Category: Writer’s Blog

The title here is most likely nonsense, because–like many writers–I know just enough Latin to get myself in trouble. It’s a play on the far more meaningful “e pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”) which was a favored motto of the United States founding fathers. Like, many states, but united, dig?

Anyhow, pruritus is the official medical terminology for itchy skin. Seriously.

Sounds a lot more serious than it is, right? “Sorry Paul, I’m going to have to cancel our dinner date. My pruritus is flaring up again.” Unless Paul is a doctor, a Latin scholar, or has read this blog, chances are his response is going to be concern and understanding rather than being pissed off at you.

Then again I know this because I’ve had several recent medical visits documenting my pruritus on account of some damn thing biting me repeatedly, causing nasty welts that itched so bad I would go nearly insane from not scratching… and then would scratch and then have to go on antibiotics because yay, I opened up the wound and the bacteria on my skin dove right in for party time. Was it a mosquito? A spider? We were baffled and so were the doctors, until finally Dawn just recently found (what we dearly hope was) a single bedbug hiding out in the mattress just under where I sleep.

Good news is that (literal) sucker is now dead and neither we nor the pest control guy found evidence of any further infestation. It appears to have been a lone rogue male. We’ll know for sure in the next couple weeks if I get chewed on again.

Also on the plus side, when the doctors were calling it a spider bite I found this article and it is a very entertaining piece showcasing the quirky world of entomology, populated by folks at least as nutty as your average zombie rancher. Give it a read and scratch that intellectual pruritus, eh?

I have to admit, I was a little bummed out this year when I confirmed the dates for Long Beach Comic Con 2019 and realized that it was the earliest it had ever been scheduled: August 31st and September 1st. In other words, my birthday weekend.

I resolved to follow through since Dawn and I have yet to miss a Long Beach show since they started, but I can’t deny there was a twinge of mopery since exhibiting at a convention just isn’t the same sort of freewheeling feeling one has for attending. You’re holding down a table for hours, and while it’s hardly something I’d compare to 9-to-5 cubicle drudgery I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t get slow at times, not to mention the effort of load-out and load-in and, in the case of Long Beach, the driving back and forth since the time and distance doesn’t quite justify the expense of a hotel.

And then maybe a little over a month ago I had an obvious epiphany: the convention by itself may not have justified a hotel, but the convention combined with a birthday? How ’bout that?

Luckily this wasn’t San Diego or even WonderCon so it wasn’t beyond question trying to find a nearby place. Even snagged one with a nice pool that was open late. We actually managed to spend an hour or so (literally) cooling our heels in that pool, and let me tell you that’s almost as rare a feat for exhibitors as being able to take advantage of a happy hour. Also on Saturday we had enough friends come by it still felt birthday enough, especially when some stayed long enough for a few drinks after.

Conventions are work, no doubt, and this was no exception. But if you work it well enough, they can still be a kind of vacation.

There are certain limitations that come with the conceit of Zombie Ranch as a “show within a show” style of narrative, but there are benefits as well. One of the greatest of these is that I have the option, at almost any time I so choose, to digress from the current action into a side commentary in the form of the “A Moment With…” segments, where an out-of-sequence interview occurs with a character.

The modern “mockumentary” style Zombie Ranch at times resembles–you know it if you’ve watched The Office or Parks & Rec–has almost constant asides like this as part of their storytelling, but in my opinion that sort of frequency doesn’t translate well to comics. A few seconds set aside for Jim Halpert to deadpan stare into the camera and tell the audience what he’s done to Dwight’s stapler takes up a lot more real estate in our format and is potentially far more disruptive. So even though the tool is at my disposal, I’ve used it very sparingly.

This latest one with Oscar? It was time to talk about his lemon tree. You know, the lemon tree?

Okay it’s been in my notes for years and the closest we got to it was him kicking back with a glass of lemonade on the Siege House balcony. But when Oscar alluded to how he tries to keep Frank alive it seemed a natural time to finally bring up his other long-running project, and so… A Moment is born.

Ever run across the Stealth Pun entry on TV Tropes? It’s mostly something where writers get to feel clever by inserting jokes into their work that they don’t explicitly call attention to, often in the form of sleazy puns or references. One example listed on the page is from the old Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series where the character Oz–who is a werewolf–habitually wears a sheepskin jacket. Making him a… well, you get the idea…

Well it wasn’t too long ago that I realized I’d crafted a pun so stealthy even I didn’t realize it until it was more or less too late. For many years we’d been intending to introduce a traveling doctor and their bodyguard, with the bodyguard role eventually fleshing out into a Native American, and the name of that Native American kept coming to me as “Whitecloud.” There were times I would go out and research looking for alternatives but nothing just seemed to fit quite as well, and so the name persisted and persisted until finally, the character was introduced. But she wasn’t introduced by name right away. We decided to leave the readers in a bit of suspense as we brought Issue 17 to a close with the newcomer raining down tear gas to drive off a Huachuca charge.

Somewhere in our in-between issues break as I was looking at Dawn’s art for that sequence for the dozenth time or so, a realization hit me so suddenly that I let out an audible groan. The mysterious Whitecloud’s first appearance in the comic had featured her unleashing…

…a white cloud.

I had without any conscious intent stealth punned myself.

Honestly though, with her name still unrevealed at that point I could have changed it, so the fact that I did not do that probably says even more than anything my subconscious may have done.

Well played, me.

So as you may have heard, Dawn got into a car accident recently. She’s okay, but when all was said and done there was still a sad casualty…

Alas, our convention car–Ghostbuster decals and all–is no more. The damage inflicted was enough to bend part of the frame, and when that happens an old car like it was just doesn’t have the raw blue book value for the insurance company to not write it off as a total loss. Sentiment and coolness aren’t factored in.

Dawn got the car in 2008, so it’s been with us since the beginning as far as our comics and exhibiting career goes. It was a rarity, a station wagon with ample cargo space in an era where that had mostly gone out of style. A car that was still running after nearly 22 years of operation and 200,000 miles on the odometer, most recently ferrying us back and forth to another fully loaded San Diego Comic Con.

So if you don’t mind, raise a glass of whatever beverage is your preference in honor of a long and distinguished career of automotive service. Hopefully we can find a worthy successor to its memory.

As you may know, our recent second Kickstarter was successfully funded, which means a Volume 2 trade collection is going to happen. First, though, I (perhaps unwisely) have consigned myself to going back through all the content involved and adjusting the lettering to a more consistent state based on my current skills and knowledge versus… 2013? Holy crap, was Episode Eight really six years ago?

I suppose that actually tracks, come to think of it. I did the same sorts of revisions for Volume 1 when we had our first Kickstarter back in 2015, and that was working with content all the way back to Episode One in 2009.

But here I am, going over 2013 content and feeling like I’m needing to make a lot of the same adjustments. Did I learn nothing?

Well, of course I did… but the fact is that 2013 comes before 2015, and 2015 was where I worked on that first trade and consolidated a lot of the standards I wanted to use going forwards. I learned, but there’s a lag time to account for. Once I hit the latter half of 2015 there should be much smoother sailing in terms of the revisions. Or at least there better be, or else I really will be having to take past me aside for a chat about all this.

In honor of the impending San Diego Comic-Con, which Dawn and I will be down in the thick of by the time you read this, I thought I’d take a moment for a recommendation. Believe it or not, it’s for a Hulk comic.

That’s the wraparound cover for Issue 16, and if you’re getting body horror vibes or even flashbacks to John Carpenter’s The Thing, congratulations because there’s no false advertising here. Writer Al Ewing stated he wanted to take the Hulk character back to the borderline(?) horror comics of his origins, and with the assistance of penciler Joe Bennett, boy howdy does he ever.

I do most of my comics reading through a Marvel Unlimited subscription these days, meaning I’m usually about six months behind the curve since that’s how long of a lag time Marvel decided on (unless you buy the print issue or pay an unlock fee… and hell, son, I’m already paying a subscription so who needs that noise?). But I’d been hearing the hype, and so far about a dozen issues in it hasn’t disappointed.  Well, except that each issue makes me want to read the next, so when I reached the end of the currently available run, that was disappointing.

If you’re not a fan of the old school horror vibe this may not be your bag, but if you liked you some Tales From The Crypt and its ilk, or especially if you were a fan of Alan Moore and Steve Bissette’s classic run on Swamp Thing in the 1980s, you’ll dig this. In fact this reminded me a lot of that Swamp Thing, perhaps a tad less psychedelic but certainly fascinating and disturbing. And I don’t think it’s coincidence that both series are obsessed in their own way with “The Green.” To go into more detail would be spoilery, so I’ll just declare: read it and see.

Well, that’s a load off. As of last Friday we had two days to go for our Volume 2 Kickstarter and although we’d raised a hefty chunk of change, we still were a few hundred dollars short of our goal. It was a far different feeling than our first go-round where we got successfully funded about halfway through the 30 day period and then were just seeing if we could reach our “Secret Stash” stretch goal (which we did at almost the very last minute). Had we fallen short of the stretch goal, no big deal, but this time around we were short of the funding goal, period, and if that didn’t get met then there would be no book. There were several people last time around who never pledged but bought a book after the fact and you wonder if they quite understand that if they don’t kick in on the project there may be no book to buy.

That’s about the time when we had been trying not to beg or bother people but I started going through my lists and arguably did just that. Sometimes people don’t have money and/or aren’t interested, but sometimes people just forget, you know? And yeah, some had forgotten. Some pledged in time, some still ended up forgetting until it was too late…

BUT… we got funded. And in the end the closing surge funded us with some cushion, though not quite enough to reach the stretch goal this time. If we’d failed, there would have had to be some examination in the wake. Was our timing wrong? Did we not promote enough? Or worst of all, was there just not enough interest and support out there to keep doing these collections?

Stressful stuff to consider, thankfully moot. We now shelve this particular stress and move fully on to the stress of preparing for San Diego Comic-Con.

Maybe it’s having doctors and science on my mind for the past few weeks, but this news warmed my heart: a grad student in Virginia just won the state beauty pageant (and semi-finals for Miss America) with a science experiment. And forgive me my title for this post, I really do find Camille Schrier’s demonstration of the surging effects of the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide far more impressive than I would seeing her in an evening gown. I mean gimme safety goggles, black gloves and scientific enthusiasm any old day:

Can she tapdance? I have no idea. But I may have to watch the Miss America pageant for the first time in… ever? Just to see what she brings to the stage there.

I mean, it’s not like she’s going to unleash her plan for world domination there, right?

Oh. Oh, dear.

No, I kid. If you don’t know, a nickname for the U.S. State of Virginia is “The Old Dominion,” so Miss Dominion just happened to be her regional title that she went to the state finals with. Still, it’d be quite appropriate to supervillainy, wouldn’t it? And once she completes her doctorate studies she can be DOCTOR DOMINION.

For now though, she’s content to wear the Miss Virginia crown and promote STEM (Science Technology Engineering & Math), particularly ladies in STEM, through her victory. Style and science co-existing on the same stage? Dr. Gwen would be proud.

“The Moor’s abused by some most villainous knave./Some base, notorious knave”

— Shakespeare, Othello (Act 4 Scene 2, Line 143-5).​

When you’re a writer you naturally think a lot about words: how they sound, where they come from, what they mean. Words make up language, which is molded by our thoughts and molds our thoughts in turn. And every so often, in thinking about words I observe certain trends in human psychology that are old enough (but seemingly universal enough) I can quote Shakespeare to illustrate them.

To put it simply: we don’t like the simple. The plain. The common. The title of this piece is all but redundant, because the term “vulgar” has its roots in the Latin word “vulgus,” which just meant “common people.” I remember the original Vampire: The Masquerade RPG book had a section labeled “Vulgar Argot” — which was really just a fancy way of saying “here’s a bunch of slang terms modern vampires use informally.” But outside of academia the common meaning (heh) is to refer to something or someone crass, or gross, or generally not meeting the standards of polite society.

“Villain” is another interesting one. In modern usage it is the go-to term for an evildoer, to the point where in fiction if authors are going for a more grey area feel they tend to describe the person or persons who oppose their main characters as antagonists rather than using the loaded words hero and villain. Villains are bad guys, m’kay?

But “villain” comes from the Old French “villein,” and you’ll note it shares several letters with the word “village.” This is not an accident. A village was used to mean a rural township, and a villein was someone from a place like that. A rube. Rural, uncultured and ignorant, to be shunned and looked down on by a better class of folk. And I guess also considered prone to criminal behavior, given how we use the word now.

You might begin to get the idea that a bunch of hoity-toity city folk are responsible for all this, but here’s a really interesting one: ornery. Calling something “ornery” ain’t what you’d expect from some city slicker snob, but “ornery” turns out to be nothing more than a countrified contraction of “ordinary.” And there we are again. You’re not just average — you’re stubborn, mean-spirited and just a general pain to deal with.

Any fans of The Good Place here? Let’s bring this full circle:

Basic. Base. Our modern slang (sorry, “vulgar argot”) has come right back around to an insult Shakespeare and his audience would have totally understood.

It’s as simple as that.

I made tacos tonight, and it was good.

Well, duh, Clint, you might say, tacos are good (unless you think tacos are not good, but let’s not go down that deviant road, shall we?). But the thing is that tacos are something I like to pair with beer, and beer can make me sleepy, and sleepy is not usually something I can afford to be on a Tuesday night when we’re trying to get the week’s comic page finalized and published.

It’s an example of one of those small things we did sort of trade away when we decided to start doing this so many years ago. TV show airing new episodes Tuesday night? Free movie sneak preview? Birthday party? Honestly it’s freaking weird how many things sometimes go on in the middle of the week, and you’ll never notice it until you have prior entanglements.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to abandon Zombie Ranch in favor of tacos, but it’s nice every so often when you do get the opportunity to give yourself that break in the cycle and have a moment to enjoy those little things again. It makes everything taste better.

Hey, our Kickstarter finally launched! A little later than I originally planned, but it’s live and, er… kicking…

Anyhow, remember some time back when I bragged about how Volume 2 was going to be so much easier to put together because I’d learned my lessons from the first time around and this time all the issues in it were 24 pages long?

No? Good. I probably shouldn’t have brought it up, huh? Well, funny story… last week we’re on the very cusp of hitting the launch button, when some gut feeling has me go through the pages again and — oh hey, Episode 15 was 28 pages.

Oh.

So wait, that means the 200 page book I calculated for was now looking at 196 pages of content rather than 192, and here’s the hilarious thing, that doesn’t include the covers. No room for an interior title page or introduction, and most importantly no room for the Special Thanks page where we promised to put the names of our higher-tier backers.

And this is why you always double check your math before going live. Adding some more pages to the printing quote turned out to not be catastrophic, and in terms of the campaign itself just meant putting that little tilde squiggle (you know, this guy: ~) in front of 200 so that it was an approximation instead of a confident absolute.

Honestly I doubt anyone would have thrown a fit over their final book having a few extra pages than indicated (less pages would be another matter). But still, it would have felt embarrassing to me to edit after the fact, and especially in regards to some stupid counting error on my part.

Maybe I’m the bizarre one for getting worked up about accuracy like that in the wild and woolly world of crowdfunding where creators have been known to pull all kinds of Darth Vaderesque “alterings of the deal” up to and including just running off with all the money people entrusted to them.  But then again all those horror stories are such that I think it’s really important for us to be honest and on the level as much as possible, even with the little things.

There are a lot of dire fates out there in the world, but as far as writers go I can’t imagine one much worse than Dementia and its close compatriot in cognitive corrosion, Alzheimer’s Disease.  Terry Jones of Monty Python fame is currently suffering from Dementia to the point he’s lost the ability to speak or even communicate, and he was a driving creative force in that troupe, including being the director for several of the films. The Pythons have just recently made it official that due to Jones’ ongoing condition, Monty Python will be no more. Meanwhile, Good Omens has made its way onto our TV screens courtesy of Neil Gaiman and Amazon, but four years ago Alzheimer’s finally claimed its co-author Terry Pratchett after a long struggle that he knew he couldn’t win. He seriously considered the idea of assisted suicide, up to and including a documentary film on the subject he made in 2011. In a way he was ‘lucky” because the form of Alzheimer’s he had was one that didn’t go straight for his frontal lobes, but it’s still heartbreaking to hear him describe the signs of his degeneration.

“It was my typing and spelling that convinced me that the diagnosis was right. They had gone haywire. Other problems I put down to my looming 60th birthday. I thought no one else had noticed the fumbling with seat belts and the several attempts to get clothing on properly… I have written 47 novels in the past 25 years, but now I have to check even quite simple words – they just blank on me, at random. I would not dare to write this without the once despised checker, and you would have your work cut out to read it, believe me.”

I cannot tell you how much rage and frustration I would feel at losing something so seemingly insignificant as the inability to spell. I pride myself on it, to the point I am quite sure that the entirety of our Zombie Ranch Volume 1 trade paperback has absolutely no misspellings or misuses of language in it that are not intentional for vernacular purposes. And having to rely on a spell checker? The vary thought sends chills down my spine, for it would absolutely not pick up that the “vary” I just used, while legitimately a word, is not the correct word for this context.

But that’s only the beginning. The condition is still considered incurable, and you get to be the slow witness of your mind fuzzing over and your ability to connect words and ideas, and often eventually even your ability to express yourself in any intelligible form, much less in the play of metaphors, alliteration and myriad other cleverness that marked your career and gave you and others so much joy.

Or worse yet (to me, anyhow), they say Jones’ condition is such that his mental faculties are still intact but he has no real capability to show that, as if he’s a passenger in his own body that can see and hear what’s going on just fine but the ride’s on autopilot and he can’t override that. Like he’s living out a real life version of the “sunken place” pictured in Get Out.

I doubt that would be a fun situation for anyone, but for people like Pratchett and Jones who lived their lives with a razor sharp wit and were able to share that gift with so many… well, it’s no wonder to me Pratchett contemplated ending things prematurely before his condition got too far, even though his death in 2015 was reportedly of natural causes.

I wonder what I would have done in his position?

Here’s hoping I never have to find out.

I should technically be talking about this next week, but I guess I’m hype. Spring seems to be the time Dawn and I cast our reservations aside and actually feel like spending money to see big things hitting each other on the big screen.

Okay, not all our reservations. We didn’t spend any money on the Transformers movies after the first (until last year’s Bumblebee which we very much liked). We want to see big things hitting each other movies that feel like they’re made by fans of big things hitting each other, if that makes sense. I suppose much like we want to watch superhero movies made by people who don’t give us the feeling they think superheroes and comic books are stupid. Anyhow, “big things hitting each other” is probably just a clumsy way of saying “kaiju battle.” Two years ago our Spring kaiju battle movie was Kong: Skull Island. Last year it was Pacific Rim: Uprising. This year, it’s the Big G himself returning with all his friends, and early reports are there’s a lot more crunchy, fully shown kaiju battle than his 2014 outing.

So yeah, we have our tickets to Godzilla: King of the Monsters this weekend, and in the meantime I’ve been obsessively listening to the OST on repeat in a way I haven’t since Fury Road. The composer actually brought the OG themes for Godzilla and Mothra into the modern age, updating them while also preserving them, and that’s something I hope to see play out in the film at large. There will hopefully be much in the way of large. And hitting. Also atomic fire.

No but seriously, if you’re any kind of classic kaiju fan, this’ll really give you flashbacks, particularly if you play it back at x1.25:

So Game of Thrones is over. Didn’t watch, of course (no HBO here at the Wolf Den), but I read enough of a spoiler recap to figure out who won so I could have points of reference to the real show, i.e. those post-episode reactions I mentioned last week.

Of course this time it’s not just post-episode but post-series. That’s it for this multi-year romp of death, drama and destruction that whatever else, got a pretty big slice of mainstream America watching and being invested in sorcerers and dragons. Zombies already being water cooler talk courtesy of The Walking Dead. Seriously though, listening to co-workers at my day job who wouldn’t be caught dead at a D&D table discuss the foibles of sorcerers and dragons was a magic all its own.

Game of Thrones made people care, which at the end of the day is arguably kind of the whole point you’re hoping for in telling a story. And it did so–both in the books and (most of?) the series–despite being utterly ruthless in its progression, just about daring you to get attached to anyone and anything when they could be snatched away at a moment’s bloody notice. GoT did not give a shit what you wanted and never did. Don’t like it? Stop reading/watching.  For better or worse, it was a story that was never captive to its audience.

Lots of “armchair quarterbacking” is nonetheless happening this week, up to and including an actual change.org petition to demand HBO redo the ending.

Actually that’s inaccurate. It’s a petition for HBO to redo the entirety of Season 8. Over 1 million people have signed.

And while that’s an impressive number, it’s a lot less than it would cost to actually do that. It’s not going to happen and I’m pretty sure most of the people who clicked over to put their names on the list know it’s not going to happen. But it was something to do, aside from or in addition to venting on social media (or around the water cooler).

Was it a satisfying ending? A satisfying last season? For a lot of folks, it would seem not. And yet, possible future fan edits aside, it’s done. Or maybe GRRM will finish the Winds of Winter and make sense of everything but I’m largely of the opinion that at this point that’s even less likely than HBO reshooting a whole season of the show.

Personally, I read the Monday morning score sheet, so to speak, and am just sort of, “Well, that’s a choice.” Won’t talk more detail since maybe some of you still haven’t seen.

And my reaction is perhaps unfair considering I admitted last week that I’d allowed myself to grow some distance from the proceedings. But on the other hand, I learned a harsh lesson about TV shows many, many years ago: don’t expect them to stick the landing. Definitely don’t hinge your entire enjoyment of the series on them doing so. I’m just going to say “Season 5 of Babylon 5” and leave it at that. Remember the good times, and yeah, write your own ending if it helps, just don’t expect the show to care. It was never your friend, and certainly never your lackey to be ordered about as you chose. For every Avengers: Endgame* there will be a Dexter. And there will even be people who hated Endgame and loved the Dexter finale.

Just don’t get me started about Mass Effect 3.

*Technically Avengers: Endgame is not a TV show but I contend (backed up by Feige himself) there is a good case for considering the MCU movies as one long, episodic serial. So close enough.

Last week I waxed more-or-less rapturous in my praise for Avengers: Endgame, but part of me wonders… what if I had really felt like they dropped the ball? What if, after 10 years and 22 movies, the MCU I had so come to love had culminated in a hot mess of suck?

Thankfully this was not a question I had to ask any more than rhetorically, but my friends and colleagues who are still following along with Game of Thrones seem to have been not so lucky. And heaven help me, I’m finding the wailing and gnashing of teeth as entertaining as I did when J.K. Rowling started talking Dumbledore’s sexuality.

I’ve been there, of course. I was there for X-Men: Last Stand, lo those many years ago. In a goddamn theater. My howls of pain and outrage were probably audible for miles. The Star Wars Prequels still haunt me. But you know, Mel Brooks has those words of wisdom:

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

And the truth is Dawn and I watched and enjoyed GoT rather slavishly for several seasons, right up to the point we decided we had to cut the cord on our cable TV bill. We told ourselves we’d catch it on Netflix after the fact, or watch at a friends’ house. It didn’t happen. Every so often some GoT-related controversy or coolness would pop up and get people talkin’, but as I ended up with less and less context I discovered I was feeling less and less like I needed to–for example–drop $19.99 or whatever to get HBO Go and be able to stream it again.

So the show is not *quite* over yet but this final Season just seems to be sparking outrage after outrage amongst my peers. That must be exhausting for them. Me, I’m reacting to the news of “So-and-so is acting completely out of character! Their whole arc is ruined!” with “Ah, that’s fascinating.” It’s like I’m engaged in a clinical study of a TV series imploding, or a fanbase, or both. Meanwhile some very deep emotions are being inspired, several of which do not seem to be positive.

I guarantee you that regardless of their rhetoric, good or bad, they’ll all be glued to their sets or other viewing devices again this Sunday for the finale. I won’t be, but I’ll still be looking forwards to the viewing of their viewings come Monday morning.

So if you’re like us (and seemingly most of the world with nearby cinemas), you have now seen or plan to see an obscure little flick known as Avengers: Endgame. If you haven’t seen it yet and are still trying to dodge spoilers — first off, good luck, and secondly you’ll probably want to stop reading now. I’m not planning a big spoilery review but I’m also not guaranteeing I’m going to be on my best behavior in terms of keeping details secret by action or implication.

Anyhow. It’s great. And more than that, what a great inspiration for me and any other serial storytellers out there on how to stick the landing and close out a huge arc while also leaving the door open to keep going forwards. Between this and Infinity War, what an accomplishment in balancing old and new, of giving the “original 6” their time to shine while still allowing everyone to applaud some more recent favorites. Not everyone will agree with me and there are moments which might fall short for some, but we’ve also come a long, long way from the Year 2000 where the X-Men all had to dress in black leather and crack snide about “yellow spandex.” The MCU dared audiences to care about a talking raccoon and eased them gradually into more and more outlandish plots and characters until we have a theater full of people nodding their heads at the idea of Quantum Time Travel and international audiences outright sobbing over the fate of a dude dressed in an American flag.

The time travel angle gave writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely the perfect excuse to revisit the nostalgia of a skein of MCU lore woven over time and the course of 22 separate movies, hearkening back even to its earliest moments. A retrospective that also manages to more forward, and broadens understanding of past, present, and future. This is the kind of stuff I aspire to achieve, and frankly I’m playing in the bush leagues while they, Kevin Feige and the Russo Brothers are up there on Expert difficulty, showing both excellent planning but also an equally excellent ability to adapt and even improvise.

The MCU had been prophesied to stumble and fail so many times over the years. Even I remember hearing the news of Captain America: Civil War and thinking they’d bitten off more than they could chew. Bringing that many heroes together in any sort of way that wasn’t a completely confusing fustercluck? Impossible. Then I watched and they pulled it off. But instead of patting themselves on the back and returning to more humble ambitions, they doubled down with Infinity War, and again the nagging doubts in my head were there and again they were quelled. By Endgame I should by all rights have had my doubt license revoked, and in fact we did go ahead and advance purchase our tickets, but I won’t deny there was some relief and wonderment still as the positive reviews started emerging.

If you disagree, if it didn’t move you, that’s fine, but just on a purely technical level there was an achievement here worthy of study and admiration. As a lifelong comics fan, for me it was so much more.

“I don’t know if I like that…”

When you’re a writer, sometimes you’re going to hear this or a variation on it from people you’ve asked for feedback. And you may instinctively get defensive. After all, we tend to be our own worst critics, right? You’re not sure if you like “that” either, or maybe you wouldn’t have had anyone else look at it in the first place. But on the other hand, you feel like you had good reasons to write what you did, and feedback that something doesn’t feel right is maddeningly vague and tempts you to just ignore it and bull on ahead.

This happens occasionally in the Wolf household because Dawn functions as my first reader. Most of the time any feedback is more along the lines of figuring out how to draw a given panel or asking me to please alter it because she doesn’t think it’s going to work visually, but occasionally the critique goes deeper than that. The original draft of this week’s page was one of those times where I could tell she felt uncomfortable.

“I don’t know if I like that she doesn’t know how to use the rifle.”

Ah. I explained that I didn’t want Suzie to come off as an expert in everything, all the time. She’s not used to automatic fire, but she corrects shortly and nails two Huachucas.

“Yeah, but, Suzie’s supposed to be a Clint Eastwood type. You wouldn’t see Clint Eastwood have that loss of control moment.”

This gave me pause, because I couldn’t readily think of an example to refute her. Dirty Harry is a master of all weaponry from revolvers to bazookas. The Man With No Name can handle small arms and artillery alike with unquestioned, sometimes even nonchalant competence, and I never asked myself where he learned to shoot a cannon with pinpoint accuracy. And certainly no supporting character was nearby cannonsplaining to him. The closest I could think of was William Munny’s shotgun misfiring in Unforgiven, and that was the hardware at fault rather than him.

But still, Zombie Ranch is meant to be a deconstruction of such fare as much as it is a celebration of it. It felt right to me to acknowledge that moment of uncertainty, even if just for a second. And Oscar’s advice isn’t meant to be mean-spirited. On Dawn’s end, though, she still felt something was off.

At these times when you’re at impasse, both feeling strongly but struggling to express that in more precise terms, it can help to take a break, so I called for one. Let’s have some dinner and watch some TV and then revisit.

When we came back to it a couple of hours later, Dawn still wasn’t feeling in agreement, but she was able to articulate, “I don’t like that they’re ganging up on her.”

You see, in the original draft, just after Oscar shouts advice, I cut to Frank grumbling about a “goddamn waste o’ ammo” — I meant that to be him grumbling about Oscar’s insistence on carrying and using an automatic rifle, but I had to admit the timing of it seemed more like a critique of Suzie, especially since Frank had been snarking at Suzie in their last interaction. Completely not what I intended, and for that matter not really necessary to the moment… so I snipped it. And thus was balance achieved.

Dawn’s not the best at articulating her critiques, but I’ve learned over the years that if she feels strongly about something, it’s worth examining that and sussing out what’s giving her pause. Then we can figure out a solution together, and more often than not the end result is the better for it.

If you’ve been paying attention to our occasional murmurings here and elsewhere, you’ll know that 2019 marks the tenth anniversary of Zombie Ranch, and that one of the events we intend to commemorate that is bundling Episodes/Issues 8-15 into a long-awaited Volume 2 collection. I mean, I presume it’s at least somewhat awaited since there are a handful of folk who have been bugging us about it almost since the first one went to print!

But we need money for it again, so it has become time to put together a new Kickstarter and see just how many of our fanbase new and old are willing to put their wallets where their mouths are. Figuratively speaking. Please don’t swallow your wallets.

That’s when I go back over our files and records from 2015 (the last time we went through this) and try to remember what we did that worked and what we did that didn’t. Also how much did we do pre-launch, how much during, and how much once we knew we were funded (and also on the hook for our “secret stash” stretch goal)?

A lot can change in four years, for instance the shipping costs that every crowdfunding effort ignores or underestimates to their peril. Beyond that there’s been noticeable inflation across the board, or at least I can’t really think of any aspect of printing and such that’s gone down in price. And that sweet deal you scored back then may have been from a company or person that’s no longer around.

On this, at least, I can report the good news that the same gentleman I worked with to get Volume 1 printed back then is still alive, kicking and ready to roll so long as we can get the moolah together. More costly than before? Sadly yes, but still a really good deal and one that isn’t subject to the possibility of tariff fluctuations since they’re within the U.S.

So that’s sorted, at least. Now for everything else…

I may have written about this before. Get ten years of nearly weekly blogs under your belt and it can be a bit of a blur… but heck, anything important enough to write about once can arguably bear repeating. So let’s talk about hoarding.

Oh, not the kind where you’ve got mummified cats in the corners of your living room because you haven’t cleaned it in years. There’s not really much of an upside there. But hoarding imagination is another matter, and what I mean by that is this — when you’re engaged in creative endeavors, never throw an idea away.

Now if you’re jotting all those ideas down in physical media I suppose you could eventually become swamped in decaying notebooks and journals, but the advent of electronic storage means that doesn’t have to happen. Hell, you could even just store it all in your head, but personally speaking I prefer to dedicate what memory space I have there to more current needs. See, it’s entirely possible that a given creative idea is too stupid to ever see the light of day in any form… but so what? Doesn’t hurt anything to keep it around, and there’s the possibility that somewhere down the line as you ransack the dusty halls of your notes and/or brain, you might pick it up and find out that it’s just what you needed. Yesterday’s trash could be tomorrow’s inspiration.

For example, Dawn and I are both fans of the D&D vodcast Critical Role (though lately we’ve been playing catch-up on episodes rather than watching as they air). We’ve also both been Gamemasters in our time, so it was with rueful laughter that we watched one episode where Dungeon Master Matt Mercer had to basically chuck an encounter he’d prepared as the players managed to snag an insta-win through a clever spell use and a successful slim-chance die roll.

I’ve been on both sides of this phenomenon and there’s an undeniable exhilaration as a player when you successfully go “off script” and subvert the carefully laid plans of your Gamemaster. If you happen to be that Gamemaster, you have to learn to adjust, and yeah, maybe that dungeon you spent all weekend working out the details of isn’t going to happen because your players took a look at the dank hole in the ground and decided they’d rather head onwards to the next Inn. One of my GMs literally chucked a thick binder over his shoulder defeatedly when we did just that.

But see, don’t throw all that work away just because it didn’t fit into the current session! Instead, I’d keep that binder handy and then maybe sometime in the future my players would want to stick their noses into some dungeon that I *didn’t* prepare for… only hah! Here happens to be this ready-made dungeon I can haul out and use, with some tweaks here and there to suit the current circumstances.

So same thing with writing. Maybe you find an idea or character or event doesn’t fit into your story after all, even though you love it dearly and perhaps even spent a lot of work researching it and fleshing out details. You’ve got to cut it. But keep it around, right? It might be just the piece of the puzzle you need at some point. A sequel perhaps. Or even a different tale entirely. Hoard that imagination and the trash has every possibility of becoming treasure.