Category: Writer’s Blog

We’re coming up on the first Anniversary of Zombie Ranch. It’s not quite here yet. The site went live on September 25th, 2009, and the first storyline comic was published Oct. 2nd, timed to when the doors opened to the exhibit hall at the first annual Long Beach Comic Con.

Zombie Ranch, more than anything, is a child of two conventions. I’ve told the story many times before of Dawn’s  first illustration of the then-nameless cowgirl facing down zombie hordes, and Dawn’s mad thought that she wasn’t hunting or fleeing them, but ranching them. But the truth is, there’s a lot that comes between looking at something and thinking “That might make a good story”, and actually getting a story produced. Two conventions were the fuel.

First was the San Diego Comic-Con, because Dawn drew On The Zombie Ranch as part of her prep for the Art Show. She tends to have a binge period of a few weeks staying up late to create some new pieces in addition to the  prints already planned for auction. So: no Art Show, no binge period, and possibly no Zombie Ranch illustration.

Beyond that though, the piece ended up in a bid war, and eventually sold for $85, still Dawn’s record for an Art Show offering. That response led us to believe that the concept had some legs to it. It was one thing if we thought it might be cool, but if no one else cared, why bother? Well, of course the whole idea is that if you’re convinced your idea has merit you proceed regardless, but remember here you’re dealing with two people of uncertain ego and little experience. That sale was a big boost to the esteem, and somewhere out there a gent named Gregor Mortis has the original that started all this. That was the name on the sale tally, anyhow, and whether real or not, his money was.

Still, by the end of San Diego all that really had us doing was still just kicking around the idea of a story based on Zombie Ranch. I don’t think we actually started bringing it to life until around a year ago this time. I remember because my parents had taken us to brunch for my birthday and it was there that my dad mentioned Long Beach Comic Con had cashed the check he fronted us for an application we’d made months back to get Dawn into the Artist’s Alley there. We hadn’t heard anything and so had pretty much given up on it. Now, suddenly, was the heavy implication we’d been accepted, which we shortly confirmed with the LBCC management. Last year LBCC was held at the beginning of October, meaning we had about a month to prepare for our first ever outing being exhibitors.

And that was also about the time where we decided to try to put together Zombie Ranch as both a webcomic and print comic in time for the convention. This was an absolutely insane idea in that short amount of time, especially with me working full time and Dawn going to school, but I’ll say this about insanity: it’s a driving force. I managed to get a full working draft of the first arc done in between trying to get permits and all the other exhibiting necessities arranged, which I was also bumbling through as a first-timer. Dawn meanwhile was going crazy trying to put together hosting and a website, plus draw and color everything in time to be able to hand over a proof to a contact at her college who was going to do a small print run for us on short notice.

September became a mad, mad month of equal parts creativity, resource wrangling, and frustration. We did not succeed entirely in our ambitions, scaling back from the original idea of a 12 page comic with a complete (if compressed) storyline, to a 6 page “sneak preview” mini-comic, and even that nearly drove us to the edge of exhaustion. In addition to the story we were creating characters almost from scratch… in my first draft Suzie started with the name “Jodi Mills”, which is more or less completely different than what we ended up calling her. Also I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the hard drive crash that we thought not only meant we’d lost all the work on the comic so far, but all of Dawn’s digitally stored artwork, period.

We got through that. We navigated through every obstacle thrown our way and got a webcomic up and running and an Artist’s Alley table together complete with Dawn’s portfolios and prints, two mini-comics, and a bunch of free sticker swag. It was hugely stressful, but in the end that insane, self-imposed deadline for Long Beach was what took Zombie Ranch from a mere idea to a reality. Otherwise, who knows how long it would have remained on the backburner waiting for us to “find the time”?

That said, I’m certainly looking forwards to a more leisurely lead up to this year’s 2nd Annual Long Beach outing. But this time, we’ll have a full print issue to sell, and most likely some other exciting news. Stay tuned!

As I’m writing this it happens to be August 31st in the good ol’ U.S. of A., also known as the birthday of one Clint Wolf. Having a birthday fall in the middle of a busy work week is a bit underwhelming, but it’s possible I could con someone into at least taking me out for some drinks this weekend. We shall see.

Another option could have been celebrating this past weekend, but that was mostly spent engaged in a marathon D&D session. I hit level 6 with my Protector Spirit Shaman. Good stuff.

Now if you haven’t ever had the experience of “tabletop” gaming, you may not be aware that a good portion of the time is actually spent not on the game itself but discussing various topics with your fellow nerds. In this case, I was talking of how my recent post regarding Steampunk for The Satellite Show had come about because of someone claiming Firefly/Serenity was somehow a Steampunk offering, and how nuts I found that concept.

Nah, my friend Justin said, Firefly isn’t Steampunk. It’s a Bat Durston.

A what? I’d never heard this term before.

“Bat Durston, Space Marshal.” Justin went on to introduce me to the gentleman known as Bat Durston. He was the invention of the editor of the 1950’s science fiction anthology Galaxy Magazine, a parody of the already common practice of transplanting Western tropes wholesale to a galactic setting and calling that Science Fiction: The “Space Western”.

H.L. Gold, the editor in question, was not a big fan of this trend. Actually I think it’s fair to say he outright hated it, and Bat Durston was his man for showing why. The infamous back cover of Galaxy provided two oddly similar tales printed side by side:

Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing…and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand.”Get back from those controls, Bat Durston,” the tall stranger lipped thinly. “You don’t know it, but this is your last space trip.”

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Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony 400 miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rim-rock…and at that point a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high boulder, six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand.”Rear back and dismount, Bat Durston,” the tall stranger lipped thinly. “You don’t know it, but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts.”

Beneath the two, Gold spelled out this little corner of his philosophy: “Sound alike? They should—one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science fiction, you’re welcome to it! YOU’LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY!”

Gold went on to say that what you would find in Galaxy was “the finest science fiction… authentic, plausible, thoughtful… written by authors who do not automatically switch over from crime waves to alien invasions; by people who know and love science fiction… for people who also know and love it.”

So Gold doesn’t as much imply as outright state that if you write science fiction this way, then your story sucks and he’s trashing it. Was he correct in his views? To a lot of professional SF writers, he was correct enough that in the Turkey City Lexicon the Space Western entry reads:

“The most pernicious suite of “Used Furniture”. The grizzled space captain swaggering into the spacer bar and slugging down a Jovian brandy, then laying down a few credits for a space hooker to give him a Galactic Rim Job.”

This might all be starting to sound very elitist, and throughout the years since Bat Durston came on the scene there have been defenses of Space Westerns, such as people pointing out that Ray Bradbury’s Martian works have a very frontier feel to them but yet are still considered the good sort of SF. From my point of view I always hate blanket dismissals of a certain genre as being somehow less worthy than others. It goes against Sturgeon’s Law; Theodore Sturgeon being a science fiction author once famously quoted as stating “Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud.” Note how he didn’t single out any particular aspect of science fiction there.

But even if I’m not prepared to dump the entire concept of the Space Western in the ashbin just for being, I’d confess there’s still room to scoff at the particular style of it embodied in Bat Durston. Mr. Durston has grown beyond his humble roots to represent any sort of lazy writing where an exotic setting seems totally irrelevant to the plot or characters, to the point where the story can be transplanted to a completely different time and place if you just change a few words around.

Anyhow, if you’ve been reading this comic you’ve probably sussed out that I have a fondness for genre “mash-ups”. I’m writing one, after all. So Bat Durston seems to be a bogeyman of mash-up attempts who I didn’t know was lurking in my creative closet until just the other day. Thankfully, despite its SF/Western elements I don’t think Zombie Ranch quite falls into his territory. The zombies replace cattle, for example, but they don’t quite replace cattle, if that makes any kind of sense to state.

In the end, I think as long as there’s thought going into your story and background beyond merely “Gangsters in Outer Space” or “Angsty Teenagers with Fangs”, you can keep ol’ Bat at bay.

Now pass me the space whiskey. I gotta spend some quality time pondering another year clocked on this ol’ corral called Earth.

Why, you ask?

Because this week marks comic #42 in the Zombie Ranch storyline!

Who’s Douglas Adams, you ask?

Sigh.

Look, you damn kids, I’m not falling for this again. It’s going to be like the day I found out Roy Scheider died all over again. I was playing World of Warcraft at the time and immediately broke the news to the guild channel.

Me: Holy crap, Roy Scheider died.

Them: Who?

Me: Roy Scheider.

Them: Rob Schneider?

Me: No, Roy Scheider. Jaws?

Them: What?

And that was about the time I realized the world had moved on. Their pop culture was no longer my pop culture. I mean, Rob Schneider? Seriously? What the hell are  Google and Wikipedia for if not doing a quick Alt-Tab and looking up a reference you don’t get?

Anyhow, because of that incident I realize Douglas Adams may not be a recognizable name for many of you, but I’d like it to be. So, y’know: WIKIPEDIA. As for whether he’d actually be proud of comic #42, I have no bloody clue, but I’m taking advantage of the fact that he’s dead and can’t contradict me without the services of a spirit medium… and as far as I know, spirit mediums don’t often take contracts from dead people on account of the problems inherent in getting paid.

42 was an important number to Mr. Adams. And by important, I mean it’s 99.9% likely he just arbitrarily decided on it, when he could just as easily have come up with 66, 7, or even pi. Actually, I doubt he would have gone with pi, which is a pretentious enough number as it is. 42 was just eminently mundane, at least until it gained its measure of fame through the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, and that really was the whole point.

So what does that have to do with a cowgirl lassoing and hog-tying a zombie? Nothing that I can think of, really… unless you offered me money to come up with reasons, in which case I could likely think of a few things. Right now, just leave it at the doorstep of cosmically arbitrary coincidence–which happens to be a central theme of Adams’ writing. Oh crap, I just did that for free.

But seriously, if you’ve never read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and at least the next two books in the series, you owe it to yourself to do so. In particular, if you’re any kind of fan of Terry Pratchett, Monty Python, or the “British style” of dark, absurdist science fiction, they’re must-reads. Even if this week’s comic isn’t an homage beyond numeric coincidence, I’d be lying to say there isn’t a bit of Adams and his ilk in situations like a country uncle dispensing folksy talk while messily feeding zombie parts into a wood chipper.

And I grew up on this stuff. So yeah, do me a favor and check out the “classics”. If nothing else, you’ll make me feel less old when I bring ’em up.

In last week’s blog I brought up Twilight in an indirect fashion. Not long after, I followed that up by also discussing it in an email exchange with one of our newest Rancheros who spoke of his tweenage daughter’s disdain for zombies (but her love for the Edward, Bella, and Jacob). Apparently this topic is on my brain of late.

Now, I’m not like some of my friends in wanting Stephanie Meyer to painfully DIAF, but in our bad movie club we recently had a viewing of “New Moon”, and damn if Twilight didn’t call us zombie fans out. If you haven’t seen it (and I’m willing to bet a lot of you haven’t), there’s a scene where Bella and one of her friends are leaving a theater where they’ve just seen a zombie flick, and Bella’s friend is bitching a blue streak about not just the movie they saw, but the whole genre.

“I don’t know why you want to sit through all those zombies eating people and no hot guys kissing anybody. Gross. Like why are there so many zombie movies anyway? Is it supposed to like draw a parallel with leprosy? My cousin had leprosy, it’s not funny, you know? And like is it supposed to be a metaphor for consumerism? Cause don’t be so pleased with your self-reverential cleverness, you know. Like, some girls like to shop.”

Reportedly, although they do go to see a zombie film in the novel, the reactions to it are limited to Bella angsting about her own relationship based on a young (living) couple in the movie, not clumsily trying to stick a thumb in Romero’s eye. This means Meyer is not responsible for the salvo so much as screenplay author Melissa Rosenberg.

Maybe she was being ironic, I don’t know. On the one hand, Melissa Rosenberg has written several episodes of Dexter. But on the other, she wrote several episodes of Birds of Prey. Whatever the case, due to her words I got to enjoy a roomful of grinning acquaintances suggesting that obviously, what I needed to do to make Zombie Ranch more popular was have two hot zombie dudes kissing.

Look, as a rule? Zombies are not hot. I’ll agree with Bella’s BFF about that (apologies to those of you out there making and buying the Zombie pin-up girl calendars). But at that moment, besides wanting to murder several of my closest friends, I thought: Is this what horror has come to? Our monsters have to be sexy, or no one sees the point?

That can’t be right, or the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street remakes would have featured a shirtless Freddy and Jason with rippling abs and chiseled-yet-tender brooding countenances. I probably shouldn’t be giving Hollywood ideas, here.

Vampires and werewolves have always had a certain erotic component to their mythos, and I don’t mind if that’s played up. I think Meyer goes too far, though, by getting rid of or downplaying a lot of the danger that ought to go with it. Sure Edward talks about being dangerous, but we don’t really see it, except perhaps in the sense that his aloofness causes Bella to attempt suicide. But that doesn’t speak “vampire” to me so much as “dude being a douche”. On his end, he really seems to have nothing serious to angst about. Sunlight doesn’t bother him, he has a cozy family to hang out with, he gets along fine on deer blood without ever having to touch a person… you just never get the sense that vampirism is any sort of curse, so when he refuses to make Bella a vampire, then again he just seems like he’s being a douche, especially when he’s simultaneously all torn up because they can never truly be together.

Jacob seems similar in that I never get that sense of loss of control and undercurrent of barely controlled rage that’s at the center of the werewolf myth. So with Twilight I feel like we get VINOs and WINOs (INO = In Name Only), which leaves me with a bland protagonist and a lot of dudes taking their shirts off. It’s about hot guys kissing people, not monsters, and hot guys kissing just doesn’t do much for me on its own.

But am I a big hypocrite for thinking this way? After all, we’ve had hot chicks in horror movies almost since the beginning, panting and swooning and getting preyed on while in flimsy revealing outfits. If the “monster” happens to be female, they tend to be highly sexualized both in appearance and behavior, often having a component of nymphomania combined with Black Widow syndrome. How many times have we seen the tagline “She mates… and then SHE KILLS!” or something similar? How many times have we seen horror covers that juxtapose a sexily posed woman with disgusting monstrosities, regardless of whether she’s cowering, controlling, or co-existing? Even our Zombie Ranch covers are guilty of that. A lot of these efforts were not particularly heavy on story or character development, so are we justified applying a double standard now that bare-chested hunks are making inroads on the genre? Just the other day a friend was telling me about a comic book proposal he’d looked at, and his take was: it had horror, it had hot girls… and frankly, at that point he was in. Nothing else necessary. So too, perhaps, with Twilight fans.

But maybe the key difference here is that the horror element needs to be maintained. The HBO series True Blood has plenty of hot guys kissing people, but the monster is always there as well, which is what makes it compelling for me. That element of horrible, horrible danger always lurking, even through the more comedic, touching, or simply quiet moments. Certainly it’s there in the “sexy” moments; if you’ve seen the episode from a couple of weeks ago, you know there was one scene between Bill and Loretta I would guess only a very small segment of the population could possibly be turned on by. And in a more recent episode I won’t spoil, the sex was purely a means to a very brutal end.

Is it because Twilight is meant as Young Adult fiction? I don’t buy that that has to be true, since the Harry Potter books have some very intense stuff in them. Hell, decades before J.K. Rowling, Roald Dahl wrote “children’s classics” like James and the Giant Peach or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that weren’t afraid to explore the dark side, and neither of those books were dealing in vampires and werewolves as subject matter.

As Young Adult fiction, Twilight seems closer to Sweet Valley High… which is fine, we all were young once, and we all have our guilty pleasures. But oh, the irony of a character trying to deconstruct the zombie genre, when Twilight can’t even get its own monsters right.

You can have horror without hotness, and horror with hotness, but if you have hotness without horror, then you have something else entirely.

Now let’s, like, go shopping.

(And for a toothily tongue-in-cheek look at bringing “hotness” to both vampires and other monsters of fiction, click here: LINK)

As I start writing this, I was suddenly deluged with the thought that telling someone about The New Dead out loud could lead to them thinking I’d recently finished reading an anthology called “The Nude Ed”. That would be an entirely different kind of book, wouldn’t it?

Fortunately, the text-only medium of this blog ensures a minimum of homonymic awkwardness, potentially hilarious though it might be. No, I read a collection of zombie stories, not ruminations on some au natural gentleman. So let’s talk about that.

As I briefly mentioned last week, The New Dead gathers together 19 different stories from 19 different authors, and while billed as a zombie anthology, editor Christopher Golden makes it clear in his foreword that not all of the tales will be in the “traditional” mold of what modern audiences have come to think of as zombie fiction. He seems to have set out to gather as many different perspectives as possible to illustrate the metaphorical role zombies fill, centering on questions of death and resurrection, and starts his introduction by contrasting the more obvious draw of vampires (eroticism and perfection in immortality) with their rather less sexy cousins. Golden surmises that the zombie is a by-product of an increasingly connected world which exposes us not only to wonders but horrors on a daily basis. Zombies, then, are means for us to confront and grapple with the images of death, torture, and disease that have always existed in the world, but that we no longer have the luxury of pretending don’t exist. I remember making a similar point several blogs ago: you can’t take a baseball bat to a virus, but you can take one to a zombie. Even if “they” win in the end, at least there was a rotting sea of troubles to take arms against.

But in any case, Golden warns you up front that while he’s gathered some tales with the usual trappings of apocalypse and the hungry dead, there is a more philosophical mission in mind that allows for some tales that get pretty far from that theme. There’s even one story which doesn’t have any supernatural element whatsoever, and by the time I’d read it I’d forgotten his warning of its existence and was surprised when it ended without so much as a twitch from the corpse. By the time you finish, you have, as promised, “…run the gamut from modern warfare to postapocalyptic futures, from love stories to heartbreaking voodoo horrors, from the Bible to Twitter.”

Is it all fantastic? All equally thought provoking? No, but that’s generally the case with any anthology. One of the stories is told entirely as a series of 140 character or less “tweets” from Twitter, which is a narrative experiment that some may love, some may hate, and some may just shrug at. Another contribution has an unending staccato rhythm to it, almost enough for me to imagine it being recited by some Beatnik in a smoky bar… it turned me off, but may turn others on. Conversely, the very first story in the collection is a retelling of the tale of Lazarus as a collection mimicking (I think) the short verses of the Bible, which had me completely fascinated but might leave others as cold as he was.

Regardless of any disagreements with styles and presentations, though, I’d venture to say there’s something here for everyone who’s a fan of the zombie genre, and even if you hate some of it, there’s going to be some of it you’ll enjoy, and maybe even one or two stories you’ll be blown away by. As you might expect I’m a big sucker for re-imaginings of the genre, or visions of how life might proceed in a world where the dead walk, and there was a good dose of that. I think my favorite story out of the bunch is one entitled “What Maisie Knew” by David Liss, which makes wonderful usage of first-person narrative. In fact, I don’t think that particular story would work at all if it wasn’t being told in first-person, which to me means the author really nailed it.

In The New Dead, there’s humor, and there’s horror, and there’s affirmations both of life and of death… but most importantly, I don’t think I could honestly assess any of the tales as mindless. An irony with zombies, I know, but then again not all the zombies in this collection are mindless. And while that might offend those for whom the Romero zombie is the be-all and end-all of what zombies are about, The New Dead’s broader definition and examination is a great way to tune in to all the possibilities of what death, and life-after-death, can mean to us as human beings, without all those pretty vampires getting in the way of the parable.

Oh great, now I’m back to the beginning of this blog and realizing “Nude Ed” could be a short form of “Nude Edward”. Say what you will about zombies, at least no one’s come along yet and decided it was a good idea to make them sparkle.

It’s weird how you can be around something for years, and yet still miss out on details you didn’t even know you were passing up until someone points them out. For instance, there’s a certain feature of lettering in comics that I never noticed, and yet is considered a fairly important formatting consideration.

The issue centers around the way the letter “I” is presented in comics, at least in the traditional method where word balloons, captions, etc. are written in all capital letters. Basically, the rule is that you only use the “crossbar I” when the letter is being used as a personal pronoun or abbreviation. What’s a crossbar I? It’s the style of capital I being used in this very blog, with the tiny perpendicular lines on the top and bottom. Any other time, you’re supposed to use the “stroke I”, which is the one without the crossbars that people might confuse for a lower case “L”… except that in an all caps situation you won’t see the lower case “l”.

It seems like such a minor thing, and I admit I was a bit skeptical until I started going back over all my professionally lettered comics and discovered it to be absolutely true. I expect the convention came about originally for ease of both writing and reading (probably mostly writing) when most lettering was done by hand, but I’m not entirely sure of the origins. What I can tell you is that something as seemingly inconsequential as the shape of your I’s  is considered one of those dividing indicators between “pro” and “amateur”. Fair? Maybe, maybe not, but if you’re going to start up a comic (web or otherwise), be aware of the convention. I wasn’t until just this week, which means if we ever get around to doing a big TPB of Zombie Ranch I’ll probably be going back and doing a fair share of re-lettering.

The crossbar I rule is considered so important that most of the computer fonts out there intended for comics use have both the crossbar and stroke I as part of their library, usually one as the ‘lowercase’ and one as the ‘capital’ (this is possible since the comics fonts don’t have a true lowercase). It turns out that’s exactly what was tripping us up, since as you might remember from my script blogs, I had all my dialog set up to automatically be capitalized. Not to mention the script itself is written in plain old Times New Roman. The font we use for the comic does have both kinds of I’s available, but until I started checking into things I never knew!

Learn from my example, any of ye who would be comics writers. And if you do acquire (or buy) a comic-specific font, take some time to check out all the features it has: for instance, one other thing I discovered in the process of all this is that our font has built-in “fireflies” I can add using Shift-[ and Shift=], which was a timely find for Uncle Chuck’s expression of “pfft” in this week’s comic.

If you’re interested in further examples of “comic book grammar”, Blambot has a nice, easy-to-read summary on their site: LINK. I’m certainly not advocating slavish devotion to what’s presented there, but it’s good to be aware of so that any choices you make in a different direction are a matter of style and not just ignorance. I was aware of a lot of it already, but I have to admit, the crossbar I bit? Well, it crossed me right up.

So anyhow, one bit regarding Comic-Con I failed to mention was that I picked up a copy of The New Dead, a zombie fiction anthology I’d been meaning to get my hands on. When I bought it the lady at the booth informed me Max Brooks (who penned one of the 19 stories, and who y’all might know better as the author of the Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z) was going to be signing copies of it if I wanted to come back in about 15 minutes. Of course, when I came back there was a line, and I had a panel I dearly wanted to get to, so I didn’t stay for the autograph, especially since I figured also I wasn’t really going to have a chance to talk to him. I chickened out on the idea of shoving a copy of Zombie Ranch at him… he probably gets dozens of people trying to pitch Zombie related stuff his way, so it seemed totally obnoxious to do that during a signing appearance. Sometimes I think I have entirely too much shame to succeed.

Regardless of which, I have my zombie book, and so far I’m greatly enjoying the first two stories in it. Depending how much further I get, I’ll likely make it next week’s blog topic. For now, I think it’s about time for bed. My I’s are crossing.

One of the things about San Diego Comic-Con is how drained it can leave you when it’s finally over. It takes awhile to adjust back to reality and the idea that you need to go do that day job again that pays the bills. Sometimes this adjustment overlaps with you being at said day job, which leaves you going through the motions in a bit of a surreal, distracted manner.

Every year, a portion of me wants the convention to go on and on, and the other portion of me (I suspect the one in charge of feet and finances) is quite happy to stop once Sunday rolls around. After that, it’s a bit more time before I can really assess how things went… but blog time is upon me, and so I shall try.

This was our first SDCC that Dawn and I attended as “Industry Professionals”, which pretty much just means you stand in a different line to get your badge and that you get the badge for free. That’s nothing to sneeze at when a 4-day badge costs $100, but you don’t get any special privileges beyond that. Heck, the badge border wasn’t even a different color than the ones the Attendees get, and our names were printed so small you wouldn’t really see them without sticking your nose in our chests to read… an awkward social proposition at the best of times.

Everything went smoothly in terms of arrival, badge acquisition, and setting up Dawn’s work for the Art Show. A particularly wonderful change was that the pre-paid parking I bought for us was just as advertised, letting us park next to the Convention Center on Wednesday and find a space within a couple of minutes of entry to the structure, as opposed to previous years where I sometimes trawled the lot for upwards of an hour after being admitted. The downside was that anyone who hadn’t been paying attention to the Comic-Con announcements and didn’t pre-buy was locked out of those lots, but compared to the overstuffing that led to my frustrations of before, well… I’ve got to come down on the side of it being a good thing. A necessary thing. This was the easiest, least stressful arrival we’ve ever had at Comic-Con… which may not be saying much considering some of the hair-tearers of the past, but it was nice to start the visit in a relatively relaxed manner.

With that said, it’s too bad we weren’t allowed to put out our freebie fliers on Wednesday, since Thursday morning was more hectic. I think it’s the first time we’ve had to stand in line to be let in despite already having our badges, and also despite being told we could head up to the freebie area anytime after 8am (security hadn’t gotten that memo, apparently). We finally just joined the general line and got up there with the rest of the crowd, where we turned in our box and watched as the volunteers started putting out the purty Zombie Ranch cards. There wasn’t much else on the table yet, which might explain why we ran into a bit of a problem…

The fliers were all gone by 4pm the same day. I was half afraid we’d been disapproved for some reason, but the man in charge of the table assured us that wasn’t so. Still, I don’t know even now whether I should be elated or disappointed. We were told there was a limit of 2000 pieces for the entire show, and the staff would take care of distributing them. I thought this meant they would make sure to only put out a certain number per day, but apparently they just put out all 1000 we had on day 1, and poof, they were gone. So anyone waiting until Friday, Saturday, or Sunday to check the table, or only attending for one of those days, never saw any of them.

I honestly don’t know how 2000 is supposed to last the whole Con when 1000 goes that fast. Maybe I misunderstood and it’s a limit of 2000 pieces per day? I don’t know. If any freebie table vets happen to be reading this, feel free to enlighten me. I also now wish I’d cooked up some way to tell how many people might be finding us as a result of the flyers. I’m not seeing any big bump in numbers so far, so either those thousand or so people haven’t had a chance to go through their swag yet or it didn’t work out so well.

Ah well, it doesn’t in any way invalidate the fact that my main missions were accomplished. I got to talk to Scott McCloud! In fact, I even worked up the nerve to offer him a copy of Zombie Ranch #1, which he not only graciously accepted but asked if we would sign it for him (Dawn later accused me of badgering him to let us sign it… it’s not true! He asked!).

I have not been that giddy and nervous in a long, long time. It took all my power not to get hopelessly tongue-tied as Scott signed Making Comics for me, and Kurt Busiek signed my Astro City: Family Album. Dawn took a picture as proof, then it was time for Kurt’s “Spotlight on Kurt Busiek” panel, where he was presented with an Inkpot Award and talked about his works.

Now, that panel was on Thursday morning, but it was still the best panel I attended all convention long. Why? Because Kurt talked about his creative process, especially in regards to Astro City, and it was quite enlightening. Actually… and I know this is going to sound weird… it was comforting. You see, I don’t have every last detail of the Zombie Ranch world mapped out, and sometimes I feel like that makes me a bad writer. So when I hear a very established, critically-acclaimed writer like Mr. Busiek saying that he still to this day is developing the environs and denizens of Astro City, after over 10 years since he started scripting it? Well, that’s a beautiful breath of fresh air for my soul, because I respect his work a lot (and so do the people that have awarded him multiple Eisners!). I’m not winning any Eisners anytime soon, but it does give me faith that a more freewheeling style can still produce powerful and memorable narratives.

Kurt’s description of his process with Astro City was not freewheeling so much as he called it “fractal”, I presume with everything that term implies. For my interpretation, it means that there’s a pattern, but it’s always unfolding, always changing, always expanding. This is something that makes total sense to me, or at least it describes the way I feel most comfortable working. Not complete order, but not complete chaos, either. So sue me if I imagined a bit of connection there… then again, maybe it’s just because Kurt had impeccable dress sense that day with his jeans and floral print shirt.

Also, Kurt at one point not only expressed that Hawkeye is his favorite superhero, but elucidated his take on what makes Hawkeye tick, and it’s an interesting analysis I’ve never heard from anyone else. He could really make something interesting out of the purple archer if he was allowed, but he said he probably never will be, so most likely will have to apply the theories to his Astro City character of Quarrel.

There was a lot more, but the upshot of it is that Scott McCloud and Kurt Busiek are both very gracious, smart, and thoughtful men, and I was rapt with attention for that whole hour listening to them talk (Scott was moderating the panel). Brent Anderson, Astro City’s artist, was also in attendance and chiming in with that side of the perspective, much to Dawn’s occasional amusement. But basically, that day I felt I had chosen my heroes well.

Oh, and Astro City is apparently going to be developed as a movie! We heard it there first. Kurt is writing a draft and seems to have a good rapport with the production company as to what Astro City is all about, which in very simple terms is that it’s a study of people who just happen to be superheroes or affected by them. Characters first, SFX second.

So, where was I? Oh yes, Comic-Con. Honestly, I think Kurt’s panel was the high point for me, although that doesn’t mean the rest was bad. We connected with a lot of friends, both those who were exhibiting and those who weren’t, saw sneak previews, got lots of swag and good deals. Since we didn’t have an exhibit space this year I decided to do a “portable booth” and carried several copies of Zombie Ranch #1 in my backpack, along with a handful of fliers and pens… really a just-in-case deal, but we actually had several people purchase or barter for copies! In particular it was fun to be able to provide copies to some of the friends we’ve met at previous Cons that have given us advice and support, such as Cari Corene of Toilet Genie or Rebecca Hicks of Little Vampires. Both of them seemed certain that we could get into the Small Press Pavilion next year if we tried for it. Mind you, longtime readers will know we did try (and fail) to get in for this year, but then again all we had for that deadline was the mini-comic. Will having a full comic be the magic entry key? I don’t know, we turned in our application while still at the con and it was stamped ‘WAIT LIST’. So I’m not holding my breath.

Anyhow, I think that’s enough rambling for this week. Perhaps I’ll have some more Comic-Con thoughts and remembrances later once my brain has more time to percolate. For now, I hope you enjoy the reintroduction of our mystery motorcycle lady, and we’ll see you next week!

So, curious ones, you return. Or perhaps you’re just joining us, if you picked up one of our Comic-Con fliers or otherwise are dropping in for the first time. In any case, welcome to the third and final installment of my blogs regarding my Zombie Ranch scripting method! You can check out the previous ones here and here, should you wish.

This final example image comes from a much more recent sample of writing. Once again, you may click on the image below to see a larger version.

Now sad to say, yes, I still hadn’t updated the header when I printed this out. I’m a terrible person, I know. This is not a 12 page script. In fact, this is also a whole new MS Word file I started as an “Issue 2” since I felt it a bit unwieldy to keep going with the original. Perhaps one day I will find out it was a mistake to keep the webcomic numbered in pure sequence while I started the script page counts over… but then again, once we get enough of an archive I may want to reorganize things, regardless.

All of that’s pretty much a long-winded way of saying this is the script for the ninth page of the second “issue”, which is story comic #32. You can check out the final version here: LINK

You’ll notice there’s been a bit of photoshopping done, mostly because I already know the character’s name and use it in my scripts, but you lot haven’t been formally introduced to her yet. Her name has been floating around in a couple places, but for those of you still scrupulously waiting to be surprised, I figured I would do you the favor of not shoving the spoiler in your faces. You’re welcome (and here’s hoping I didn’t overlook anything!).

Moving on, this page shows a feature I took way too long to actually start adding to the script, which is a title for that week’s comic! Prior to this, Dawn would be asking me as deadlines approached what the post title should be, and sometimes I’d find to my horror I either hadn’t thought it through, or might have thought it up earlier but had since forgotten. The practice of having a title for every comic page is something fairly unique to webcomics, I think. Some just use plain numbers or dates, but I’d already dug the hole of trying to be clever with it, and if I left it up to Dawn madness would follow.

Anyhow, the simple solution (which, again, I took a stupidly long time implementing) was to start including a title with each page. Of course, I ended up changing the title for this one prior to publication, but at least there was something there, right? “Everyone Wins”.

Look, Dawn always prints the script page out before she starts drawing, sometimes days in advance, so, you know… rewrites happen. Ever seen one of the online drafts of a screenplay for a well-known movie?  The shooting script for Airplane is almost unrecognizable from what made it to the screen. Here, we’re just changing a few words around and configuring panels.

In the upper right you’ll see two panel layouts I sketched as suggestions, neither of which Dawn ended up using in favor of her own idea. This happens a lot, and for the most part I let it happen, since effective visuals are more in her area of expertise. On the flip side of that, you’ll notice I’ve gotten much more detailed in my descriptions, for instance the word balloon placement in panel 1. Dawn had a better idea for how the sound effects should go, but otherwise she followed what I wanted and I think it turned out effectively. I truly believe that sequential art is a medium where even the placement of a speech bubble can change the feeling and “timing” of a panel.

More specifics (and some research blurbs) crop up in the following panels. It’s entirely possible Dawn’s artist eyes may have started glazing over with all the words, so in the third panel I made sure to unleash the secret weapon of the Internet age: I went out, found reference pictures, scaled them down and pasted them right into the document. Boom. This is really easy to do, and can be very helpful if you want to make sure you and your artist are thinking of the same things. That said, I still also ended up drawing a quick sketch of how I imagined everything fitting together, framed in the binoculars. Collaboration can be a messy and redundant business.

And that brings me to the last part of the discussion/lecture/whatnot. Redundancy is a good thing when communicating with your artist. Redundancy is not a good thing in the actual comic. This is what I call my “Stan Lee Test” when writing. Much respect for Stan the Man and his contributions to comicsdom, but as a writer he did have certain faults, and one of those was an alarming tendency to unnecessarily restate whatever was going on visually in a panel. So, for example: the art would show the supervillain firing a laser blast from his eyes that was cutting right through our hero’s armor like it was paper. Then the hero would inevitably think (or say!) something like:

“Good lord! Laser blasts… from his eyes! Cutting through my armor like it was paper!”

Now, to be fair, Stan was not the only writer who operated like this. The Silver Age was rife with the practice, but he’s just the biggest name that occurs to me when I think of cluttering a comic with words that serve no function except to narrate something we as readers can already see happening. That’s one of the whole points of having the pictures, right? It’s probably one of the greatest pitfalls of a purely text-based writer trying to move into comics writing, since they’re used to carrying the entire narrative burden by themselves. I suppose I’m lucky there since I majored in Theater in college, so I’m used to writing more like a playwright where a lot of the details are going to ultimately be conveyed in a visual manner.

Still, I do like my words, and it’s a constant struggle to make sure they serve a purpose and aren’t crowding out or being redundant to the images. One of the reasons I’m happy to have Zombie Ranch as a  project is because the subject matter doesn’t lend itself to big narrative captions or interior monologues where I’d be tempted to ramble on and on and on, in love with my own verbiage and thinking I’m providing some deep perspective on life, the universe, and everything. I mean, that’s what this blog is for, right?

But seriously, there’s a prime example in the script image above where I had to apply the Stan Lee Test to myself, and it’s another reason I chose this particular page. It didn’t occur to me until after I’d printed out the page and was explaining/sketching out to Dawn how a zombie ranch is identified to passerby, i.e. the biohazard warnings tacked onto the ranch sign. I suddenly realized that if this is supposed to be such a universal symbol in this world, then the lady looking through the binoculars didn’t really need to narrate what she was seeing. Also, you the readers already had all the information, since you knew by now what the Z Ranch is. I came to the conclusion that it was unnecessary text, so I lined it out and reduced it to a simple utterance of “HMM”, trusting instead  to the art and context to get the idea across.

Was it the right decision? I like to think so. It just seems like a waste of space to repeat the same idea in both text and pictures, unless maybe you’re making an instruction manual.  Scott McCloud calls it a “Duo-Specific” combo and is glad it has fallen out of use with most modern comics (except Silver Age homages/parodies and other specific exemptions), and I agree.  After all, when I consider what our hero should really be saying or thinking when a laser blast is cutting through his armor, I can only come up with “Oh crap!” — or perhaps just, “Argh!”

Ahh, Scott McCloud. Gonna stalk that guy at Comic-Con and make him sign my copy of his Making Comics book. So much good stuff in there, for writers and artists both. Ideally I’m going to corner him at the panel he’s hosting for his old friend Kurt Busiek, so I can also get Kurt Busiek to sign my copy of Astro City.

Hopefully that goes better than my abortive attempt at getting Jim Steranko’s autograph earlier this year. Maybe I can even ask Kurt Busiek about his scripting methods. He’s been at this a hell of a lot longer than I have, and even though this is the last in my series for the time being, you better believe I’m still looking for ways to improve my own process and my communication with Ye Artist.

For now, off to San Diego we go! See you next week!

So as promised (or threatened, depending on your point of view), I’m going to continue talking about the evolution of my scripting process this week. With that in mind, let’s look at example #2, taken from a later draft of Zombie Ranch. Go ahead and click on the image below for a larger view.

All set? Let’s talk shop, then. The first thing you may notice is that the page counts in the header still hadn’t been revised. This is not due to any grand plan on my part, it’s just something I didn’t bother mucking with at the time, since all of two people were going to be looking at it. The more important number was the big PAGE ELEVEN, which I put in manually at the top of each new script segment. This is important because, although I try my best to keep to a system of one script page per posted comic, there are times where I’ve had to break that rule. For instance, I had a lot of panel description on the fourth story page of the second arc (#27 in the archives), which meant that “page” was actually two pages in the script. That throws off any automatic numbering, so I prefer to just do it manually.

Incidentally, you may notice a great deal of white space present in the bottom portion of the page. That’s not actually there so I can doodle and make notes (although in this case, I did) — it’s there because this particular comic posting ends after panel 4, and I make a hard page break whenever that happens. It helps to keep the “beats” organized in my head (and Dawn’s, as well), and though it may seem wasteful at times, I think it’s indispensable when you’re working with someone else who can’t read your mind on where things are supposed to start and stop. You want to eliminate confusion as much as possible.

In that same vein, by this draft I had begun the time honored practice of consecutively numbering every line of dialog (and sound effect) that’s supposed to appear. Notice how the numbering carries through to the end of the page, instead of starting over with each panel. This is very, very important because both you and the artist have to be thinking about the composition of the page, and if there are words to be said, the words and images have to find room to effectively co-exist. If I start getting into dialog line #13 or #14, I know I’m in dangerous territory, which is a good warning system to have since I think it’s very easy for a writer to overdo it in a comics medium. More on that later.

The numbering helps mostly, again, in letting your artist keep track of the various elements. When Dawn sketches up a quick storyboard for me, she can also sketch in word balloons and label them ‘1’, ‘2’, and ‘3’ to show which lines of the script they correspond to, and there’s much less chance of accidentally skipping something. For this same reason, I put the names of characters appearing in a given panel in ALL CAPS in the visual instructions, so they’re not overlooked.

My visual instructions on this page are relatively sparse, which is perhaps a shortcoming. There are times I’ve leaned heavily on Dawn to help provide the visual flair. Sometimes a lack of detail is liberating to an artist, but don’t be surprised if what they come up with might stray from what you intended.  That said, it was Dawn who came up with the elaborate final composition of Panel 4, including the idea of Suzie casually lighting up a cigarette. That image is still one of my favorites from the entire run of the comic, which is probably why it’s on the back of both our postcard fliers and our print issue.

And just to go back to the dialog numbering for a bit, you may notice Suzie’s words in Panel 4 are split into two separate lines, even though it’s only her talking. I actually do this a lot… there’s only so much text that can be crammed into a single word balloon, so an artist will often have to split things up. When those splits need to happen, I’d prefer they happen my way, at my pace and flow, so I arrange it up front so that Dawn knows where she should make the breaks.

There are further differences between this page and the final that make it obvious there was more revision, such as my adding of an entire extra line to Panel 1, and Dawn winning out with her argument that ‘SPACK’ was a stupid sound effect. Oh, and if you haven’t guessed by now, ‘LGZ’ was my abbreviation for ‘LITTLE GIRL ZOMBIE’. I wrote it out on a previous script page and felt like using the shortened version from then on.

The scrawls at the bottom of this script page don’t refer to page eleven at all, but the page after. I was reworking the dialog, and also did a simple little attempt at storyboarding since I was having trouble describing to Dawn what I had envisioned. I think we may have been having a bit of an argument over how to present things. Some married couples have fights over Junior getting an earring, or why Mr. Smith once again came home drunk and smelling of perfume… we have fights over the sequential art of a webcomic.

This is hardly unusual, though, even for writer/artist pairings that aren’t living together. Arguments and misunderstandings will occur despite your best efforts to minimize them, but in a lot of cases the end result may turn out better for having two separate viewpoints, even if it’s wildly different from the original script.

Anyhow, Comic-Con is coming up next week and we’re trying to get everything together for that, so on the comic front we’ll probably be leaving you folks with this week’s minor cliffhanger and then resuming the story on the 28th. I do have one more post I wanted to make about the scripting, though, so I’m going to try to get that written up for my blog for the 21st. Stop by then and I’ll tell you about my “Stan Lee Rule”.

Oh, and on the advice of one of our peers, we’ve put together a Support page, listing various suggestions on how those of you who are fans of Zombie Ranch can show your love (in ways that won’t get you arrested, I mean). A lot of it is stuff that we’ve mentioned at various times before, like our Facebook group, but now it’s all gathered into one convenient place. Check it out! LINK

A question I get asked a lot, even from other webcomickers (perhaps especially from other webcomickers), is how Zombie Ranch goes from thoughts in my brain to a finished page for consumption. Mmm… brains… consumption… wait, where were we?

Well, first off, I’m only a portion of the process. According to our latest poll, the overwhelming majority of you who cared to see ‘behind the scenes’ are interested in everything, but I will let Dawn talk of her end of things when and if she chooses to. Actually, if you haven’t yet, I encourage you to click on over to some of the videos that were done last year, where you can see her drawing and coloring. In one of them you can hear me yammering on as well, should the sound of my voice be a curiosity of yours.

https://www.zombieranchcomic.com/extras/dawn-tv/

https://www.zombieranchcomic.com/extras/podcast/

So that’s a taste of her side of the equation. On my side, there’s mainly the script. Yes, Zombie Ranch does indeed have a script, and it can get pretty complicated at times as I try to communicate what I want to the woman sitting five feet away from me. That’s not as easy as you might imagine, which believe you me has given me new respect for the writer/artist teams who aren’t even working in the same state (or even country!).

But I’m guessing one of the first questions any aspiring comics writer asks is, “What’s the format for this?” If they also happen to be the artist, the answer is most likely “Not much”, since they have the most minimal communication barrier possible. For the rest of us, we grasp about asking people and looking at various sample scripts, and eventually come to the perhaps disquieting realization that there’s no universal format. I mean, if you’re working for a certain publisher such as Marvel, I would guess they have a “house style” for scripts in the same fashion they do for artists… but I swear to you, I’ve seen a lot of samples from professional comics writers whose scripts have marked differences in presentation. Sometimes they look no different from screenplays, including all the dialog being centered and instructions like EXT. STREET – DAY. Sometimes they marshal the power of the computer age to include reference screenshots for the panels and characters. There are so many different ways that successful, critically acclaimed comics writers have brought their ideas forth, how can you possibly choose?

Well, keep in mind that I haven’t been doing this for very long, but I went through that period where I was fretting about how to write the script, which as you might imagine can really get in the way of actually getting a script written. So anytime anyone asks me the question of how I set up my script, I will gladly share what I came up with. As far as self-publishing such as webcomics goes, I think the question of comic scripting boils down to two rules:

1: Is this format comfortable for you?

2: Are you communicating effectively with your creative partner(s)?

It’s really as simple as that, in my opinion. My scripting style uses a lot of discrete elements to try to make it as easy as possible for Dawn to pick out the details she needs to. Often the dialog for a certain page starts with the horribly last century method of just writing lines in a notebook, so that I’m not thinking of too many things at once. Then in the next pass, I move things electronic, but I still use nothing fancier than plain old Microsoft Word for my drafts.

Speaking of drafts, if you click the image below you can see a scan of one of the printed out pages when I was revising my first draft of Zombie Ranch several months ago, complete with my horrible handwriting as I pondered changes and expansions.

Not especially pretty, as you can see, but the basic script format I still use is present in this example. I was in the process of expanding the original, very condensed 12 pages into something not quite as hurried, which explains why the printer stamped this as ’16’ and why the bolded “PAGE” entry at the top doesn’t have a number following it. This is about as rough as it gets without me subjecting you to my mad, cramped notebook scribblings.

If you compare this page to the final product visible in story pages 16-19, you’ll see how differently things can turn out. I’m often revising, sometimes until the last minute, based on feedback from Dawn or just my own sensibilities as I try to find the precise “rhythm” for that week’s installment. Obviously some elements are easier to revise than others… once Dawn has a panel inked, there’s no going back, but the word balloons are all added electronically, making them comparatively easy to alter or reposition.

But anyhow, there it is. I have several pre-programmed Styles in MS Word that are a click away as I write. “COMIC PAGE NUMBER” is big and bold, “Comic Book Panel” is underlined, “Comic Book Visuals“, italicized, and “COMIC BOOK BODY” (for the dialog) is all caps.

This honestly isn’t even the best example for scripting since it doesn’t include later improvements I made such as numbering every dialog element, or including the title for posting the page along with the page number. Actually, that sounds like a good topic for next week! Stay tuned!

P.S. Big thanks to Michael Hamersky, who read and reviewed the full print version of Zombie Ranch #1 this week on his blog. If you’re interested to see what he thought, click here: ComicBookCollectorsBlog.Com

First off… print issue for sale at last! Including the super-duper Special Edition with extra stuff! Yes, this announcement is redundant with the comic blog, but I’m going to throw the link at you again regardless. Cuz I’m excited. LINK.

In the comments to last week’s comic, the movie Fido came up. It’s about time I talked of this film, since it’s one of the single biggest inspirations for Zombie Ranch.

Let’s face it, there’s plenty of zombie movies and fiction out there dealing with either the “outbreak” or its immediate aftermath. The credits roll as the survivors reach safety (however temporary), or are wiped out along with the rest of humankind. What you see a lot less of are stories set a ways down the road, that explore the effect the emergence of zombies has had on the world as we know it. Shaun of the Dead riffed on this in a brief, tantalizing glimpse of zombies being used as cart return clerks, game show props and fall guy video game opponents — but at that point, its story has been told and the movie is over.

Fido, in a sense, picks up where Shaun of the Dead left off, envisioning a world mostly in zombie infested ruin, except for fenced-in safe areas such as the one the human populace of the movie dwells in. The choice of how the safe area is presented is one of the genius concepts of the film, because it’s the manicured lawns and smiling faces of 1950’s American suburbia, a time warp stuck in the Eisenhower years. In our own history, the idealized nuclear families presented in the media of the era lived in the shadow of the Cold War and the less ideal nuclear aspects that threatened. This was the era of the much lampooned “Duck and Cover!” films that taught schoolkids that all they had to do in the event of a mushroom cloud was get under their desks and they’d be A-okay. It was an era where evil Communists supposedly lurked behind the most innocent faces, ready to subvert your way of life and make you one of them.  In short, a thin veneer of normalcy and sunshine overlaid some ugly lies, and even uglier truths. It was also quite the era for consumerism, as all manner of gadgets popped up in the post-WWII years to make your life easier and demonstrate your superiority to the neighbors.

Fido has no Communists to speak of, but endangering the safety of the community is grounds for exile, which is of course tantamount to a death sentence. Now, you’d think having zombies around would definitely be endangering the community, but wait! As the film demonstrates early on, the friendly corporation Zomcon has solved the undead problem through use of special collars that keep their murderous, flesh eating impulses in line. Because of this, zombies can contribute to the community as paperboys (inaccurate ones, but aren’t they all?), garbagemen, and, of course, household pets.

Fido also presents a world where anyone who dies from any means will re-animate, so its quite important to call Zombie Control as soon as possible so that they can be properly rounded up, as evidenced by another scene from the Zomcon Public Service Announcement where a small girl yells, “Help! Grandpa’s fallen… and he’s getting up!” (anyone who’s seen the old Life Alert commercials should snicker at this). But anyhow, back to the pets… this is of course why the movie is named as it is, since the titular zombie is purchased as a companion for a lonely young boy. Also as a status symbol, because frankly being a family without at least one zombie is as big of an embarrassment as not having a television.

I really don’t want to spoil the movie for those who haven’t seen it, but let me just say that if you’re enjoying Zombie Ranch, I think you’ll enjoy Fido. There’s a lot of clever satire and exploration of the line between zombie and human, not to mention other issues that the unique setting allows a focus on. It’s Leave It To Beaver meets the zombie apocalypse. If you want a more straightforward zombie fest, it may not be your thing, but I found it a highly original take on the genre, and like I said at the beginning, a take that very much inspired my own.

So, I re-watched The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly the other night, and damn if it isn’t even better than I remembered from last time. Quentin Tarantino considers it the best movie ever made. I can’t agree with him there, on account of Jaws existing, but I can understand why he’d feel that way.

It’s one of those movies that I think gets better with repeat viewings. Certainly that’s how the critical response has been, where it was mostly panned or dismissed when it first premiered in 1966, but these days it’s considered a classic by some very respectable names. Roger Ebert gives it four stars; in 1966 he gave it three stars, but admits now that he knocked off a star for peer pressure alone, because the attitude of the time was that no “spaghetti western” could possibly make the cut of cinematic greatness. They were just cheap, exploitative foreign knock-offs of a dying genre, pandering to the lowest common denominator of filmgoer.

But the lowest common denominator doesn’t challenge. It doesn’t risk. Right from its beginning, TGTB&TU does both, by spending its first ten minutes with absolutely no dialogue whatsoever. Ten minutes is a noticeable length of time for no one to be talking, but the story points and characters come across in crystal clear moments, some brief — some intentionally, uncomfortably drawn out. I don’t understand the notion expressed by some that spaghetti westerns are minimalist in their cinematography, since I feel the exact opposite is true. Sergio Leone was fussy, temperamental, and above all a perfectionist, particularly with his visual details. That attention shines through in this film: yes, there’s the famous parts everyone remembers, the close-ups on twitching hands and mouths and eyes, but there’s also a lot of subtler, gorgeously framed sequences to be enjoyed. Don’t agree? Again, watch that first ten minutes, particularly the entrance of Angel Eyes (the titular “Bad”) into the home of the man he’s going to interrogate. From one direction, he looms larger than the archways, a wolf at the door. From the other direction, in the same exact architecture, the home owner looks dwarfed and trapped. It’s illusion, tension, and mood-setting at its finest, and you can see a lot of Tarantino’s opening sequence for Inglorious Basterds in what Leone filmed almost half a century earlier.

The weakest parts of the movie are probably where Leone’s script starts to get a bit preachy about war and man’s inhumanity to man, talking about it instead of just showing it (and oh, how he shows it…). Well, that and if you’re a stickler for historical accuracy, the film will annoy you to no end — for example, that the Winchester rifle Clint Eastwood’s character uses wasn’t made until eight years after the end of the American Civil War, the period in which the movie is ostensibly set. But it’s not about accuracy; I mean, Leone went one further than all the “Texas” westerns filmed in Arizona and Utah and California, and filmed everything in Spain… but damned if it doesn’t look like the iconic western landscape. TGTB&TU is Iconic with a capital “I”. Great landscapes, great characters, a rousing storyline of betrayal and hidden gold, wild setpieces like a gunfight that occurs in a town being shelled by artillery, or that famous three way duel at the climax… and I’d be more than remiss to not mention Ennio Morricone’s musical score. You know the one… Ah-EE-ah-EE-aaaah WAAH WAAH WAAAAAAH.

Oh c’mon, everyone knows it. Here, does this help? Clickie.

If you still don’t recognize it, I’m disowning you. Chad and Elspeth will split the estate between them, and you will get nothing. NOTHING, do you hear?

I jest. Keep reading Zombie Ranch, and all is forgiven.

Less than a month to go before Comic-Con International 2010. Did I ever mention that Dawn and I scored Professional status this year? While I’m not entirely sure this comic clinched the deal, I’d like to thank you all again regardless for your readership and support. We didn’t manage to get a booth, but we’ll have a presence on the Freebie Table (don’t laugh, you actually have to be approved for that!), and Dawn will have art available for bidding and purchase in the Art Show. And hey, that Art Show was where “On the Zombie Ranch” was first displayed and sold, so someone out there has quite a piece of original illustration on their hands. Who knows, Dr. Jones? In 10,000 years maybe even it will be worth something!

All right, time to end the blog for this week, before I grow even stranger in my meanderings. Type at y’all next time!

I admit it. I’ve wanted to sneak in the phrase “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” since the comic first started. It’s just so cowboy. It is, in fact, cowboy enough to have its own wikipedia entry stating how cowboy it is.

Also, we just recently went on a tangent to give y’all a first taste of  a new character, and when you want to get back off a tangent, why not go with the classic standards of yore? Some of you might have noticed that our motorcycle lady is not yet listed in the Cast, even partially. We know. Perhaps we have decided to keep you in suspense over whether she will actually be a regular cast member, or a mere plot device on legs? Of course, if you’ve read some of the commentary, Dawn already let slip her name, or at least part of it. Does one give a name to plot devices? Doesn’t that just make it harder if you have to eat them later?

One way or another we’ll be back to our “Desert Rose” soon enough (or soon enough for a weekly webcomic, anyhow). In the meantime, we get to watch zombies being slopped, and you get to learn a few more tidbits about how they work in this particular setting.

I’ve said this now to a lot to people I’ve talked to since I started writing the comic, but I think one of the most important aspects of any good zombie tale is to know what your zombies are going to be like; even if the audience never gets the whole story, you as the storyteller should have the answers. Actually, I’d argue that principle holds for any creative enterprise featuring a monster with a past history to it: are your vampires burned by silver? do your werewolves recoil from holy symbols? And no, I didn’t get those mixed up — depending which myths you come across, they’re considered truths, even if the most mainstream versions we’re used to have them reversed.

The modern zombie mythology is a more youthful exercise, but still has blossomed into several different riffs on the theme in the past 40 or so years. Are your zombies fast or slow? Living or dead? Do they die from a destroyed brain? Can they “survive” being dismembered or decapitated? How does the infection spread? Will they eat anything, or only people? In his Zombie Survival Guide Max Brooks spends his entire first chapters answering all these questions, establishing clearly what his specific vision of the zombie is. Only then can he move on to the rest of the book describing how to deal with them, and for that matter, only then can he move on to writing World War Z. The specific nature of your monsters has an enormous impact on the stories you’re going to tell. I’ve been playing my zombies much closer to the chest than Mr. Brooks did, but then, I have a different story.

Anyhow, I wanted to mention again that last Sunday we were gifted with a wonderful bit of Suzie fan art from DK, the very talented artist for The Becoming. If you haven’t seen the art yet, click here! Both the artist and writer of The Becoming are big fans of Zombie Ranch, as well as being very friendly folk. If you have some more time on your webcomic docket, why not click over and give their own tale a look? They’re just starting on their second story arc, but have already created a lushly fantastic world blending aspects of the Renaissance, Steampunk Victoriana, and other interesting genres and time periods into a unique stage for their characters. Plus there’s a mysterious plague, hints of vampirism… it’s good stuff and I look forward to watching it unfold.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (see how good that works?)… apologies to some of you who may have made comments and never had them show up until just recently. I hadn’t checked the spam log for awhile and it had been a bit overzealous, particularly with shorter entries. We can’t really afford to not let it operate or the comments would be overwhelmed by actual spam, but I’ll try to keep a better eye on it from now on.

One thing that might help if you’re a regular commentator would be registering for the site, which you can do on the left hand side of the page just below the Events listing. Actually, why don’t I just give a link: click here.

That way the spamcatcher shouldn’t nick you for anything, nor should you have to wait on any moderation from our end. Instant gratification! And if that sounds like a sleazy way to get your names on a mailing list, well, truth is we don’t really have one right now beyond our Facebook and Twitter, so that’s where you oughtta hook up if you want the latest. I don’t know if we need an email list above and beyond that. Perhaps I’ll make that the new poll, and see what all of you think.

Happy trails!

So, yeah, we’re having a bit of a reactor leak this week. On the plus side, this was the week we had already planned to skip a comic (and pre-warned y’all) due to Dawn’s final exams. On the minus side, both our Cable and Internet are completely kaput at home and the earliest a repairman can get there is Wednesday afternoon. I’m already getting the shakes.

Also, I at least was planning to do a blog as usual, but at the moment I’m limited to typing this during my lunch break at work. So I’ve got to keep things short and sweet for once, and schedule this ahead for the usual just-past-midnight update. My plan at the moment is maybe to come back and edit something more fulfilling into place once things are back to normal.

So, apologies. Oh, and if you have Netflix Instant and want to check out a crazy entertaining pseudo-western out of Thailand, look up Tears of the Black Tiger. It’s slow in some places, but when it goes over the top it is TAKING that next trench!

Yeah, that’s right, I just made a clumsily awesome World War I metaphor. Don’t you tell me it’s Too Soon.

And see you next week! Or maybe later this week, if we get everything sorted properly. Very small leak… don’t send security team…

EDIT: Okay, so our home internet is fixed! Yay! So as I sort-of-promised I’ll add a little more to this post. First off, I mentioned Tears of the Black Tiger above, which is a movie made in 2000 that I swear looks like one from the early 60s, right down to the faaaabulous color choices for characters. It’s a very stylized piece of work, set in a world that seems stuck somewhere between 1960 and the Wild West. And like I mentioned, very over-the-top, to the point where Dawn is certain they went to the trouble of coloring in geysers of spewing blood in post-production. That or Thailand allows a level of explosive squib packs that would make OSHA flip their lids.

I found this movie while browsing an interesting thread on Warren Ellis’s online forum, Whitechapel, pondering if the release of Red Dead Redemption might inspire a renaissance of the western genre (click here if you wanna see). A decent number of responders declared the western a dead and gone thing, a product of a time and place which has passed. On a related note, one of the makers of Red Dead Redemption talked about how much the western, almost uniquely amongst film genres, is tied in to geography.

But if you play Red Dead Redemption, you’ll notice that there’s several types of geography you progress through during the game, so it sort of undercuts the point. A western doesn’t have to be set in the desert under towering rock formations. There is a geography to westerns, but that geography is a frontier. You have a wilderness dotted by settlements here and there, and maybe the occasional big city for contrast and conflict between the forces of freedom/savagery and law/civilization. You really don’t need to be more specific than that for a “western” tale to work.

So, frankly, this is why those Kurosawa movies about feudal Japan translate so well into the American Old West (and Kurosawa was in fact inspired by John Ford in the first place). In fact, this is also why the whole concept of Space Cowboys work so well. What could be more of a wilderness than the depths of space? What was that famous line…? “Space… the final frontier…”

Perusing the Whitechapel thread, I ran across another new movie I want to get my hands on, this time out of Korea: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0901487/ . The original title is a mouthful, which is why it’s funny one of the international titles is “Nom Nom Nom”, but it’s also going by “The Good, The Bad, and The Weird”. So far I’ve only seen a clip, and it’s really kooky stuff. Do a search on Youtube and you might find it.

So does this mean there’s a new era of Spaghetti Westerns coming out of mainland Asia? What do you call that, Rice Westerns? Regardless, there’s an ebullience and enthusiasm to them that calls to mind Bollywood’s revisiting of the classic movie musicals of the mid-20th century.

So if a genre can skip from America, to Japan, to Italy, to Thailand and Korea, and even to the reaches of outer space, does it really make sense to call it a dead product of a time and place now gone? Me, I say you’re one poor misguided sonofabitch, and you’d best draw that katana/sixgun/blaster pistol and defend yourself, pardner.

That’s probably what I’ll need down the road, now that I picked up Red Dead Redemption over the weekend. Such are the benefits of having a convention occurring so close to home and closing its exhibit hall relatively early.

This game is frigging fantastic… glitchy at times, such as wagons and coaches getting stuck in place for no reason… but hopefully that will be patched, and in the meantime you’ve got yourself the ultimate sandbox to play in, which just happens to be set on the borders of myth and reality in the Old West. As you might imagine I was particularly giddy over the missions involving ranch work, where you got to herd cattle and guard the perimeter from rustlers, but I think they manage to make it fun even if you’re not a guy who’s writing a crazy comic that’s replaced cattle with zombies. There’s even a bit of a Suzie type running the place in the person of Bonnie McFarlane (this is not a spoiler since you meet her pretty much right at the start).

As far as the convention itself, I must regrettably report that my invocation of Murphy’s Law bore out: even though I remembered my Nick Fury book (and thanks to Gillsing for the reminder as requested!), Jim Steranko ended up canceling his appearance. The folk at his booth mentioned on the first day that he’d missed his plane, and I suspect that a disappointing attendance turnout might have made them call him up and say not to bother. It was definitely less well trafficked than Long Beach, but we had a few good conversations with people who dropped by, whether attendees or exhibitors, and got at least one verified new Zombie Ranch fan out of it (we have the email as proof!). We even had a representative of a local comic book store ask us if we might be interested in doing a book signing in the future. To which first, we gotta get those print issues in order, but hey, it was flattering to have the offer. I’m not sure how much of a crowd we could draw, but then again it probably helps that there wouldn’t be a $25 entry fee. Anyhow, more on that when and if it develops.

As Dawn has likely indicated in her blog, she will be deep in her semester finals this coming week and so we probably won’t be able to continue the storyline until the week after. The script is there, but as I’ve said before, my stick figures just ain’t gonna express it properly. I know, I know, it might be a little torturous if you happen to be intrigued by this new character, but I’ll let you in on a little secret since you’re bothering to read this: this comic and the last one are sort of an introductory bit, and then we’ll be headed back to the ranch again for awhile before we see more of our motorcycle mystery woman. So I was already planning on being a big tease regardless of my artist’s status.

I’ll be back with another blog next week, for sure. Likely with more Red Dead Redemption talk, especially since my friends and I are going to try to do some “posse” multiplayer soon. It’s uh, research… yeah, that’s it…

Although in all seriousness, RDR really, really does provide an immersive Western experience. Not anywhere near total realism, but close enough to feel like you’re absorbing some good ambience and details while playing, and the environments are gorgeous… or you can just get your jollies shooting folks in the face. RDR takes all kinds.

So this weekend comes the first inaugural Pasadena Rock’N Comic Con. Will it be any good? We hope so, since we’re going to be part of it! It will be our second “first”, since we also exhibited at the first Long Beach Comic Con last year. LBCC was a great experience, but on the other hand might be a very different experience than this one, which is not focused on comics so much as, well, just about everything in popular entertainment.

I hope to see at least a few familiar faces (or new but interested faces) there. It looks like our table will be #915, near the middle of the exhibit hall, and will likely be listed in the program as either “Art of Dawn” or “Art of Dawn Wolf”. Our current banner also is for ART OF DAWN rather than Zombie Ranch, although if you get close enough we should have our scale model Cambot displayed.

Besides possibly recruiting a few new fans, or chatting up current ones, I think my main goal at the Con is to see if I can get Jim Steranko to sign my trade paperback collection of his “Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” comics. The guy ain’t gettin’ any younger, and in my opinion he’s one of the all-time greats of sequential art storytelling. Look at this page, showing a dream sequence from one of his 1969 stories of Captain America, and keep in mind this is no experimental indy comic but right in the heart of the Marvel line-up. Yes, that rampant white space is all part of the original page. Steranko would break any and every rule he felt like if his instincts guided him to do so, and damn if I don’t consider those instincts correct. He had a famous sequence of panels from Nick Fury censored for being too suggestively passionate, and if you go look at the originals they are not at all what you could honestly term pornographic–they just have an eroticism to them that will reach out and grab you by the… well, whatever you like to be grabbed. Even the censored version is striking stuff, perhaps even moreso due to the wink-wink “non-sequiturs” of telephones buzzing and guns in sheaths.

Steranko just seemed to be pathologically incapable of drawing a boring panel sequence, even for scenes where nothing was really happening. Which isn’t to say what he did was inappropriate to the storytelling… it always seemed to fit in just right to get the points across. And when he did do his action sequences or dramatic reveals? Ooh boy howdy, were you in for a treat. Gigantic evil lairs, legions of henchmen, grandstanding villains… all the things that make a comic book reader a giddy ten-year-old again. Yes, I’m a tremendous fan of more restrained comic stories with depth and layering as well, but let’s face it, every so often I like to see some megalomaniac in a monocle raise his arms to the heavens and proclaim that ALL SHALL BOW TO THE SUPREMACY OF HYDRA!!! And then some cigar-smoking, eyepatched dude crashes through the wall on a motorcycle and KICKS HIM RIGHT IN THE FACE and shouts “NUTS!”, probably busting the panel wide open along the way. Or hell, how about just a moonlight serenade of Captain America owning some fools?

Steranko delivers. If I actually get to talk to him I have no doubt I’ll say absolutely nothing intelligent, but seriously, I’ll be deliriously happy just to get his John Hancock on my book. Must not forget book. I still kick myself for leaving all my Hellboys at home when Mike Mignola was so very accessible at the Expo earlier this year. You hear me, Dawn?! Do not let me forget my Nick Fury collection!

Bah, Dawn is notoriously forgetful at reminding me. You! Out there reading this! Email me on Thursday night and remind me!

And after all that, Murphy’s Law decrees Steranko will either cancel his appearance, or I’ll miss his signing time. But a man can dream…

This week’s comic features the long-awaited return of Zeke, or at least what’s left of him. No, we didn’t feed him into a wood chipper, but hey, we figured a little suspense never hurts. Wood chippers hurt, though. I mean, not that I would know from personal experience, I’m just guessing. I think it’s a good guess.

Mentioning wood chippers actually serves as a roundabout tie-in to the western I was going to talk of this week, True Grit. True Grit is another John Wayne headlined film that originally premiered July 4, 1969. Funky timing, eh? Just over two weeks later Neil Armstrong would be getting moon dust on his boots, and less than a month after that half a million people would pack themselves into a little outdoor arts & music festival called Woodstock. Some at the time held True Grit up as a voice of simpler, conservative mores in the face of upheaval and change, especially with their patron saint The Duke at the helm, but I don’t think the filmmakers ever meant it to be. They were just making a movie. As a matter of fact, the script (adapted from a novel of the same name) was typed up by a lady named Marguerite Roberts who had been blacklisted by HUAC during the McCarthy era. Someone who used to be a card carrying member of the American Communist Party had her name attached to a western, which years later still made studios reluctant to touch it.

Who got the movie greenlit? John Wayne himself. And yes, he knew about Marguerite’s past, but after looking over the screenplay he declared it the best he’d ever read, and wrangled the film into production. There was quite an ensemble together by the end, including a young Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall (Duvall still squinted, though), and Wayne’s character was not exactly a shining hero archetype, unless an aging, greedy, alcoholic bounty hunter (okay, Deputy U.S. Marshal, to-may-to to-mah-to) with an eyepatch is your idea of shiny.

Whether or not that’s the case, it was the Academy’s idea of an Oscar performance, and Wayne received his one and only Best Actor award for his performance as Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn. Frankly, I think some of his other roles were much stronger (*cough*The Searchers*cough*), so it probably was a case of them wanting to honor him before he stopped being able to make movies. Even at the time it was fairly incredible that he was making movies, particularly ones with any kind of physical activity required, since the man had an entire damn lung removed in 1964 as part of cancer surgery. After that, who knew how long he might have had left? Sort of like how Return of the King wasn’t really better than Fellowship of the Ring, but the Academy waited until the end to give the nods… well, except that Peter Jackson wasn’t suffering lung cancer.

The person who really steals the show in True Grit, in my opinion, is Kim Darby as the young, obsessed heroine Mattie Ross who sets everything in motion in order to track down her father’s killer. At times she’s the naive girl who really is in as much danger as the men with her insist, but at other times she’s a complete force of nature, to the point where if she didn’t have the training and experience gap she’d probably be the scariest, most relentless bounty hunter of all.

It’s not a movie that held me riveted from start to finish the way The Searchers or Red River did, but it’s worth a look, including the famous exchange at the end:

Mattie Ross: You are too old and fat to be jumping horses.
Rooster Cogburn: Well, come see a fat old man some time!

And he waves his hat with a smile, and jumps the fence on his horse. Never mind that in actuality a stuntman had to do the actual fence jumping, it’s still a fitting milestone in the career of The Duke.

Oh, and that wood chipper tie-in? While checking out IMDB for this blog I discovered that the Coen brothers are doing a remake of True Grit, scheduled for release in December of this year! If you don’t know, the Coen brothers are the guys behind Miller’s Crossing, The Big Lebowski, No Country For Old Men, and a host of other memorable films. One, Fargo, being particularly memorable for feeding a body into a wood chipper. There you go, full circle.

I’m actually really excited about this. If you watch the original film, it pulls a lot of quirky, stylized dialog directly out of the novel, and the Coen brothers love their quirky, stylized dialog. Plus, No Country For Old Men had some western motifs to it, but I really want to see what they’ll do with a full on period piece. Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin are already in the cast and should do admirable jobs with the material, all that remains to be seen is if their Mattie can tie it together with the same verve Miss Darby did.

Zombie Ranch owes its inspiration to many sources, not the least of which was that weird picture Dawn drew in the wee hours of the morning in July 2009.

But that was just the beginning. When I started thinking about making a story out of people ranching zombies, there was a lot more that had to percolate together, and one of the conceptual debts I owe is to the various “dangerous jobs” reality TV programs that have cropped up in recent years. In particular, there’s the one that Uncle Chuck is hearkening back to in this week’s comic, a Discovery Channel series entitled Deadliest Catch.

Deadliest Catch follows the crews of several fishing boats that make a living by fishing up Alaskan King Crab and Opilio Crab in the waters of the Bering Straits off Alaska. They are often doing this (or at least attempting to) in conditions that are… not so good. “Suicidal” might even come to mind, given a combination of heavy equipment, fatigue, and an often storm-tossed, frigid ocean where your life expectancy is measured in seconds should you go overboard. That “one death per week” statistic isn’t something Chuck is misremembering or exaggerating, it comes right from the first season of the show. In fact, the show probably wouldn’t exist except for someone noticing the fact that the fatality and casualty rates for Alaskan crab fishing were far and away the highest in the United States. Police? Firemen? Test pilots? Nothing compared to trying to entice a bunch of arthopods into an 800-pound steel trap while huge waves are slapping your boat sideways.

It all sounds incredibly dramatic, and it can be, but partially because the whole situation is in such contrast to the matter-of-factness of the men involved. To them, it’s just their job, and even grief for the death of a friend or relative comes with a sort of stoic acceptance you’d see in wartime soldiers. It’s a strange world to watch, but on the other hand it’s entirely real. These crews and their ancestors were living this life long before anyone thought to put a camera in their faces. They’re cowboys of the sea, and lest you think I’m stretching to make that comparison: Alaskan crews call their new members “greenhorns”, and the theme song for Deadliest Catch is Bon Jovi’s “Wanted: Dead or Alive”.

Also, I give honorable mention to Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs, another great series dealing with the presentation of real people who make a living performing disgusting and/or bizarre trades. I’m particularly fond of the episode where Mike goes to visit the Ostrich wranglers. Mike doesn’t have the benefit of remote control camera drones, you see, and spends the entire time utterly (and justifiably) terrified of these gigantic birds that could lay him open with a single kick. On the other hand, the guys who run the ranch have absolutely no fear and just wade in, grab them by the neck and wrangle ’em nice as you please, while Mike asides to the camera that the men doing this are completely out of their minds.

Sort of sounds like the opinions a Safe Zone denizen would have of zombie ranchers, doesn’t it? Yes, it does. So anytime someone comes up to me and tells me no one would be crazy enough to wrangle zombies for a living, even in a weird, wild West of the future, I can just grin and point them to the Discovery channel of our present day. After all, if it weren’t for the fact the Alaskan crab market collapsed with the apocalypse, zombie ranching might still be only #2 on the list of risky occupations!

Those of you who were reading this blog around Christmas might recall that I mentioned a few previous places where the idea of ranching zombies for one reason or another had surfaced. Well, turns out I missed one, since a group of talented folks down Arizona way have a couple t-shirts regarding a “Zed’s Zombie Ranch”, which are made using manipulations of vintage photographs that the proprietors had lying about. Fun stuff! Also that’s far from the only customized, geektastic merchandise available for purchase on their Etsy site at http://www.vampieoodles.com — we particularly like the “Free Range Zombies” sign.

Kelly and her partners from vampieoodles will be having a booth at the Phoenix Comic-Con the same weekend Dawn and myself will be at the Pasadena convention, but we’ve wished them best of luck and vice-versa. So if anyone’s at the Phoenix show and sees the Zed’s shirt, well, now you know the story there! Just another strange and wonderful case of parallel evolution.

Okay, now, I promised myself I’d get to a movie review in this blog. It’s been an especially long while since I talked about a western, so let’s jaw awhile about The Culpepper Cattle Co. Now one thing I’ll have to admit up front is that I have a chronically terrible memory for recognizing actors from film to film, especially on a name basis… so while some of the cowpokes in this 1972 flick looked powerfully familiar, nothing really clicked, even when I used the power of IMDB to attempt to compensate and find where else I might have seen them.

So it’s entirely possible I just fail, but otherwise the only memorable aspect of the movie up front is that one of the associate producers was Jerry Bruckheimer. In fact, it appears to be the first movie he’s got any sort of producer’s credit for… and for every Bruckheimer-involved movie I hate, there’s others I’m indifferent to and others I love, so I shrugged and settled in to see how things turned out.

How the movie turned out was pretty darned bleak, start to finish. Perhaps “bleak” doesn’t quite cover it. It was as if the filmmakers were driving for “gritty realism”, missed that offramp, passed up “nihilistic” while they were still cussing about the mistake, and ended up plowing through several signs warning “CARTOONISH CARICATURES OF AMORALITY AHEAD” before plunging into the ever-lovin’ ravine of WTF.

Tortured metaphors aside, perhaps I’m being too harsh, but it’s another of those movies you can’t quite figure out if you’re supposed to be taking seriously. I’ll be the first to admit that the Old West wasn’t the nice, squeaky clean place folks like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers wanted to portray, but CCC was so far in the other direction I was having separate but equal trouble sometimes in suspending disbelief. For instance, I hesitate to believe that any given strangers meeting each other in the wilderness will always rob and/or kill each other in cold blood, but this movie takes it as a given. Occasionally? Okay, it’s a rough time and a lawless land. But eventually it gets to be a little much, and certainly desensitizing.

Maybe that’s the point, since this is one of those coming-of-age “fresh faced greenhorn grows up fast” tales with our young, Zeke-esque protagonist joining up with a cattle drive run by the tough, trail-hardened Frank Culpepper and his band of roughnecks. The group gets even rougher when an incident partway through leads to the death and replacement of some of the hands with men I will generously term as “a mite psychotic”.

These are our heroes, who carve a bloody swath across the countryside that is only stifled when they finally run into some people who are even bigger assholes. Then they end up defending some Amish squatters or something from the wrath of the greater assholes. It’s a weird climax, and an even weirder message at the end… the psycho cowpokes all die defending a bunch of religious nuts who won’t take up arms in their own defense (and would have been slaughtered because of this), and somehow this convinces our protagonist, the sole survivor of the armed side, that the proper response is to give up his guns and head back home.

Mind you, this entire movie has been hammering home the point that if you’re not armed and sociopathic, you’re a victim. I gave the kid about ten minutes after the credits rolled before he was robbed, murdered, and possibly sexually assaulted, not necessarily in any particular order. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher.

Also, there’s no indication of whether or not Frank Culpepper got his cattle to market, since as far as I can tell he doesn’t come back to fight, and everyone else deserts him to do so. Given that the Old West in this movie is a land that Mad Max would be hesitant to wander, I figure the ol’ Cattle Co. doesn’t make it, either.

Now all that said, there are some good lines and interesting scenes in the film, so if you want to have, say, a Netflix gander at it, more power to you. Much more so than even Unforgiven, it represents one end of the western genre spectrum that can provide some perspective when you’re figuring out where on the range you roam.

I had the pleasure of some great email correspondence lately with some other zombie aficionados. First I want to give a shout to Carter Reid over at The Zombie Nation, who had sent me a contact back in March saying he was a fan of Zombie Ranch. Now, my email at that time somehow decided a contact form from my own website was spam and shunted it to the junk folder, where I only found it by accident a couple weeks later after one of Dawn’s emails shared the same fate. Fortunately, it was a case of better late than never, and Carter and I went on to have an interesting discussion about zombie flicks, in addition to doing the link exchange thing, etc. etc.

Carter’s site isn’t just his comic but the site of his rather prolific blog, which is actually where I learned about the site of the second group. You might expect that anything combining zombies and westerns pings my radar (and you’d be right), but so far most of the examples of the genre fusion I’ve run across have been on the campy side of the equation. I’ll probably talk about a couple of those in blogs to come…

Anyhow, enter Revelation Trail, a film and multimedia project in the works concerning the effects of a zombie outbreak in the American frontier of the 1880’s. I clicked on their “first look” link and was immediately drawn in, as I watched a scene depicting a man apparently so desperately lonely that he talks about the weather and his life to a zombie he’s caught in a bear trap. That sounds extremely campy as a concept, but it’s played straight, and–in my own damned opinion–it works. It’s the same sort of straightforward, humanistic style in the midst of the bizarre that I’ve tried to capture in Zombie Ranch. My only critical thought was it might have been even more powerful if he had gotten through his whole story and only then do we find out what he’s talking to, especially for trailer purposes… but that’s nitpicking. It was good stuff.

Even more impressive were the animated diaries of “Lilith’s Story” which are part of the website’s promotional materials. I can’t say enough good things about these little pieces of art, but I feel like I’d be destroying the experience to do so. So I’ll just say: go watch them. They’re not long, but they show a lot of care in every aspect of their craftsmanship, including certain subtleties you may miss the first time if you blink.

By the time I was done with the diaries, I had to write to the Revelation Trail team and gush. Then they wrote a long email back where, amongst other things, they said they came and checked us out here, and had some praise for Zombie Ranch in turn. Oh, and they mentioned they were greatly inspired by the movie Unforgiven, which if you know me at all (or have read this blog in the past), you know that’s a fantastic way to get on my good side. Not that they needed to after I’d seen their work, but it’s great to find that a group whose stuff you admire is as friendly as they are talented.

Anyhow, time to cap off the gush. But Revelation Trail is just getting started, and since I stumbled on them through pure word of mouth (well, word of blog), here’s some further mention. Check them out, tell your friends, join their Facebook. I think they’ve got something really memorable in the works, here.

http://www.revelationtrail.com/