing plays out with far more impact on film than it would in a comic. In comic panels, even when there are no words, our brains often fill in entire conversations occurring… a phenomenon we’ve actually made use of in the past. It’s what makes those comics that decide to have no word balloons or narration work and still tell effective stories to us as readers. We’ll even fill in all the necessary sound effects.

Given that, I’m not sure how many times we could have our Brujefe standing around smiling with her dolls before it ceased being eerie and people started making up pithy MST3k dialogue to fill the void. Perhaps it’s the wrong decision, but on the issue of silence, luckily there’s other examples out there of brutal outlaws who aren’t as silent but are certainly still menacing. You don’t get much more talky than Lord Humungus, for instance, but I don’t want to meet him in a dark alley, no matter how much some might have seen him as a reasonable man.

Keeping the Huachucas silent could have been an interesting gimmick, but I think in the end it would have been just that: a gimmick, rather than something that helped the story. In the minds of the average person I’m sure they remain figures of nightmare, but one of my most important credos with any villain is that they never see themselves as villains. The Huachucas may be brutal and capable of great cruelties, especially to those outside their circle, but they’re still human in the end. Communicating is something humans do.

I just have to remember, Hitler was human as well. He communicated quite a bit.

And with that invocation of Godwin’s law upon myself, I shall end here. The rest is silence.

Lewis Carroll knew one of the most fun things about being a writer. Occasionally, you get to just make up words.

Well, with Carroll it tended to be more than just occasional, he made a downright habit of it. Probably his most famous example was the Jabberwocky poem:

“‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”

On and on like that for several verses, and in Through the Looking Glass Carroll includes an entire scene where Humpty Dumpty painstakingly walks Alice through the meanings of the words she doesn’t comprehend, even though his explanations sometimes aren’t precisely helpful.

“It’s called “wabe” you know, because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it —’.”

That clears everything up, doesn’t it? But you know, it’s still quite possible to get the gist of Jabberwocky without knowing what everything means. It was fun for me to read as a kid, and as an adult it’s still fun, not to mention a reminder to me that words can be rather arbitrary things. Carroll may have gone way out there, but language is an ever evolving project, and today’s nonsense may be tomorrow’s triple word score in Scrabble. Every year the Oxford English Dictionary inducts new words into its lexicon, such as “podcast”, “selfie”, and “frenemy”. English in particular seems to love such additions and provide room for them, making it at once perhaps the messiest language in the world and the most flexible.

Anyhow, I’m jabbering (wockily?) about all this because this week’s comic debuts a little concoction of my own. There I was, struggling to come up with something suitably bizarre to use as the title of the leader (or at least one of the leaders) of the Huachucas. “Bruja” would have worked, I suppose, but… it was missing something, especially considering some of the background elements I had in mind.

And then it hit me in a flash. Here’s a lady who is both “witch” and “boss”, right? Even though the Huachucas are not meant to be entirely Mexican in origin or current roster, if the Spanish words for witch and boss combined in unholy union, you’d get a new word that rolled right off the tongue: Brujefe. Suck it, English, you’re not the only language that can do portmanteaus!

Now Dawn expressed concern about me doing something like this outside the scope of my native tongue, but, eh, if it doesn’t actually make sense in Spanish I invoke rule of awesome, particularly since, as previously discussed, the Huachucas are not strictly Mexican. Interestingly enough I did poke at “jefe” just to see if the feminine version would be said “la jefe” or “la jefa”, and according to at least one source it can vary depending where you are and who you’re addressing, and in fact it’s suggested that nowadays you should default to masculine form with feminine prefix if you want to use the safer choice.

I probably would have gone with Brujefe rather than Brujefa anyhow since jefe is the more instantly recognized word, but it was nice to have some backup as I gyre and gimble. The best nonsense words are the ones that not only fill a necessary niche, but sound like they should’ve been there all along.

The original Star Trek series was pitched by Gene Rodenberry as a wagon train in space. It’s a telling example of the fickle nature of entertainment executives that you’d be hard pressed to get any sort of Western series greenlit these days, but back in the 1960s Westerns were all the rage and a science fiction series had to be explained in those terms for it to make sense to the people with the money. This is, naturally, why the opening narration refers to space “the final frontier”, hoping to hook in that same mass demographic that kept Gunsmoke on the air for 20 years. It didn’t work so well and Trek was cancelled after only three seasons of disappointing ratings, despite a massive letter writing campaign on the part of the small but rabid fanbase it did attract. Possibly the most ironic bit of the story? The final episode of the original series aired on June 3, 1969, barely one month before Neil Armstrong’s boots hit the lunar surface and America was suddenly gripped with space madness.

Weird to think about that now since your average person, much less your average nerd, is far more likely to show recognition of the name James Kirk than Matt Dillon. A new TV Show or movie might change that for the Marshal, but again, Westerns are the hard sell now, not science fiction. Even Firefly seemed to have suffered for daring to wear its Western influences on its sleeve. The Star Trek franchise has always been a little more subtle than that… except, of course, that to this day the famous line echoes down through the voice of new Captains of the Federation: “Space… the final frontier…”

Makes you wonder what neglected series of today might become the franchises of tomorrow? I’m sure Browncoats would be quick to latch onto the parallels in Firefly‘s case, but I’d argue that’s premature, and the only final arbiter seems to be the test of time itself in terms of the legacy a given work will have. The term “Instant Classic”, fond as we might be of tossing it around, is nonsense. Things that are considered classics might have been recognized and lauded in their time, or might have been derided, or even ignored and consigned to obscurity until rediscovered by later generations.

But does the idea that your average modern Comic-Con attendee would look blankly at you for bringing up Marshal Matt Dillon diminish Gunsmoke‘s status? That’s probably a dangerous claim to make, given that the only thing perhaps more fickle than entertainment executives is pop culture. People who review television for a living still seem pretty smitten with it. Probably people who write television for a living, as well. Perhaps even though we might not know Matt Dillon specifically, we have our own versions of his likeness in Deadwood and Justified.

Speaking of which, I still have to work my way through some more episodes of Justified. Haven’t seen enough yet to really feel comfortable with a review here, but I won’t make you wait 40 years for my opinion. Time makes the classics, but that doesn’t stop us from jawing back and forth a bit in the meanwhile.

The Holiday Season is over, but I’ve been thinking on a certain aspect of Christmas Past just recently; the peculiar form my childhood belief in Santa Claus took.

I was what you might call a precocious tyke, quite interested in science or at least certain aspects of it. At the ripe old age of four my parents claim I was already playing “unofficial docent” on visits to the Natural History Museum, expounding to anyone who might happen by the Allosaurus exhibit that they were not, in fact, gazing upon a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which was a creature of the Cretaceous rather than Jurassic Period… the two carnivores existed millions of years apart.

“S’arks and whales” (as I lisped via not quite fully developed speech faculties) were another specialty, to the point where I expressed a profound disappointment in my grandmother after the felt dolphin ornaments she had sewn up as Christmas ornaments were shown to display the vertical tails of fish rather than proper horizontal flukes. That sounds like the sort of thing that should have earned me a spanking, but I was lucky enough to have a scientist grandmother who, instead of chewing me out for being ungrateful, went and fixed the tails to their correct orientation–as a microbiologist she was willing to bow to my youthful expertise on the far more macro world of cetaceans.

Depending on your perspective that anecdote might seem satisfying or horrible, I suppose, but it leads back to Santa and Christmas. A kid who made scale models of the solar system for his first grade class, insisting on covering the styrofoam ball of Venus with cotton to represent its thick atmosphere, was hardly going to buy into the myth of a jolly fat man fitting down chimneys and somehow visiting every house in the world in one single night with a flying reindeer sleigh. Far too many problems with that; for one thing, what about houses that didn’t have chimneys?

Well, simple enough. Santa, I logically decided, was something not quite human. An energy force or spirit, like the kind that whipped around the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but instead of melting your face it would zip in and leave you presents. The fat man was just a face the world put to this to make it seem friendlier and more anthopomorphic, but I didn’t care about looks, I cared about results. And logic, of course. A force of this nature could certainly slip into your home unseen and unheard and would be capable of traveling at the speed of light, unbound by forces of gravity and inertia that could slow its rounds. Perhaps it could even be several places at once?

Now somehow this force was also capable of spontaneous generation ex nihilo of race car sets and Transformers and (yeccch) socks, but I didn’t really get that far into the details of how the system worked. Presents showed up on Christmas, and how else could I explain how they got there?

For me my belief was both logical and magical at the same time, and I remember locking myself in a bathroom and sobbing when my parents finally admitted that there was no Santa, not even as I had imagined it. There was another explanation, after all, and that explanation was that I had been systematically lied to for years. It was the shattering day I learned to never trust again.

Okay, okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic. My mom sometimes reads these blogs, after all, I don’t need to dredge up old guilt. Sooner or later I would have figured out Santa wasn’t real, even in the way I had imagined. But I have to admit, it was at least somewhat disappointing to find out the truth was entirely mundane and my framework allowing for the fantastic was an ultimately futile project.

Or perhaps not? After all, here I am today working through a framework where Earth suffered a zombie apocalypse and then turned zombies into a consumer commodity. All these weird childhood needs of mine to balance the fantastic with elements that would “make sense” definitely influence my adult style of writing fiction. I don’t want mundane, but neither am I satisfied with the completely ridiculous and random. I struggle for a sense of consistency, which has led to many a day of Dawn throwing up her hands and declaring, “No one cares about this stuff except you!” It has certainly led to my ongoing status in her eyes as an Enemy of Fun.

Yet from my perspective, I look back on my Santa Theory and ask, isn’t it possible for wonderment to still exist within constraint? Isn’t it arguably even cooler to figure out ways the fantastic might have some anchor points to the realm of plausibility?

I don’t feel I’m a fanatic on the subject, as evidenced by my willingness back then to gloss over how the spiritual Santaforce in question manifested Star Wars action figures, and my willingness currently to declare that zombies and flying cameras exist because I wish them to for the purposes of the story. There are no rigidly scientific justifications planned for them, but I do nonetheless have definite rules for what they are and aren’t capable of. That remains extremely important to me. Where the fantastic is concerned, I still strive for that strange quasi-logical framework of the imagination that satisfied me as a child.

You can’t have proper suspension of disbelief without something to suspend it on, after all.

I recall a review of Zombie Ranch from a couple years back that was not exactly glowing. The reviewer seemed to have two main complaints, one being that there was no opening narration to explain the setting, and the other being that the comic “doesn’t go anywhere”. Despite this he declared it “okay”, but then gave a 1 star out of 5 rating, which left me wondering what scale he used for things he found actually terrible.

Now in the interests of fairness, what he was reviewing was our print copy of Issue #1, which corresponds to Episode One online (pages 1-23). There was more story on the website by that point, but I can’t fault him for giving his opinion on the comic as a standalone product. I just found it a great irony since that first episode is the one I’d always considered to be the most self-contained as a story, and by the end of it much more had happened than people just standing around talking.

I bring this up because I’m sitting here thinking about how, if he felt Episode One was slow and pointless, this current Episode would probably drive him to madness. For all I know he wouldn’t have even been satisfied with the chaos and running about of Episode Six or Seven, but then this just reminds me that I don’t want to be writing based on the desires and tastes of others, at least not without a hefty paycheck involved.

But yeah, Episode Eight is I guess a bit of a breather for me (and for you? I can’t make that judgment). Not filler, mind you–I’ve never intentionally written a story page that just takes up space–but compared to the previous stuff it possibly comes off a little slow. Will the eventual print issue suffer for that?

I do write with the print issues in mind, but I also write for the overall story and each individual weekly installment. Sometimes balancing all of those needs is tricky, to say the least, and a lot of my decisions often come down to pure gut instinct that a certain moment or direction just feels right. At the moment it feels right to ease up on the gas pedal, so to speak, while we change lanes from one arc to the next.

I could have made a big dramatic deal over Suzie crossing the bridge… maybe… she slips! Cue lots of gasping from the onlookers as she struggles to pull up before the zombies get her!

I could have… but it felt artificial. The bridge crossing becomes yet another instance in the lives of the Z Ranch personnel where the risky and fantastic is so mundane to them they don’t even think twice about it. It is my intent, after all, to show this as a procedure they’ve gone through before. It remains, after all, a whole theme of the comic to contrast an occupation most would consider insane with the workaday attitudes of the men and women making their living doing it. It takes a lot to make these people lose their cool, which arguably makes it all the more exciting when they finally do.

In fact there was a fair amount of feedback in the latter parts of the last arc where Readers Like You expressed just that sentiment, that Zombie Ranch for them was a satisfying progression of a slow burn of development leading to an exciting payoff in the end. That “end” culminated in Episode Seven with Muriel’s demise, and yet since this is a serial, that end was also a continuation… and from another perspective could even be seen as a new beginning. In that respect I consider Episode Eight to be where I answer some lingering questions, raise some new ones, and am busily striking the flint that’s going to light a new fuse.

So although it might lack the zombie stampedes and punching and shooting of its immediate predecessor, I still feel like there’s plenty going on. There are probably people who disagree, but those are also probably the people who never gave the first arc a chance, either. For the rest of you, well, I’ve already managed it once. I hope you’re content to come along and see how this second go ’round shapes up.

Since we’re doing family holidays this week I’m not going to get very wordy with the blog, but I did want to bring up something interesting.

Libraries. Obsolete, am I right? I mean, with the Internet and such, why go through the trouble of shlepping down to borrow books, and then worry about returning them, possibly getting fines if you forget, etc. etc.? Well, that was my line of thinking, anyhow. I used to frequent libraries all the time as a kid and young gent, but by the time I finished college it was the mid-90s and the World Wide Web was starting to come into its own. Research became something just a click away, and although you can argue that even these days it’s not smart to put too much faith into things you read online, printed books are sadly no guarantee of any less bias or factual errors, regardless of the number of letters following the author’s name. And as far as fiction, well, I guess I got in the habit of buying anything I was particularly interested in so I could read it at my own pace… and there was a good amount of public domain classics again available just a click away.

Well, about twenty years after my last library card expired, here I am with one again. I had to go get a permit from a city office, and I used the city library’s parking lot to run across the street and do that. Then, out of some combination of nostalgia and guilt, I decided to actually poke my nose into the library afterwards in order to justify my occupation of one of their spaces. It wasn’t like there was an admission fee, after all… maybe just wander dusty stacks for a bit, remember what once was, and then mosey on out.

Except that was about the time I ran across their graphic novel section.

I’m not going to claim they had everything one might want, but there was a lot of good stuff on those shelves. Twenty years ago, libraries, at least any libraries I was familiar with, didn’t have something like this. It never occurred to me that that might have changed, and yet there I was, gawking at case after case stuffed with an A-Z collection. A short visit to the front desk later and I had a brand new card and some Locke & Key, Queen and Country and Bone volumes to read over the next three weeks (with an option to renew online).

Don’t get me wrong, it’s always nice to be able to own. But if you’re short on cash or shelf space or both, or want to try before you buy, it might be well worth checking into your local branch and seeing if they might be able to help scratch your comics itch for titles that aren’t available through digital channels, and in some cases might not even be in print any longer.

Best of all it’s completely legal. As was my parking that fateful day. My conscience may rest at ease on both counts.

So a few weeks ago it suddenly hit me that Christmas Day and New Year’s Day would fall on Wednesdays this year, i.e. that day we do updates. I know, my powers of calendar are amazing.

We’ve taken breaks during this time in the past, sometimes with sketches and sometimes with fan art, and we’ve acknowledged other holidays in our blogs as they come around, especially if they happen to actually coincide with a publication date. But compared to some webcomics, I have to admit we really aren’t all that “festive”. If you’re a regular webcomic reader you probably know what I’m talking about, you open up their site on December 25th or thereabouts and there’s some illustration of the cast in their Santa hats all gathered ’round a tree, sipping eggnog, unwrapping presents, and engaging in all other manner of stereotypical Holiday cheer.  Meanwhile, you open up Zombie Ranch today and get a blood-spattered Uncle Chuck with nary a wreath or sprig of mistletoe in sight.

Now mind you that’s a story page where it would make absolutely no sense to shove in Christmasy things, but even when we’ve had fan art or sketches for these times they tend not to be themed. Jeez. Buncha Scrooges over here.

Before you ask: no, we’re not really meaning to make any sort of principled point with this. We’re not being Puritans, even if Dawn did once post a Halloween sketch of Suzie dressed up in Solomon Kane garb. Actually I guess that illustration stands as proof we did tip a nod towards a holiday occurring on at least one occasion. It was also one of the only times we posted something on a day other than a Wednesday, since Halloween was on a Saturday that year. Dawn felt inspired, so she sketched it up. In succeeding years, for one reason or another, it just hasn’t happened, even last year when Halloween did indeed fall on a Wednesday. Suzie did look pretty spooky, though.

I know personally I could argue that holiday shout-outs aren’t as easy for a long-form serial comic as they are for something more gag-a-day, and in fact have the potential to be disruptive. Here’s your complex fantasy world set someplace that’s decidedly Not Earth, and now here’s your Elven Court hanging stockings over a fireplace and leaving out milk and cookies for good ol’ St. Nick… things that are not only specific to our world, but to a specific culture of our world and the specific way they choose to celebrate the Season. Note that I’m not saying you’ve got to have a Menorrah and a Mkeke mat in there, that’d probably just make it more strange to me. Then again, is taking a side trip to present the adventures of a caveman and zombie on Mars any less weird? I suppose I shouldn’t judge.

But then again, there’s the whole issue of holidays, period. Nearly everyone everywhere on Earth has some sort of celebration going on around this time, but there’s plenty of webcomics originating out of Canada (for example), and while they do celebrate a Thanksgiving, it’s on the second Monday of October rather than the fourth Thursday of November. And hey, most countries don’t even celebrate a Thanksgiving at all, or at least not as the Turkey-centric feast AmeriCanada does. This is one of those little thought about quirks that results from having the international audience a webcomic can give you… sometimes not everyone’s going to understand what the big deal is, and you either adopt a sink-or-Google policy in regards to that or devote part of your posting towards explaining the holiday in addition to showing your characters observing it.

Would the Zanes celebrate (American) Thanksgiving? Most probably so, although they’d have to work around some problems like turkeys and pigs being all but extinct. Of course, working that into the narrative means getting there first, which is a daunting prospect at our current pace where we’ve been taking a year or more of real-world time just to get through the events of a single day. It would probably have to be a one-off illustration, and in that case again becomes a matter of Dawn feeling she has the time and inspiration to do it. You don’t want to force an artist to make a holiday image. It will lack joy.

I mean, aside from when I did sort of get sneaky and squeezed in a reference to the U.S.’s Memorial Day on one of our covers. But that’s only fair after she does things like Zombie Charlie Brown. Talk about a guy who’s always caught up in one holiday or another, right? Good grief.

Last week I wrote some more words in regards to the Death of the Author concept. I remember when I first ran across it I had a knee-jerk negative response, because I’m a bit of a control freak like that where my writing is concerned. You dare propose that my readers know my story better than I do? Preposterous! The themes are mine. The subtext is mine. MINE. My preciousssss.

Filthy Bagginses.

But over time I mellowed, and had to admit–to reference another franchise–the more I tighten my grip, the more star systems will slip through my fingers. The reality is that the sole way to retain one and only one interpretation of your precious is, like Gollum, to hide it away in the dark. If you’re going to make it public, then here comes the public to interact with your tale, and each of those interactions will have their own spin.

An example of the divergent craziness that happens next is a book’s description of a character, and the picture in our heads we form of what that character looks like. I’m talking about the picture we form in the absence of any illustrations or other visual depictions of that character. Let’s assume for sake of this point that we have an author and five readers who are all able to draw fairly well in a realistic style, and we ask them individually, and without consulting one another, to provide a rendering of the fearsome smuggler Saravia the Bold.

Even if the author has gone into what they think is painstakingly exacting detail on Saravia’s appearance, I would bet you good money that you’re going to end up with five very different depictions of the same character, to the point where it’s entirely possible you’ll get them all together and have a furious author shouting, “What the hell?! Saravia is black!”

Note that while this is an entirely made-up example, there is an actual story of Harlan Ellison publicly chewing out an English student for, in the midst of waxing rhapsodic about all the hidden meanings of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, missing that the character of Ellen is supposed to be black. It happens.  Supposedly Ellison was just annoyed that the guy was manufacturing all these things Ellison never actually put into text while missing something he did, but I’m sure the student in question would have been much better off if Ellison were dead, or at least not standing in the back of the auditorium.

So Death of the Author can get pretty awkward at times unless the author is actually unavailable for comment, but there’s another part to it I actually wanted to talk about this time around, which I personally find a much more positive concept. Death of the Author is not just a matter of Word of God being not such a big deal, it also preaches that Life of God (yeah I just made that term up… I think) should be divorced from commentary on the work.

In other words, just because an author happens to be a devout Catholic, we don’t necessarily have to be digging Catholic dogma out of every nook and cranny of the fiction they write. The fallout of the alternative is all around us. We learn that Lewis Carroll might sexually desire underage girls and start looking for signs of that deviancy in the Alice tales. Decades after its publication, Ender’s Game somehow morphs into a treatise chock full of pro-Mormon, anti-gay propaganda.

I’m not saying Author Tracts don’t exist, or that an author’s experiences never influence their work, but there’s a lot of stories out there where the writer wanted nothing more than to tell a story. To have someone read your tale of robots and aliens and then say, “Obviously this is about the writer’s documented problems with impotence”… well… that’d be a little frustrating to endure, don’t you think? Bad enough that you have documented problems with impotence without it being the first thing any critique of your work feels obliged to mention.

Your subconscious mind by definition is out of your control, which is often the argument of critics when an author protests that he didn’t mean things that way. There’s also that thing writers themselves often admit, which is they’re not really sure what their story is about until they’ve finished it (or at least finished a first draft). Sometimes this is a positive, like my experience last week. Sometimes it’s a negative, like that creative writing class I tried to take in college where no one seemed to be able to get past my status as a Theatre major. But the more anyone delves into the subtext of a work, the more risk there is of a kind of verbal version of pareidolia where you’re seeing the Virgin Mary in the toast. Witness an entire collegiate curriculum based on the reading of Moby Dick as political allegory rather than a crazy obsessed guy hunting a whale. If Herman Melville were alive today, would he be crankily interjecting that he had no political motive in mind? That his personal religious beliefs have no bearing on the text? Is it coincidence that Moby Dick was only rediscovered and hailed as a deep (pardon the pun) classic of literature years after Melville had passed from the mortal coil, or the best sort of convenience for those wanting to expound about what the book “really means”?

I’m not against doing so; overthinking fiction, particularly fiction many people would consider shallow pop culture, is one of my favorite hobbies. Whether the actual creatives involved respond with “Dude, no”, or “Oh yeah, we totally meant it that way”, or don’t even respond at all, it can be a fun exercise to fill in the blanks.

The real problems, as usual, come when anyone gets too serious about it. The reader has the potential to inflict just as much bias onto a work as the author does, whether consciously or as a result of that ever ill-defined and unknowable subconscious. And heck, if a story has absolutely nothing to say and invokes no reactions, why does it even exist? What separates it from, say, the instruction sheet for your television?

It’s good for fiction to have meaning. Just try not to let your interpretations get too much in the way of enjoying what’s there.

So there’s a new review of the comic out, courtesy of the fine ladies over at Girls Like Comics. I thought the reviewer had some interesting things to say, particularly the notion that Zombie Ranch could be thought of as one of the ultimate takes on the over-saturation of the zombie genre: the idea of the zombie being commercialized, mass-marketed, and ultimately tamed.

There’s no question in my mind that back in 2009 when I started putting this story together, I was only willing and able to do so because I felt this particular take might have something new to say in the midst of what even then was arguably a crowded market. I had no intent of capitalizing on the trend, because trends are damned fickle things, not to mention they can be a double-edged sword (Alan Kistler  outright stated back in 2011 that he refused to look at any review submissions he got that had anything to do with zombies, regardless of other factors). Anyhow, whether the “zombie bubble” collapsed in a few days or a few years, I still figured we had something unique that could outlast it. That was important to me.

But although I certainly haven’t shied away from a certain amount of social commentary in my writing, and I certainly had the notion that zombies were potentially being done to (un)death, I never actually had the intent of thematically equating the taming and processing of our zombie herds (for profit!) with the glut of zombies in popular culture.

Does that make the reviewer wrong? Nope. Actually, it’s kind of a cool interpretation, and it didn’t stop her from recognizing some of the more intentional dramatic and satirical themes I’ve put in. It wasn’t that long ago that I brought up the concept of Death of the Author, where the creator’s intent is not the end-all be-all of a work. It’s a particularly interesting phenomenon in the context of serially produced webcomics, where a fan often is able to just up and ask the creator(s) what they meant a certain scene to convey or even give their own theories on why things are happening or what a character’s motivations are. I’m quite guilty of responding to more than one instance of this with a Word of God in the interest of limiting confusion, and sometimes I wonder if that’s a good habit or a terrible one.  Maybe I should be content to leave more things up to interpretation rather than speaking out with a voice of (potentially stifling) authority.

After all, sometimes the alternate interpretations can be pretty interesting stuff.

So here’s a weird thing for me to admit, seeing as I’m writing a comic that has a large pool of inspiration drawn from “reality television”: I’m not all that entertained by reality.

What I mean by that is, when it comes to fictional offerings, I’m always more inclined towards the ones which have some sort of fantastic or paranormal element to them. I’m fully aware of the irony that many shows purporting to be realistic are often anything but. I complained about it in a long ago blog, and TV Tropes is full of entries on such hair-tearing nonsense as the “Enhance button” presented as a standard investigation technique. I do prefer the honesty of fantasies that fully embrace the Phlebotinum of their Sonic Screwdrivers, but what I’m talking about today goes beyond even that. It’s a full blown personality flaw.

Well, maybe it’s a personality feature. But I rarely get excited about fiction that’s presented in an entirely realistic setting. Again, leaving aside that even a “realistic” setting will take a lot of liberties, I will put up as an example that I just never got into Breaking Bad. I watched several episodes and I fully support the idea that it was a good show. I can absolutely see why people adore it. It just didn’t hook me. Not the way, say, X-Files did. Or Buffy, or Angel, or Babylon 5 or True Blood or Supernatural.

Am I saying that those shows are better than Breaking Bad? Or The Wire? Or any number of others close, respected friends of mine hold up as great television? No. No no no. I’m just saying that personally speaking, I’ve always felt much more desire to keep up with shows that had some element of overt fantasy or science fiction in their premise. Or watch them in the first place.

That doesn’t mean you get a free pass because your show has superheroes or aliens in it, I still have my standards. X-Files really started losing its focus after a few seasons, so I lost my focus on it. Birds of Prey? I barely lasted an episode or two before giving up on it. But I won’t deny it’s an easier sell to me than something focusing purely on gritty reality. I gave Longmire a try recently and liked it, I really did… not to mention it’s all modern Western-y, which should be inspirational… and yet I still haven’t gotten around to watching more.

Bah. Well, I have some saving graces. The instinct doesn’t seem to apply to movies, possibly because of Jaws sinking its teeth into me at such a young age. Then again that arguably has a giant monster in it. Pretty sure I was over a need for the paranormal in movies by the time I saw Die Hard in my teens. Casablanca took a bit longer, but has been on my favorites list ever since I finally queued it up.

Also, I don’t think this ever applied to comedies, just dramas. I have a definite hankering to keep watching Arrested Development after starting a Netflix run of it earlier this year. Ditto for New Girl, and before that How I Met Your Mother. I don’t seem to need spaceships and demons and dragons so long as the laughs keep coming my way. But something about dramatic serials… I just ideally want to see them play out on a stage that’s a little beyond the world we know. Greater room for metaphor, perhaps?

Probably nothing to try to analyze rationally. It just is. And I suppose explains why all these zombies and floating cameras keep hovering around the story here, instead of it being straight up people drama. It’s what keeps me interested in watching, so it keeps me interested in writing, as well.

I consider myself an introvert. Honestly, I’m pretty damn sure I’m an introvert. On the other hand, I guess I’ve gotten to the point I fake being social pretty well. If you don’t mind the somewhat scratchy audio, I give you Exhibit A, recorded at the Long Beach Comic and Horror Con this past weekend:

That is nearly seven minutes of me jabbering, with the interviewer only occasionally chiming in. Dawn had to bow out partway to make a sale, and while she might be the first to claim that I would have done all the talking anyways, sometimes you can just run out of things to say and it’s good to have a partner there to pick up the slack. A different interview we did the day before was proof of that to me, although we don’t have the audio for that one. You’ll just have to trust me. (EDIT: I have spoken too soon. Instead of trusting me, go listen to our interview with Indie Comics Tracker. We’re about five minutes in. LINK )

Speaking of not having the audio, I also partnered up with my friend Justin Robinson for a panel. It went well, and another of our friends recorded it and plans to have it ready by around noon on Wednesday. That means it won’t be ready when this blog goes live, but once it’s ready I’ll edit things to add in a link. It was on using your fears to create fiction and some of you might find it interesting. (EDIT: The audio is up, check out your listening options here: LINK )

Anyhow, I watched all the way through that interview video and I was surprised and pleased to determine that I didn’t find it embarrassing. That guy looked like he knew what he was doing in terms of promoting a project and being in front of a camera for several minutes, and that guy was me.

At the end of it all, though, I’m exhausted, which is where that introversion comes in. So forgive me if I let this be the extent of my blog for this week. I’m all talked out.

It was only a couple years ago, and yet I may never forget the moment as long as I live. My extended family had gathered to celebrate the Holiday Season, which included my very young niece. One of the toys she had with her was a wooden train set with little train cars that would magnetically stick together and modular tracks you could arrange to roll them on. Of course not even a preschool style train set would be worth its weight without some accessories and scenery, though, so there were plenty of extra bits provided like trees and switching towers and various non-train vehicles to roll around outside of the tracks themselves.

It was the construction vehicles that got me in trouble. I made running narration as I took hold of a dump truck and moseyed it along: “Okay, here he comes to get a load from the train.”

My niece shook her head. “She. That’s Mrs. Truck.” Fair enough. Her playset, her rules. And then only a handful of seconds later, I described how “he’s heading back up the hill”. Just automatically, without thinking.

“MRS. Truck!” corrected my niece again, exasperated with her apparently deaf uncle.

I had never felt so much like a programmed drone of the patriarchal establishment. Okay, that’s exaggerating, I doubt my 3 year old niece was making any pronouncement on gender issues… but I had to admit that my brain kept wanting to think of the truck as male. And there was no rational reason for that. This wasn’t a Thomas the Tank Engine set where everything is anthropomorphized and things had faces and names, it was just a truck. I looked at the truck and saw it as male, while my niece looked at the truck and saw it as female. It was pure projection, and neither of us was really be any more right or wrong than the other… I just found it weird that despite thinking a lady dump truck was cool by me, my subconscious fell back on the masculine interpretation. Was it just more comfortable for me to narrate the truck’s actions as if it were Mr. Truck?

I’m reminded of my earlier blog where I mentioned Adilifu Nama and how important it was to him as a kid that The Falcon existed, representing the idea of a black man who could fly. The white heroes were cool, too, but there was something significant in seeing a guy who looked more like him being able to do awesome things. He identified with that.

How important is it that we identify with our heroes? That’s an interesting question. Take it to its extreme and you get the Hollywood problem where the Powers-That-Be claim we have to have a white male lead or the audience won’t connect… which I suspect wouldn’t be as prevalent an obstacle if the majority of high level studio execs weren’t (still) white men. The unfortunate implication of that attitude is that if you’re not a white male, apparently it’s either no problem for you to connect with a white male character, or you just plain don’t matter. It’s gotten better, but more often than not you’re just not even going to be given a choice.

It doesn’t even necessarily hold true for white males. Am I really expected to identify with, say, Rob Schneider? I don’t connect with Rob Schneider, not as he’s usually presented anyhow. I don’t feel inspired by his characters or want to live their lives. Now you could counter that I can afford to be choosy, since I get my pick of John McLanes and Han Solos and the like, but before I get too mired in objectivity let me just mention a couple very subjective experiences from my life in regards to this.

See, on the one hand, I think back to being a kid reading Charles Schulz’ Peanuts strips and watching the animated specials… for whatever reason I wanted to imprint myself on that little universe and its adventures, but… Charlie Brown? No thanks. Linus? Ugh. Snoopy? Not even human. No, out of all the kids the one I would have wanted to be my avatar was Schroeder. It wasn’t that he really looked like me that much, for example I’m certainly not a blonde. I wasn’t obsessed with pianos. But there was something about his attitude that just spoke to me… and the problem was, he was a support character. When Charlie Brown got to go to France or to the National Spelling Bee or whatnot, there were always excuses for Snoopy and Linus to tag along, but Schroeder was left back at the ranch. Most disappointing to my young self. The resulting adventures always rang a bit hollow because of my lack of caring for anyone who wasn’t named Schroeder. Bizarre? Irrational? You betcha. Truth? Undeniably.

On the other hand, around that same age I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and it made absolutely no nevermind to me that a girl was the protagonist. I didn’t feel like I needed to be her, but I did end up caring what happened to her and I loved the crazy world she was finding her way through. I would like to hope that there are many women and girls out there who have a similar love for Treasure Island despite its lack of much in the way of female characters. Maybe it’s not quite the same since Alice’s tales aren’t lacking for a male presence, kooky as most of them might be, but… I dunno, I just find Treasure Island pretty rad. Heck, a lot of ladies love The Princess Bride even though Buttercup (for my money anyhow) is kind of useless and annoying.

So perhaps the need for identification can be overrated, not to mention sometimes we connect not with the way someone looks so much as an attitude they have or a lifestyle they live. It’s probably nothing to base your fiction around. Just remember, never assume the truck is a Mister.

If you’ve been following my ramblings here long enough, you might dimly recall a couple of rants I did back in the day on the subject of using “hard sell” tactics at comic conventions. There was my tamer version here, and my not so tame version over here. If you don’t have the time or inclination to read those, basically I just hate hard sells. They make me very uncomfortable as a buyer and so I’m always really, really hoping I never give off that vibe even accidentally as an exhibitor. Your visitation to an exhibitor’s table should never, ever feel like your only importance to them is spending your money on their stuff.

I bring this up because Dawn and I were scoping out a couple of local conventions this past weekend and I had an experience where a guy offered us some free stuff to get us to his booth, then pointed out the graphic novel he had for sale, and before I’d barely started leafing through the copy he handed me to check out was telling me the price, and that he’d “take care of the tax for me, no problem”, etc. etc.

Now not all of you may make it out to conventions often (or at all), but it is almost unheard of for an independent creator to charge sales tax. We still turn it over to the state and city when we file our returns, but on site we already have it factored into the price of what we’re offering so we can more easily take your cash money in nice round numbers, which is why I just had to nod and smile once at some well-meaning visitors who advised me I should change all my prices to “$x.99” because that’s how retail stores do it. I know the trick, I know people are more inclined instinctually to view “$4.99” as four dollars instead of five. I just don’t happen to like pennies that much.

Now this isn’t true of the bigger outfits with their hourly employees and non-Square merchant accounts, but in an artist’s alley or small press situation, telling me you’ll take care of the tax is sort of like telling me what a great deal I’m getting on a pen because it contains ink. Meanwhile I’m having trouble actually evaluating what I’m being asked to buy because you won’t stop talking for a moment. I begin to suspect that the talking is supposed to cover for the content, like you’re uncertain it can speak for itself. I begin now to feel uncertain if my decision to purchase will be my own, or if I’ll find myself with a heavier bag and a lighter wallet later on and wonder in disgruntlement, “Why did I do that?”

Have I been guilty of this? Quite possibly. In fact I look over my earlier rant and see me quoting myself telling people the print comics are five dollars apiece, though I do hope that was the response to someone actually asking. In my experience this weekend, I didn’t ask, and that just stuck in my craw that it was brought up so quickly. Unless someone’s starting to walk off with it under a mistaken impression it’s free (and if you don’t have pricing signs up, understand that may be partially your fault), don’t bring up how much it is, or start wheeling and dealing over something they haven’t even indicated they might want to buy. It just makes things awkward for everyone.

Which, you know… I think that’s what I’ve been trying to figure these past four years of exhibiting. Beyond hard or soft sell, beyond everything, just… don’t make it weird. This is perhaps a nigh impossible goal for me, socially awkward freakshow that I am. It’s also pretty nebulous as any sort of maxim, so let me give a more concrete example. A rather successful webcomic artist by name of Erika Moen made a training video that’s been being passed around by my peers, where amongst other things she talks about how to properly promote yourself at a comic convention. You can find it at this link if you’re interested, although be warned it is quite long: http://vimeo.com/68958287

I’ll just cut to the important part of it for my purposes. She basically tells her proteges that they need to always be on their feet, always looking, always greeting passerby. This is the path to success.

More specifically though, I feel this her path. Erika Moen is a petite young lady who runs the risk of completely disappearing behind her display should she sit. Despite her penchant for colorful hair, if she’s not constantly putting herself out there to passerby, they might very well pass her by.

I am a hairy man who is over six feet tall, and though I don’t know exactly what her weight is, I wouldn’t be surprised if I doubled it. I have a default expression that more than one person has told me makes me look like I’m annoyed with life. Now I also admit that I have problems with my feet where I physically just can’t stand in one place very long, but beyond that, when I stand up at our table, I *loom*. I can’t help it. Erika Moen probably couldn’t loom unless she stood on a chair and got a big dracula cape, and even then it would probably come off more adorable than threatening.

Me on my feet, greeting passerby, has a high potential to make things weird. That’s not just theory, there’s at least one convention where I did try to do the “outgoing” thing and Dawn made me sit down after a couple of hours of attendees scurrying by like field mice seeing the shadow of a hawk. Lo and behold, once I was back on (or below) their level, they started coming over to browse and buy again. So it works. I keep my ass planted in the seat, and the young ladies don’t feel the need to keep their mace keychains close to hand.

Even then, our table is well-laid out and stocked with price notifications so that I don’t usually have to say anything more than “Welcome, feel free to look. If you have any questions, let us know.” My voice is a loud and potentially looming thing as well. I try to find some other activity to work on instead of watching people browse, because I’ve yet to figure out any way to do so which doesn’t feel like I’m being creepy. If they start talking to me and asking me things, I’m more than happy to chat, but otherwise I’ve learned the hard way that a guy of my stature and bearing is better off being more passive than aggressive (and definitely not passive-aggressive).

So yes, if you’re small, it probably behooves you to try to seem large. But if you’re large, you might try to seem small. When near, appear far, when far, near, and all that other stuff Sun Tzu kept advising. If you recognize a cosplay you might compliment them, though it’s best to be sure… getting it wrong is a near surefire way to make things weird. Also it might be best to let the guy in the Doctor Doom get-up find your Doctor Doom print for sale naturally after that point, rather than shoving it at him and shouting “10 bucks and it’s yours!”.

There are really no right or wrong answers here, just instincts and circumstances. But more than anything it’s important to find a technique that works for you, and makes you comfortable. I know some might argue that you never want to feel comfortable in a sales environment, but think about it… when you do that you’re making things awkward right from the start, before a single visitor has crossed your path. Isn’t that half the battle lost, right there? Relax, and they’ll relax along with you.

That’s my opinion, anyhow. Don’t make this weird.

Expectations can definitely play a role in your reaction to a movie. The greater your excitement and hopes, the easier it is for a film to not meet them. Conversely, if you start off from a position of “This is gonna be crap” or “I’m only watching this because the remote’s out of reach”, there’s every possibility a movie might not only exceed expectations (faint praise, since the bar is set low) but actually end up feeling like it was an entertaining use of your time.

I really don’t remember The Book of Eli making a big noise when it was first released. Even now it’s got some pretty anemic scores both from a critical and commercial sense, and despite its post-apocalyptic Western sensibilities I think it was Dawn who stuck it on our Netflix queue, not me. The disc proclaimed a 118 minute runtime, which meant nearly two hours… already a violation of the unofficial guideline some of my friends and I have adopted where we feel like a movie’s ideal length is around an hour and a half. It’s a guideline, not a rule… after all, I’ve admitted several times here how I enjoy some of the classic movies with a slower sense of pacing… but we’re definitely living in an era where most of the time movies that go two hours (or more) really don’t need to. I don’t want to be checking my watch as my ass goes numb waiting for a film to figure out how to end itself.

Anyhow, I bring this particular bit up because The Book of Eli managed to feel like a 90 minute movie for me, and I say that with my compliments. I can see people being turned off as it tilts thematically between stabs at philosophy and scenes of almost cartoonish ultra-violence (mind you, the kind of cartoon that includes geysering neck blood).  I might just be used to that sort of thing after watching so much anime, but the violence remained grounded just enough so as not to be rendered entirely devoid of weight and meaning… even despite the unfortunate decision to use CGI for some of the combat scenes in a setting which cried out for the grit and dust and just sheer physicality of practical effects. Bloodily slaughtering a bunch of bandit mooks is no big thing, but the named characters were still people to care about.  I suppose I’m reminded in several ways of the tone in Escape From New York… and again, I say that with my compliments. I’m an unrepentant child of the ’80s.

I don’t think it’ll be any major spoiler to say that Denzel Washington’s lone drifter character is carrying a book, and that book is supposedly the last existing copy of the Bible. That may or may not be true, but  America (and presumably the rest of the world) suffered nuclear armageddon, or something close enough to it, and in the wake of that it’s declared people sought out and burned any copies that survived since a lot of blame for the war fell on religious motives. The post-war generation doesn’t even know the concept of saying grace before a meal… which again seems a bit far-fetched, but without it we don’t have the central conflict where the one other guy in the wasteland who remembers the Bible (played by Gary Oldman, and I’m a big sucker for Gary Oldman villains) wants it so he can use its words to control and oppress. “People will come from all over, they’ll do exactly what I tell ’em if the words are from the book. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. All we need is that book.”

Yeah, this is… not a subtle movie. But it does have some surprisingly smart moments, especially in the twist at the end (foreshadowed at several points when you start thinking back on them). So despite Book of Eli arguably having nothing really fresh to offer in terms of visuals or plotlines, I didn’t check my watch, my ass didn’t go numb, and I’m actually going to remember this film for awhile. I say that with my compliments.

I’m not going to stand in front of you and claim that the McCartys are paragons of thought and wisdom. On the other hand, even though I was writing them with all the trappings of stereotype “stupid rednecks” for the purposes of the Muriel’s Revenge arc, I wanted to give at least a little sense that what you’re seeing represents their behavior under extraordinary circumstances.

Nobody’s stupid all the time, any more than they’re smart all the time, but there were two really nasty factors working against the McCartys’ capabilities for good decisions from the start of their arrival.

1: Muriel, a very charismatic leader figure (who you figure has dominated everyone, Eustace included, for a good portion of their lives)

2: Because of her need for immediate action, they set out through the desert ill-prepared, and came to the Z Ranch hungry, thirsty, and very, very tired.

These are insidious factors that throughout human history have led otherwise perfectly normal, reasonable people down dark roads, or just to terrible decisions. I know I get really irritable after missing a couple of meals, and any business paperwork I deal with is best not processed after an all-night bender. I have less personal experience with cults of personality (thankfully), but there’s ample evidence out there of what folks are capable of when someone they trust tells them it’s the right thing to do. Think of Jonestown. Or Nazi Germany.

Without Muriel driving them on, it’s doubtful the McCartys even end up at the ranch the way they did. It’s also entirely possible that the violence doesn’t escalate if Muriel isn’t there to urge it on… Cousin Bob seemed to have quite the mean streak, but the rest?

In fact I had the idea of Muriel as sort of the Queen Bee of a “hive mind”, to the point where near the end of Episode 7 her temporary removal from the picture leads to a lull where the surviving McCartys surrender on Eustace’s sensible advice that they listen to the men with the guns. All it takes is Muriel’s reappearance for that to go right to hell and everything to be stirred up again, and it’s not until that final rifle shot through her head that the fight goes out of all her kin.

I went so far as to have Frank make a bit of a shout out since I knew there were Warhammer 40,000 fans among the readers. An alien army called the Tyranids operated as a hive mind, and there was a special rule called “Shoot The Big Ones” where if you killed off one of the bigger leader types the rank-and-file bugs near them might stop fighting. So that was Frank’s advice to Oscar… shoot the big one and it’s all over.

Human beings aren’t hive insects, but in some circumstances we do fall into a mob mentality which isn’t all that far off. But once that mob breaks up, once the instigator(s) lose their hold, the survivors are left wondering what happened, and why they did the things they did in the grip of the moment.

Will the McCartys wake up after their nap and return to jobs as natural philosophers and rocket scientists? No. But if they don’t end up dead or in jail, I’m sure they can go back to farming, and considering how many of them there were and how healthy they seem, it doesn’t seem like they were too bad at that.

“Feed men, then ask of them virtue” may have been put forth as the hypothetical slogan on the banners raised against Christ, but whatever your default state of IQ and education, I do believe reason at least comes best after a good meal and a good night’s sleep.

Sometimes I am very happy to be wrong.

I’m referring to a rather vitriolic post I made last year when I first heard about a movie in production titled “Warm Bodies“, which seemed to be my worst fears come to life. The final indignity of the Twilight phenomenon, as vapid watered down teen angst romance, having exhausted all other monstrous options, somehow intruded upon the zombie genre; the one place I had hoped against hope would remain sacrosanct.

If you don’t remember the post it’s because I felt I was inspired to enough swearing that I decided to host it on my other blog spot at the time and take the gloves off my inner language filter. Though looking at it in hindsight it’s not that bad, I suppose… if you don’t mind a few F-bombs and are curious, you can read it here. Or not. Short version is that I was horrified. I held out tenuous hope that the movie would be a comedy that would be aware of the ridiculousness of its premise, but circumstantial evidence such as an endorsement from Stephenie Meyer and IMDB classifying it under “drama” were not good signs.

If you look now, the IMDB entry is in the comedy section. And horror, and romance, but that’s fine… Love At First Bite has the same tags, and I’m an unabashed fan of that flick. Since it’s February 2013 debut, Warm Bodies has certainly failed to ignite any wave of tweens and twi-moms lusting after zombie dudes. That was also a good thing. A trusted friend of ours went to see it and declared to me that it definitely wasn’t taking itself seriously. Because of all this, sometime between then and now I breathed a sigh of relief and let go of any lingering rage. Then, while we were curled up sick last week, Dawn pointed out it was available on cable… so, what the heck, we gave it a go.

Now in my angry blog of yesteryear, I did bring up the movie Heathers, and how it had suffered from an ad campaign during its original release that made it seem a lot more airheaded than it turned out to be. I’m not quite prepared to elevate Warm Bodies to the hallowed place Heathers holds in my esteem (and if you’ve never seen Heathers, you really, really should), but by the time the credits rolled I not only didn’t hate it but found myself quite entertained… perhaps even a bit moved. I even found myself wondering if this is where Romero kept trying to go with his later movies, but could never quite get the tone right.

Yes, there’s still a zombie who falls in love with a human. And yes, she does eventually love him back. The “romance” is, thankfully, played for the creepy, blackly comic situation it should be for most of the film, and by the time it becomes anything more, well… certain important circumstances have developed. The story being told is a larger one than simple teen hook-ups, and if some of its particulars seem far-fetched or handwaved, I was willing to roll with them because the movie wasn’t taking itself too seriously. Considering the stuff I’ve been writing here, I’d be a bit hypocritical not to extend the same courtesy. Also, hell, even if liberties were taken in certain areas, I got to see a zombie eat someone’s brains by actually cracking the victim’s head open on the ground first, rather than magically biting through a human skull. This pleased me immensely.

It’s a weird sort of zombie movie, but it actually stands as an interesting addition to the genre, and if anything seems to satirize films like Twilight rather than try to imitate them.

Warm Bodies wasn’t the zombie apocalypse (heh) that I feared. In fact given the course of the film, I could almost call it an anti-apocalypse… but perhaps that gives away too much. I will instead merely repeat: I am happy to have been wrong.

Any time I don’t quite meet a commitment I feel I’ve made, I do feel bad. Right now, though, I feel bad mostly because I’ve been sick, and Dawn’s even worse… I try not to get overly informative about our personal lives, but fact is she got back from the doctor recently with a diagnosis of acute bronchitis and a 100 degree fever.

Untold story: she first started feeling awful early last week, and still forged through to get the previous comic done in between bouts of coughing and sneezing. We did not mention this, because, well, eh, what do we want, medals? There are people out there who put out a comic 5 or even 7 days a week, sometimes under even worse circumstances. Cry you a river, right?

Some readers are perfectly understanding that, especially with a comic being done for free, the creators might have an occasional life-related lapse. Some others are on the other extreme, unwilling to take any excuse for lateness or missed updates… sometimes so much so I fantasize even a post of “The author died yesterday” would be met with “Well they should have had a buffer. WHERE’S MY COMIC?!”

I can’t control those reactions. I also try to rarely resort to making excuses, but you know, this has just been one of those weeks. The script was done, but to get the artwork done on time would have required me pushing a very sick wife who really ought to be doing nothing more than lying down. Even so she’s voluntarily getting a sketch together for you all as I type this, but one that doesn’t rely so much on brainpower and getting certain specifics right. One that’s not going into the posterity of the storyline.

There’s the rub, right? If I’d insisted she would have done her best, because she really is a trooper like that… but it’s hard to give 100% if your body feels like it’s running at around 25%. Not too long ago, Mark Waid authored “An Open Letter to Young Freelancers“, and though it was mostly geared towards warning new aspiring comics professionals not to be taken advantage of, there was this one quote from it that really stuck with me:

“The quality of your work is all that matters.”

And so that I’m not accused of taking that out of context, this is the explanation he gives in that same paragraph.

“You’re being given an absurd deadline and you think you’re better off turning in crap than being late? We used to literally stand over the fax machine at the DC offices while Neil Gaiman sent in his Sandman scripts in batches of exactly one page. Not admirable, but twenty years on, no one remembers how slow Neil could be, just how phenomenal the stories were.”

Now I still believe that schedules have their place, and that if you ever end up in a situation where you seem to be making more excuses than comics, there might be a problem. But I had a choice this week. I could choose to insist on work out of a sick wife to meet our self-imposed deadline, work which almost certainly would have been compromised and lacking in much of anything resembling joy in its composition… or yield, make my apologies to our fans, and angle for something produced in a healthier state. Excuses, excuses. But after all, as the pages come out the time between them disappears. All that’s left in the end will be how well they tell the story.

“Timing is everything” is a phrase you usually hear applied to comedy, but it’s equally applicable to tragedy. Maybe even more so.

Consider the ending of Romeo & Juliet, if Romeo arrives 10 minutes later or Juliet awakens 10 minutes earlier. For that matter, there’s that message the Friar sends to Romeo telling him that Juliet is going to fake her death… the messenger gets delayed and those crucial words that could have changed everything are never read.

My most recent poll asks the question, “Do you think Muriel would have left peacefully if Zeke had been handed over?” Not one person so far has given an assured Yes, but at least a handful voted that it was a possibility as long as things weren’t allowed to escalate the way they did. Unfortunately, people in possession of the information that could have changed the situation just didn’t know that it mattered, or didn’t get to convey it in time.

There’s a TV Trope that sort of covers these situations, called Poor Communication Kills. I say ‘sort of’ because the way the trope is defined heavily weighs on the side of inexplicable and out of character lack of communication employed by a writer in order for a plot to proceed. That’s (hopefully) not what I’ve put together in our last arc… I set the locations, timing, and various egos (or lack thereof) up in such a way that a feasible tragedy could occur. Yes, it’s possible that communication could have set it right, but that’s the truth of most tragedies, including ones that take place in real life. Shakespeare knew that well, as did the Greeks (though those dramatists were helped out by their cultural audience being preconditioned to the idea of unavoidable fates). The trick, then, is to arrange the elements so that the characters have palatable reasons to not speak, or speak but not be listened to. Information that could defuse the issue arrives too late, or never at all… but for dramatic reasons it’s usually the former, so that the survivors know along with the audience that things have taken a terrible turn. And for my money, it’s even worse(better?) for us in the modern era where we feel fate is something that isn’t predestined and wonder on those small things that could have led to a happy ending instead. But so long as the characters’ actions feel right, and the timing is right (if also oh-so-wrong), then the tale should feel solid, no matter its conclusion.