Category: Writer’s Blog

It is always darkest before the Dawn…

But this time… there will be no Dawn!

How dramatic was that? And now my wife & comic partner is going to ruin it all if she happens to make a filler post, but we’ll have to see just how much offishness she’s going to have with her week off. We’re both pretty busy getting back into the day job grind after our family gathering in San Francisco, which was a fun time. I could complain about it being cold and rainy, but the fact is it was plenty cold and rainy down in L.A., at least on the days we left and came back. It looked like the Rose Parade was spared, but we watched that remotely.

I don’t mind watching the Tournament of Roses remotely. I have a great abundance of pollen and flower allergies to contend with, which takes away the upside that we live within a few blocks of the parade route and float viewing area. The complimentary tickets we receive are just things that I pass on to family and friends, and meanwhile we still enjoy the benefits of not being able to park on our own street for a few days a year. Might as well leave the car at the airport, right?

While in San Francisco we checked out the Moscone Convention Center, or at least a small portion of it since it turns out that Moscone represents an entire complex of buildings and outdoor spaces. Now that I’m home and checking maps it doesn’t look like we ever saw the actual building that WonderCon takes place in, much less APE. Matter of fact, it turns out APE is held in an entirely different location several blocks away, so that was even more of a fail on my part.

Let me back up a moment for those unfamiliar with the “convention circuit”. WonderCon and APE (the Alternative Press Expo) are the other two expositions directly run by the same people who are responsible for San Diego Comic-Con. They are smaller scale, but then again compared to SDCC that’s not saying much. WonderCon occurs in April and APE in October, and both are held in San Francisco, so we were interested in scouting out their locations as part of our hoped for expanding of Zombie Ranch operations in 2011. Also influencing our interest was the fact that by getting pro status with San Diego, we also qualified as pros for WonderCon, meaning we can get free passes to see the show. The plan right now is to go to WonderCon as pure attendees, and then hopefully get in on APE as exhibitors… this means APE on one weekend of October, and then Long Beach Comic Con the next, but all the independent publishing folks we’ve talked to really recommend APE as a “gateway convention” to getting approved for the small press section in San Diego. Our 2011 application for SDCC Small Press was again denied, which again both disappoints and elates (elation because it means we get to wander free for at least one more year), but we’re really pulling for 2012 to go through.

By the end of this year we’re hoping not only to have a label company up and running for Zombie Ranch, but also another comic for public consumption. This new comic will still be primarily web-based, but we may be publishing it in “chunks” rather than page-per-week format. It’s going to be a humorous fantasy theme, and before you say that there’s already a gajillion of such offerings online (including my much enjoyed Rusty & Co.), I must say that Dawn has been looking forwards to telling this story for a long time. Whereas Zombie Ranch is a project that I write and she draws, the new comic (for now code-named “Saturnine”) is a project that she will draw and I will write. If that’s confusing to contemplate, let’s just say that she gets to be much more in the driver’s seat this time around, and she’s being rather disturbingly giddy about that.

So that’s what’s currently on the agenda. Meanwhile I caught a showing of the True Grit remake, but decided to combine that with actually reading the book, which I’m not quite done with as of this writing. Dawn also retrieved a tome entitled ‘Zombies vs. Unicorns’ from a bookstore we browsed in the Haight-Ashbury district, but that means she’s got first crack at it and has made noises of reviewing it her own self. I don’t know about you lot, but I’m intrigued.

Next week, the story of Zombie Ranch continues. See you then, and Happy New Year!

If Dawn hasn’t declared as such already, I’ll repeat the message here, which is that this coming week will be our brief “winter vacation”. I’ll most likely have a blog up, but the comic will resume on January 12th. Hope everyone had/has Happy Holidays!

I had mentioned this pair of books a couple blogs ago, and I’ll say this much for being sick: I definitely had time to catch up on my reading.

Day By Day Armageddon

Day By Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile

This series started, according to the introduction in the first book, as a free publication on the web, which again shows the potential of an emerging 21st century business model: make a good product, gather an audience, and if it works out well enough the publishers may come calling. Perhaps one day that will happen for Zombie Ranch, but in the meantime it’s great to see the success stories of others in action, particularly when they result in something fantastic like Day By Day Armageddon.

The books are written by J.L. Bourne, drawing on his real-life experiences in the U.S. Military to present a tale of an American soldier who decides to keep a journal of his life shortly before a zombie apocalypse turns the world into a living hell. Appropriately enough for the time of this blog, the journal is his New Year’s Resolution, but only a few days after January 1st, the first vague reports are coming through of a nasty new strain of flu hitting China. And we all know where that’s going to lead…

On a side note, it’s interesting that both World War Z and this series decided to center ground zero of their zombie apocalypse in China. Sure, it’s the most populous nation on Earth, coupled with a government that’s not keen on sharing information with either its populace or the world at large, but if I were an analytical man (and I am) I’d say the idea runs deeper than just that and touches on the sort of zeitgeist that was responsible for turning Invasion of the Body Snatchers into a Communist allegory. China these days is the new Russia, an emerging bogeyman threatening America’s “We’re the only Superpower” status, and it’s even more complicated than that because as far as I know we didn’t owe billions of dollars of trade debt to Russia during the Cold War. China doesn’t even need to be a military superpower considering how much money the U.S. has tied up there. China is that Communist state that just won’t have the good grace to collapse in on itself or stay in the economic minor leagues, and it could be easily argued that the U.S. had a big hand in “creating the monster”.

That’s all an admittedly oversimplified take on the situation, but as an American myself, I think deep down on some level, China makes us uneasy these days, and we know that what affects China affects us. There’s also, perhaps, a distrust of government policies that led us to this point… and so on at least two occasions now, I’ve read zombie apocalypse scenarios that have their flashpoint in China, quickly spread to the globe, and in the U.S. at least there’s a combination of press blackouts and overconfidence that lead to disastrous consequences. Does the 21st century zombie apocalypse on some level reflect on a global society where all nations are tied together and a stock market crash on one side of the world causes hunger and homelessness on the other side? If so, then that could be one big reason the genre got so popular recently.

I should be getting back to Mr. Bourne’s book, though, and trust me, he isn’t wasting time with all this philosophy. The entries in his soldier’s journal are a dry sort of prose, often loaded down with minute details of his preparations for survival, and yet are compelling in spite of that. His matter-of-fact descriptions of the first weeks of January, where things are starting to fall apart, convey a tactile, grass roots appreciation of the situation that trumps any amount of poetry or scientific exposition, and develop a picture of the frightened but determined human being behind the terse words.

Having read both books so far, I cannot recommend them enough if you hunger for a dose of serious, well considered zombie survival fiction. Bourne is not big on flowery description or dialogue, but the descriptions he does give will stick with you. For a chosen format that represents a journal being written in entries after the action being described has taken place, Bourne still manages terse, visceral moments of tension and horror, moments that can make you forget that the protagonist must have survived them or you wouldn’t be reading his words. And though I say there’s a distinct lack of “flora” in the writing, there are times where it can be downright artful in its rhythms or observations.

You grow to care for this man and his struggle to survive, and the struggles of those he comes in contact with. You want to keep turning the pages. This is the first (and perhaps most important) accomplishment Bourne achieves. The second is one I talked about before when I reviewed the first episode of The Walking Dead, the ability to craft a deadly serious, compelling vision of the zombie apocalypse without straying into camp. The third is that, at least in my opinion, none of the events that occur feel forced for dramatic effect. There are many times where supply runs and the like are accomplished routinely or careful plans work out okay, and sometimes the SNAFUs come from very unexpected angles. Everything is presented with a high dose of realism: the protagonist may be a trained military officer, but he’s not Superman. He misses shots. He confesses terrors. When he’s hurt, he needs time to recover. When he’s too close to an explosion, he has to write later on that he doesn’t even remember the immediate aftermath and had to be filled in on it by the friends who dragged him to safety.

He also keeps his weapons oiled, his survival gear inventoried, and is always trying to think ahead to the next options should the current safe haven be compromised. It’s a nice, balanced picture of a man in the situation who’s not Hollywood competent, but also isn’t Hollywood stupid. The same goes for the other survivors around him. When they come upon a young lady trapped in a car, she’s so dehydrated they think at first she’s dead, and the back seat is full of containers filled with… well, exactly what you’d figure they’d be filled with if any human being were trapped in a confined space with no facilities. She wasn’t going to last much longer, but holding out for days under those conditions while the living dead pounded and moaned on the windows day and night shows immediately that she’s not just the usual screaming fluff. If it’s ever made into a movie they’ll probably delete the details here, since everyone knows girls don’t poop. But those little details, fair or foul, are what really keep the narrative in focus.

You do have to accept a central conceit of most zombie apocalypsii, which is that things go straight to hell hard, fast, and in such a thorough way that within a month the small bit of the U.S. Government left is authorizing nuclear strikes on its own cities. But if that works for you, the rest proceeds in a logical enough fashion, even once we get to book two and the scope of the man’s experience starts going from a local to a national and even global concern. Perhaps you might even consider matters at this point to devolve into some shark jumping, but I feel like it was all handled gradually and skillfully enough not to stray too far from where things started. The second book in particular has a little appendix that all but spells out how the foetid zombie ball got rolling, but at its core Day By Day Armageddon remains a tale told by one man, doing the best he can to keep himself and those he cares about alive in the face of disaster, clinging to a thin shred of hope in the darkest of days… day by day.

And not in the (arguably) good Internet way. No, for the past week I’ve been in the throes of a cold which has been repeatedly attempting to kick my ass up through my sinuses, and if not quite succeeding in that, it’s at least doing a fine job of being debilitating.

So that said, I think for once I’m going to spare you, my handful of regular readers, from my usual assault of words, and spare my phlegm-clogged brain from trying to think of them. What the heck, it’s the Holidays. We’ve got the comic out, and another one coming next week… then the week after that the comic will take a quick break, but I’ll probably still do a blog at that point in penance for missing this one.

Take care and stay healthy, everyone! (trust me, the alternative sucks)

You know what the single most insidious feature of Amazon.com is? It’s not 1-click ordering, or their immense selection, or their discounts… it’s that Super Saver Shipping deal. You buy $25 or more of qualifying items, and they ship to you for free.

Admittedly books have gotten expensive these days along with most everything else (I can now look back and recall, in quavering old man tones, the 1990s where gas was down to 99 cents a gallon), but it’s still rare to find one that by itself is over $25, at least on Amazon. Maybe the hardcovers, but I usually prefer my print reading in a more portable format. So you start out buying a $10 book, but really, the shipping’s gonna kick it up a few more dollars, and by that point, why not just find a couple more books so you can hit that magic number? Oh, and Amazon makes it easy by recommending books with similar genres and subjects to the one you’re already browsing.

Anyhow, I went in to buy one zombie novel and ended up with three. Two of them were part of the same series and I’ll get to them another day. The original selection was chosen based on a recommendation from one of our readers: Feed, by Mira Grant.

I took the plunge on this book mainly because it was another zombie setting that, like Zombie Ranch, is a vision of a couple decades down the road from the apocalypse, where humans and the undead have settled into an uneasy equilibrium.  Well, the undead don’t really care about the balance of power, but for the humans things have definitely progressed to the point of “We survived. Now what?”

The cover of Feed is a bloody RSS logo, which is highly appropriate considering the story is told from the point of view of a professional news blogger and her cohorts. In this world, online news has become perhaps the main way people get information, and part of this shift is because the mainstream news did such a poor job when the zombie crisis first occurred. Although Grant never makes a direct reference to it, her descriptions of people using social networking and blogs to provide alerts and assistance to others struggling to survive reminded me of the recent riots in Iran where Twitter became one of the only sources of info. Basically, the heavy implication is that services like Twitter allowed humanity to survive, and so the blogosphere, while still struggling somewhat against the prejudice of traditional media, has much more clout and legitimacy than before. In this case, for the first time ever, the main character’s blogsite group is invited to be part of a presidential campaign’s press corps.

What? Oh yes, in Feed there’s still enough of a U.S. for politics as usual, and this is despite Grant choosing her zombie delivery device to be one of the nastiest possible, the kind that not only can get you through a scratch or bite from the infected, but will raise up anyone who dies for any other reason. Not just humans, but any mammal weighing at least 40 pounds (and those animals can infect people in turn). The thought behind how the disease works, and how the populace has learned to deal with these realities, is very thorough and one of the best parts of the book to me. Which, hey, that’s mainly why I picked up the novel in the first place, to see someone else’s thoughts on a post-zom world.  I’m not enough of a scientist to tell you if it’s all as kosher as it seems to a layman, but she certainly had a shopping list of experts she consulted, and it has an internal logic to it that works for me.

But though worldbuilding is all well and good, what’s the story like? Well, I admit, I’m a sucker for the fantastic environment Grant has created, but I did feel at times like the narrative didn’t quite measure up to that same standard. It could be because the story is told from the point of view of a “just-the-facts” style person and there are so many elements of realistic detail that there are times where I felt the dialogue was a little too cinematic. Witty one-liners being tossed back and forth when zombies are groping for your flesh have their place, but it seemed out of place in a piece whose tone was otherwise so serious. Also, the very ending confrontation resorts to a cliche that again, seemed more appropriate to a Schwarzenegger movie as well as being one of the few instances where, looking back on it, what happens really makes no sense.

I can’t really delve into why it doesn’t without spoilers, though, and I won’t spoil it because I honestly still believe this book was entirely worth the purchase. I’m quibbling with my criticisms on the writing, in part because I really can’t say I’m doing any better. It’s also part 1 of a series, so I’ll be interested to see if the narrative portion smooths out more for part 2 and beyond… again, Feed represents a really well thought out take on Life-After-Undeath, and does so in a world that didn’t completely fall apart when the dead rose. The CDC is still around, for instance… so take that, Walking Dead series!

Also, there’s a very entertaining website.

Feed is $9.99 on Amazon currently, so all you gotta do is find $15.01 more of purchases and you get your super saver freak on! I’ll actually spoil a bit of surprise here and say the other two books I bought are from the “Day to Day Armageddon” series by J.L. Bourne. I’ll review them another time, but short version? They’re great. Pick ’em up.

There are a lot of writing guides out there offering tips to those trying to step up their game with their own fictional offerings. There’s a lot of advice in those guides, presented with varying degrees of authority and mandate, and sometimes hoping you’ll be willing to pay for the privilege rather than just browsing the free ones (semi-pro tip: they most often say the same things).

Now, writing guides are not useless, especially if you’ve never read any. In fact, I encourage people interested in writing to read a lot of them, despite the redundancies you’ll come across. The most fascinating thing about them is not what the professional, published, successful writers delivering them your way have to say that’s the same, but what they have to say that’s different. Sometimes they’ll blatantly contradict one another on the habits and techniques that will lead you down the golden path. Sometimes, they’ll even contradict themselves. If you experience enough lists of guidelines, you may get the feeling that the ultimate statement regarding writing is, “Don’t do this, it’s bad and never works out well… unless it does.”

Putting it another way, it’s like the old argument about Jesus which usually ended in some cocky teenager getting smacked.

“Cut your damn hair!”

“Jesus had long hair!”

“That’s different. He was Jesus!”

So for writing, we have:

“Shorten your damn sentence!”

“Faulkner wrote run on sentences!”

“That’s different. He was Faulkner!”

This usually ends in some cocky creative writing student getting a fail. But to be fair, I do agree it’s at least important to know the rules before you think about breaking them. You might still end up with crap, but at least you’re experimenting rather than just being ignorant. So check out all those different authors and their different rules, and see which ones make sense for your work.

And honestly, sometimes, you get little gems of insight you might not have thought about, and that a dozen other guides didn’t mention either (maybe that particular author thought they were too obvious? who knows). For example, relating to this week’s comic is a gem I picked up along the way, which sadly I can’t remember the proper attribution for anymore, and it regards the senses. To badly paraphrase the original tip, the claim was that one of the hallmarks of a beginning writer is that they rely too heavily on how things look or sound, and never give consideration to other elements of the characters’ environment, especially in terms of how things smell.

Maybe this is because humans don’t prioritize smell all that much, or that we don’t especially expect it in our entertainment media. I mean, I don’t, I’m actually rather glad that Smell-O-Vision was a failed experiment in immersive cinema that Hollywood has yet to try again. But we do notice smells, and, good or bad, they do have a big influence on our memories and reactions. They can even show, more than anything else, the difference between a native and a newcomer to a certain place. To me, a barnyard or ranch is still an almost eye-wateringly overpowering experience, while for my wife that same scent is a comforting memory of growing up. Conversely, someone who grew up on a mountain farm would probably feel like choking on the streets of Downtown L.A., while I looked oddly at them and wondered what the problem was.

So, imagine the sort of stench a zombie ranch would have hanging over it… and yet, that stench would be all but invisible to people who have worked there all their lives. Certainly it would be invisible to a TV Crew whose only contact is remote drones being operated from miles away. But oh, poor Rosa. She may be no stranger to zombies, but it’s like the difference between driving by a cow pasture and being next to a slaughterhouse on a hot day. Her chutzpah has been undone in dramatic fashion by the simple expedient of no longer being upwind. And if characters have their own lives, as many writers will claim, then somewhere, somewhen, she’s cursing me for having read that guide.

Have I mentioned how many weird ideas come out of Dawn’s mind on a near daily basis? I believe I have. As evidence, this comic would not exist if it were otherwise.

If not captured and turned into webcomics or art, these ideas tend to keep circulating and coming up every so often. One of the ones that always had her excited when it came back around was the following:

“You know that old game Oregon Trail? They should totally remake that into a zombie apocalypse thing and call it Organ Trail!” (may be paraphrased)

Oregon Trail has to be one of the oldest personal computer games ever made. It debuted before I was born, and that’s saying something these days. What’s also saying something is that it’s gone all the way from 1971 to 2010 without much change, being both simple and addictive. It was a shoo-in for the new era of cellphones and mobile devices, attracting an entire new generation as well as nostalgic older folks who might remember playing it on their Apple II or DOS PC. In the original, you managed a 19th century wagon train finding its way to the (then) Oregon Territory, trying to keep your people alive through all manner of hardships and misfortune such as famine, disease, and attacks by wild animals. Dysentery was a particularly notorious killer, enough to warrant its own t-shirt.

Anyhow, the thing is, some other people had the same idea Dawn did, right down to the puntastic name alteration. Organ Trail is upon us, courtesy of indie game developers The Men Who Wear Many Hats. We’re totally suing.

Just kidding. There is, after all, such a thing as parallel evolution, especially in the case of an idea just begging to be brought to (un)life. These guys did a great job adapting that core, addictive gameplay of the original into a zombie setting. Instead of a wagon train, you and your crew of survivors pile into a station wagon and hit the road from a soon-to-be-nuked Washington D.C. You have eight hours time to split up between scavenging for various supplies like food, bullets, and car parts before starting your convoluted journey through the apocalypse in an attempt to reach the Safe Haven (coincidentally enough, in Oregon).

Oh, you can choose to start as one of three different professions. The cop is much more equipped for survival than the lawyer, but the lawyer will give you the most bonus points if you make it. Being a glutton for punishment, I went the lawyer route. Pro tip, though: don’t overdo it on the food scavenging. It’s the only thing you can hunt up along the way, everything else has to be traded for as opportunity arises. I spent several stranded, nervous hours outside D.C. after I busted a tire almost as soon as we started. Luckily the nuke didn’t appear to reach that far.

The graphics are straight up 1970s Apple II quality, which has a certain nostalgic feel but also ensures your browser or device should have no trouble playing it. As you progress you’ll end up passing through various cities and landmarks where you can get hints from other survivors, trade for more supplies and rest in relative safety. This is where the game developers show that they’re great devotees not only of Oregon Trail but of the zombie genre, since the landmarks you’ll hit represent just about every classic zombie movie setting you can think of, including a very deliberate placement of A Mall and A Farmhouse in Pennsylvania.

In the original you hunted animals for food. In Organ Trail, you guide your little guy through a landscape as grocery bags and shopping carts appear to be grabbed, while trying to shoot or dodge an ever increasing horde of undead. The diseases your crew suffers also will have some familiar names to zombie fanatics, such as “Green Flu” or “The G-Virus”. On occasion, your progress will be blocked by a horde that you’ll need to try to sneak through or fight through, and the animations of doing so are strangely nailbiting despite their simplicity.

By far the most insidious feature, though, is that as far as I can tell there is no save function, which meant I was glued to the addictive thing for several hours because dammit, I was getting to Oregon. I made it there with 3 of my 5 original people, with my two losses being frustratingly random and unavoidable (You may grow to hate the message “X wandered off and you couldn’t find them”), but the original game also apparently had such smackdowns of fate. Then again, it’s still in Beta, so maybe enough complaints and they might tweak that particular bit of nostalgia.

In any case, it was fun. And free. So if you’ve got some time on your hands for some old-school fun in a new-school theme, I say check it out. Such a simple game, but it still evokes moments of desperation, relief, and even triumph, and changing it over to the modern zombie apocalypse fit like a rotting glove. Dawn was right, and so are The Men Who Wear Many Hats. Great brains think alike. At least, until they’re eaten.

Netflix Instant is a wonderful thing. For less than 10 bucks a month you get unlimited access in addition to your one-at-a-time DVD mailer allotment, with the only limitation being you need some sort of broadband-enabled hardware to stream it (your computer will do if you don’t have an Xbox or Wii to work with). Only a small portion of their total inventory is available this way, but there’s more than you might think, from new releases all the way back to the silent movie era.

I regret to say I’m not very efficient with this abundance of riches, however. My instant queue has had upwards of 30 shows in it for some time now, and I can’t just excuse that by saying Dawn uses the same account. The classic version of Phantom of the Opera has been sitting there for quite awhile, staring at me with sunken-eyed accusation every time we browse on through to watch another episode of Pawn Stars.

Honestly, part of it really is the fact there’s another person sharing the living space who really isn’t interested in watching Phantom of the Opera at that moment when you have the time and inclination to do so. So it has to wait for that celestial alignment when you have time on your hands, are in the mood to watch, and the roommate/significant other is out of the apartment so that their own mood doesn’t factor into things. The last time this alignment occurred, I still regrettably betrayed the Phantom, and instead fired up some of the leftover zombie movies I’d queued up just prior to Halloween, including George A. Romero’s latest offering, Survival of the Dead.

If you remember my review of Diary of the Dead, you’ll know I feel the father of the modern zombie genre has lost a step (or many steps… perhaps even a leg…) since his early days. Sometimes I feel like one of those grumbling old men complaining it was all better in the olden days, and certainly Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead had their share of cheesy moments and sketchy characterizations. In fact, I’m not even a hater on Land of the Dead, since it touched on the concept that zombies might find a new consciousness emerging on the other side of death, a thought he’d already brought up in Day of the Dead with Bub. Bub is what elevates Day of the Dead to being a great movie for me even through the cheese, partly because Romero managed to make a zombie the most sympathetic character, but also because it was a twistedly hopeful message going beyond the human survivors escaping: Bub doesn’t backslide into mindlessness, even after his “father” is murdered. In fact, he ends up attacking someone in a properly civilized manner–shooting them–with a properly civilized motive: revenge. It’s still markedly antisocial behavior, true, but it’s reasoned behavior, and that implies that somewhere down the road in Romero’s Day of the Dead world, zombies could be reasoned with.

Whether or not that notion is sacrilege to you, it was still an interesting one to leave us with. Land of the Dead expanded upon it, culminating in having Big Daddy lead his horde in a semi-organized assault on the humans that had been “persecuting” them (shades of I Am Legend, there), but after that Romero took a big step back with Diary and started the apocalypse clock over again, in the process telling a story I felt he’d already told, and told better.

Which brings me to Survival of the Dead, a movie I felt was meant as a spiritual successor to Day of the Dead, but one that became very confused along the way. Rather than go into all the details, I’ll refer you to a review that pretty much sums up both the (very odd) plot and my reactions: Click Here

Long story short, at the core of this I think Romero was again trying to explore the idea of somehow reaching out to the zombies and modifying their behavior, but this time the only result is that they decide to broaden their eating habits. Along the way, there’s a lot of half-developed headscratchers, such as two clans of Irishmen fighting over an island within ferry distance of the coast of modern day Delaware. There’s also some zombie wrangling in a sort-of-cowboy-setting, which is of course something I wanted to see, but it’s somehow developed even less than the limited wrangling scenes they did in the original Day of the Dead. Any social commentary message seems to be all over the place, as well as the characters’ motives. The same man will lecture people one moment about not showing proper respect for the (un)dead, then soon after is casually lighting his cigarette off of one he just needlessly set on fire. A teenager met just a few days after the outbreak is inexplicably competent with all manner of weaponry, and instead of getting his back story we get the back story of another man which is not especially relevant or interesting. Not that the teenager’s story would have been interesting either, perhaps, but I wish Romero had at least given a wink to us in terms of accepting his gun acumen.

Maybe I just go into these things expecting too much from Romero, or hoping to see some of the old magic. I admit, I had the same long run with John Carpenter before finally giving up on him… and frankly, even a crappy Romero zombie movie is still better than at least half or more the zombie movies out there, because you can still see the neat ideas wanting to break through. Hell, Romero inverts the Zombie Ranch aesthetic by having a zombie woman riding a normal horse… which I suppose isn’t much stranger than a normal woman riding a zombie horse, but sooner or later people are going to want to know why that’s happening, and probably particularly how a Romero-style uncoordinated shambler can mount and ride a horse successfully. That’s after all one of the big things people like about Romero: he stuck to his guns with his original vision and hasn’t jumped on the “fast zombie” bandwagon… but because of that, there’s some activities his zombies probably oughtn’t to be doing without it being commented on as a big anomaly. Here it’s just “Oh yeah, she’s still riding”. At a gallop. Jumping fences.

I don’t mean to get on my high horse about this (heh heh), since there’s many bits of the Zombie Ranch world that ain’t been explained yet… but on the other hand, I have the luxury of taking my time with them. The story’s not over yet. Survival of the Dead has 90 minutes to tell its tale, and by the time it’s over the only real reaction I had was “Well… that happened”. Somewhere in there I do believe the themes of Day of the Dead were there, wanting to be revisited in a more modern context… but the story had already been told, and told better the first time around.

This week’s comic delves a bit more into the moral/legal framework of the Zombie Ranch world, which I must admit is one of the main reasons I was excited with developing the concept in the first place. Let’s face it, there’s plenty of zombie fiction out there dealing with the apocalypse as it happens, or the months/years immediately after… but not so much that thinks about what life might be like a few decades down the road. If history (and even pre-history) has shown us one thing, it’s that humanity are a bunch of real persistent buggers, even (or perhaps especially) in the worst of circumstances. Ice Age? Keep going. Collapse of Rome? Keep going. Black Death? Keep going. Even on a smaller scale, you have numerous examples of civilians in war zones somehow adjusting to being bombed and raped and murdered on an unconscionably regular basis, and carrying on. What’s unconscionable, even insane under our circumstances became routine under theirs, sometimes in only a matter of months.

The point is that for better or worse, people adjust. Ask them how they can possibly live like they do, and they will shrug. It’s enough that they live. Morals, law, and philosophy can wait, although if it goes on long enough, new codes of conduct can and will emerge. Eventually, you may get an entire generation who have trouble imagining there was ever any other way. Exploring this phenomenon is, I think, at the heart of a lot of themes of apocalyptic fiction, and I see no reason why a zombie apocalypse should be any different–which is probably one of the main reasons I was underwhelmed when I watched The Quick and the Undead several months ago: a movie purportedly set 82 years after the dead started walking should not really have any angsty scenes involving strangers reluctant to kill other strangers who have been bitten, presuming being bitten = inevitable zombification (and it did).

You can certainly make the argument that The Quick and the Undead was one of those films where you really shouldn’t bother trying to make sense out of what’s happening, but when an outright spoof like Shaun of the Dead makes more logical and emotional sense than a purportedly “serious” piece, well, there’s the heart of the matter. Hell, Shaun of the Dead even gave glimpses into how zombies might be incorporated into daily life once the immediate crisis was dealt with, and while they were meant for humorous effect, on another level they were funny because “Yeah… why *wouldn’t* there be zombie game shows?”

Now is Zombie Ranch meant as some hardcore, painstakingly researched take on how the world really might be once it adjusted to zombies in its midst? Heck no, but on the other hand the surviving folks of the Wild Zones have had a long time to adjust to their situation, and the laws of the new frontier, when they’re enforced at all, grew out of making official what people were already doing from a practical survival standpoint. You have to figure that after the first few years of denial and tears, it got to the point most sane and reasonable folk finally agreed that not killing grandma when she got bitten just put everybody at risk for no good reason.

Sane and reasonable, of course, in the context of this Weird New West. But when everything’s gone off kilter, after awhile it’s only the people on the outside who are going to notice  that the angle’s weird.

And then again, maybe they’re the straight and level ones, and you’re the one who ended up with the skewed perspective?

I’ll just meditate on my novelty nudie pen awhiles while y’all contemplate that.

Last week I had three big zombie-related topics on my mind, and opted to write about our Zombie Ranch outing to Long Beach Comic Con 2010. That left out any more than just a brief mention of AMC’s premiere of “The Walking Dead”, and Rockstar’s DLC release of their Undead Nightmare pack for Red Dead Redemption.

Now, since I did still want to spend some time talking about those, I went ahead and took the rare step of using my other blog space at The Satellite Show to discuss a zombie topic, so if you want to read my thoughts on The Walking Dead, then click on over. Meanwhile, that leaves me free and clear to discuss cowboys and zombies, which as you might surmise is a topic close to my heart.

If you’ve been a regular reader of my blog then you’ll be aware that I liked Red Dead Redemption a lot, and that post was just after first impressions. Finishing the single-player campaign truly takes you through an epic western tale, where you might see certain plot twists and tropes coming, but others could just as easily leave you shocked. If some of the supporting characters seem little more than two-dimensional stereotypes, fair enough, but the main protagonist is a compelling enough man to shoulder the narrative burden and keep you caring about his fate and the fate of his family, even as you take the occasional side trip to rob stagecoaches or skin a bunch of random wildlife. I’m not going to spoil that narrative for anyone who hasn’t played, but I will suggest that if you’re any fan of GTA-style “sandbox” games and/or the western genre, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy.

Plus, there’s now another big, rotting, groaning reason to do so. The core campaign of Red Dead Redemption scrupulously avoids anything actually supernatural (with one exception that’s not part of the main narrative), but several months back I read a blurb saying that Rockstar was in process of trying to develop a zombie-themed expansion pack, set to hopefully debut in time for Halloween. I was of course very interested, but between then and now had just filed it away somewhere in the back of my brain, likely in the dusty realms between my bicycle lock combination from 8^th grade and where I set down my eyeglasses ten minutes ago.

Well, Rockstar didn’t forget. There it was on Xbox Live, right on schedule the week before Halloween. I figured that for about a sawbuck’s worth of Microsoft Points–10 United States dollars to you young folks and foreign types–what the heck, I’d take their Undead Nightmare for a whirl. After all, it’s RESEARCH. Right?

Well, research or not, the game nearly sabotaged my preparations for the Comic Con by being much more awesome than I expected. I suppose I’m used to DLCs just being little patch jobs on top of the main content, heavy on the multiplayer modes, and was expecting maybe some re-skinned (or de-skinned) horses and enemies to roam around and blow away until you got tired of it. Instead, Rockstar put together a whole new mini-campaign that takes John Marston from beginning to end through an Old West style zombie apocalypse, while meeting (and occasionally eating) several familiar faces from the original story along the way. The “random encounters” of the wilderness are all re-worked to provide classic zombie moments, such as a crazed man offering body parts to his chained down, zombified wife while exhorting her to “chew like a lady”, or the sick people asking to be taken to a doctor, only to turn before your eyes and come staggering after you. And the enemies aren’t just re-skinned people… they move in truly creepy ways, the sounds they make are disturbing as hell, and (of course) only a headshot will put them down for good. You will never be so glad to have your slow-motion Deadeye meter as when a half dozen of the riled-up bastards are pinwheeling hungrily in your direction.

On the Zombie Ranch side of things, I was pleased as punch to note a few things such as the ability to hogtie zombies and throw them over your horse (the game actually requires you to do just this very early on)… if only they’d had this expansion out back when we were putting together those reference shots for Comic #42, eh? There’s a zombie horse to be acquired as a mount, and though the game claims it’ll be ornery it seemed perfectly well behaved to me, if not the purtiest thing.

In fact, I was all set to keep the zombie horse as my preferred mount until I realized that Rockstar went further than just zombies and has some “mythical creatures” roaming the prairies, forests and deserts. The presence of Sasquatch in the northern lands left me disappointed in the apparent lack of Jackalopes and Chupacabra in the more southerly areas, but there’s no disappointment to be had when you can find and break one of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse. Let me just say this… War has flaming hooves, mane, and tail, and sets fire to any zombies or other poor suckers you run over with It. Epic. Apparently there’s a Unicorn out there as well, but I didn’t find it so I can’t confirm if Erasure starts playing when you climb aboard.

The various towns in the game are not much changed except for some cosmetic fires and graffiti, but when they’re being overrun by undead hordes you may not be thinking about that much. In an ingenious mash-up of zombie and western, you’re cast as the lone cowboy riding into town to save it from destruction, helping the few holdout survivors sniping from the rooftops and balconies to clear the infestation of their former friends and neighbors. Their location is a big hint as to how you yourself might want to deal with the situation, provided you can make it to a good spot before They get to you. If you can’t, it’s a pretty white knuckle experience, and you really, really want to keep your Deadeye meter full or you’re going to end up a brain donor in short order.

I’ve seen some complaints that certain aspects are too repetitive, but honestly, I didn’t feel that way, if for no other reason than that clearing out Graveyard X can be completely different from clearing out Graveyard Y just based on something as simple as the amount of fences around. They also give you some unique new weapons as you progress, such as a 19th century version of the L4D pipe bomb affectionately named “Boom Bait”. All the original voice actors are back for high quality cut scenes, as such notables as Nigel West Dickens and Seth react to a world gone to Hell (Seth, as you might imagine, seems right at home, in ways that must be seen to be believed). You don’t have to have completed the original campaign to enjoy this one, but I highly recommend it just to get all the references, and because the “ending” will make much more sense.

If you’re a zombie fan, a western fan, or (target audience here!) both, you owe it to yourself to download this expansion. I mean, presuming you already own a copy of RDR and have the requisite game console and network connections… but if not, y’know, Christmas is coming up and the prices have dropped, so it’s as good a time as any to take the plunge. Rockstar promised us an RDR Zombie Apocalypse for Halloween, and they sure as shootin’ delivered.

There’s really just entirely too much to talk about this week, even for me.

Yeah, I’m serious. “The Walking Dead” premiered as a series on AMC, the Undead Nightmare expansion came out for Red Dead Redemption, and then of course there was Long Beach Comic Con. I could probably do a whole blog on any one of those topics… for now I’ll just chime in with most everyone else on The Walking Dead pilot being really, really good (including some LGZ goodness right up front!), I’ll state that Undead Nightmare is insidiously fun, and then let me move right along and talk LBCC.

If I told you the Convention was a huge money maker for us, I’d be lying. I’d also be lying to say that we had a lot of traffic at our table all weekend. What we did have, though, might best be exemplified in a picture like this:

That’s me, the meat in an Amanda Conner/Jimmy Palmiotti sandwich. She provided the clothespin as part of her whole Skunk costume motif. The knife is mine, and fills up with blood if you hold it point down… I never imagined so many people would be so fascinated by something that cost me $8 at the local seasonal Halloween store, and that includes Jimmy and Amanda.

Anyhow, it’s one thing to get your picture taken with these guys, and another to get your picture taken after closing time on Sunday when you’ve been their table neighbors all weekend. We managed some quality time, even though Amanda had a sketch/autograph line pretty much from bell to bell all three days she was there… hell, we apparently made a good enough impression that she asked if we’d stow and look after her bags while she did a panel, and if you’d told me a year ago that would happen, I’d have called you overly optimistic, if not a damn liar. Miz Conner, if you happen to be reading this, I swear we didn’t lick anything.

Jimmy was great, too, inviting me to pull up a chair and go through his latest Jonah Hex issue and ask him questions on how he scripted it. I repaid him with an unintentional videobomb of his ComicVine interview (shown on this page) when you see Dawn applying my Zombie Ranch brand tattoo about 3/4ths of the way through. People probably are wondering if that dude in the Batman shirt has a fever. I suppose I could have turned towards the camera and gotten the tattoo on film, but I was being a good boy.

But anyhow, I’m finally starting to feel like we might belong amongst all these established people, especially if we keep working at what we’re doing. We didn’t sell a lot of our print comics, but we did sell more than one to people I’d never met, some of whom had never even run across the comic until the convention, but after a look felt like it was worth shelling out $5 of their hard earned cash for. That was very, very encouraging to us. Similarly, our panel had what I considered to be a damn decent crowd for a Sunday afternoon, especially since the amount of faces I didn’t know outnumbered those I did. All the audio-visual stuff worked fine and we gave out a lot of information I hope was useful to people… and there were lots of nods and note takings and even a couple folk who came by our table after to ask more questions, so I’m guessing that indicates a yes.

I didn’t even mention yet how well treated we were by the organizers. Martha Donato (the head organatrix) came by on Friday to personally introduce herself and chat with us, then the head of programming came by and gave me a guided tour of the panel area at my request. Small things, I guess, but it made me feel important. A convention where they have people like Amanda Conner and Mark Waid on the floor, and they’re bothering to talk to us and show me around? Niiice. San Diego had best approve our Small Press application this time around, so that I can be humbled into buglike insignificance again. Then again if they deny us that should serve the same purpose… but we won’t be chained to a table the whole time.

So while from an economic and promotional standpoint LBCC wasn’t stratospheric for us, from a confidence and connections standpoint Dawn and I were on Cloud 9. It was great to start seeing some familiar fan faces from prior appearances, as well as a couple of new ones. I went walkabout with my forehead brand, which was quite the conversation piece–most people were wondering if it was the ‘OZ’ logo, but that just gave me opportunity to explain the true significance… and a couple of times that I did that, the response was “Oh! Zombie Ranch! That’s you?” Loved that. In reciprocation of that recognition, I particularly would like to mention Shane and Chris Houghton, the brothers responsible for Reed Gunther, and Rick Marson, the mad Dr. Frankenstein of handmade stitchery behind the ZOMs. Rick had a very flashy (literally!) zombie costume for Halloween, which actually ended up winning Image’s Walking Dead promo contest, but let’s get back to the ZOMs. Rick has somehow managed to make zombies cuddly. This shows he is very talented, and on top of that he’s also a treat to “talk shop” with in regards to the undead.

I’m sure I’m forgetting things, but like I said, just too much to talk about. Maybe I’ll get to Red Dead Redemption and The Walking Dead next week. For now, I wanted to share the impetus for the title of this blog… I personally wasn’t there this time so I only have Dawn’s word for what happened, but apparently we had another adorable little girl incident (the first was documented in my blog from LBCC ’09). This time around, though, the girl was far from silent as she declared her enthusiasm for all things monsterly. She ended up haranguing her dad into buying a Cthulhu that Dawn sketched, dismissing her father’s attempt to guide her towards the sketch of a witch instead. According to Dawn, the exchange was more or less as follows:

“Don’t you want the witch? It’s Halloween…”

“Pfft. Witches are Halloween. Monsters are Halloween and EVERY DAY!”

You just can’t argue with logic like that.

Brand Z!

Yeah, we don’t actually have them in hand yet, so things could still go horribly wrong… but the order has shipped, so dang it, I can’t wait any longer to say something.

Last week I mentioned a special mystery giveaway item we were hoping to have for Long Beach this weekend. Well, the deal is that we found a place that does quality orders of custom temporary tattoos, and so come Friday we should have a stack of Z Ranch “Circle Z”s for people to brand themselves with! I expect there will be a decent amount of zombies shambling around the Convention Center, especially since Image is doing their own Walking Dead promo giveaways for people in zombie costume… so I’m hopeful there will be some willing to slap on our conveniently forehead-sized brand. The living are also welcome to them, of course… just stop by our Artist’s Alley table at #1700!

Now that I’ve said something, the Fed Ex truck will no doubt fall through a hole in the space-time continuum and we won’t get the shipment for 17 years. Everything else seems to be in order, though… I just have to keep my artist from exploding after I checked the floor map and we realized that our table will apparently be right next to Amanda Conner’s. Yes, that Amanda Conner, the one I already giddily gushed over in my entry I wrote after LBCC ’09. As far as I know this was completely random chance, and Dawn’s still convinced A.C. and Jimmy Palmiotti (also right next door) will move as soon as they realize what freaks they’ve been placed with. Perhaps a Zombie Ranch tattoo will assuage them? Or some candy? We’re going to have gummi body parts candy on Sunday since the Comic-Con is letting in kids for free to Trick-Or-Treat the booths.

I’m a little nervous myself, especially with our panel looming (Sunday, 1pm, Seaside Lobby!), but I have a feeling this is going to be a really fun Convention. Our good friend Robin Walker will be on one side with her beautiful Sanguine Threads costuming items, and Amanda Conner/Jimmy Palmiotti on the other. We’ll have our new Zombie Ranch banner proudly flying the colors, our print issue (special and regular editions) for sale,  our Z Ranch tattoos, our candy (provided Dawn doesn’t eat it all)… I hope to see several of you there, but if you can’t make it I understand. On the one hand, it’s absolutely fantastic that the Web allows us to have fans from all over the world, but that also means it can be a long, long drive to Southern California… as well as the fact that for several of you, your car might have to be capable of floating!

Maybe one day we’ll be richer and famouser enough to be able to rove longer distances. But speaking of richer and famouser, before I sign off this week I wanted to give a shout out to a hugely entertaining web comic that absolutely, positively, does not need my help promoting it… but in case you’re amongst those who haven’t heard of it, or have heard of it but haven’t gotten around to checking it out yet:

Axe Cop.

How to sum it up… have you ever listened to the ranting, insanely freeform play sessions of a five year old? One day that five year old’s comic artist older brother decided to start putting his ideas into comic form and publishing them online. Since then the whole thing went viral and has already been snapped up by Dark Horse for a publishing deal, in (I think) less than a year’s time. But there’s no room in my heart for jealousy over the success of Axe Cop, because Axe Cop is wonderful and deserves every bit of that success. If you haven’t experienced Axe Cop yet, check your brain at the door and then go check it out.

And with that, time to make our final preparations for the weekend. Happy Halloween, everyone!

Well here we are at last with the beginning of Issue #3 of Zombie Ranch. Dawn had less work to do than usual since I went ahead and indulged in some wordiness, and it’s not fair to make your artist try to cram in a lot of images if you’re also going nuts with the text. I hope the brief “history lesson” was intriguing rather than just a tl;dr situation. Then again, anyone who reads this blog probably doesn’t have tl;dr issues to speak of.

We’re still trying to get everything arranged for Long Beach, but should hopefully be able to continue the comic straight through. We could have waited to start again until after, but that just seemed like too long a pause, so we’re making the try. [EDIT: Of course, now Dawn’s computer is acting up in a bad way, so stack that on top of everything else. *sigh*]

All our orders for various stuff are in, and we for sure will have a nice stack of Issue #1 copies to sell, along with some convention approved Halloween candy to give out on Sunday. Now we’re just waiting on the Zombie Ranch stand-up display, plus another special giveaway item that we’re hoping will arrive in time. Since it’s cutting close to the deadline I don’t want to get anyone really excited about said mystery item, but if they do come in time we think they’ll be really fun, especially for people like yourselves who are fans of the comic.

Now then, I wanted to bring back a topic that I’d announced before on our Facebook/Twitter, and that’s the free online comic out right now for the Left 4 Dead game series, called The Sacrifice. Dawn and I both love Left 4 Dead and its sequel, but the characters were always a bit of a broad sketch, and the story not particularly emphasized. That’s not a bad thing when your intent is to create a fast-paced action game about killing tons of zombies, but I have to admit that there was one related download I felt unsatisfied with, called The Passing. Maybe it was the rampant hype surrounding it, claiming amongst other things that you’d finally be able to mix-and-match the survivors from L4D and L4D2, and that in order to finish the campaign, someone would have to intentionally sacrifice themselves.

Without getting into spoilers, let’s just say the results were underwhelming, particularly in terms of an offscreen death of a major character that’s apparently already happened when you arrived, and is so unremarked on that the first time through I didn’t even notice the body. Also, the L4D survivors weren’t interactable at all, much less playable. The Passing had new maps and new weapons, but just seemed really… half-assed? Incomplete?

Anyhow, the DLC release of The Sacrifice (game portion) really seems to make the incomplete part clear… I think The Passing and The Sacrifice were originally supposed to be released together, but for whatever reason Valve ran out of time. Perhaps that was for the best, though, since we got the comic out of it.

In general, I’m not a big fan of comics based on movies or videogames, since they so often are just cheap money grabs on people who like the brand, and that lack of quality shows through. But in this case, The Sacrifice comic was being offered online, for free, not even requiring ad viewing or a mailing list sign up… so what the hell, after checking out the first few pages and finding them good, I decided to share the news.

Then later, I went back and read through all four chapters, and what do you know? It’s actually really, really good. I said before that the characters in L4D are broadly sketched, but there’s enough of a sense of who they are that they could have still been screwed up. Instead, the dialogue and actions of the four survivors felt absolutely authentic and consistent to me, even carrying over the witty banter of some of the better exchanges. You get more than just a logical sequence of events carrying the group from point A (the end of L4D) to point B (the beginning of The Sacrifice)… the comic also manages to both create and elaborate on some character arcs and give a bit of smoothly delivered backstory on where each survivor was when things first went to hell. Zoey’s flashback is particularly chilling, if you pay attention to what she’s told right before she starts to remember it, and it makes her attitude for the ending portion all the more justifiable.

There’s more than enough zombie-slaughtering mayhem to go around, which would probably have been made it worth the read just in of itself, but what’s surprising is the amount of thought and soul that went into the comic. It is very, very well written, even as a standalone story–much less as a video game adaptation whose only real mandate was likely to fill in some blanks and promote an upcoming DLC release. Chet Faliszek, Jay Pinkerton, and Michael Avon Oeming have given us something really great here, and more than that, given it to us for free.

Also, Bill is an absolute badass. We already knew this in our hearts, but to see it in action is a thing of beauty. Go read online, download the PDF, or (as of this week) get it on your mobile device through Comixology. If you’re into zombie fiction, L4D, or both, it’s well worth your time.

First off I wanted to again take a moment to thank everyone who voted in last week’s poll. I did my best to hold back my own opinions until the results were in, so as not to influence anyone, but it looks like the majority shared them: the zombie background won out, and several of you who voted for it stated reasons in line with my thinking on why. New poll is up this week letting that cover compete with two other alternates Dawn put together, so check it out!

Now that said, I put another notch in my western viewin’ gunbelt recently, and it’s a big one; name of “Shane“. If you start delving into the western genre in cinema in any depth, you run across that name, held up time and time again as an archetype, a movie that has inspired countless others.

Now I’m not the type to go watch a film and call it a classic just because it was labeled as such. Probably because, for me, “classic” when applied to a film means I better feel it was good and timelessly relevant, not  just old. This means I can get very subjective about my viewings of old movies. For every “Casablanca” (which was every bit as good to me as its hype), there are other films like “Gone With The Wind” where I end up checking my watch (frankly, my dear, after two hours I didn’t give a damn); or “Support Your Local Sheriff”, which despite having James Garner in the lead I didn’t feel was either all that funny or all that great.

This is not meant to run down anyone who likes movies I don’t, just basically what I’m getting at here is that I’m picky about this stuff: and at about the two-thirds mark of Shane’s runtime, I breathlessly declared out loud, “I love this movie.” If you’ve seen it or plan to see it, it was right at the close of the scene where Ryker has come out to Starrett’s homestead for a last attempt at negotiation, also allowing Shane and Jack Wilson to meet each other for the first time. There are two choices here that floored me with both their presence and how well they were done:

– First, that the dueling philosophies of the old rancher and the upstart homesteader are given an equal footing, to where you are allowed to see and even perhaps empathize with where the “villain” of the movie is coming from. So many movies would be content to simply paint the antagonist as greedy or otherwise sinful and simply leave it at that, that they oppose the protagonist because they are bad. There is arguably a sincere gesture of good faith given, a compromise offered to avoid bloodshed that’s so tempting it leaves you and Starrett both in hesitation, wondering which path should be taken. Keep in mind, this is a movie made in 1953, an era of America that we of the cynical modern age like to think was full of uncomplicated, Us vs. Them attitudes. Here I was again, like with “The Searchers”, being proven dead wrong in my naive thoughts that westerns prior to “Unforgiven” were free of grey areas.

– Second, while Ryker and Starrett are negotiating, Shane and Jack Wilson, the proverbial two sides of the same gunslinger coin, size each other up in a way that’s completely casual, subtle, and silent, and yet brings to mind nothing less than circling attack dogs. There’s none of the posturing that you might expect (and that goes on in other scenes in the film), no words exchanged, but just the act of getting a drink from a water barrel becomes supercharged.

Basically, two scenes are going on at the same time, both of which would have been fantastic on their own, except they also mesh together perfectly.

So simple, Shane is, and yet so finely crafted. On the surface, Shane is the movie that established the myth of the mysterious stranger who comes from nowhere to assist a community against oppression, then disappears once his job is done. That’s the legacy everyone remembers and has homaged down through the decades, to the point where Dawn started to watch and commented, “Wow, I think ‘Vampire Hunter D’ ripped off this plot.” Homaged, my dear, I corrected. Homaged. I mean, so many hundreds of others have used the basic structure of Shane that for all we know Vampire Hunter D thought it was referencing “Yojimbo”, or “High Plains Drifter”, or… well, you get the idea.

I’m not even 100% sure that Shane was the first of its kind, but the consensus seems to be that it was. Frankly, even if it didn’t inspire such a legacy, for me Shane is a movie that stands on its own merits as a fine piece of cinematic storytelling. It’s interesting to read through some of the reviews that have been penned regarding it and find people who I feel are either reading too little into the characters or are reading too much into them, but I suppose that’s a byproduct of another of Shane’s strengths, an art largely lost in modern filmmaking: that not everything needs to be explained. Shane and Jack Wilson have been criticized for being ciphers, a symbolic white hat and black hat with no backstories and nothing to connect them to humanity. I argue that they do have backstories, but they don’t need to talk about them and we don’t need to know them, any more than we need to go into the motives and pasts of the homesteaders and cowboys. We get all that we need, and no more than we need.

Well, except perhaps for Ryker getting to speak his piece and put us all on an uncomfortable moral footing that only a stranger who feels he’s already lost his soul can resolve.

This movie is fantastic. The cinematography, the use of scenery and environment to externalize the internal, the slow-burn, realistic escalation of violence between stubborn people with clear motivations… it’s a very mature, artfully told story wrapped in the veneer of a simple morality play. Often imitated. But rarely, if ever, duplicated.

So I’d been pondering our last poll, the one regarding Rosa, and coming to gratifying conclusions. Maybe I shouldn’t be… I mean, to be honest I set that one up mostly for entertainment, including providing a ready made “joke answer”. Little tip: if you want to get anywhere near receiving useful data from a poll, don’t give a smart-ass option. It will win out, every time.

Rosa Amarilla: Threat or Menace?

• Neither! Viva Rosa! (33%, 18 Votes)
• Who cares, with that horrible Spider-Man still at large? (27%, 15 Votes)
• Threat. (15%, 8 Votes)
• Menace. (13%, 7 Votes)
• Undecided. (12%, 7 Votes)

Total Voters: 55

Except this time, it didn’t. It came close, but the very fact it wasn’t the top answer was pretty surprising. Maybe it’s just because people weren’t familiar with the reference to the old Spider-Man comics, and the infamous (and very funny) Daily Bugle headline “SPIDER-MAN: THREAT OR MENACE?”. Maybe. I like to flatter myself instead that we’ve created an interesting enough character to actually warrant the cries of ‘Viva Rosa!’, and I suppose I can back that up by noting the good number of respondents who also considered her a threat, a menace, or just weren’t sure yet (but hey, they cared enough to click that).

Anyhow, I don’t know if any of you out there feel up to it, but if you wanted to leave a comment here to explain why you voted in a certain way, I’d love to hear it. The polling function is always interesting because it’s so limited in some ways: anytime I put an “Other” option in there and people vote for it, I’m left wondering what the “Other” would be. For instance, in the poll about which character(s) you’d like to see more sketches of, Suzie was the clear winner, but a strong runner-up was the “Cambot/Popcorn/Other” choice. Did those of you who clicked on that want more Cambot pictures? Popcorn pictures? Or maybe random zombies and zombie creatures? My current theory is the latter, cuz, you know, we have a good helping of zombie fans reading Zombie Ranch for some reason. But hell, for all I know you wanted more pictures of the ClearStream clerk, or the shadowy executive Dawn and I colloquially refer to in our internal discussions as “Dr. Klaw”.

Oh, I know there’s more detailed polling surveys available out there which allow people to explain their answers, but I don’t know if you the fans would be interested in such things. Hey, maybe I should make a poll! 🙂 But no, the poll this week is reserved as a place for people to vote some opinions on Dawn’s first piece of potential cover artwork.

I also have to admit we’re running somewhat behind our original intended schedule, so we’ve decided to extend the “artwork” period to two weeks instead of just one. Might as well get it all out of the way now before we start a new chapter arc, right? I personally think Dawn’s been doing some wonderful work with these, so we both highly appreciate everyone’s patience, not to mention we actually want your feedback on some aspects of them. For instance, this week’s cover possibility… white cross? Wood-grain cross? Or cross filled with zombie images? We’ve been arguing about it, and in this case figured we’d let Ye Publick chime in and shout out which you think looks best.

Last but not least I wanted to share a link, which is the newest trailer for the remake of “True Grit” that I had mentioned in a previous blog. I had already had good feelings about having the Coen Brothers at the helm, but this has me really excited, even moreso than the first teaser did. So click here, scroll down a tad, watch the video, and see if you agree.

“How many men have you shot?”

“Shot? Or killed?”

Mr. Bridges might very well fill The Duke’s shoes, after all…

With this week’s comic we mark the end of what I consider to be the second “issue” of Zombie Ranch. Also, even though this site went live Sept. 25th, 2009, this coming Saturday will mark the first anniversary since we started posting the story, and then in about a month from now we should reach story comic #50. That’s a lot of different milestones to choose between, but right now I think we’ll go with the anniversary and take a small pause for breath next week before continuing with the tale. Long Beach Comic Con is fast approaching and our panel presentation has gotten the final greenlight, plus Dawn needs to get some new artwork together in time to hopefully make a nice big Zombie Ranch banner for our table.

So next Wednesday we might actually have a couple of different drawings for you folks to look at and vote on in terms of a banner and/or potential cover for a print of Zombie Ranch #2. Honestly, there’s no way #2 would be together in time for Long Beach, but then again I still want to see how we do with #1 there since it’ll actually be the first time we’ll have a stack of full comics available for people to buy at a convention, instead of just a mini-comic or postcard flyers.

Oh, and speaking of Zombie Ranch #1, a new review has been posted over at Geek Girls Network, courtesy of Amy, the Geek With Curves. You can check out the review here, and also check out Amy’s own blog while you’re at it. She’s good peoples, and I’m not just saying that because she implies we have talent. 🙂

I believe I already mentioned that our panel will be Dawn and myself discussing being newbie independent creators taking our idea from concept to webcomic/comic book on a limited budget, with an eye towards helping others do the same. I still have to put this whole presentation together, so I’m wondering what you all might be hoping to find out if you were to attend such a panel, and what questions you might ask? You can speak your piece in the comments or email me directly. This coming week is the calm before the storm, so I’m hoping to make the most of it.

No, I’m not attempting to one-up discussing Shakespeare last week by randomly quoting Classical Latin. First off, the above phrase isn’t even proper Latin, a discrepancy which comes clear when I tell you it’s from words carved into a wooden plank by a half-literate former Texas Ranger: a Ranger who freely admits he doesn’t know what it means, but that hey, it sure looks classy.

The Ranger in question is one Augustus McCrae, half of the fictional pairing that makes up the main protagonists of a TV miniseries by the name of Lonesome Dove. Together with his partner Woodrow F. Call, Gus owns and operates the Hat Creek Cattle Company just outside the town of Lonesome Dove, Texas. Calling Lonesome Dove a town is being extremely generous, since it seems to consist of little more than a saloon. Because of this, and also a heavy implication that settling down doesn’t sit well with Woodrow, a decision is made to make a cattle drive to Montana where they and their crew can set up a new homestead in a still relatively virgin wilderness. That drive and its immediate aftermath are the subject matter of the show.

I have vague memories of watching Lonesome Dove when it first aired, way back in 1989, but that wasn’t much to go on. What I did remember was that it still comes highly recommended for fans of the western genre, so I managed to get my paws on it recently and have a watch. Let me tell you, this was no small commitment. We’re talking over six hours’ worth of show, with a huge cast of characters, sprawling from Texas to Mexico to Arkansas to Montana and just about everywhere between. The series started out as a screenplay in the early 70s for a movie that was slated to star John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda, but the story is that Wayne turned it down on the advice of John Ford, Stewart backed off when he heard Wayne was out, and I guess Fonda alone wasn’t enough oomph to keep things going. The film was abandoned, and writer Larry McMurtrey ended up turning it into a novel instead, which then over 15 years later made its way back to the (smaller) screen.

So, a smaller screen, perhaps, but the budget must have been spectacular for its time, based on the quality and scope of the locations, and the cast. Watching Lonesome Dove I was shocked at the quality and depth of the acting roster, which is probably the main part of how it managed to keep my interest for its entire length. In particular, the two leads featured Gus McCrae being played by Robert Duvall, and Woodrow F. Call being played by Tommy Lee Jones, and the chemistry between them is incredible.

Let’s put it this way: you know which folks are easy for me to write in Zombie Ranch? People like Uncle Chuck and Rosa, the ones who talk your ear off and show their hearts on their sleeves (keeping in mind that heart might have an extra ace tucked up under). Suzie and especially Frank are infinitely harder because they keep their own counsel and don’t necessarily say what’s on their minds, meaning the reader has to interpret that based on other clues.

In Lonesome Dove, Gus does lean towards the former type, but Woodrow is firmly in the stoic mold of the latter, and TLJ is masterful at somehow taking that stone-faced cipher and making him interesting. Then again, I suppose they do cheat by having Gus chatter to Woodrow and to others about what Woodrow happens to be thinking, often claiming to know his partner better than his partner knows himself. Point is, a lot of times volumes are being spoken without actually being said (or when something else is being said), which to me is an essence of good writing and good acting, especially in a western. Flamboyant is easy. Stoic is hard.

Duvall and Jones represent the core of the show, and hold the whole thing together, but there’s a lot of other talent surrounding them. Just as a short list, we have Danny Glover, Diane Lane, Robert Urich, Angelica Huston, Steve Buscemi, Rick Schroder, and even D.B. Sweeney (looking exactly the same 20 years ago as he does today, which makes me wonder if perhaps he was miscast as human in True Blood).

About the show itself, there’s really too much to go into than will fit even in one of my blogs, but I wasn’t disappointed. There are some dated special effects; Dawn in particular started hooting with laughter during a dramatic stampede scene in a thunderstorm when the cattle suddenly became “electrified” by lighting, and the irony there is that scene comes straight from the book, which comes straight from a true account of a trailhand in the 1800s who watched in awe as ball lightning rolled between the horns of the cattle he was herding. Whether or not that cowhand was making it all up to begin with, the fact remains that the effects budget wasn’t up to representing it well.

Where Lonesome Dove shines is in the details of a huge cross-section of American frontier life circa 1876, and the interpersonal relationships of the rough and courageous people trying to make their way in that world. The core storyline is based out of a historical cattle drive and two historical men of the time, Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, which might go a long way towards explaining this, but it could easily have rung false in the telling. Lonesome Dove teeters towards melodrama at times, but always returns to people and happenings that I could believe in and care about. In the end, no matter how grounded or fantastical your setting, that’s what makes a good story.

Oh, the Latin motto? It’s intentionally corrupted, but when corrected translates roughly to “a grape ripens when it sees (or is around) another grape”. There’s been a lot of talk on whether that’s an actual theme of Lonesome Dove (and if so, what it means), but as far as I know McMurtry has not given a definitive answer. Even if he didn’t understand it, Gus loved an unspoken ideal it seemed to represent, as this exchange showed:

Woodrow Call: …and if that ain’t bad enough you got all them Greek words on there, too.
Gus McCrae: I told you, Woodrow, a long time ago it ain’t Greek, it’s Latin.
Woodrow Call: Well what does it say in Latin?
[Gus blusters some gibberish]
Woodrow Call: For all you know it invites people to rob us.
Gus McCrae: Well the first man comes along that can read Latin is welcome to rob us, far as I’m concerned. I’d like a chance t’ shoot at a educated man once in my life.

It’s a funny moment, but it leaves so much wonderfully unexplained–and sometimes, those moments in fiction are the ones that seem most true to life.

So in this week’s comic, any of those of you out there who were still waiting finally got themselves a name to call our cheerful trespasser by. Is it her real name? Suzie doesn’t seem to think so, but what’s in a name? I’m reasonably sure The Lord Humongous was not given that name at his birth, and yet it’s a quite fitting moniker for The Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah. By any other name, he would still smell as sweet — “sweet” in his case probably being a mix of dirt, sweat, and pustulent head tumors.

This is also the second time I’ve used a partial line from Shakespeare as the comic title, perhaps proving beyond a doubt that I can’t help but let a bit of pretentiousness creep into my works — that or I’m just trying to make some use out of years of formal stage training in high school and college. In my defense, though, I would point out that quoting Shakespeare wasn’t always considered pretentious. In fact, let’s talk about a historical tidbit that’s not generally remembered nowadays: Shakespeare was huge in the Old West.

Surprising? If you’ve delved into The Bard beyond a half clueless high school English teacher trying to ram him down your throat as “culture”, not so much. Shakespeare’s original audiences consisted of no small amount of undereducated farmers and tradesmen, and if you look past the outdated language (sometimes you don’t even need to do that), you’ll find quite a few sexual references, instances of bodily function humor, and other elements I can’t quite bring myself to call highbrow: for example, one of the main characters in Twelfth Night is named “Sir Toby Belch“. Even The Bard’s most somber historical works will usually contain a scene or two that seems to have no point to it but random puns and vulgar slapstick on par with the Scary Movie films, which means they’re often cut from productions or left out of school editions entirely.

But this doesn’t mean Shakespeare should be considered lowest common denominator entertainment, either. Though he wasn’t above pandering to the baser amusements of the audience, he also achieved soaring heights of poetry and emotion in his works that connected to that same audience, no matter if they were illiterate rat-catchers or cloistered noblewomen. The greatest crime committed to Shakespeare in the modern age was this social/psychological shift into the mindset that his plays are the province solely of the elite and educated minority, able to be understood and enjoyed only by them.

In the West of 19th Century America, this prejudice didn’t exist. Cowboys and trappers and miners, many of whom couldn’t read, still loved to gather round and listen to the guy who could as he read from a tattered copy of Julius Caesar, often interspersing his own unique oaths and embellishments like the best tale-tellers do. Or better yet, there was the occasion that some big name actor or troupe from back East might pull into a town and put on a professional performance at the local theater, though the experience was closer to the rowdiness of the original Elizabethan crowds than the prim and sophisticated silence expected of today’s audiences. One of my favorite anecdotes–though one terrifying to contemplate as an actor–was about a fellow so adept at playing the villainous Iago in Othello that a drunken attendee clambered onto the stage with a loaded six-shooter and threatened to gun him down where he stood unless he confessed his crimes to the other dramatis personae. I reckon in that instance there was a quick improvisation, and the play enjoyed a happier and much shorter resolution that night to prevent a bullet in the head of one of the leads.

You could hold up that example to show how savage and lawless and disrespectful the theatergoers of the Old West were, but think about it a moment: the reason it happened was because the man got that worked up about what was happening on stage. This was an era where Shakespeare still lived and breathed and was the province of the common man and woman, stirring their passions and speaking to their own experiences. In fact, if you don’t mind clicking off a couple of pop-ups, I present to you a piece that goes into a lot more fascinating detail on the subject, as well as pondering what happened between then and now: LINK

Let’s see, what else is on the news docket for today: oh yes, the possible exciting news I had mentioned last time.

We’re gonna be on a panel!

Long Beach Comic-Con has confirmed us for a 1pm panel on Sunday, Oct. 31st, called “Starting Out: Independent Publishers/Independent Creators”. I know, what a waste to have a panel on Halloween and not be talking about zombies, right? But this is our first time ever doing a convention panel, so we’re not going to be too picky; right now, Dawn and I are just both wavering between being very excited and very nervous. Hopefully we’ll have enough good insights to talk about for all five or so of our family and friends that show up to see us. 😉 Then again, maybe we’ll get a crowd and be terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.

But as The Tick would tell us: “You can’t hide from it. You’ve got to hug it. Hug your destiny…!”

Who can say no to that big, blue mug?