Category: Writer’s Blog

The next action-packed(?) installment on our schedule for March was WonderCon, which happened this last weekend at the Anaheim Convention Center. Exhibiting at WonderCon was actually a fairly late decision for us, since even though it moved down to our neck of the woods for 2012, we had free professional badges all set to go and were thinking about just kicking back and enjoying it as attendees like we had in 2011. Then we got the news that we’d been wait listed for San Diego Small Press, and since that had become a “maybe” decided it would be best if we stayed on the exhibiting radar with the Comic-Con International organization, despite WonderCon being so close to the dates for Emerald City. For those of you who aren’t aware, San Diego Comic Con, APE, and WonderCon are all staffed and managed by the same folks, and there actually is a sort of “points” system they maintain for exhibitors based partly on the amount and frequency of their presence at CCI events. San Diego needs no help, but for purposes of stocking San Diego they look kindly on those who come to be part of their lesser attended shows.

Now if WonderCon had still been in San Francisco this year that might have been too expensive a proposition to squeeze into the budget, but fate intervened in the form of the Moscone Center deciding to do renovations for the first half of 2012 and thus leaving the convention bereft of its usual home. San Francisco’s tourism people, at least from the scuttlebutt I’ve heard, do not especially care about keeping Comic-Con International happy. While I hesitated to take our sour experience with the Chevy’s restaurant at WC ’11 as an indicator of general trends, it seems there might very well be a feeling given off by the visitor’s bureau of “we don’t need your kind”, which is odd as I’m sure the Bay Area must have at least some form of nerd community. Are we still being dunked in trash cans up there? If so, are we being put in the right ones? I don’t know if nerds count as compostables or not.

I presumed that the Moscone Center’s renovations came with an understanding that when they were done, WonderCon would be welcomed back north with open arms, but CCI has gone on record on their facebook page asking for people wanting it to return to SF to please make their voices heard to the Moscone Center management. That doesn’t sound like something you’d request on a done deal, so at this point your guesses are as good as mine on what’ll happen for 2013.

You know what city really does seem to want to get some nerd dollars filling its coffers? Anaheim. Anaheim hosted both Wizard World and AM2 last year, and was one of the cities campaigning to try to steal San Diego Comic Con from San Diego. Comic Con decided to stay at least until 2015, but it lit a fire under San Diego to get some much needed expansions and improvements into the works. SDCC has a clout with its host city that WonderCon just doesn’t seem to share, even though attendance last year seemed quite admirable. So while I can’t speak for what goes on behind closed doors, it makes sense to me that WonderCon might try out a new venue that was actually eager for its presence. Anaheim wanted SDCC, but WonderCon’s sudden homelessness represented an opportunity for the next best thing. It’s possible Anaheim even approached CCI about it first, rather than vice-versa.

If you’re wondering why I’ve spent so many paragraphs talking about this, it’s because I think it’s actually a good thing for exhibitors to keep an eye on what’s happening with the conventions they might frequent. Heck, it’s even a good idea for attendees. An established show making a major location move like this can really throw your plans in a jumble, and while it’s not a good idea to put too much faith in rumors, you can use them judiciously to try to avoid being caught entirely off-guard, or perhaps seize on opportunities.

 So, I should probably get around to talking about the show itself. The forecast was rain and cold for most of the weekend, and while the rain confined itself mostly to Saturday, I’m sure it was an ironic twist for a San Francisco convention “vacationing” (so far) in sunny Southern California. I had worried that the weather might keep people away, but if it did you would never have noticed. Friday wasn’t very busy, but Saturday and even Sunday gave way to a packed lobby and a packed exhibit hall. I haven’t seen a comic convention be that busy on Sunday since, well… San Diego. Unlike San Diego, WonderCon still lets you buy your tickets at the door, but delivers on some big names and big panels because it’s still part of the CCI family. It would have been entirely possible to wake up on Saturday morning, have a leisurely breakfast, and then decide, “By Jove, I think I’ll check out that WonderCon business the radio’s been squawking about!”.

Now lest I give the impression that attendance was anywhere near San Diego Comic-Con, it was not. The exhibit hall being packed is an obvious sign of a good turnout, but the crowded state of the lobbies, hotels, and parking lots were due to several other unrelated  conventions playing neighbor to WonderCon in the same weekend. Despite the sprawling campus represented by the Anaheim Convention Center (the largest on the west coast, according to their publicity), the on-site parking seems to be abysmally limited. We had no problems during Wizard World or AM2, and I don’t know how well they would have coped had WonderCon been on its own, but by Saturday morning people were being turned away and forced to park at overflow lots several blocks away from the halls (still paying for the privilege, of course). There were shuttles, but you can imagine how glad Dawn and I were that one of our friends let us stay with him at the Hilton on Thursday night, which has a lot close enough for loading purposes. We had our own (cheap but close) place to stay on Friday and Saturday and have learned to leave our set-up mostly in place, so that was easy enough, but Sunday I had to drop Dawn off and find some remote street parking because they literally had police cars parked across all the entrances.

Happily, at the end of the day they let exhibitors into a parking lot right across from the back of the hall so we could load our things. Unhappily, they made us pay the $12 all-day flat parking rate to do so, but in retrospect I suppose I’ve done that at other conventions; it probably just stung in this case I had to walk several blocks to grab the car, and then we were in and out of the paid area in 20 minutes. If I’d used the designated overflow parking I would have been hit for money twice.

As far as the staff of WonderCon, I have no complaints, they were very helpful and informative all through the show, and even provided free plastic tarps to all exhibitors on the offchance that the forecast rain might cause leaks (it didn’t, but a nice gesture nonetheless). I can’t downplay a complaint from several of my fellows in Artist’s Alley and Small Press, though, that the way the exhibit hall was laid out somewhat cut us off from the main body of the floor. The culprit was that this particular hall’s bathrooms were out in the middle of the floor inside of these big brick buildings, instead of being on the perimeter like I remember with the other Anaheim halls. If they do stay in Anaheim I hope they can move to a different hall or otherwise figure something out, because it was definitely impacting the flow of all that juicy traffic. I think Small Press in particular was feeling it because of a combination of being in the lee of one of the bathroom buildings and having high draperies blocking sightlines unless you took the time to walk down the rows.

As for us, we still got our share of people coming by, enough to keep Dawn doing her sketch cards almost constantly. We had a young lady by the name of Stephanie who made the most flattering purchase possible for creators who occasionally struggle with self-esteem… she bought and read Issue #1 last year, and this year came back to buy Issue #2 and #3. Several friends, and at least one complete stranger, walked away with freshly purchased Zombie Ranch t-shirts.

I would be remiss to leave out some of the new faces we got to meet in person, such as Robert and Sarrah Wilkinson who are not only Zombie Ranch readers, but fine webcomic creators in their own right over at their Planes of Eldlor lair. In addition we got to meet some of the team behind our Print-On-Demand services at Ka-Blam, and made the acquaintance of one R. B. LeMoyne, cool dude and mild-mannered reporter for the ComicBooked.com news site, who has his own thoughts on WonderCon 2012 available here. Since I didn’t get to see too much of the show beyond our table, he’s got some good dirt on the panels that occurred.

So that’s the second of our “firsts” for March Madness put away. Next up is the big climax of Emerald City in Seattle, but I won’t be writing about that until April, so I’ll have to figure out some other form of madness for next week. I think I have an appropriate topic. See you then!

Much of the United States (and let’s not exclude nerds here because I personally know several who also happen to be basketball fans) knows of the term “March Madness” as referring to the men’s college basketball tournament that occurs every year around this time. For me, it’s more the case that we just have a lot going on in our lives this month, including several “firsts” for our Lab Reject Studios venture (the Doing-Business-As name we sell our Zombie Ranch and Art of Dawn merchandise under). Whenever I do anything for the first time, I have a certain amount of stress attached, so I’ll probably be running a bit of a fever until the month is over. Meanwhile we’re going to do our best to keep bringing you the comic every week, with the only question mark being the first week of April due to us being out of town for several days for Emerald City. If anyone has fan art they’ve been wanting to submit, now’s a great time!

Anyhow, the first of the aforementioned firsts has already come and gone, which was our presentation for the Los Angeles City College Book Club on the topic of self-publishing an online comic. It’s true that we’ve done a convention panel before on this very topic, but this was our first time stepping outside the convention format to something more akin to an actual speaking engagement.

Now this wasn’t an invitation out of the blue, my day job is actually involved with the college and I’ve been sitting in on Book Club meetings this year as a consultant of sorts. You see, every year they single out a work of fiction or non-fiction to theme a program around, and the selection this year happened to be Grant Morrison’s book Supergods. It’s important to note that this committee is mostly made up of middle-aged professors and college staff who are in no way what I would term comic book nerds. And yet, inspired by the book, they were enthusiastic on seeing just what this comics stuff was all about. I came onto their radar because a colleague of mine (who was also on the committee) was aware that I had been attending and exhibiting at comic conventions and was working on a comic of my own, so they asked me to join in as… well, I suppose an expert of sorts.

Truly, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Well, perhaps that’s unfair to both them and myself. I’m the one who suggested they try and have Scott McCloud in for a seminar, which they did and it was everything I could have hoped. There’s even thoughts of scoring Grant Morrison himself, although I have to imagine his fees would be well beyond the available budget. But in amongst all this, the committee chair turned to me and asked, “What about you, would you be interested in giving a talk?”

I’ve gotten to the point where I managed to say yes to this question, despite having Scott McCloud scheduled on one side and Adilifu Nama on the other. Of course it was on the condition Dawn accompany me, and to her credit she’s come a long way as well and no longer breaks out in immediate hives at the thought of public speaking. Our lives as creative artists seem to be eternal cycles of pride and humility, where one day I’m having Neal Stephenson nodding at what I have to say, and another day we’re so lonely and forgotten at our convention table we’re wondering why we ever bothered. We’ve learned to seize on the high water marks, no matter how fleeting, because there’ll be plenty of ebb tides waiting to drag you down. Dawn has washed her cheek since the day Amanda Conner kissed it, but she’ll always remember that it happened.

I suppose I’ve already talked about this subject of public speaking, but this was an entirely new animal than a convention. We were possibly going to be speaking to a room full of people who were not well-versed in comics. Mind you, we hoped at least some of them would be interested, considering our whole topic was how to start up and propagate your comic idea online, but beyond that I had no idea how our humble presentation and résumé were going to go over in an environment I imagined was mostly populated by guys and gals who make their living roaming the country (and even the world) and giving seminars on the subjects of their expertise. Would we be laughed out of the room if we failed to show up in formal business attire? And what of our slideshow which fails to include audio or moving pictures or any of that multimedia hoo-hah that keeps audiences awake?

Well, in the end we took the risk and dressed comfortably. The whole point, after all, was to express that we were regular folks who managed to accomplish what we’ve done on a small budget, hoping to speak to an audience of people looking for similar inspiration. The feel of the seminar itself ended up having only one huge difference from doing a convention panel, and that was the luxury of getting to speak for 90 minutes and still have time for Q&A. It’s funny, going into these things Dawn & I always worry that we won’t have enough to say. Going out of them, we always think about everything we either forgot to say or didn’t have the time for. It’s still a good thing, in my opinion, because one of my pet peeves at conventions is the panel which just starts off Q&A with no real guidance from “the podium”. Feeling like you had too much to say seems much better than the momentum killer of “Sooooo… any questions?”

Matter of fact, I did have one lull during our ending Q&A, but as soon as the crickets were warming up I was prepared. “No questions? Does anyone want to hear about copyrights & trademarks?” That perked people right up. Leading the witness may be objectionable in a courtroom, but in a seminar or panel I think it’s a great tactic, and so I whipped up a whole two pages of notes beforehand to fill in any gaps. It worked like a charm.

So that’s one down for our own version of March Madness. Next week I’ll have a report on WonderCon, on our first exhibition there and its first time at Anaheim. And hello to any of you who attended our seminar that might be reading this! I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback, but more than anything I hope what we had to say will continue to help people in their own efforts and understanding.

One of the things I find most fun about the zombie ranch concept is working out how similar (or in some cases, how different) they might be to a conventional livestock herd. Obviously close enough that Suzie’s daddy, the late Jonathan Zane, was able to adapt some of the tried-and-true methods of cattle ranching to wrangling zombies, but in other ways you’d have to figure there are differences that could prove deadly if ignored.

There’s a lot roiling in my brain about this topic that I rarely find the space to cram into the comic. For one thing, we’re talking about a set-up which doesn’t exist much in nature: zombies (as pop culture usually knows them) seem to naturally want to do gather together, forming swarms far beyond the scale of the largest packs of predators such as lions and wolves. The closest examples there might be creatures such as army ants, although fortunately for humanity the zombie mobs weren’t quite as smart about cooperating or navigating obstacles.

But of course, given the western theme one big concept I keep returning to is that trail hand’s nightmare of the stampede. That peaceful mass of animals that can suddenly become a deadly, nearly unstoppable surge of force at the slightest provocation. One or two herd members get spooked and start running, and before you know it thousands of hooves are pounding the ground, indiscriminately flattening anything unlucky enough to be in the way.

Zombie ranchers are wrangling mere human-sized charges, but if you’ve heard of those tragic events over the years at religious pilgrimages, sporting events, or even Black Friday at Wal-Mart, even a “human stampede” can do plenty of damage to people and property.

Now imagine that instead of wanting that special price on a flat-screen TV, that stampede wants to eat you. This is the paradox of zombie ranching. On the one hand, you need to gather a big herd together or you’ll never turn a profit. On the other, even the most insulated Safer knows zombies are most dangerous in large groups.

Is there such a thing as “zombie whispering“, or are Suzie and her peers just plain crazy for having a job where they regularly have to climb in amongst the walking dead? Or is it a little of both?

All questions I do want to go into more as the story continues. Assuming anyone survives the current circumstances, of course…

I think it was approximately a year ago that a certain trailer made the rounds amongst my zombie and video game loving friends. Everyone was out of their minds over this 3 minute video, a promotion for the upcoming game Dead Island. It was artistic. It was bloody, and tragic, and scary, and heartbreaking, and aside from the lack of chainsaws and shotguns touched on a lot of the bases that people wanting to indulge in a good zombie-apocalypse-as-it-happens tale are looking for. Sudden and inexplicable attack, things on fire, a desperate family in peril, a little girl who’s done got herself bit… all these elements are pretty much par for the course by now, but I can still appreciate the same ol’ same ol’ if it’s executed well. Besides, this game gave the hint of something different in the terms of the setting. Instead of spooky mansions and ruined cities, this was a vacation Nirvana gone to Hell. A literal “Paradise Lost”. I’ve told enough, though, so click here for a little show.

So that trailer was February-ish of 2011, and then the game released in Fall, to… not much fanfare, that I can remember. Everyone loved the trailer (Wired went so far as to call it “the best video game trailer ever made”), but I just wasn’t hearing the same sort of buzz once actual play began. And what with one thing or another (this comic being a big part of “another”) I never got around to a rental until just recently.

So here’s the thing: when I personally watched that trailer, I remember thinking “great cutscene, but what’s the actual game like?”. Because from the trailer, you’d expect some measure of survival horror poignancy, perhaps the man with the axe fighting through a sun-drenched nightmare after the loss of his family– I mean, I don’t know about you, but I figure tossing my little daughter out the window after she bit me like a rabid animal would be pretty traumatizing.

I start up the game and I’m greeted with a choice of four playable characters, none of whom seem like family people. In fact they each introduce themselves to you with an extended (and I do mean extended) voice-over of their backstory that drops more f-bombs than George Carlin stubbing his toe. Well, except for the Asian Stereotype, who perhaps considers naughty language to be dishonorable.

Listen, language-wise I try to keep things PG-13 for this site, but if you’ve ever read my Satellite Show blogs you’ll know I’m no stranger to turning the air blue. On the other hand, if I begin to feel like every other word is trying to justify “Rated M for Mature”, alarm bells go off in my head, because I’ve run into way too many bits of fiction where it seems like constant cursing has been used as a substitute for writing dialogue with actual resonance. For every property like Goodfellas where it works, there’s a lot more where it comes off like a five year old gleefully shouting the word they just heard daddy use because mommy makes funny faces when she hears it.

Then, despite all this back story they explain to you, none of it seems to matter in the actual game. It doesn’t matter that you’re fighting to restore your family’s honor, or out to recover your street cred, or just committed to the preservation of your fancy fauxhawk (the ex-football player Texan sports one, for some reason); dialogue and interactions play out exactly the same. Each character has different specialties (firearms, blades, blunt weapons, throwing), slightly different stats, and a different voice for saying variations on things like “Yes, I’ll do it!”… and that’s about it. You have skill trees as you level up which provide further customization of your gameplay, but as far as characters go, I just wasn’t feeling the sense of these people. I contrast that to the opening cutscene of Left 4 Dead, a game of far less RPG elements but one that paradoxically had me caring about Francis, Zoey, et al. much more, despite them not filling me in on their life stories before the game started.

Speaking of which, the opening cutscene of this game seems to cast you as a random drunk guy stumbling around, who is obviously not one of the four characters since you run into each of them briefly. In the playable prologue (which occurs after character selection), you wake up with a hangover in what’s very obviously the same bed he passed out in. Were you supposed to have been the random dude for that time? If so, why am I wearing high heels and hearing a woman’s voice when I talk? It seems like the wires got crossed a bit, here, and that lends to a feeling of the game being rushed despite having had a five year development period.

But anyhow, the game’s opener is very different than the teaser trailer, which may be the major disappointment. The trailer gave a certain set of expectations, but the actual game plays out like a strange combination of L4D, Dead Rising, and Grand Theft Auto. There is actually a logical, if semi-bizarre explanation for this disconnect, which is that the trailer was produced by a separate company that had almost no contact with the actual game development team. There is also reputably a movie in the works… and it’s based entirely on the trailer.

Actually if I had to pick one game that Dead Island most resembles, it would be Borderlands. Four characters with different specialties, on the fly co-op, level ups, sandboxy, lots of Diablo-style loot and weapons, vehicles, quests… there’s a lot of similarity here. I’ve heard others compare it to the Fallout series, but Fallout has a lot more customization of your character and branching decisions that make a difference… the comparison doesn’t work for me. If you liked Borderlands, you’ll probably like Dead Island. If you didn’t like Borderlands, or were ambivalent towards it, you might have some problems.

So how is Dead Island for a man like myself, who grew bored of Borderlands after a few days and sent it whisking back to Gamefly? It’s hard to say. I’m still playing it, because finding my way around the zombies rewards a certain tactical mindset, but the developers obviously want me to care about what’s happening to the other people on the island, and I just don’t. It’s impossible to buy into people complaining of supply shortages when the game keeps renewing all the health items and loot containers every time you exit the game or sometimes even travel between areas.

The “continual quests”, where you get cash/items and XP every time you turn in certain things to a survivor, can be particularly immersion breaking. When you hand a certain lady 15 bottles of water in a row and she continues to whine at you that she’s cramping up from dehydration every time you pass by her, I begin to feel less sympathy and more “SHUT UP”.  50 cans of food to another guy? He’s still starving. Not to mention the people who keep sending me back to the same pharmacy to grab stuff I would have looted the first time had the game decided to let me. Early on there’s a doctor who complains about there being no painkiller and bandages in the infirmary you broke into, and as he does so you can see painkiller bottles and bandages on the table right next to him. And loot them if you want. Maybe that’s why he’s complaining?

In most games like this, the people you’re interacting with aren’t necessarily in dire straits, so no big deal. In Dead Island, you just have to throw in the towel after awhile and ignore the details, or perhaps just pretend you’re part of some weekend LARP session where there’s no actual stakes if Sheila doesn’t get her insulin (the ratio of severe asthmatics and diabetics amongst the survivors is quite surprisingly high). It doesn’t help that many of the character models are firmly in Uncanny Valley territory and often don’t focus on you when they’re speaking. Then there’s the issue of them referring to your female character as “him” or referring to you in the plural even though you might be very much alone. Well, except in some of the cutscenes where suddenly all four playable characters are inexplicably present. It’s just like in L4D, except in L4D they actually are there all along. Here, it’s sort of jarring.

This is not a small thing for me. It’s this matter of continually regenerating supplies and other gameplay elements that conspire so that, while I did have moments of dread, I never felt the kind of unrelenting suspense I experienced with both iterations of Dead Space. Remember in that game how, when you died, you were treated to an extremely graphic rendering of the consequences of your failure? In Dead Island, when you lose all your health you fall over, and then respawn a little ways away with full health a handful of seconds later, like you were playing a Halo deathmatch. Also any damage you inflicted is still present, which makes it entirely possible to zerg. Yes, you can zerg rush the zombies. You don’t even take equipment damage, you just lose a little cash off your total– which personally, I’ve been finding easy enough to replenish.

I suppose it’s an accomplishment that the game does manage to make encounters a hectic affair despite the knowledge in the back of your brain that “death” holds almost no consequences, even in a progression sense. But part of that is the combat itself can be frustrating at times. There’s reviews here and here which talk about that, and also a lot of the rest of what I’ve discussed in a possibly much more succinct manner.

One thing I really do love is how beautifully the environments are rendered in this game. Not so much now that I’ve moved on to Act II, which takes place in the kind of third-world cityscape I’ve already had some fill of in Resident Evil 5, but Act I is the super-expensive resort hotel and its surrounding beaches and bungalows, and I kept thinking “Oh my God I want to go here”. This thought kept occurring, no matter how many half-rotted corpses were either bloodily strewn about or trying to eat my flesh… I wanted to just set my machete aside, grab one of the ubiquitous health-restoring energy drinks, and pull up a deck lounger by the clear blue South Seas waters. Act I was almost more “Place I Will Probably Never Afford To Stay At: The Video Simulation” than survival horror, where I felt like killing the zombies mainly because they were in the way of the water slides, or their agonized growls were drowning out the sounds of surf and the soothing calls of gulls. Is it still effective survival horror when you keep wanting to be in the setting presented?

I’m still playing, which is more than I can say for Borderlands, but it definitely helps that I let the promise of the trailer go early. Much as the game itself does (as shown in this clip from the beginning prologue).

I will also not deny that chopping zombie arms off with the electrified axe you MacGuyvered together, running them down in trucks or drowning them in jacuzzi spas (yes, they can drown) is satisfying enough that it still hasn’t gotten old. This is what I think you have to focus on, not the ill-fated attempts at making you give a damn about your own character or the rest of the Island’s populace. For me it’s sort of like a Summer popcorn movie in gaming form; fun, with great effects, but not particularly deep or compelling from a story perspective. If you’re good with that, it’s definitely worth at least a rental. If not, then you’re better off looking elsewhere for your slice of Paradise.

Right around the time we were starting up Zombie Ranch, Dawn and I became aware of a reality television show purporting to show how people might survive and thrive in the face of apocalypse. Not a zombie apocalypse, per se, but still presented as a global-scale disaster which would leave small groups of survivors isolated from outside contact, with minimal resources.

Despite being interested, we never got around to watching The Colony at that time. For one thing, our own scenario was one where the disaster happened years beforehand, instead of focusing on immediate aftermaths, but the main reason is that Dawn and I are just horrible at keeping track of television shows as they air, and as I recall at the time only a couple of the full episodes were available on the Discovery Channel website, with the rest being just partial clips. Tantalizing, perhaps, but ultimately just frustrating. I also wondered how feasible they could really pull off the idea of apocalyptic isolation while using a warehouse area near Downtown Los Angeles. Would sending “biker gangs” and other twists of fate at the survivors be compelling? Or just cheesy?

Three years later and the show has finally hit Netflix. We just finished watching the entirety of Season 1, and… yes, in my opinion, it was plenty compelling. The ‘volunteers’ (I guess maybe you can’t call them survivors for fear of comparison to that Other Reality Show) really seemed to buy into the reality of their situation, especially as the days wore on.

I underestimated just how isolating those all but abandoned areas between Downtown and the L.A. river can be… having a passing familiarity with them, I probably shouldn’t have. They’re industrial ghost towns smack in the midst of one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the world, which is a fascinating and sobering topic all in itself. I don’t know how much editing had to be done, but from a viewing perspective the illusions were maintained, with not even one single homeless person wandering through that wasn’t scripted by the producers to do so.

What really makes the show as well is the lack of competition in the concept. Yes, there is internal strife, especially as supplies dwindle and frustrations and tempers ebb and flow, but there is no motive for any of the volunteers to act against or undermine each other. There is no reward prize dangling at the end except the idea of survival and self-discovery. At the beginning there doesn’t even seem to be a set goal, with the producers eventually adapting to the colonists’ efforts to allow for a satisfying closure.

For that matter, the “challenges” are a far cry from those in most reality shows. There’s no host explaining what to do next; instead, it’s a mix of naturally occurring and scripted stimuli for the colonists to react to as they will. The first season starts with the group confined to an abandoned warehouse and scrapyard, with a few beginning supplies which quickly need to be supplemented. One of the early problems is one of water, and the desperation really hits home when they have to gather it from the L.A. River. I don’t even want to set *foot* in the L.A. River, especially at the portion they’re at, and these folks have to use it for sustenance? But they manage to quickly rig up a system to purify it to potability, and the ingenuity just keeps building from there. You will boggle at some of the ideas these people come up with, and you will boggle even more when they actually make those crazy ideas work. Well, at least I did.

And even with all that ingenuity, there’s always a sense of being one or two steps from disaster. If the curveballs don’t come from the environment, outside elements are introduced to keep the colonists on their toes. Two starving travelers come by to ask for food and water… do you turn them away? The route you got used to for scavenging is suddenly closed off… now what? Marauders threaten your supplies… how will you defend them?

I really shouldn’t go into much more for fear of spoilers. I know, I know, I’m the guy who contended that spoilers aren’t the end-all be-all of entertainment enjoyment, but I’ll admit, there’s a lot of events here that are probably best experienced in the same way the colonists must have experienced them.

It is a really good show, and not only that, I feel like I learned things from it, both on a technological and simply human standpoint. The Colony’s narrator often refers to it as “the experiment”. An experiment which, at the end of it all, shows just how resilient we can be.

On the comments for last week’s comic, an interesting point was brought up. Can’t all this potential violence be solved by just handing Zeke (or technically, the zombie-formerly-known-as-Zeke) over?

Possibly. Seems like it could work. Will it be tried? That’s for me to know, and you to find out. Right now, it seems like Suzie and Muriel are hell bent on sizing each other up, and that’s not leaving much room for logic.

But hey, that speaks to me. Most of the confrontations I’ve gotten into in my life are not really a matter of destiny, so much as an interaction that spirals out of control, often without any warning. One or both of you has had a bad day, and suddenly your hearts are thudding away and you’re screaming horrible things, with the blood buzzing in your ears drowning out all sense except your need for Fight or Flight.

Of course there’s certainly something to be said for the epic clash of legendary figures, foretold in prophecy to decide whether the land will survive, or fall to everlasting darkness. But I think movies like Unforgiven or various Coen brothers offerings show an equally compelling vision of the kind of conflict we’re more familiar with… the ones that spring not from starkly defined avatars of good and evil, but from unfortunate coincidences, bad timing, and tempers in the heat of the moment.

Regardless of which type you’re going for, writing a believable confrontation shares a common element, whether it’s a staredown between cosmic beings deciding the fate of the multiverse, or two middle-aged moms spying the last available Christmas toy their child had their hearts set on. I heard it expressed best by Bob Goodwin, who sat next to me on the “Violence in Storytelling” panel at CombatCon last year, and while I can’t supply an exact quote, this is basically what he said:

When you have a confrontation going on between characters, imagine they’re in a room, and behind each is a door. If they turn around and leave through that door, they’re free. The confrontation is over.

Why don’t they use that door?

Greed? Revenge? Pride? Honor? Protecting others? Or even, as noted above, the simple fight or flight decision of a tense moment unraveling beyond reason, causing a fist to be thrown instead of unclenched?

If, as a writer, you don’t have an answer as to why the characters in your staredown don’t just leave/give ground, then any subsequent conflict may ring a little hollow.

In subsequent weeks, I suppose we’ll be finding out how well I can practice what I preach. For now, though, as I write this it’s Valentine’s Day in the States, and I promised I’d put my meager cooking skills to the test tonight in whipping up a meal for Dawn and myself. See you next time!

It may be very presumptive to expect anyone besides me to pay this much attention to the progression of the comic, but I wonder if anyone’s noticed that folks like Suzie and Frank don’t do things like say “ya” for “you” nearly as much as they did in Episode 1?

It’s strange how that’s evolved– even though I still hear their accents in my head, I don’t feel nearly as much need to try to represent it on the page. Meanwhile the phonetic torch has been unspokenly (well, spokenly) passed to those like Brett, Lacey, and the Oklahoma gang.

The subject of conveying accents in print is something I think every writer has to wrestle with sooner or later. Some ignore it entirely. Some, like George Bernard Shaw or Zane Grey, go absolutely hog wild with the concept to the point you have to sit there and translate what certain characters are supposed to be saying. Sussing out a Shaw play was sometimes worse than figuring out Shakespeare, especially when he’d get into the “lower class” speech.

“Yew jus’ come agen me en ow’ll besh yer roody fice, yew stahk-oop pice ah tresh, see if oi dun’t!”

That’s not an exact quote, but it isn’t that far off.

Grey, meanwhile, loved to try to transliterate his Texan drawls, but how much he did so also seems to depend which story you’re reading. Crack open the right one and you’ll get enough utterances of “Wal, shore!” to make your head spin.

For my own tastes, I always felt like there was a point trying to represent people talkin’ funny would start getting in the way of the story, so even in the case of Muriel and company I try not to get so far afield as to make things incomprehensible. For that matter, here’s the thing about accents: no one believes they have one. You’re fine, it’s everyone else who talks weird. Because of that, any writer dealing in spelling out accents is making a certain call on a baseline “normal” way to talk, and when I consider that people are reading this comic in places like Australia and Poland, that gets strange to contemplate in a hurry.

So why have I kept on doing it? Well… the plain fact is it’s fun to do, and at this point I’ve just made my baseline a certain fictional place, the one occupied by the central heroes of the stories I’m paying homage to, rather than the wild and wooly character parts of the supporting cast. I especially like going nuts with the “infomercial voice-over”, which is probably more in the style of Disney’s Frontierland than any realistic mode of speech that ever was.

And besides, if I really got to be a stickler for things, my mind would bring up that most people in Texas don’t talk like cowboys anymore. Then where would I be?

Wouldn’t I rather just keep on keepin’ on in this Weird New West of my concoction?

Wal, pardners?

Shore I would.

You buy a ticket.

Okay, that’s facetious, and for that matter easier said than done in the case of San Diego. In any case, I’m talking more about exhibiting. How do you elbow your way in to a spot on the floor?

A few months back on one of the forums I frequent, a webcomic author posted asking if comic conventions were worth trying to host a table or booth at. Specifically, were they a good place to network and meet people, or would they be shunned by the establishment? Were webcomics “treated as lepers or not”?

The thought of putting yourself out there at one of these gatherings, particularly one that attracts more than just local talent, can be very intimidating. Who are you, Mr. or Miss Self-Publish, to believe you deserve to share the same space as nationally or even internationally famed artists and authors, some of whom have been working in the industry since before you were born? Please. San Diego has a five year waiting list for their Small Press area, and you think you have a chance?

Hang on, back up.

If San Diego really had a backlog of five years on their Small Press area, how the hell did we manage to get called up to exhibit there last year? Because I can guarantee you we had no special insider angle. Until APE last year we’d never even met the man in charge in person, and the first time I’d ever talked to him was when he called us out of the blue last April to offer us a just-opened spot he needed to fill. Had we said no or not made a decision fast enough, he would have just moved on down his list. We were a piece of paper, and for that matter a piece of paper that had been stamped ‘WAIT LIST’ on the CCI 2010 Sunday I turned in our application. At most you could say that our Small Press jury submission had passed muster, but we had no idea of even that being true until that phone call.

The point I’m making here is, we applied despite the hopelessness and pessimism a lot of people have surrounding the show, and it worked. This year we’re back on the wait list, but we now know that being turned down in December is not the end of hope. Nor did we feel out of place while we were there, and that’s important too.

It’s usually not in a convention’s interest to turn people away. San Diego Small Press is, in fact, an extreme example in terms of requiring a material print submission for judgment as part of the application process. Every other convention we’ve dealt with has wanted only two things to be true:

– All the paperwork is in order

– Your check clears

That’s about it. Now if you’re a pure webcomic it might be a bit rough if you don’t even have so much as some fliers to hand out, but I doubt you’ll be denied a table. A lot of applications don’t even really ask if you happen to be a webcomic or not, and most conventions don’t have any separate area for such, they’ll just seed you into Artist’s Alley or one of the booths. You might get a terrible spot, you might get an okay spot, or you might even get a great spot, but it’s all going to be pretty random in your first outings.

But if you want to keep going, plan ahead. Get your paperwork and payment in as early as possible. Speaking as a clerk in my own day job, I can’t tell you how much of a turn-on it is to get properly completed forms. Okay, perhaps I should rephrase that — but in any case I always try to make it a point to have all t’s crossed and all i’s dotted, and I make sure to politely follow up by email to ensure all the connections are made. Sometimes an organizer will make the rounds of the convention to introduce themselves, and that’s a great time to shake their hands and introduce yourself right back. Even the biggest shows are nowhere near as impersonal as something like, say, calling AT&T customer service… you’ll have a person or persons that you’ll get to know, and if you make a good impression with them, well, now you’re not just a piece of paper and a bank check any more. The flipside of this is that if you piss them off you might have trouble, but so far I think I’ve managed to balance being assertive about any needs without crossing the line into ‘annoying git’.

One absolute warning though, I’m not kidding about getting things taken care of early. Some conventions are okay to let slide for awhile after they open applications, but when we made the decision to try out Emerald City I had our paperwork in less than a month after they started taking submissions, and it wasn’t long after that that they had completely sold out of exhibit space. For San Diego I turn in our application while we’re still at the convention. The same thing can go for hotel reservations if you need them — grab them early, especially if your convention has any special exhibitor deals negotiated with the nearby ones.

Do webcomics have a stigma at conventions? Maybe there’s some attendees and exhibitors who’ll avoid you, but there’s a lot more who are just fine with it. I mean, again, assuming they can even tell that sort of thing on sight. When you have a venue where a guest artist often shows up with a single banner for their plain white plastic table, how do you tell amateur from professional at a glance? For that matter, we live in a world where you can’t assume the guy wearing jeans and sneakers isn’t a millionaire. I wouldn’t even worry about it. The very fact you have that table should be evidence enough of dedication to your cause. Everyone starts somewhere, and if there are any convention organizers out there who refuse to respect or recognize that, then I have, thankfully, yet to meet them.

Ever heard the idea of the elevator pitch? If you’d rather not let Wikipedia enlighten you, I can summarize by saying that, well… it’s a summary.

An elevator pitch (or elevator speech or statement) is a short summary used to quickly and simply define a product, service, or organization and its value proposition.

It takes its name from the idea that you can finish the proposal in no more than a minute’s time, for instance the time you might happen to be on an elevator ride with your busy boss or film producer or whatnot.

I’m terrible at it.

I remember at one of our early convention appearances where I tried to explain Zombie Ranch to an acquaintance of ours who works in the movie industry, and after I finished rambling he flat out told me, “You need to work on your pitch”.

Nearly two years later, I still haven’t found that perfect short-form alchemy that is both snazzy to the ear and presents all of what I consider to be the key concepts and unique aspects of this comic. I have our introduction blurb which is the closest I think I’ve come, but it sounds better written than spoken and is probably way too long for a world where a lot of pitches are boiled down to statements like “Die Hard on a Space Station”.

If I try that I end up with “It’s Lonesome Dove meets Hatari! meets Deadliest Catch meets Night of the Living Dead meets…” and DING! the elevator has arrived and there goes the boss. But if I just say “Deadliest Catch meets Night of the Living Dead“, or worse, “Cowboys vs. Zombies”, they might end up intrigued in entirely the wrong way, with long-term disappointment for everyone.

I don’t know, maybe it’s actually a good thing that I have trouble condensing Zombie Ranch into a quick sound bite. Or maybe I’m just making excuses for being terminally long-winded.

So hey, you out there… fair assumption that you read the comic, right? How would you sell someone on it in sixty seconds or less? Or would you even bother to try?

As I’m writing this blog, it is Dawn’s birthday. When it publishes, her birthday will be past, and I hope I will have achieved a sort of extra present for her, which will actually be more of an absent than a present: I’m going to try not to have “coach face” for Tuesday evening.

If you’ve ever watched professional sports, you may know what I’m talking about here. The team has just scored again, they’re up by a really comfortable margin with almost no time left, the home crowd is on its feet cheering, the players are grinning and slapping each others’ hindsides…

…and the camera cuts over to the coach, and he might as well be carved from granite. Frowning, judging granite. I never was able to understand how someone could look that unhappy in the midst of a situation where everyone else was jumping for joy — like they’d just learned they were being audited instead of about to claim a victory after watching their people play a great game.

And then, somewhere along the line after we started Zombie Ranch, I realized that on some Tuesday nights I often ended up with that same face. It’s like I can’t allow myself to relax and smile until everything is ready to go, and poor Dawn is my quarterback (or equivalent) waiting for that nod which is the closest thing she may get to approval for the moment.

Before this ends up sounding terminally unfun, the reason I bring it up is because we watched something recently that made us both realize this phenomenon isn’t necessarily an aberration, but a more-or-less natural result of the creative process colliding with deadlines (self-imposed or otherwise).

The documentary, which I believe is currently still available for instant streaming on Netflix, is titled Six Days To Air: The Making Of South Park. Onion A.V. Club has an excellent review of it here, and I recommend it to any of you out there who are slugging away week after week to provide a story (or just some entertainment) to the masses, especially if you’re doing so as part of a team. You won’t feel so crazy anymore.

Well, you might still feel like crazy people, but you’ll at least take some comfort that you’re not alone. I recognize that hangdog, strangely almost depressive state Trey Parker exhibits on the day the episode is shipped off to air, even though everyone that it’s been shown to is laughing their heads off. He talks at one point about gorging on McDonald’s, not because it helps his creative process but because it makes him happy “for five minutes”. And one of his candid speeches should speak to the heart of any webcomic creator out there, whether you’re writer, artist, or both:

“I always feel like, wow, I wish I had another day with this show. That’s why there’s so many episodes that we’ve been able to get done, because there is a deadline and you can’t keep going. Because there’s so many times that I’d say, no, it’s not ready yet, it’s not ready yet. And I’d have spent four weeks on one show. All you do is start second-guessing yourself and rewriting stuff, and it’s over-thought. And it would have been 5 percent better.”

The next day, you can visibly see the weight come off his shoulders as the finished product has aired, and they’ve got another six days before crunch time comes around again. It’s important to note also that you can see him (and all the rest of the crew) having a lot of fun with the brainstorming sessions, voice recordings, and all the other aspects of turning an idea into an episode… but yeah, on that final deadline day, Trey has some serious coach face. 

I wonder if that’s where pro (American) football players came up with the tradition of dumping a barrel of gatorade on the coach after a big win, just to shock him out of his stoic state. Fortunately Dawn hasn’t started doing this to me yet, although it’s possible she’s been tempted on some of the more extreme days.

But anyhow, happy birthday to my favorite wife and artist! Oh and a heads up for anyone who doesn’t know yet, on Wednesday some big sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Boing Boing are all shutting down access for 24 hours in protest of the SOPA bill trying to be passed in the U.S. — details here. That means the barrel o’ gatorade link above won’t be working unless you read this on Thursday or later. As the skull on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride would say, “properly warned ye be…”

So this week’s comic revealed that yes, Mrs. McCarty and her posse are responsible for the current smoky state of the Z Ranch. It’s entirely possible that this surprised no one.

But you know, that’s okay. I find there’s entirely too much emphasis these days on twist endings and endings in general, where the destination eclipses all thought of enjoying the ride to get there. There are a lot of people out there who have come to a point where, if someone reveals the ending of a book/movie/etc., they feel as if their whole experience is irrevocably ruined. In extreme cases they now refuse to read/watch/listen, because why bother? They know how it turns out.

I’ve never been able to understand it. Is there really nothing to be said for the journey? Have our narratives become that fragile, that the moment Point B becomes clear, we lose all motivation to reach it?

Keep in mind that for thousands of years, the exact opposite was the case. If you’ve ever been to a production of Ancient Greek or Shakespearean drama, they employ Prologues as a matter of course, such as the famous one that begins Romeo & Juliet:

Two households, both alike in dignity
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage—
The which, if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

If the language is giving you trouble, let me just put it this way: Romeo & Juliet commit suicide, and that tragedy will finally convince their two warring families to make peace. The play is telling you that straight up at the very beginning; yet if you posted a summary like this for a modern movie, to a modern internet forum, you’d be raked over the coals for ruining the plot. Shakespeare and Sophocles weren’t afraid of telling you “Dumbledore dies”, they used it as a hook to keep your interest as they brought you on the journey. Like the Columbo mysteries where the culprit and crime was always revealed at the beginning, making them not so much “whodunit?” as “howdhecatchem?”

I had someone get legitimately mad at me for “spoiling” the end of the movie 300 for them, which for me makes as much sense as someone claiming you spoiled Titanic because you tell them the ship sinks. But I’m sure someone has done just that. This obsessive need to avoid spoilers at all costs has gotten way out of hand, and feeds back into creators who feel a need to throw in more and more ludicrous twists to keep their audience guessing. An infamous example comes from the DC Universe crossover event Armageddon 2001, where the identity of the mystery villain was leaked before the end, and rather than soldier on with the carefully constructed foreshadowing of the series so far, DC decided to chuck everything and insert a nonsensical last minute change to preserve the “surprise”.

And that was back in 1991, before the Internet existed in its current form. Nowadays entire messageboards exist to comb over the latest clues in an ongoing series in near instantaneous fashion. If you have enough fans, then guess what? Some of them are going to pick up on the trail of breadcrumbs, and it’s only human at that point to want to show the path to others. Should you derail your narrative because they’ve figured out where it’s headed?

I say no. I say, focus on the journey and let the destination stand. For one thing, there will always be things some consider blindingly obvious that others will completely miss. Never assume that “Everyone could see this coming” is any kind of true statement… usually it just means those who didn’t either remain quiet out of fear of being thought stupid, or aren’t really paying attention to forums and comments anyhow. For another thing, if the journey is good enough, then it shouldn’t matter, and those who figured it out ahead of time are going to just feel gratified rather than disappointed. Or maybe they’ll be disappointed… you can’t control every last opinion. But it’s better than chucking everything, isn’t it?

But let’s all take a breath and calm down about the spoilers. Yes, we love to be surprised and taken in unexpected directions, but that shouldn’t be the only thing, or fiction eventually just dissolves into a senseless mass of WHAM! moments. They’re great, but as a writer don’t make them the end-all-be-all or you’ll end up with an unsustainable case of Shyamalan Syndrome. And as an audience member, take the fact you know the truth about Keyser Soze or Malcolm Crowe before you watch those movies as a liberation rather than a disaster. It’s a lot less stressful on both sides.

Plus, even if you knew it was the McCarty gang, maybe you didn’t figure out it was their own bulldozer on fire…

On the poll before the current one I asked y’all what your preference would be in the world of Zombie Ranch: the order and security of a Safe Zone, or the freedom and risk of the Wild Zones?

With 61 votes tallied at the time I closed voting, the Wild Zoners had edged out the Safers, but only barely, by a margin of 32 to 29. It might be surprising in the sense that a lot of zombie fans are also what I suppose we could call “survival enthusiasts”, but then again we’re talking zombie fans who are reading comics on the World Wide Web, a medium which likely wouldn’t exist anymore if the apocalyptic hammer ever drops.

I honestly don’t know how long the Web would survive without regular maintenance. On the one hand, it’s extremely decentralized in its structure, so that failure of parts won’t affect the whole. On the other, some parts are more important than others, such as the telecommunications “backbones”… or the satellites, for that matter, without which things we’re already starting to take for granted such as GPS couldn’t exist. Even rugged mountain men and explorers have a GPS handy these days, keeping them constantly in touch with those invisible eyes in the sky.

And how long would those satellites last? Well, in Zombie Ranch we know there’s at least one still active, but jealously controlled by its masters. Even with the limitations involved in what’s likely much more limited satellite coverage, it’s a pretty big advantage. Getting signals to your drone cameras would require a lot of repeaters to compensate for the curvature of the Earth, and if those towers are mostly out in hostile wilderness, that gets tricky mighty quick. You might have already inferred from the ranch crew’s struggles with their old-school UHF walkie-talkies that cell phones don’t seem to be a consideration any more, at least not for the common man. There’s a lot of infrastructure required and a lot of men and women who are working on a daily basis to keep those cellular “footprints” in working order. For that matter, it can be positively terrifying to contemplate just how much our modern civilization has become dependent on the ready flow of electricity.

But hey, I’ll admit it: I’m a fan. I love my refrigeration, and my air conditioning, and my 40 watt bulbs and my Internet. I probably wouldn’t last long out in the wilds, and more than that, I might not want to, so despite my value of personal freedom I’m a Safer at heart. I run straight onto the rocks of Ben Franklin’s scorn and his famous quote, oft-repeated in the post-9/11 days of the Patriot Act: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Then again, that scorn could all depend on what he meant by essential Liberty, and given Mr. Franklin’s propensities that might just have been the Liberty to pursue French demimondes.

It’s interesting to go back to the original quote (the source of which is detailed here) and note the qualifiers of “essential” and “temporary”, words often left out when the phrase is regurgitated, as if there is no way Liberty and Safety could possibly co-exist. And maybe they can’t, at least not as absolutes, but human society does seem to balance best on a sliding scale between the two. The worst breakdowns occur when Liberty is curtailed but people still live in fear (the “Police State”), or when Liberty runs entirely free from law, at which point it’s oft been shown certain people will use their own freedom to oppress the freedom of others.

There’s a give and take we’ve been dancing with since our first tribal groupings, as we groped for some form of effective cooperation which would allow us to do more than we could do on our own, and that usually meant designating one person who seemed to know what they were doing as the person who told the rest what to do. That was the death of Freedom as an absolute. There was always the choice to leave, but even the most badass hunter would have a lot more trouble taking down prey on their own.

And then, of course, beer happened. I’m pretty convinced (and there’s early historical evidence to back it up) that beer really greased the wheels of the decision to stop roving around and establish cities. Sure, there was other agriculture, but I don’t think “You’ll have a lot more bread to eat if you settle down here and pay taxes” had nearly the same immediate impact as “Here, try this. We call it ‘Liquid Party'”.

From bread and beer to sewer systems and Xbox Live, we’ve always been ready to give up a little freedom for our luxuries. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with that, any more than I see anything wrong with the people who still do emulate the lone hunters of the past, taking themselves “off the grid” and working for self-sufficiency. It’s all about determining those freedoms we deem essential, the safety level we want, and how far we’re willing to go.

Yeah, okay, that’s not much of a threat (or relief), is it?

We’ve come to the end zone of 2011. There were ups and downs, but Zombie Ranch has persevered to its third print issue and fifth online episode. We celebrated our two-year anniversary and our 100th story comic. We got to exhibit at the San Diego Comic-Con, and over in Las Vegas I sat on a panel shoulder to shoulder with Neal Stephenson. We got to be special guests at Wizard World Anaheim, and would have been at Wizard World L.A. as well had that not been canceled.

Lest this begin to sound like some rock star lifestyle, it’s not. My email is not yet flooded with the adulation (or condemnation) of fans. We still pay our way to most of these appearances, and it’s only rarely we don’t also pay for the privilege of a table presence. When I talked briefly to Chris Hastings (the creator of Dr. McNinja), he’d never heard of Zombie Ranch, and probably forgot the whole encounter within a few minutes.

No, for the most part Dawn and myself continue our mild-mannered lives as nerds, working our day jobs. Neither of us are aces of self-promotion — I mean, look at how much spiritual searching I had to do even to decide to go ahead with adding Zombie Ranch to the TV Tropes site, despite their assurances that all published works are notable. I know Wikipedia certainly wouldn’t find us worthy of mention, they’re actually quite infamous for deleting the entries of webcomics much more well-known than ours.

There’s this balance we struggle with between wanting to let people know about what we’re doing, and wanting to make sure what we’re doing is worth letting people know about it. I don’t feel comfortable with that hyperbolic carnival barker style Stan Lee had in the 60s, declaring every new character a legend, every tale an epic (and that he was right about some of them ignores the fact that he was wrong about a great many others). 

We haven’t gotten rich off of doing this, and we haven’t gotten famous. We’re probably less rich (at least financially speaking) than we would be if we’d never started. But I do feel better about my life today than I did three years ago, because I’m applying myself in some sort of creative arts, and if the stats don’t lie there’s hundreds of you out there who are glad that Dawn and myself put our story out for you to read and enjoy. That’s a fulfilling thing to contemplate. There are people who have invited me to come talk to strangers, simply on the strength of the idea that I have interesting stuff to say. Better yet, I leave such occasions with nary a hint of tar or feathers upon my person.

What will another year bring? Well, if the Mayans are right we’ve got less than 12 months to make Zombie Ranch a household word. But then again, in that case such fame would really, really be fleeting since no one would be around to remember it. So I think we’re good with our progress so far. We’ve had experiences and opportunities we never would have had if we just sat back and let this story go untold, not to mention meeting some great people in the form of fans and fellow creators (and sometimes both!).

So here’s to the inevitable approach of 2012. Happy holidays everyone!

Other comic authors, and aspiring comic authors, sometimes wonder about the topic of pacing their story. Occasionally they seek advice about it. Once in a very great while, I’m asked to give that advice.

This is not really one of those times, I’m just going to weigh in without anyone having specifically asked my opinion. I’ve written before about the importance of keeping a balance between a satisfying single installment and the overall arc of the story being told. I think it’s absolutely crucial to a long form webcomic, particularly one like ours which updates once a week. I don’t expect you’ll be spending every waking moment between Wednesdays in a state of edge-of-your-seat suspense, but I definitely hope to keep you looking forwards to next time, and caring about where the next page updates takes you.

In the old days of the newspaper serials, it was all pretty blatant. The last panel would have something like the protagonist turning with a shocked look and shouting “YOU?!” while some silhouette in the foreground held a gun upon them. Tune in next time. And then next time, the first panel would start with a (re)caption — “While investigating the submarine base of Dr. Morbis, Sato is suddenly confronted by an old enemy!”. Three panels later the old enemy, revealed as Fang the Funkadelic, would drop the news that he’d taken pretty Miss Mingle as his hostage, and the cycle would start anew.

Long form webcomics usually get to breathe a bit more in this sense, but I still like to play around with the idea of connecting the previous comic to the last in some way beyond just a Back and Next button. I feel as though it’s worth the effort; that even if a reader doesn’t consciously make the connections, their subconscious will help carry the narrative.

I could also be totally incorrect and not a little full of myself, but that’s my theory. I do get a lot of comments on Zombie Ranch from people saying they were compelled to keep reading, often sometimes without knowing why (such as the rough beginnings). Is that a function of my clever lil’ transition efforts? Well, if nothing else it makes the writing more fun for me.

Sometimes it’s a visual, such as the ending the last panel here with a grinning cartoony zombie, and starting the first panel here with the much more glum reality. Sometimes it’s combining similar visuals with similar words, such as here to here, or what I’ve put together for our latest two comics where smoke defines the switch between two physically distant locations.

The flow and rhythm of the words are also very important to me. I nudge around my drafts of the script until I can achieve something which sounds good to me in recitation. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man who wrote my most favorite poem of all time in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, once declared that poetry was not just the best words, but “the best words in the best order”.

I realize comics writing is not really poetry, since for one thing you have accompanying imagery to pick up your sensory slack, but there are certain similarities in the idea of economy of expression. You just don’t have the elbow room a prose writer does to wax at length on topics, you need to get your points across in a more condensed form. And the rhythm, the order, is still important. The greatest speeches in history have an undeniable flow to them that grabs attention and stirs both intellect and emotion. Even prose writers are well advised to pay heed to the rhythm and quality, especially in the beginnings of their tales when they’re first knocking at your door for your time and attention. Dickens certainly knew it:

“IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

He could have just as easily written “In the time just before the French revolution, things were pretty chaotic and contradictory… which actually isn’t too far off from the way things are now”, but that might not have been quite so memorable. Even if you don’t get his meaning right away, the flow is still there, carrying you along, inviting you to come visit Somewhere Else and return, eventually, more fulfilled than when you left.

Or I could use a much more modern and simpler example. Watch the original trilogy of the Star Wars films and see how effective the scene transitions are, especially compared to the newer prequels. Part of the reason I feel the prequels lose me is they lack that underlying sense of rhythm, killing scenes too abruptly or letting them linger too long even with John Williams doing his best to still provide the audio cues. Whatever your feelings on Ewoks, I do feel that Return of the Jedi managed to quite effectively juggle an epic battle taking place in three different places at once in a way Phantom Menace did not, and a lot of that, again, I ascribe to the rhythm. 

“You… (ominous music)… like your father… (music builds)… are now… MINE!” (crash of music, jump cut to other battle in progress)

When done right, there’s this exhilarated sense of being swept off your feet and carried forwards, unable to look away/put the book down/stop listening to the speaker. You have become lost in the transitions.

I can’t say I’ve mastered it. I can’t say, truthfully, that I even feel like much more than an apprentice. But I keep at it because I feel like it helps and benefits the work, whether or not the audience takes conscious notice.

Of course there’s the other kind of becoming lost in transitions where you scene jump so poorly the audience has no clue where they are. I hope I’ve avoided that for the most part, and think, again, that the connector elements can help out. The answer lies with the majority of the readership, but I take some pride in the lack of complaint I’ve heard about the opening pages of Episode 2, where (with Dawn’s talented assistance, of course!) I really pulled some shenanigans with time, space, and even the very format of the information being delivered.

Then again it’s possible the people who hated it just up and left, and I’ll never know how many of those there were. Possibly many thousands more than those it worked for. But any time someone tells me they start our archive and feel compelled (sometimes against their intentions) to finish it, I like to think part of the answer lies in that thread I try to stitch between each and every page — sometimes obvious, sometimes barely perceivable even to myself. But in the sharing of a story, I feel it’s part of the crucial conveyance that keeps the fantasy alive.

I guess I’ve had Ancient Romans on the brain lately. The previous comic referenced Juvenal’s famous passage regarding bread and circuses, and now with this comic I’ve been thinking back again on lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights

This is part of a speech from Julius to Marc Antony expressing his (rather justified, it turns out) concerns regarding one Senator Cassius, who has “a lean and hungry look”; in other words, a sense of ambition and purpose that makes Caesar nervous.

If only Caesar had had television on his side, perhaps his toga wouldn’t have ended up with all those unsightly dagger holes.

Which is not to say I believe television kills ambition. For one thing, these days the kids seem to be weaning themselves away from it. Well, sort of. Now they just stream the same content to their handhelds, leaving them more mobile but still occupying their attentions (a dangerous combination, if the new driving laws banning cellphones are to be believed). They go outside, but remain wired.

And by kids I of course mean “us”, it’s just that the kids are the ones who, as always, are the native sons and daughters of the new wave, their thumbs dancing on tiny key and touchpads with blinding speeds while someone like me is stuck doing the equivalent of the one finger typing I used to mock my own elders for.

Anyhow, I digress. It comes down to a simple matter of boredom, or at least perceived boredom. I’ve maintained for years that Boredom, not Money, is the true Root of All Evil. So assuming a person isn’t starving or taking care of other immediate survival needs, then their thoughts are going to wander to the question of “How do I occupy my time?”.

In a society that hopes to last, the Powers That Be had better seriously consider the answer to that question and how to guide it in a way that’s safe for their continued existence — a true irony considering that providing for their basic needs and securities is what even brought you to this point. That’s why it’s not just bread that rules the equation, it’s bread and circuses. Entertainment.

People are certainly capable of coming up with ways to entertain themselves, but O King, blame me not if you don’t like the result. It could involve setting fires and turning over cars, and I know this well from living in a city where people riot not just because corrupt cops get set free, but because our basketball team wins.

Juvenal was contemptuous of the idea of bread and circuses since it distracted the people from real matters of civics and government. It was appealing to the lowest common denominator of satisfaction. But at least in the short run, it works. And is it all bad? People have always desired escapism, especially in times where they felt most confined. We want to experience fantastic tales, perhaps safely quenching that desire for adventure in our own hearts with a minimum of disruption in our routines. Those that can best deliver such adventures to us, we reward with our loyalty and what wealth we can spare.

And they, perhaps, are content in turn that we are fat, and sleep o’ nights.

Writers tend to do a lot of research. I think we even take a perverse enjoyment in the activity. You might have gotten a hint of that after I spent most of my last blog giddily describing all the physical details of San Antonio that made me want to turn it into a futuristic city-state.

So how about this one? I look up the term “utopia” — I know what it means, of course, but I wanted to get some more sense of the history behind the concept. It’s a concept I’ve been skeptical of for a long time, possibly ever since I heard it. Possibly. That’s just leaving open that I might have heard it at a very young age, an age where I still believed in Santa. And astronauts.

Let me quote you the second paragraph in the wikipedia entry on the subject:

The word comes from the Greek: οὐ (“not”) and τόπος (“place”) and means “no place”. The English homophone eutopia, derived from the Greek εὖ (“good” or “well”) and τόπος (“place”), means “good place”. This, due to the identical pronunciation of “utopia” and “eutopia”, gives rise to a double meaning.

Wow. The damn word is skeptical of itself? That’s… well, I did not know that. This is like the Ancient Greek version of my fascination with the fact Operation: Just Cause could be easily reinterpreted as Operation: Just ‘Cause.

I would have loved to shove this insight into the comic, but Dawn was already casting a fishy eye at the climbing word count. So I did what I felt was the next best thing… pack the page with a bunch of other double meanings and then bring the whole utopia controversy up in this blog.

I mean, it’s all just suspect. Plato’s Republic is the first recorded instance of trying to describe an ideal society, and it:

proposes a categorization of citizens into a rigid class structure of “golden,” “silver,” “bronze” and “iron” socioeconomic classes. The golden citizens are trained in a rigorous 50-year long educational program to be benign oligarchs, the “philosopher-kings.” The wisdom of these rulers will supposedly eliminate poverty and deprivation through fairly distributed resources, though the details on how to do this are unclear.

That’s the ideal society? Holy crap, no, that’s Huxley’s Brave New World, which was written as a nightmare, drug-fueled parody of utopian ideals.

What about the modern revival of the concept of Utopia, largely credited to Thomas More’s 1516 book of the same name? Well, seems there’s debate on whether he meant the society he depicted to be something practically achievable, or just a vehicle for satire in the way that Dante depicted the afterlife? When I read that More’s vision depends on having two slaves for every household, drawn from the ranks of criminals and foreigners and weighted down with chains made of gold, then I make it my fervent hope he was, as the Brits say, “taking the piss”. I know that the 16th Century was a time when Europe still considered slavery to be no big deal, but even so, I see problems with a society that hinges on chained criminals taking care of your household needs.

How can slavery and rigid caste systems be part of an ideal human society? At best, it’s an ideal society for those who aren’t slaves, or are at the top of the pyramid of privilege. And in an imagined society where everyone is equal, and equally free to pursue their interests, who exactly is going to haul the trash?

Santone isn’t a utopia. But what is? It seems like from the start we’ve had trouble even conceiving of a workable version such a society in our imaginations, much less making it happen in reality.

Unfortunate homonym or intentional double meaning, it really does seem that the Good Place also remains No Place. But if utopia has betrayed itself, I at least can still take comfort in the closing statement of one Detective William Somerset:

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” I agree with the second part.

Word.

Well, here we are. Comic #100 in the zombie ranch storyline, and the start of Episode 5. I wanted to do something special, both for us and for you. Up until now we’ve kept our locations purposely vague. We’re somewhere in Texas. Now we’re on the borders of Oklahoma, or looking in on a shadowy corporate office. It was time, at least in this case, to take a risk and finally get specific. Though the Z Ranch itself remains “somewhere out there”, we’ve cast our cowboy hat in the ring and declared that there’s no need to Remember The Alamo in the world of Zombie Ranch; this time around The Alamo, and the city surrounding it, never fell.

I’ve had that skyline vista of the last panel, with its contradictory pattern of welcome and isolationism, optimism and invasive authority, in my head for a long time now. Since before the start of Episode 2 I had the thought that San Antonio represented that big Safe Zone people were strutting around in, but we left it generic at that time while I fretted the details to figure out how feasible that might be. Isn’t it one of the sacred tenets of the zombie apocalypse that all major cities must be abandoned and/or wiped away? Certainly one recent book (which we’ve given a nod to in the form of graffiti) was very specific about San Antonio not surviving. How would that possibly work, especially for a bustling metropolis that in modern times is a big tourist destination?

Eventually I got over myself, considering I already have a world here where the dead walk (and are harvested for pharmaceuticals!), and there’s camera drones floating around with no more suspension provided than that of disbelief. Zombie Ranch is already not your usual zombie story, so why couldn’t there be the idea of a city that closed its borders early enough and policed itself effectively enough to get by?

Plus, the details of this particular city just kept drawing me back. The enclosing loops of highways that from overhead reminded me of ancient castles or fortified cities, with their interior palace or keep surrounded by an inner and outer bailey. An image of the Pam Am Expressway where I could envision steel or concrete barriers integrated with the underside to form not only an impenetrable wall, but one that was very easily moved around upon by its wardens.  Finding out the San Antonio River doesn’t just flow through the city, it actually bubbles up from deep underground only a few miles from downtown like a sort of gigantic natural well. The city runs its own power company, and is home to major military bases, medical complexes, biotech industries, and a certain broadcasting entity that inspires our own ClearStream Corporation.

Military and biotech? Hospitals? Wouldn’t those be ground zero? Well, think about that. Most of the apocalype scenarios involving these institutions hinge upon them not knowing what they’re dealing with until it’s too late. Not that I’m implying anything sinister here, but the Safe Zone of Santone responded in a lot of correct ways to the Great Plague, in very quick order.

Finally, I suppose I’ll just take cover behind those same rules of cool that allow me to have floating cameras. San Antonio is an iconic city of the Old West, a place many a hero of cowboy fiction passed through, and I want it. More than that, it’s a modern metropolis overlaid on those wild and dusty roots, where the Alamo is laid seige to these days not by Santa Anna, but by tall buildings and 21st century commercialism. All I have to do is tweak that to a starker contrast. So given the choice between Generic Safe Zone A and a place far more intriguing in past, present, and future, I go with Santone. If we’ve gotten some details wrong, I beg your indulgence for fiction’s sake. Trust me, I have to deal with the same thing every time I play a sandbox video game of Los Angeles, and those aren’t even set decades into a post-apocalyptic future.

What can I say? The last time a vision nagged at me like this, it was the start of this whole comic. And that was just a few months, compared to this concept kicking around in my skull for almost two years. I’m thrilled to finally be able to share it, and hope it was a fitting treat for those of you that have joined Dawn and myself on this continuing journey into a Weird New West.

Unless you’re new to this blog, you’re probably well aware that I am… wordy. Locquacious. Trending towards maximum verbosity. Don’t worry about looking all those up, it’s just different ways of saying that for better or worse I tend to assault you with walls of text in making my points. Unless I try really hard, I seem genetically incapable of keeping things short and concise. The 140 character limit on Twitter is, along with my continuing lack of a smartphone, precisely why I don’t use Twitter much. I like my words.

Now am I coherent? Probably not as much as I’d like to be, but it beats the hell out of when I’m speaking out loud, where I feel a near constant level of embarrassment over my mealy mouthed mumblings and stumblings and statements that sounded way better in my head than they do now that I’ve said them and oh god why doesn’t my brain work fast enough to edit properly before I open my yap? How does that saying (supposedly courtesy of Abraham Lincoln) go? “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

I reckon there’s a great majority of the population who feel the same way. But for communication to occur, someone has to take that risk.  If Honest Abe had hewn strictly to his own advice, one of the greatest speeches in U.S. history would never have been heard. And on a more topical front, panel programming at comic conventions would be little more than a handful of people at a table twiddling their thumbs while a bunch of other people stared at them in ever increasing boredom. Though at San Diego they might just be thankful enough to get off of their feet for awhile.

To paraphrase The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, there are two kinds of paneling in the comics world: the ones you use to make sequential art, and the ones you might eventually be part of where you have to keep the interest of a room full of strangers for 45 minutes. If you’re terrified of the latter, you’re not alone, but I’m here to tell you that that fear is natural. It is, in fact, good. How can I say this? If you’d rather hurl yourself off a roof than do public speaking, then how about this exchange from an interview with veteran movie stuntman Bob Fisher:

Being a stuntman for so long do you readily jump off building[sic] or get catapulted into cars without hesitation? Or is there a certain fear that you must consciously conquer?

A good friend of mine recently said, “If I lose that feeling (fear/butterflies) I need to quit doing stunts.” He meant that having fear is a good thing in that it keeps us in check, or from just jumping without thinking. And I agree. I like to think that I have a healthy respect of fear. I try and use it to focus and concentrate on the stunt. I still get excited whenever I get to do any stunt work, big or small.

I do not classify myself as an extravert. At a party full of strangers, I’ll often find a quiet corner to hide in. Yet this past Saturday, at the invitation of organizer (and The Other Grey Meat writer) James Maillet, I spent about seven hours’ worth of my time in live audio chat on various comics topics for his online convention (recordings are available here).  I loved it. I love the panels I’ve done at “normal” conventions as well. Is it scary? Do I feel foolish at times, especially after the fact? Of course. When I flew out to be part of CombatCon it was particularly terrifying, seeing as I was surrounded by people I considered actual professionals.

But there’s that weird thing I discovered when I pushed through the fear. People were listening to what I had to say. Complete strangers were nodding thoughtfully at my blather and taking notes. Even fellow panelists, like the famous guy whose book I thought was one of the coolest things ever when I read it in college, seemed to value my input despite my questionable pedigree.

I hope any of you in the creative fields have the chance to experience the same sort of exhilaration. No matter how unqualified or unpolished you think you are, chances are there is an audience out there that’s even less further along the path, and they’re eager to hear your experiences. You may find you know a lot more than you think, even if it’s just reciting a litany of mistakes you’ve made and want to help others avoid.

It may take some promotion on your part, since the most surefire way to get on a panel is to propose one yourself. Many conventions are hungry for programming and it’s just a matter of exchanging email or proposal forms with the organizers. The worst that happens is a “no”. Why bother? Well, it’s an excellent way to stand out from the exhibit hall crowd, since you’ll inevitably have people coming by to check out your booth afterwards (so long as you leave them a way to find you!). Unless you’re a big name you’re probably better off not theming the panel around your creation(s), but heck, I’m sure plenty of us have ideas on “what makes a good villain?” that could make for interesting discussion, and if you have interesting things to say people will remember you. That includes your fellow panelists. Exchange some contact info from them, and when they’re putting together a panel of their own down the road they might just extend you an invitation.

Of course, it’s no crime to avoid doing panels, especially if you’ve already got a lot on your plate. I can’t say I’ve gotten to the point where I try to put one together every time I go to a convention, especially if it’s my first time at that convention (and I’m still going through a lot of “firsts”). But if you do get the opportunity I highly recommend it. You might feel like the biggest nerd ever, but remember that your audience is most likely going to be a bunch of nerds as well, many of whom are probably impressed already that you had the courage to speak when they didn’t. Keep the fear, because as Bob Fisher said, the fear keeps you humble and keeps you thinking. Use it to focus, and contribute what you can. Maybe you can even do so in a much more efficient manner than I usually do… but hey, at least I can fill up those 45 minutes pretty well.

I still recall a singularly discouraging moment I suffered during San Diego Comic-Con 2007. It was around the time I had first started mulling over the idea of scripting a comic for Dawn to draw, but was still in the process of figuring out just how I might do that effectively.

It also happened to be the 25th anniversay of Groo the Wanderer, which happened to be the first comic I ever bought at any convention, in a dingy basement at the Shrine Auditorium which my dad had agreed to escort my young self to. So I was in line to have Sergio Aragones sign a collection as a return gift to my dad, and just happened to be passing by the table of a couple of the artists who were currently working on the Fables series.

Well, we got into a brief conversation about how much I was enjoying Fables, and then, seeing as I had the ear of a couple of pros, I asked what sort of techniques Bill Willingham used as a writer to communicate with his artists. Well, apparently Bill Willingham is an artist in his own right, so the answer I got was nothing more than a clipped “learn to draw” before they proceeded to ignore me.

I’ve seen a Willingham script since then and it wasn’t a bunch of drawings. I don’t know, maybe they were just pissed at me for being part of the Aragones line that was temporarily blocking their table, but it was crushingly dismissive at the time. “Learn to draw” — easy enough, I’ll get right on that! Should only take several years and possibly end up being a talent I don’t even possess. Thanks, guys!

Well, if nothing else that conversation is what’s made it so that now that I sit on the other side of the table, I try to always answer people helpfully when they ask me the same sorts of things.

Or at least I try to answer thoroughly. You see, four years later I’m at the point where I can distance myself from the disappointment and reflect that “learn to draw” probably does qualify as good advice, if it’s explained a little better. I don’t know if my thoughts now are what they actually meant, but I like to imagine it is since it makes them a little less mean-spirited.

The idea would be that “learn to draw” doesn’t mean you have to, as a writer, be capable of producing the kind of whizzbang, knock-their-socks-off effort that professionals who went to school and have been drawing constantly since they were ten can whip out. A better phrase might be “learn to storyboard”. Learn how to tell a story visually, even if your characters might look like burn victims with anatomical proportions unknown to mortal men. Your artist can fix that, so long as you can inject a sense of expression and environment for them to work from.

I just recently watched the biopic American Splendor, which is about the life and times of comics writer Harvey Pekar. He was never a great artist. In fact, he’s shown doing exactly what he did for all his years of scripting… laying out panels with stick figures. That’s all he ever did for his whole career, and it worked, and I wished I’d known about this a long time ago.

There it is, two seated people silently staring at each other over a table — and the artists he worked with loved it. I don’t know if every artist is the same way, but Dawn has told me before that even a stick figure layout can communicate to her more about what I want than several paragraphs of instructional text. It’s a visual thing.

Looking at things from the Pekar perspective is a lot less intimidating, isn’t it? I still believe I can’t draw, but I feel like I can at least draw better than Harvey (may he rest in peace), and if he could be the writer of several internationally acclaimed comics, then there’s hope that I, too, can “learn to draw”.

So anyhow, in accordance with that, what started as a bit of a joke has become more. One common feature of conventions is people browsing artist’s alley with their sketchbooks in hand, asking if they can get a drawing from the man (or woman) behind the table. But sometimes Dawn wasn’t at the table, and so they’d be asking me, and I’d wave them off frantically by stating I wasn’t the artist they were looking for. Then at last year’s LBCC a little girl was insistent — “Pleeease?” she begged, not knowing the amateur horror she was calling to be unleashed. So I drew her one of the stick zombies I’d been doodling, signed the page and — well, if she hated it, she was at least polite enough to wait until she was out of sight before tearing it out of her once-pristine journal and jumping up and down on it.

That same stick zombie (with a few variations) is now gracing several sketchbooks, even though I kept warning people they were making a mistake. Finally, when we exhibited for the first time at San Diego Comic-Con this year, I decided to just stop protesting and offer free “Writer Sketches” upon request. The customer could name any commission they wanted, but the results were, naturally, At Their Own Risk.

I ended up having a lot of fun, and people were appreciative of their sketches in the way only someone with completely rock bottom expectations can be. So now if someone at a convention asks me to draw, I give them fair warning, but I’ll do it. The thing is, not only is it fun, it’s actually good practice. I can’t draw photorealistic people, so instead I just try to make them recognizable. What (more or less) are they wearing? What are they doing? Let me play with a really simple representation of a face and see if I can capture a grimace of “worried anger”. I mean, if you’ve ever watched old videos of people like Charles Schulz drawing, you realize how just a few simple lines can come together to create  something unquestionably Snoopy.

Forget about making the head and chin look pretty… let’s concentrate on making the face look happy or sad. Forget if the legs don’t come out the right length, let’s see if I can express the essence of someone tip-toeing stealthily. Those are the storytelling bits. Those are the kinds of elements that I feel are really going to matter when I’m trying to show Dawn what I want for the next page. I’ve even started experimenting without someone asking me to sully their sketchbook, during those lulls when no one’s about. Just trying to put some approximation of the image in my head on paper. I figure practice may not make me perfect, but it might at least make me adequate.

If you’ve been reading this blog even semi-regularly you’re probably aware of my ongoing love affair with the TV Tropes website. This entrancing siren is a user-maintained database documenting all the fiddly bits and techniques we love to use and recognize in the creation or appreciation of fiction (and sometimes non-fiction as well), and whenever I go visit her I usually end up with far too many browser windows open as I giddily peruse what she has to offer. Maybe it’s just me speaking as a writer, but browsing a tongue-in-cheek explication of the tendency in movies and television for someone shot with a gun to go flipping acrobatically to their doom, complete with examples, is some quality edutainment.

I’ve decided it’s time to take this relationship to the next level.

You see, TV Tropes also allows for creative works to have posted entries that give details on the work, followed by a list of tropes embodied by its elements. You can see an example here with The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. But you don’t have to be a world-famous classic to have a spot, in fact one of the first things TV Tropes tells you is that, unlike the exclusionary standards of stuffy ol’ Wikipedia, There Is No Such Thing As Notability. All works are notable. Even, theoretically speaking, a homegrown web comic about cowboys and cowgirls ranching a herd of zombies.

But Dawn and I are often humble to a fault. I could have added us as soon as we started, but even now, two years down the road, a little voice is railing against the egotism of doing so. If we truly belonged there, wouldn’t some fan have gone through the trouble of adding us already? Isn’t it horribly presumptuous for a creator to slap up their own work? Shouldn’t I just wait until it happens naturally as a result of us being inspiring and, uh… notable enough?

Well, I’ve been talking to other webcomic peers lately and a lot of them have not only “self-published” a TV Tropes entry, they’re seeing a decent amount of exposure out of having done so. Based on that, I resolved that I need to get over myself and get this done. After all, I know there’s at least a few of you out there who really love what Dawn and I are doing, and not just because you’re friends or relatives but because you genuinely feel we’re telling a unique and interesting story.

So within the next few weeks I’m hoping to get a Zombie Ranch page together and posted. I’ll do all the coding and the writing and such, but what I’m hoping from you folks is some help with suggestions on the tropes we’ve had examples of so far.  Because there are a lot of tropes on the site, and I’ve only just begun to make my own list. This could be as simple as just naming a trope or giving me a link to check out. Tropes cover just about everything from situations, to visuals, to characters and beyond. For example, one of the first items on my list is the Determined Homesteader entry, which is a Western character archetype I feel Suzie embodies. In the examples section of the page I’m then intending to put:

Determined Homesteader: Suzie

Simple enough, right? Some other entries on my list are Zombie Apocalypse, Our Zombies Are Different, Raising the Steaks, Cowboy, Schizo Tech, Naive Newcomer and Shoot The Dog.

But I’d love more suggestions. There may be things I’ve forgotten or not even thought of which would apply. We don’t have to cover everything, especially because once I get this up and running, anyone can add to it later on, but if you do have thoughts please post them in the comments or you can email them to me at clint @ zombieranchcomic.com — I figure the more brains (mmm… brains…) I have giving input, the faster this’ll go.

Hope to hear from you!