Category: Writer’s Blog

I have long been a sucker for “real-time”, dramatic side-scroller platformer games. It’s not a big genre. I mean, technically we’re talking the same sort of gameplay that’s been around for decades (perhaps most famously in the original Super Mario Bros.), but there’s a certain specific vibe to the ones I’m referring to, which I first encountered back in my college days playing a French import called Another World, or Out of this World in the U.S.

It was this immersive, cinematic sense of being there, despite the platform format. Things were happening that could have been cutscenes in other games, but required your interaction to see the protagonist through safely. Recently, the most stellar example of this I encountered was a game called Limbo, which inspired a whole Satellite Show blog from me on its virtues. I highly recommend checking that out if you want my further ramblings on generally what really floats my boat about the style.

Part of what made Limbo so great was its moody, color-leached, dreadfully atmospheric style…

…and then I found another game that took all of that and applied it to a zombie apocalypse.

Deadlight came to me courtesy of an Xbox Live Arcade download, as I was randomly browsing for things to do in the wake of finishing the main quest of Skyrim. I played through the free trial, and was impressed enough to spring for the full game, which at 600 Microsoft Points is about the equivalent of eight U.S. dollars. The development company is based out of Spain, but unlike others of its genre that precede it, Deadlight actually has extensive spoken audio and story segments in between the platformer play. I don’t know how it is outside the U.S. version, but the action of the game takes place in and around Seattle, Washington, and the English voice actors and scripting are, by and large, pretty decent. You take on the role of Randall Wayne, a former forest ranger from a small town in British Columbia, who is trying desperately to find his wife and daughter in the wake of a world gone to hell because of… you guessed it… the dead returning to life with a  hunger for living flesh. They are not referred to as zombies, keeping to the usual trope, but as “Shadows”, because of being shadows of what they once were. I kind of liked that. Also the fact that the game is such a leached, nearly monochrome palette that everything tends to be in silhouette, so yes, a lot of times they just seem like black shadows pursuing you with unnaturally glowing eyes.

I could even go further than that and talk about the deliberate choice the game developers made to backdate this particular apocalypse to the year 1986. Yes, the zombies are still caused by plague like they would be nowadays, but there’s some good old paranoia about commies and nuclear war, and when I thought about that, I thought about how the only nukes ever used against a human population left those awful shadows behind.

You can start playing right away, but you can also take the time to peruse the protagonist’s 60 page journal. There are missing pages. You may find some of those pages in the course of your journey, along with other mementos. If that doesn’t seem to make sense, well, by the end of the game, it will. You may see the ending coming a mile off, or may end up entirely surprised by it. Either way, it may be a twist that I’ve seen before, but I still found it compelling enough in its execution. As far as the cutscenes went, I’m not a big fan of motion comics, but I’m much more forgiving in the case of an indie developer that can’t afford full animation, and in this case they worked decently enough for me.

Getting chased by zombie hordes and crazed militia through this sort of a game was a concept long overdue, and it’s amazing it took this long for someone to go through with it. They even included a stamina meter which determines not only how long you can swing your fire axe around keeping the shadows at bay, but how long you can hang off that ledge while figuring out where to go next. In the best zombie apocalypse fashion, one shadow is easy to deal with, but three or more means you’re better off running.

Deadlight may not be for everyone, but hey, that’s why it’s good there’s a free trial. If you’ve got Xbox Live, I highly encourage giving it a looksee… and if you were caught up like I was, the full experience isn’t too much out of your wallet.

This week marks the 150th story page of Zombie Ranch. That would mark another milestone of sorts, but one thing I’ve found in the process of writing this comic is that such events don’t necessarily line up with the opportunity to celebrate or even draw attention to them. I mean, if the whole Mayan Calendar kerfluffle is accurate, it will be our last page prior to the End of the World, but I have trouble buying into the idea of a calendar being able to mark The End when it happens to be printed on a circle.

Thus, the most significant thing about the page is a shout out referencing a memorable exchange of dialogue from O Brother, Where Art Thou? I must admit, I wrestled with this a bit. On the one hand, I like paying homage to our inspirations. On the other, Zombie Ranch possesses elements of parody but has its serious tones as well, which could be undercut if we end up on the wrong side of the reference vs. original content equation. Ideally I want them to flavor (or at least not get in the way of) the tale, making anyone who “gets it” smile, while not breaking the flow for anyone who doesn’t. No one should feel stupid for not catching the reference, because whether you do or not shouldn’t actually impact the story. Otherwise, the fault, as far as I’m concerned, rests squarely on my shoulders.

The fact that many of my shout outs so far have gone unremarked upon hopefully means this is the case. It probably helps that many of them are from properties that aren’t particularly in the limelight at the moment, or are well known but not necessarily in terms of line-by-line specifics. I think the biggest blip on the radar that readers have noticed without any prompting was “Parasol Pharmaceuticals“, which some enterprising soul went and took the time to add to our TV Tropes page, though as a Stealth Pun rather than a Shout Out. Is that because Resident Evil is still very much in the pop culture mindset, whereas a thinly paraphrased speech from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly might not trigger memories as readily?

Then there’s the accidents, such as people thinking I meant Suzie calling out “Popcorn” as a reference to Grosse Pointe Blank. I’ve seen the movie, but had actually completely forgotten about Dan Akroyd’s character saying that— for us it was just Suzie calling out her horse’s name, which happened to also be a random enough word to give Muriel pause. But there we’re talking a side detail from a 15 year old film, which sort of sinks the theory that it has to be something near the top of the current radar in order to register… unless GPB somehow occupies that same Internet nostalgia spot references to stuff like Super Mario, Sonic, and Legend of Zelda do.

It would be interesting to hear how many references people have picked up on since the comic started, even in terms of ones that weren’t intentional on our part. But again, whether they register or not shouldn’t have any bearing on the narrative. This isn’t a gag-a-day strip where Frank can turn to the audience and say “I’m glad zombies are green, because if they were blue, that would suck. Because Avatar sucks.” First off, whether you like Avatar or not, that’s not even funny. But secondly, it’s even worse when a comic purporting to be telling its own story suddenly derails itself to indulge in something like that. It’s like if Bilbo Baggins stopped in the middle of his riddle contest with Gollum to wink at you and say “Eggs, eh? Khloe Kardashian could probably use a few less of those!” Bonus points if he follows up by explaining, “‘Cause she’s fat!”

See, now, if you’ve been keeping up with current pop culture trends you probably got all those references… but meanwhile you just lost all sense of drama and immersion in what Bilbo and Gollum were doing in their story. Even “random comedy” shows like South Park or The Family Guy whose entire existence seems to revolve around making allusions to pop culture can ride a fine line between doing so and keeping some sort of identity of their own.

So far Zombie Ranch seems to have avoided falling on the wrong side of that line, at least for any of you still reading. I think the trick is to make it so that any shout out is either a background element, or at least something that isn’t a punchline in of itself. Where the audience doesn’t feel like the creator is elbowing them and waggling their eyebrows, waiting for some validation before moving on. Allusions can sometimes be elusive, but it’s best to let them stay that way.

The past couple of comic pages have been my opportunity to finally dip my foot into a subject that so far has been only present in my mind, my notes, and some scattered references in the cast summary and world FAQ. Suzie’s bio probably brings it up most prominently:

“The young owner of the Z Ranch is a “Repop”, one of many babies born in the wave of jubilation that accompanied the announced end of the Wars.”

I like trying to think through reasons for things. I always have. I don’t need every last little thing I observe to make sense, but where fiction is concerned I have a particular love for stories and settings that take time to attempt a certain logic to what they’re presenting… the explanation doesn’t have to be given right away, but I always hope for a payoff of some kind down the road.

Now Dawn, on the other hand, is a much more freewheeling soul, with a tendency to draw whatever happens to bubble up from the depths of her brain (if you’ve ever seen the sketch cards she produces at conventions, you’ll know just what I mean). I must tell you, she chafes constantly under my strictures of storytelling, and yet still manages to squeeze in the occasional random element to spite me, as if to cackle “Make sense of THIS, chump!”

Okay, I might be exaggerating a bit. Also, if not for Dawn’s random drawings, the comic wouldn’t exist. Once again I refer to exhibit A, “On The Zombie Ranch“. I cannot claim this did not fit my vision, because at the point Dawn drew it, there was no vision. There was a picture, and once we talked about making a comic story from it there was me, trying to figure out some world in which that picture made sense.

So, yeah, we had a young lady whose profession it is to wrangle things that could doom her in one bite, showing off a whole bunch of skin. Now sure, it’s such a common trope to have your young heroine be scantily clad that many creators would probably have said, “It’s sexy” and called it a day. Dawn would happen to be one of those.

Not me. I had to go and invent a whole speculative, fictional youth culture in an attempt to justify why she might run around like that. Perhaps you might think it a lost cause, bordering on a case of Voodoo Shark. Perhaps you might think it’s a moot point at the present time in the comic, where we’ve (at least temporarily) thrown a duster on Suzie. Perhaps you really just don’t give a damn — it’s sexy, call it a day…

Well, the whole Repop thing quickly blossomed beyond the simple matter of Suzie’s midriff. The esteemed(?) Miss Langhorne may speak of the excesses of the young as if they were something new, but teenagers acting like they’re invincible and engaging in hero worship is a phenomenon that’s repeated itself through countless iterations of humanity. Beyond those basics, though, what would the specifics be like? Well, once it seemed clear humanity wasn’t going to go extinct, once the War against the zombie hordes was declared over, it made sense to me there would be a celebratory baby boom like the famous one in the wake of World War Two. In fact, it made sense that in a lot of cases people would be officially encouraged to have babies given how depopulated of the living the world would have become. Life would be precious. The new generation would be the symbol of final victory over the forces of Evil.

And then, the jubilation would wear off. Some areas might find that their lack of population had been a blessing and new mouths to feed would become an unexpected burden in a new era where the old supply chains no longer existed. Those with adequate supplies might tilt too far in the opposite direction, with parents becoming smotheringly overprotective. Neither situation would be a particularly healthy environment.

But Repops also wouldn’t have had to deal with the worst years of the Plague and the Wars. They wouldn’t remember the world the way it was before the zombies. They would even have been too young to have to deal with the sudden introduction of the news that zombies represented a pharmaceutical (and thus economic) goldmine, which their elders would wrestle with after years of a “destroy on sight” mentality.

I saw a generation raised with contradictory cues that zombies were to be both feared and desired. Where they themselves felt both cherished and resented. Their parents would still seem to flinch from death, even as they pasted its by-products onto their faces… which any teenager would probably view as utter B.S. — so incorporating skulls and other such reminders of mortality into their clothing, or exposing skin, would be every bit as rebellious as an earring or tattoo might have been in days past.

And finally I cross-seeded back into the idea of keeping a “New Old West” influence. Nearly everyone in Zombie Ranch would have some of this aesthetic to their looks, but Repops in particular would combine it with elements of the morbid. Western Gothic, in a way (since “American Gothic” brings older folks to mind). But not necessarily with the somber, mournful implications of what “gothic” styling tends to mean to us. Repops would acknowledge death openly, but want to challenge it rather than imitate or assimilate. To be considered vivid… full of life, living existence to the fullest… is the greatest compliment.

But as much as I can run off at the brain about this, it still goes full circle back to Dawn in terms of bringing the imagery to life. We’ve discussed all of the above, so with that done I feel confident letting her go and seeing what she comes up with… I particularly liked the girl in red-and-black from last week’s comic, with her frilled cape and hint of a bustle, but runner-up is the boy in the t-shirt and trucker hat, even if I do claim the credit for adding ‘NO DEAD CHICKS’.

How well does all this work? How well does it carry through? Those are the kinds of questions that only get answered once it’s out to an audience, no matter how much time and effort we might be spending on our end. But hey, whatever else, I had fun with the thinking.

If you happen to be a grammar guardian who knows the difference between “discrete” and “discreet”, hold off on the torches and pitchforks— I’m actually using the word correctly. This post has nothing to do with being subtle or secretive, but rather the separation of elements. Namely, the usefulness of splitting a story into separate chunks.

Whether you call them “chapters”, “issues”, “episodes”, or something even more esoteric, I’ve found the practice very useful from a pacing standpoint. Where a webcomic is concerned there’s really no authority or mandate for a certain type of structure, or even much in the way of structure at all. There is, for example, no real need to conform to the strictures observed by a monthly comic book, which tends not to run much longer than about 24 pages of content, not counting all the advertisements, letters pages, etc.

Zombie Ranch was the first real foray into comics for Dawn and myself, and in many ways is still a learning experience even after three years of publication. We’ve gone through many experiments, such as forays into animation, text-heavy pages, pages completely absent of text, art shifts, crazily dynamic layouts, etc. etc. Our first story arc happened to end conveniently at about the length of the pages of a standard comic, and for me set a precedent of trying to compose the ebb and flow of events after that into similar lengths.

But I’m always aware that I don’t *have* to follow that. Even when we go to print there’s no need to fit in ad space or be a specific size, and so when we were getting towards the end of Episode/Issue 3 I remember thinking, “I’d really like four extra pages to wrap this particular bit up in a way I find satisfying”. And there it was… if anyone happened to be paying attention, Episode 3 is 28 comic pages long, with a correspondingly slightly larger print issue.

I doubt anyone really noticed or cared, particularly online where, although we divide up the episodes with covers or title cards, the comics themselves are numbered to represent an ongoing, contiguous story. But for me that’s exactly how an online reader would function, right? You wouldn’t get to the end of the episode and stop, you’d just keep going until you got tired or ran out of material. However, the dividers still serve the function (at least in my imaginings) of letting a reader “pause for breath” during their archive binge, maybe taking a moment to reflect on what they just read before plunging onwards.

And from our end, these spots provide a convenient place to change things up a bit, taking a moment to work in some world info in entertaining ways that are hopefully never too jarring. Sometimes we’ve done these inserts mid-stream (like the “Moment With Suzie” in Episode 5), and at the beginning of Episode 6 we dispensed with any sidetracks to get right back to business. Is sidetracking for the beginning of Episode 7 the right call? Well, just call it some more experimentation if you must. The idea of cutting to some Safe Zone woman criticizing the fashion sense of the Z Ranchers seemed deliciously dark after the readers (who of course have seen a lot more of the “footage”) just witnessed them fighting for their lives and livelihoods. But the chapter change also again gives that breath in the pacing, like the pause before a bridge in the music, after which we return to the main theme.

I guess that’s a fairly subtle thing to consider. So call this a post about being discreet, as well.

I originally titled this post “Happiness in Slavery” before deciding that was just slightly overblown as a headline, even if it makes for a snappy Nine Inch Nails reference. Last week I spent some bandwidth discussing the whole idea of the boundaries of “professionalism” insofar as making an independent comic goes, and in a sense you could contend that some creators become slaves to their creation, in some extreme cases even sacrificing personal health and welfare for the sake of getting those pages out to an ever-hungry public.

But slavery? Not really, even if much of the time the lack of monetary compensation seems to fit the bill. Any floggings tend to be self-inflicted (and hopefully figurative). If you run off on a hiatus, no one’s going to hunt you through the woods with hounds and return you to your computer and/or drawing table in chains. There may be some choice flames flung your way, but even if you somehow stir the Internet hornet’s nest enough that someone goes to the trouble of an entire site dedicated to how much you suck, it’s still insane to compare that to even the most enlightened models of indentured servitude.

Perspective, you see. I brought up the idea of perspective last week, and I’ll bring it up again because it’s important. Perspective is, for example, what prevents you from declaring your life is over because you woke up with a zit on your nose before the big dance. Teenagers can be notoriously lacking in perspective, but it’s still an issue going into adulthood.

For example, in recent months Dawn had been having such stability troubles with her computer that we never knew if it was going to function correctly when she turned it on. I tried and tried to fix it, stressing myself to the point I eventually twitched into an instinctual fight-or-flight response every time she pushed the power button. That computer was MISSION CRITICAL to getting the comic produced, and she never seemed to properly understand what a disaster we were constantly teetering on the brink of.

Actually, her plan was to hook up the drawing tablet to our laptop if worse came to worst and get things done that way, even if it meant having to start over. Maybe we wouldn’t make our weekly deadline, but she was okay with that in a way I couldn’t fathom. There would be a ZIT. RIGHT ON OUR NOSE.

I mean, this all came from a good place, the idea that we made a commitment to the readers that if they swung by on a Wednesday, there’d be some new content for them. Even though no one’s paying us for it, even though there’s no editor looming over our shoulders, that was something I felt should be striven for. But as I mentioned last week, once I realized I’d gotten to the point where a single minute past midnight felt like a crushing failure, it was time for perspective. To ease off the throttle some and let happiness creep back into the process. I mean, the fact is that the one time we’ve been significantly late (by more than an hour) in the past year or so was due to an unavoidable server issue. True, we also take the occasional filler break, such as the traditional chapter break we’re doing now, but even then it’s still new content even if it doesn’t happen to be specific story progession.

But it was vitally important for me to find the happiness in what I was doing again, which not incidentally lets Dawn be happy as well… because a twitchy, worried Clint tends to cramp her style. I think the last couple months of the comic have actually been the better for it. The quality has remained the same (or better), but the creative team is a more cheerful bunch. This is also important when you happen to be living together as husband and wife.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I finally seem to have gotten her computer working stably again. Really, perspective also dictates that these are amongst the firstiest of first-world problems (though not quite up there with deciding whether to drive the Porsche or the Jag to your Summer home), but occasionally we all dip into that well of my-life-is-over hyperbole. The important thing is to recognize when it stares you in your zit-schnozzled face, and agree to disagree.

There’s a constant, looming spectre that lurks just over the shoulders of everyone involved in creating webcomics. Were I hosting a social mixer where it needed a nametag, I suppose I’d call it “professionalism”. Sooner or later, it creeps into the thoughts and stress levels of everyone who decides to try their hand at the art beyond just a momentary fling, and even the most successful are not immune to its insidious whispers.

If you don’t believe me on that last bit, I submit this Oatmeal comic as damning evidence. Love The Oatmeal or hate it, as web ventures go it’s a pretty successful thing. $500,000 in revenue this year alone. Matthew Inman is one of those few webcomic creators who does not need a day job.

And yet, as noted in the comic, Inman sometimes doesn’t update his site more than once or twice a month. He is on the one hand riddled with guilt by this, but on the other thinks that forcing himself to update more frequently would be a bad idea.

“I’m a firm believer that if you don’t have anything to say, you shouldn’t be talking. And if you don’t have anything to write about, don’t write.”

Does this make him unprofessional? Well, this is the spectre we all deal with, the idea that if we’re not working X number of hours a week, or producing X amount of content for consumption, we’re not being serious. We have no right to call ourselves professional. What we’re doing is dabbling, and while that’s cute and all, at the end of the day it’s just a glorified hobby at best.

The fact that even Matthew Inman still experiences this guilt despite his financial success, and that he still gets “Oh, you’re a web cartoonist…” comments at parties, speaks volumes about how it’s good to have some perspective on this. Who, exactly, is judging you? Who is setting the standards? Isn’t part of the whole glory of this modern webcomics free-for-all the idea that you are beholden, ultimately, to no one except yourself?

And yet that spectre looms. Is this business of creating comics a job, or a hobby? What determines the dividing lines? Level of enjoyment? Income tax categories? Page views (hah)? Invites to comic conventions?

Is it even worth stressing over? Inman is holding to the kind of schedule (or lack thereof) which according to most webcomic success models should be a recipe for failure, but it not only succeeds, it’s succeeding at a pace he’s comfortable with. According to wikipedia he typically spends about eight hours over the course of a few days getting a new comic together, which would be pretty enviable hours for a job. Of course, knowing what I do, I guarantee you that’s just the observable “work” of drawing and arranging, which doesn’t take into account all the stuff involved in collecting notes or even sorting out the contents of one’s own head into coherent communication with an audience.

We (and most other web creators) aren’t making nearly the money Inman does, but that to me seems like even more of an argument for proceeding at our own pace, and “professionalism” be damned. That’s not the same thing as saying we don’t care about our readers, but Dawn and I have this strange compulsion to find enjoyment in what we’re doing, and worrying too much about whether we’re working hard enough is a fantastic way to destroy that. Just a few months ago I had to force myself to step back from the brink and relax after becoming nearly obsessive about our self-imposed deadlines, to the point where even posting a few minutes after midnight on Wednesday felt like utter failure. A lot of you don’t even come to check on the comic until  Thursday or later, so that’s kind of insane once I took some time to think it over. No one really cared about those few minutes except me and that spectre hovering over my shoulder. Well, and that one other guy… but he’s gone now since we refused to go five days a week for his benefit.

I do these blogs once a week because I feel that’s about the length of time I need to come up with something interesting to write about. We do the comic once a week because we feel that’s about the length of time we need to keep doing the story justice, and keep it rolling along without fear of our creative juices drying up like a Mojave waterin’ hole. I remember attending the Eisner Awards ceremony at San Diego Comic-Con in 2011, and although it was a largely sleep-inducing affair, I have this odd recollection of more than one person being introduced as “The Hardest Working Man in Comics”. In any case, the title’s already taken, right? Might as well aim a little lower.

If that makes us nothing more than hobbyists in some eyes,  so be it. I have made my peace with that. Zombie Ranch may never be something well known in the webcomics community, much less beyond it. I have made my peace with that as well.

In this way, I remain polite, and I remain positive, and we continue to provide the contents of our heads to a small but enthusiastic section of the public, which I suppose wouldn’t be too far off to call returning customers.

And isn’t that, in the end, what professionalism is all about?

Feeling a bit under the weather this week, so my blog will be shorter than usual, but I definitely wanted to bring this up. I had a happy accident last week when I browsed back to a listing site that I hadn’t visited in awhile, looking to see how our entry was faring. Well, lo and behold, on the ‘recently updated’ list was a webcomic I hadn’t heard of going by the name Death Springs. The blurb promised a rousing zombie apocalypse tale set in the Old West, so I clicked through and checked it out.

Fatefully enough, this week’s page of Death Springs, the one that I opened up to (and which you’ll open up to should you read this blog before their Thursday update), presented a familiar echo in the form of a man branding captive zombies on their foreheads. Now you might ask, did this rile me… and I’ll truthfully answer no. I see it as them being either inspired by us, or (much more likely) they’ve never heard of us and just ended up on a similar road—and that’s actually still gratifying to me because I see it as vindication of my early thoughts that the best, most visible place to brand your bipedal zombie herd would be smack dab in the middle of their headbones. Great minds thinking alike and all that. I sent off a note of greetings and support and let them know I’d be mentioning them in this week’s blog.

Death Springs  just made its debut in March of this year, but there’s a veteran team behind it that certainly shows in the quality of the finished product. So if you’re in the mood to add another dose of western-flavored zombie tales to your webcomics feed, I highly recommend giving it a look. Just one bit of advice: when an old medicine man warns you not to drink the water? Best to heed his words.

The Long Beach Comic & Horror Con holds a special place in our hearts. Zombie Ranch was jumpstarted into being when we were given our first ever exhibitor space in 2009, back when it was just called the Long Beach Comic Con and was a brand new venture. So were we. Untried, untested, but enthusiastic enough to have somehow overcome all the obstacles in our path, our one and only Friday update occurred as our first comic page went live on the web on October 2nd, just as the ribbon was cut on the convention itself.

Since then we’ve become good friends with convention director Martha Donato, who along with her staff reached out early to welcome us to being part of the comics scene. Long Beach provided us with our first ever experience hosting a panel, and one year even went so far as to include our names on their promotional ad copy alongside people such as Amanda Conner. Even if that might have been a one time thing, it was still a thing… and Martha still knows us and has a friendly smile for us every time we attend.

So, I admit, I had some worries. The past couple of outings in 2010 and 2011 had seemed to be a mixed bag, culminating in 2011 when the convention ended up on the short end of the stick compared to the cheaper admission of the new Comikaze Expo which scheduled itself the week after. There’s no denying that Long Beach suffered because of that, with people either choosing to attend Comikaze only, or attending both but saving their purchases for the latter show. That’s not idle guesswork, either, I remember no few people asking us if we’d be at Comikaze and saying they’d come by our table there instead. The crowd was down and the sales were dismal, and this even after Long Beach had scaled back to being a two day show when it was originally three.

Well, what a difference some breathing room makes. Long Beach 2012 was still only two days long, but it was a solid two days, with a good (but not overwhelming) crowd all the way from start to finish. Not only that, but a crowd that seemed willing to spend some money, as well as people who wanted to talk art or comics or do some networking. Dawn’s long heard me lament that our biggest grossing shows are the ones furthest away, with the local ones being much more modest, but all that changed this last weekend. I won’t say we were swimming in money by the end, but it was leaps and bounds above any previous L.A. area tally, in addition to the fun of getting to be next to some good friends making their first try at having a table. I warned them ahead of time that it was my experience pure print books didn’t do so well at comic conventions, but by the end of the show I was (happily) eating crow as Justin and his lovely wife moved at least twenty copies of his various novels.

Dawn was kept busy with commissions, we interviewed with a local paper, I participated in a webcomics panel, we got to talk with some dedicated fans and potential new ones… this outing reminded me of everything that makes the trouble and expense of a convention great. I couldn’t be happier, particularly because the resurgence gives me hope the Long Beach convention will continue happening for the foreseeable future.

But before I close out, I wanted to put focus on one particular discovery we made during the weekend. Across the way from us in Artist’s Alley was some sort of game. It seemed to involve zombies. On Sunday we got the scoop from creator Derak Morrell himself regarding his in-development boardgame, We Are Dead: Zombie Mall Massacre!!

Now there’s been a lot of zombie boardgames out there in the last few years, such as Last Night on Earth, but Derak’s version casts the players completely in the role of the zombies, with some unique mechanics that promise to be a fun experience. Plus the card art is absolutely hilarious. His Kickstarter is already successfully funded as of this writing, but there’s still some stretch goals to be met, as well as being able to pre-order the game as a reward. It’s going on until November 19, so if you’re interested click here to get more details and see if it might be something you’d want to contribute to. Derak seems like he’s really put some thought into his project, and what can I say? I have a soft spot for independent creators putting an entertaining spin on the zombie genre.

If you ever labor under the illusion that your childhood experiences have no effect on your adulthood? Forget it.

I’m not just talking about the smell of cinnamon relaxing you because your mom made homemade buns, or a phobia of creepy crawlies you acquired when you picked up and drank from an “occupied” soda can. Neither of those are personal examples, anyhow. What’s personal is that, dammit, I think 80’s era Chris Columbus brainwashed my writing.

I’m talking in particular about two movies: 1984’s Gremlins and 1985’s The Goonies. I’m old enough to have seen both in their first theatrical releases, and Goonies was probably the most insidious since I would have been right about the age of most of the kids involved. In retrospect, I remember having a Member’s Only jacket in exactly the same color as the one worn by Corey Feldman’s character Mouth, while my taste in shirts appears to have come straight out of Chunk’s closet. These, of course, are wardrobe decisions that probably weren’t part of the screenplay, but you see what I mean? Brainwashing.

I meant to talk more in-depth about the films for this installment, but my re-watch of Goonies encountered some technical difficulties. So it’ll wait. Let’s just say for now that in both cases I recognized a certain freewheeling tonal tapdance between drama, horror, and comedy, and between characters that on one hand seem as believable as the kids next door and on the other as cartoonishly archetypal as bickering lawmen or bloodthirsty old ladies. Where deadly danger can maintain its tension, even unto the occasional bit of outright gore, but the story as a whole maintains a lighthearted quality. And somehow, it works.

Oh, I didn’t say this brainwashing was a bad thing. I’m just saying.

I can’t speak for all writers everywhere, but a lot of what I do seems to boil down to getting my characters and situations from Point A to Point B in what I hope is an entertaining and not too overly contrived manner. This week’s comic is risky in that respect. There’s a lot of things going wrong in a just so fashion. Too much for suspension of disbelief? Well, all I can say is I put a lot of effort into laying the groundwork for this SNAFU (or SNACU, seeing how Chuck-specific it is).

Now I recall back when Chuck was explaining hydrolock, one commenter took exception to the mechanics involved (pardon the pun) and claimed it would be perfectly fine and even beneficial. When this has occurred before I’ve sometimes linked to the research and testimonials supporting what I’ve written, but in this case I didn’t bother, because I had a secret. Whether it would have worked or not didn’t matter. What mattered is that Chuck believed it enough to set a tractor at full throttle and leave it running, a situation just itching for an accidental nudge that would send it careening out of control.

“Ol’ Bessie”‘s flaming wreck, heavy machinery with tricky controls, loose pipe bombs, a bunch of sleep-deprived, angry, beer-addled rednecks, and of course Chuck’s general greed and lack of thinking things through… it’s my own little perfect storm, which I felt would be much more fun and creative than some early drafts where the driver would just somehow get shot and just happen to have some dynamite or something in the back. Now true, Chuck instead shows up with his Bag O’ Tricks that happens to include home-made explosives, but I rolled with the idea that Chuck seems like the type of guy who might have such a thing ready to throw together. It didn’t seem too far-fetched or out of character. Maybe in the end it’s no less of an Ass Pull, but yea, I did walk in the Valley of the Foreshadowing, all the way back as far as the first meeting with Uncle Chuck being under circumstances where he botched an important deal the crew entrusted him with. If Frank had had anyone else he could have sent to take care of the tractor problem, I’m sure he would have gone with them instead. But I suppose he figured even Chuck can’t screw up all the time, right?

I’m sure Chuck would consider himself a victim of circumstance, and in a way, that’s exactly what he is. But even if he didn’t see it coming, I sure did… and I hope (even if only in hindsight) you folks did, too.

According to our current on-site poll, which we’ve let percolate for several weeks now, not one person has ever discovered Zombie Ranch as a result of running into us at a “Live Appearance”, which naturally would include any of the conventions we’ve ever done; including Comikaze 2012 which came and went with the poll live for voting purposes.

So what’s that mean? Well, technically speaking not much, since all we’re sampling are the people who bothered to vote and not the readership as a whole. Still, I must admit I would have hoped for a number above zero, considering all the hundreds of fliers we’ve given away in the last three years. Plus, if you think going to conventions is a money sink as an attendee, you should try it some time as an exhibitor.

Sure, the idea is that you’re going to make some sales back to help cover your costs, or maybe even make some profit, but I’m fully willing to admit we have still not mastered that. So you think, hey, at least we’re getting our names out there and getting some exposure… but then you find out even that’s questionable. Is it worth continuing when it seems like most of your audience is finding you through online means, anyhow?

If you by any chance have followed the behind-the-scenes saga of Zombie Ranch from its very beginning, you’ll know that it was never even a decision for us on whether or not taking the comic to a convention was a good idea. The comic bloody well got jumpstarted from concept to reality because we had applied to the first ever Long Beach Comic-Con, mostly with the thought of just trying to showcase Dawn’s art, but then we got our acceptance notice and decided to try to show off a comic book as well. What happened next was more of a frantic blur than any form of careful planning. We jumped right in the deep end with some vague ideas about learning to swim. I can’t even remember at what point we ended up deciding to make it a webcomic, but once we had we timed our first online page to publish right as the first day of the convention opened. And remember this was pretty much our first go at an ongoing comic story, as well, along with a great heaping helping of “Who the hell are you guys and why should I care?” It was probably, by any measure, an insane plan.

There’s been quite a bit of learning between 2009 and now, but conventions are still just something where I can’t quite figure if we’re on a learning curve… and even if we are, is it curving up or down? I mean, our biggest sales to date were at Emerald City Comic-Con, and had that been a local show we might have broken even or perhaps even come out ahead… but alas, once table and travel expenses were figured in, no chance. Then we come back to the more local shows, where the travel is cheaper, but we just can’t seem to get the same kind of gross out of them. What sells at one show gathers dust at the next. Even the same exact show can vary wildly from year to year, so if your thought is that you might eventually make enough money to justify your presence, much less have extra to kick back into your creative and personal life, you can imagine that being somewhat frustrating.

That said, I do know webcomic people who aren’t on the scale of, say, Phil Foglio, who still seem able to consistently break even or profit, and in a lot of cases they’ll admit it took them years to get to that point. They have a diverse set of merchandise that covers price ranges from “What the heck, I’ll buy a set of buttons for $1” to “What the heck, I’ll buy that custom sculpture for $200”. They also manage to store, transport, set-up and take-down their elaborate displays with a minimum of fuss. They pay $1000 for a booth, confident that by the end of the weekend they’ll have made that back and then some.

They also make most of their money selling stuff that’s designed to look cool to passerby, without hinging on whatever comic they’re doing. This is perhaps the biggest dirty secret of making money at conventions; you have to let go of your ego and accept that a majority of purchasers don’t know or care about your story, they just think that zombie horse t-shirt looks cool. Yes, we made that t-shirt, and yes, people at Emerald City bought quite a few of them for that very reason. And then, just when we thought we’d hit on something marketable, our next two appearances sold none of them. Back to the drawing board. Do we invest in buttons? Bookmarks? How are we going to carry all of them when our current containers are already bursting at the seams? Will Dawn finally breaking down and making an art print of Dr. Who (just like everyone else on the floor) continue to get buyers? Will we ever sell any of those other prints she had made, some of which are years old now?

After all the advice and observation, it still seems like we’re subject to the whims of fate, groping towards some manner of solvency where these appearances would at least pay for themselves. Can we keep it up long enough to make that happen? Should we, especially if the promotional aspect just isn’t there?

I want to, because there is nothing like the experience of meeting people in person who are genuinely interested in your work, especially in the nerd-friendly atmosphere of a comics convention. After weeks or months of producing comics online, never quite knowing who’s reading or how invested they are, I get to shake the hand of a man or woman who is overjoyed Dawn and I just signed their print copies of the latest issue.

In the spiritual sense, that’s worth a lot. We’re making the connections. Now it’s just a matter of making ends meet.

People have commented before that they had to get through the beginning of Zombie Ranch before it began to hook them and get them engaged as fans. Oh, we did our best to try to spark enough curiosity for that, what with the floating camera bot and undead horsie, but I won’t deny things were rough back at the start. If someone’s be-all-end-all is a pretty first impression, then they’ll miss out on the rest… and biased as I am, I like to think the rest is something worthwhile.

Which brings me to Minecraft. I am a few years late to this party. Once, several months ago, I tried the game out in its browser-based version and gave up after a bit since it looked so primitive and I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. If that sounds hypocritical considering my first paragraph, well, I will stand guilty as charged. The important thing is that I have now gone back and given it another chance, and can now see why so many around the world have praised this piece o’ software.

Minecraft is a much more complex game than it would seem at first glance, but you do have to have the patience to (pardon the pun) delve into it. There is no in-game tutorial on how to do things, which means there may be a lot of trial-and-error on your part unless you choose to ask friends who play or check on of the online guides such as the Minecraft Wiki. Dawn pointed out to me that there are certain achievements that you can look at from the game menu that give you hints, but I probably wouldn’t have thought to check that had she not told me.

So there might be some early frustration, especially if you’re playing on the default Survival mode (if you’re playing Hardcore for your first time out, well, you’ve got a higher failure tolerance than I do). You appear at a random spawn point in a randomly generated landscape, with nothing but the clothes on your back. After fumbling around a bit you may realize than you’re able to use your bare hands to dig up and collect blocks of stuff from the blocky landscape. Soft stuff like dirt, sand, and wood… okay, wood isn’t so soft, but it’s important at this stage that you be able to punch apart trees with enough effort. That’s because the wood will let you create your first tools, and the tools will let you gather sturdier blocks like stone.

A lot of the crafting does its best to be intuitive, conducive to experimation and accidental discovery as you arrange various layouts. On your inventory screen you have just enough crafting slots to be able to use collected wood to create a crafting table. Then the crafting table has enough slots to start creating things like pickaxes. Two sticks up the middle, with three blocks of wood/stone/? across the top. Looks vaguely pickaxe like. Fair enough.

Other crafting, alas, isn’t as obvious, so perhaps I’ll save you some grief right now to say that a stick topped by a piece of coal = a torch. Okay, maybe that’s obvious to everyone except me, but I spent a frustrating amount of time figuratively and literally in the dark when night fell.

And day and night in the Minecraft world are not just cosmetic. You will start the game in daylight, but in a distressingly short amount of time, the sun will be dipping below the horizon. Once that happens, the monsters come.

This element is where Minecraft starts getting really interesting to any of you who’ve ever wondered about building your fortress in the wake of the Apocalypse. I’m not saying the game environment looks like a wasteland, or is even entirely devoid of human habitation, but I could not help but feel very, very alone. No one to tell me what to do, sure, but no one to help, either. It’s Robinson Crusoe time, with nary a Friday to be seen. Did I mention that in addition to needing to worry about monster attacks, you have to keep yourself fed?

Whether you consider yourself a castaway, a sole survivor, or a victim of interdimensional shenanigans, you’ve got to get a shelter built to survive the night, and in the morning either expand that shelter or find a better site for something more permanent. And find some source of food, that would be good, too.

Now we’re not talking an entirely realistic experience, here. I mean, for one thing you can chop apart the base of a tree and the trunk above will remain in perfect, gravity-defying health. But who cares, when you can, with enough work, mold the landscape to your vision? If your idea of an impregnable compound is on an island, you can make one. Or build your castle on the biggest mountain you find. Or dig it into the side of a hill. Or take advantage of the same hole in physics the trees display to build a house in the sky supported by a single pillar of stone; then take some soil, seeds, and a bucket of water up there and plant your siege garden where wheat grows safe from the marauding hordes. Just make sure that whatever you choose, you’re able to get back there before dark.

The survival aspect is just the tip of the game, though. Again taking lessons from Crusoe, first you see to your basic needs, and then it’s time to go exploring. And mining. That’s the name of the game, after all, and the coolest stuff can only be fashioned from ores and gems gathered deep within the ground. There are caverns a-plenty to be found, and even abandoned shafts with wooden supports and cart tracks indicating some long-lost predecessor(s).  On the other hand, you’ll discover this is where the monsters lurk when the sun is in the sky, and so some weapons and armor are good priorities when you get ahold of iron.

There actually is an endgame to all of this, but nothing’s forcing you towards it if you’d rather do your own thing. I decided, for instance, to build a small railroad from my main shelter to an auxiliary one I set up across the peninsula where I started, and wanted to figure out the best way to dig things out so it would stay flat. That meant a lot of dangerous iron-gathering expeditions for materials to make tracks, not to mention surveying on the surface, and of course getting to my shelters when night came. 

In another instance, in the course of exploring a deep cavern I discovered a spot where the frickin’ ocean was pouring through, and I know it was the ocean because I stupidly attempted to swim to the surface. Obsessed with at least making something interesting out of this stupidity, I managed to locate the spot from the surface and create a walkway out to it, then an airshaft complete with ladders that let me go up and down in safety.

Anyhow, I did mention one of the monster types is zombies, right? No? Well, there you go. And at night they’ll come pound on your doors and groan, and if you’re playing Hardcore difficulty they can actually break the doors down. I don’t think they can break down fences and gates, though, which means that, yes, eventually I might be able to see if I could get a “ranch” going. I doubt I’ll ever be as good at wrangling them as Suzie is, but I can dream.

If Dawn and I were married to this comic, we’d have just passed our third anniversary, which some call the “leather anniversary”. I don’t know why I bring that particular factoid up, except it reminds me that I still haven’t really had time nor opportunity to address the issue of leather goods in a mostly post-bovine setting. It’s yet another element of the world where I have the answers in my head and/or notes, but so far you readers have had to just play along, assuming you were even thinking about it at all. I always presume at least some of you are thinking about it. I mean, I would be… but then again, Dawn never fails to remind me what a freak I am for that tendency. She’s the type of person who doesn’t sweat the details so long as she finds something entertaining. I’m the type of person who asks, “If Spongebob lives under the ocean, how can he possibly be going to the beach?”

Then occasionally we run across an article like this which seeks to reconcile both parties. You might wonder how, with such different creative approaches, we’ve managed to keep Zombie Ranch going for three years, but we’re honestly not as opposite as I think either of us will admit. After all, sometimes she’s the one shutting down my ideas with tidbits like “he can’t shove the goat or it’ll just think he’s playing and shove back”.

Somehow we’ve gotten through, and hopefully still have a good comic to show for it. In fact we might even dare to hope that our occasional conflicts have led to a better comic than we might have otherwise produced. We learned as of Friday that Comic-Con International has decided to renew our professional status, which considering the sweat, tears, and even blood we’ve spilled over this project is nicely gratifying. The occasional gratification is immensely important, especially when you’re not really making any big profit.

Starting a webcomic is easy. Keeping it going, that’s the trick. Just this July the nice and talented couple we met at WonderCon had to shut the doors on their gorgeous fantasy tale Planes of Eldlor, although they’ve kept the art & sculpture side of their efforts going. Just this past week we lost a shambling fellow traveler in the form of The Other Grey Meat, whose writer has a strange habit of referring to my works as wise and intelligent despite all evidence to the contrary. TOGM was another husband & wife creative team in James and June Maillet, and although I’m sorry to see them bring their tale to a close, one side effect of having a webcomic of your own is sympathy for those peers who, for whatever reasons, just cannot continue. Even if you might miss their occasional stroking of your ego in public places.

That sounds dirty, strike that. Truth is, James was generous with his praise and support to a lot of people both inside and out of the community of ComicFury where TOGM was hosted, to the point he almost single-handedly managed to wrangle together an online convention last year featuring several hours’ worth of panel discussions. I don’t know if he plans to take a step back from all that now that his webcomic has ended (although he might very well be reading this and thus be goaded into commenting), but I wish I had half his energy on the subject of networking and outreach. At least half the battle of having a successful webcomic is letting people know you exist, and if the popularity of TOGM was any indication, he was pretty darn good at that.

So even though both comics mentioned have ended, I encourage you to give them a read if you haven’t already. They represent the good works of good folks, and I always had a soft spot for TOGM in particular, not just because James thinks I’m cool (though that doesn’t hurt) but because it was another very non-standard take on the zombie genre.

As for us, we’re still trotting along the trail, keeping a pace we hope will carry Zombie Ranch forwards for at least another year, if not beyond. Thanks for sticking with us, and for every bit of word of mouth you might have spread around to bring us new eyeballs. May you find the story to come every bit as compelling as the story so far.

By the time next week’s posting goes live, Zombie Ranch will have reached its 3rd anniversary. I reckon I’ll talk more on that once the occasion has arrived, but it does remind me that we have produced quite a few comic pages, and I’ve written quite a few of these blogs to accompany them. I ponder sometimes how much I might actually be repeating myself, since Dawn (rightly) accuses me of having a horrible memory in a lot of cases. I’ll make some comment on some commercial I find interesting, and she’ll pointedly inform me I made the exact same comment on the exact same commercial a month beforehand.

So you must accept my profound apologies if you find me making observations here that I have already made in the past. I make a concerted effort to keep the story of the comic straight, but the blog is much more of a freeform exercise, sometimes with a topic that invaded my thoughts on the very same night I compose it. The thoughts tonight are those of influence, conscious or unconscious, on a person’s writing style.

One of the bits I can’t quite recollect is if I’ve already mentioned my creative writing frustrations in my college days. Well, if I have, consider this a recap. I majored in Theater in college, and something I consider a grave mistake was letting the other people in the (non-theater) creative writing class I took part in know that. I’m pretty sure it was the teacher who had us go around the room and tell our peers about ourselves, but whatever the case, for the next few months I received no critique which did not disparagingly hinge around a dozen different variations on “this reads too much like a play”. When pressed for what the hell that meant, exactly, it seemed I was leaving far too much to the imagination, and that was abhorrent to the art of prose. On a stage we might get to see your collaborators in acting and design fill in all your missing details, but in prose, good sir, you must provide everything for us or we shall be lost.

Hemingway might have had a rebuttal at this point, but, I was young, and the wind was against me, and so I did my best to conform my writing to what the instructor and my peers seemed to want, forcing out what was to me excruciatingly overblown amounts of description and exposition… but no matter what I did, it was never enough. They would look, and “tsk”, and once again tell me that it seemed I’d be better off writing for the theater. But that wasn’t the most frustrating part; the most frustrating was that because my drama background seemed to be the beginning and end of the conversation, then insofar as I remember I had only one critique from that all that time that looked beyond that and gave me something worth a damn in terms of improving my skills.

Now of course, all writers are people, and people convey both fact and fiction from their own viewpoints. To be a writer without a “voice” is to be a non-entity, someone whose output is as entertaining as a set of electronics instructions. To be a writer with a voice, it seems only logical to consider that the voice is going to have the experiences and prejudices of a unique life experience behind it. We are all drunk upon our own lives, carrying with us those joys and pains and ups and downs, a lot of which may be the fuel driving us to tell stories in the first place.

But do they really color everything? I read Ender’s Game and don’t really see a bunch of pro-Mormon propaganda in it, but there are a lot of people who seem to honestly believe that because Orson Scott Card happens to be a Mormon, everything he writes is nothing more than a thinly veiled religious treatise, and anyone who can’t see that is being willfully blind.

How many people would have come up with that if they didn’t know (or think they know) the man (or woman) behind the tale? How many people would have critiqued my stories as being too much like stage plays if they had no idea what my main focus of study was?

You won’t find me claiming writers aren’t under the influence of their lives, but given these kinds of responses, it’s little wonder why some resort to pen names, especially when they happen to be stepping outside their comfort zone—or more accurately, the zone their audience might be comfortable with. It may be the only way for them to get an honest critique at the public’s hands.

So we’re back from Comikaze 2012… pardon me, I guess it’s full formal name now is “Stan Lee’s Comikaze – Comic, Anime, Gaming Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Expo – Shock and Awesome!”.

We were there for the inaugural show last year, and since they let us be special guests with a free Artist’s Alley table, we were not as much for the complaints that some of our fellow vendors had. Plus I always find it good practice to cut a show slack in its freshman outing (with the exception of the horrible Pasadena Rock’n Comic Con, but that was basically the Birdemic of conventions). They gave away a lot of complimentary tickets that first year and had heavy discounts on the rest, so there were crowds, and people (at least from our perspective) seemed in the mood to buy. The L.A. Convention Center is also just a quick car trip from our house, so all in all it was a laid-back experience despite some of the hiccups I mentioned.

Actually, now that I’m scouring back through my November 2011 blogs, it seems like I never talked about Comikaze. So I guess I didn’t really mention anything, good or bad. Well, I covered the good already, and the bad could be chalked up mostly to inexperience… such as having no separate rooms for the panels and expecting curtained off areas on the convention floor to work as a viable substitute. Since we were not part of any panels we did not suffer from this, but I empathized with those who did because an open-on-top, curtained off area does not stop outside sound, and there was a lot of it, particularly in the form of very loud P.A. announcements that drowned people out so badly the panels had to just pause until they were over.

If that had happened again this year, I would honestly wonder what the organizers were smoking, but it did not. Many things were improved, not the least of which was moving the show out of the basement area it was held in last year. I cannot, however, argue with a couple of reviews of this year’s show that I’ve read, one from the perspective of veteran exhibitor Travis Hanson going to Comikaze for the first time, and the other from veteran attendee Whitney Drake doing the same.

Reading Whitney Drake’s account of the line to get in was stunning, because yes, the weather was terribly hot. On Saturday morning when we showed up to get our exhibitor badges we were inside the lobby, but the sun coming through the glass was enough to break the exhibitors waiting into a sweat, and there were a surprising amount of exhibitors waiting. Word was that for whatever reason, no badges could be printed and distributed prior to 9am, and so everyone was jammed up, not to mention anxious since the show opened at 10. We were stuck there for at least a half an hour before we were able to get into the exhibit hall and start setting up. I heard some people claim that because of the delay security were willing to let people in to set up without badges, but that’s a whole other can o’ worms.

Drake’s report on the attendee line? That makes me feel that we got off easy. Ouch. I did have one friend who texted us saying he tried to make it down around 1pm or so and didn’t even make it as far as a line, the parking situation alone at that point made him give up and drive back home. Honestly, it took me about 20 minutes after we finished setting up before I started to relax and feel sane and reasonable again… I can’t imagine the effect on the general crowds. Actually, I suppose it might answer the question of why it seemed so slow for us for the first several hours on Saturday despite the crowds, because those crowds might have also been trying to overcome a grumpy beginning to their outing.

I did also think of something else when I read Drake’s suggestion that they might have wanted to have more people processing tickets. There’s a good friend of the Ranch named Gregory who likes to volunteer around at the L.A. area shows, and he showed up to say hi on Saturday afternoon with a strange story that he’d been turned away because of some ruling that because Comikaze was a for-profit enterprise, they weren’t permitted to recruit volunteers. Anyone who’s been to any of the Comic-Con International shows knows just how important the volunteers are to beefing up your staffing. Now the Comic-Con organization is non-profit, but I think there’s other for-profit conventions that recruit volunteers with no problem. I think even Comikaze had volunteers last year. I don’t know what changed, but the new policy seemed to have blindsided the organizers as much as anyone else, and because of that might have left them severely short on working bodies. That bottleneck likely contributed to all the “traffic jams”, with too many attendees and not enough people to process them efficiently.

Travis Hanson’s point about the P.A. is also valid; it wasn’t interrupting panels this year, but it still felt intrusive, particularly towards the end of Sunday when they appeared to be getting almost desperate to sell off their Comikaze merchandise. First was the announcement everything was slashed to 50% off, and then, I kid you not, there was a point two staffers with armloads of Comikaze t-shirts went down the aisles shouting they were selling them for $5 apiece, like they were street vendors hawking their wares. Whether under orders to do so or not, that was just weird, and I suppose underscores the point of not making your exhibitors feel like you’re in competition with them.

As for the idea of bells and whistles at the expense of basics? I’m honestly surprised neither blog made more mention of the Zombie Apocalypse course, which was a fairly late addition that I’m sure was inspired by the one AMC put on at Petco Park during San Diego Comic-Con. There was a separate admission charged to be part of that, but that made sense since it wasn’t even being run by the same company. Here it was a $30 charge to be a survivor (later discounted to $20 in the course of the show) and a $70 charge to be a zombie, and the zombies needed a two hour training session in addition to time for make-up. The course itself was made up mostly of inflatable slides and the like, which looked somewhat fun, but when I finally got over to take a close look at it through the “quarantine fence”, it seemed very deserted. Maybe I just caught it between runs, but then again, I think it’s entirely possible that the amount of would-be zombies willing to pay $70 to be part of the experience was vastly overestimated. And without zombies, where’s the experience for the would-be survivors?

I don’t know how it went on Saturday, but on Sunday all I saw was a couple of zombies shambling around the bounce castles, with the whole area being uncrowded enough some FemmeLoki cosplayer was having a photoshoot at the fence, complete with stand-up reflectors. All in all, it seems like they poured a lot of effort into that aspect of the convention for not much return, which is then when you start wondering if they could have spent the money and time more wisely. Comikaze’s sophomore show fixed some things, but other experiments didn’t quite pan out.

Will Dawn and I go back next year? That depends on a lot of factors. This year we didn’t get a free booth but we at least got to take advantage of an offered “grandfather clause” which gave us a good discount for having been present at the first show. If they raise up their prices, we might need to make some hard decisions, which are also complicated by not quite knowing yet what the SoCal convention scene will be like in 2013.

I do know that we finally listened to what all our friends and peers kept telling us and booked a table for Phoenix. So anyone out Arizona way, if you’re free Memorial Day weekend, Dawn and I will be coming your way!

Sometimes it’s nice just to kick back and watch a movie for the sheer hell of it. Last week I got all deeply analytical and philosophical on the subject of Once Upon A Time In The West, a film made with meticulous care and a measured, operatic pace.

This week, I popped open a cold one and fired up Smokey and the Bandit. This is one of those movies that was on TV all the time when I was a little kid. All. The. Time. And I remember just eating it up, because it had fast cars, cartoony characters, and just plain seemed like everyone involved in the production was having a hell of a good time.

Revisiting it as an adult? Well, it ain’t no masterpiece of cinema, but it’s still a lot of fun. For one thing, I had forgotten that the big bootlegging crux of the film is transporting 400 cases of Coors beer from East Texas to Georgia. In 1977 America, it was illegal to bring Coors east of the Mississippi river without a special permit, a concept that baffles my mind because, well… Coors. 2012 is a year where so many better domestic and imported brews are so widely available, for such cheap prices, it boggles my mind that anyone could ever risk incarceration over Coors. Coors for me is the stuff people fall back on when they just need mass quantities of beer and don’t care what it is.

And yet, yeah, I suppose prior to the 1990s the beer market in the U.S. wasn’t nearly as diverse, and apparently, quite jealously guarded in some cases. I still love the concept that the main impetus of the movie is based around driving a truckload of cheap beer from Texarkana to Atlanta as fast as possible, dodging every kind of law along the way. This isn’t cocaine or bioweapons, it’s Coors, and there’s a certain innocence to that.

The whole movie shares that sort of childlike innocence, like a Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon brought to live action and moved to the highways of the Deep South, or at least a fantasy version of it where everyone has a CB Radio and is more than willing to mess around with the law so that a charismatic, carefree rebel can win the day. Cars crash and property gets destroyed, but there’s no lasting consequences beyond some frustrated “countie mountie” stomping on his Smokey hat. Burt Reynolds as The Bandit could easily be seen as a lower-rent template for Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark. Jackie Gleason’s portrayal of Sherriff Buford T. Justice is such a stereotype he all but transcends the concept, and has resonated down through the decades into such strange descendants as Eric Cartman of South Park shouting about his “Authori-TY!”. Even Sally Field’s love interest character in the movie seems somehow more vibrant than many modern equivalents.

Again, not claiming great cinema here, but Smokey and the Bandit really never tries to be profound. You don’t get that weird whiplash effect of movies like Transformers which occasionally seem to feel the need to say something about the human condition, instead of just sticking to giant robots duking it out. Smokey and the Bandit is what it is, straightforward escapist entertainment, presented with no regrets, no apologies, and a big charming grin on its mustachioed mug. It’s also a movie from back when “PC” barely even meant Personal Computer, much less Political Correctness, so I suppose I perhaps ought to warn off the easily offended—but the only openly racist character also happens to be the villain, and again, he’s racist in the way Cartman is racist, so overblown you can’t really take him seriously.

For me, it held up as 90 minutes of well-paced fun, and when a movie can do that whether you’re nine years old or thirty years past that mark, there’s something special to it. Call it a guilty pleasure if you must… I’ll just call it a pleasure, plain and simple.

Longtime readers will know of my love for Sergio Leone’s westerns, particularly The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I may have even gone so far as to call that particular film his masterpiece.

If you’re familiar with Leone’s work, you might be about to argue with me… and I’ll admit, you might very well be right. As a wizened old Dagobah muppet once said: “there is another…”. 

Once Upon a Time in the West is that other, and many consider it not only to be the pinnacle of Leone’s career, not only one of the greatest westerns ever made, but one of the best films ever made, period.

Why? That’s not something easily told. In fact, the first time that I watched it (and I can’t even remember the year), I don’t think I found it particularly memorable. Maybe I was too disappointed in the lack of Clint Eastwood, since I vaguely remember being in a big Man With No Name fanboy phase. Maybe it was a bad copy. I hadn’t revisited it since, even when I went into my western binge with the development of Zombie Ranch. Even after I found a 2-disc DVD set for $4 at my local Blockbuster’s closeout sale and decided “what the heck, I’ll own that”, I just had never gotten around to a viewing.

It comforts me that I’m not alone and that articles like this exist, commisserating the notion that this is one of those movies you should see that you just (for whatever reason) don’t get around to seeing. Or even worse in my case, that I’d seen and (for whatever reason) remained unmoved. It was thus not really possible for me to jump in on the conversation with some of my film buff friends over the weekend as they hailed it as near perfection in cinema. I just nodded along, and then the next day decided I had a few hours to kill so I might as well dig out the DVD and give things a second look. That’s definitely one thing to warn people about going in, there’s a time commitment involved.

And a commitment of attention. I’ve spoken before about how the old-school classics found a way to be interesting without needing to throw action scenes at us every minute, and Once Upon a Time in the West takes a stand on this right from the beginning, with a ten-minute sequence of three men waiting for a train. If that sounds reminiscent of the opening of High Noon, it is unabashedly so, homaged along with several other classics by a director freely admitting his influences… Leone doing what we might think of as Quentin Tarantino’s shtick, when the latter was still barely 5 years old. But still, this particular sequence is unique. Barely any dialogue. No music. No sound, besides the kinds of sounds you only notice when you’re waiting for something to happen.

This is where I began to realize what one of the biggest problems was with my prior viewing. Last time, I had a crappy print shown on a tiny, crappy television. This time, I had it playing on a 40″ HDTV, and even though it wasn’t a Blu-Ray disc, the print was so clear and vivid that it about blows my mind to think it could get any better. Simply put, I think that in order to watch Once Upon a Time in the West properly, you need to be able to see the pores in every craggy face. You should have the capability to notice that one of Charles Bronson’s eyes has slightly different irises from the other, because you’ll have the time and close-ups to do so. Leone wants to tell you his story through his visuals, through every carefully framed shot… so trying to get the sense of that on a small and low-rez screen is like being half-blind. If you don’t lose yourself in the audio/visuals, you’ll be on the outside of the storytelling; Leone leans so heavily on that part of his equation over, say, plot and dialogue, that if you don’t get fascinated by the cinematics, it might just seem boring.

Because really, it’s a much more somber film than his earlier westerns. And quieter. This is less a celebration of the untamed frontier than a funeral for it, albeit a moving one. The pacing reminds me a lot of Shane, with much of the runtime devoted to the anticipation of violence rather than its commitment. Or as the wikipedia article aptly puts it, “Leone was far more interested in the rituals preceding violence than in the violence itself.”

In a way the opening of the film could be seen as a litmus test on the viewer. If you’re not being entertained by those three guys killing time waiting at a train station, then you might want to skip watching the rest, or at least save it for a day and time when you’re in the proper mood, with the proper environment. Let’s just say this time around, I had that going, and it makes all the difference. Once Upon a Time in the West is a deliberate film, as harsh and beautiful as the desert that makes up its setting, where something as simple as the drip of water onto a man’s hat takes on a mythic significance. Like Citizen Kane, it’s a movie first and foremost for those who love movies, the way Watchmen could be said to be a comic for those who love comics. Not to say the story isn’t compelling or the characters and dialogue aren’t memorable, but it’s one of those films that’s fascinating to approach from the perspective of how it was made as much as the subject matter being presented; a movie where the director’s every choice matters.

And it’s a damn fine western, too. I’m glad I gave it a second look. If you haven’t even given it a first, consider doing so. Just don’t judge our Frank here by his namesake there; I don’t think either one would appreciate that.

Fiction writers must drive the FBI nuts. I’m thinking about the research I did just for this current sequence of pages. Guns. Pipe bombs. Ways to sabotage heavy equipment. As I sat there on one lunch break at work, casually browsing an online manual of ecoterrorism, it occurred to me that this sort of thing must look very suspicious out of context.

And it’s almost certainly being tracked. If not by government agencies, there are the algorithms used by targeted maketing campaigns snooping around your Amazon and E-bay purchase histories. For example, earlier this year we made the decision to splurge on a few reference models so that Dawn would have an easier time drawing certain things—by which I mean, guns. Not actual guns, which would have been rather expensive, harder to acquire, and need a lot more care in handling, but I roamed around the ‘Net for a few weeks to find deals on a few cheap-but-decent-looking Airsoft and toy replicas.

You never realize how hard it is to find stock photography of a certain pose or angle until you start trying to locate it when your suffering artist asks for a bone thrown her way. It has been so nice to have something available where we can just take our own pictures and work from that, but the side effect was I had Google ads following me around for weeks after I ceased the buying splurge, offering all manner of Airsoft deals. Of course, anyone looking over my shoulder from a discreet distance would just see guns. Guns guns guns. Not so bad at home, but a tad embarrassing at the day job. I just had to try my best not to look twitchy to my co-workers.

Perhaps this is just the writer’s equivalent to the concern expressed in Dawn’s favorite comic from Awkward Zombie. I’m sure I’m far from the worst one out there; can you imagine the sort of searches being performed by a murder mystery author? “concealing taste of poison”, “hiding dead bodies”, “quick kills with blunt trauma”, etc. etc.

Or how about authors dealing with speculative fiction involving terrorist acts? “bio-warfare best practices” or “bombing Buckingham Palace” must be a tad awkward to have in your browser history. Not quite kiddie porn awkward, but I’m sure even that dark underbelly gets delved for research purposes. Has anyone ever been hauled into court over such things and had to explain, “I’m writing a book!”?

I’m guessing not (at least in non-police states) unless they were already arrested or under investigation for something else. In modern times this has gone way beyond who’s checking out what books from a library, this is an infinite shelf with infinite access, and I highly doubt even the combined government agencies of the world have the manpower to follow up every time someone does a search for “reliable methods of kidnapping minors”. And this is a good thing, because if I ever wanted to write about such a topic I would likely be searching for details with terms like that. This is, after all, something where I would most definitely hope I was breaking the rule of “write what you know”. As I would hope would be true of any writer dealing with rape, murder, cannibalism, or sundry other nasty, nasty topics. So we research.

Writers (hacks excepted) want to do our homework. We want to have a certain sense of accuracy. This is even odder to consider when I think about who exactly we’re worried will be calling us out for inaccuracies. “Pshaw! That’s not how you keep cheerleaders alive in your basement!” … that seems like the sort of fan interaction we’d be gingerly placing into the trash (or trash folder).

There’s some things where personal experience just shouldn’t be required. If that means a few odd stares at my choice of reading material? Well, so be it. A crazy I am, lest a crazy I become.

Came across one of my old college textbooks the other day. Seeing as I went to college in the early 90s, I can’t even really remember which class it was for, but it had an interesting guide to elements of fiction, with an eye towards analyzing and critiquing written stories.

One of the elements it talked about was the issue of “point of view”. All stories need to make a decision about how they’re told, and in pure prose this decision is one of the more important ones because of the scale of intimacy and information provided. You may have heard terms before such as “first person” or “third person”, but did you know that the third person viewpoint can be subdivided further into a “limited” or “omniscient” style? Or have you heard of the “dramatic” viewpoint?

Well, let me back up in case you were confused at the beginning. The point of view is probably defined most simply as the identity of the narrator of your tale. For example purposes I could take the first line of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series: “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.”

This is a third-person viewpoint, possibly even a dramatic one. In a couple of other choices, I might get the following…

First-person: That damned man in black fled across the desert, and I followed him.

Third-person omniscient: The traitorous Walter, the man in black, fled across the desert, and the honorable Roland Deschain, gunslinger, followed him.

You could also switch the first-person viewpoint and get “I fled across the desert, and that stubborn gunslinger followed me.”

These simple changes become pretty fundamental when you think about them. First-person viewpoints are the most obvious in terms of coloring everything experienced, because it’s through the filter of a single character, an “I” which not only has imperfect access to information about the world and other characters, but may also be very, very biased.

Third-person limited takes a step back and tends to still present information through the focus of a single character, having access to their inner thoughts as needed, but has a little more leeway in relating events; including the option to actually jump the focus around, something that can’t really happen with first person unless you want the reader to be thoroughly confused. In A Song of Ice and Fire George R. R. Martin uses third-person limited, first following one of his protagonists, and then another. In this chapter you might be treated to Tyrion’s thoughts and fears over a certain event, while in the next it might be the same event retold from another character’s perspective. It’s a very flexible option, allowing for a balance of bias and detatchment.

Third-person omniscient just basically plays God. The narrator sees all and knows all, although there’s a paradox in that sometimes this viewpoint is the most biased of all. “The traitorous Walter, the man in black, fled across the desert, and the honorable Roland Deschain, gunslinger, followed him.” Judgments are being communicated to the audience right from the start, all the more powerful for the fact that there’s a “voice of God” delivering them. “In this week’s episode, the courageous He-Man must rescue the beautiful princess from the evil Skeletor!” In cases like these the audience really isn’t given any chance to decide for themselves, the story does it for them. Tolkien certainly never seemed interested in showing us Saruman’s point of view, so much as condemning him, both through Gandalf and the Universe. Omniscient stories might arguably be the only ones where unfettered Good and Evil can exist–although it could be only because the author tells us so.

Now if you’re paying attention you might have noticed that I skipped over the idea of second-person. There’s a reason for that, and that reason is because it is almost non-existent in narrative fiction.

“You fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

That’s the second-person viewpoint, and it’s a mighty awkward choice for telling stories… with one exception: Interactive Fiction. The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, or the Infocom games of yore, are shining examples of where second-person works to draw the reader into the story as an active participant. The storyteller in this case isn’t talking about someone else (or even “themselves”), they’re interested in you, and what you will do next.

Finally there’s the dramatic viewpoint, which is the one Zombie Ranch uses most. It’s the idea of having no narrator at all, of just capturing events as they unfold and leaving the audience to form their own opinions and judgments. No telepathic insights, no universal adjectives or inner monologues. Actions and words, presented with minimal commentary. Hemingway was said to be a master of this, and so perhaps I really ought to brush up on my Hemingway.

For now, I hope this entry wasn’t too rambling. I’m still trying to get over a nasty cold and I have an unfortunate feeling my coherency is not the better for it. But that might just be my point of view.

So a couple weeks ago, I got “freshly pressed” for the first time. The Satellite Show, which is the blog collective I post to most every Saturday in addition to my yammerings here, is hosted on the actual WordPress.com site. One of the things that can happen because of this detail is that a WordPress editor may happen across whatever you’ve written and think it deserves a spotlight on the WordPress.com front page.

Was I aware of any of this? I have to admit, no, I wasn’t. Neither I nor any of my co-bloggers had ever been Freshly Pressed in our two years of operation, and it was just a week like any other week, a week where I chose to rant about the oncoming horror known as the film version of Warm Bodies, which seems by all accounts to represent that last broken taboo of trying to take the zombie genre and Twilightize it.

You may read my article here: LINK. I chose to use the Satellite Show for it rather than publishing on this site, because here I try to avoid swearing too much, and this news required some expletives.

So I write it up, post it, and then the next day there’s an out-of-the-blue email that I’ve been selected to be Freshly Pressed, so prepare for a surge of traffic once the link goes live. I pondered just how much traffic, but in the end it wasn’t anything too massive in the grand scheme of things: 1000 views on the first day, maybe about 600 on the next, and then the link dropped off the front page and things went right back to obscurity.

Now for a blog site that normally doesn’t see anywhere near that level of traffic, sure, it’s pretty nice to see the stats spike, but I wasn’t shocked to see that all the viewership bled away again. Where the Internet is concerned, people sticking around is much more the exception than the rule. I had another article last year that a random Twitter gentleman with a lot of followers decided to tweet about, and boom—huge traffic spike for a few hours, after which it went back to the usual trickle.

I count myself pretty lucky that this blog here happens to be grouped in with an ongoing comic, and I know there’s at least a handful of you who actually come back week after week to see what I’ve decided to ramble about. I guess I could call you “verticals”, people who for whatever reason (boredom, seeking wisdom, seeking a good laugh at my expense) will read my writings regardless of the topic. It’s a pretty amazing feeling to get even a few strangers who are willing to do that, even though there’s also usually the impetus of a new comic page calling you over as well.

By contrast, most blog traffic, especially those big spikes I’m talking about, is more “horizontal”. Your topic for that particular post blipped onto the radar for a short time, and people came, and people read, and then people went on about their business. Most of you have probably heard the phrase 15 minutes of fame. On the Internet, you may not even get 15 minutes. 1500 pageviews, perhaps, and your content usually matters far more than the name attached to it… which means that unlike William Hung, all those net surfers probably won’t know who you are, much less what you look like. This is, of course, something of a poor recipe for return interest.

I’m not here today to tell you how to overcome this. I’m still iffy on the whole subject of self-promotion; on walking that fine line between feeling like there’s people out there who would appreciate what I’m writing, and feeling like an entitled, delusional douchenozzle for thinking that. One thing I was fascinated with during the Freshly Pressed interlude was the amount of “likes” I was receiving from bloggers who really, really didn’t seem as if they were the type who would be interested in zombies, or movies, or anything close to what I was discussing. Sure enough, it turns out there’s a whole thing where people just go through whatever’s Freshly Pressed, liking everything in a blind, shotgun blast attempt to get their own stuff noticed. They’re not even reading the content, just trying to piggy back on your moment of popularity… and considering how fleeting even that popularity is, it all seems pretty crazy—perhaps even to the point of being ultimately meaningless.

But I think it’s wrong to approach it from that direction. I (usually) do two blogs a week, because that’s about the limit of what I feel is my capacity for having interesting things to say. Maybe no one beyond a few people ever sees them. Maybe I get lucky and thousands of people see one of them. If most of those melt away again, I don’t really take it as a sign that what I had to say was hollow and stupid, so much as it’s just the nature of the ‘Net to bounce around, to seek content for the most part topically based on whatever’s on your mind at a particular moment, with perhaps only a few sites or people you return to over and over.

More memorable, perhaps, than any spike in views are the times there’s a wholly unexpected connection, such as when I talked about the history of Cowboys & Aliens and ended up having a conversation in the comments with one of the actual co-writers of the graphic novel. I just never know who’s going to see what I’ve put out there, and that potential can be exhilarating—maybe even a little scary, considering how *ahem* opinionated I’ve occasionally gotten. Bottom line is, I have lots of thoughts about lots of things, and for better or worse these are my attempts at sharing them in a manner that, if not cohesive, might at least stir a little emotion or at least a nod of recognition from a reader. Whether that’s 15 readers or 1500, I figure there must be some meaning there.