Category: Writer’s Blog

Don’t let T.S. Eliot fool you with his excoriation of April; in the webcomic world, indeed, the online content world as a whole, April is pretty sweet. It’s August and its partners in crime, June and July, that sneak up on you every year and sucker punch you.

The worst is probably the first time you experience it, if you’re the kind of person who monitors your traffic counts as a sign your audience is growing. Yes, various counters will tell you various things, but when you’ve been on the rise and then you suddenly see an across the board dip in people looking your way, and that dip keeps going and going from week to week, you’ll get that sinking feeling in your stomach and wonder just what it was that you did wrong.

You did nothing wrong. To paraphrase Chinatown: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Summer.” It’s the Summer Slump, and it’s a phenomenon that’s been known about by webmasters for years. The kids are out of school, people are going on vacation, and basically, a lot of folks just plain decide they have something better to do than read webcomics, no matter how gripping the cliffhangers you dangle before them are. Hell, if you look into it you’ll find out it’s not even just the web, television viewership also drops during these months to the point networks hold their new seasons of shows until Fall.

This is such a recurring thing that some wecomic creators take a page from the TV and are known to just put their comics on hiatus until Summer ends. Others use the time to experiment with layouts or otherwise do risky business with their sites before the “crowds” return, figuring anyone loyal enough to stick around during slump time is also willing to cut them some slack if there’s a temporary breakdown. As for us, we’ve mostly been holding the course, especially because this year June and July weren’t as bad as they’ve been before. But August? August looks so far to be shaping up as nasty as ever, so it’s probably time to see about some overdue updates. Of course, August in the Los Angeles area also happens to be when it gets so hot it’s really hard to motivate to do anything except lie around in the path of as much air circulation as possible.

The upside you have to keep telling yourself is that eventually it will get cooler, and school will start up again, and you’ll see a lot of familiar faces returning, eager to see how the story has gone since they last checked in. That’s also perhaps when you might find out that they really have abandoned you, but so far Dawn and I have always found September to be the time everyone comes back from “reverse hibernation”, perhaps dragging a few friends along as well.

Summer slump is just something all online creators have to deal with, unless they’re too big or too small to notice. For us here at the Ranch there’s no avoiding it, so we slog through the heat and comparative lack of feedback/commentary until we reach that cool breeze that heralds the migratory return.

That,  or maybe next time the slump rolls ’round we should look into doing an ad blitz in places like Australia.

This is going to be a weird piece of writing; a very subjective piece of writing.

But then, aren’t they all?

There’s this cartoon making the rounds of my Facebook acquaintances recently, produced by Shannon Wheeler of Too Much Coffee Man fame.

How old is the cartoon? Good question. The Internet, especially in the form of social networking sites, tends to be a churning morass of content where stuff keeps seeping back to the surface even though it might be years old. People seeing it for the first time then excitedly share it around until someone rains on their parade by telling them they’ve seen it before, perhaps even taking the opportunity to make snarky comments about their intellect for daring to only now enjoy what others previously enjoyed when it was still hip.

This article is not about that, though. Nor is it about fuzzy mathematics. It’s about panic. I think I can safely date his cartoon as being done sometime after March, 2010, when Shannon Wheeler’s interview with the Portland Tribune had him quoting the line.

Tribune: Do you really clean your whole room just before you write?

Wheeler: Yeah. It’s like a meditative thing. And it’s a way to procrastinate. There was a recent cartoon, “Writing is 90 percent procrastination and 30 percent panic.”

So I guess it’s not even originally his cartoon, then. But nevermind, let’s get back to the panic.

Growing up, I used to write fairly often, but it was mostly for the behest of school projects and the like. My personal creative writing attempts were sporadic, and although there might have been a germ of talent in them, I never ended up doing anything on a regular basis, even on the scale of doing something like writing for a school paper. When I did get off my ass in some fit of undeniable inspiration, I couldn’t keep it up. Was it a fear of failure?

No, it was something much stranger. It was a fear of success. A paralyzing, panic-inducing fear that people might like what I was doing so much they’d clamor for more, and I’d have to then produce more for them. What if I couldn’t maintain the quality of the content? What if I ran out of ideas? What if they got angry with me for saying something stupid? What if, what if, what if…?

As those of you reading this are aware, I got better. Oh, I’m not saying the quality of every one of these posts is fantastic, much less the dialogue in every Zombie Ranch page—but for the past three years I’ve managed to crank them out in a state that I’m more or less okay with. And yet I’d be lying to say there’s not still a little bit of panic and terror underlying the process, which doesn’t even necessarily involve looming (mostly self-imposed) deadlines. If you want to find a way to interpret the cartoon’s math, you can envision that 20% of panic overlaps into the procrastination, which would leave 10% pure panic that’s not tied into any specific timeframe or circumstance.

Ten percent panic—that sounds about right. Ninety percent of my life continuing as normal, only a small portion of which consists of me occasionally not being able to sleep because my mind is churning through plotlines and trying to figure out how to get to the scenes I want, without trampling on the characters or otherwise presenting something which I would mercilessly tear apart if I were the reader.

This is without even getting to where Dawn has to sometimes come in and tell me that a certain thing I want to present won’t work visually, or at least won’t work as well as I’m imagining. This has no need for a script, or a writing session, or any such logical examples of cause and effect. I just get to enjoy that at any given moment, I may look at what I’ve gotten myself into and wonder: what the hell have you gotten yourself into?

It helps to hear of other writers who speak of panic and procrastination, but then there are all those writers who have it totally together. Productive. Scheduled. Their trains of thought all run on time. They’re the real professionals, right? The prom queens. You’re just the wallflower who showed up in their mom’s old dress, no matter what interesting alterations you might have made.

Ten percent of the time, I wonder if I should even be writing… which of course leads to an even more disturbing thought: if it makes me so anxious, why don’t I quit?

But that’s the damnable thing, I also enjoy writing. For as much as I speak of fear and panic, there are joys and satisfactions. The times in my life where I stopped writing altogether were, to look back on them, times I felt anxiety of a different sort, an anxiety, I suppose, of doing nothing at all. Of taking no risks. Of sitting on and letting rot what my mommy and daddy at least thought was a halfway decent ability to express myself in written form.

Speaking of which, both of them to this day seem more than just supportive of my taking up the pen/keyboard again, they seem almost relieved. As in, yes, they must have really felt I was wasting something by not writing. And I must also credit my dad for saying something worthy of thought when I admitted to him about my feelings of unease—basically, that anything you feel completely comfortable doing probably isn’t worth doing. The unease is what keeps you on your toes. What keeps you focused. What keeps you striving for more.

So is the panic always there, for all writers? I don’t know. My friend Justin (recently published!) is one of those guys who has his schedule down and sticks to it, but would be the first to tell you that writing is pretty much the idea of putting your inner psyche on display to a world full of strangers, and letting them judge you—an inherently terrifying concept to all but the most narcissistic of souls.

All I can say is that, for better or worse, I got back on this horse three years ago and I’m holding on tight for the ride. If it runs off a cliff, well, that’ll definitely be a good time to start writing some wings.

Hang around authors of fiction long enough and you’re bound to hear one or more of them express something along these lines:

“My characters have taken over my story! It doesn’t matter what I want anymore… they’re writing it for me!”

It’s entirely possible some of you reading this, being writers yourselves, have experienced the feeling personally. Sounds weird to say out loud though, doesn’t it? The sort of thing that would get you funny looks at a family gathering, much less a gathering of strangers. But in the writing world, you wouldn’t be alone– even big shots like Stephen King have been reported as saying he feels writing is more like dictation than creation.  His characters take over and he just writes down what they are saying and doing.

And if that works for you, more power to you. King’s fame and bank account certainly don’t dispute it works for him; but from my perspective, I’m not willing to go that far. The idea that you’re just taking down dictation sounds more to me like the work of a secretary than a storyteller, and I don’t cotton to those implications. Letting your characters run your story seems as dangerous an idea as a director letting their actors run their film.

Mind you, I also don’t like the idea that characters are just props and mouthpieces. I suppose I’m somewhere in the middle on this whole shebang; I can’t remember ever feeling like one of my characters was talking to me or writing for me, but they ought to have a certain sense of having lives of their own beyond what I want them to do. I’ve felt a certain amount of “pushback” if I’m putting words in their mouths or making them do certain actions that, on review, end up being questionable. Is that the same thing as characters telling me what to do? Maybe, but it’s not any sort of literal conversation occurring. It’s an internal process of give and take, and there’s two sides to it, the side of the character and the side of the narrative. In fact, I’ll revisit the actor/director comparison I made just a paragraph ago. The actor’s job is to portray their specific character as best as they can. The director’s job is telling the story that character is involved in– which often happens to be a story other characters are involved in as well. It’s not the actor’s job to think about those other characters or the structure of how the story is going to unfold. Nor should it be! They’ve got their hands full bringing a fictional being to life in a way the audience will care about, which is no easy task (trust the guy with the theater background; it ain’t).

Now you can see how that can lead to a limited perspective. Sometimes the actor is right to tell the director, “I’m not feeling these lines. Can we talk about this?” And a good director should have a listen to the concerns, but also can’t be afraid to put their foot down; they’re not only the ones responsible for the big picture, they’re in the best position to see it. Sure, the actor would love to have their character do a 15 minute monologue, but there’s no real time for it… so sorry, but we need to keep it to 15 seconds.

I won’t speak for all writers, but in my personal process, I’m constantly internalizing this whole debate. It definitely sounds like a crazy thing to say– but then again if you were watching me it would probably be a pretty boring sight of me typing… looking at the computer screen… typing some more… deleting… tapping the keyboard thoughtfully…

This is not exactly the stuff of straitjackets and  tranquilizer syringes. But I’d venture to say that ever since people started telling stories, storytellers have played with the line between fiction and reality. To make your fiction have the semblance of reality, it has to instill some sense of belief in your audience, and so at least in a temporary sense, you have to let yourself believe in it. Believe in the characters, and the world, and the conflicts occurring… but at the same time I feel like it’s a good thing–perhaps even a necessity–to keep at least part of your brain in “director mode”. Find your balance between being the puppet and the puppeteer. Let the characters breathe with the life you gave them, and if you think they’re trying to tell you something (so to speak), by all means, listen. Just remember the final decisions are yours.

Or possibly your editor’s. But that’s a whole other story.

So as some of you know, we did not manage to score a Small Press table this year for Comic-Con International. We did what we could in terms of getting our paperwork and jury submission in early, but in the end we were put back on the wait list, and this time there was no April call to bring us forwards.

Disappointing? In a sense, sure, but if you read my report from last year, I did mention how exhausting it is. Also I was hearing some disappointment from our vendor friends that we talked to, expressing a similar sentiment to that of Jeph Jacques that traffic and sales seemed down.

Does that mean we didn’t turn in our application for next year? Of course not! I mean, hey, maybe that disappointment will translate into some spaces opening up again. Or maybe not. But Dawn and I were attending SDCC for many years before we ever had our table, and it was easy enough this year to slip right back into the freedom of keeping our own schedule. Eating where and when we wanted, checking out whatever interested us… sleeping in. Oh how it was nice to sleep in again.

Also, I have to say that we had enough nasty happenstances getting there  that I’ve decided this was more blessing than curse. To begin with our car suffered a breakdown before we even got out of the L.A. area, and although the station we pulled into was kind enough to run a speedy diagnostic in hopes of a quick repair, the trouble turned out to be of the expensive and time-consuming sort. Then the car we borrowed ended up with a flat tire. Then the spare also turned out to be flat, although fortunately that was just a case of refilling it since it had never been used. Also fortunately, it was a robust enough spare to finally get us down to San Diego (and eventually back again), but by the end of it all what should have been a three hour trip became six and a half and had us arriving dirty, sweaty, and drained of energy. We were also too late to hang Dawn’s art in the Art Show and had to wait for that until Thursday morning, which we knew would be a zoo all over again. But can you imagine if we’d had to deal with exhibitor set-up on top of all that? I think my head would have exploded. Now it’s entirely possible that if we’d scored a table we would have driven down the previous day instead, but then our car might have died on us either halfway to San Diego or down in San Diego, leaving us with potentially even more stress and problems. So hey, file that under Just As Well.

Was it worth all the trouble? Well, to tell the truth… yes. It always is, and 2012 was no exception. This was possibly our most hassle ever in arriving, but we got there, and because we did, we got to do stuff like this:

That’s me there in the back, punching a demon in the mouth on the way to seeing a free Dethklok concert on an aircraft carrier last Friday. Dawn of course, is highly visible there in the front. She didn’t get to go to a lot of concerts growing up, and absolutely adores Metalocalypse, so this was kind of a can’t miss opportunity. We did not miss. It was fantastic. Oh, and then there was this:

Dawn made herself a Boot Angel costume for last year’s Long Beach Comic Con. Don’t know Boot Angel? Then you haven’t been keeping up on the latest Love and Rockets collections of the past few years, where Jaime Hernandez started weaving whimsical tales of an all-girl supergroup called the Ti-Girls. SDCC also saw the first debut of the book that collected all those episodes plus some new additions into a single volume, titled God and Science. If you click the link you’ll see Boot Angel front and center on the cover.

But anyhow, Dawn retouched the costume for San Diego since we knew all three Hernandez bros. would be there to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Love and Rockets (which I’ve gushed about in a prior article). We didn’t know if they’d be doing signings, or how mobbed they’d be if they were, but she brought everything just in case. And in the end, we not only got to talk to all of them and get their signatures on several books, but they were especially pleased at the cosplay. From Jaime’s own mouth (and I have no reason to believe he was lying), he said that in 30 years of doing what he does he had almost never seen anyone cosplay as any of his characters, and the one that he did remember was part of a contest with prizes rather than just doing it out of pure inspiration. That floored me, but also it was easy to understand why their faces lit up seeing Dawn arrive at the Fantagraphics booth. She made their day. You can’t ask for much more than that. But what the hell, while they were in good moods I gave each brother a copy of Zombie Ranch #1. Don’t judge me, we’d just been at their panel where they talked about their love of unusual stories and how they started in do-it-yourself efforts… we may not have had a table, but I still had a backpack to carry a few issues around in for just such moments of shamelessness on my part. I did the same after a nice conversation with Karl Kerschl, creator of The Abominable Charles Christopher. I don’t expect anything to come of these offerings, really, they’re more like sacrifices to my Gods… and at least I’ve stopped shaking like I did when I offered them to Scott McCloud and Kurt Busiek two years ago.

I think Dawn’s doing better, too. Just walking around with a Professional badge, you’ll get people asking what you do, and that’s a great icebreaker for telling them without feeling like you’re imposing yourself. I think being on the other side of the table has also helped a ton, because we now better understand things like trying not to “block the merch”. We said hi to a lot of friends, bought some good stuff, and had some great times. And Dawn sold her She-Ra vs. Rainbow Brite picture, of course.

Comikaze comes up in September and we’ll be back on the exhibitor side, but all in all this turned out for the best. If there’s any show where the siren call of wanting to just walk around and experience it tugs at you, it’s SDCC, and it’s a privilege these days just to be there in any capacity. We’ll still see how it pans out for 2013!

Two weeks ago I was discussing the movie Tremors, and among other things praising the characters for reacting to their situation in a “fairly realistic” manner. If you’re wondering what I mean by that, I guess the core of the idea could be boiled down to this:

– If a character puts their hand on a hot stove, and doesn’t immediately recoil from doing so, you’d better have a good reason.

“Because my script needs their hand on that stove” is not a good enough reason by itself, at least not if you’re hoping for some level of audience investment in what’s happening to the character. If you can’t figure out a decent explanation, even for yourself, then it’s a good sign it might be time for a rewrite.

Do you have to immediately spell out the explanation to the audience? That can be its own pitfall, so no, I don’t believe that’s always appropriate. What’s important is a certain sense of consistency; an internal logic of character that is at least as important as the internal logic of your world. If you’ve established someone as a timid follower, scared of their own shadow, you probably shouldn’t write them as being the first to poke their nose into the spooky abandoned house unless you’ve got an answer for that, and sooner or later are prepared to let your audience in on that answer. On the other hand, if you established someone as curious and reckless, you can treat that as a sort of shorthand for behavior that fits along those lines and get on with things.

I just re-watched Alien recently and noted a perfect example of this with Kane, who out of all the “space truckers” of the Nostromo crew has the most enthusiasm about venturing into the unknown, volunteering without hesitation to go out after the distress signal. There are people who complain that his decision to peer over an opening egg is monumentally stupid and only happens because it has to happen for the plot… and if it had been the griping, nervous Lambert in the same situation, I would agree. But it’s Kane. Is it smart? No. But perhaps even more important than your folks being smart in a manner consistent to their character, is when they’re stupid in a manner consistent to their character. Who else but Parker would have ever tried to knock a seven foot tall monster aside to save the girl? (Dallas, earlier on: “Parker – I don’t want any heroics out of you, all right?”) Not to mention Lambert had just recently saved his life in the tussle against a certain robot.

Alien works, in my opinion, because even if the characters involved are doing things you personally would never do, chances are you know some people who might react like that. It’s accessible in that way, and that lets you get involved and start to care. I think that’s why every death in Alien feels shocking in a way that most of its imitations can’t seem to capture, beyond just the blood and guts (although oh, those are still some nasty ways to go). These were people, and what’s happening to them is therefore quite tragic.

Keeping a character-driven consistency in the actions and reactions of your people is a great way to present who they are to an audience without needing to dump a ton of exposition on their heads. Deviating from expectations can also be rewarding, since I think all of us know people who have surprised us with some relationship or reaction even after we’ve known them for years. Go too far in one direction and the character seems unrealistic because they’re so “one-note”. Go too far in the other and they become a random mess. How do you capture that elusive middle ground? Hell, I’m still working on that, myself. Some readers expected Suzie to come out shooting as soon as she found the McCartys on her land. She didn’t — which I’m fully willing to say may actually have been the dumb choice under the circumstances — but if it seems like a deviation from her character all I can tell you is I don’t feel it’s an unreasonable one, both in terms of aspects of her that have been presented to you so far and aspects that haven’t.

And with all that said, it’s time to finish packing for Comic-Con! No table for us this year, but if you happen to be one of the lucky ones attending, make sure to stop by the Art Show upstairs in the Sails Pavilion where Dawn will have some great original art and prints available. We’ll be having sketch time next Wednesday before continuing the story, but I’ll be here with my blog as usual. See you then!

When this article goes live, it will be July 4th in most of the United States of America, a.k.a. Independence Day. It is the freedomest of freedom times, though mostly we just end up celebrating the anniversary of our declared separation from the governance of the British Empire with beer, barbecues, and lots of bright lights and loud noises. Even then, the freedom to blow your own fingers off with an M-80 firecracker has been curtailed by the U.S. government since the 1970s.

Your mileage may vary on whether that’s a good or bad thing, but there’s no question that Americans (and apologies to my international readers who get their feathers ruffled that the U.S. of A. has co-opted the term despite their being quite a few nations in the Americas… I’m guessing mostly because “Statesians” just sounds weird…) do love the notion of being able to choose whether or not to blow our own fingers off. In theory, I mean. Once it happens, then we wonder why the hell there wasn’t a law preventing that poor kid from blowing his fingers off, and then a law gets drafted, and then everyone still in the theory stage gets disgruntled  that the days of easy and convenient finger endangerment have passed them by.

This tug of war between individual freedom and government regulation has been going on pretty much since the country started, but in my opinion nowhere did it come into as stark a contrast as in the frontiers of the Old West. It’s what makes that particular historical time and place fascinating to me beyond just the usual trappings of cowboys and indians, gunslingers and bandits; here was a setting where laws and civilization still held sway enough that people had contracts and filed legal actions, but also knew that their best defense for their land claim might end up being a loaded shotgun. The movers and shakers of distant big cities exerted a subtle but long reach. More local powers in certain areas could exert an immense influence that became almost a law unto themselves, at least until a “bigger fish” decided to take an interest.

A telling crossroads of savagery and civilization is in that old chestnut of the bandit gang “robbing the mail”, which didn’t mean they were after your letter to Aunt Ethel back in New York, but the cash payrolls that were being transported along with it. Outside of civilization, cash, letters of credit, etc. have no value beyond the paper and ink they’re printed with. If the Old West were a truly lawless and savage place, then you’d reckon the bandits would be after something they could actually eat, wear, or use, and cut out civilization as a middleman.

Now, I’ll admit this is not a wholly unique circumstance, as any highwayman of 18th Century England would happily explain as he took your jewelry. But there is also a certain inherent “bigness” to the Western United States that added to that sense of freedom, for those who preferred answering to no one but themselves. It didn’t mean you were an outlaw, because you really could ride off somewhere that no one had laid claim to. Even today, there’s that whole wistful ideal of “no fences”.

But then again, what happened once someone had found a place with no claims? Well, they tended to lay claim to it, and they tended to want a way to formalize and represent that claim, especially once other people got wind that there was a nice spot of potential out beyond where they were. And if you’re any student of human nature, you know that when two people can’t agree on something, there’s generally three options: they come to blows, or one party gives in, or they take their case to a third party whose authority they’re willing to accept.

That third party is exactly where government starts. And recording the decision is where paperwork starts. But the settlers of the Old West didn’t have to figure all that out from scratch, they’d already grown up with it, and to a certain extent also had the ability to govern themselves.  Townspeople couldn’t agree? Let’s take a vote! The setup of the American government tended to repeat itself even on the fringes. A town might elect a mayor or alderman, but his word wasn’t law without the support of the people. People who tended to be independent-minded, resourceful, and always looking to better their lot… otherwise, they’d have stayed where they were.

The Western frontier was a place packed full of folks seeking Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, often at the risk of Life; and the echoes still resonate to this day, if nothing else in the international stereotype of seeing Americans as reckless, whooping cowboys.  The reality was far more complicated than just that, but no less fascinating.

I’ve been asked several times about my inspirations for Zombie Ranch. I’ve gone over none too few of them in these articles over the years, and I’ve done enough of these articles I can no longer rightly remember if I ever gave Tremors its due. If I have, I apologize… but only somewhat, because I’m fully okay with praising this film twice. Come to think, I’m fully okay with praising it over and over and over until everyone in the whole wide world takes the hint and gives it a watch.

If you’ve already done so, good on you. If you haven’t, and you’re any kind of fan of monster movies, treat yourself to this gem from the year 1990, in those days before a lick of CGI had intruded itself upon the genre.

I’m not going to recap the plot for you, there’s plenty of other places out there to get your fill of that (including a recent review over on the Nostalgia Critic site which is pretty much entirely recap)… but if you see a ‘Jaws’ homage in the movie poster, there’s no way I’m going to deny that the filmmakers intended some similarities. This is a film that manages to bring sharks onto dry land in a way that’s not completely ludicrous. Not actual sharks, mind you, but a desert becomes an ocean, with deadly and voracious predators lurking just beneath the surface. The nature of the creatures is revealed patiently, in stages, until we (and the characters) are finally treated to their full disgusting glory. And even then, there’s still surprises in store.

There’s a deceptive simplicity, a competent humility, that runs through the whole film, which I believe is one of the reasons it’s resonated down through the decades. The cast is (with one exception) a bunch of rural Nevada yokels, and while that’s mined for some comic effect, the movie never sets itself above them. They have fairly realistic reactions to their situation, even as things start getting really, really weird and dangerous. In fact, in a lot of cases the decisions they make and the plans they come up with are quite a bit better and more practical than entire casts of supposed scientists and specialists often subject us to in other movies (lookin’ at you, Prometheus). Early on, people ignorant of the danger get picked off easily enough, but once the alarm is raised the monsters start really having to work for their supper, while the survivors try just as hard to avoid becoming supper.

Does Tremors have amazing character depth? Not really, but then I just got done recently writing about why that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I still don’t remember everyone’s names, even after just watching it again this week, but I do know that as the whopping 14 person population of Perfection, Nevada dwindles down, you start caring about the fates of those remaining. Even if you don’t know their names, or their hobbies, or what happened in their childhood… every one of them, even the token asshole teenager, becomes someone who you feel very, very much wants to stay alive, and you can’t help but have a sympathy for that considering the nasty fates of those who draw the short straws.

But as Dawn pointed out to me, for a movie not presenting itself as having much in the way of depth, it gets a lot of details right. A man cleans out the hooves of a horse before riding it. Another man, confronted with something alien but snake-like, treats it like he would a dangerous snake (again looking at you, Prometheus). The lone scientist of the bunch (a Seismologist) has enough curiosity to be excited over the discovery of a new lifeform, but enough sense to also run away from its teeth… and best of all, is frustrated when everyone keeps turning to her for answers she doesn’t have. They’re small bits, but I argue they make a huge difference in seeing these characters as the people they’re supposed to be.

Anyone who’s watched Tremors can never forget the golden moment that happens in a certain basement rec room, which people had wanted to see in every monster movie, ever. But it wouldn’t have had nearly the same impact if it weren’t for how carefully that scene is paced and (pardon the pun) shot. This is only one of the more obvious displays of the understated but thorough filmmaking skill that permeates the movie from beginning to end. The script provides necessary exposition in an economical, almost elegant fashion. Important set pieces are introduced without rubbing your nose in them being important later. The setting is so naturally isolated that you can easily buy these people falling off the grid for a few days without anyone outside the valley really noticing. 1990 was a year before horror movies had to start taking widespread cellphone usage into account, but even if it was set in 2012 Perfection looks very much like one of those places no one would have bothered to put up a tower.

Tremors is a movie that embraces everything to love about its genre, while avoiding some of its more groanworthy cliches. It delivers scares, but also maintains a sense of humor without straying over into parody; if I might stray into cliche myself for a moment, I’d contend that when you laugh, you’re laughing with the movie, not at it. It also makes me long for the good ol’ days of practical effects, of carefully crafted puppets covered in slime and dust that no CGI has ever been able to match in terms of being viscerally there.

But when we get back to Zombie Ranch, the movie’s biggest influence for me was probably in the idea of taking the “ignorant rednecks” that had mostly been villains and victims in horror movies, and making them heroes instead, capable of just as much ingenuity and perseverance in their own way as any crusading scientist or special forces badass.  But on the other hand, still having moments like reacting to a dead alien thing with a haggling argument over how much it’d be worth to put on display in the general store, which never gets higher than twenty dollars. The scale of affairs is just different in Perfection… but it’s a consistent different. It’s an immersive different. You believe in this place and its people, and when you combine that with a great monster, imaginative action sequences, and a scenario that takes the old children’s game of “don’t touch the floor!” to a deadly extreme, you’ve got something special.

The echoes of Tremors may never be felt as strongly as those of movies like Them! or Alien, but the movie still holds up over twenty years since it rumbled its way into theaters. If you ask me if any of its numerous sequels are worthwhile, I can’t tell you there because I haven’t seen them. But the original comes with my highest recommendation. Watch it for fun, and then watch it for craftsmanship, and then watch it for fun again. And no need to worry about being afraid to go back in the water… the ground under your feet will be plenty scary enough.

It’s always flattering when someone solicits for commentary on their work, but especially so if it’s another writer whose work you happen to respect and enjoy. If that writer also happens to be a good buddy? That’s pretty much a trifecta.

Anyhow, for a few years now I’ve been helping my friend Justin Robinson with feedback on various novels he’s been putting together for attempted publication. Justin has been a very patient man, first with drafting and redrafting his fiction, and then (after suffering the slings and arrows of myself and others picking apart his blood, sweat, and tears), finding a company to help bring his work to the masses, where a professional editor once again would call for rewrites before greenlighting the book. To say the least, it’s not the greatest vector for instant gratification.

Thus, when one of his books finally does make it through all these hoops, it’s a justifiable occasion for joy. I’m particularly happy with this latest, and it’s not necessarily for the reason you might think. Yes, it’s an imaginative take on the zombie genre. Yes, Solstice Publishing saw fit to use my testimonial (even if they call me “Creator” of Zombie Ranch, when I try to always present myself as a co-creator). But what I love best about Undead on Arrival  being officially available in PDF, Kindle, and soon, print, is that it puts to rest the Curse of the Wolf.

Let me explain. I am not a superstitious person. I do not believe in things like spilling salt or the number 13 being inherently unlucky, and yet it seemed like so far, every one of Justin’s drafts I’d been lukewarm about sold, while the ones that were my favorites languished in unloved, unpublished limbo. It got to the point that when he sent me his newest tale a few months back, I jokingly responded with something akin to, “I like it. It’s doomed.”

But after several years of watching their non-Wolfened brethren find homes, this is the year both UoA and Mr. Blank, another of my personal faves, get to have their turns in the spotlight. If everything works out Justin will have some print copies of UoA in hand by the time San Diego Comic Con opens its doors, and you better believe I’ll snag one. The Curse is banished. Now we just have to see how many other people in this wide world are as discerning in their tastes as me!

I wanted to talk some more about the concept of character depth in fiction. I think about this issue a lot, as evidenced most recently by my blog post from a few weeks ago on getting your audience to give a damn about fictional beings. So you may imagine my chin-scratching delight in finding a 2010 article at OverthinkingIt.com which digs into some interesting thoughts on how not every character in fiction needs to be presented in the vaunted “three dimensions”. In fact, it’s probably better that they aren’t: LINK

It’s a long piece, and it rambles some; for instance, the first page is mostly about the dangers of reducing characters or entire works into socio-political constructs (another topic I’ve touched on before). Overthinking It is a place that often makes my own writing here seem brief and to the point by comparison. But it has some very, very good points in calling for writers to stop obsessively trying to present “depth” in all their characters, which more often than not just ends up coming off as an artificial exercise.

This sounds on the surface (heh) like a blasphemous notion that would condemn us all to the shallow spectacle of a Michael Bay casting call, but Michael Bay films are actually a pretty good example of how making these weird, misplaced nods towards the notion of depth have been screwing up modern movies. Article scribe Fenzel provides his own example that could easily have been culled from a Bay movie or any number of others, imagining the first words out of a character’s mouth:

“Oh, hi, I like ketchup. Yum, ketchup. Best thing ever on a pastrami sandwich! My mom used to make it for me before she died of cancer. I’ve decided that, because she died of cancer, I’m going after this tobacco company, and you’re either with me or against me.” Congratulations, plucky news reporter on the wrong side of the law, your character has been developed.

Is this ketchup stuff and mom stuff actually important to your character? The producer who insists you have a three-dimensional character thinks so. Is it important for the audience to know this about your character? The social critic thinks so.

But if you met me on the street and we had a conversation that didn’t involve ketchup or pastrami, I don’t think you’d necessarily find the conversation lacking, and if the words I said didn’t happen to reveal any information about my history with cold cuts or condiments, I don’t think it would make me less believable as a human being in that context.

After you’ve seen it for the millionth time, this character development stuff smells an awful lot like crap.

In the quest to make characters seem more real to an audience, stuff like this arguably does the opposite… because yes, how many people do you meet and immediately start spilling your life story to? If I had started Zombie Ranch with Suzie explaining exactly what happened to her daddy and how that’s colored her motivations and her reactions ever since, it might clear up a few questions — but it would have done so at a price. Fenzel again:

Do I really need to see another flashback to this person’s childhood? Do I really need to hear him talk in impossibly straightforward, if emotionally terse terms about his psychological baggage? People you come across in life don’t tend to provide you with this information before you interact with them, and yet somehow when a fictional character holds back this information, it’s unrealistic. Really?

I hearken back to those stoic Western heroes and heroines of old, whose moody stares could convey a more powerful sense of depth and history than endless paragraphs of narration. Shane begins and ends his tale as a cipher to us, the audience, but I never once doubted his reality as a thinking, feeling human being. The still waters ran deep. Fenzel himself draws some apt quotes from Mac Wellman, a playwright who lamented this compulsion to lay everything about a character out on the table:

…it may be precisely the habit of writing characters from the inside out, as it were, that leads to this impasse: characters made up of explanations become creakingly artificial, emotional automata who never, but never, resemble people as actually experienced. Rather these characters — and I would offer the entire cast of Death of a Salesman as example — are merely theoretical. They are aggregations of explicated motives, explicated past behavior, wholly knowable and wholly contrived. They seem animated by remote control, as if from another planet. Representing, as they do, a theoretical view of life (and there is none more theoretical than contemporary American naturalism), they cannot hold back any nasty little secrets, they tell no lies, do not surprise us too much, and, in fact, are capable of very little that is interesting.

Admittedly, a lot of the article is rooted in the media that can enjoy the luxury of the writing not having to cover everything, since there are other elements that can expand upon it: stage plays, film, etc. But I would definitely go ahead and include comics. Pure prose fiction makes the best case for characters talking (or thinking) about themselves for the audience’s benefit, but even then I know several novelists who firmly believe less is more and childhood flashbacks should be used with care.  Would more detail about John McLane’s past have helped or hurt the movie Die Hard? Over on the Satellite Show I’ve already argued it would hurt, and it’s why I dread any thought of a modern remake. Somewhere along the line, the idea of implication as opposed to explication was lost, and movies started spoon-feeding to their audiences why we should care about the people in them, rather than letting them decide for themselves based on what’s actually happening in the story.

Long story short, even with my main cast of Zombie Ranch I’ve left a lot of things unsaid and a lot of mysteries unexplained, at least so far. If that choice makes them somehow seem shallower or two-dimensional, so be it, but I think there’s a good case to be made for the decision, both for the genre(s) inspiring the story and just in general. We all see stereotypes on our first meetings with new people, and judge from there based on the actions and reactions of those folk as we see them deal with life. There’s a sense of discovery in that journey, and I believe when that same sense is present in fiction, we recognize and appreciate it. We start in the shallow end, and progress deeper as we ease into the relationship.

Fiction will never truly be reality, but if you want your characters to come off as “natural”, no matter how crazy the setting, I think it’s worth keeping in mind.

I have a confession to make. The following analogy is not mine. I wish it was.

“It’s almost like every webcomic is a student on a college campus; we see each other everywhere, yet rarely talk.”

No, that quote comes from Devin Blake, author of Monster Soup, after I emailed her with my compliments on her work. I had finally gotten ’round to an archive dive after seeing the banner ads here and there, and admitted as such. Similarly, she’d seen Zombie Ranch about but hadn’t had time to check it out yet. It happens. We’re all kind of doing our own thing, and even if we weren’t busy with our own stuff I don’t think it’s humanly possible to follow all the webcomics out there, much less reach out to their creators. Don’t get me wrong, I like the college campus comparison and still wish I’d thought of it, but we’re talking a “college campus” that makes Harvard look intimate by comparison.

I should probably get to the point. Monster Soup is worth reading. It’s still new enough you won’t have to to spend too much time doing so, but what’s there so far is a combination of expressive art and witty writing of the sort that always makes me somewhat jealous when it combines into a single person. It’s also a fine study in the power of how self-publishing allows experimentation in how stories are told. Chapter 1 introduces each character in turn as if they had their own mini-chapters consisting of one splash cover page and a few story pages apiece, and you know what? It works. It works quite swimmingly, and the introduction preceding it all is a well-paced, blackly humorous hook which gives the reader a good sense of what to expect.

The basic premise revealed so far is that monsters have a code of laws they have to abide by or be punished, and by the end of Chapter 1 we’ve met an example of a zombie, a witch, a ghost, a werewolf, and a vampire who have run afoul of this justice system. Brought one by one into a court with an invisible man as their judge, the charges are read and the sentence is eventually passed– exile to a monster prison, somewhere known appropriately enough as “Oubliette Castle”.

At the time of this review the story (and characters) haven’t quite reached the castle yet, but the fearsome fivesome have met, and the friction between them already promises endless entertainment. Blake obviously has a good grasp on the mythology behind her “monsters”, but has provided her own spin on it, and more importantly made them individuals that aren’t just the sum of their fangs/spells/ectoplasm/etc. I am particularly giddy over the werewolf, who is dealing with a rather unique take on the dual nature and repressed urges of her condition.

There’s a lot of humor in Monster Soup, edging over at times into parody, but it’s not mindless parody. There are pop culture references, but they don’t exist in a vacuum (which Nature and I both abhor). It’s got smarts, it’s entertaining, and I’m looking forwards to more. Give it a taste. Just be careful that it doesn’t bite you back.

Well, here we are at our latest cover week, otherwise known as the-break-that’s-not-really-a-break before we get started on the next chapter. I suppose we’re peculiar in that we use a placeholder in the episode we’re currently working on, then at the end of the arc is when we debut the cover and shuffle it into its proper position. I think this all started because we used a cropped version of Dawn’s original drawing as the cover image for our sneak preview, but then a few months down the road when we started seriously entertaining the idea of self-publishing a full print comic, Dawn was ready to do something different, so she created an all new illustration.

These covers tend to be Dawn’s jealously guarded refuge from my occasional micromanagement tendencies. We still talk about them, but I tend to have limited review and input compared to the week-to-week story pages… so it’s less a matter of getting individual details correct than the artist getting “set free” to put together something that looks cool. It’s not unheard of in comics, for sure, as there’s been many a cover promising a hero lying limp at the feet of a gloating villain that you don’t find anywhere in the comic itself.

I do still meddle occasionally, because I like to maintain a symbolic connection to the content even if, for example, we still haven’t seen that exact photograph pictured for Issue/Episode #4. So I asked for a spattering of old zombie blood and composed a caption signifying better times (and oddly enough, confirming that Memorial Day is still celebrated, which would have been much more timely in a real world sense had it occurred on this week’s cover instead!). There are also times Dawn herself still decides to solicit my help, which is how we ended up with a Texas flag draped on Issue 3 rather than just something more generic. Nothing is a complete vaccuum, and probably stronger in the end for the give and take. Heck, I remember for Issue 2 we took some time to let all you readers help us decide which concept to use.

Today’s cover is unique in that we’ve had the idea of it percolating for months. It’s entirely possible that I’ve had it on my brain at least since the end of Issue 3, where we saw The Exec (a.k.a. “Sir”) pontificating on how a clever person could “stack the deck”. This is a man who is literally playing with peoples’ lives, so I loved the idea that we might show him holding up a hand of poker with the cards representing some of the dramatis personae he’s worked to bring into conflict. Nicely thematic, right? But I wanted to wait until we finally brought Muriel and Suzie into confrontation– and here we are!

This is probably the most specific I’ve ever gotten with a cover idea so far, but as I started blathering on about various details Dawn reminded me I was treading her sacred turf… so I scaled back to merely dictating who should be what face card and left the rest up to her. And with that “dealt” with, it’ll be time to move on to Episode 6. See you then!

Sometimes there are inspirations out there you don’t realize until you find that you’ve been unknowingly trodding along in their giant footsteps.

For years I’d been vaguely aware there were these highly regarded independent comics being published under the title Love and Rockets. I never paid much heed to the buzz, since most of the excerpts I ever saw seemed to be heavy on the slice-of-life drama and distressingly light on any kind of rockets or science fiction. I had no time for that guff as a kid, and when I got back into comics again after college, I was still preferring the sort of flights of fancy enabled by such works as the Sandman series, or Hellblazer. Yes, John Constantine himself is pretty grounded and “street level” as protagonists go, but he still got himself regularly tangled up with angels and demons and epicness of that nature.

Then one day, years later, that same me started writing Zombie Ranch — a comic deliberately meant to be non-epic. No one here was saving the world. Nor are they the last survivors of a world gone by. They are not the scions of the prophecy, or possessed of secret divine blood… and to be brutally honest, they are probably not even the best they are at what they do. There’s no quest to perform, no macguffin to seek. It’s ultimately about people living their lives, albeit lives being lived (and unlived) in some very Interesting Times.

Twenty-something me probably wouldn’t be much of a fan of what thirty-something me is producing. Thirty-something me has become a belated, but thoroughly engaged fan of Love and Rockets. I took the plunge at APE in October of last year, where one of the vendors was having a sale that included several of the collections… and they’re big collections, so it’s lucky that we drove up there rather than taking a plane.

One thing you have to understand about Love and Rockets is that, after the initial wild and wooly days of the early 80s, the series settled into two main forks, each fully written and drawn by either Gilbert or Jaime Hernandez. While they share similarities in style, the thread and continuity of Gilbert’s “Palomar” comics are a separate animal from Jaime’s “Locas” storyline. Both are worthwhile to check out, though, because in them you may see, as I did, the roots of the magic realism and narrative freedom inherent in a lot of today’s webcomics, long before the Internet even existed.

It’s difficult to really define what the stories are about except to give you the basic scenario. Palomar is a Central American village that time forgot, populated by eccentric generations of characters… and I do mean generations, as one of Gilbert’s most fascinating conceits is that he freely moves around back and forth in time as he picks out various stories to tell. The squalling baby in one tale is a cocky teenager in another chapter, and then is a doddering old woman before rewinding back to when she was raising a family. Her character status also fluctuates, sometimes being a mere supporting player or even a cameo, but then maybe getting her own turn “in the sun” for a star outing.

Jaime’s stories revolve around Maggie and Hopey, two teens who might be growing up in the Los Angeles punk scene of the 1980s, but one that apparently has dinosaurs and rocketships just around the corner. No big deal. On one page you might be treated to the gritty realities of the jobless and depressed vomiting into a trash can after a nasty bender, and on the next a masked wrestler is delivering two-fisted justice to International hitmen. The richest man in the world quite literally looks like Satan, horns and all, but he’s at a loss when dealing with his crazy girlfriend who wants the one thing he can’t possibly give her: superpowers.

Jaime is a bit more freewheeling with his stuff than Gilbert, but neither brother shies away from shifting freely between heartwarming moments, absurdist comedy, and subjects that are (quite literally) deadly serious. Their art styles also shift as necessary, at times becoming comically abstract in the style of some of the classic newspaper strips like Blondie or Popeye, with steam pouring from the ears of the angry or people swept off their feet in shock with a puff of dust in their wake. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the obvious influence of the Archie comics which the Hernandez bros. freely admit cherishing as kids growing up– I saw Betty and Veronica more than once in some of those mugs, but then classic Archie never dealt with serial killers or suicide.

The bizarre genius of Love and Rockets is that no matter what flights of fancy the brothers get up to, the tales remain ultimately grounded and recognizable, and most of all compelling. They are at once entirely self-aware and completely freewheeling, creating a world where it’s entirely excusable for a character to suddenly rattle off a paragraph of game-changing exposition in the middle of the event that exposition affects. This would normally be a big no-no, but Jaime for example does it so much you get the sense it’s less of a mistake than a running gag, and he fills each page with such an enthusiasm it’s nigh impossible to get mad at him for it.

2012 actually marks the 30th anniversary of the series, so if you’re lucky enough to attend Comic-Con San Diego this year we’ll probably be seeing a good chunk of fan art and articles in the souvenir book, though conversely it probably won’t be the best time to try to get any autographs. But still, even though we started Zombie Ranch before we’d gotten around to delving into Los Bros. Hernandez, I’d say we and a lot of other webcomics owe them a conceptual debt for being guys who showed that slice-of-life stories about “everyday” people could be fantastic, in all senses of the word.

Last week I put a poll up asking what you readers would choose when faced with the same “one bullet” decision Suzie had to make. By an overwhelming margin, most of you opted for shooting Muriel. Couple that with the previous poll’s runaway answer that you didn’t care what her reasonings were, she needed to die, and I’m beginning to get the feeling y’all don’t like her much!

I’ve mentioned before how I’m fond of my grey areas in terms of heroes and villains, but it’s true that I’ve been building up Mrs. McCarty as the big antagonist of this first storyline since we were first treated to her delicate countenance and dulcet tones at the end of Episode 2. If there’s a sin on my part here it’s maybe that she’s an “easy” villain, displaying few redeeming qualities. It’s entirely possible that the presentation is skewed so that you’re only seeing her at her worst, but let’s face it — it’s not much of an accomplishment to get people to hate her. I just hope there’s enough twisted motivation evident in her actions that she doesn’t seem driven by pure madness. Unfathomable madness can be sort of boring in a villain, as is the whole idea of “doing it for darkness“, i.e. evil for evil’s sake.

It’s been pointed out (and perhaps not unfairly so) that Muriel and her posse come off more as caricatures than actual people. Is this a bad thing? Does every mook in fiction need or deserve a backstory? Should the writer(s) make you value them as characters, or is it enough that you want to see them fail?

On the other end of the spectrum, how much time as a writer do you need to devote to a character before your audience wants to see them succeed? Or at least not die? I have it on record that at least one reader felt sorry when Zeke met his end, and there was a comment back towards the beginning of Episode 5 where someone hoped “the ranch hands” (which I took to mean Brett & Lacey) would survive unscathed. But I’m fully accepting of the idea that putting Brett in mortal danger is not necessarily going to get the same sort of rise out of you folks as I’d get if Suzie or Frank were in his place.

For that matter, how many of you would care about Suzie or Frank being in mortal danger? That’s a good question, and one I dearly hope at this point would be answered with at least some of you giving a damn. You don’t have to love them, necessarily, but I’d like to think at least a portion of the current hate against Muriel is related to some feeling of wanting the young miss Zane and her crew to get through this intact.

This is one of the hardest things about writing a story, and at the same time one of the most crucial things. The twists and turns of your plot, the richness of your world… all of it still hangs on the balance of your characters being people your audience feels like they can give a damn about, whether that feeling is positive or negative. Then on top of that, you want them interested in seeing your protagonist(s) win and your antagonist(s) lose, even if your intent is to horribly subvert that and let the bad guys win. Or you might be George R. R. Martin and just play with your audience’s feelings the way a cat plays with a yarn ball, never letting them get comfortable. Dawn had to stop reading that saga because by the third book she was feeling downright abused by the constant obliteration or undermining of everyone she had allowed herself to identify with… but now of course she’s getting to watch it all over again on television.

I digress, though, because GRRM certainly makes you care, otherwise it wouldn’t hurt so much. The death of any story is if the reader remains no more invested in it than if they were reading an iPhone tutorial, and the tricky part about this is that the only way to discover whether you succeeded is to put it out there and have them experience it. Even if you have some friends, an editor, and/or a writing club to give feedback on your work, the ultimate test still rests in tossing your tale to the mercy of total strangers and seeing if your carefully baited lines reel ’em in.

So in that sense, I’m quite gratified that Muriel McCarty seems to have struck a chord (or discord, if you will). I like my grey areas, but then even a series as grey as Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones has a place for its “Joffreys”, right?

Man. Santa Claus. If there’s one thing more played out than zombies, it’s Santa Claus, am I right? Seems like every Christmas, another glut of saccharine, kid-friendly movies come out to “celebrate the season” with the same old lessons in rediscovering childhood magic and believing in jolly fat men, ironically decrying the commercialism of the modern Holiday while happily taking your ticket money (and of course, already raking in the money for ubiquitous product placement). The very concept of it makes me twitch. How could you possibly have a fresh take on that?

Well, first, I guess you’ve got to get out of Hollywood, or at least get away from all the genre straitjackets Hollywood likes to lay down. Maybe it helps to be out of the United States entirely and approach it from a different cultural perspective. I’ve already sung the praises of Troll Hunter for making me appreciate the “mockumentary” format again, and now from Norway’s neighbor Finland comes a crazy spin on the story of the kid who believes in Santa despite the modern skepticism all around him: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale .

What’s the spin? This particular kid believes in the Santa of Old, before the propaganda of the modern age that turned him into a whitewashed, smiling deliverer of gifts. No, as the montage of old books in the opening credits shows us, to this young boy Santa exists as a demonic spirit sent to punish and torture the naughty; and he fears a nearby American excavation at Korvatunturi is about to set him free. All this is rooted solidly in Finnish folklore, including that their version of Santa is said to make his home at Korvatunturi, and is known as Joulupukki, a word that translates to “Yule Goat”. These days Joulupukki is more or less equivalent to Santa As We Know Him, but once upon a time…

Pagans used to have festivities to ward off evil spirits. In Finland these spirits of darkness wore goat skins and horns. In the beginning this creature didn’t give presents but demanded them. The Yule Goat was an ugly creature and frightened children.

With that ominously established, it’s no accident in my mind that some of the scenes around the expedition resemble the establishing shots of The Thing. Santa has been buried in the ice for centuries, but is about to be Woken Up.

I won’t spoil overly what happens next, but suffice it to say you may be surprised even if you’re approaching it now from the perspective of a horror film. Rare Exports has some great ideas in it, including some that warm the cockles of my Zombie Ranch heart; for example, once the rural reindeer herder heroes finally accept the boy’s insistence that Santa is real, one of their earliest thoughts beyond the immediate wonder and horror of that is, “How can we make money off of this?” I won’t say anything about the final ending, but if you watch you’ll understand why I loved it, and how it instantly crystallizes the title into making perfect sense. Like the denoument of Shaun of the Dead, it’s so wrong, and yet so right.

Like Troll Hunter before it, Rare Exports is available on Netflix Instant, and is just as deserving of a look if you appreciate a fresh, quirky take on what at first glance might seem to be a tired premise. Believe in Santa. Or else.

Oh, you can complain, or quit reading, or both, but it isn’t really grounds for a lawsuit. What am I babbling about? Mood whiplash: when a work of fiction veers between emotional extremes so quickly it can leave your head spinning. One of the more well-known variations is the laugh spot that’s followed immediately by something calculated to make you scream instead, such as the infamous “come down here and chum this” scene in Jaws. That’s an example of it being done well, while the climax of The Phantom Menace was such a confusion of scenes that even those who worked on it admitted the emotions being evoked were flitting so fast as to become close to white noise.

I think I’ve touched near this topic before when I was writing about what makes a horror comic, particularly in observing that so-called “camp” horror has a long and bloodily brilliant pedigree in comics like Tales From The Crypt or films such as Brain Dead/Dead Alive. It seems like a good portion of us enjoy laughter mixed with our terror and don’t have much of a problem switching the two up, or even feeling joyful and scared simultaneously. If that weren’t true, amusement parks probably wouldn’t invest in fun houses, much less rollercoasters.

Zombie Ranch is a much more low-key affair for the most part, in terms of both horror and humor. Arguably it’s more of a matter of serious vs. comedic, and from the start my intention was to swerve back and forth over the line between the two; sometimes gently, sometimes sharply. I hope I laid the seeds for that tone with the very first Episode/Issue, mixing enough light and dark so that no reader would get past that first arc without realizing what they’d be in for in the future. I think Dawn’s art also helps with this, since it’s not overly gritty while also not being cartoony (except of course, when we’re doing those TV cartoons).

Have we succeeded? Well, according to the comments on various pages we’ve evoked all sorts of reponses, and they’ve usually been the emotions we were aiming for, whether it was sorrow, or laughter, or even a mix of both. Heck, evoking any response at all is something of a victory for an artist, but it speaks much better to your meager skills if you’re not desperately backpedaling and claiming your piece is meant as comedy when it clearly wasn’t .

Zombie Ranch was never meant to be comedy or drama, horror or humor, but something that hopefully allows for all those aspects to co-exist and tell an interesting story. If you’re still reading I can only guess that you’re appreciating that mix. But hold onto something–the last few pages have been pretty light, and it looks like Muriel’s decided we’re about due for a dark turn…

Last week, we had a reader leave us. He (and I will presume the gender simply because I don’t feel like typing ‘they’ or some clunkier pronoun option throughout the article) expressed a lack of satisfaction with our once-a-week update schedule, with the last straw being our late posting of Comic 118. There was no excuse for such affairs, he voiced, especially when there were other people out there updating their comics on a daily basis.

Now ironically enough, we did have the comic done on time, only to experience an unforeseen outage of our hosting service that took our whole site down for several hours… so if one was in the mindset to consider excuses, I reckon that does seem like a pretty good one. What was more worthy of thought is that he then left a follow-up statement that made it clear he felt it wasn’t just a matter of being late, but that there was no place on the Internet for story-driven webcomics that updated at the rate of a single page a week. That it was an impossibly slow pace for anything dependent on continuity. Zombie Ranch had been entertaining so far, but he was done with us, and I suppose also felt obligated to leave behind a warning, like a Dickensian spirit,  in hopes we would mend our ways before it was too late.

It’s easy to get angry or defensive in the face of such comments. My blog last week was all about the idea that creative arts are a matter of taking your inner thoughts and perspectives and throwing them out to the public, and criticism in response can sometimes feel like your soul is getting kicked around, particularly if you’re not getting any significant financial benefit as a buffer to the slings and arrows. As W.B. Yeats wrote: “But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”.

But the plain fact of the world is, if you put your dreams out there, there will be treading, and some of it may be wearing cleats and a heavy hat. If art is, as I argued, a way for people to communicate between disparate selves, then the manner of communication can matter as much as the audience. What frequency are you tuning them to? How much static is on it? And if they’re not satisfied, you better believe you may get some static in return. Some may, to put it even more colloquially, be all up in yo’ grill.

Frequency of course has a double meaning here, because I like to pretend I’m clever in that way. Dawn and I made our decision at the very beginning to run on a weekly schedule, on the basis that we’d witnessed far too many examples of webcomics attempting more ambitious schedules and failing to meet them, or worse yet, burning out their creators entirely. Better to go at a steady “every Wednesday” rate, possibly ramping up later if we felt we could handle it, than to start off three times a week and then have to give up and scale back after the readers were used to the faster pace. That always seemed to me like a much bigger recipe for disappointment, which would lead to reader complaints at just the wrong time (i.e. snarking on a creator or creators who were already by definition feeling overworked). In fact, a variation on this could be said to be exactly what happened in the ex-reader’s case, as it appears he was fine as long as he had archive comics to go through as fast as it suited him, but once he hit the end of those the sudden slowdown was too much to adjust to.

Now it’s entirely possible that we’d be more popular if we tried to update more frequently, but it’s also entirely possible that I’d just end up spending a lot of days making apologies and excuses. We do have weeks where we post artwork instead of story progession, but I always make a point of warning people ahead of time so that they’re not unpleasantly surprised. I don’t beg forgiveness for such breaks, but on the other hand I never want us to be one of those webcomics that just leave their readers hanging, or worse adopt the attitude of “You’ll get your new page when I damn well feel like it!”

Is it enough? It is what it is. Bizarre as it might seem to say, I actually do appreciate the former reader expressing why he was leaving us. I have to, because haven’t I lamented many times on how much of a vaccuum webcomic creators exist in despite all our statistic trackers? Having someone specifically express why they’re not satisfied is hardly as pleasant as having someone express why they think what you’re doing is great, but at least it’s feedback. Just in this case, stating that weekly updates aren’t enough happens to be feedback I really feel unable to address for the foreseeable future, even if I were to accept his opinion as fact. For the record, I do not, and I could list several webcomics with audiences who seem just fine with the slow but steady drip-feed diet, including critically acclaimed offerings like The Abominable Charles Christopher.

Interestingly enough, in my original, longer draft of last week’s blog I had intended to discuss a facet of “the insider perspective” that might have pertained to all this. As a writer, it’s pretty much my job to remember every character and every situation I’ve introduced as clearly as possible. Every few months I re-read the comic from top to bottom in a no doubt futile effort to not go off the rails with the narrative. So I have every line of Deputy Jimmy’s dialogue fresh in my head, when many readers would probably just wonder: who the hell is Deputy Jimmy?

And why not? His last appearance was not that long ago in terms of the comic, but in real world terms he hasn’t graced the page since 2010. So in that sense, yes, if it weren’t for the success of other weekly story comics I might succumb to that nagging feeling that I’m fooling myself anyone besides me has a sense of continuity about what I’m doing. I still don’t expect any of you, even Dawn, to have it to the same level I do, because I’m sure you all have better things to do than try to keep all this stuff straight over the years. Mind you it doesn’t stop me from doing subtle or even not-so-subtle callbacks to previous comics, but I knew better than to throw a fit because no one commented “Oh!” when Rosa answered Frank’s snark with some of her own. The two strips in question were originally published five months apart… it’s something that probably would only be noticeable in the print issue or an archive dive, assuming anyone noticed at all before I brought it up just now.

Speaking of which, I feel like it’s a valid point to consider that as every new comic is published, the time separations between them disappear. It’s a reason I don’t begrudge those who skip off for a few weeks or even months before returning to “catch up”. It doesn’t do our daily traffic counts any good, but that’s a perfectly viable alternative for those who aren’t comfortable reading at the pace of a page a week, and I’d much prefer that to anyone feeling they had to stop reading entirely, particularly if they were enjoying the story!

I have to say that as losing readers goes, “I like this but there’s not enough of it” is one of the mildest, if not one of the most positive, criticisms there can be. There will be more — and even if the frequency doesn’t satisfy, if the content connects there’s always the possibility they might tune back in down the road.

Are you self-centered?

Take a moment to think about your answer. Even for the most empathic of us, I would venture to suggest that “feeling someone else’s pain” remains a figure of speech rather than anything literal. We make our best guesses based on the feedback we receive, and react accordingly.

To put it bluntly (so to speak), there is no way I am going to know exactly how it felt for you when you stub your toe in front of me. At best, I will wince in sympathy by equating to that time I stubbed my toe, and recalling that man, that really sucked. I’m coming at your pain from my experience. And if I’ve somehow managed to avoid stubbing my toe for my entire life, then I’m having to find something else that seems to come closest… maybe banging my elbow?

Everyone starts and ends with the self. It’s not the same thing as saying we are all selfish, because selflessness can and does occur — but feeding your children before yourself, or rescuing strangers from a burning building still doesn’t bridge the islands of consciousness. We approach other people and the world from the ultimate insider perspective. Our own.

As Keanu Reeves might say: Whoa.

But seriously, I have this notion that the creative arts are our way of trying to reach out across those gaps that separate us. Anyone can dream, but the greatest artists are the ones who can make the best use of whatever their chosen medium or media might be to share their dreams with others. They can communicate that stubbed toe in such a vivid way that we not only recognize it from our own experience but can’t help but get a pang in our own foot. Or at least our elbow.

The insider perspective, brought out for all to see.

In the throes of my March Madness this last month I was sitting one morning at my day job, sorting through paperwork, when a co-worker asked if “I was going”.

After one of those long moments where you desperately sort through everything such a vague question might be referring to, I realized that it was the day Adilifu Nama was supposed to be giving his presentation as the next speaker for the Los Angeles City College Book Club program. The same program that had hosted Dawn and myself a couple of weeks before, and was now bringing in Dr. Nama for a discussion of his book Super Black, about the impact of black superheroes on American pop culture.

Personally I’m such a white boy I wondered how much I might get out of such a seminar, but I shouldn’t have worried. I forgot that amazing thing about geeks and nerds: the color of our skin has never mattered so much as the matter of our interests. Dr. Nama is an unabashed fan of comic books and science fiction and has been ever since (as detailed in his own introduction) his father took him to a comic store which had a Mego action figure of The Falcon.

On the other hand, Nama doesn’t shy away from the fact that out of all the toys on display, The Falcon captivated him because of the idea he was a black man that could fly. There was a connection there that might not have existed had every toy been a representation of a white person or bizarrely hued alien.

It wasn’t that none of the other heroes mattered because they didn’t immediately remind him of his own appearance, but the idea that someone who looked like him could be part of these exciting adventures was particularly inspiring. Probably in the same way a young girl at that same time in the 1970s might stare in awe at all the colorful dude superheroes, but then get particularly interested in Wonder Woman. They’re like gateway drugs, entry doors onto the world of comics fandom, and because of that will also always hold a special place in your heart.

And so that also got me thinking on old problems. An issue continuing to this day is that there’s still fairly few “heroes of color” (or with boobs, or both) in the mainstream compared to the cavalcade of white men of all shapes, sizes, and personalities that have made their names in superhero-dom (and villain-dom). Or as Dwayne McDuffie (may he rest in peace) once articulated:

“My problem… and I’ll speak as a writer now… with writing a black character in either the Marvel or DC universe is that he is not a man. He is a symbol.”

Dwayne McDuffie was black, but certainly had no problems writing a character like Reed Richards. Reed Richards represents nothing more than Reed Richards, and if you don’t like the cut of his jib, you have plenty of alternatives in superheroic fiction to choose from. But if Reed Richards was black, or gay, or anything else considered a deviation from the norm, you suddenly have the challenge of presenting that as well as simply presenting a character (and by the by, I’m only using “deviation from the norm” in the sense that the great majority of mainstream superheroes are shown as straight white guys). You have the challenge of whether or not to present it at all. That’s a lot of baggage to deal with in addition to story itself, and especially so if the roles happen to be reversed and you’re a white guy who grew up in the suburbs who wants to have non-white people in his story.

Now for my part, I created characters like Oscar and Rosa not because I’m expecting young children to look up to them, but because even the Old West was a lot less whitewashed than people might believe, and so I didn’t want my Weird New West to be devoid of skin tones darker than “beige”. I also thought it might make for interesting fodder down the road on the idea of race relations in a world where people of all races ended up dead and green. But I’ll admit, from a race standpoint the story stands at one example of a black man, one example of a Latina, and several examples of white folks. Does that matter? Maybe yes, maybe no. When a cast has a bunch of white folks to play around with, there’s the opportunity to show how some are smart and some are dumb, some are courageous and some cowardly, and that’s the point that sticks. When you have one or two characters whose appearance stands apart from that, suddenly the instinct is to revert to the surface. Suddenly that’s in grave danger of defining who they are, and it’s got a lot more baggage to it than even referring to one of the people as “The Fat Guy”.  You can make a safe, if cynical bet that if there’s a white guy who’s fat, he’ll be identified as “The Fat Guy”, whereas if there’s a black guy who’s fat, he’ll be “The Black Guy”. A symbol, not a character. However, there’s no question I would bet the other way if it were an all black cast with a token white guy.

There’s that horrible word: token. Looking up tokenism makes my skin crawl because I don’t want to be guilty of it, but by taking the risk of including non-white characters in a predominately white cast, I’ve opened myself up to the possibility. The only absolute defense against the specter of tokenism is plurality, i.e. having many and varied examples for your audience to have to dig deeper on, rather than wrapping all their expectations and projections onto a character based on their surface characteristics. But that makes for a pretty cumbersome cast list. I will admit, presenting Suzie as a competent young lady has certainly helped me feel more free to portray Lacey as being not quite so together. Then I can also contrast them against Rosa, Muriel, etc., and none of them can really be classified as “The Girl” anymore, which is a status some solo female members of other webcomic casts have been labeled with.

On the other hand, Oscar and Rosa could still very well be in peoples’ heads as “The Black Guy” or “The Mexican Chick”. It’s something I do think about, particularly when this comic does have a pace where characters might disappear into the background for weeks or even months at time and space for character development is at a premium between an ensemble cast and a need to keep the story progressing. In absence of plurality the next best thing would be to invest them with enough life as individuals that people move past appearances and look into character, although this is again where the issue of symbolism rears its head. Rosa is sneaky, so am I saying all Mexicans are sneaky? Is showing Oscar preaching scripture and dispensing advice to Frank relegating him to that groan-worthy trope of the Magical Negro? I doubt it, considering Oscar misremembered the scripture and tried to dispense cigarettes along with advice; but because I did that, would someone be offended I was portraying my only black cast member as a flawed person?

In the end, it’s entirely possible this is just me overthinking my writing in a way far beyond anything you folks have bothered to conceive… nor should you have to, seeing as you’re here first and foremost to be entertained. But although McDuffie’s quote might specifically refer to black characters, he speaks as a writer, and speaks to that fundamental challenge of getting your characters through to your audience as living, breathing people.

“Karma owes us,” Dawn declared as we sat on an Alaskan Airlines jet waiting to take off from Burbank airport last Thursday. Somehow we’d managed to get everything together for our journey to Seattle, despite the last minute one-two punch of her badly spraining her ankle and coming down with a nasty cold.

Karma delivered.

I’m not going to say everything went perfectly, or that we came close to breaking even on our costs, but all things considered we not only had a fairly smooth process logistically, but also managed to take in more money at Emerald City Comic Con than any other convention we’ve been at, including San Diego. The event lived up to the hype all my fellow exhibitors who’d been there before had been feeding me, with big crowds on all three days. Sunday was still slow in terms of actual sales, but Friday was good and Saturday was incredible. Dawn was propped up nicely by the sheer momentum of compliments on her work, although I’m sure her medication and the wheelchair we rented also helped.

I doubted the t-shirts, and I was wrong. Oh so wrong. Gloriously wrong. We traveled up there with something like 16 of them and came back with 6, and the best part was that some of the people buying the shirts had never heard of the comic.

Does that seem odd to say? Well, here’s the hard knocks of the situation… unless you’re really getting well known, most people at a convention aren’t really going to buy something based on your brand alone. It’s a perhaps bitter pill to swallow, but putting the main character of your webcomic’s face on a t-shirt probably isn’t going to make those shirts fly off the shelves the way putting Spider-Man on them does. It’s the same reason why if you walk down Artist’s Alley at a convention you’ll be seeing a lot of different takes on Doctor Who or Joker/Harley or whatever else is popular for the time… exhibiting costs money and time, and exhibitors are constantly trying to find that balance between promoting themselves and their product, and supporting continuing to do so by appealing to the crowds.

So before designing t-shirts, we hearkened to the advice of those who had gone before us and “generecized”. Paul Martinez of Adventures of the 19xx made cool-looking posters in 1930s and 1940s pin-up style. Weregeek offers t-shirts with D&D jokes. Planes of Eldlor has lots of buttons and bookmarks with dragons on them. Every one of these is connected to the creative property they’re promoting without being overtly dependent on people knowing the comic. Of course it would be fantastic if they decided to come on board as readers, but first and foremost it’s a matter of snagging attention and getting some merchandise moved so you can hopefully offset some of the cost of being there and be there again in the future.

Thus Dawn got the shirt together with the zombie horse, because Dawn figured hey, zombie horse. Sure it says “ZOMBIE RANCH” on it and has our web address off to the side, but the main idea was that even if you have no idea what our comic is about, you might buy the shirt anyway because it just looks cool. Or you like zombies, or horses, or maybe know someone who does, and whatever the reasons for your particular impulse, out comes the wallet. I was skeptical it could be that easy, and, as stated above, but as I will repeat– I was wrong.

Maybe it’s also that a t-shirt is a WYSIWYG deal – What You See Is What You Get. There’s no commitment involved like there might be in buying a print issue, even though I bless the hearts of all the people this weekend who took the chance on us, including those who splurged and bought all three of the issues we so far have available. Your satisfaction with the t-shirt is entirely self-contained, though I would like to contend that knowing the horse on your shirt is named Popcorn gives more value added satisfaction to the true fan.

Speaking of which, we had our first ever Zombie Ranch cosplay, courtesy of longtime fan Jacky Morris who had promised to come dressed as Miss Suzie on Sunday. Fortunately this did not turn out to be an April Fool’s joke, and the pics are on our Facebook page if you haven’t seen ’em yet. We had other fans come by as well that we haven’t met before (at least not in person), such as the people who run Comic Rocket and exhibiting newbies Kristy Kuechenmeister and Jon Grasseschi, there for the first time to pimp their respective projects.

So we’re still waiting on FedEx Ground to deliver the remainder of our stuff back to our door, but beyond that everything is done. As of Tuesday night we are home, safe and sound, along with everything we were able to take on the plane with us, which includes the zombie horse plushie concept Dawn sketched to be our post for the week. This is another item we’ve been talking about that could be a good seller, but the trick is definitely going to be finding some way to have them made that doesn’t break our bank accounts: print-on-demand is a reality, but plushie-on-demand is much less so, seeming to require both exorbitant prototype fees and minimum orders in the low hundreds at best. And it’s not something I necessarily feel worthy of a Kickstarter project, at least not on its own.

But the shirts worked, and they’re giving me hope that yes, just maybe, we really can work up at least to the point of consistently covering our costs at conventions. We did make our table price back and then some, but when you add airfare and hotel and food and all that, long-distance exhibiting still becomes a daunting dip in the red. But a few more issues, more shirts, maybe some bookmarks and the like, and who knows? Karma may or may not have owed us, but it certainly helps to have a lot of different things for fans and non-fans alike to buy.

I need to come right out and say it: Dawn and I make a good team. Don’t laugh, it’s something that we often forget, especially in the throes of a miscommunication in the face of approaching deadlines (“I told you he needed to be wearing a hat!” “No you didn’t!”, etc.), or the arguments trying to get ourselves out the door to the latest convention. Those are the moments which make us look at each other and grin ruefully when some stranger claims that we must work really well together.

But the truth is, we do each have strengths and weaknesses that complement, and not just in the field of writing versus art. Dawn, for instance, is amazing at packing things in a way I can barely begin to fathom. She’s so good at putting together and dismantling our table displays that it’s almost more efficient for me to get the heck out of the way and let her work the magic. I got home this last Friday afternoon to find she’d somehow collapsed 90% of our merchandise and materials into three small, snug, secured boxes ready for FedEx’s tender mercies.

I, meanwhile, muddle through all the bureaucratics and try to make sure, for example, that those boxes are going to end up in the right place at the right time. I take care of figuring out what permits we need, and how do we get where we’re going, and where do we stay/park when we get there. I do our balance sheets for expenses and sales, and am continually trying my best to make sure we’re satisfying any tax people who demand their slice of our meager income.

This is stuff we had about as much experience with when we started as we did doing a comic, and like doing the comic it’s an ongoing learning process. I’ve never gone into the specifics that much because those specifics are mostly specific to California, which is not necessarily a useful or interesting thing to those of you who live outside the state (or for that matter, the country). But heck, for those of you do live here and are wanting to do sales at Cons, I’ll give you a tip: get a permanent seller’s permit.

You can get temporary sales permits, but you have to keep reapplying for them for every convention you go to, and file separate sales tax returns. The permanent permit is just as free to acquire from the BOE (short for California State Board of Equalization) and has proven to be a lot less hassle. It only took us eighteen months of operation to figure that out. All you have to do with the permanent permit is set up “locations” in California (i.e. the convention sites) where you’ll be doing business, which can be added to or removed with a simple phone call, and they give you multiple sales permits to take to the specific convention as necessary. You also now have a master permit number you can easily put on any convention paperwork that asks for it.

If you’re new to things I do recommend the option of going in person to your local BOE branch and having the clerks assist you in setting everything up. By and large I’ve found BOE clerks to be quite helpful, probably because there’s nothing to be gained by being obstructive: the State would most definitely like a cut of your money and is thus keen on getting you registered.

Getting a permanent permit also means you only have to worry about filing a return once a year, which you can do online and even get a clerk on the phone to step you through it if you’re unsure what to put where. As bureaucratic dealings go, it’s been rather painless.

It’s also important to note that you do not have to be a formalized business (LLC, etc.)  in order to acquire a seller’s permit, whether permanent or temporary. We currently operate as a “married co-ownership”, which is basically the same as a “sole proprietorship” filtered through the state’s communal property laws. My name is the one on the actual permit(s) but Dawn has full rights to also do business, without needing to be considered an employee (which is a whole other can of worms we’ve not yet dipped into). Also as far as I remember we’re free to use whatever DBA (“doing business as”) that we wish, meaning we can exhibit at a convention under our own names, or Lab Reject Studios, or Art of Dawn, as long as the permit checks out.

The first time we stepped out to exhibit, at Long Beach Comic Con 2009, I had a hell of a time trying to figure out if we needed a city permit in addition to the state one. The better organized conventions will be able to tell you straight up if it’s required, but for the most part it seems like as long as you’re within an established convention center, there are exemptions. An interesting exception I’ll note is L.A. City, which sent us a letter about a month ago asking us to please contact them about our potential tax liability for having made undeclared sales there last year and not having the required certificate.

The important thing when you get surprise notices like these, no matter where you are, is not to panic. They can look nasty and looming, all officially stamped and giving deadlines to respond before “further action is taken”. You can be left wondering how you missed this, and why the convention organizers or your fellow exhibitors didn’t warn you about it. In this case, the other exhibitors I knew that I asked responded with confusion that such a thing was happening.

Well, honestly, it may seem like you’re being singled out personally, but it happens because computers are out there that look at column A and column B and row C and then flag certain matches and generate inquiries. Sometimes you may feel like the only guy who got pulled over despite everybody speeding… in this case, I not only felt like that guy, but like the guy who was going the speed limit and got pulled over anyway because of an unposted rule that you have to go slower on Saturdays.

But you just have to take a deep breath, and look things over, and then start making phone calls. And be aware that, bureaucracy being bureaucracy, you may not immediately reach the correct people, and may get wrong or outdated information. It’s frustrating, but in the end, I was able to get things straightened out with a single declaration by email to the correct person. Getting all manner of names and confirmation numbers, naturally.

This is the sort of aggravation I take care of so that Dawn can work her magic, artistic and otherwise. It’s not to say she couldn’t deal with all the paperwork if she had to, any more than I couldn’t pack up our booth if I had to, but it’s nice to have a partner to take some of the weight off your shoulders and know it’s going to be handled according to their strengths.

Of course, if you’ve read the comic blog you’re aware than Dawn took a nasty fall that’s put her ankle in a bad way, which means I’ll be shouldering some more burden than usual just in time for our first out-of-state jaunt. We can all be glad it wasn’t her drawing arm, but this is going to make interesting times even more interesting. I think I’ve done everything I can and should from the paperwork side — Washington State seems pretty painless on the out-of-state seller regulations, but more on that next week. Also remember that due to all this going on and us being out of town, we’re likely to be posting a sketch next Wednesday, but my blog should be here as usual. Come by then, or we’ll see you in two!