Category: Writer’s Blog

When this posts it’ll be Halloween time here in the States. An interesting Holiday, Halloween. Uncelebrated in any official sense, and yet possibly because it’s not tied to any widely observed religion here, the modern version is possibly the most unabashedly commercial of all and thus quintessentially American in its nature. Where Thanksgiving and Christmas bring expectations of travel and family gatherings and gifting, Halloween offers an enticing combo of none of the obligations with all of the consumption.

But enough of that. Enjoy the day, and enjoy a video of a horse made up as a skeleton (which came to me by way of a horse veterinarian friend, so don’t worry, I’m pretty confident whatever methods were used are non-harmful):

Serial comics. Long-form comics. Basically, what Zombie Ranch is: a tale told over weeks, months, or even years, rather than the more-or-less isolated punchlines of a gag strip. The payoffs for reading aren’t necessarily as immediate, but (hopefully) good enough to justify the commitment.

Ah yes, commitment. Earlier this month marked nine years since we got all this started in a whirlwind fervor and fresh-facedly made our first convention exhibitor appearance. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs since then, but one thing I can admit is that the early sense of infatuation, of being borderline obsessed, is no longer there.

That might sound bad, but it’s not far off from how Dawn and I feel about our marriage. Ooookay, that probably sounds worse. Love is supposed to be forever, right?

Well, there’s love and there’s love. In particular, there’s love and there’s limerence. Limerence is the term for that whirlwind romance state. The proverbial “honeymoon” referred to by such ominous phrases as “the honeymoon is over.” In terms of relationships, the limerence period typically lasts between 18 months and three years, but it’s widely agreed that it won’t last forever.

Terrible, huh? Well, only if your definitions of love and limerence are conflated, so that when limerence goes you feel like love is gone, too. Since pop culture bombards us all our lives with stories of “love at first sight,” “true love,” and “happily ever after,” it’s not an easy conflation to avoid. When “love” has been lost, then why are we even doing this?

That’s the big question, and my answer is: friendship.

Call it friends with benefits if you will, although I’m not going to transfer that particular metaphor back to the comic (because eww, messy). If your lover also happens to be your best buddy, then the loss of limerence doesn’t need to lead to failure and separation. You’re still friends, you still enjoy each other’s company, you’re still giving and getting something important out of the arrangement.

Not so bad, that.

I don’t know precisely what I expected when Dawn insisted on watching Netflix’s latest binge-a-thon offering, The Haunting of Hill House. Probably not much. Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name has been adapted several times over the years, to varying degrees of success, and so I think I greeted another telling of it with the same amount of enthusiasm I greet the announcement of another Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood show. Again, probably not much. Ho hum, Halloween is around the corner so everyone wants their scare fix, no matter how mediocre it might be.

But our apartment is small and I can see our television from my computer, so whatever Dawn happens to be watching is something I’m at least half-watching whether I feel like it or not. By the end of the first episode, it was clear to me this was not going to be a “half-watch” scenario. By the end of this past weekend, we’d binged through to the end, in part because I figured I needed to write about it for this blog and for once I was going to base my impressions on the whole damn package rather than a handful of initial episodes. I’ve had a few times over the years where that early enthusiasm and resulting glowing recommendation didn’t pan out in the final tally.

This series gets my unreserved recommend from start to finish. It is exceedingly well-crafted in all aspects of its design, from actor performances to set design to the script and camera work. It is a more subtle and patient work than much of its genre and has been compared to a family drama that happens to have ghosts in it. And in this man’s opinion, that totally works. I’ve talked in this very space about an arguable character flaw of mine where I can get bored of drama that’s too grounded in reality. Give me some fantastical elements with which to play out the metaphors and foibles of interpersonal relationships. This show provides that. Oh boy howdy does it ever. And for that matter it’s a damn good and at times damn scary ghost story precisely because it hews so closely to studies of character and makes you care. These aren’t just the nigh-interchangeable victims of your average “evil house” lock-in. Actually you learn early on that showrunner (and director of all 10 episodes!) Mike Flanagan has remixed the foundations of Jackson’s novel in a… well, very novel way, because there’s no (well, almost no) lock-in at all. Gone is the literal claustrophobia and isolation that’s become such a staple of ghost and monster stories, including previous adaptations of this story. In its place is something far, far more unsettling.

The most insidious thing for me about the new Haunting of Hill House is how aggressively normal a lot of the settings are presented, including the House itself. Rather than detracting from the horror, though, it emphasizes it because by the time you’re a few episodes in the message is loud and clear: nowhere is safe. Not your home, not your office… fear will follow you into the most mundane places. In part this is framed by the show as being because there is no getting away from your own mind, but also in part the show is very clear that this is not just a matter of hallucinations and hysteria. There are ghosts — and while their influence is strongest within the House itself, they are not confined to it. They will manifest to sensitive and skeptic alike, and can only be explained away for so long before they must be confronted. Don’t be so complacent just because the lights are on… they can go out at any time. Or perhaps worst of all, won’t go out, and you’ll be denied even the fleeting succor of not clearly seeing what’s in front of you.

That’s not the only horror trope subverted, inverted and otherwise manipulated in the course of the series. There are a few jump scares and moments of gore, but parceled out sparingly enough that they retain their impact when they happen. The jump scares don’t happen when you expect, for one thing. Flanagan is both a lifelong horror fan and a skilled director and you can tell he really went all out with this project as both a love letter to the genre and a gentle deconstruction, but the kind of deconstruction that’s more of a back-to-basics, “this is why we have always been fascinated by ghost stories” reminder.

Now there’s more I could say but it would be edging into spoiler territory, so again I just leave you with my recommend, and a warning that once you’ve watched all the way through, you may need to watch again. Let’s just say that if Hill House seems underpopulated with supernatural manifestations (save for a few very noteworthy exceptions), you just weren’t looking hard enough.

To say I’m not a big sports guy these days would be an understatement. It was only a few days ago that I pretty much stumbled on the fact that my hometown baseball team, the L.A. Dodgers, were in the playoffs and potentially making another run at the World Series. I used to follow them a lot more as a kid, but these days, yeah, I’m one of those bandwagon jerks who only maybe gets excited when they’re doing well.

Also before any of you internationals comment, I am well aware that the World Series is a highly ironic moniker for the championship of a sport that most of the world doesn’t care about. Hell, baseball is maligned by many in the United States as well, with such luminaries as George Carlin mocking “America’s pastime” as irredeemably boring.

But despite what I say in the first paragraph, I still like it. I won’t necessarily go out of my way for it, but I can still get caught up watching in a way I don’t with other sports. My half-remembered youth still downloads the intricacies of batting averages and designated hitters and ground rule doubles into my brain so that I can play armchair manager and shout obscenities at the batter who decides to chase a wild pitch on a 3-0 count.

Don’t get any of that? No worries. I’ve come to a conclusion over the years that I still prefer baseball over many other sports in the same way I prefer the X-Com video games over, say, Starcraft: baseball is turn-based. Baseball is thought and strategy free from the pressures of a clock, that is then punctuated by moments of white-knuckle excitement as the element of chance comes into play.  The “downtime” in between plays is for me not a bug but a feature.

And as I found myself drawn into watching it this week, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that fans of serial webcomics either enjoy baseball or would enjoy it if exposed to it. Because there is that similar feeling of moments of drama couched in between periods of reflection. There’s a want to know what happens next, but also a patience to let that happen in its own time. Even a webcomic that updates seven days a week will never approach the “real time” experience of a movie. But does that make it any less impactful?

Maybe, maybe not. But baseball survives to this day. And serial comics do, too.

I’m fairly certain I’ve written before about the kinds of epiphanies you can experience as a writer, at any time and place, where suddenly all the figurative obstacles of a particular narrative point blow away and a light shines through. It’s those moments that for me make all the stress of wrangling an ongoing story worth the trouble, because preceding it are always those times where you feel like you’ve “painted yourself into a corner” with the tale so far and there’s no clean way out. That’s a suffocating feeling, and the confident decision you made a few weeks, months, or even years back might have you regretting that you didn’t take another track.

But I’ve learned through many of these moments to trust myself and my instincts. It helps immensely to have a wife who occasionally admits she thinks I’m some sort of magician at this point for the way I can continue to produce meaningful progression of a nearly ten year old story, weaving in elements that may give an entirely new but still plausible way to look at older stuff. Sometimes it’s all planned, and sometimes I’ll admit that I’m just an opportunist who has that flash of insight that the stuff I worried might be off-topic or meandering nonsense had a point after all.

It’s weird to think of interpreting your own text, and yet if you write the same story for long enough, I think it’s bound to happen sooner or later. Your brain connects the dots you didn’t quite see clearly.

That’s what I tell myself, anyhow. And hey, when life hasn’t exactly been free of stress, you take whatever epiphanies you can interpret.

It’s a tad ironic that I started this chapter with the Robert Frost poem about favoring fire. Our world didn’t end, in fact we came out of things not too bad off for having raging flames and smoke pouring forth about a bedroom’s length from our home. Smoke smell and debris is still everywhere but none of our stuff burned and as I write this we have water, power, gas and Internet back on, with the big question being if there’s anything that’s going to need to be rebuilt since we were in the same building. Compare that to the neighbors whose place actually caught fire. They don’t even have a home right now and they weren’t even here when it happened so wouldn’t have been able to save anything beyond what they took with them on their daytrip.

Sudden disasters are surreal things. Our first indication anything was wrong was a sound of breaking glass and yelling. I thought someone was having a fight and Dawn went to look, then came back in yelling there was a fire. You grab for things like wallets and keys and your pet (thankfully no kids here), trying not to panic, and you get outside and everything’s just smoke, noise and hollering. Is everyone out? Has anyone called 911? And by the way oh shit, the building you live in is on fire and for all you know it’s already spread into your own separating walls and all you can think of is grabbing a garden hose and watering the roof and the part of the blaze you can see.

It’s a little surreal. Okay, a lot surreal, as you can probably get a sense of by this photo some bystander snapped right as the fire trucks were finally arriving to take over from our amateur hour. Would have fit right into the X-Files.

Then of course you’ve got to get the hell out of the way and let the pros do their job, except okay, I admit I dodged the cops for a bit so I could unlock and open my own front door before anyone felt a need to bust it down. Then you go sit on the curb and watch and hope that the chainsaw the firefighters are taking onto the roof won’t be needing to cut a hole in your part of the ceiling, which would really suck if your part wasn’t in danger of burning. Then again burning would be worse.

I would guess they got the fire out pretty quickly after they arrived. Then there’s a lot of standing around while their machine sucks out as much smoke as possible, and then the forensics guys had to come inspect and record the site just in case of arson while the police interview the witnesses one by one. All signs point to this being an accident but it’s a procedure thing.

And well, that was my Friday night, and I could not hold with those who favor fire. How was yours?

“Art should be free from compromise” is a refrain you may occasionally hear.

Sure. And flapping your arms and believing hard enough should be able to get you to fly. I think it is safe to say, though, that in all cases I’ve ever run across it is not the case. Gliding? That’s a compromise, isn’t it?

Even a completely solo effort is going to deal with issues of materials, time and energy, etc. Now add in even one other person and, well… everyone’s done group projects, right? Compromise is everywhere–even with a paycheck involved–and it doesn’t do much good to pretend otherwise. And if Bob hates drawing maps and you assign him to draw the map, even firing Bob is going to leave you with a shitty or non-existent map at the end of the day.

When a paycheck’s not involved, or there’s some money but hardly a living wage, then it becomes even more important to be aware of the strengths and limitations of those involved. The great majority of comics still start at base with a written script, and even if like me you’re lucky enough to have an “in-house” artist who is technically working for free, and we have no corporate overlords or gatekeepers to satisfy, there is still a budget to be considered, and that budget is what Dawn and I are capable of bringing forth in a timely manner. Writing “we open on a town where hundreds of people are going about their business in the Weird New West” is easy for me to do, but unless I happen to be working with Sergio Aragonés it’s probably not going to fly in the art stage, particularly if there’s a short time limit involved. And even if I was working with Sergio Aragonés then I probably shouldn’t tell him “I want this done in a photo-realistic style.” He might do his best to try, consummate professional that he is, but that ain’t how he usually rolls.

There’s a case to be made for stretching limits and tackling challenges, of course, but do your best to find out the strongs and not-so-strongs of your partner(s) and keep them in mind, and while at it keep in mind that life loves getting in the way as well. Art is never free from compromise, but arguably it’s the end result of those compromises that truly makes it art.

This past weekend at Long Beach Comic Con we tabled next to a gentleman who was relatively new to the exhibiting scene and he had plenty of questions for us since we seemed like veterans.

Well okay, I guess after almost nine years we aren’t really spring chickens at this. Hardly experts, either, but it just reminds me how much everyone still hobnobs with each other about best practices.

Now our neighbor didn’t bring this up in particular, but one aspect of tabling at conventions that’s a continuous concern is load-ins and load-outs and trying to make those run as smoothly as possible. And for this blog I’m just going to take a minute and basically be an advertisement if you’re thinking of joining the hallowed ranks, or you have joined the ranks but are still struggling with efficient schlepping of your stuff. This little guy right here is awesome:

Pictured above (including handy Amazon link, but you can find it elsewhere as well) is the Magna Cart Flatform 300 lb Capacity Four Wheel Folding Platform Truck, and it is the bee’s knees. We don’t know how we’ve gotten along without it all this time. I suppose poorly. We’re strongly considering getting another, and at about $50-$70 retail that’s well within budget.

It is something that seems too good to be true, and yet it’s been living up to its hype. Lightweight, low-priced, sturdy, and it folds up beautifully for easy storage under even a tiny convention table. Yep, those wheels collapse, but thankfully only when you choose to have them do so. They’re also cushiony and thick enough to handle a bit of rough terrain (though I’m talking cobblestones or rough asphalt there, not true offroading), and the padded handle is comfortable to push and pull.

But the best feature is one we didn’t even realize until it was delivered. There are labels on it that clearly show you how to extend and collapse the cart, and I can’t stress enough how nice that is to have the first few times you use it, to say nothing of coming back to it after a long break or just being too damn tired to think much.

It’s got its limits in terms of platform size and carrying weight, but for the average Artist’s Alley or Small Press denizen, it’s like it was tailor made just for our needs. If you don’t got one, I say get one. Your back, your brain and your sweat glands will all thank you.

“It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights!

It’s time to get things started on the Muppet Show tonight!”

It’s a refrain that has echoed down through my memories, and Jim Henson is to blame. Oh, no doubt he had scores of collaborators and enablers and fellow travelers along the way, not the least of which was his wife Jane who did indeed help “get things started” way back with their first TV puppeteering show, Sam and Friends, in 1955. After that came commercials, Sesame Street (50th anniversary next year!), The Muppet Show, and then cult movie classics like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. And honestly that’s just the most well known output.

This last weekend Dawn and I managed to get ourselves out to the Jim Henson Exhibition on its last day at its (relatively) local Los Angeles location, and passing through in some ways made me sad all over again at his sudden and untimely passing in 1990. I’ll be honest, there are a lot of celebrity deaths that haven’t really impacted me much. Henson was an ouch. Looking at the exhibition’s pictures of him in the year he died, at barely over half century old, I saw a man still smiling, still working, still full of life and energy and imagination. He was 53. By that reckoning I would have eight years left.

But man, what a career. What a legacy. I still don’t know a huge amount about his personal life, but Henson never seemed to suffer from the imposter syndrome that plagues a lot of creatives. He knew he was talented and he knew he had good things to offer the world, but never went full Kanye (never go full Kanye). He worked his employees hard but stayed friends with them as well, sharing credit wherever credit was due. He navigated the adult world like a boss but remained a child at heart.

As creative role models go, you could do a lot worse than Jim Henson. Nearly twenty years after he’s gone, he’s still inspiring. Still getting things started. And we can all be happy about that.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t always have my finger on the pulse of zombie fiction, so to speak. I figure that’s forgivable seeing as a good chunk of the zombie genre’s specimens don’t have pulses to speak of.

Still, occasionally I do get my read on, even if it’s a somewhat belated one. If you’re not aware, there is a Reanimated Writers coalition which serves as a community for folks who write zombie fiction. Not too long ago, they came up with an intriguing premise: a short-story contest where zombie tales would be paired up one-on-one in various genres with folks voting to determine the winner of the “round.” The losing author would be “knocked out” while the winner progressed to a further round.

The catch? None of the stories would have the author’s name attached, a conceit which would theoretically prevent any personal feelings from influencing the outcome. The stories would live or die on their own. Insert obligatory “undeath” joke here.

With my usual sense of timeliness, I failed to get around to being part of the initial voting, and before I knew it the contest was done. This despite a friend involved doing his best to prod me towards participating. Don’t worry, he was still scrupulous about the rules and only expressed that he was curious if I might recognize his style. In the end it didn’t matter due to my steel sieve of a mind.

But anyhow… now they’ve made a book out of it, and I ended up buying that, which is arguably better as a support. This is what I tell myself. I read through it during the recent hiatus and it’s about what you’d expect from an anthology, with varying degrees of originality, storytelling skill and even grammatical prowess on display (a disclaimer from the editor warns that all tales are presented in their original forms).

The really unfortunate part from my perspective is that they abandoned the main conceit for this print version and labeled all the stories with their authors, both in the table of contents up front and on each tale itself. True, the voting is long over and the outcomes are now predetermined, but I had retained some hope of being able to give my buddy that honest feedback on whether I recognized his stuff without his name plastered on it. If they do another of these I would hope they consider retaining the anonymity. The authors should of course be credited for their work, but seeing as this is a small publisher exercise free of any big house or guild constraints I don’t see any reason the stories couldn’t be kept unattributed in their entries and then at the end of the book you’d reveal who wrote what and who ended up being the ultimate winner.

That said, you’re getting a good fistful of different takes on zombie fiction from various voices for either a 99 cent digital version or a $10 perfect bound book, which ain’t bad, especially if you’re a real zombie enthusiast. Give it a look if you’re interested, and also keep an eye out because it’s almost a certainty Reanimated Writers will come around with a second card!

Man, you leave your blog unattended for one second…

Okay, it was more like a few weeks, but still, as soon as a lull appeared in my weekly updates (for the first time in several years) the sleaze crept in.

“Hi. I see that you don’t update your site too often. I know that writing posts is boring and
time consuming. But did you know that there is a tool that allows you to create new articles using existing content (from article directories or other pages from your niche)?
And it does it very well. The new articles are unique and pass the copyscape test.
You should try miftolo’s tools”

Now my first reaction was, “Dude, did you miss the big notices saying we were on vacation?” Then I realized the username this was posted under was “ClintJuicy” and then I re-read what was being said and…

Gah. This is ad spam.

What’s worse, this is ad spam for something I was blissfully ignorant of until now, which is the practice of article spinning. Put simply, article spinning is generating “new” content by regurgitating previous articles on your site with just enough words changed so that the indexing agents of search engines like Google are fooled into actually considering it new content and thus your search ranking is maintained or whatever the hell the shenanigans and permutations of the SEO (search engine optimization) world get up to.

It’s big business, no doubt about it, heck I even had a friend who worked for one of these SEO companies for awhile… at least until the manager was led out in handcuffs by the police (true story!).

Me? Hell, I might occasionally regurgitate content but it’ll either be out of genuine poor memory or because I feel like I have a genuinely new take on the subject. Changing a few words around and calling that new? Feh. Automating the process? Double feh. If it ever came down to that, I’d rather just post nothing at all.

I’ve just always referred to the shadowy bald dude apparently pulling the strings at ClearStream as “The Exec.” Enterprising readers have come up with other nicknames for him like “Mr. Clean” or just “That Bastard.” I remember pondering the whole shadowy figure trope I’d rolled with and thinking maybe I’d been inspired by characters like Dr. Klaw from Inspector Gadget, who in turn was inspired by Ernst Blofeld of the James Bond movie franchise — though it didn’t take long before Blofeld showed his face.

Why am I bringing this up again? Well, several months ago I snagged X-Com 2 during a Steam sale… maybe the Black Friday one? I don’t even remember. If you’re any sort of PC gamer you’ve probably got a Steam library going, and Steam libraries are notorious for accumulating more games in them than one ever gets around to playing, much less finishing. X-Com 2 originally debuted in early 2016, I bought it in late 2017, and I’m just now doing the “get around to playing” thing. One of the first things I noted was how robust the soldier customization was compared to the X-Com: Enemy Unknown, and so in one of my common fits of hubris when presented with such I tried my hand at creating a Suzie. All in all it didn’t turn out too bad… I was initially aghast when her random combat specialty was slotted as Sharpshooter, since sniping would be far more of a Frank thing. Fortunately, unlike the first (reboot) game where a Sniper was pretty much unequivocally a long-range combatant, the sequel allowed a sub-specialty of “Gunslinger” which enhanced abilities with pistols. Now we’re talking! She’s a little froo-froo sci-fi looking at this point versus when she started out but you know, sometimes you just gotta adapt to the circumstances.

But anyhow, I had somehow forgotten an aspect of the first game and when it resurfaced in this one I had a double take and had to check the release dates. Because… this guy…

That’s the X-Com “Council Spokesman”, and despite his shadowy nature he seemed ultimately on the up and up in the first game, with the second game seeming to be going the same way. But aside from that, wow, certain similarities are apparent. The Exec first debuted in our comic on April 28, 2010, which would seem to put paid to any thoughts of subliminal evolution, but for awhile he was little more than the Dr. Klaw style “arm and hand” configuration. When did Dawn solidify the bald silhouette? I guess that’s in September of the same year.

X-Com: Enemy Unknown released in 2012,  but was in development starting in 2008. When did they solidify their concept for the spokesman? Were there any images released early? Did we pick up on unreleased imagery via subliminal alien psychic attunement? Eh, maybe shadowy bald guys were just all the rage during that span of years. Who knows?

But given what The Exec’s been up to in the meantime, I can’t help but want to keep a hairy eyeball on The Spokesman, too.

This week’s comic features some talk about technology and what should and shouldn’t be possible according to the characters’ knowledge, in particular on the topic of “active camouflage” — which in layman’s terms could best be described as being able to disappear into the background a la The Predator, or Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. If you google it you’ll come across some videos of people claiming they’ve already made it happen. These videos tend to be, to put it kindly, “unverified.” I don’t know if you reading this are old enough to remember when the claims of cold fusion made headlines back in 1989, only to fizzle under peer review and remain–so far as anyone knows–unrealized nearly 30 years later.

But technology has a way of blindsiding even the most prescient of futurists and science fiction authors. What if I write a comic like today’s where Rosa claims active camo isn’t possible, and tomorrow I read the real-world headlines that active camo is real?

Well, first I’d be waiting for the cooling off period cold fusion went through (pun intended), but if indeed it turns out to be a real, repeatable, verifiable tech, then I look kind of foolish that I had a tech-savvy character say otherwise, right?

That’s when divergence becomes important.

How to best explain the concept? Well, most settings where superheroes exist in our modern world tend to set a divergence point somewhere shortly before, during, or after World War II, which not coincidentally was the point in our world where superheroes started appearing in popular media. Human history progresses normally up until the point of divergence, but after that point all bets are off.

As exercises in alternative history this can be fascinating in of itself and also allow for positively Kirbyesque flights of fancy, but a very practical reason is entwined in this process as well. For Zombie Ranch, I have taken a snapshot of our world as it existed in the early 21st Century and started riffing on it from there, which means now I don’t feel burdened by the need to continually update based on current real-world technological advances. Instead, the advent of the zombie apocalypse gives me the freedom to say, for example, that Tech Aspect A is further along now than we may ever know in our own lifetimes, but Tech Aspect B remains stagnant or retrograde even though we in the real world might tomorrow be enjoying its benefits (or cursing its problems).

Divergence allows for an uncoupling of the reality you require for your story from the reality you’re living through, and I feel is nearly mandatory when you’re dealing with a modern or near future setting. Will active camo be a thing on the battlefields of tomorrow? Is it already a thing, just not available to the public? Will it just prove completely unfeasible to implement?

As a certain wizard of Middle-Earth once said: “even the very wise cannot see all ends.” Diverge, and you can just fit your ends to justify your means.

The sonorous opening narration of Jim Henson’ s The Dark Crystal proclaims, “another world, another time, in the age of wonder.”

This isn’t about that. There is another Age of Wonder coming to a close soon, as Project Wonderful has announced it is shutting down after over a decade of operation. Their farewell message might be visible to members only, so I’ll quote it here:

Thanks for being a member of Project Wonderful! We wanted to inform you of some sad news:

But all good things must come to an end. When we started working on Project Wonderful in early 2006, it was with the hope that online advertising could be something good, something that you’d want to see. We were always the odd company out: we didn’t track readers, we didn’t sell out our publishers, and we never had issues with popups, popunders, or other bad ads the plague the internet – because our technology simply wasn’t built to allow for that. We let you place an image and link on a website, and that was it. And we filtered the ads that could run on our network, so our publishers knew they could trust us.

We’d hoped that would be enough, but in the past several years, the internet has changed. Large sites like Facebook do all they can to keep readers on their network, rather than sending that traffic out to individual websites. As such, many readers – who used to visit dozens if not hundreds of websites a day – now visit only a few sites, and things like the indie “blogosphere” (remember that?) are disappearing. We’re hopeful that individual creators can adapt – either by embracing these walled gardens in a way that protects themselves, or by finding other ways to draw attention to their work – but as a network founded on supporting independent websites, our options were limited. Some advertising networks have held on by adopting more and more invasive user tracking, forcing their publishers to sign binding contracts, or by trying to train publishers (and readers!) to expect that “sometimes a bad ad will sneak through”, but that’s something we always refused to do. We believed – and still believe – that you deserve better. We believed – and still believe – in a world where an ad blocker wouldn’t be an obvious thing to install, because advertising would be good, interesting, and non-invasive.

Unfortunately, we’re no longer in a position to supply that better option to you.

We know this may come as a shock, which is why we’re giving everyone as much notice as possible. Here’s the Project Wonderful shutdown timeline:

• June 11th, 2018: We announce our shutdown phase. No new accounts can be created, and no new publishers will be added to the network. Members are contacted to let them know to spend or withdraw their funds before August 1st.
• July 11th: Ad serving is turned off, so our ads will no longer appear on anyone’s websites, and any existing bids are suspended. No new bids can be placed on Project Wonderful – but of course people can still withdraw their funds.
• August 1st: This is the deadline for anyone to do anything they want with their Project Wonderful accounts before they close!
• August 6th: After a few days of grace for any stragglers, and after 12 years, 6 months, and 12 days of service, Project Wonderful’s servers finally go offline.

We want to thank you all: from the publishers and advertisers who have been with us since day one (and there are hundreds!) to those that joined somewhere along the road to today. We’re so proud of the artists we’ve helped support and the good we brought into the world – and we still hope that we’ve managed to bring some change into an industry not typically associated with “decency”. And to the readers who clicked our ads, and in doing so discovered new comics, new work, new ideas, new art, and new people through the simple act of peer-to-peer advertising: we think you’re great too.

It really was a wonderful project. And it couldn’t have happened without you.

– Team PW.

So within a few weeks, our Zombie Ranch page will be looking a lot more austere as most of the ad displays we’ve had running for years go bye bye. It’s not catastrophic, we never really made more than a few bucks a month off of them… but it was something, and it is mostly sad to see PW fold since I agree with their statement that they were among the good guys.  In that sense I suppose I’d rather they pull the plug than end up in a repeat of our shitty experience with Google Adsense. In our eight years being part of PW we never had shenanigans like a redirect ad or a problem withdrawing (or reinvesting) the money we’d earned, no matter how much or how little, whenever we wanted to do so. And there was never a feeling like you weren’t welcome in the network, from the biggest sites pulling in hundreds of dollars a day to the smallest startups.

Alas, the good guys are finishing last.

Anyhow, I know some of you out there are fellow webcomic authors who may also have used the service, so heads up that sometime between July 11th (when the ad network shuts down) and August 1st (when accounts are frozen) you’ll want to make your final withdrawals. The Great Disjunction comes.

I’ve had a habit of singing praises of various movies and video games in this blog based on early impressions, some of which pan out and some of which don’t.

Well, who am I to break with habit?

I mean wow. WOW. I’m late to the party on this one (it debuted in its entirety on Netflix back in February) but if you’re any kind of fan of cyberpunk style science fiction or just science fiction world building in general, and you haven’t seen it yet, you should give Altered Carbon a go. The two episodes I’ve watched probably shouldn’t be enough for as strong a recommend as I’m making here, but again. Habit. Just from a writing perspective I’ve been thoroughly impressed with how they’ve handled the exposition and presentation of a world both familiar to and wildly different than our own. It reminds me of how I felt reading Asimov, but turned up to 11 and splashed into fully audio-visual format without losing any of the thought-provoking underpinnings of the philosophical consequences of advancing technology.

This being Netflix there’s also no shortage blood, butts, boobs and harsh language to go around, so it might not make for the best family viewing–if for no other reason than being stuck explaining to your kids all the gratuitous gratuities adults take for granted–but again there’s a feeling of deep thoughts beneath that surface sheen and even the sex and violence has angles of approach that are not what you might be used to experiencing.

And that’s all I’m really going to say because I knew nothing about this series going into it and I think it was all the better discovering it fresh with no preconceptions of what it could or should be.

Okay, one spoiler: Poe is awesome.

I leave the rest of the opinions to you.

Warfare is certainly known as a time where man’s inhumanity to his fellow man (or woman) is often on full display. But we don’t necessarily dwell on this question in the history books: if we’ll commit atrocities on another human being in the name of King and Country (or equivalent), what would we be willing to do to an animal?

Well, it’s not a pretty subject to delve into. Nowadays if you google up “pigs and landmines” you’ll get articles about pigs being trained to carefully snuffle them out, rather than the darker accounts of herds being intentionally driven onto suspect fields, which I suppose provided not only mine clearance but a good source of pork for dinner so long as you didn’t mind a little shrapnel in your bacon.

Barbaric, sure, but on a scale of one to mass graves, poison gas and ethnic cleansing, these sorts of considerations can fall by the wayside. No doubt there are soldiers who dealt with the horrors by clinging onto some code of conduct where they’d shoot an insurgent but draw the line at killing a dog (at least a dog that wasn’t actively trying to bite them) but would you hesitate at tossing a grenade into a sniper’s nest because some birds might be nesting there, too?

It’s a time and place where estimations of Right and Wrong can get as muddied as a French field in WWI. Is it worse for a human that understands what’s happening or an animal that doesn’t? Do even the humans understand what’s happening half the time?

But all in all I’d say it’s the traditional pet animals like dogs or the otherwise stereotypically “cute” critters that have the best chance for some modicum of mercy. Rats? Rats don’t have either going for them and tend to be considered pests and disease carriers, besides. No one sticks up for rats, or certainly doesn’t on the front lines. Hell even in peacetime we just about make a hobby of injecting them with cancer-causing chemicals and otherwise being less than copacetic. That they survive at all in a war is probably testament to them being as cussedly determined and adaptable as us. And of course breeding like… well, rats.

In a feature film I tend to believe that getting on with the story is job number one, since you’ve got a limited time window to tell (what should be) a complete tale. If you’re world building you drop just enough detail to assist that and no more. The original Star Wars has its famous opening crawl  and then gets right to the action, and as it goes along is constantly peppered with throwaway dialogue about Sand People or Jabba or the Emperor which hits just the right balance of intriguingly vague and supportive of “Oh okay, now back to laser swords.”

Here, we move at a more leisurely pace. Literally so in that the story is being told at a much slower pace as first presented, but also formatively in that we can take breaks from what’s happening directly to Suzie and co. and fill in some of those intriguing bits of the setting I may have had a character mention or may just be something you were wondering about. Like, what sort of tactics did the military come up with to fight (our particular brand of) zombies?

I suppose Star Wars trained me well for this in that I’ve spent probably a far too big percentage of my life wondering about the its intricacies and implications, so now that I’m developing my own setting I’m inclined to think about those answers and details long before a reader ever asks about them. And every so often, I get the chance to present those bits and pieces. Sometimes they’re even thematically relevant to the story at hand and that gets me perilously close to me thinking I might be decent at this.

Excuse the flippant self-deprecation, it’s an artist thing. Unless perhaps you’re someone like Kanye, but all in all I’d rather be me.

I don’t think I’d go so far as to say that the idea of zombies being “cold” made no sense to me, and that’s why I years ago decided the zeds of our particular settings wouldn’t go that route, at least so long as they were in periods of activity. It perhaps makes more sense, but I’m not precisely aiming for scientific acumen or ironclad logic on explaining how my dead people walk. That said, I have notes. This is not something I made up recently, it’s pretty much been there since the start and just hasn’t really come up in the story.

Most of the time in this genre I think it’s a mistake to get too lost in the details of why your zombies work. As far as the story is concerned, keep to the important bits like, well… the biting. But then again it makes sense, doesn’t it? As a (layman) physics concept, motion requires expenditure of energy and energy expenditure gives off some measure of waste heat. That’s just basic thermodynamics right there… and now I’m starting to sound like Uncle Chuck but hopefully am not as off base as he sometimes can be.

So I have my logic structure of why and how my zombies work but there’s every chance that were I to ever reveal every last detail of that the scientists in the audience could tear me apart as readily as any undead horde. Would they be right to do that? I suppose that would depend on how seriously I’m presenting things, and I like to think I’ve gotten across the gist that Zombie Ranch is not meant as some actual post-apoc survival guide for battling zombies. To paraphrase The Princess Bride: zombies are fiction, highness. Anyone who tries to tell you different is selling something.

Well, last week I had my first surgery in years, or at least the most involved one I’ve had in years. Without getting into gory details, I do want to say that either my memory is faulty or I really don’t remember past instances of this same sort of thing being so involved. Oh sure there was cutting and stitches, but not a full operating room stint with IVs and stripping of clothes and anesthesia.

I maintain it was not a serious operation, it just felt serious. And I don’t know, maybe because of the brouhaha it felt serious afterwards, too. I was ordered not to wash my hair or shower for five days, and that was rough. And the stitches throbbed and I’d get dizzy if I bent over for too long, and of course taking pain meds to compensate means you’re having to tackle the world through pain meds.

So anyhow, I’m happy for an understanding audience that allowed us to skip a week on short notice, and despite not quite feeling 100% yet I did manage to get the script finalized so we can get back on track. It’s another weirdness of brain and body, some activities (or inactivities) don’t strain you, but start trying to get your creative juices flowing and sometimes it’s suddenly like fighting through a skull-squeezing haze. I’m going to be re-reading things tonight before I letter just to make sure I was properly coherent, and then once that’s done I’ll be happy to give myself another few days for these dang stitches to stop being so ornery in terms of my thinkbox.

But hey, it’s done. And hopefully won’t have to happen again for a good, long time.

As noted on this week’s comic page, we have some medical issues to attend to so are making do with a sketch week — and on my end, a blog that’s far less long-winded than usual. So until next week, enjoy the blurring of reality and science fiction as this video shows how Texas ranchers in our world are starting to use remote-controlled drones to help monitor their herds!