Category: Writer’s Blog

Growing up in the 1980s, I was a huge Uncanny X-Men fan. I had next to no idea about who was writing and drawing it (although for the record it was the Chris Claremont/John Byrne dream team), all I knew was my big sister just happened to have a few issues lying around in her room that also happened to be the issues introducing Kitty Pryde, the Hellfire Club (including one Emma Frost), and culminating in the Dark Phoenix saga. To say they blew my fragile little mind is probably understatement, and for the next decade or so I devoured various X-stories even as the spin-offs began. It took the advent of the “Dark Age” of the 1990s before I gave up on the ever proliferating crop, no longer really recognizing the characters I had grown so attached to.

That’s a whole other story, but I want to get back to the fact that I first ran across those X-men comics in my big sister’s room. I don’t know if she was still interested much in them at that point, but they represented prima facie evidence that in some earlier time they had held her interest enough for her to brave our dusty, dark local comic book store and buy several issues over a course of several months.

But you know, why not? The X-books, by and large, still have a reputation for being “female friendly”, and what Claremont was doing around the late 70s/early 80s is probably largely responsible for establishing that. That age of comics was where heroes were getting more complicated than just punching the bad guys, and Storm and Jean Grey/Phoenix benefited from that just as much as their male counterparts. Sure it might have just been the two of them on the team as regulars, but as soon as you have even two ladies present, you stop being able to just define them as “the girl”.  I guess there still could have been “the white girl” and “the black girl”, but Claremont was pretty good about giving them a lot more distinctions to chew over.

A little over a year ago I made an entire post on the subject of superficiality in characters, of the danger of those that deviate from the “norm” being seen as symbols rather than people, becoming defined by their deviance rather than any other facet of their being. Unless you as a writer can overcome this human tendency to compartmentalize based on surface impressions, you risk your heroes ending up feeling somehow more shallow, like the way a happy face might represent a person smiling, but an actual photorealistic portrait of a person smiling has so much more for a viewer to contemplate. Without any perceivable depth to the presentation, the spectre of tokenism raises its stereotypical head.

In the course of that argument with myself, I came up with the idea that the easiest way to solve the problem was plurality. Like in the example above, if there’s two women on the X-team, the viewer’s mind will start to search for other differences besides just boobs/no boobs. Would they stop at the skin color? Maybe, but at least you’re already getting some analytical momentum going, right? The brain has now engaged in the same mode as it would when looking between the male characters and being curious about what makes this one different than that one. The next step as an author is the same as you would do with those men… give them distinct dialogue, give them things to react to in different ways, show the things that make them interesting so that the reader, in turn, gets interested. This gal’s tough, but her hot temper can get her in trouble. This gal’s honorable to a fault. Et cetera, et cetera.

Mind you, all this further development can only happen if the ladies in question get some time in the spotlight. That’s true of any characters, truthfully, but in mainstream comics it can still be rare to see the women on a team get some quality time. That’s why this month, I’m looking with piqued interest at the X-Men again for the first time in a long time. Why? Because X-Men may actually be a misnomer in this case. Call it an experiment in plurality:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/01/x-men-relaunches-as-all-female-superhero-team/

I’ll be interested to see how this turns out. A lot of the women on the roster have already benefited in the past from the X-books not being shy about focusing on them from time to time, but now we’re also looking at an entire team dynamic filled out without any of the usual (male) suspects involved. It leaves Rogue unquestionably in the “big muscle” role, Psylocke (with pants!) probably acting as the hard edged loner… and any Marvel brat of the 80s knows that “Storm With Mohawk = Leader”. But no matter which character of this team the spotlight focuses on from issue to issue, it’ll be a woman.

X-Men #1 should supposedly be out by the end of May. The plurality is there. It just remains to be seen what writer Brian Wood can do with it.

Verisimilitude, dear readers. Verisimilitude. Mouthful of a word, isn’t it? In fiction it speaks directly to the issue of “realism”, and how close or how far a story holds to how we understand things to function in our daily lives. It’s also tied into willing suspension of disbelief, internal consistency, blah-dee blah…

The important thing to me here, this week, was how it plays into a certain protagonist finally getting the opportunity to punch the hell out of someone who richly, richly deserved it.

Zombie Ranch is a story where for the most part, I haven’t had the characters do too much that might be considered, for lack of a better term, “badass”. They’re not superheroes. In fact, keeping with the theme of reality television, I like to think of them just plain folks. Plain folks doing a dangerous job. I tend to write them that way, too, because it makes them real to me… and, hopefully, that carries through to the readership.

The thing is, though, that no fiction will be absolutely true-to-life, at least not any fiction I would find conceivably enjoyable. This opinion piece has an interesting discussion on realism as applied to superhero comics, which includes the following quote: “…when fans talk about wanting more “realism” in their superhero stories, I don’t think that’s what they mean. I think they want verisimilitude. Which is a ten-dollar word that translates to, more or less, “fake realism that I can sort of believe in even though I know it’s silly.” ”

Now that’s definitely a “more or less” translation, but I understand what the author’s getting at, and it applies to more than just superheroes but all manner of drama. Every time some CSI perp is identified based on their “enhanced” reflection in a crappy photograph, every time the commanders of great armies suddenly find themselves face to face on the battlefield where they can engage in single combat, every time characters trade perfectly formed, zingy one-liners over the blades of their crossed swords or the trays of their afternoon tea… none of these things are very realistic, are they? But they sure are entertaining. No matter how grounded and realistic the setting, we crave a certain amount of departure. We want those acceptable breaks from reality, or why bother with fiction at all?

Even where the vaunted “reality television” is concerned, by the time it reaches an audience there’s a soundtrack added, visual effects, and tons and tons of editing to make sure you only see enough of the boring moments of working a crab boat long enough to remind you there are boring moments. But Zombie Ranch mostly represents the raw footage, right?

Well, it’s also a story. Mind you, it’s a story I paced with a deliberate slowness to the point where at least one review accused that in the entire first issue/episode, “nothing happens”, but there’s still plenty of stuff that comes with a bit of dramatic license attached, whether for the sake of humor or just presenting something cool.

Most of the time I’m pretty low-key about it, and Dawn’s art follows suit. You probably won’t ever see someone in this comic wielding chainsaw nunchucks, awesome as that is. It ain’t that kind of setting. But that doesn’t mean I can’t try to provide the occasional cathartic, heroic moment of… well, verisimilitude, of the kind Suzie has just busted out.

Some people even contend such moments are good for character development, but regardless of that they sure are damn good fun to read.

And write.

You know, I’m not sure if our weekly schedule has been harder or easier of late on those of you who are truly caught up in the throes of “What happens next?” Is it good to have a week to relax the tension while you go about your other business, or is it torturous? I hope it’s more towards the former, seeing as the schedule isn’t going to get faster anytime soon. My intent is not to torment, honest.

But yeah, regardless of intent I sure feel like I’ve hit the readership with a lot of cliff hangers lately, particularly compared to the early episodes. Not every page has ended with someone figuratively dangling by their fingernails, so I dare to dream that I’m not running fans to emotional exhaustion… but these last few weeks have been pretty intense.

In my defense, we’ve come to the climactic moments of this whole first story arc, so dangit, it’s high time for some focused intensity. Also in my defense, most of the readership likely isn’t nearly as invested as the vocal (and much appreciated!) few that are piping up every week to urge Suzie onwards and shake their fists in Muriel’s direction. I know at least one person who’s commented that they can’t ever really get concerned about a main protagonist because of the phenomenon of “plot armor” (mind you, if they ever read any of the books Game of Thrones is based on they’re in for a shock or ten). Others are reading over a dozen webcomics and taking classes/working jobs and just mosey by every month or so to see if “whats-her-name” finally got the drop on “whos-her-face”.

I don’t honestly know how many fans we’ve corralled that could be termed “hardcore”, in that they really (cliff) hang on our every update. I would be hesitant to declare that even one such exists, except just a few days ago Dawn got a comment on her DeviantArt page from a reader who claimed “yours is the only webcomic I follow religiously and bother to learn the posting schedule of. It has a lot of my favorite things.”

Just knowing even one such is out there is a heady feeling. Successfully getting people embroiled in your story and characters, especially to that level? Hell yeah. And yet ironically, those people are the most likely to suffer at those points of your story where you put your characters in harm’s way. I think most dramatic fiction gets its hooks in us regardless of people being aware of the plot armor phenomenon… the James Bond 007 movies are continuing proof of that. And Doctor Who has that whole bit where even if he dies he’ll come back, but that doesn’t stop people from being on the edge of their seats in regards to his adventures.

Mind you if a story was dependent on nothing more than cliff hangers I would probably find it boring rather quickly, which is why it’s important that people are interested in what James Bond is up to even when he’s not chained into the latest death trap. And then when he’s in the death trap, you desperately want him to get out of it so he can continue doing all those other cool things, and also kick the butt of that smug villain who put him there.

So, at least in some of your cases I think I’ve gotten to that point with Suzie, and because of that I do apologize for any emotional trauma all these recent cliff hangers may be provoking. Just remember, if and when she does make it through, you’ll also be the ones most primed to stand up and cheer.

The past few weeks this blog has been pretty heavy on the “business” side of my experiences, so I figure it might be about time to get back to discussing more creative matters. The idea of tropes raised its head again in the comic commentary recently, and this time for once it wasn’t me bringing them up but readers. Of course, at least one of them seemed a bit critical of the choice to have Muriel suddenly reappear for one last confrontation between villain and hero, considering it a played out sort of thing.

Now first, oddly enough, when I went to good ol’ TV Tropes to try to find the entry governing such matters, I couldn’t locate one. If it’s common enough for some to consider it tired out, you’d think it would have the good grace to be easier to find!

That is, by the way, free license for any of you reading this to roam forth and succeed where I failed… I didn’t look too hard. But even if it really isn’t there right now, I’d be the first to argue it’s perfectly worthy of a YKTTW attempt. YKTTW stands for “You Know, That Thing Where…” and is basically the way tropes get put forward as possible additions to the site, where they can be refined for consumption, or (as happens more often than not) outed as already being present on TV Tropes in some form. It means some patience and effort on the part of the sponsor, but it’s a fairly decent editorial process. I ran the gauntlet myself awhiles back when I put together an entry on people in fiction being able to hear each other perfectly no matter the circumstances, which I cunningly(?) termed Acoustic License.

I digress, however. Villain rises again for a last shot at the hero, sometimes in what is felt to be a far-fetched fashion. My gut tells me that yes, this is a Thing. As for my use of it? Well, from my perspective I didn’t find it out of the blue, since everything I’d shown (or more importantly, not shown) since the last time we saw Muriel left the question of her survival open. I myself know exactly what happened in that smoke cloud at the end of Episode 6, and what she did after, and even though the audience may never see it, that was enough for me to move forward with the narrative as planned.

And from a writing perspective, that’s just something you sometimes have to do. Sure, you can seek feedback from all manner of different folk and look at all manner of different approaches others have used for similar subject matter, but in the end the decision and the burden rests on you. And you’ll have to face the fact that not everyone will be happy with the direction you go.

This isn’t the first time a reader has questioned an aspect of the story or the behavior of a character, and it won’t be the last. It’s not the first time a trope has been invoked, and it won’t be the last. If you read no other article on TV Tropes as an aspiring writer, you should read the one I linked last week, but shall link again here: Tropes Are Tools. Hell, I recommend it for everyone. If you don’t want to take the time, the basic principles are that Tropes Are Not Bad, and Tropes Are Not Good… and no work of fiction can exist without them.

As with all tools, skill and experience play a role in the product created… but there’s also always a subjectivity involved in the creative arts. As far as comics go, for instance, there are many, many people who regard both Watchmen and Batman: Arkham Asylum as masterworks. And yet Grant Morrison was on record as considering Watchmen “the 300-page equivalent of a 6th form poem” (in U.S. terms, basically saying it was a college freshman effort at best), and Alan Moore in turn described Arkham Asylum as “a gilded turd”.

Truly, one man’s trash can be another man’s masterpiece, eh?

This doesn’t invalidate criticism, but it’s something to keep in mind. Mark Evanier, who I’ve mentioned before, is fond of saying that there are two truisms involved in any piece of creative work that achieves popularity: someone will declare it the worst piece of crap that’s ever crossed their radar, and someone else will be so impressed they’ll steal it and try to pass it off as their own.

For the record, I’m not considering Zombie Ranch a masterwork, or even all that popular. I work with my tools, and I do the best I can in the manner in which I feel best serves the story we want to tell. I’m sure there are plenty of people who have been disappointed along the course of that, whether or not they chose to express their disappointment vocally (well, as “vocal” as you technically can be in written forms). Even those of you who have stuck around probably have your own hopes and dreams of “What happens next?”, which may not jibe with what I have cooking. Every new comic comes fraught with the peril to underwhelm at least a portion of the audience… but if I spent my time worrying about that, I could never get the story told at all. Tropes are tools, and a writer should be aware of them, and perhaps even a little afraid of them, the way one would be cautious handling any potentially dangerous substance… but never to the point of trying to avoid them. That’s just troping against trope, and while I suppose that is also a Thing, it’s not a particularly productive one.

Last week I went over my reasons for why Dawn and I have become leery of submitting to paid entry contests involving our creative work. Even if they’re not intended as scams, some of them just seem like little more than what could be termed “vanity awards”, where if you rise to the top of the heap you get to put a little logo on your comic or whatnot – “Winner of the 2012 Golden Shuzbut Award for Best New Fiction!”

Sounds impressive, unless of course you’re dealing with an industry professional who asks, “What the hell is the Golden Shuzbut Award?”, and even more embarrassingly may follow this with the further question, “Why should I care?”. How does the fact you won this Golden Shuzbut have any more bearing on your credentials as a creative artist than that mug you received for Christmas last year with “World’s Greatest Nephew!” ?

Well, if you were the World’s Greatest Nephew of Steven Spielberg, that might be something, but let’s stay away from nepotism for the time being. The point is that even if you win the contest you paid to enter, the end result might well be no more impressive to the world at large than if you’d just taken your money to an engraver and had a nice plaque made with your name and “#1 Artist!”

The question of whether or not a contest is worth being part of is such a big one that the Writer Beware site of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America has an entire section devoted to helping aspiring writers make the judgment call. Just having an entry fee doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not worth the time, but there are other pitfalls to consider as well.

For instance, winning can have far worse consequences than just receiving a consensually insignificant award. Much, much worse.

You might win a contract.

Well, wait… how is that bad? Isn’t the whole point to garner some fame, recognition, and (hopefully) money? A guaranteed contract with people who will promote you and your ideas to the world sounds like the perfect reward!

This is where it gets sticky, though. What are the terms of this contract? And does participating in the contest mean you have no right of refusal should you win? That’s a big red flag to look out for, because you could be locked in legally just by signing up, and you may not like the end result.

In general, I think independent artists nowadays understand that copyright is an important thing and not to be given up lightly. But just recently a fellow webcomicker brought to my attention a contract award where the organizers made a big deal of the artist retaining their copyright… but their company will control exclusive commercial distribution rights, in all forms, for the next eight years. The artist will enjoy 20% of the net profits of those enterprises.

Which still might sound pretty tempting to a person struggling to pay their rent, right? The problem is you might be giving up a lot for very little. “Net profits”, for example, are not the same as “gross profits”, and there is a very clear illustration of why they are risky to have in your contract at this link. One of the highest grossing movies in history, Return of the Jedi, is making some people very rich and leaving others very poor, and the reason why is right there in the term “highest grossing”. Due to Hollywood accounting shenanigans, it’s still considered unprofitable, which in this case is to say that it made no net profit once the ahem, “operating expenses” were tallied.

That’s pretty sobering to consider, but hey, at least Peter Mayhew has some fame and still gets to be a special guest at conventions, right? He was part of something really special and has fans all over the world, even if he never got rich off of it.

Well, consider this. In the case above, they are paying you exactly zilch for the potential to profit off of your idea. In fact, I believe you do have to pay to enter the contest, but even if you didn’t, the key term here is “potential”. What happens if they just decide to sit on it and do nothing? Was there any clause requiring them to actually do something with the property? Sure, people get paid by film companies wanting to option the rights to their ideas all the time, and a lot of times those companies don’t end up doing anything with it. I have one friend whose graphic novel has been optioned not just once, but twice by different film companies, the second picking it up after the first sat on it for too long and the rights expired.

Is he angry that he never got to see his ideas make it to the silver screen? Nope. If the second company doesn’t do anything for long enough, the rights expire again, and every time another company comes to him with an option deal, he gets paid thousands of dollars again. You’ll notice there’s two important factors at work here, though, which is that he’s getting paid up front, and the terms of expiration aren’t eight years, but the standard 12-18 months the film industry works with.

Also, hell, the whole legal structure of “optioning” is different. Optioning is not so much buying the rights as buying a window of time where they have the exclusive right to cut a further deal, assuming they can put a production together. If they can’t, that’s their fault and they gave you thousands of dollars for nothing. Too bad for them, but great for you, especially if another suitor comes knocking.

Now I admit I haven’t gone over the contest contract with a legal expert, but these organizers don’t sound like they’d be out thousands of dollars if they did jack crap with what you gave them. You might say it’s in their best interests to at least try, but how hard will they try? For how long? All eight of those years? Sure, you still own the copyright to your work, but how much does that matter if the only way you’re legally allowed to profit off it is through them, and any net profits (much less 20% of net profits) may never exist at all even if the IP proves very popular? I’m guessing since you still own the copyright you might be able to give your work away for free, but you better not have so much as one Project Wonderful ad on your website.

Commercial distribution in all forms is a pretty draconian clause, when you think about it. Are they really the best company possible to handle every potential licensing agreement for the next several years? Games, books, movies, comics, action figures, maybe even potential media that hasn’t even surfaced yet? Again, you at very least signed away your right to deal with movie companies yourself, now all that tasty option money is theirs and you don’t get a dime.

And even if they are completely sincere about making you and your work the next big thing, there’s the spectre of a company going bankrupt and being bought by someone else. Eight years is a long time, particularly where a new venture is concerned, and unless there are specific clauses in your contract, it does not expire because it changed hands, and the new owners may have even less interest in promoting you.

It’s possible with terms like this that you could still get lucky, but if you don’t, you might end up just as broke and unknown as you are now, and with the added burden that you no longer are the sole custodian of that wonderful idea you nurtured. Even promises of copyright retention aren’t enough to just nod and sign, and you had better be very aware of the terms & conditions you’re agreeing to just by entering, which might in some cases be as good as signing that contract in blood in the eyes of the courts.

If you win, of course. But sometimes, it does seem like winning can be far worse than losing.

In case you trip over my pretentious (and possibly inappropriately used) Latin here, the basic translation is “I do not wish to contend”, or more simply, “no contest”. The term mainly comes up in U.S. courts where a defendant chooses to accept conviction on the criminal charges filed against them without actually admitting guilt, even though it pretty much still counts as a guilty plea. It’s complicated. I don’t claim to understand it.

But I’m tempted to start using the phrase at conventions, though obviously not quite in the same sense. At WonderCon we had some very nice, enthusiastic people come by our table, and they seemed very interested in our work. They also handed us a flier advertising their awards contest, encouraging us to enter.

Now I want to emphasize that I believe (or at least am willing to give the benefit of doubt) that their praise was genuine, but as they wandered on at last, I turned to Dawn and remarked under my breath, “I wonder how much this one costs?” It was a bit of an in-joke since we’d dealt with a group last year that on two occasions gushed over Dawn’s artwork and asked her to enter their art competition, both times neglecting to mention there was a hefty entry fee. You must forgive me if I’ve grown a bit skeptical in the wake of that.

Besides, when I logged on to check out the contest site, I found: you guessed it, a hefty entry fee. In fact it was even stranger because that fee only got you considered for one “Best Of” and one limited category, and then you had to pay further fees to get consideration beyond that. For example, you submitted your work to the Film section, and could ask to also be considered for “Best Director” as part of your initial fee… but “Best Actress”, “Best Screenplay”, etc. were separate buys.

I’m not suggesting these contests are all scams. I know movie companies spend quite a bit to get looked at by the Oscars (though I’m not sure if that’s promotional or if there’s fees to even be looked at), but we’re usually not talking the Oscars, or even the Eisners. There’s no fee I know of for the Eisner Awards, aside from production and shipping costs in getting copies of your work to the judges if you’re nominated. Same for the Russ Manning Award, which we went ahead and submitted Dawn for this year. Does she have a chance of making it to nomination stage? Maybe, maybe not, but all it cost us so far was a print copy of one of our comics, an envelope and a stamp. And these are awards that have at least some pedigree to them, that have been running for years or even decades.

The entry fee contests I’ve been referring to are relatively new fish, even to the point of being first year start-ups. Sure, everything’s got to start somewhere, but if you’re insisting on cash up front I’m going to be a bit leery no matter how much in the way of exposure and good times you’re promising. And if you or your volunteers / minions / whatnot cruise conventions telling artists they’re fantastic and they’ve surely got what it takes to win, can you at least be up front about the fact that they need to pay to play? Otherwise it comes off a bit like the nice lady who tells you how handsome you are and how much she’d love to date you, then when you get excited informs you it’ll be fifty dollars for the first twenty minutes. Weird stuff extra.

Again, not accusing anyone of scamming. I honestly think most “scams” that occur aren’t professional criminal operations so much as they come from an unfortunate convergence of naive organizers and naive clients. Out of sheer enthusiasm, the organizers make promises they can’t really deliver on, the clients buy into the dream, and then as crushing realities set in there’s a panic, everything collapses, and no one’s happy.  This does not always happen, but it happens enough that as one of the potential clients it pays to be wary, even if the person you’re talking to seems like the most sincere fan of your work *ever*. I mean, if that’s really true, shouldn’t they just feel the honor of having you be part of their contest outweighs any paltry fees? I don’t want to come off as arrogant there, I’m just saying if you butter someone up that much and then hold out your hand for money, you may be sending the wrong message. Maybe that’s exactly why no one wants to do that last part in person, they just want to get you to their contest website and… I dunno… hope the lingering afterglow of the interaction causes you to open your wallet.

The fact is that even if someone is 100% sincere and 100% confident of their organization skills, there are a lot of genuine scams that use the contest format, and scams tend to have “payment up front” as a vital component of their model. There’s an uphill struggle to overcome that stigma, and if I feel right off the bat that someone wasn’t being fully honest with me, it severely hampers my enthusiasm for taking a chance on what’s already an untested venture of dubious value.

In fact, I’m pretty much at the point where “pay to enter” just means I’m not interested. Maybe we’ll miss out on some genuine opportunities because of that stance, but a long-time professional like Mark Evanier will tell you the #1 rule is “They pay you, you don’t pay them“. Mr. Evanier was referring specifically to writing, not contests, but if you read that linked A Writer’s Life article he does mention the idea of contests and (spoiler alert) does not have good things to say. I don’t imagine there’s any contest out there that would pay me to enter it (for reasons of conflict of interest if not good taste), but unless it’s something exceptionally prestigious and established I don’t think I should have to pay them either, and then only a reasonable fee for processing. If their prizes and/or infrastructure are contingent on getting entry money, that’s just even more reason to run away (screaming and flailing optional, but encouraged).

Whether it’s a matter of malice or inexperience, the end result is often the same. So while it’s great to hear they love my work (or Dawn’s), if there’s a fee to get it considered by whatever panel of experts they’ve put together, chances are that we must enter our plea of No Contest.

I think I’ve mentioned before how lately I’d gotten somewhat pessimistic going into convention appearances. There have been occasions of terrible sales, terrible boredom, and on a couple of occasions a deadly combination of both, and running into one of the latter when you go in bright-eyed and full of hope is a disastrous toll on the soul. So I suppose it’s a defensive measure, right? Expect the worst, be pleasantly surprised when it’s not as bad as you expected. Much better than the other way around.

I should probably try to mitigate this attitude, since it makes the pre-convention travel and setup more unpleasant than it needs to be. Also I look at some of my convention reports from 2010, for example, and see how happy I was just to have a table regardless of any issues… I figured at some point I’d start to get jaded about things. Has that happened? After three years, I think you do have to consider yourselves as maybe moving beyond the “starter” stage where you can just shrug off the expenses as being made up for by promotion/networking rather than profits. That was part of our recent decision to scale back from non-local conventions after we do Phoenix this year.

Or will we?

That decision was based on the fact that we just never seemed to be able to do much more than make back our expenses reserving a table, and sometimes not even that much. Again, not something we realistically expected at first, but by our third year I admit to getting antsy. WonderCon 2012 was a particular sore spot where our sales totals didn’t justify the table, much less the gas, parking, or anything else. Emerald City 2012 was much better, but despite that put us much more in the red what with plane travel and such being involved. Had it been local it might have been a different story, but that was my same lament for this year, plus our sales saw almost no increase and that seemed to be a bad sign.

And we just couldn’t seem to make the numbers work at a local con, at least until Long Beach last November. I’ll still call that one a beacon of hope, both for us and for the convention itself, but before I got too celebratory I wanted to get another good show going. When Emerald City didn’t improve over the previous year, I started doubting again…

WonderCon Anaheim 2013 hit like a bolt from the blue. I can’t even begin to grasp at what went right, but… things went right. Do we finally have a good enough spread of merchandise? Have we finally gotten our table set-up worked out to maximum effect? Or was this just an amazing fluke?

We more than doubled our best sales total ever. Ever. It was like fate decided that it had had enough pessimism out of me, thankyewverymuch, and provided us with a weekend of unassailable success. Shut up, Clint, and take their money. Combined with the relatively low overhead of a local show, we might have actually made a profit on this one… or at least broke even. I’ll take being able to break even.

The next big question will be how the one day Long Beach Expo does for us, and then of course how things go at Phoenix. Could Phoenix possibly be good enough to us that we balance the expenses of being there? Before this weekend, I would never believe it. Now? Maybe.

The thing is, every convention is a bit of a crap shoot, even when it’s the same show on a different year. The date matters. Your position on the floor matters. The organization of the show matters. All of these can be variables, and you never know when you might end up with a booth that has a support pillar stuck in the middle of it that screws your usual sweet set-up. I did have a conversation at Emerald City with a friend who has been at this far longer than we have (but still has a day job), and asked him how they made the ends meet every year… and his response was that you can never be 100% sure how things will go, but hopefully the shows you do well at will at least balance out those that are disappointments.

This year’s WonderCon has given us our first taste of being able to do really, really well, and Long Beach and Emerald City weren’t shabby. We’ll see how the rest of the year goes.

You know about Shaun. But do you know about Juan?

The oddest thing about the movie Juan of the Dead is that the pun of its title works far better in English than the original Spanish of “Juan de los Muertos“, especially when you consider that the international release of the original Dawn of the Dead used the title Zombi.

But this is unquestionably not only a Spanish-language film, it’s one that’s very much written from the “hometown” perspective of Cuban filmmaker Alejandro Brugués. In terms of social subtext, Juan of the Dead is definitely a spiritual descendant of Romero’s 1978 offering, but the culture of the setting is different, and thus the subtext follows. When the zombies start to rise, every official announcement makes certain to not only assure the public that the “dissidents” are being dealt with, but to end with condemnation of the United States and their imperialist aggressions. Mind you, there’s absolutely no hint in the movie the U.S. has anything to do with the undead plague, but that doesn’t seem to matter, and you get the sense the people listening mostly just treat it like the white noise it is. There’s not even much surprise at one moment of hilarious juxtaposition when the radio is declaring a return to normalcy even as another smoking building on the horizon collapses.

The “heroes” of the movie, such as they are, are on the one hand the familiar bunch of slackers common to most of the comedic zombie movies of the last decade, and on the other have a certain nihilistic, amoral practicality to them that seems again to be intended at least in part as a cultural commentary. In a communist land, one of their first decisions as the dead walk is to start up a business whose slogan is quite literally “We kill your loved ones”, a market niche even the most soulless Western capitalist might have hesitated to fill.

They’re organized to do it on maybe… day 3 of the impending apocalypse? You call them, you pay them, and they put grandma down so you don’t have to. Of course, the apocalypse seems like such a strangely gradual thing… the streets fill with zombies, more and more buildings burn on the skyline… but that doesn’t matter so much as squeezing a living from the opportunity, not to mention looting whatever they get their hands on. I don’t put “heroes” in scare quotes for nothing, these folks would dump a crippled man out of his wheelchair so they could use it to carry more tequila. When the fat comic relief character runs across a (still human) guy who owed him money, he takes a moment to butcher him with a machete, explains why, and everyone sort of nods, shrugs, and carries on. Rosa’s behavior so far in our comic seems positively saintly by comparison.

But if they seem morally bankrupt, I also got the sense that their situation living in the poorer sections of Havana portrayed them as not having far to fall. In fact, that may have been the whole point, that their daily lives were already such a wasteland that the zombie apocalypse required precious little adjustment. And yet, in the end, they make a brave choice you rarely see in one of these movies, a choice which again seemed very tied to cultural issues.

It’s an uneven film, and one that probably makes more sense to someone familiar with modern Cuba, but there’s enough enjoyable ideas and takes on old zombie tropes to entertain. Lest we forget, the original Dawn of the Dead had its kooky moments of nonsense as well, but people responded to that strong undercurrent of commentary on mindless American consumerism. Here we have a similar lens turned on Cuba, but also a protagonist in Juan who starts with nothing and ends with nothing, but always resolves to survive the best he can. As he says throughout the movie even in the midst of the most hopeless odds: “All I need is a chance.”

Juan of the Dead is currently available on Netflix Instant, so if you’re a zombie movie fan with access and 90 minutes to kill, well… give it a chance.

A few weeks ago I was reminded once again that my perspective on this series is not that of the average reader. Now when I’m saying “average” I don’t mean that in a disparaging sense, because otherwise I’d be putting myself in that same boat with my readings of other peoples’ work. Sometimes I don’t even catch up on a comic until a few weeks or months have passed, and if there’s a big cast or a complex plot it can be tough to keep track… I’ve had a lot of other things on my mind in-between, as opposed to the creator(s) who are living and breathing their story on a near constant basis.

In the case of Zombie Ranch, it’s not uncommon in the comments for people to get characters’ names wrong or forget the names entirely. This would cause me fits, if I didn’t have the sense to take a breath and put myself in their shoes. For one thing, they (and let’s not forget many of “they” happen to be you reading this) have cared enough to comment, period. No one forced them to do that, and comments on webcomics tend to be spur-of-the-moment affairs where someone was inspired by a particular aspect of the current page. While they’re writing that comment, do they really want to open up a new tab and go searching around the archives to try to find the exact name of the person they’re talking about? Most probably not.

Repetition helps. It might even be the case (though I don’t know how much) that an entry on the cast page helps, and I keep meaning to get that expanded just in case it assists readers. I think, for instance, that most people by now have Suzie, Frank, Chuck, and Rosa as characters they recognize on sight. But Oscar has been nothing but a voice on a walkie-talkie for quite awhile, and when I reintroduced him it wasn’t just a matter of people not remembering his name, but remembering he existed at all. There’s a black guy on the ranch? When did that happen?!

Well, whaddaya mean? Geez, I introduced Brett, Lacey, and Oscar all the way back as far as Episode 3! Okay, so we didn’t actually find out their names or hear them talk until the middle of Episode 4, but how do you completely forget them?

Breathe, Clint. Breathe. Remember the date on the last post (before the recent ones) where we actually saw what Oscar looked like? August 17th, 2011. More than a year and a half ago. I’ve read a lot of webcomics that for one reason or another, either author choice or format, don’t have posting dates on their pages. I like having it right there, easy to find, both so a reader can see the progression and so I myself can go back and look and remind myself of the amount of real-world time that has passed.

In a sense, the most loyal, longest-running fans, the weekly readers of Zombie Ranch might ironically be the ones who are going to have the most trouble keeping track of the details. As noted above, they would have last seen Oscar in Summer of 2011… whereas someone just joining us and doing a fresh “archive dive” could have last seen him as recently as this morning.

So under those circumstances, if you’re going to run people down for not remembering details, it’s entirely possible that the people you’re running down are the ones who love your work the most. That’s not a good thing. And that’s why I usually try to be helpful and understanding if someone has those kinds of questions.

Ideally of course, you create characters memorable enough that no one has a problem remembering them, which I’m happy to have succeeded with in terms of several of the cast. On that score, if people refer to Muriel as “Honeysuckle” or even one of the less flattering nicknames she’s been called over the course of the comic, so be it. If people have entirely forgotten Oscar, that means maybe he just needs a few more moments to stick in the memory properly. Like maybe a quirky moment of faith and firepower.

We’ll see how that works out.

I’ve had this poll on the site for a few weeks now asking people what their favorite method of reading comics is: online, or in print? And I acknowledged right up front that this is perhaps a silly question to ask on a webcomic site, but I myself fall into the position where I often feel more comfortable with print despite being a webcomic author… so call it a silly question from a silly person.

It might be because I prefer to “binge read”, even where print is concerned, waiting for trade collections over single issues, or even grabbing up some big thick omnibus to devour. It’s not as often that I find myself able and willing to relax in front of a computer for such a binge, particularly since it can be a bit iffy to do so at my day job and I’m still lacking in terms of decently-sized-yet-portable technology like an iPad. Even then, taking an iPad to certain traditional reading places of mine like the bathtub would be rather risky.

Of course, there’s one massive, obvious benefit reading webcomics online has over reading their print versions, and that’s cost.  If you go to a convention like San Diego Comic Con, big companies sometimes have entire racks or displays where they give away print comics for free. Smaller fry, like most webcomics people, cannot afford to do this with their print versions… and really, why should they, when they’ve got that totally free option available? Get your butt online if you don’t wanna shell out the 20 bucks, you old dinosaur!

But speaking of the ancient past, there’s that thing you can potentially do if you happen to be a creator yourself, with print versions of your own. Barter.

Oh, this is not something I advocate opening a conversation with. Struggling Independent creators need to eat, and books tend to not be edible. On the other end, well-known people and/or those with more than just themselves to answer to for sales are probably going to decline and possibly be very annoyed that you think what you’re doing is anywhere near worth what they’ve done. This situation is one I feel is best strenuously avoided, particularly with creators I happen to admire. There are times I’ve just plain given away a print copy of Zombie Ranch to a personal hero and just felt grateful they didn’t toss it in the garbage in front of my eyes (out of my sight, well, who knows? At least I can preserve the fantasy they might have liked it).

In between the extremes though, there’s plenty of talented people who I can think of as being more or less around my “caste level”, if such a term can be applied to comicsdom. This is still not blanket license to go around to them asking for barter deals. For one thing, all self-deprecation aside, I should consider that my own stuff has some value, too, right? So it just makes sense to look around and see first of all if there’s something I might want that seems like it might be fair to trade for. Part of that process includes talking to the other creator and gauging their enthusiasm for the work, and beyond that I’d say gauging their enthusiasm for having any sort of interaction with me. I particularly know we might be getting somewhere if the conversation turns to what I do and they seem interested in Zombie Ranch. At that point, if I’m interested in what they have, and they’re interested in what I have, I might suggest a trade arrangement.

And I have to be entirely prepared to still be declined, and not take that personally. Sometimes they’re just worried about having enough stock on hand, which is why the last day of a convention can often be the best time to actually go through with an exchange,  and if you make the offer earlier it can be best to phrase it like “Say, if you still have some copies left on Sunday afternoon…”

But sometimes they’re just plain not interested, and that’s fine, too. Not everyone is interested in everything, and if you don’t happen to like cabbages, you’re not going to trade for a cabbage. Or it’s just not your policy to barter. As long as both parties are polite about it, there shouldn’t be any cause for bad feelings.

What I like about brokering trades with other creators, when it does work, is that not only do I have something new to read,  but it’s so much more memorable than just exchanging business cards. You get a slice of their creativity and they get a slice of yours, and at least in my case I usually have it read in its entirety within a few weeks, something I can never usually promise to myself when I need to go look at things online.

Cases in point, at Emerald City I bartered with the respective creators for Mary Elizabeth’s Sock, Accursed Dragon, and Hominids, and while I can’t speak directly on Mary Elizabeth’s Sock yet (since Dawn has hold of it), the other two were well worth the exchange. But without those trades, who knows when I might have gotten around to checking them out? Particularly in the case of Accursed Dragon, which I’m pretty sure I’d never run across any ads or links for in my online ramblings.

Now Hominids, not to mince words, is absolutely gorgeous to look at, which will draw people in before they even get to the fact that creator Jordan Kotzebue is also a pretty darn good storyteller working with a concept you don’t see every day… I could call it Clan of the Cave Bear meets Elfquest, but that’s probably a disservice. I’ll just tell you it’s worth reading. There are naked cartoon boobs involved, but for once those are more just there in a National Geographic sense rather than being a source of gratuitous titillation (pardon the pun). Give it a look if you can.

Accursed Dragon doesn’t have the visual flash Hominids does, particularly since it’s presented in 100% black and white (although a new run of it promises color starting in April). And the story may be one you’ve heard before, with a cursed hero and an optimist companion on a quest to right wrongs… but for me it’s all in the fact that Ryan Smith has a great sense of comic timing. He makes me laugh, without necessarily forcing those laughs. The characters are simply drawn but expressive enough that the silent reaction panels have the desired result… and even if the story might be an old one (aren’t they all?), he does a good job moving it along. I’ll be honest, I went into those pages not knowing what to expect, but came out of them feeling thoroughly entertained and wanting to spread the word to others to give it a chance. So here I am. I don’t know if he’ll find our comic similarly engaging, but I hope this at least makes the trade worthwhile. In the webcomics world, I believe positive word of mouth is one of the best gifts possible.

So there’s a couple of examples of the benefits a bit of barter can achieve. And before I sign off this week, mentioning word of mouth reminds me that I need to announce a happy occasion. A few months back the wonderful webcomic Rusty & Co. had to shut its doors abruptly due to shakily-grounded-yet-ominous threats of legal action from Wizards of the Coast. Well, Mike R. has worked out a settlement.

Rusty & Co. is back!

And if you missed my gushing recommendation back when Mike did some fan art for us, I’ll just tell you that Mike hasn’t missed a step despite his recent woes. His art and humor are just as sharp as ever, but his audience, alas, has dipped far below what it was before the forced hiatus. I’m sure a portion of that is just people who are unaware things have returned to normal, so once I myself realized it I promised him I’d do my part to inform. If you’re a former fan, the time has come to return! And if you’re not a fan yet? Go be one! Also if you’re reading this before 9pm EST on Wednesday, there’s info on his site blog about the ComicMix contest R&C is entered into… it’s currently seeded against XKCD which is an unenviable match-up, but hey, take an opportunity to root for the underdog…. undermonster… whatever. You get the idea.

Well, last week I spelled out all my reservations regarding the sudden expansion of Emerald City Comic Con. Was it as big a letdown as I expected?

Thankfully, no. In fact, if it weren’t for the expense involved in getting there, I would have signed us up for another year.

Yeah, we’re not headed back for 2014. Never say never, of course, but our sales, which would have been fantastic at a local show, once again disappeared into the black hole of travel and lodging costs. But I’m happy to report that the issues were purely economical… I found the staff this year to be just as attentive and organized as in 2012, once again constantly checking in to see how we were and offering water bottles and booth sitting as needed.

That said, it seemed like different sections may have experienced different results, as some peers in the Q section of Artist’s Alley reported they weren’t benefiting from any of this sort of attention. Also, I still do believe the sky bridge acted as something of a divider to the detriment of those on our (far) side of it, since another peer claimed no less than 3 people told him “Oh, I didn’t know you were here, I already spent all my money near the entrance!”

Rough stuff, and with the layout of the Washington State Convention Center, perhaps not easily addressed, though my first instinct is that there’s a perfectly good area in the middle they could have used as the entrance rather than sticking it all the way at one end. I still will never agree that splitting Artist’s Alley into two halves is a good idea, but the only truly bonehead move I noticed was putting the photo shoot area right at one end of the sky bridge, ensuring a permanent traffic knot in a crucial area that was already going to be a bottleneck. Photo areas need to be out of the traffic flow, not in the midst of it… if you’ve ever been at a convention walking behind someone in a gorgeous and/or skimpy costume, you know how even that bottles things up. Take a lesson from other conventions and keep them confined to a lobby area, says I.

But it wasn’t the absolute disaster I had feared… it just wasn’t enough that we can safely budget to go back again. All the days sold out, with who knows how much of an increase in attendance over last year (the convention was apparently being tight-lipped about that even to its volunteers), but we personally sold only four dollars more than we did in 2012 when all was said and done, and witnessed a lot of people looking without buying, some of whom did mention they were out of money. Did they shoot their wads in the south area nearer the entrance? Quite possible. Even if they made it to the north side, we were all the way towards the back. I was pleasantly surprised at how well we did despite that, but I think it still needs work.  Regardless, fare thee well, Emerald City. One day we may see you again, but for the foreseeable future, we must part.

As stated in the text section below this week’s comic, this coming weekend will see Dawn and I returning to the Emerald City Comicon in Seattle for the second year. We also included a custom map showing our location, because the convention has become… larger.

The press for the show says it’s their biggest ever, and they aren’t kidding. Last year the floor was confined to the north hall of the convention center, and this year it’s both north and south, so we’re talking almost doubling the size.

And while I’m sure the organizers are ecstatic about the explosion in popularity that enabled the expansion, I’m not so sure how I feel about it from my end. I know from an attendee end the ticket prices saw a significant increase, which not everyone was happy about. Meanwhile I’m looking at the show floor and having to squint to find our table, which is located way, waaaaaay back from the show entrance. They split Artist’s Alley into two different Artist’s Alleys, which I’ve personally never found to be a good thing,  although to their credit they seem to have spaced out the “big names” between the sections.

This is their prerogative as the organizers, and also something of a function of how the Washington State CC is laid out… but the convention has been effectively split in two, and the only attendee entrance is all the way at one end of those halves with a skyway separating north from south. And man are there a lot of exhibitors this time around, with a staff that may not be prepared to deal with growing 100% in a single year. Call me a downer (Dawn does), but I do worry about being “lost in the shuffle”, or perhaps even “lost in the haystack”.

Will there be the same sort of personal attention we got last year, where staff volunteers actually came around to ask if we’d like some complimentary bottled water, or even if we needed a temporary booth sitter while we took a bathroom or food break? I admit, I’d never been to any other convention that did this, but now that I’ve experienced it I also admit I’d find it sad if it goes away.  Will we get any decent flow of traffic, given past conventions where even attendees who wanted to see us got lost finding our table in much smaller, less complicated layouts? Anytime you split up Artist’s Alley you risk your attendees browsing through one half of it and then stopping, not realizing there was more. Now there’s a situation where attendees might browse through one half of a convention and then stop, not checking out the rest… I hope having some of the special guests on the “far side” will be enough to overcome that possibility.

Anyway, here’s me, being a perhaps silly pessimist before I set one foot in Seattle. We just ended up doing so well last year and having such a great experience that we decided to deal with the costs and troubles of coming around for a second outing, and I can’t help but wonder if there’s going to be disappointment. Or maybe I’m just inoculating myself, keeping expectations low and hoping to be pleasantly surprised. I’m fairly certain a large part of my disappointment with APE was due to my giddy hopes going in, so I’m keeping giddiness to a minimum.

Will ECCC growing so big so fast be boom or bust for us? This time next week, I’ll have my answers. I will say that if it’s a bust, it’ll make it easier to let go, since at the moment it looks like 2013 will be our last big year in terms of convention outings, at least those which require non-local travel. Oh, to be one of those people important enough that a convention springs for your travel and hotel costs… but that requires a lot more clout than we’ll probably ever have. I think I am glad we managed one more year at Emerald City, though, if for nothing else than the opportunity to personally witness the growth spurt for good or ill.

There’s a tab on several of the more popular TV  Tropes pages with the initials “WMG”, which stands for “Wild Mass Guessing“. If you’ve ever debated with your friends over something like whether Cobb is awake or asleep at the end of Inception, you’ve experienced this phenomenon. It can be a lot of fun to look back at something you’ve enjoyed and consider its bits and pieces, especially if there might be a follow-up in the works. I think we all have a little bit of detective in us where we’d love to put together the clues we’ve been given and see our theories come to fruition on the screen (or page, wherever).

Is it sometimes a recipe for disappointment? Sure, especially if you get your heart set on things turning out a certain way and the creators take matters in a different direction. X ended up engaged to Y instead of Z?! Sacrilege! Nonsense! Meanwhile the creators can end up bitter at the backlash of their fandom—who are you to tell me how things should go? Who’s running this story, anyhow?

It seems like any popular work of fiction will run into this problem sooner or later, but webcomics can be particularly vulnerable what with their ongoing nature and the ease of access to the creator(s). At least to start with… it seems like many of the biggest ones today started off with an open comments section… then at some point started moderating the comments… then killed comments altogether, perhaps continuing to respond on a forum… and then eventually they stop really interacting on the forum, either, and the conversation becomes mostly that of moderators and fans talking into the wilderness, wondering if anyone hears. At that point it’s basically become indistinguishable from the traditional mass media set-up, right? Except maybe the people that were there from the beginning feel personally shunned now in a way they wouldn’t if there had always been a clear divide.

I wonder sometimes if everything that gets popular is doomed to this same progression, a progression that seems to start out of simple, innocent speculations that are made with no more motive than pure love and enjoyment. And on the creators’ side, don’t we want to have people excited about what we’re doing? Don’t we, to put it plainly, want to get people to care? To get them talking?

I know I do. I love hearing your reactions and your guesses on where things are going. With the amount of cliffhangers I put in week to week (especially lately), what else should I expect? I love hearing someone “call out to the screen” and tell Chuck to spray his antagonist in the face—knowing that yes, that’s exactly what they’ll see a week from now (predictable but satisfying), but will they have also guessed that an angry billy goat subsequently butts the man off the roof (surprising, but hopefully no less satisfying)?

Maybe this is another reason I’m reluctant to push too hard for recognition. Yeah, there’s the occasional comic which engenders no comments at all, but I’d just as soon have a small handful of neat responses than a page full of “FIRST!”. It’s at the level I can still personalize things… not to say I respond to every single comment, but if you stick around I tend to end up knowing names. It’s sort of like Cheers in that way. Please get the Cheers reference so I don’t feel terribly old.

Just something that’s flitted across my mental radar from time to time. Don’t get me wrong, of course I’d love to get to the point where more people than not have heard about Zombie Ranch when I bring it up, at least in comic/webcomic circles, but I hope that won’t ever have to go hand in hand with feeling overwhelmed by wild masses, guessing or not.

P.S. speaking of word getting out about the Ranch, Sunday-Superheroes.com has a review of us up this week. Check it out!

So I have a confession to make, and that’s that I was not exactly champing at the bit to see Django Unchained. Yes, despite Quentin Tarantino’s name attached (and actually directing rather than simply producing). Despite it being a modern homage to the Spaghetti Westerns of yore, with the added twist of bringing a Deep South setting and the spectre of slavery into the mix, letting a black man play the part of the wronged hero with a pressing need to kill all the bastards that crossed him up in the past.

It’s a compelling concept, but with ticket prices what they are these days I don’t get motivated to the theater for much of anything, which often means I’m months or even years behind the times as I wait for cable or Netflix to queue up something I was interested in… but not necessarily $12+ interested in. Well, courtesy of a friend springing for the ticket price, Dawn and I were recently able to check it out.

Now it always helps with my mood for films when I have no cash on the line, which is the secret of how I was able to stand sitting through Star Wars Episode II and III (my parents made them family outings). I paid for Phantom Menace, but at that time, who knew better? Plus I may or may not have been stoned out of my mind to the point my critical faculties were reduced to around those of an easily pleased 5 year old. I approached Django Unchained without high expectations. Partly because Tarantino’s last offering, Inglorious Basterds, was a bit of a muddle for me, and partly because of the original namesake casting its shadow. I rented the 1966 Django and found it a chore to get through because on the one hand it was trashy and over-the-top, and on the other hand it seemed to want to take itself so, so seriously. This is a mix that doesn’t make much sense when your hero hauls around a full-size coffin everywhere, and that coffin then turns out to contain a gatling gun which he proceeds to fire from the hip, no problem. Should be awesome; and yet somehow, just ended up being annoying.

I don’t know, maybe I would have enjoyed it more had I not been stone cold sober. Maybe Sergio Leone has me spoiled, because he takes the same sort of situations and stylistic touches and makes authentic cinematic art out of them, and Sergio Corbucci felt like a pale imitation. All the sound and fury with none of the thought or skill. It’s the difference between watching Die Hard and watching Transformers.

But you know, considering that Django Unchained’s story and characters have jack all to do with Django (beyond the name and a subtle cameo by the original’s star Franco Nero), that part of things ended up being a non-issue. Django Unchained is its own beast, for sure.

And for about 90% or so of its runtime, by golly, it’s a handsome beast. I was pleasantly surprised at how well everything flowed and made good, entertaining sense, and how Tarantino wasn’t even afraid to inject a little outright levity here and there to prevent the proceedings from weighing down with too much seriousness. I refer particularly to a scene involving a proto-Ku Klux Klan bitching about their headwear, which Dawn very correctly named “the Blazing Saddles interlude”. Present and accounted for was that tightrope balance between the dramatic and absurd that marks out Tarantino’s best work, and there’s some wonderfully entertaining performances by the actors, particularly Samuel L. Jackson stepping far out from how you’d usually see him.

Sadly, for me at least, it falls apart right at the end. I probably shouldn’t get spoilery, but let’s just say there seems to be about 20 minutes of afterthought and a secondary climax that I felt didn’t need to be there, and the movie strains its credulity at the seams to make it happen. It’s like Tarantino suddenly woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, shouting “Wait! If we end here my title character doesn’t get to display his true independence!”—which I agree could be a sticking point, but disagree on how it was handled. The very ending comes off as making more sense as some imaginary fever dream, “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”-style, on the part of Django, than anything actually happening in the established reality.

And I doubt that was Tarantino’s intent, but there you are. He got famous for his non-sequential storytelling, pulling off some great tricks with it… but then when he tries to write something that just carries straightforward from point A to point B, I feel like he can run into problems.

All this doesn’t make Django Unchained a bad movie; hell, I hate the ending of Chinatown too, not because the bad guys win but because they win in a way that completely depends on Jake engaging in sudden, inexplicably moronic behavior. Chinatown is still worth watching, it just will never make my list of all-time greats. Similarly, in hindsight I would happily say Django Unchained would have been worth the price of admission, and it’s great to see a western do so well both critically and commercially (hopefully not just because Q.T.’s name is on it), but it failed in one crucial aspect for me. The Ars Terminus—the Art of Ending, on the perfect note, at the perfect moment that brings everything home.

Which may be waaaay too nitpicky a point to bring up on a movie based in Spaghetti Westerns, but Leone was really good at making it happen. A little more Leone and a little less Corbucci is always worth striving for.

There comes a time in every webcomic’s life, assuming it lasts past the first several months, that a creator will look back at the first pages and think, “Man, that’s some rough stuff.”

Some people go so far as to completely redraw these pages in a frenzy of revision, which can lead to some real strangeness if their motivation doesn’t last through the entire archive… I remember reading at least one webcomic where I was really, really impressed with the quality, and then all of a sudden around the 12th page there was a sudden nosedive and things got much simpler and sketchier. I was confused until I realized that the author had done just what I mentioned above… marshalling their more recent skills, they’d gone back and overhauled some of their starting pages to match the quality of the later ones, but hadn’t followed entirely through. As a result, that 12th page was a reader’s first taste of the actual, original art from several years prior.

The Least I Could Do comic is another  one I remember causing some controversy when big chunks of the early strips were redone, especially because they were redone by an entirely different artist.  It turns out that was only for a print book version, though, and the decision made because the original strips weren’t made in high enough resolution– which is actually a very good reason. The old strips are still available online, but it’s not particularly easy to navigate to them… so you could argue that they’re effectively hidden away in favor of the modern, more polished Lar DeSouza look. Since Ryan Sohmer is one of those guys who is reportedly very concerned with being seen as “professional” and LICD is a big business for him, I can see why he might want to de-emphasize the past, even if there weren’t the added muddle of those strips being done by completely different partners he’s since parted ways with.

In fact, another writer/creator friend of mine had to hire a new artist to redo his first chapter of comics not because he felt they were particularly bad, but because the former artist asserted ownership rights over what he had drawn even though he no longer had any interest in continuing. There’s a lot of reasons to go back and make changes, and not all of them stem from embarrassment.

Now true, the biggest reason is probably still the idea of first impressions. Most comics are going to have their current strip/page posted for a visitor, but a natural reaction for a newcomer, particularly where a story comic is concerned, would be to want to start from the beginning. If, in the creator’s humble opinion, their early artwork looks like warmed over ass, they will feel a certain anxiety about scaring away potential new fans. A good story may keep people hooked, but first they have to snap up the shiny bait, right?

The flipside to this is that there are a good number of people out there willing to overlook roughness in the early presentation, especially considering they’re getting the content for no more cost than a bit of their time. Some fans actually go so far as to find the reworking of early strips something of a betrayal, because they enjoy seeing how far a creator has progressed from when they started to where they are now. Heck, when you’re a beginning creator yourself, sometimes it’s nice to look at a success story who arose from humble beginnings, and an unrevised archive can show a wonderful roadmap of that.

As for us? Dawn will be first to say she feels her art has improved quite a bit since the early days, but early on we made a mutual decision to “play it where it lies” as far as the visuals went, except in occasional extreme cases with a comic page that just recently went live. That’s extended to our print issues, and yet we still get purchases at conventions even though Issue #1 was made with far more enthusiasm than experience. Now I admit, where the lettering is concerned I went back through Episode 2 and Episode 3 and fixed that up a lot for the print versions. The art has stayed in its original form though, for better or worse. Hopefully for the better, at least in terms of most of our fans. One man’s junk is another man’s masterpiece, right? And I hope my writing has enjoyed a certain consistency to it… though that might be backhanding myself in the sense that if I started out “good”, I haven’t really improved at all.

Anyhow, we probably won’t be touching any of the artwork for the foreseeable future. The lettering? Well, I actually have done some touch-ups here and there already, and I’m pondering really digging in and fixing up that aspect of the early comics just to make things more readable and more consistent. But then again, it could be that such an effort isn’t really necessary… so if you’ve any opinions, I’ve got a new poll up on the left sidebar for Yea or Nay. And/or you can comment here. Let me know!

Last week’s comic represented a bit of a rarity for us, in that we actually went ahead and showed a person with his face half chewed off. For a comic named “Zombie Ranch”, we really don’t have much of a gore quotient, do we?

Well, it’s one of my pet theories that constant gore gets desensitizing after awhile. If you want blood and guts to have an actual impact on a reader, you dish them out sparingly. So we do. It’s not that we’re morally against showing horrible violence, so much as trying to find ways to make that violence be memorable when we want it to be.

Beyond even that, we make copious use of the so-called “discretion shot“, hoping to suggest things well enough to harness the power of your imaginations rather than Dawn just outright drawing throats being slit or people getting blown away by gunfire. Or Rosa vomiting.

Does it work? Well, honestly, implying rather than showing does run the risk of confusion, and we’ve fielded our share of comments over the years from readers who were left scratching their heads, or even outright misinterpreting what went on. It’s hard to tell just how big a problem that represents, since we might get a handful of such feedback at most, compared to a silent majority of hundreds of regular readers who never say anything. Did they fill in the blanks in the way we intended? If they didn’t, they probably didn’t feel a need to chime in with another “I don’t get it!”. If they did, they were probably similarly reluctant to post something like “Yeesh, come on, this is obvious.”

Zeke’s demise was probably our biggest example of this, and while I never expected anyone to figure out exactly what happened “offscreen” at the time, I reckoned by the time we got ’round to the glamour shot close-up, the clues would all be there to be pieced together. Yet the confusion still occasionally bubbled up, including people who thought Zeke had been shot. I just couldn’t understand that one at all, since Frank had very deliberately put his rifle away (on Suzie’s orders) and pulled out a Bowie knife.

But, you know, my first instinct is always that it’s somehow our fault. I didn’t set things up right, or maybe Dawn didn’t highlight some detail or other enough. Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to be subtle at all, that we’re just plain not good enough to pull it off properly. Less was not more, it was less.

Dawn usually takes the opposite tack and insists everything from our end is fine, and if a few people happen to miss out on what’s being implied, oh well. You’ll notice I’m almost always the one jumping into the comments with some explanation or clarification if people seem genuinely lost— most recently in, well, last week’s comic.  Sometimes I feel like I’m explaining the joke I just told, which, again, feels like failure to communicate. The audience shouldn’t need creator commentary to understand what’s happening, right?

Dawn’s probably right, and I make a bigger deal out of this than I should. The comic comes out slowly, and for a lot of you is hardly the only comic you read. Many of you who responded to the poll about that indicated you’re regularly following a dozen or more. That, more than anything, is the likely culprit for people not catching fiddly details or remembering sequences of events that in real-world terms “happened” months or even years ago. Hell, I constantly run across people (both online and in person) who get the characters’ names mixed up or can’t remember them at all… which I could possibly be upset about if I didn’t do the exact same thing with other people’s comics, even ones I really like. It doesn’t indicate lack of love, so much as lack of RAM. We think about a lot of different things from day to day. I happen to think about my comic a lot. Other creators no doubt think about their comics a lot, and yeah, I’ve most definitely been on the other end of the awkward conversation that goes more or less like this:

“Oh man, I love your comic! Especially the funny old guy, uh… uhm…”

“Mr. Snoozle?”

“Yeah! Mr. Snoozle! He’s great.”

From that point of departure, the creator probably figures the chances of discussing his subtle foreshadowing of Mr. Snoozle’s fall to the Dark Side with you might be slim. Last year I got the opportunity to ask Jaime Hernandez if his lady superhero group the Ti-Girls was pronounced “TEE” or “TYE”, and he proceeded to point out that every single founding member had a “TYE” in their name. He graciously did not add, “Duh!”

I ponder if he didn’t do that, not just because he’s a nice guy (which he was), but because at that moment, part of him was wondering if my confusion was his fault. I’m pretty sure it was mine. It’s one of those things that just seemed so obvious in hindsight that part of me wanted to crawl away and hide, and another part was chortling “You were baffled people thought Zeke had been shot, eh? NOW look at you!”

But, you know, I think even though obsession and geekdom go hand in hand, it’s actually rare for a fandom to be more invested in something than its creator(s), at least if it’s that creator’s personal project. And the fans becoming that involved is a definite double-edged sword, if you listen to all those creators complaining about feeling like they’ve lost control and that people are focusing on minutiae to the detriment of the actual story.

Well, we still bull on ahead with the idea of showing less instead of more. It’s just the way I like to tell things, and if we really are bad at it, then my hope is we’ll eventually get better. I was gratified recently by hearing from someone who read through the comic again and picked up on a lot of little things they missed the first time. In my wildest dreams I even hope that one day, someone will notice a certain subtle feature of Issue/Episode 1 that we put in… but I can’t even really hint at what it is without potentially spoiling the joy of a natural discovery. And on top of that, it could also be not half as clever as I think it is. It’s probably easiest to see in the print issue.

Ugh, even that might have been too much of a hint. It’s possible I’ll live and die with not a single reader ever finding it, much less letting me know they did. That’s all right.

But I won’t deny it would be damn cool. And no, before you ask, it’s not a sailboat.

There was a feature Wizard Magazine used to do back in the day, which many online geek sites still continue their own versions of: who would their speculative actor picks be for a movie based on a comic book? Sometimes the decision was based on the looks, sometimes it was the attitude, sometimes both. Sometimes it just seemed to be a person the article writer had a crush on, or sometimes they just seemed to be huffing crack. I mean, Jessica Alba as Susan Storm? In what kind of crazy person world would that ever be a good idea?

Oh.

Well, it’s not like my own tastes have been perfect.  I personally thought that Jennifer Garner should have made a great Elektra, and I had serious doubts about Heath Ledger being able to pull off the Joker.  I had full faith Robert Downey Jr. would nail Tony Stark, but really, that was some low-hanging fruit in predictive terms.

Maybe that’s one reason why I’d never really applied this sort of speculation to Zombie Ranch. Suzie’s character is influenced in part by John Wayne, but she sure doesn’t look like him. The closest I’d come to that sort of thing was at the very beginning, discussing with Dawn that Frank might bear some physical resemblance to Paul Newman. Not that Paul Newman could play Frank now, much less Andy Devine being available to follow up on the inspiration he provided for Uncle Chuck.

Plus, on the occasions it did cross my mind, I figured it’s probably best to let the characters be their own people, not chain them to the look and mannerisms of this or that real-life person (or persona). I once was part of a gaming group where the gamemaster always required us to pick some well-known movie or TV star for our character’s look, and while yes, that did make it somewhat easier to visualize, it also seemed somehow limiting.

Well, with all that said, I must admit I looked over at the TV while my wife was watching yet another episode of Revenge, and murmured, “You know, she kind of looks like Suzie…”

“She” being Emily VanCamp, though I think what really prompted me was seeing her in a disguise where she was without her usual blond hair. Once that happened, the face just fell into place.

On the show the character she plays is hardly what you’d call a working class rancher type, but the intensity of purpose is certainly there to match the similarity in look. Heck, her biography even states “she is a talented horse rider“. She’s Canadian, but it seems these days the U.S. outsources all its tough cowboy roles to foreign folks, so why not its cowgirls as well?

What difference does this make to the comic? Probably none, really, but after all my hemming and hawing, along comes Miss VanCamp and just unknowingly stakes her claim as someone that, yes, I could imagine bringing Suzie Zane to life.  Plus she’s not long dead (or undead).

As for the rest of the cast? Well, except for this and maybe Kathy Bates for Muriel, I got nothing… and I’m still not exactly looking. I’m curious though if any of you out there have speculated where I haven’t. What say you, have you had any idle thoughts on current actors who you might pick for a Zombie Ranch movie, were budget no object?

I put up a couple of polls regarding comic conventions around the end of last year. One asked what your main reason was for not going to them… lack of money was the clear winner there, followed by distance.

I hear ya.

The poll was meant from an attendee perspective, but from an exhibitor standpoint I could also add “need some time to recuperate” to the list. I recently got around to updating our live appearance list for 2013. Emerald City Comicon, then WonderCon Anaheim, the Long Beach Comic Expo, Phoenix Comicon… also just confirmed heading out to a Free Comic Book Day appearance, which I still need to add.

Might seem like a lot, but compared to some peers we know on the convention circuit, this schedule is nothing. They have times of the year where they’re setting up shop at some show or other nearly every weekend, sometimes at places hundreds of miles apart. Since most conventions aren’t really springing for hotel or travel expenses except for their biggest names, they’re also often driving to keep their costs down. I know one couple who commuted back and forth from San Diego to the L.A. area for each day of a convention rather than eat the cost of a hotel stay. That’s at least a three or four hour drive, both coming and going. Picture a show which might go 2pm-8pm on Friday (with a few hours beforehand for setup), Saturday hours of 10am-7pm, and Sunday 11am-5pm (now a few hours for teardown), and think about what time that leaves for sleep, much less anything else. But they were still there and smiling for all their fans or whoever else might happen by.

That is some serious commitment right there. Truth to tell, I doubt Dawn and I would be capable of doing the same. Certainly not on a regular basis, and then probably not while remaining bright and cheery during a nine hour stretch of meet and greet with convention attendees. And anyone who’s ever attended a convention as fans (including us) can tell you the bummer stories of meeting a creator who seemed grumpy or inattentive. I don’t wanna be that guy, the guy who drags down your whole day. It’s entirely possible I already have been that guy, but I do try not to be, and lack of sleep/stress sounds like a great way to stack the odds in favor of “hatred of humanity” (another popular poll choice for staying away from cons).

I’ve also never been all that great at traveling, especially long-distance. Some guys sashay out the door with some clean underwear and a toothbrush. Me, I fret about what I need and (especially) what I might forget. Then beat myself up when I inevitably forget something anyhow. I try to arrange the pieces of the travel puzzle as thoroughly as possible, stacking the odds against mishap, and yet still always feeling like something will go wrong until the pleasant surprise of arrival. It’s not that I’m afraid the plane will crash, it’s that I’m deathly afraid of missing the flight.

Now, take that attitude and add the complexity of transporting and setting up a convention table space on top of it. I’m fortunate that Dawn is much better at the packing and unpacking, and can, for example, take care of that while I’m reparking the car. But still, if there’s any kind of schedule involved I can never quite relax on most trips until we’ve reached the destination, and if there’s a convention on the other end that relaxation doesn’t truly set in until maybe 15 minutes or so after the table is ready.

I had hoped that this was merely the jitters of starting out, but after three years I think I just have to admit it’s a personality flaw… err, feature? that’s not changing anytime soon. So while I’m definitely looking forwards to Emerald City and Phoenix this year, you can bet I’ll have some stress in the transit no matter how much I get pre-arranged. Sure, sending a good chunk of our materials by FedEx worked out perfectly in 2012… but what about this year?

With how much of a worrywart I am you’d probably think I become an absolute basketcase when something really does go awry. And I won’t deny there is definitely some panic and harsh language, but between the two of us Team Wolf has managed so far to muddle through, get ourselves and our displays to the site in working order, and present a largely non-grumpy face to the public— even when Dawn had to be at Emerald City with a sprained ankle and a terrible cold (and on my end I had to haul everything from our hotel in addition to hauling her in her wheelchair).

A couple weeks ago I went back through every last one of these writer’s blogs that I’ve written since Zombie Ranch began, including all my reports on various appearances we’ve done. Not everything made it into those reports, of course, since I doubted the average Joe or Jane wanted to hear about how we ran out of the food we brought and were half-starved on our last day exhibiting at SDCC 2011… but oh gods, if you ever get the chance be more prepared than we were. Our only local option was the convention center’s hot dogs, which we’d already determined the Thursday before to be a fate worse than hunger.

Is it worth all the trouble? For a good show, absolutely. Like I said, 15 minutes after everything’s ready to go, I get groovy, and though we do love sales since they go towards covering our being there, as long as there’s some good nerdy conversations to be had I’m usually a satisfied Clint. That said, since we’re not aggressively pursuing making our appearances profitable, 2013 may mark the end of our live shows beyond occasional local Southern California events. Not the end of the world, especially considering I just got done talking about how much I can get stressed out with the long-distance wrangling… but Emerald City for instance really is a great show. I just wish it were closer.

I remember several years back, while I was still deep in the midst of my Left 4 Dead phase,  this delightful piece of artwork made its way to my attention via the various currents of the Internet (click the pic for the larger version):

Possibly just because there happened to be four kids in the picture, my friends and I were left wondering if it represented L4D fan art of some kind, re-imagining Bill, Zoey, Louis and Francis as kids. Except then that meant Francis was a red-haired girl with glasses, which, while a hilarious thought, probably wasn’t the intent. Some digging (because I don’t think the signature and copyright was on the version I saw back then) turned up the artist as one Jason Chen, but other than being a fun bit of imagination, it didn’t seem to bespeak anything more than one guy’s momentary vision.

Shows you what I know. Turns out there was an entirely new video game idea brewing behind this illustration, name of Zombie Playground. Zombie Playground Kickstarted itself just last year, an event which came and went without me or any of my friends realizing it was happening. If I had, I would certainly have mentioned it here. The bad news is it’s too late to contribute to that. The good news is that it reached its funding goal to at least get the minimum version they wanted underway, and if you like you can still donate to the cause through their main site (although without rewards beyond good will). Meanwhile this blog must serve as my poor, belated attempt to correct my own oversight.

The basic idea is the zombie apocalypse as it might be viewed through the wild imagination of a child, where your super soaker is actually a flamethrower and that trashcan lid and whiffleball bat make you king (or queen) of the mountain. Where those weekend karate lessons let you do axe kicks or throw Street Fighter fireballs. It’s exactly the kind of crazy crap I recall making up with my friends on the playground as a kid, barring the fact zombies weren’t really the en vogue antagonists at that time. It was the 1980s, so it might have been ninjas.

Point is, this is a great idea, and so far what I’ve seen of the development diaries and concept art really seems to be running with it in all the best possible ways. If you click on the Kickstarter or main site link you’ll see a lot more of Jason Chan’s depictions of the kids and their foes, which include some obviously inspired by the way stuffed toys or other mundane things can take on sinister features on a dark and stormy night.

That said, they wanted $2 million to really put together the game in a way measuring up to their vision, but managed only a little over $160,000 when the Kickstarter was done. It was enough for the Kickstarter to succeed, but the final game will probably only be a fraction of the tantalizing potential. Enough that maybe some more investors might buy in and let it fully blossom? I think that’s the hope, and it’s a hope I share. There’s a good dose of energy and imagination behind Zombie Playground, and while Massive Black seems fully capable of bringing it to (un)life with the funds they have, the game they could deliver with the funds they want sounds like something that could easily be a classic.

The main obstacle with webcomics isn’t getting them published. Even if you don’t have a lick of money to spare, you can score some free site space and start posting your creative output to the world.

No, the main obstacle is actually getting the world to notice you. If you care about that sort of thing. I’d say webcomic creators do, at some level, care about that, or we wouldn’t be putting up our stuff for public viewing.

But this is where it starts taking some effort, and quite possibly money, to make things happen. Sure, you can just concentrate on creation and wait for Neil Gaiman or Warren Ellis or some similar person of influence to happen across your comic and like it enough to introduce you to their audience, but that’s a bit like hoping to win the lottery. Actually, it might even be more like hoping to win the lottery with a random ticket you found in the gutter. You should probably at least be buying a few chances at the jackpot, right?

That’s a lot of what advertising your webcomic can feel like. You put out a ping on the Internet’s radar and get some curious souls wandering by, a few of whom might end up becoming readers. There’s some comics that come pre-equipped with some sort of professional marketing strategy attached, and that certainly helps, but even then the Web is littered with the bones of comics that made a big splash, only to fade away. In some cases it even feels like it was the actual event of being noticed on a large scale that caused the breakdown. They won the lottery but just didn’t know what to do with all the attention. I know at least one friend who pulled the plug on his comic precisely because he started getting a lot of interest and couldn’t reconcile that with his ultimately reclusive nature. I know another who has had to (at least temporarily) take his comic down because he got popular enough that a company sent him a cease & desist order over use of certain trademarks, and now he’s got a fair use case on his hands.

I don’t think we would necessarily suffer from those circumstances, but there’s another nagging feeling I wrestle with… what if we don’t actually deserve to win the lottery? If our current resolution is to err on the side of having fun with the comic rather than stressing over it, should we even be attempting to promote ourselves over those innumerable other struggling creators out there who update more often, most likely with much better story and art as well? Look at us right now, taking not one but two weeks off for the Holidays, when others out there are still powering through. For shame!

This is a reason I’ve (at least for now) abandoned any thought of bugging the bigger news/reviews sites with our existence. If they find us independently and think us worthy of attention, that’s one thing, but my past experiments with actively reaching out have not gotten much result, and at this point I’m back to where I feel bad trumpeting Zombie Ranch if we’re not being “serious” about it. Poking at them would probably just legitimately invoke the question, “Wouldn’t your time and energy be better served getting a buffer built up?”

Then there’s even the subject matter problem. At a “how to get noticed” panel at a big convention last year one of the panelists said he won’t look at any submission that has zombies. Period. Or there’s the time awhile back I had considered submitting us to The Webcomic Overlook, since even El Santo’s negative reviews tend to show he’s put some time and care into them and usually have some constructive criticism to offer. I shied off. Firstly because it was around when he said he was no longer going to take suggestions of what to check out, and secondly because in his review of Dead Winter, he flat out stated “When I want to read about zombies, I don’t want anything more than over-the-top action and copious amounts of blood and guts.”

So, yeah, not a good sign for floating his boat, there. I admit, he’ll probably never find us on his own. Neither will Newsarama, or The Beat, or any of those juggernauts (or even semi-juggernauts) of geekdom– and if they do, they’ll probably click through a few pages at best before moving on to something more polished. But, that’s probably okay at this point. We have some people reading and enjoying, willing to follow along at the pace we’ve set. It’s like having a mom-and-pop store with some regular customers who are understanding when we want to close up early for Christmas, because they like our product and the atmosphere it’s delivered in. Spending time and effort on some massive promotional push doesn’t seem like the right thing to go for under those circumstances.

Mind you, it doesn’t mean I’ve completely stopped advertising and promoting… even mom and pop stores rely on more than just word of mouth… but sometime in the latter part of 2013 is when we’re planning to put together our first ever Kickstarter in hopes of being able to fund our first trade paperback collection. So as a New Year’s resolution, I reckon we’d best save some of our energy for that.