Category: Writer’s Blog

The other day I had a friend complain to me that I’d completely slacked off on my mini-reviews of movies in this blog. This probably surprised me the most in terms of someone actually caring enough about my blog to complain about its contents, but I shall not dwell on that, for creator self-deprecation is largely (and probably very rightly) considered a not-so-entertaining topic. Besides, from the very beginning of the website I willingly exiled myself to the bottom of the page, knowing that the great majority of folks come by a webcomic to read a friggin’ webcomic, not read some random dude’s prattle about whatever’s ticked his fancy that week.

Uh, anyhow, you are reading this. So for you folks, I’ll just plead that it ain’t my fault! You see, after several weeks’ worth of my binging on various westerns and zombie movies, my wife put her foot down and banned further viewings in her presence, despite my protestations that Redneck Zombies was necessary research. Yes, the same wife that draws Zombie Ranch… meaning I have more than just the usual marital reasons for keeping her happy; if she burns out, my stick figure acumen just isn’t going to be a replacement.

I had to go cold turkey for awhile, but fortunately she’s 1) expressed that it’s okay again now that there’s been a break, and more importantly 2) she’s working Renaissance Faire on the weekends, meaning I get the apartment to myself. So I managed to sneak in a few movies, one of which I’ll talk about now.

Diary of the Dead is George Romero’s latest re-telling of his zombie apocalypse. Actually I should say next-to-latest since Survival of the Dead is now released, but I haven’t gotten my eyeballs on that one yet. Reviews so far (even from genre fans) seem to suggest I ain’t missing much, even though I’ve heard it tried to evoke a bit of a Western feel and had penned zombies. That interests me, naturally, but I’ll probably be waiting on Netflix.

Diary of the Dead also interested me because of the documentary aspect applied to zombies. For those who don’t know, Diary’s plot opens on a group of film students making a horror movie, who start seeing and hearing the early news reports of what turns out to be a zombie outbreak –a particularly nasty outbreak that combines the ‘death by bite’ motif with ‘everyone who dies for whatever reason becomes a zombie’. The remainder of the movie shows their attempts to get home or to safety, and does so purely by way of  “in the environment” means, including various hand held cameras and security footage. Never is the camera meant not to be an actual camera.

It’s an interesting conceit that goes a step beyond films like Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, or REC/Quarantine by not chaining all the action to the view of a single camera, but it still suffers at times from the stretches of credulity that crop up, a la “Why the heck are you still filming? Run!” Of course when they do run, you get that lovely shakycam blur effect which annoys the heck out of me if it goes on longer than a few seconds. Yes, I know this is supposed to immerse me in the chaos, but I’d like to at least see comprehensible images on the screen.

Now there’s attempts to lampshade this phenomenon in Diary by making out the main guy doing the filming as being obsessed with documenting the events to the point where he lacks all empathy and all common sense, but the way the film does that is very, very heavy-handed. You have characters basically spelling all of it out to us, when I think the point would have come across rather readily on its own. In fact, that’s the main failing of the movie; Romero feels the need to spell out everything, either in the dialog or in the intrusive narration of one of the characters. That character, by the way, is narrating everything as a flashback, which destroys the immediacy and intimacy of the idea of filming this “as it happens” right at the movie’s start.

Let’s put it this way. The end of the original Night of the Living Dead played out as casual, incidental talk, a terrible (but unknown) mistake, and then silent images of the aftermath. It’s powerful to this day because that silence allows you to think about what you’ve witnessed and come to your conclusions. But as evidenced in Diary, if Romero were directing NotLD today, that whole sequence would have had to have some disembodied narrative voice clearly condemning everything going on and declaring things like “We… we are the true zombies!”

No really, at the end the narrator character in Diary literally must muse, “Are we worth saving?”

I think Romero wanted to revise his formula to make a commentary on our current media-obsessed, viral video culture in the way he commented on consumerism back in Dawn of the Dead, but in Diary he’s just lost that whole idea of showing and not telling. There’s no room to ponder potential larger meanings when those meanings are being force-fed to you, at which point I was left with the impression of a zombie movie desperately attempting to be “deep and relevant” in between the gore shots.

That said, it wasn’t all bad… hell, Romero even gave me my much desired scene of a survivalist compound that was populated by people who hadn’t become complete sociopaths overnight. And when the students later get robbed by a different group, no one’s sexually assaulted and they even get to keep their guns, with the explanation that the opportunists wanted the food and medicine but allowed that taking someone’s guns at this time was a death sentence. “They’re thieves, not murderers,” one character observes, in one of the few comments on the action that I appreciated.

Remnants of human decency between strangers, even in the midst of total social breakdown? Hell yeah, that was nice to see. I just wish the rest of the movie had shut up long enough for me to decide if we were worth saving or not.

This week, courtesy of the TV Network’s ad for Zombie Ranch, we give you the in-comic answer to the biggest question people have had since the story started. Why ranch zombies? Why keep these horribly dangerous creatures around, risking death (or worse than death) every time you handle them? The occasional rodeo can’t possibly be enough justification, can it?

You’re right, it’s not. As the trope goes, Our Zombies Are Different. Our zombies can cure cancer.

Now that’s simplifying things considerably — but you can get the gist, even through the haze of feel-good mass media fluff in that advertisement. Zombies are a pharmaceutical cornucopia. You ever heard of the term “black gold” applied to oil? Well, “green gold” might not be far off when talking of zombies.  Unlike with Jed Clampett it’s not something that’ll make you a millionaire overnight, but there’s enough potential reward to make the risks worthwhile.

Also, if you’re getting any vibes from the last couple of comics that remind you of the kooky ads seen in movies like Robocop, I will plead guilty to the influence; although I could just as easily plead influence from some of those medication ads that cheerfully list off dozens of horrible possible side-effects while puppies and children bound around in meadows.

The media, especially in advertising, has always been a strange beast when it comes to unpleasant topics. There’s a huge tendency to sugarcoat the situation. For example, there’s Speedy the Alka-Seltzer mascot, putting his creepy anthropomorphic smiley face to digestional problems since the 1950’s. Or the Massengill ladies fretting about their “not-so-fresh” feeling, or the Charmin bears frolicking with their toilet paper.

How about the Foster Farms chickens? Commercial after commercial featuring two puppet birds whose only purpose in life seems to be trying every trick possible to get themselves eaten — I guess because they have an inferiority complex to the chickens actually getting slaughtered for food. This is the kind of stuff that’s actually been out on the airwaves, to the point that when I’m writing my own versions of it I wonder less if I’m going too far, and more if I’m not going far enough.

In other news, I spent some time last week reorganizing the site to be more navigable, especially to new people. Some folks never look at About/Cast pages, but others do so before they even start reading, so I’m hoping the new layout gives a nice one-stop experience on that score. If anyone has further suggestions, feel free to speak up in the comments, email us, or even leave them on our forum.

Oh, and one more thing, per request the “Zombie Ranch Theme Song” has now been made available as a download link in our Extras section (in addition to the streaming flash version). Right-click-save-as, and enjoy!

Here we are, faithful readers, your first glimpse of a Safe Zone! For those of you who never read the ‘About the Story‘ section or the Setting FAQ, it might in fact be the first exposure you’ve had that there are Safe Zones.

No big problem there, you just had to wait a bit longer for us to get around to it. Exposition is a tricky business, especially when you start in media res (fancy talk for “in the middle of things”) like Zombie Ranch does. I know a lot of people out there are still champing at the bit to know the big reason why the zombies are being wrangled and herded, and that’s coming up really soon. Again, those that wanted to brave the wall o’ text in the FAQ have the answers already, but I’m a big believer in making sure people don’t have to go outside the comic to understand the comic — eventually, anyhow. Like I said, exposition is tricky and I want to avoid clumsily shoving it down peoples’ throats when they’d rather be enjoying the story. Only time will tell if I’m getting the balance right.

Also, although the poll I put up last week has been steadily deadlocked between those who believe Zeke’s fate should be taken into account on the cast page, and those who think otherwise, by far the most popular response is from people unaware that there even was a cast page. Whoops. It appears our layout has certain flaws.

But hey, that was a question that nagged at me, so it’s good to have it addressed. Looks like we need to rearrange some buttons to make important elements more accessible. For all I know there are people who would have wanted to read the FAQ but didn’t realize there was one of those, either. Can you tell it’s our first webcomic?

So thanks to everyone who responded! I’m still not sure what to do about Zeke since it seems like either option is going to make a certain segment unhappy, though of course I’m trending towards the “don’t change it” crowd since it means less work. Maybe I’ll leave the poll up awhile longer, and see what people think once the cast page link is more visible.

Anyhow, we’re back, and if the level of technology evident in today’s comic surprises you, just remember those floating camera drones have to come from somewhere (not to mention there’s certain areas of cities today that already look a lot like the above). Life in the Safe Zones is wonderful, as those that run them will be quick to tell you. In this Zone, one of the more corporate examples, it’s possible you might feel a little intruded on by commercial interests. Maybe you might even consider it something of an eyesore. But hey, if being constantly bombarded by talking, animated ads in STUNNING 3-D isn’t your thing, you’re welcome to a life out in the Wild, Wild Waste.

“Comparable to or better than” can mean a lot of things, after all.

So, a few weeks ago the Zombie Ranch theme song popped into my skull. A theme song for a webcomic? Preposterous, you say! And yet, this webcomic is in part about a TV show, and TV shows have theme songs. What could be better than some country-twanged gentleman regaling the Safe Zone audiences about the romance and danger of the occupation they’re about to witness?

Now I can (allegedly) write, and even do a bit of singing, but I sure can’t play guitar much. Fortunately, I happen to have friends who can sing, play, and have access to a recording studio. So after confirming they’d be interested in bringing the song to life (unlife?), I typed up the lyrics and made a recording of me warbling out a preliminary melody, and sent them off with a few “mood” guidelines.

You can tell when your partners are excited about a project, because they got this done in just a couple of weeks, and what they came up with is fantastic. I expected maybe one of them strumming a guitar and singing, and instead got a recording worthy of Nashville. You better believe I’m going to permalink it somewhere on the site, as soon as we figure out where to put it. For now, we’ve linked it as this week’s “comic”, so go there and have a listen if you haven’t already!

Zombie Ranch Theme Song

By the by, Seth and Justin have a band called Southern Oracle that tours the Los Angeles area. If you’re interested, join up on their Facebook page and find out when you can catch a concert! Southern Oracle isn’t really a Country-Western group, but that just goes to show how talented they are at exploring all sorts of music. They love what they do, and it shows.

Turns out our break was well-timed, since Dawn ended up with a mild bout of RSI in her drawing hand. I recognized the symptoms from back when I was playing MMORPG’s such as City of Heroes/Villains or World of Warcraft obsessively. Fortunately a bit of rest and some ointment are doing wonders, and so we should be back on track making progress towards the print issue and then our new comics.

On my end, I’ve finally finished reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies after a couple months of trying. When I first heard about it I was very enthusiastic on the concept, but in actual experience it just didn’t work out for me.  It’s odd because I absolutely devoured a much larger and longer novel in the Victorian style called Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, so I can’t say I was turned off by the style. Also, I usually love quirky parodies, but I just felt lukewarm about this one. Maybe it was just the way the whole zombie angle felt like a tacked-on afterthought. Actually, I suppose the whole point was that the zombie angle is a tacked-on afterthought, and so I found myself at an impasse, at times literally having to force myself to keep reading through large passages of boring Jane Austen romance.

I’m in the minority, though. Most folk seem to love the thing. It was #3 on the New York Times Best Seller List, there’s a feature film in the works, and a graphic novel already being previewed. I saw some of the graphic novel, and it might actually be much cooler than the book… mostly on account of getting rid of a lot of the text and focusing on the zombie mayhem. Call me uncultured if you must, but then again anyone truly wishing to be a literati should probably be reading the original Austen novel, anyhow.

Also, there’s one part of P&P&Z that’s a geek flub so blatant I can only hope Seth Grahame-Smith did it intentionally. He decided to make martial arts (or as termed by the upper class of the novel, “the deadly arts”) a fairly significant part of the book, and one particularly memorable scene has the heroine defending the honor of her Chinese style against the Japanese style (and ninjas!) of her hostess. This is very specifically set up as something to determine which of the two martial schools is superior.

The heroine’s choice of weapon to uphold the honor of China against Japan?

A katana.

I mean, you might as well remake a movie called The Karate Kid and set it in China, having the protagonist learn Kung Fu instead. Oh wait, that’s happening.

Indictment of Victorian era ignorance towards the “Orient”? Intentional invocation of nerdrage? Those are my best two interpretations. My nerdrage was duly invoked. But it would have been a trivial issue had the rest of the book managed to keep my interest. As it is, I finished it for completeness’ sake, but in the end I was glad I had borrowed it from a friend rather than purchased it myself.

So there it is, a book with zombies and ninjas in it that left me bored. Go figure. But hey, if you enjoyed it, more power to you! As those Austen Brits might declare, it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

This week’s comic marks the end point for the first script of Zombie Ranch that I wrote up back in August-September 2009. Mind you, it’s gone through several revisions and extensions since then, but the core arc has remained the same. Poor Zeke has been doomed since the beginning, and anytime I started to get soft on that fate my artist wife was right there to push me back on track, in her adorably bloodthirsty fashion. My intent was to capture some of the spirit of those classic Twilight Zone episodes or old school sci-fi/horror comics where you get introduced to a world not quite our own, and by the end something twisted has happened in a “makes-ya-think” sort of fashion. Whether or not we succeeded is, of course, in the hands of you readers.

Unlike those episodes and comics, which tended to be self-contained stories, this is not the end. There are many more questions to answer and stories to tell. We will be taking a short break, however, since we feel at this point that we’ve finished our first “issue”. I know, I know, that terminology doesn’t mean all that much in webcomics, but Dawn is very excited about putting together something for actual print publication. And what the heck, I suppose I am, too. We’ve got another convention coming up right here in our backyard in Pasadena, CA and it’ll be nice to be able to have something on the table in addition to just referring folk to the website.

Now don’t worry, we do mean short break. Two or three weeks at most, and we’ll have some content for you all in the meantime, such as a new full-color Suzie image that Dawn has drawn up for the print issue cover. You can actually see a black-and-white preview of that currently if you click on over to vote for us at TopWebComics. Actually, whether or not you’re interested in the image I’ll be a bit shameless here and implore you to give us a vote click. It only takes a few seconds and the higher we are on the list, the more new eyeballs we attract to the comic. I’m not expecting top 10 or even top 50 with how new we are, but we’ve been at least on the first page (top 100) until just a few days ago, and I’d love to get back there. You can vote once per day and it’s entirely kosher and legal to do so. Some of you already do so, which is fantastic! I don’t know what I should refer to you as for your dedication… Ranchites? Rancheros? It’s probably just enough to say thanks.

Speaking of TopWebComics, they have another promotion going for one of their affiliates, much as they did for 7th Son back last November. ‘Tis as follows:

Have you ever wanted to be a radio supervillain? Or rather, did you have an idea for a villain you’d love to actually hear on a radiostyle podcast?  Submit your idea for a radio supervillain and read about where you can get hundreds of hours of free audio drama done by the impression cast of Decoder Ring Theatre, over at topwebcomics.com.

Like I’ve said before, TopWebComics has been great for us in terms of getting new readers looking our way, so I’m always happy to return the favor when they put out a call for help. Who knows, maybe one of you out there will have the supervillain idea that Decoder Ring Theatre has longed for!

So here we are. It’s been one heck of a whirlwind few months for Dawn and myself as we waded into the wide world of webcomics, and we extend our heartfelt thank-yous to everyone out there who has supported us… or heck, has just been a regular reader of the comic. As soon as that print issue is available, we’ll announce it for those interested, including the super duper Special Edition I believe Dawn still has a mind to put together. And soon enough we’ll be back to continuing the story of the Z Ranch crew and their bizarre occupation.

For now though, it’s time to pop open a celebratory brewski. By the time you read this it’ll be my baby niece’s birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, and a first Zombie Ranch milestone. Cheers, y’all!

So now we see how the Z Ranch plans to deal with the question of what to do with a colleague who’s got “the bite”. It calls to mind one of my favorite exchanges from the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw:

Higgins: Do you mean to say, you callous rascal, that you would sell your daughter for £50?
Doolittle: Not in a general way I wouldn’t….
Pickering: Have you no morals, man?
Doolittle: Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

If you recognize those names, yes, the movie musical My Fair Lady is a watered down version of Shaw’s work. Very, very watered down. A hundred years ago, GBS was reveling in no holds barred, incisive cynicism in ways that make Warren Ellis seem like Bil Keane. It’s telling that My Fair Lady was only able to be made over Shaw’s dead body. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my musical theater (perhaps, as has been suggested to me in the past, entirely too much for a heterosexual male), but I understand why Shaw forbade musical adaptations of his own stuff until such time as he didn’t have to be alive to witness them.

Now before I spend this blog entirely on Shaw, let me haul myself back on my intended track, which was to talk about a couple more movies I saw recently and didn’t get around to discussing last week. First off, there was Valley of Gwangi. Many of you (if not all of you) may not understand the absolute need I had to see this movie as soon as I watched a clip of a cowboy wrestling a Pteranodon. First I had to figure out where the clip was from, and then I had to figure out where to get ahold of the film. Netflix to the rescue (although it now appears to be available in its entirety on Youtube, as well).

Valley of Gwangi lived up to my expectations. They weren’t high expectations; basically, I was good so long as I got to see Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs. There could have been more of this, but then again, I don’t know how much Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs action would have had to happen before I could truthfully say, “no more, I’m good”. The entire movie reminded me of the kind of games I would have come up with when I was eight years old and would throw together whatever random toys and playsets I had to hand, creating messy, wonderful smorgasbords of self-entertainment. Only in this case my toys would have been crafted by stop-motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen. In the final analysis, any day I get to watch a T-Rex getting lassoed is a good day.

The second film I wanted to note is the remake of The Crazies, which I caught a theatrical showing of last Tuesday. Now the original was directed by George Romero, and, shamefully perhaps, I have not seen it. What I saw last week was one of the best serious horror movies I’ve witnessed in awhile, and that’s saying something in an era where most of the better horror flicks, zombie or otherwise, seem to veer onto the humor or camp side of the equation. That might be because we’ve seen all the old tropes played out so much they’ve become jokes, but The Crazies takes those tropes and puts them to work again in a way that becomes truly compelling. It’s not going to open any eyes to new vistas of socio-political thought, but cynical ol’ me cared what the hell was happening to the characters. There are set pieces in it that will awaken all sorts of weird phobias you didn’t even know you had. I won’t spoil it, but there was one sequence involving a car wash I was trying like hell to find ludicrous, and I just couldn’t manage it. It was too awesome. Breck Eisner, the director, is currently slated to helm the Flash Gordon remake in 2012, and I can’t wait to see it. I never thought I’d say that since the 1980 movie was such a paragon of cheeseball quirkiness, but this guy’s damn good behind a camera. He delivered a horror experience I hadn’t felt since The Descent. Maybe even moreso. We’ll see how he does in the future.

One of the most terrifying aspects of the zombie genre to me is the idea of the inescapable doom that awaits once you’re “infected”. No matter how small or insignificant the wound might seem, the clock is ticking, and denial of the situation inevitably just ends up making things worse for everyone.

Mind you, this phenomenon isn’t confined solely to zombie fiction, but it’s something that really speaks “zombie story” to me. This is why I can comfortably consider a movie like 28 Days Later to be a zombie movie, regardless of whether the zombies are fast or slow, alive or dead, etc. etc. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean I don’t consider Night of the Living Dead to be a zombie movie, because that would just be silly. So I’ll delve a bit deeper and say that it’s not just the idea of the infection that makes you “one of them”, it’s that the infection makes you no longer “one of us”. It’s the people you knew and cared for turning on you, with no way to stop it from happening except by killing them in cold blood, or at least doing something very bloody to their corpse.

Now it might be pollyanna of me to declare, but in general I’ll say people don’t like the idea of killing other people or defiling their bodies. Particularly when it’s a loved one. Look at how much time and effort and expense we spend on funerals, trying to make a dead relative look as alive and intact as possible. We have huge controversies to this day about the practice of assisted suicide, even when the patient is fully aware, calm, and consenting. Now imagine trying to muster up the gumption to put a bullet in a friend’s head when they’re begging and pleading for their lives. It’s such a small bite. Can you really be sure they won’t recover? Is amputation an option? What if you’re wrong?

So now, if we come back around to Night of the Living Dead, then we have several elements of the above horrors in place regardless of the fact that infection is irrelevant to creating new zombies. We also have a good example in Ben of someone who adapts to the new situation quickly and practically, but because of that is committing acts we might think were monstrous, or at very least worthy of pause or reflection. His desensitized state by the end of the film might even serve as a foreshadowing of his own fate.

Sure, you could argue he’s shooting zombies, but in one case he most definitely shoots a human being. Where do you draw the line? As a non-zombie example, in John Carpenter’s The Thing, one character shoots another, and later the infamous blood test scene reveals the victim was human, leading another of the team to declare “… that makes you a murderer.”

Matter of fact, it’s much akin to the murky borderlines between self-defense and murder that often occurred in the Old West. Anyhow, we’ll see how the folks of the Z Ranch deal with this situation soon enough. I’ve rambled on so long on this I didn’t even get around to talking about any of the new movies I’ve seen, like Dead Snow.

Dead Snow was referred to me a few months back by a visitor to our (as yet still not so very used) forums, but it only recently popped up for Netflix viewing. After viewing it, I can safely say it’s a lot of fun. Mind, you’d have to try really hard to make a movie involving Nazi zombies unfun, and the filmmakers are obvious fans of flicks like Evil Dead and Brain Dead/Dead Alive (I’m a fan, too… an appropriate quote from the latter provided the title of this blog). There’s a flipside to the whole horror of THE BITE where it’s played for laughs, and Dead Snow indulges in not just one but two instances of it. Anyhow, maybe some might find the film a bit too meta since the characters actually talk about those films and one even wears a Brain Dead t-shirt, but whatever. Nazi zombies! Is there anything in creation as killable without guilt as Nazi zombies? It subverts just about everything I laid out in the beginning about hesitation and morality, because… man, it’s an undead Nazi, of COURSE it’s moral to grind its head into a snowmobile intake.

I saw some other flicks I want to mention, but I’ll hold off until next week. And speaking of holding off, last week I wanted to mention something but didn’t, out of respect for the sheer amount of email he was probably already receiving during a tough time. The creator of Everyday Decay announced that he is putting the comic on permanent hiatus, at least in terms of online updates. We were sad to hear of it, but Dawn and I fully respect his reasons for doing so, and the archives will still be up to inspire and entertain. Also at some point in the future, Derrick may finish the story up offline and get a publication together. If and when that happens, I know I’ll be looking out for it.

Maybe it’s because I’m still a fresh-faced young turk as these things go (heaven knows I’m happy to have an opportunity to apply the adjective “young” to myself in anything), but I have to admit I get a thrill out of sitting behind an exhibitor table. Dawn’s always nervous because she doesn’t feel worthy of rubbing elbows with much more established, professional neighbors. Me, I think our layout looks pretty darn sweet for a second outing, and the LBCC shows are low key so far, with little in the way of the tightly regulated lines and restricted access you’d experience in San Diego. I’m not a big fan of Jim Lee, but back at the October con there were times Jim Lee was surrounded by no more than a small handful of admirers, smiling and joking as he gave out autographs.

San Diego? If Jim Lee was having a signing there’d likely be a queue, and you’d maybe get to exchange one or two sentences before being asked to move along. Although to be fair, that’s mostly for the scheduled signings hosted by DC or Marvel or whoever. If you know where to look you might be able to catch them at their own booth or table and have some quality time. Heck, I’ve had friends who had random meetings with big pros in hotel bars.

At Long Beach, and especially at this one-day Expo we were at, you didn’t have to go looking. The floor space was small, but clean and adequate for the traffic. Mike Mignola (creator of Hellboy) and Stan Sakai (Usagi Yojimbo) were just two rows over from us. Right next to us was Brian Haberlin, showing off a whole stack of artwork from a huge graphic novel he’s been working on, called Anomaly. Looking at it upside down would have been an option from where I was sitting, but I decided to sneak out and around to the fanboy side of the tables so I could get the full effect. It was that gorgeous.

I should make special mention of Tim Bradstreet as well. I’ve loved his art ever since I first ran across it in the early editions of White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade RPG, and since then he’s gone on to do very memorable images of The Punisher and John Constantine, two of my favorite characters in comics-dom. Tim was nice enough to do free sketches for myself and a friend, and besides that we talked long enough to bond over something as random as a computer game not many folk remember, called Myth: The Fallen Lords. Tim also has a very adorable tiny daughter who kept handing us sketches of her own, although I’m not quite sure what they were meant to represent.

Anyhow, it was also great to see all the folks we met in October once again (minus Amanda Conner who didn’t make it to this one), and talk to some new people as well, like Rebecca Hicks. Rebecca and her significant other have been in the webcomics business for many years now, but I was gratified that she seemed fascinated by at least the concept of Zombie Ranch (hah, wait until she reads it, then we’ll see…).

That’s enough self-deprecation out of me, though. Her own ongoing creation of the moment is called Little Vampires. There are also werewolves, frankensteins, and zombies involved, and if you desire some more light-hearted fare to pass the time, then click on over using that golden link above.

Well now, seems like things might be heatin’ up a bit at that there Z Ranch. Perfect timing for us to pull up stakes and head off to Long Beach, CA for the Comic Con Expo, right?

Don’t worry, we still plan to get the next page up on schedule as usual. The Expo is one day only and Long Beach isn’t all that far from our homestead; but hey, if anyone’s going and wants to stop by and say howdy, maybe I’ll tell you what happens. Or maybe not, but you can at least get a picture with our scale model Cam-Bot. I still happen to think it’s pretty neat, myself.

Besides the Expo, this week I’m all about the grass. Bluegrass, that is. You might recognize my blog title as a line from a little ditty name of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”, made famous by the Charlie Daniels Band. I’m not sure if TDWDTG counts as pure bluegrass, but let’s not split hairs here: it’s close enough, and more importantly, it’s a rockin’ song. Click here if you want a listen. Not the best recording, but you’ll get the gist.

There’s something about bluegrass that gets my toes tappin’ and my hands clappin’, despite being a city slicker. Maybe it’s my Irish side, genetically hearkening back to the immigrants who developed it out of traditional Scotch-Irish-English folk music, but I think I just find it… FUN.

Yes, this is the stereotypical “hillbilly” music. This is the kind of music that you might remember from Deliverance, and so it has an unfortunate association with… *ahem* non-consensual romance. Nevermind that the perpetrators of said act actually were nowhere near the kid who plays one-half of the “Dueling Banjos” duet with one of the city folk. That duet is actually a great scene where two people from wildly different walks of life find a moment of common ground, while everyone else is fumbling around trying to communicate.

I know who the real culprits who instigated this sudden resurgence of my interest are, though, and that’s Billy Hill and the Hillbillies, otherwise known as just “The Billys”. This last weekend Dawn and I went to Disneyland, and being faithful Zombie Ranchers we figured we’d catch a show at the Golden Horseshoe Theater over in Frontierland. Dawn had seen The Billys play before, but it was my first time, and man, it might have been only about 20-30 minutes but they put on a heck of a show. You didn’t get any of that sense of forced cheerfulness other Disney park performers often exhibit: The Billys are genuinely glad to be there, and genuinely impressive to watch perform. They are FUN. And they play bluegrass, which is FUN. So the FUN is squared. And the square is danced.

I checked out their website and, to be honest, it’s not as pretty as it could be, but then again neither are The Billys. But if you have any interest in this sort of thing at all, do like I did and pick up one of their CDs. I got mine at Disneyland, but they have it at places like Amazon.com as well. Here’s hoping they’ll be fiddling around still for awhile to come.

Late edit: I completely forgot to include a bit of bluegrass styling I’ve loved for many a year. It’s a cover of a Snoop Dogg song, so as you might imagine it ain’t all Safe For Work. But if you ain’t at work (or don’t care), you best give this a listen. Gin & Juice!

Based on this week’s comic, it should come as no surprise that I find lawn flamingos to be creepy things. It’s probably the eyes, more than anything. They always put me in mind of a speech from my favorite movie of all time:

“And, you know, the thing about a shark… he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be living… until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all the poundin’ and the hollerin’, they all come in and they… rip you to pieces.”

Yes, it’s true, my favorite movie is not a zombie movie. But it’s got great characters, great pacing, and every so often, someone gets eaten. What more can you ask for? I’ve loved Jaws to pieces (heh) since I was just a little tyke, and nearly 30 years later no movie has yet toppled that big, beautiful man-eating fish from its pedestal.

That said, I did dedicate myself to some new zombie viewing this week. Severed: Forest of the Dead made its way into the Netflix queue. I wasn’t expecting much, to be honest, but at first I was actually getting into it. The set-up was interesting (logging camp and eco protesters beset by the living dead), the acting seemed decent… but once the apocalypse scenario started it was all the same ol’ same ol’. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but in my opinion you really have to bring the A game if you’re going to trod over the same tired tropes of the genre. Otherwise all the jump cuts, film grain and shakycam in the world won’t save the film from getting a bit, well, dull.

You have the cowardly douchebag company man who abandons people to die, you have the ‘Apocasex Now’ scenario (female and male lead pork each other because… well, because they’re there… and they’re pretty…) … but I really started groaning when they stumbled into the makeshift survivalist compound and all its attendant cliches. Just once I’d like to see one of these where the “Alpha Male” does not attempt to rape the female lead the first time he’s alone with her, especially when it’s pretty clear no more than a few days have passed at most since everyone was isolated. At least 28 Days Later gave us a month.

The thing is, there was some potential here. There was one wonderfully ironic scene where the survivors were trying to rescue screaming eco types who had chained themselves to trees before the outbreak, and were now being set upon by the zombies of fellow tree huggers and loggers alike. That’s a moment arguably up there with the original Dawn of the Dead having a zombie hiding amongst the store mannequins, in being setting-specific and having some social commentary underlying the gore. But I could never quite figure out if the movie was being self-aware like that. For instance… and yeah, I’ve been giving lots of spoilers, but let’s face it, this isn’t The Sixth Sense… we have the following exchange of dialog after the douchebag scientist admits the company was performing genetic experiments to regenerate trees and make them grow faster:

Scientist: Only I can stop the clear-cutting of forests!

Eco-girl: You can’t stop it like this!

Well, actually eco-girl, this scenario is exactly how you can stop the clear-cutting of forests. In the better movie that could have been, the dialog would go:

Scientist: Only I can stop the clear-cutting of forests!

Eco-girl: You’re right. Once everyone’s a zombie, they won’t care about lumber anymore.

Ah well. Thus does Severed plod along to its oddly inconclusive conclusion, possibly making some point along the way. I think the point was that people are dicks, and zombies like to eat people regardless of whether they’re dicks or not. I just wish they’d found some new ways to express that.

For some time now I’ve been meaning to once again gush happily over the A World On Fire blog. Every day its proprietor, Brian, has new and exciting zombie-related entries. Oftentimes multiple entries. I know there’s plenty of zombie sites out there, but AWOF is the one I consistently find easiest to browse and cherry pick interesting movies, games, or toys to check out. I found AWOF when Brian first found and reviewed us back last October, and have been happily checking it out ever since.

Well, Brian hadn’t forgotten about us, either, and just last week he posted a new update praising what we’ve done so far. Perhaps then, my pimping his blog now will seem self serving. Perhaps. All I can say in my defense is that I’ve had AWOF on our links page for several months now. And that I enjoy being self-serving once in awhile.

Strange diseases are a staple of the modern zombie genre, at least since it moved away from radiation and voodoo towards something more infectious in style. Our latest comic brings up Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, better known as “Mad Cow Disease”.

You’ve probably heard of it at least in passing. If not, a quick trip to wikipedia will let you know it was, and is, a quite real affliction. One that was definitely spread by the practice of grinding slaughterhouse leftovers and sick and injured animals into the meal used to feed other livestock. Thus, cows eating cows.

If that wasn’t bizarre enough, Mad Cow isn’t spread by a virus, but by mutated proteins called prions. In a mammal’s brain, they get bent out of shape, and then they start mutating all the proteins near them in the same way, eventually producing holes where tissue should be. Needless to say this has a bad effect on functions the brain controls, and eventually shuts down the whole system. It was never as big an epidemic in North America as it was in Europe, but in the United Kingdom entire cattle populations had to be exterminated to get things under control.

What’s that you say? People are mammals? Why yes, they are, and there are still people being diagnosed with the human equivalent of mad cow due to tainted beef they might have consumed years or even decades earlier. Prions can have a very long incubation period, you see.

Sleep well, children.

Anyhow, a particularly nasty strain of Mad Cow Disease is the whole premise behind the zombie flick Dead Meat. For one thing, the cows are out to get their own (human) happy meals, which I suppose is the extreme interpretation of the results of giving them a non-herbivorous diet. Something akin to Mad Cow might also be at the root of Zombieland, although we don’t get much detail beyond a mention of “Patient Zero” having eaten a bad hamburger.

Another disease often used as a zombie catalyst is variations on rabies. Off the top of my head, some super-rabies derivative was the culprit behind the outbreaks of the Left 4 Dead game and the movie Quarantine. Part of the attraction of rabies, again, is the easy transmission between mammals, plus hyper-aggression and being incurable once symptoms have set in. A disease that’s incurable is very important to an apocalypse scenario. Most everyone has probably experienced the frustration of going to the doctor about the cold making them miserable, only be to informed it’s viral and there’s nothing to be done for it except bedrest and fluids. Not only did you not choose to be infected in the first place, you’re at the mercy of the bug until it decides to leave you alone.

So of course, it’s an easy jump from that to the Superflu that doesn’t leave you alone. At least, not until you’re dead. And from there, you get the disease that won’t even leave you alone after you’re dead, and instead makes you get up and shamble after the still healthy and their juicy flesh. In a way, though, zombies could be seen as an invention that allows people to express some control over the idea of a killer plague. You can at least see zombies coming. You can’t chainsaw a virus, but you can sure as heck chainsaw a zed. It might still be a hopeless situation in the end, but not quite as random… and hey, at least you’re being proactive.

Let’s hope no zombie apocalypse ever goes the route of an old video game I owned, though, called Incubation. It was a science-fiction horror scenario where formerly peaceful aliens start mutating into ferocious killers after coming into contact with a human virus. You find out in the course of the game that the virus causing the mutations is Herpes Simplex. Now, I’m guessing this choice was made based on the fact that Herpes Simplex is incurable and remains in the body for life once infection occurs; however, the shuddersome question I have to this day is, “How did the aliens get herpes?”

Again, sleep well, children.

It could be worse. After all, you could have a significant other who once fed a hamburger to a cow.

This week’s comic puts a few more tidbits of zombie-related information out there for you readers, or at least starts to. Chuck tends to ramble on some. It’s probably all that drinking before noon.

I have to admit, every time I actually get around to presenting more of what’s in my head (and in my notes) to the public, I feel a certain amount of nerves. Even in the case of a bizarre setting like Zombie Ranch, I want to keep a level of consistency to things; and so, once a concept is out there, then I’ve moved past the point of consideration to the point where it’s “in production”, and I can only hope it continues to make as much sense as it did when I was mulling it over. Gotta get things written sometime, though, or you might as well not be writing at all. If all else fails I can always pull a dream sequence trick like the 8th Season of “Dallas“, right?

I kid, I kid. In truth, I suppose I can count my blessings this is a two-person operation. I don’t have many people to bounce ideas off of, but there’s none of the issues that could crop up if someone else was writing the comic next month, or even next week. Anyone who’s a fan of long-running TV shows or comic book characters knows how much of a 90 degree turn can happen as creative teams rotate in and out. Sometimes it’s a right turn (ho ho), but a lot of other times the continuity goes haywire so badly that things either shut down on a sour note, or the next creative rotation has to resort to have someone waking up from a bad dream.

Sometimes that can happen even with the same people involved on the creative end. The Star Wars prequels are a fine example of that, and I’m still trying to pinch myself awake from that particular bad dream. It’s probably the single greatest pitfall of any fantasy/sci-fi world: that world can have whatever screwball justifications and pseudoscience it wants to come up with, as long as it then makes the effort to stick to it. Call it internal logic or what you will, it just boils down to not having Hobbits fly in the second book if they didn’t in the first, unless you have a very, very good reason. Otherwise your audience will likely get confused. Possibly angry. Or if I may borrow an apt phrase we use in the bad movie viewing club my friends formed: “Wait, what?”

Some media properties play more loosely in tone than others, so you can give them more slack and just enjoy them for what they are. Since I’ve started writing regularly, though, I sometimes feel like one of those former film students who notice every time someone in a movie has a handkerchief in their pocket in one shot and is missing it in the next. I also know just how hard it can be to communicate clearly with a creative partner, even if you happen to live with her (cough, cough)… so I then wonder if it’s really the writer’s fault, or some wires got crossed between the script and the final.

Case in point, I watched an old episode of Farscape recently where the hero knocks a couple of guards out with a shovel. Now, Farscape is definitely not on the “hard” side of science fiction, and is something you should in general just roll with and not try to analyze; however, the guards the hero knocks out are both wearing thick steel helmets that cover their entire skull and neck area.

So part of me is now thinking of the writer seeing the finished result, and cursing the names of the director and the costume designer for putting those helmets on the guards. I highly doubt the helmets were called for in the original script. Maybe the shovel wasn’t either. I will probably never know, but the end result is magic helmets that give no actual protection from concussion. “Wait, what?”

Anyhow, very minor on the scale of things that don’t make sense, and from a show that never really made much pretense about making sense in the first place. But I’ll probably think about it again next time I see something similarly strange, and I still hold out the  hope of minimizing any magic helmet issues in my own works.

Oh, and my apologies to anyone who thought this blog might be about Elmer Fudd singing opera. I only advertised magic helmets, not spears.

Bit of a bizarre happening today, aside from Los Angeles threatening to drown under a short but very intense thunderstorm (more rain on the way, too, so we’ll see how that goes… every so often Mother Nature loves reminding the Valley that it’s, well… a valley).

Back when I was trying to get some initial word out about Zombie Ranch, I registered for several forums where promoting your comic was fair game. I don’t believe we ever really got much more than a trickle out of those posts, which is to be expected since we really didn’t have much to look at yet. I remember one responder opining that we probably shouldn’t promote ourselves until we had at least 30 strips available for viewing, but we considered that a tad impractical since at our planned rate of posting 30 strips would mean over six months of wait.

That said we haven’t really been too aggressive in promotion since our initial push, since we do want to take the time to get some content built up. No one reads a webcomic because you tell them they have to. I mean, they might, but they’ll only keep reading if they find it worthwhile and to their tastes.

Anyhow, back to the oddity I mentioned, which was a rejection notice from a forum I almost didn’t remember I’d even submitted a registration request for. I had to think about it for a moment because I’m fairly sure I put in the request sometime back in November of last year, and it had largely passed out of mind. I then remembered thinking it odd at the time that it was one of the only public webcomic forums I had checked into that required moderator approval before you could post, rather than just the usual anti-spam measures.

Moderator approval is all well and good, of course, as long as it’s done in a timely manner. Two months is not especially timely, and at the end of it comes a very brief email saying that “regrettably” my application to join has been rejected. Keep in mind this was not an application to be hosted somewhere or get ad space or anything like that; in fact, the application, if it can be called that, was just the usual username/email/password what-are-the-colored-letters-in-the-speckled-box business. I would have had to have been approved before I could even begin to start crafting a profile full of sins against God and man.

Sometimes sites blacklist IP addresses that have offended in the past, but since mine isn’t an IP that hundreds share I can’t imagine that would be the case, unless the wife has been a very naughty girl. Perhaps it was just a more ‘leet sort of forum than it seemed, or perhaps it was just a matter of someone finally getting around to a long backlog of registration requests and doing a mass “NO” to save time and clear the slate. That might be likely considering the news update on the site itself seems to be one of those Under New Management posts after a long dry spell. Perhaps it will be worth trying again in the future, or perhaps I’m really not missing out on much of anything. We’ll see. For now, it was simply an oddity, like a Tickle Me Elmo doll suddenly burbling to the surface of a military academy fountain. It raises questions, but it’s not necessarily something to lose sleep over.

So, sometimes sowing the seeds doesn’t work out. And then again, sometimes it does. Another site that recently got its updates together after a few months was Tomgeeks, and there our much more in-depth application was approved. Tomgeeks is a site that exists mainly to promote webcomics that have someone of the female persuasion on the creative team. Since my better half is also the artistic half of Zombie Ranch, we qualify, and it’s great to be part of such a slick looking website. Dawn was particularly happy to note that Tomgeeks is a “girl” site that does not use any pink in its composition. Dawn hates pink. It makes her angry. Tomgeeks uses very pleasant tones of green instead, and both Dawn and I are great fans of green. But besides that, Tomgeeks is a great jumping off point for browsing all kinds of webcomics, many of which have little in common except that someone involved in writing or drawing them has boobs.

And it really is a very nice shade of green…

Actually it’s pretty cruel of me to mention the word “drill” today since the artist wife got two root canals done yesterday. She was feeling incredibly lousy and yet still managed to get this week’s comic finished up for y’all, so worship her. Or at least give her a pat on the back (but gently). It’s also her birthday this weekend, so birthday wishes are happily accepted as well.

Truth is I was having trouble coming up with a title for this week’s blog since I’m still suffering through the haze of some nasty new head cold I got for Christmas. Seriously, it seems like there’s no time for plague like the Holidays. All the relatives and friends gather, someone out of the group happens to be sick, and before you know it everyone’s winging their way back to their own corners of the world and carrying a few extra passengers. Makes you wonder why so many zombie apocalypse stories are set during Halloween, when it’s December that’s the real viral culprit. Or heck, how about New Year’s Eve? Let’s see you run from the horde with twelve Jagermeister shots in your belly, buddy. And no one’s going to notice anything amiss if people are stumbling around and groaning.

So a few weeks back I watched a 1993 flick entitled “Geronimo: An American Legend“. As you might guess, it was based on the real life story of the (in)famous Apache chieftain. Quite a cast list, as well: Wes Studi in the title role, plus Gene Hackman, Matt Damon, Jason Patric, and Robert Duvall. You know, people always talk about the famous squint Clint Eastwood has, but Eastwood has nothing on Duvall. If someone can find documented proof that Robert Duvall can open his eyes wider than a mean half-mast, feel free to send it my way, because until I see it happen I consign it to the same skepticism I reserve for concepts like the Easter Bunny, or RP-PVP.

Anywise, Geronimo: AAL is not a bad movie, but it’s not a great movie either. As Westerns go, I’ll say this much for it: it got me thinking about a film aspect you never experience in any of the classic Westerns I can think of, and that’s voice-over narration. Geronimo: AAL engages liberally in voice-over narration, and for lack of a better term, it was jarring to me. Or at least took me away from the story rather than immersing me in it.

I think my feeling here is that the Western is a very stoic genre, because it deals mostly with stoic characters. There’s not much room for angst on the wild frontier. As far as introspection goes, the best cowboy actors would speak volumes with their silence. We didn’t need to hear an internal monologue from John Wayne or Gary Cooper… we read all we needed to on the chiseled slates of their faces as they leaned on a corral post and watched the herd graze, or eyed the steadily ticking hands of a clock. Didn’t need no damn fool narration telling us what they were thinkin’.

That said, I don’t know if Geronimo: AAL was intending to be a Western, or a just a very heavily dramatized documentary with overtones of finger-wagging at the paleface. Not that the paleface doesn’t deserve some finger-wagging: it’s a documented fact that the US Army had to recruit and use Apache scouts to hunt down Geronimo and his band, then when it was over those scouts were not only kicked out of the army, but arrested and shipped into the same exile as the brothers they helped capture. I can understand a certain amount of political and military expediency, but that was just a dick move. Then again, world history sometimes seems like nothing more than one long string of dick moves. If history is truly written by the victors, well, I suppose the victors just don’t really mind being seen as a-holes, or they’d do a better job of covering their tracks.

That’ll do for this week, I reckon. Time for some more cold medicine. And again, happy birthday to Dawn!

All right, then, Holidays are over, everybody back to the grind. This week we’ve finally gotten around to debuting Suzie’s Uncle Chuck in all his food-stained glory. We thank you for your patience, although there’s as good a chance everyone was far too busy with new toys to be keeping up with the Ranch. I know I was both blessed and cursed with a little productivity killer known as Dragon Age: Origins, which the artist was also taken enough with that we finally had to go out and buy her her own copy for her PC so we’d stop fighting over Xbox time. Bioware RPGs are like designer drugs for us.

On the more productive front, I was also presented with a copy of Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art. If you don’t know who Will Eisner is, you probably don’t need to worry about it as a casual comics fan. I’ll freely admit that for a good portion of my life I didn’t know, and then when I heard the name I first thought, “The guy who used to run Disney?” (for the record, that was Michael Eisner).

Everyone’s heard of Stan Lee, but in the professional comics world Will Eisner is regarded as one of the great movers, shakers, and innovators of comics as an art form, including being credited as the inventor of the graphic novel. His best known creation is The Spirit, a two-fisted detective who recently featured in an abortion of a film that probably would have been better off labeled “Sin City 2” than anything to do with Eisner’s hero. That’s probably how most people outside the comics industry ever heard of The Spirit, but then again the movie (quite deservedly) bombed, so I’d guess he’s still not on the minds of the man and woman on the street the way Spider-Man or Superman are.

Regardless of which, you look at the comics of The Spirit and, at face value, they’re very simplistic and cartoony tales. It’s the way they’re told that matters, so much so that years ago when Neil Gaiman first decided to write comics, one of the first books he sought out was the one I just got for Christmas. The yearly comic industry awards given out at the San Diego Comic Con are named in honor of Will Eisner, and the Eisner awards are more or less the Oscars of sequential art. You might notice it even labeled on some graphic novels or trade paperbacks in the same way you see Academy Awards listed on movie DVDs… “Winner of 2 Eisner awards!”

Eisner died just a few years ago, but he left a definite legacy. Pick up a Best of The Spirit collection and you’ll see how sixty years ago this guy and his proteges were telling comics stories in crazy, exciting ways that even today a lot of publications don’t bother with. Comics and Sequential Art is an outgrowth of the arts classes he taught for many years in New York City, and is his collected treatise of the principles and techniques he observed, cataloged, and used over the years to really make the most of the unique medium of comics. It’s not just the words. It’s not just the drawings. It’s everything.

Now for certain, you don’t need to study Will Eisner to make a successful comic, any more than you need to study Sophocles to be a successful playwright. But there’s a lot of good ideas to be had, whether you’re a writer, or an artist, or an interested reader, or some or all of the above. So I’m a happy man to have Eisner’s book in my possession.

Now that I’ve filled up most of this blog with Eisner love, I should probably get to the observation that led to my header for this week. It’s going to seem short by comparison, but what the heck. The wife and I were listening to the HP Podcraft broadcast recently and they were doing a segment on Herbert West: Re-Animator. Now this is the original short story by H. P. Lovecraft they were talking of, not the movie. I’ve actually never seen the movie. But the podcasters reminded me that back in 1922, H. P. Lovecraft had written a story about dead people brought back to a semblance of life, and those reanimated corpses had a ravening hunger for human flesh.

Now H. P. Lovecraft is most famous for writing of Cthulhu and the other Great Old Ones of his Cthulhu Mythos, and the Herbert West story often isn’t included in collections of his works. But there it is, and the podcast team quite correctly picked up on this and talked about it: Lovecraft had the cannibalistic undead theme on paper decades before Romero ever looked through a camera lens. Whatever his shortcomings as a writer might have been, I still consider Lovecraft to be one of the great innovators of post-Gothic horror, and this is just one more reason why.

Ya, I took the day off. I know I sort of took the day off when I was sick…but not really because I still drew a comic – though it wasn’t of the greatest of quality. But it was still a comic.

But this week we’ve been busy. I had my mother to drive out to and visit, and then we have Clint’s family to go and have Christmas with. Plus we were given the opportunity to go to Disneyland on Monday…and who would turn down free tickets to Disneyland?

But the next page is also going to be a bit more complicated. We have a new character to introduce and I have to train myself in drawing the new scenery.

It’s the holiday season, and Dawn is already happy as a zombie in brains because her Cintiq drawing tablet arrived. Unlike her previous tablet, the cat hasn’t chewed on the connection cord for this one (yet), so it should much improve her ability to color the comic.

One tradition of the holidays seems to be just about any and every media franchise out there doing their own versions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. You know the one, I’m sure. Scrooge? Marley? Tiny Tim? Bah humbug? Some are clever, some… well, some seem to just be done out of tradition, or at least the idea of “this script already exists, and it works, so all we have to do is shove our own characters into the roles, make a few pop-culture references for the kids, and we’re good”.

If you’ve somehow avoided all contact with A Christmas Carol or any number of its derivatives, the basic premise is this: old miser is visited by the ghost of his equally miserly business partner and also ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, shown how the joyless greed of his life will lead to ruin, miser reforms himself and helps his downtrodded employee celebrate Christmas. And his little crippled son, too.

In other words, it’s an age old morality fable, and that’s why it still can resonate today over a hundred and fifty years since its publication. Arguably it would have resonated with people a hundred and fifty years before its publication, as well. Maybe even a thousand years before, although they didn’t really have Christmas to speak of so some details would need changing.

Certainly the morality plays of the Middle Ages would have recognized similar elements. The story has been told innumerable times since, but was also most likely told before. The trick is in the twists you bring to the tale, and the skill you have in presenting it.

I’m getting somewhere with this, honest. There’s a well-known maxim that there are no truly original ideas, and even something as bizarre as people ranching zombies for profit falls into that realm. When we were searching for a domain name and title for our series back in September, we ran across the remains of a few fellow travelers. They are the Ghosts of Zombie Ranches past, and in honor of Mr. Scrooge I name them now. Fittingly enough, these ghosts are three in number.

#1: I can’t quite call these folks fellow travelers since they’re the ones I’ve mentioned in a previous blog that have had the URL of zombieranch.com reserved since the year 2000 without having seemed to have done anything with it. Flying M Design, and their zombie ranching intentions, remain a mystery.

#2: This is more like it, but as far as I can tell has been defunct since 2006. Someone’s school project from the College of New Jersey, now abandoned? Anyhow, some of the site either loads very slow or doesn’t load at all. The concept seems like fun, where you have to defend your own ranch “fortress” and your zombie herd while locating other ranches to mess around with. As for the larger world setting, who knows? All we really have to go by is the tantalizing “How to Play” page linked above.

#3: Last but not least is the Zombie Rancher game from Invisible City Productions. It’s a boardgame which is still available as a free PDF for download and play, and if you feel like doing so I highly encourage giving it a try, because these folks had a great concept. Now I promise you, any similarities between their setting and ours are very coincidental. We are fellow travelers on a shambling, rotting path, but I do have to admit I opted for our zombies tasting terrible partially out of respect for what they came up with. The designer’s story of a combination of reading the Zombie Survival Guide and a visit to the Texas Land and Cattle eatery is golden. I really should try to track down Jonathan A. Leistiko and offer him a virtual beer, both for that, and for game design decisions such as “The hungriest player goes first”.

So there we have it. We have been visited by three ghosts, although only one of them (Zombie Rancher) still seems to be around in some form that might be able to benefit from my pointing out their existence.

And yes, I know, why use ghosts for all this when I could have used zombies. What can I say? Blame Dickens.

Here we see what happens when the artist, already smack in the midst of her final exams, catches the horrible head cold I suffered from last week. It’s a nasty bug that severely impairs your ability to do much more than lie around and groan, so I’m surprised she even got the little “sick day” comic done that she did. For those not in the know, Clamp is the Manga group responsible for bringing such things as Chobits and Magic Knight Rayearth into the world. I apologize profusely to our readership for my negligence in allowing her fevered brain to bring you “Manga Suzie”.

I suppose we can count our blessings it wasn’t Chibi Suzie. I’m locking her away from the art supplies until the fever passes… but we should be back on track next week, and one step closer to resolving the enigma that is Uncle Chuck.

Anyhow, this week I finally got around to a first-time viewing of the zombie genre oldster, Lucio Fulci’s “Zombie“. Or “Zombi 2”, depending what country you’re in, or what mood you’re in; because honestly, I couldn’t find any indication on IMDB that Fulci ever made a “Zombi 1”. This mystery persisted until I discovered that George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead was released the previous year (1978) with the Italian title of Zombi, so Fulci’s movie was renamed “Zombi 2” in a naked attempt to cash in on DotD’s success.

An alternate title could just as well have been, “That movie where a zombie fights a shark“, since that’s what everyone remembers most. Yes, that’s a real tiger shark, and the zombie is the shark’s trainer. Personally, I’ve never heard of a shark trainer, and believe that whatever they were paying that man, it wasn’t enough. Zombie was not a high budget flick, as evidenced by end credit scenes of a zombie apocalypse in New York where you can clearly see bridge traffic below proceeding in an orderly everyday fashion. Also, it’s one of those zombie movies (and there’s a lot of them) where the human cast has to be made artificially stupid in order for the living dead to get their rotting hands on them. Like a research scientist who has been dealing with the rising dead for weeks freezing in place and screaming uselessly as they get up and close in slowly… ever… so… slowly… on her. And no, she’s not surrounded. Two steps to the left and she’s out the door.

The thing is, slow zombies can be scary. Night of the Living Dead is proof of that, and while Barbara spends most of the film in traumatized uselessness, it never made me bust out laughing the way some of the manufactured demises in Zombie/Zombi 2 did. This is the sort of thing I was getting at in the podcast about there not being many “classics” of the zombie genre. Some people do consider Zombie/Zombi 2 a classic, but I’ll just call it an “oldie” and leave it at that. Maybe a comedy classic.

To be fair, I will say that immediately after watching Z/Z2 I checked out Troma productions’ Redneck Zombies, and regretted having done so without alcohol in my system. Yes, I know Troma is intentionally low-budget, trashy and campy, but wow did it make Z/Z2 look fantastic in comparison.

So that’ll be that for this week. I need to go feed Dawn and check that her chains are secured until the evil Clamp virus is purged from her system. Then she will be made to draw again. See y’all in seven!

This week’s Western, courtesy of the fine folks at Netflix, was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It’s another John Ford directed classic, starring John Wayne, although this time around John Wayne gets to share the film with Jimmy Stuart and Lee Marvin. It’s always a treat for me watching actors with a lot of screen presence playing off one another, which means it’s a bit of a sadness that these days green screen technology makes it possible for actors to appear to be having a scene together but never actually have met in person. Yes, I’m looking at you, Sin City; you had Mickey Rourke and Rutger Hauer in the same movie, but never in the same room.

Then again I suppose the same complaint could be made about Shatner vs. Montalban in Wrath of Khan, and yet their scenery chewing struggle to out-overact one another is what arguably makes the movie. So perhaps my point is pointless.

Anyhow, TMWSLV is a tale of the struggle occurring towards the end of the Old West between the forces of civilization and (if I may be so dramatic) savagery. At least that’s my view, and I think one backed up by dramatic character names like Ransom Stoddard and Liberty Valance. The interesting thing about the movie is how it appears to be sympathetic to the side of civilization, but the climactic event seems to give the lesson that only another act of savagery by a lawless man can keep the dream of civilization alive. Ford’s ambiguity isn’t as full force here as it is by the time of The Searchers, but there’s still questions to chew on.

TMWSLV gives us two more famous legacies for the ages: first, I believe it’s the one and only movie where John Wayne keeps uttering the word “pilgrim”, but wow has that stuck with The Duke. And second, we get the immortal lines from the newspaper man who has just heard the true account of what happened all those years ago in the town of Shinbone, but makes clear that he intends to keep to the dramatic story everyone knows:

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Great line. And it so happens that I’ve recently finished up my own little slice of fact/legend in fulfilling last week’s promise of a background setting page for Zombie Ranch. Now again, I’m going to warn you folks that this page may give away details you don’t want to know yet. I will further warn you that if you think these blog posts are wordy, you’d best stay away from the walls o’ text which will greet you over yonder. But if you really want a gander at some of the concepts behind this weird world of zombie livestock, feel free to check out “The Setting” under our About page: LINK

In closing this week I’d like to give a shout out to Derrick Ravey and Emi over at Everyday Decay for being great email pen pals and playing a mean game of Left 4 Dead. Really, I nominate Left 4 Dead (and Left 4 Dead 2) as the “new golf”, which all friends and fellow travelers should feel free to bond over. Derrick and Emi have been good enough to list Zombie Ranch on their links page, and we’ve returned the favor. I know I’ve mentioned their site in the past, but doggone it I’ll mention it again. Check ’em out!