Category: Writer’s Blog

There’s a slang phrase you don’t really hear anymore, so much so I’m pretty sure most people have forgotten its meaning: “From hunger”. In fact the last time I can recall hearing it recently wasn’t technically recent, since it was a line of dialogue from the 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard. In that film, a potential movie script is rejected by its reader as being “from hunger”. Modern audiences have to guess at that from its context… or you could do a quick search and find this explanation from The Free Dictionary: “very mediocre; acceptable only when nothing else is available”. The suggested etymology is that of the idea of food you would only choose to eat if you had no real other choice, save starvation.

So I watched The Hunger Games. And before you draw too many conclusions from the first paragraph: I liked it. It’s not a new idea; but then, what really is? The writers of the Book of Ecclesiastes of The Bible were already considering the well of human imagination to have run dry almost 3000 years ago, and they certainly weren’t referring to the prior existence of Battle Royale. The author of Hunger Games is on record as saying she never heard of Battle Royale until she submitted her manuscript for publication, and you know what? I believe her. If you wanted to claim rip-off you could point both properties to The Running Man, but I’m sure The Running Man has its own parallel ancestry to deal with. This is why you can’t copyright ideas, only the specific way those ideas are executed. And that’s also how you have to judge a work… it helps of course if the premise isn’t one that’s been done to death in recent memory, but even an idea which seems like a true breath of fresh air to the audience of the day still has to succeed as a story.

We retell stories because our memories aren’t perfect, even in this day and age where even our humblest drunken ramblings are recorded for posterity. We also retell them because, while certain themes and types of stories remain universal, the way it’s delivered to us changes, and that can matter more than we perhaps like to admit. Beethoven and Trent Reznor both use the same 12 note scale to make music, but although Reznor does have a classically trained background, his industrial, computer-assisted compositions spoke a lot more viscerally to my teenaged self.

I realize I still haven’t said much about Hunger Games itself, beyond saying I liked it. I did see a lot of Running Man in its presentation, which brought me to the curious realization that unlike many other sci-fi movies of my youth (Total Recall, Robocop) it hasn’t been remade. Maybe now it doesn’t need to be? I think I can happily christen Hunger Games as a Running Man for the millenial generation, and if I had a teenage daughter I’d much prefer she be a fan of it than Twilight. Jennifer Lawrence is a fine young actress and Katniss as a character spanks Bella Swan on pretty much all counts.

Lest this sound like faint praise, it’s not. I’m of course predisposed towards post-apocalyptic settings with an overbearing media aspect, and there were many fine moments and places where I thought the director made some ambitious choices. Not all of them work, but some do, and the ambition is to be appreciated in a time when a lot of what’s coming out of Hollywood has a mucky sameness to it, particularly in action movies. Hell I can’t even remember an instance of “shakycam”, and for that I am *profoundly* grateful.

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s definitely worth a watch. Is it mind blowing? No. Is it a classic for the ages? No. But it at least engages your brain a bit, looks pretty, and it can’t be overstated that a young woman is there as the competent, complicated, and (most importantly) non-fetishized action hero, even though that’s not the central message. It can’t help but be a message because we just have so few of those in our larger mass media, but that’s perhaps a discussion for another day.

In the meantime, I’ll just sum up by saying that from hunger, Hunger Games is not.

Zombie Ranch is a comic where I constantly wrestle with issues of presentation, due to its “show-within-a-show” nature. For instance, should every image presented be considered something that was filmed?

The revelation that there are hidden cameras about allows that to be possible… but while I’ve had that twist in my plans for quite awhile, I’ll be honest that I didn’t (and don’t) feel it necessary to constrain Dawn to treating everything primarily like a camera shot.  You may have noticed that even the panels we’ve done that are meant to represent raw, live footage are not uniform in shape, and may or may not have a ‘CAMERA 3’ slapped on them. Of course we can fudge that and say the futuristic camera technology allows changing the shape of the lens, but the real reason is first and foremost an aesthetic one. Every panel uniform, with “TV Lines”? That’d get old, fast.

Then again, sometimes I do want to have panels happening from an obvious camera perspective.  Sometimes we have “media breaks” showing aspects of the larger world. Sometimes we have those ‘A Moment With…’ segments where previously unseen footage intrudes briefly upon the present, or (as was the case near the start of Episode 2) even runs in tandem with the present as a meta-commentary. Crazy stuff, man.

The saving grace here (in my head, at least) is that one of my themes for the comic is regarding the blurring of lines that “reality television” inflicts on its subjects. What’s real? What’s edited? Did these events actually happen in the order we’re seeing them? How much of these peoples’ lives is on the cutting room floor (so to speak), and what changes when those missing bits are picked up and revealed? How do people act with a camera in their face? How do they act when they think one’s not there? And what does it say when even peeks into the secret back rooms of the show’s producers seem to be staged for dramatic effect?

Mind you my goal isn’t to hit anyone repeatedly over the head with all these questions, including myself and Dawn. This in fact is one of the reasons I rewrote the Exec’s speech last week, since he started spouting off a little too much about metaphysical things, when the focus of the story should remain grounded on the trials and tribulations of one Susannah Zane and her compadres. We always return sooner or later to the Z Ranch, and the happenings there continue on without much regard to the structural antics of some egghead writer and his crazy artist wife.

So when I reflect upon all this, I am content to continue to let the lens (or lack of lens) through which we show the story alter as needed, and by doing so hopefully weave its own tale without sidetracking the main one.

Zombie Ranch is a comic about cowpokes who wrangle zombies for profit. Never let us tell you different.

We have a lot more fun showing you instead.

For those unfamiliar with the slangy term in the title, think of a dial such as you might have on a stove or an electric blanket. As you turn it the heat gets more and more intense, until it might very well be too much for the current circumstances. So you “dial it back” until proper temperature is achieved.

With the kitchen stove in my home, dialing back is often a necessity since the way the burners light is by turning the dial to its maximum setting. High heat is how it always begins, with a quick, unrefined motion. It’s necessary to get started. But in most cases, after that needs to come some more careful adjustments so dinner doesn’t end up a burned, unpalatable mess.

So it is with fiction writing. The comparison isn’t perfect as not every scene is going to be “high heat”, but it’s rare that a first draft isn’t that unrefined beginning, full of energy but lacking in control. A good case in point would be this week’s page, where the dialogue in its final form is greatly reduced and altered  from my original. It sounded great in my head. It even looked great when I got it on paper (or, well, word processor)– it was a continuation of the speech started in comic 179, stuffed full of the themes and big ideas I like to think I have bubbling beneath the surface of the comic, finally getting another chance to express themselves through my “big picture”, erudite executive as opposed to being constrained by the work-a-day, practical outlooks of my main cast.

It flowed. It was poetic.

And somehow, it was way, way too much.

Thinking back I suppose I felt a strange restlessness even at the time of writing. The page before where the executive began his speech seemed much like it, but where that one worked, this one was somehow problematic. I couldn’t pin that feeling down until one day I experienced one of those weird moments I’ve talked about before. I don’t truly believe fictional characters of my creation have a life of their own, but they do represent some parallel space in my head that’s allowed to give occasional input on the big picture of the story, like an actor/director sort of relationship. In this case, I narrowed down my restless feeling to where I could imagine my mysterious executive calling me in for a chat:

“Now listen, I’ve liked the lines you’ve written for me in the past, but this… this is overdoing it. I’ve dropped enough hints that the audience should be able to infer some of my worldview and motivations without having everything shoved down their throats. Even though I’m technically talking to myself, you made me subtler than that, didn’t you?”

Goddamn if he wasn’t right. To borrow one of the gambling metaphors he’s so fond of… he’s not going to lay all his cards on the table right now, even for us. Well, technically I can see his hand, but the point is I needed to resist blabbing about it too much. That would ruin the game. Also, it made me remember that it would be best to keep any metaphyscial murmurings on point, or for story purposes I’d be edging entirely too close to a boring character filibuster, or even a dreaded author filibuster born of being too damn excited with my own ideas.

I still believed the scene itself was good, and would make for the nice reveal and the segue back to the ranch I wanted, but I mercilessly hacked away a lot of my pretty, pretty prose until that parallel portion of my brain nodded, took a thoughtful drag off his cigar and declared, “I can work with that.” It’s still got some ideas in there, delivered in the practiced rhythms of a smart man who has thought deeply about what he’s doing and why… but it’s far more economical, and in keeping with the character is hiding away at least as much as it reveals.

I dialed things back, hopefully to that point where the story simmers with a promise of tasty things to come, rather than wrinkling noses with an uncontrolled burn. We’ll see how it cooks up.

So this last week, I addressed an odd quirk in my movie experiences regarding the Rambo franchise. Namely, that while I have over the years watched Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rambo III, and even the more recent (just plain) Rambo, I never had viewed the original First Blood. I knew the gist of it: Sylvester Stallone’s Vietnam vet character freaks out after mistreatment by corrupt small town law enforcement and a big manhunt ensues… but since John Rambo turns out to be a green beret, who is hunting whom?

I don’t know quite what I was expecting. The sequels aren’t exactly thought provoking, although they’re certainly entertaining as long as you’re in it for the gunfire and the explosions. I wondered if First Blood would have anything different on the table, before all the formulaic violence was established and John Rambo became more of a jingoistic cartoon (and I do mean that literally).

So here’s the thing: the climax of First Blood does indulge itself in the sort of over-the-top, almost laughable action that came to define the franchise, as John Rambo wields an M60 from the hip to blow up cars and gas stations. Prior to that, though, it’s surprisingly low key. Rambo’s opponents aren’t trained soldiers, and the script respects that… even the National Guardsmen are “weekend warrior” types who have never really been shot at and react appropriately when it happens (ducking for cover and being very reluctant to move from it). The actual body count is incredibly low, and I’ve said before that when you keep it that way it makes each actual death mean more. First Blood could in fact be said to have only one “confirmed kill”, and it’s more of a tragic accident than anything, born out of desperation on one side and the darkness of human ego on the other.

Now there’s a police car later on which is inexplicably made of explodium and thus it’s difficult to imagine the cops inside surviving its crash, but that moment happens to be my dividing line between all that goes before and the aforementioned M60 rampage, the moment where the movie goes somewhere entirely different (and less interesting to me because I’ve seen it before).

But up until that division, there is this fascinating film of a situation spiraling out of control despite efforts on both sides to defuse it. Maybe in that sense the climax isn’t totally out of place, because as a small town goes up in flames you remind yourself every last bit of this happened because the Sheriff didn’t want a “drifter” stopping for a bite to eat in his city limits. On the other hand, calling the Sheriff corrupt might be simplifying the issue, because there’s also a moment where a different John Rambo swallows his pride and moves on after the Sheriff drops him off (closer, it must be said, to his intended destination). This John Rambo turns around and comes back.

Both decisions are made out of pride and perfectly justified from the points of view of the characters involved, but from these small beginnings, these nothings, comes catastrophe. Stallone often gets short shrift as an actor, but every time someone grabs at John Rambo you can see the reflex for him to defend himself barely held in check, even as his expression remains numb… the symptoms of PTSD in action back when that was barely recognized as a thing. Of course, eventually it becomes too much and the freakout begins, but even then once a man lies dead there’s a sad moment where he tries to turn himself in, horrified at what’s happened. But a stray(?) trigger pull ends any hope of things being resolved. The bullets whine around him, cutting his cheek as he flees. First blood is drawn, and that’s when Rambo really starts getting mean.

Brian Dennehy turns in a great performance as the Sheriff as well. He’s nominally the villain, but if you walk in his shoes, with what he knows, well, he’s probably thinking he’s the hero. He doesn’t seem like a bad guy, or a corrupt one. In fact, he and most of his deputies seem like decent enough sorts in their daily lives. But his all-too-human ego won’t let him rest once things start escalating. There are many people who just really end up hating him, but I suppose I didn’t really, I just felt sad for everyone. I mean, heck, I wrote Muriel as someone convinced she was the hero as well, and her actions were much less sympathetic.

So, yeah, that first arc of Zombie Ranch I wrote was sort of my own study of a catastrophe that could have been avoided (or at least minimized) but for circumstance and ego, even with an unseen hand nudging things along. That’s probably why I’m a sucker right now for fiction that does similar things.

Who drew first blood? When the dust settles and the sun rises on the wreckage, the most tragic truth is that destruction doesn’t care about human justifications. But time and time again, we find ourselves unable to just walk away.

I decided to return back to physics Professor Peter Beckmann’s office …

“ Can science fiction be used to teach science? ” I inquired.

“Of course, ” he replied. “Good science fiction looks at all rules of reality, the rules of physics, and breaks [one] rule.”

(From a 2012 essay at http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/12270)

Professor Peter Beckmann (not, I hope, to be confused with Dr. Peter Venkman) would consider me a bad man. Or at least a writer of bad science fiction, assuming he considered Zombie Ranch to be a work of science fiction at all. There’s at least one other essay out there declaring that any work containing creatures like werewolves, vampires, and zombies is automaticallly disqualified from being science fiction, no matter what rationalizations might be attempted by the author. Those sorts of things just ain’t good science, so they ain’t good science fiction.

So from some perspectives, any zombie story is already deep in fantasyland from the moment the dead walk, even if that happens to be the “one rule” being broken. But if Beckmann were to accept the risen dead, he would still be aghast because alongside them I included camera drones that defy gravity for no discernable reason.

There are aspects of this vision of a Weird New West that are recognizable as things that already exist or seem like they’re just around the corner from existing, but anti-gravity is actually a pretty big deal, at least based on our current knowledge.  There are effects that mimic something like it, but our cambot design doesn’t have the triangular configuration of an Ionocraft, nor does it have the airflow required to say it’s using conventional propellers. If it did, I could show people this video and be done with it (SUGGESTION: Watch that video regardless, it’s awesome).

Michio Kaku (author of Physics of the Impossible) has this to say on the subject of antigravity:

In science fiction, force fields have another purpose besides deflecting ray-gun blasts, and that is to serve as a platform to defy gravity. In the movie Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox rides a “hover board,” which resembles a skateboard except that it floats over the street. Such an antigravity device is impossible given the laws of physics as we know them today (as we will see in Chapter 10). But magnetically enhanced hover boards and hover cars could become a reality in the future, giving us the ability to levitate large objects at will. In the future, if “room temperature superconductors” become a reality, one might be able to levitate objects using the power of magnetic force fields.

Well there you go, boom! My brilliant scientists invented a room temperature superconductor.

“Not so fast there, Clint,” said a little voice in the back of my mind.

See, any time you start bringing in “real world” concepts of how a tech could operate, you invite the possibility that you’re going to cleverly explain yourself right into a corner, especially if you only have a layman’s understanding of the concepts in question. J.J. Abrams often seems to fall into this trap. People ask why it annoys me (and others) that the newest Star Trek movie has a “cold fusion bomb” that freezes a volcano, when Star Trek is already chock full of technobabble and impossibilities. Well that’s just it, if they’d called it a “thermonomic inversion bomb” it wouldn’t really have any real world benchmark from which the audience can complain it’s inaccurate. In a similar way, the opening concept behind his TV show Revolution said all electricity was permanently gone from Earth because of an EMP, and eventually in Season Two they had to retcon that and make something up with nanites because people kept pointing out that a) EMPs don’t work that way, and b) removing “all electricity” means biological life and many important chemical reactions wouldn’t function, as opposed to just making your iPhone a brick. The funny thing is, Abrams and his co-writer didn’t really care about all this, they just wanted to make a show based on the cool image in their heads of two dudes swordfighting in front of a Starbucks… but hitching their premise to an actual, studied scientific phenomenon weighed it down more than if they’d just left it all completely vague and got on with what was important to them (swordfights).

I’m not a dumb guy, but I like to think I’m smart enough to remember that I don’t have an advanced degree in physics, and moreover, that one or more of my readers might. If I went down the road of magnets, then I would be dealing with the fact that (no matter what the Insane Clown Posse might think) there are people out there who understand how magnets work.

I could pretend that I had some deeper scientific purpose and thought to including floating cameras on the very first page of Zombie Ranch, but the plain truth is it’s there for storytelling. The zombies are already arguably spoilered by the title, but the cambot serves to introduce that there’s other diversions from what a reader might expect. It steps (hovers?) right up and announces in not so many words that there will be a technological theme behind these proceedings, a media theme… and more than just that, the remoteness of the human operator punches up the sense of disconnect already evident in modern reality TV between cameraperson and subject.

It also just looks cool. And fortunately, writers in my situation have had a solution to this dilemma for many years. Where an explanation is not explicitly required for the story, we don’t try to explain. We take refuge in the wonderful, fantastical substance known as Phlebotinum, the stuff dreams are made of (or at least, suspension of disbelief). Even in these past few comics where I’ve turned a self-reflective lens upon the origins of the cambot, the intent is not to explain why it works, so much as show why its existence was (and is) important to the inhabitants of this world.

Can science fiction be used to teach science? Sure. But I’m here first and foremost to entertain. Perhaps in some definitions that disqualifies this story from being science fiction. I’m all right with that if so. Phlebotinum is a bit of a “get out of science free” card, but it still should be handled with care, and if the amount of thought I put into all this (and the amount of blabbering in this blog entry) is any indication, I’m using appropriate precautions. You don’t have to ignore the Phlebotinum behind the curtain, but sometimes it’s best to just let the wizard do his thing and move right along.

Last week, courtesy of a Facebook acquaintance, I came across this image of someone’s Tumblr where some interesting conversation took place regarding humanity: http://imgur.com/gallery/hINj1xf

Now because that happens to be a reposted image, I have no idea what the original Tumblr page was. I don’t even know if it’s a page that discusses topics related to science fiction or if this represented a fascinating (but fleeting) tangent. Thus, I apologize profusely to anyone involved who I’m quoting here but can’t properly credit.

If you didn’t check out the link, the gist of it was a commenter by the handle of “bogleech” lamenting how humans are so often given short shrift when it comes to fantasy and science fiction, treated as “boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.” S/he wants to see “a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.”

Now there are certainly science fiction settings out there that do just that, but the more interesting part of the conversation is everyone shifting out of the subjective viewpoint and bringing up all the ways in which your bog standard human actually does represent a fairly terrifying beast, even to the sorts of animals we tend to fear (lions and tigers and bears, oh my!)… even without the benefits of modern technology.

It makes sense if you think about it… we didn’t always have guns and cars, or even domesticated riding animals. We must have had something going for us, right? The human brain’s ability to reason is usually put up as the answer, and it’s a good one, but this particular response was also quite interesting from a pure physical perspective:

“More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness – but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator… Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you – and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.”

Right in the middle of all this is a concept I hadn’t really come across before: pursuit predation. That’s a pretty terrifying thought, isn’t it? A tireless hunter that will find you anywhere you go, and never seems to sleep? I mean, anyone who’s seen The Terminator knows it is. Hell, anyone who watched the old Pepe Le Pew cartoons saw the same concept played for laughs, but the cat he pursued was never laughing.

But the Terminator was out purely to kill, and Le Pew’s ultimate goal was (at least his idea of) love. When ancient man picked up his spear and started trotting after a gazelle, his motive tended to be dinner.

So say you’re that gazelle. This weird two-legged thing after you… it’s so slow. I mean, you outrun cheetas on a daily basis, and this  joke of a creature thinks it can catch you? In seconds flat, you’ve left it in the dust. A bit winded after your exertions, you stop to rest.

And then, suddenly, it shows up again. And you run again.

But it just. Keeps. Coming.

Implacable. Seemingly tireless. Hungry. More often than not, there be an entire swarm of them closing in. And when they catch you, they will surround you, tear you to shreds and feed.

If animals had the concept of a zombie apocalypse, ancient man would have easily fit the bill. It gets even funkier when you consider that some recent research indicates ancient man’s arrival in their territory may have represented an extinction event for many species.

I believe one of man’s primal fears (that has passed down to us) is not just fear of sharp teeth or fear of the dark, but a more complicated fear of being rendered obsolete. That someone or something out there will prove to be better and more efficient at an aspect of the world we considered ourselves masters of. The spectre of jealousy may, in fact, be rooted in this fear, as we find our guts turning over with unease at the thought that someone has talents or possessions we view as superior to our own.

But beyond that, consider how many monster movies revolve around the idea of a creature that is not only stronger, faster, and bigger than us, but somehow smarter than us as well. Our one historical (and prehistorical) trump card, gone. Every time we hear about a new advance in robotics or genetic engineering, our brains start concocting apocalyptic scenarios where we create something capable of replacing us, because it becomes everything we are except moreso. Evolutionarily speaking, we no longer have a niche to fill, and must give way to the superior species.

Even within our own human tribes, this sort of thing happens all the time. I think of how, in the American viewpoint of the 1980s, the super-efficient, tireless population of Japan were going to take over everything. They had grabbed all of our technology and not only replicated it, but were doing it better. For God(and Apple Pie)’s sake, they were doing Capitalism (which I sometimes still have a feeling a good portion of my countrymen think we invented) better! I don’t think it was until the Nikkei stock market crash in 1990 before the zeitgeist calmed down and admitted that, okay, maybe envisioning a society stuffed full of ruthless economic superpredators wasn’t all that rational after all.

Not in the real world, anyhow. In science fiction and fantasy we get to play with all sorts of “what-if” scenarios, and in all my rambling, I don’t want to forget the shambling. Pursuit predation is a real thing, and I believe it’s a core element of why slow zombies can be just as frightening as the more modern runners and leapers. It’s yet another dark mirror of ourselves. This is how we once hunted, and now, something has come along that is hunting us in the same way, and doing so more implacably, more tirelessly, and more hungrily than we ever could. Regardless of whether they catch us in the short run, they have supplanted us in our niche, and because of that we would have that uneasy feeling that we’re staring down the barrel of our extinction.

Well, here we are, August 21st, and the storyline of Zombie Ranch is continuing as promised. I have to admit, it was nice to be able to take a breather after all the intensity of wrapping up the first arc. Oh sure, we’ve had breaks here and there where holidays and conventions cropped up, but we’ve never just “closed the shop” for an entire month. I studiously avoided using the term “hiatus“, but that’s pretty much what it was.

I suppose I liked referring to it as our “Summer Vacation” rather than a hiatus because I felt like hearing hiatus in regards to a webcomic had an unfortunate connotation of burnout, or at least of creators disappearing on their fans, abandoning the comic (perhaps forever) with nary a word of explanation. We intended to return. We intended to continue. And because of that, we set a specific date and, hopefully, made people aware of it.

Also I didn’t go completely off the grid, continuing to blog and comment and otherwise communicate (as Dawn also occasionally did). I would have done this even if we’d seen a major slump in readership… but surprisingly, that didn’t occur, even with August being the cruelest month. In the poll I left up (in part as a marker with the August 21st date) a majority of respondents indicated they’d continue checking by on Wednesdays to see the guest posts, rather than just coming back in a month.

I admit I had a tiny bit of worry that taking time off would be disastrous, but so far that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s possible everyone who couldn’t handle the weekly schedule (with occasional filler) already clicked off into the wild blue yonder a long time ago, so we’re left with a core that doesn’t really care if they get their next installment in one week or four, as long as they’re assured it’s still coming. Mind you that doesn’t mean we take it as license to start doing one story update a month, but it’s gratifying to know that we’re not so fragile an operation that a few weeks of filler updates means disaster.

My theory was always that readers ultimately just don’t want to be in the dark about what’s happening. So if you miss an update as a creator, you ought to say why at that time, or at least check in at the earliest opportunity. Better yet, if you know ahead of time you’re going to have to vary your usual schedule, you can give warnings, as I did in the weeks leading up to the end of Episode 7.  Will everyone read those warnings? Maybe not, but at least you tried. At least if they get curious/worried about what’s happening and start rummaging about, they have something to find other than just a digital equivalent of the Mary Celeste. I’ve seen my share of “ghost ships” out there in webcomic land, and it’s never pretty.

I definitely deal with my share of people who are (with varying degrees of politeness or rudeness) impatient for the next update, but I also feel like there are a great number of webcomic readers out there who have more patience and more loyalty towards the stories they enjoy than they are often given credit for, and it’s only respectful to acknowledge that by staying in touch. If (heaven forbid) you have to stop altogether, have the courage to let them know that so everyone can move on. If your hiatus has no set end (your mother is gravely ill and you need to focus on taking care of her), that should also be communicated, perhaps with an offering of a mailing list signup or something similar so you can announce when things get better. And if you do have a definite return date, announce it before you head out. I’m happy we’ve only had to do the last of those three so far, and that we’ve returned as promised.

That said, it *is* technically still August. Time to see how the Grand Re-Opening goes…

Last week I wrote about canon, the more or less “official doctrine” surrounding a fictional property. But since then, I’ve been thinking how even the most exhaustively detailed creations will leave holes that the author or authors have failed to fill, or perhaps just haven’t gotten around to communicating yet.

I’ll come right out and say the world of Zombie Ranch is not one I would claim as exhaustively detailed, although it is more detailed than I’ve put forth so far in the comic and even the FAQ. Some of it I could arguably say has been presented without me coming right out and saying it… for instance, can our version of zombies climb? The answer to that should be reasonably apparent by now despite no narration or character explicitly stating the answer. In other cases the answer has been explicitly stated in the comic but not the FAQ, which sometimes leads to people forgetting details like that Popcorn’s bite won’t cause zombification in a person. Would it cause zombification in another horse? Ah, now that’s more interesting, but also not immediately relevant to my story, and so I’ve felt no pressing need to go into the topic.

Which of course, could be an issue should someone out there ever be sufficiently inspired by the setting to attempt some sort of fan fiction. As far as I know none such exists yet, but wherever legitimate gaps in a sufficiently popular canon occur, “Fanon“ will inevitably seek to fill the void. Fanon is, as you might guess, any attempts by a given work’s audience to expand upon a fictional setting, regardless of how simple or complicated those expansions might become. An interesting fact about the Star Wars property is that pretty much anything aside from the movies was always considered non-canon, meaning Lucas licensed out dozens of novels without considering himself bound by anything written in them. The characters, settings, and stories of the EU, or “Extended Universe”, may be beloved by millions of people, but don’t expect Mara Jade or Grand Admiral Thrawn to show up in Episode VII. Not to say those stories are bad, but they still exist in a state of being no more than legalized and highly polished fanfic, and I don’t expect J.J. Abrams feels any more obligation to pay attention to EU material than Lucas did.

Mind you, not every property has such a draconian attitude towards contributions from outside the “official” source. Some welcome them, as evidenced by the fact that there is such a thing as Ascended Fanon. Even my Star Wars strangeness above contains an example because Timothy Zahn, who wrote those EU novels with Thrawn and Mara Jade, was the first man who named the capitol planet of the Empire (and formerly the Republic) as Coruscant.

Two weeks ago our longtime fan Jacky Morris provided us with some new fan art, and I mentioned that way back before we started the comic Dawn had called for some submissions based on nothing more than the vague premise of our setting as I had explained it so far to her. Jacky made a couple of fictional ads based on that, as still shown here and here, and it’s hard to argue she got any details wrong since back then there were precious few details at all. She was working with what she’d been told, which was what Dawn had been told, and had some fun running with it. Did I feel bound to the existence of a Warzone Warehouse Unlimited, located off the second exit of Zombie City on the way to the Zombie Ranch? No, that didn’t really work with what was planned. On the other hand, ZOM CON? Well, if you’ve read the comic you know what eventually happened with that, even if it was just a cameo appearance. Its existence (in name, at least) is now canon, because you know, yeah, why couldn’t there be a hyped up trade show for zombie-related professions? Fit right into our themes, and gave us a nice backdrop for “Wild” Will’s first debut.

I have been thinking about expanding the FAQ a bit though, truth be told. I mean, did you guys know that in this world only mammals can become zombies? Possibly not, because I’ve never actually stated it and it’s also not something I would expect someone to assume. We’ve never shown a zombie that wasn’t a former mammal, but how angry could I honestly get at anyone who might (theoretically) write a piece of fanfic where they had a zombie crow or zombie gila monster? Hell, I don’t even get angry at the people who are somehow convinced Zane and co. are raising their zombies as a food source, and *that* is explicitly refuted at least by the mid-point of Episode 3, as well as the FAQ. I feel entirely more forgiving towards someone who (like Jacky in the early days) is inspired and making honest guesses based on what little they know. And hey, even though I honestly do have a lot of answers for those spaces between, it’s a big, big world, so I always love hearing your thoughts when it fires your imaginations. Who knows? Some of them may continue to inspire us in turn.

No, the title isn’t a typo, just another of my puns. Ever heard the old joke “Hark! I hear the cannon’s roar!” ? There’s a version of it here if you want to look, but I think I first remember hearing it from my dad.

Basically, an actor gets one of those “spear carrier” extra parts in a play where he has one and only one line that he’s responsible for saying: “Hark! I hear the cannon’s roar!” Nonetheless, he’s so excited that he rehearses and rehearses for his one big moment on the stage. The moment of truth finally comes and his cue sounds in the form of the booming gun, and he shouts out…

“What the HELL was that?!”

Call it a pre-Internet version of the You Had One Job meme. Now a writer of fiction might seem like they have one job, but it sure feels more complicated than that by the time you’ve (hopefully) put together some coherent characters and told a coherent story, and especially if you happened to be doing some worldbuilding along the way. As a byproduct you have now established a canon, a “Word of God” of sorts instructing what is and isn’t part of your little corner of reality… appropriate enough I suppose since the term was first used in regards to Biblical scripture.

Once a canon gets rolling, it can make quite a roar, and if violated, the contradictions can certainly lead to shouts of “What the HELL was that?!” After all, the whole point of canon is to lay the groundwork for continuity, and without continuity your story is going to just be a random mess. It’s a frustrating situation that often crops up in longstanding properties where multiple authors are involved and no single creator is guiding the direction (or maybe there was, but now they’ve retired, been fired, or died).

But it can happen even in a single author situation with the original creator. Or someone who gets it in their head that they were a single author, like the utter trainwreck that happened with the Star Wars prequels.  Prequels as a rule are already much rougher to work with in a canon sense because the butterfly effect of everything that happens in them has to be considered as being able to logically blossom into a specific present that we’ve already experienced. There’s a lot to think about and be careful with, both for your sake and the sake of your fans. It’s not easy. The quicker, easier path would be to just ignore everything inconvenient and answer anyone who complains with, “I made these rules, so I get to break them. End of story”.

I feel queasy at the thought of using that justification myself, so I find it very frustrating when another author does it in a cavalier way. The Twilight series had another example where Stephenie Meyer made a plot point of saying newly made vampires are dangerously out of control, and then a certain newly made vampire is fine and perfect from the get go because… well… it’s never really explained. It’s just done, because that’s what she wanted to write.

I mean, not to say there aren’t authors/creators who I have much more respect for that have done such things. There’s the concept of Broad Strokes. There’s the ever looming fear that this has already happened in my own work, or inevitably will in the future as canon piles atop canon and one day I’ll find I’ve written myself into a prison whose only escape will be me just snapping my fingers and causing the bars to become spaghetti. What the HELL was that?!

But gah, I do try, even with the challenge of Dawn occasionally throwing some continuity curveball into the artwork which she’s fine and dandy with but I feel a compulsive need to justify, even if I may be the only person who ever notices. I do get a certain thrill out of getting called to task in the comments at times if it happens to be on a subject that I’ve thought through, even if my answers have to remain cryptic for the time being. For one thing, being called to task at all at least indicates people out there are paying attention and having some investment in the story. If I ever did succeed to a much bigger audience, perhaps everything would blur and I’d eventually just get tired of fielding the same complaints or questions over and over, and I’d start seeing the fans as more obstacles and adversaries than fellow travelers, and perhaps even reach that breaking point where I just start messing with things because I can and damn your ungrateful hides.

For now, I still feel like I call myself to task first and foremost… and while I work to build upon what’s already established for Zombie Ranch, typing up the pages to come, I still hearken to hear that canon’s roar.

A couple of weeks ago I penned a piece on what I felt were my basics in crafting a good character. But what exactly is a good character? Or a strong character? Aren’t these adjectives bringing connotations with them that apply unnecessary baggage to the concept? Villains can be good characters. Weaklings can be strong characters. Here we are, writers who make a living (or at least make a studied hobby) of expressing ourselves through words, and yet after all this time, what the hell, exactly, are we even talking about?

I suppose at the core there’s that idea I touched on of a character being somehow relatable to the audience. There’s some facet we recognize in ourselves or in others of our experience that we can cling onto, core elements and archetypes of the human condition. Yes, I just used the phrase “the human condition” unironically, feel free to virtually punch me in the face. Ow. Virtual pain. But listen, it’s not that far removed a concept from when I was studying acting. As an actor your task is bringing a character written by someone else to a semblance of life, but no one requires you to have personal experience of, say, murdering someone, much less committing suicide. Putting a successful suicide on your resume seems like something that would be a detriment to your career, at least in this world.

So you have to fudge things. To a certain extent personal experience may help with authenticity, but more often than not, you’re going to be searching within yourself for the part of your own experience that’s closest to the situation. You find that angry part of you, that scared part, that grieving part, and coax it forwards. As weird as it sounds, you have methods like remembering the shattering grief you felt when your favorite pet died and using that as the gateway to the tears you’ll sob every night as your Lear staggers under the weight of his dear Cordelia’s corpse.

And if you do it right, the audience will connect with that. Again the chances are that most of them wouldn’t have the personal experience of losing a child, especially under such horrible circumstances, but they can empathize with the situation. In fact it’s exactly this sort of empathy which drags us into stories and makes us crave them, safely experiencing triumphs and tragedies through a vicarious vector.

I once compared writing to being a director wrangling (at times ornery) actors through the story. But another truth is that ultimately, you represent both director and actor, and the “strength” of your characters will depend at least in part on your ability to relate to them. And through them.

If you’ve never heard the term “Con Crud” before this post, I shall educate you. If you’ve never experienced Con Crud, I shall envy you, because I am currently deep in its throes and very thankful we don’t have to produce a comic this week.

The easiest way to avoid ever experiencing Con Crud is to never attend a comic convention, something I believe was actually true for several of you last time I asked about such things. Of course, if you have the time and money and aren’t afraid of a crowd, I still do highly recommend the convention experience, but there’s no denying the danger any time you get a whole bunch of people together from all over the place. Family get-togethers for holidays are prime breeding grounds for disease, and that’s usually not more than a few dozen folks. A successful convention means jostling around with hundreds if not thousands of strangers.

And then there’s San Diego Comic Con, which we just got back from. “Successful” is not the right word. “Nerdi Gras”, perhaps. “Conageddon”. I’d say getting out of SDCC without any sort of communicable illness hitching a ride is a matter not only of prevention but just plain luck. My dice came up short this time, no matter how many paper towels I used to open the doors of public restrooms (and I did use plenty). You will touch and be touched, multiple times. You will be jostled. In the case of some people, you will be deliberately groped, and good luck figuring out which one of the throng pressing behind you was responsible.

And yet, people will pay $700 to a scalper on Craigslist they’ve never met, just for a chance to get in those oh-so crowded doors. Don’t get me wrong, I understand. I put up with all of it, every year, because a) we’re lucky enough to be able to get passes, and b) it’s still possible to have quite a bit of fun, no matter what disgruntled veterans might tell you.

But yeah, get over 125,000 people in one spot, from all over the globe, and the bacteria and viruses do have their field day, especially when you consider the exhaustion four or five days of conventioneering wreaks on your immune system. The one sort of good thing about Con Crud is it doesn’t tend to hit fully until you get home, so you still get to enjoy yourself while you’re there… Dawn manages to specialize in getting sick or injured just before a convention, and I know which sort I would prefer. It’s just not much comfort as I curl on the couch with orange juice, soda crackers, and the gentle heat of an L.A. July.

Speaking of which, gonna get back to that now. Hopefully next week I can sneeze up some deeper thoughts instead of just congestion.

This link may not work for you without an InkOutbreak account, but basically Savannah Houston-McIntyre, writer of the webcomic Amya, was opening a discussion on the forums about creating strong, iconic, and most of all relatable characters, and the techniques people use for doing so.

I got about seven thick paragraphs into my response before figuring it would be better for everyone if I just made it a blog entry, like the tumblr post she made that inspired her to ask around. So here it is.

When first putting together Zombie Ranch I wanted a lot of classic Western fiction influence, so I tended to start a certain archetypal template and then flesh things out from there. For example, when coming up with our lead’s mannerisms and attitudes, I took a lot of inspiration from the classic cowboy roles of John Wayne. For a drifter character of uncertain morals, I couldn’t have asked for a better model than Eli Wallach’s portrayal of Tuco from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.

That gave me a headstart on being iconic, but icons will only take you so far if there’s nothing beyond the surface. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter how much back story you have for a character if you can’t communicate it effectively to your readers, which includes having the restraint to *not* communicate the back story if it’s not appropriate for the narrative. Han Solo didn’t sit down at the Mos Eisley table and immediately regale Luke and Ben about his days as a Lieutenant in the Imperial Navy… it wasn’t relevant and likely would have left the audience cold. In fact, it never comes up over the course of the movies, except for Han occasionally having some strangely specific knowledge of Imperial procedures. Anyhow, we’ve been over this.

When writing from anything other than a first person viewpoint (and sometimes even then), I still think when you’re introducing a character it helps to mimic the natural flow of how we meet and get to know people in our real lives… we start with stereotypical surface impressions, and only later, over a period of time, do we get potentially get past that and learn how correct (or incorrect) our assumptions might be. I remember the first time I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark as a kid, when no one knew who Indiana Jones was, and in the opening minutes this grizzled thug attacks a guy with a bullwhip and looms out of the jungle darkness with a scowl. It was the introduction a villain would have, but then you find out, nope, that’s our hero! Then as we go along we keep peeling back the onion of who this guy is. Ooh, he’s pretty good at this. Oops, nope, now he’s running for his life. Hates snakes? Funny. Whoa, look how clean-cut he is now, and teaching a college class?!

Nowhere in all this do they stop to spell things out, but the surprises also don’t seem out of place, and they keep hooking your interest by challenging your assumptions, like that mousy co-worker you’ve known for three years and suddenly find out they used to be a professional singer. “You sing? I didn’t know you sing!” “Well, we work in a post office. it never came up.” Dr. Jones doesn’t just randomly start shouting that he hates snakes, it comes up because his pilot’s pet snake is in the (motherf’in) plane. And while it’s played for a bit of random laughs, later on it becomes really important when we reach the Well of Souls.

I know it’s not technically a comic, but seriously, look at what a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark accomplishes without resorting to a single flashback sequence, even though there’s obviously a ton of history between certain characters. We know all we need to know from just watching them in the present, and it works, and we grow to love or hate them accordingly. We don’t need to see every encounter that ever happened between Indy and Belloq, we only need to know that “…there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away“.

So how does all this rambling come back to the issue of strong, relatable characters? Well, I think it’s all about the basics, and the basics are about people, and we more readily perceive fictional creations as people if they are behaving in ways somehow familiar to us, even if their surroundings are bizarre. “People” doesn’t necessarily have to mean “human” in fiction, but it’s a tough job writing creatures with a truly alien mindset. Usually aliens (including non-human fantasy races) just end up being a certain aspect of human nature taken to extremes, but still recognizable. Even our notions of Gods still tend to have human forms and human motivations. We can’t get away from it, and I’m not sure we should even try, because ultimately I think storytelling boils down to humanity wanting to hear about, and reflect upon, Ourselves.

Whew. See why I decided to take this to the blog?

This week’s comic page is very important to me. It represents not only the endpoint of Episode 7, but the end of our whole first trade collection (assuming, of course, we manage to put one together). It’s the close of the overall arc we started in 2009, as well as bridging into ominous hints of where we’re headed in the future.

And it was, to put it candidly, quite the bitch to write.

It’s one thing to have an outline, or a scene envisioned in broad strokes, or even a vivid image in your head that you’re going to do your best to try to communicate to your wife and artist. I’ve had all those for quite some time. It’s an entirely different thing to actually sit yourself down and get the pacing and dialogue into a form that will hopefully (with the aid of the aforementioned artist) convey all the important things the reader needs to know, without smothering the imagery, much less any potential emotional impact, under humongous mounds of text.

“Writing is rewriting”. You may have heard this maxim, and you may wonder if it’s more of a guideline for writers just like “Show, don’t tell”. Well, I won’t claim I go over every one of these blogs with a fine-toothed editorial comb, but I do tend to read them over both in the process of writing them as well as a time or two after I’m finished, if nothing else in the hopes of catching any stupid typos.

Writing without any sort of rewriting arguably isn’t writing at all, it’s typing. Rarely if ever do we know exactly what we’re trying to say and how to say it the first time, and even prose writers are under an obligation to “trim the fat” and pare down their early drafts into something that turns more-or-less random ramblings into dramatic coherency. Then you have comics, where even my final draft may not end up being my final draft once I get the finished art and suddenly realize what I’ve written won’t fit into the panels.

This may very well happen. I write this prior to the final steps, although I’ve given Dawn a draft to work from so she can have the art ready. That particular draft already went through several rewrites, especially when the first time she read it she told me she thought the exec was getting chewed out by ClearStream (maybe because the ratings were good but could still be better) rather than this being an entirely new revelation. If even my closest partner, the one who knows about my planned plot twists gets confused, well… time for rewrites. One of the new versions was much clearer to her, and so that got the greenlight for her to start with the drawings and the colorings and such.

Meanwhile, there was still room for me to refine and economize the actual dialogue (or in this case, I suppose, monologue). The more I could whittle it down, the less chance there would be for the dread situation I mention above where even more rewrites would have to occur at the last minute due to space constraints. Sometimes in the past we got away with it here and there by changing the font size, but these days messing with the font size for any reason other than an intentional story purpose always feels like a cheat to me. I also try my darndest to fit all the panel directions and words on a single page of script, a practice only two people might ever see,  but it serves as an important gauge of how much I’m asking the story to do at once. If it’s too much that’s occasionally a sign to decompress and break the page in twain, but here, with this page, we were at the end. Nowhere to go. And I planned it all out this way, so it’s on me if I can’t deliver.

Anyhow, I’ve honestly lost count of how many times I’ve rewritten the contents of less than a dozen word bubbles. My brain feels like one great, fuzzy rewrite. And yet, I think I’m finally happy with the words and can give this arc the send-off I wanted, bringing closure to some matters just before hitting the readership with an entirely new set of speculation fodder. Not exactly a cliff hanger, but something to chew over during the intermission, or (again, if things go well) when you reach the end of a nice thick print collection.

We shall see. Writing might be rewriting, but there comes a time where you just have to post it up and hope, like my shadowy and wordy executive, that everything will work out nicely.

And here we have another egregious example of writer exaggeration in effect. This isn’t about bank robbery, or public nuisance, or even parking at an expired meter, I’m talking more about the nebulous laws of storytelling, especially one in particular: show, don’t tell.

In this week’s comic, I broke that law. Through the unwitting assistance of a fictional executive assistant, I quickly summarized a few “not pictured” outcomes of three episodes’ worth of chaos and conflict. Brett’s alive. The zeds are (mostly) contained. Popcorn the Zombie Horse will ride again.

Will we be showing these things eventually? Of course, but with the end of this episode and our Summer vacation looming, I turned things over in my head and came to the conclusion that these were not elements I intended to keep people in suspense with while they awaited the resumption of the narrative. I had actually wanted to show Popcorn getting up and out of the way after briefly teasing his end, but artistically it didn’t work out with the flow of the pages. Ditto for Brett, there didn’t seem to be any pressing need to bring him and/or Lacey back into an already crowded climax (and I can once again hear the chorus of “Who are Brett and Lacey?!”… which I believe supports my point).

But there may have been some people wondering about them. Certainly I know there were people in suspense regarding Popcorn, and I felt like extending some mercy after all the weeks of emotional wringers I’ve been throwing out. Now should be the time for the readers, as well as us, to be able to relax and catch a breath.

So I have indulged in what could certainly be considered a cheap shortcut, although out of the best of intentions. I know of course that good intentions are what the road to Hell is purported to be paved with, but there are enough other existing mysteries to chew over (*cough*Zeke*cough*) that I figured I could afford to sweep a couple into the “done” pile and make a bit of room for more.

I broke the law. But heck, the TV Tropes entry does state “it’s not an ironclad rule, and knowing when to break it to quickly explain minor details is a major aspect of learning to write.”

Did the end result justify the nefarious means? Hell if I know, I’m still learning. Then again, every writer is always learning. Every “law” of writing, every rule, has been broken by fiction authors more than once. Fiction writers are an unruly bunch, ready to flaunt tradition at a moment’s notice if they feel it best suits their purpose. I suppose in that sense… whether I succeeded or failed, whatever hot-footed road I might be traveling… I can count on some decent company.

It’s a new century. A digital age. Thirteen years ago in his book Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud looked to the future with shining eyes and pondered the possibilities of the “infinite canvas” that digital comics storytelling would enable.

Thirteen years later, people like me and my wife are publishing a comic online that still hews to the practices and philosophies of the distant past.

Oh, certainly, we’ve had our bits of experimentation, but even the partially animated pages we’ve done were composed with an eye towards how they could be published in print without much change. From the beginning we also established a ratio for each page that makes it easy to put into a standard comic book format.

Part of this can be explained by the fact that in its whirlwind infancy, Zombie Ranch was originally intended for print, and only later did we decide on the web as its primary distribution method. The other part can be explained by us (or at least, me) being stubborn bastards. My primary goal is not to innovate entirely new forms of comics storytelling, it’s to get a story told… and I feel like “the old ways” still provide plenty of interesting ways to do that, ways that are often lost in the flash and bang of modern comics. Too many of them seem to end up trying to imitate movies, and comics aren’t movies (don’t even get me started on the abomination of motion comics… well, okay, if you don’t mind a little NSFW language, here’s one of my rants).

The truth is that, for better or worse, I’ve fallen in love with the traditional, multi-panel comics page method of storytelling, because it showcases all the elements that are unique about the medium. Unlike a movie or cartoon, everything is there at once to be taken in… but now you as an author can arrange that “everything” to an illusion of sequential events, and the ways you can do that are all but limitless. In the best cases, you can weave this so that it’s not only the individual panels of a page but the overall page itself that helps tell the story.

You can blame Will Eisner for this. He devoted an entire chapter of Comics and Sequential Art to the idea of “framing”, to how the choices you make on what sort of panels to use and how they fit together are just as important to the meaning of your comic as the contents inside those panels. Reading some of Eisner’s works really opened my eyes to the potential bag o’ tricks available to someone with the time and skill to make use of them, and you can see more modern examples in J.H. Williams III’s art or that New 52 Flash #1 comic I gushed over in a previous blog.

And this is why, beyond the questions of whether or not we’d even begin to meet whatever standards of quality they want, I have yet to try to get Zombie Ranch onto someplace like ComiXology, even though earlier this year they put out a call to independent creators to submit their works for free. “Guided View” frightens me, as does any other app that takes a comic page and splits it up panel-by-panel. I know the whole idea is to make things fit better on the small screen of a mobile device, but reading it that way destroys any hope of getting meaning from the overall layout.  I try to imagine reading that Flash page I discussed in a panel-by-panel style and just cringe at how much impact (pardon the pun) would be lost. Panel-by-panel works fine for strip formats like Diesel Sweeties, but splitting up an Eisner graphic novel like Life on Another Planet in that manner would be much more complicated and also feels like a borderline criminal act against both creator and reader, on par with removing the string section from a Beethoven symphony.

I’ve heard Guided View can be easily toggled off to permit viewing the page as a whole, and certainly not every page of ours has been ambitious in its layouts… but since ComiXology supposedly will take on the task of doing the formatting if you’re accepted, I wonder what they’d make of this? Or this? Or even this? That last one seems simple on the surface, but we really tried to engage the notion of the reader finding the source of the “smoke” just as Suzie does, especially if you’re reading online and having to scroll down.

I suppose that last might fly in the face of my diatribe on traditionalism, this admission that occasionally we do play around with providing experiences you’d only encounter in one method of reading versus another, and what you get out of reading might indeed be different depending if you come here for your page a week, you do a power dive through the web archive, or you wait to read the individual print issues as we get them published. But still, I do love that potential of experimenting with a nice full-sized comic page to manipulate time, space, and emotion.

Of course, I’m not so much a purist that if ComiXology came asking, I’d say no. But that isn’t likely. Getting approved if we went and applied isn’t likely either, but even trying it requires an output of effort that I’m not convinced wouldn’t be better spent elsewhere, especially if I’m still iffy about the end results.

It’s yet another way we conspire to stifle innovation and limit our potential audience like the silly little homespun project we are. But is it a bad thing for us to want to focus our creativity on the story itself rather than pushing the envelope on how it’s being conveyed? I don’t think so. I certainly have no small amount of admiration for works like Homestuck or When I am King that do break the traditional mold in glorious ways, but ours is a humbler corner of the Internet, serving up more old-fashioned fare. As long as our repeat customers are finding that tasty, we’re good for now.

You know, I count myself amongst those who greeted the news of Microsoft’s plan for the future of its console gaming with… disappointment. Okay, more accurate to say that the “One” in “Xbox One” could be analogized to one finger. My middle finger. Extended vigorously.

Will I buy a PS4 instead? I don’t know. I’ve been a 360 junkie for years. It gave me everything I wanted. Courtesy of services like Xbox Live Arcade, it even gave me games I didn’t know I wanted but, when I found them, turned out to be fantastic little gems well worth their bargain price.  Another reason for the middle finger is that as of this writing, Microsoft appears to be planning to greatly scale back the support they had for getting these low-cost independent titles out to the gaming public. Between that, and the used/rental gaming restrictions, and the mandatory Kinect driving the price through the roof, it’s like a concerted effort to destroy everything I liked about their product.

But I digress. The Xbox One and all the news surrounding it represents the unfortunate future. For now, I still have my 360, and I still have Xbox Live, and because of that, I have State of Decay.

PC Gamers will have to wait for an as yet unspecified future release, but if you’ve got Xbox Live and are a zombie fan, I highly recommended at least downloading the free trial. Even then the trial barely scratches the surface of what makes this game interesting, but it was enough that (along with the positive reviews it’s been getting), I was willing to plunk down the $20 to unlock the full version.

What are you getting? The zombie survival sandbox game we always wanted, and this little bastard snuck up on me as surely as any zed hiding hungrily in the bushes.

Well, let me dial back a bit. We’ve had open-world zombie games in the past in series like Dead Rising or Dead Island, but this one comes from a community and resource management focus the others lack. You start off quite literally in the midst of the action as you and your friend Ed have returned from a remote mountain fishing trip to find “crazy people” trying to eat you. That done, you guide your protagonist Marcus Campbell as he and Ed sneak or fight their way to the local Ranger station and find some more survivors there who fill you in just enough that you know things are seriously wrong. Another chance encounter soon after has you meeting Maya, a lady soldier who joins you and turns out to be someone you can actually switch back and forth to as a playable character.

Now at first, I thought this was a neat gimmick to enable people to play either a male or female protagonist, per their preference. You will eventually find out it goes much deeper than that. As the game opens up past the tutorial area, you’ll get involved with an even larger group of survivors holed up in the makeshift fortifications of a town church, and as you earn their trust, more and more of the roster will flip to “Friend” status, making them playable as well.

Cute, huh? No, crucial. For one thing, no one is safe from permanent death, including Marcus and Maya. Get them torn apart by a horde or caught too close to an exploding car? They’re gone forever. Even if they don’t die, after a certain amount of running around and fighting, they’ll get fatigued, or get injured, and you’ll be well advised to switch off to someone else so they can recover (otherwise losing them for good is going to be much more likely). This is without even getting into later circumstances like people becoming ill or going missing.

So you want to make nice with other survivors in the area as well, since sometimes a timely rescue will convince them they’d be better off joining forces and you’ll get a new friend out of it. But here’s the other problem… you need to make sure you have the supplies and facilities to support your burgeoning crew of survivalists. There’s a resource and base management game at play here, too, as you make dangerous scavenging runs to find the stuff you need and then make choices on whether to upgrade your medical tent now or wait on that while you fortify your lookout tower.

The survivors aren’t faceless and interchangeable, either. Every one has a name and a unique set of skills and traits, some of which are there for nothing more than flavor… for example, skills improve with use, but the guy with the five star rating in Reality TV Trivia hasn’t gotten much chance to impress. On the other hand, despite starting with no real combat skills he’s now become one of my go-to badasses, which makes me glad I actually went through all the trouble to nurse him back to health instead of taking the option to shoot him in the head. Occasionally a survivor will talk to you and tell you little snippets about their lives… which makes it pretty personal when you start having to make decisions like exiling them for coming down with an incurable illness. Will the community’s morale suffer? And for that matter, will you be losing the lady that helps keep your machine shop running with her tools expertise?

Speaking of which, despite constant teases of armed conflict with other survivors, I have yet to have to fight the living. I know it’s a big trope of the genre (hell we’re using it ourselves), but it’s kind of refreshing to have the zombies remain your biggest threat, especially with all the other things you have to manage. Combat is arguably fairly simplistic (at least until you start unlocking special moves), but for me that drives home the feel of guiding a group of mostly regular Joes and Janes through very bad circumstances. There’s still plenty of zombie killing action, though I’ve found a good sideswipe from a moving car door can be much safer in thinning out a horde than trying to fight hand to hand. And of course with the guns you have to shoot zed in the head, and every shot makes noise that might bring more. One zed is easy to deal with. Six? You might want to run, and pray your stamina holds out long enough to reach a place to hide.

This review is still only scratching the surface of what State of Decay has to offer. It’s engrossing stuff. If anything, at any given moment you may just feel overwhelmed by the constant problems that need to be addressed, and I’ll admit I’ve let a few strangers die when they got themselves in trouble in some remote corner of the map. I’ve been caught out in the boonies as hordes converged on my home base and had to pray the defenses would hold. And there’s one more thing I should mention…

The game world doesn’t stop just because you aren’t there. The devs have tried to strike a balance between immersion and frustration with that feature, since both good and bad events can happen, but yeah, I’ve been offline for over a day now and have no idea what’ll be waiting for me when I come back. My biggest worry is that I had to log off with my daily materials needs being bigger than my current stockpile… will something end up collapsing? I don’t know.

But hey, if you felt safe, secure and happy all the time, it wouldn’t be much of an apocalypse simulator, would it? And you only ever get one continuous save. Screw up too bad and you may have no option but starting all over. Thankfully for me that hasn’t happened. Yet. But it sure keeps me on my toes.

If State of Decay has one major flaw for me, it’s that it leaves a lot of its game features undocumented, including what I consider some basic needs like how to choose skill specializations once you unlock them. It’s not always practical to be combing through menus trying to figure out how they all work while the game clock is ticking away, and some of the tutorial pop-ups only come up once, so there may be a certain amount of aggravating trial-and-error, or at least combing wikis and forums. To a certain extent it’s thematic to simulate that no one knows what the hell they’re doing by keeping the player in the dark, but I think there could be at least a few more nudges in the right direction, especially given that aforementioned situation of only one save per game session.

But if you’ve been waiting for a good “real-time” simulator of what it might be like to guide a ragtag group through the zombpocalypse a la The Walking Dead, pick this up. Especially with that $20 price tag, I’m so far finding it entirely worth the buy.

One of the biggest pet peeves I notice amongst comics pros is that whenever anything related to comics gets some sort of mainstream media coverage, the title will predictably include a handful of sound effects straight out of the campy Batman TV show of the 1960’s.

Exhibit A, for example: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/05/14/biff-bam-pow-dc-comics-sues-lawyer-over-superman-rights/

You don’t need to read the article, just know that it’s the Wall Street Journal, it’s 2010, and it’s about continuing litigation regarding the creators’ rights struggle over Superman. A fairly serious subject, right? Well, BIFF! BAM! POW! …maybe not so much still to the average journalist or editor with only a passing interest in all this superhero funny business. I’m not picking on this article in particular, it’s just the first to come up in my quick google search. There are many, many others, of course, or there would be nothing to peeve upon.

But that’s interesting, isn’t it? Most people in the world still seem to associate comic books first and foremost with vivid onomatopoeias of violence… and yet there are plenty of comics, especially since the 1980s, that not only forego any “visual aids” for the sounds of people punching each other, but omit any added sound effects whatsoever. Watchmen is probably the best example of this… it didn’t matter how “loud” the events being depicted were supposed to be, they took place in a complete void of silence aside from what we the readers filled in from our own heads. And yet, that process works so naturally you may not even have noticed it. In fact, I seem to recall that after the period of several years where my comics consumption was limited mostly to Vertigo titles that took a similar minimalistic approach, it was actually jarring to go back and read a comic where the ‘WHOK’s and ‘SNIKT’s and ‘BU-THROOM’s once again graced the page.

Comics are a silent medium. That’s why you can theoretically get away with showing something exploding and just let your reader supply how that might sound… but hey, not everyone can be as pure with the idea as Watchmen. Chew is a great comic, but it’s also not afraid to throw in a sound effect here and there. Hell, I was just cracking open one of my graphic novels from Will Eisner himself and, while he does play out many pages in “silence”, you then get to the occasional panel where a door ‘SLAM’s shut as a woman hangs up a phone with a decided ‘CLICK’.

Certainly it would be both counterproductive and hypocritical of me to claim onomatopoeias have no place, seeing as we abandoned that notion all the way back on our fifth page. Sometimes we use them a lot, sometimes a little, sometimes not at all, and I couldn’t honestly tell you which of those three pages I think is the strongest. I like to think that whenever we do use added sounds, it’s not overly gratuitous; for instance, the guns always get a sound effect when they fire, but since Dawn doesn’t like doing much in the way of muzzle flashes I want to make sure people know there are bullets flying. And arguably sometimes it’s even the best, easiest way to convey certain things like multiple firings of a revolver or pressings of a button.

In this week’s comic, I really wanted that ominous sound of a rifle bolt slamming home, where hopefully ‘KA-KLATCH’ will come across as a good enough representation. That’s a whole other can of worms, sometimes we have wildly different ideas of how sounds should be written out, even without getting into other languages. Another reason perhaps to use them as little as possible? Eh. I think they have their place in the toolbox. Plus you get to have visual fun with them at times, like our ‘SPLASH’ from page 163. Overuse them and they may lose their impact (POW!), but to not use them at all is an extreme choice all of its own. Because of Watchmen and Vertigo, is there perhaps a perception that the less sound effects present, the more mature the offering?

Well, we’re somewhere in between, moving back and forth along the scale as we deem necessary. But whew, when I think about it it’s pretty amazing how much effort we sometimes put into the sound design of something with no audio present. The sounds of silence.

Do you recall this exchange from Shaun of the Dead?

Ed: Are there any zombies out there?
Shaun: Don’t say that!
Ed: What?
Shaun: That.
Ed: What?
Shaun: That. The Z word. Don’t say it.
Ed: Why not?
Shaun: Because it’s ridiculous!
Ed: Alright… Are there any out there, though?

The joke for fans of the zombie genre is that there has always seemed to be this unwritten rule that no one ever can refer to the hungry walking dead by the term we the audience are most familiar with. It even inspired a TV Tropes entry on how fiction writers sometimes tie themselves in knots to avoid calling a vampire a vampire, or a zombie a zombie.

Which, y’know, whatever… George Romero himself thought of his creatures as “ghouls”. Plus if your characters immediately scream “Zombie!” when a groaning, walking corpse is grasping for them, you may be forfeiting a certain amount of genre blindness that a lot of zombie fiction needs in order for the narrative to function properly. This comic’s characters are perfectly okay with calling them what they are, but then they’re practical folks like that, and it’s not the usual zombie story. It doesn’t hinge around the chaos and uncertainty of the zombie apocalypse as it happens.

But it’s not unknown for a more mainstream zombie story to use the Z word. Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a perfect example of that exception to the rule…

…which is why it’s all the more bizarre that the film adaptation seems to be doing everything in its power to hide away that it involves zombies, like it’s ashamed of its own subject matter. Shortening the title to just World War Z is understandable. Trailers which make no mention of the undead (or even “infected”) in any form, and show split-second, confusing images of what could be just really excited people running about and piling up on each other begin to feel weird. In fact the beginning of the latest trailer I saw, with Brad Pitt and his family stopped in traffic in some big city (and then EXPLOSION!), could have easily been interchangeable with a disaster film like Independence Day or Armageddon.

Speaking of which, check out the poster.

Very dramatic, but no real clue as to why the city happens to be on fire in several places. Independence Day didn’t hide the alien spaceships. The Day After Tomorrow gleefully showed off the Statue of Liberty being splashed with giant waves. Why is this film afraid of its disaster? Why is it afraid of its own zombies? Anyone who already knows the World War Z property knows it’s about zombies, this is entirely about concealing it from the rest of the moviegoing public.

Think I’m imagining things? Screenrant.com agrees with me, and tells a story of a rather bloated and mismanaged production process, as well: CLICK

The last time I saw a movie ad campaign this afraid of its own subject matter was John Carter, and we all know how well that worked out. But hell, even though there’s some backlash on the zombie genre here and there, with the ongoing success of The Walking Dead both as a comic and a TV show I wasn’t aware that zombies were as much box office poison as Mars was apparently supposed to be. I had my own rant about the handling of John Carter a year ago, and again I’m seeing all the signs of a studio that can’t figure out how to market a property that should have been a much easier sell.

Max Brooks already distanced himself from the adaptation, saying the only similarity between it and his book is the title. But I expected that, especially when I heard Brad Pitt had been cast… the book’s format just doesn’t support a standard star-driven Hollywood picture’s structure. I suppose I even expected that they would discard Brooks’ shamblers in favor of the “fast zombie” option that’s all the Rage (har har) these days.

What I didn’t expect was a production that optioned a film of a book about a zombie apocalypse, and is now in headlong retreat trying to distance that film’s marketing from zombies. Has the Z Word become that much of a dirty word, unmentionable not just for genre reasons but financial ones as well? Or is this another cowardly misfire from Tinseltown that will end up making no one happy?

I know the handling of things so far hasn’t made me any more confident about spending money on a theater ticket. John Carter was still a decently entertaining film despite the fustercluck surrounding its failure, because some of the people involved still seemed to believe.

World War Z? I don’t know. All it seems to be looking to do is try to get as much money as possible on opening weekend, before the word gets out to the masses that the movie has those silly, silly zombies in it.

If you’ve been paying attention to our comings and goings, you’ll know that this past weekend Dawn and I made our journey to Phoenix Comicon. If you haven’t? Uh, well… this past weekend Dawn and I made our journey to Phoenix Comicon.

How did it go? Well, in my blog on WonderCon 2013 a couple months back I mentioned how I’ve adopted a degree of low expectations where conventions are concerned, in hopes of being pleasantly surprised. WonderCon then indeed turned out to be shockingly good for us, especially given that we didn’t have to spend much in terms of getting there. Given the mess of WonderCon 2012, it really took me by surprise, and some of my exhibitor friends who didn’t come back had to just ponder what might have been.

Our situation with Phoenix could be said to be a reversal of that. All our exhibitor friends who’d been there in previous years talked it up so high that (as another first-timer stated) “it sounded like the aisles were paved with gold”. It’s a four day convention, which does imply a certain amount of bigness… San Diego lasts for five days, while I’d consider the average to be three… but it doesn’t matter how long a convention lasts if the sales aren’t there. Phoenix Comicon 2012 was reportedly such a money maker that one small creator-owned operation we know made over $1500 by the halfway mark. That’s probably a drop in the bucket to a vendor like BOOM! Studios, but it’s the kind of numbers that would put stars in the eyes of most people on our level.

How would we have done last year? Dawn and I will never know. This year, the aisles lacked their golden sheen and most everyone I talked to both new and old had to admit to some disappointment. Thursday and Friday were very slow for the exhibitors, seemingly across the board. It was definitely true for us. Saturday picked up, and after a desolate first few hours on Sunday things picked up so much Sunday actually became our best day, even with the drama of a fire alarm evacuation towards the end. Fortunately the convention did not burn down at that time, even if it might have been interesting to see if it would rise from the ashes like its namesake.

When all was said and done, we made more than we have at any convention aside from WonderCon, but the costs of going long distance still swallowed that, even though we avoided flying/shipping things and got a no frills hotel stay. The logistics were probably the smoothest we’ve ever had on one of these trips, so I have no complaints there… but it didn’t do anything to change our minds about scaling back to local shows for the foreseeable future. I’m not bitching and moaning here, because the fact is that here’s a situation where my tendency towards low expectations helped out. I listened to all the hype, and though of course it would have been great had we caught the wave of those previous years, I wasn’t devastated at not breaking even, much less the failure to rake in thousands of dollars. We didn’t put ourselves in a position where that was necessary.

Anyhow, it just goes to show that there are always surprises, whether you’re trying out a new show or even returning to a previous one. I had an idea that heading out to Arizona might be a place where our comic might find some traction, what with the Western themes, but it seemed like we found more people in Anaheim that were into the ranching and farming angle. Maybe there’s a lesson there in comics as escapism, where if you live in a desert, you’d rather read something set elsewhere. Maybe it was the position and size of our table. Maybe it was the phase of the moon. Trying to figure these things out seems like a great way to go nuts. The only sane expectation to have is the unexpected.

Speaking of which, before I wrap up for the week I did want to gush about a few cool things I could say made the trip worthwhile beyond the mere monetary aspects. We got to meet at least a few people who were fans of the comic that we hadn’t met before, including Laura Knatt who will be debuting a new webcomic of her own quite soon, titled CMYK. Sarrah Wilkinson of Red Nebula Studios, who drew that wonderful Popcorn fan art, personally presented a print of it that she had made up just for us (and you should’ve seen her stunning cosplay of Garrus from Mass Effect… wow!). We also got to be chatty neighbors with Jennie Breeden of The Devil’s Panties and Dusty of Scuttlebutt Ink, who were both very fun to nerd out with. I found Andrew Hussie of Homestuck standing alone at the Topataco booth on Thursday night and got him all to myself for several minutes of questions and admiration, which was pretty great because Homestuck is freaking amazing.

But I must give special thanks to Arizona-based artist Keith Decesare, who caught our eyes with his work and before the con ended was generous enough to agree to an art trade despite never meeting us before. I’m really glad I asked him because as far as I can tell this particular print isn’t even available on his online store:

You can click the image for the larger version based at his site, http://www.kadcreations.com . In fact, hell, click that link and browse around, he’s got several gorgeous pieces on display… this one is just the one that spoke most to me. What can I say? I have a weakness for tough ladies that look like they’re truly striving against the odds, and while this knight isn’t hard on the eyes, she’s not there to just be cheesecake… she’s got a monster to slay or die trying… perhaps both.

But as Keith himself admits, the image started as a doodle of something completely different. The direction it went in for him was a surprise. As far as I’m concerned, it was one of my happiest surprises of the show.

“I chartered one of the superb vessels of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company for a hundred and eighty thousand dollars, and invited several parties to go along with me, twelve hundred in all. I shall not take so many next time. The fewer people you take with you, the fewer there are to grumble. I did not suppose that any one could find anything to grumble at in so faultless a ship as ours, but I was mistaken. Very few of our twelve hundred had ever been so pleasantly circumstanced before, or had sailed with an abler Captain or a more obliging baggage master, but yet they grumbled. Such is human-nature. The man who drinks beer at home always criticizes the champagne, and finds fault with the Burgundy when he is invited out to dinner.” – Mark Twain, in a letter to the Chicago Republican

 Ah, webcomics. Like Twain’s steamship, you are invited along for the ride, free of charge, for a venture beyond the bounds of the usual. And doesn’t it also seem to hold true that the more people along for the ride, the more grumbling occurs?

I’ve touched on this subject before, and while there’s always the possibility of commentary that’s just outright trolling, the majority probably comes from the idea of being helpful. That we care, so the criticism we are providing will make things better somehow, particularly if we’re pointing out what seem to be mistakes.

Now in looking at the issue from the other side in the case of Zombie Ranch, there has been more than once that we missed filling in the colors of a certain spot, or in the case of last week’s comic forgot altogether to put the bolts and brands on the zombies that should have been there. Truth to tell I woke up the next morning suddenly realizing it and expecting to log on to find someone questioning the lapse, and yep, there it was in the very first comment. There was nothing to be done there but go “whoops” and make the correction as soon as we had the chance. Thank heavens for a digital age that makes that easy. Sooner or later we’d probably notice these mistakes ourselves (hopefully before going to any print version), but I have no problem with people bringing them up. I do wish we were perfect enough it never happened, but occasionally there’s going to be a fly landing in the Burgundy glass and it’s legitimate to politely point that out.

But all that said and done, there are limits. There is a line where constructive criticism just crosses over into nitpicking, and the artist(s) who invited you along on this trip might justifiably become a bit frustrated. Now I still don’t think it gives an artist the right to have a public meltdown and go crazypants on someone, but my “inspiration” for the current post came from moseying by one of the latest pages for the always gorgeously drawn and composed Next Town Over.

NTO has a big audience, no doubt far bigger than ours… I don’t think we’ve ever gotten 20 or more comments on a single page, for instance, while Erin Mehlos gets them on a regular basis. But then I look at some of those comments and see things like “The wound has moved” or a discussion of how the rain shouldn’t be slanted a particular way. Now I’m no artist, but rain is not a particularly easy thing to do well, and I find the fact she’s including it at all to be rather impressive, particularly since she now has a newborn child to take care of.  She spends a few posts going back and forth on the idea of viewer perspective before the frustration bubble bursts: