Okay, that’s facetious, and for that matter easier said than done in the case of San Diego. In any case, I’m talking more about exhibiting. How do you elbow your way in to a spot on the floor?

A few months back on one of the forums I frequent, a webcomic author posted asking if comic conventions were worth trying to host a table or booth at. Specifically, were they a good place to network and meet people, or would they be shunned by the establishment? Were webcomics “treated as lepers or not”?

The thought of putting yourself out there at one of these gatherings, particularly one that attracts more than just local talent, can be very intimidating. Who are you, Mr. or Miss Self-Publish, to believe you deserve to share the same space as nationally or even internationally famed artists and authors, some of whom have been working in the industry since before you were born? Please. San Diego has a five year waiting list for their Small Press area, and you think you have a chance?

Hang on, back up.

If San Diego really had a backlog of five years on their Small Press area, how the hell did we manage to get called up to exhibit there last year? Because I can guarantee you we had no special insider angle. Until APE last year we’d never even met the man in charge in person, and the first time I’d ever talked to him was when he called us out of the blue last April to offer us a just-opened spot he needed to fill. Had we said no or not made a decision fast enough, he would have just moved on down his list. We were a piece of paper, and for that matter a piece of paper that had been stamped ‘WAIT LIST’ on the CCI 2010 Sunday I turned in our application. At most you could say that our Small Press jury submission had passed muster, but we had no idea of even that being true until that phone call.

The point I’m making here is, we applied despite the hopelessness and pessimism a lot of people have surrounding the show, and it worked. This year we’re back on the wait list, but we now know that being turned down in December is not the end of hope. Nor did we feel out of place while we were there, and that’s important too.

It’s usually not in a convention’s interest to turn people away. San Diego Small Press is, in fact, an extreme example in terms of requiring a material print submission for judgment as part of the application process. Every other convention we’ve dealt with has wanted only two things to be true:

- All the paperwork is in order

- Your check clears

That’s about it. Now if you’re a pure webcomic it might be a bit rough if you don’t even have so much as some fliers to hand out, but I doubt you’ll be denied a table. A lot of applications don’t even really ask if you happen to be a webcomic or not, and most conventions don’t have any separate area for such, they’ll just seed you into Artist’s Alley or one of the booths. You might get a terrible spot, you might get an okay spot, or you might even get a great spot, but it’s all going to be pretty random in your first outings.

But if you want to keep going, plan ahead. Get your paperwork and payment in as early as possible. Speaking as a clerk in my own day job, I can’t tell you how much of a turn-on it is to get properly completed forms. Okay, perhaps I should rephrase that — but in any case I always try to make it a point to have all t’s crossed and all i’s dotted, and I make sure to politely follow up by email to ensure all the connections are made. Sometimes an organizer will make the rounds of the convention to introduce themselves, and that’s a great time to shake their hands and introduce yourself right back. Even the biggest shows are nowhere near as impersonal as something like, say, calling AT&T customer service… you’ll have a person or persons that you’ll get to know, and if you make a good impression with them, well, now you’re not just a piece of paper and a bank check any more. The flipside of this is that if you piss them off you might have trouble, but so far I think I’ve managed to balance being assertive about any needs without crossing the line into ‘annoying git’.

One absolute warning though, I’m not kidding about getting things taken care of early. Some conventions are okay to let slide for awhile after they open applications, but when we made the decision to try out Emerald City I had our paperwork in less than a month after they started taking submissions, and it wasn’t long after that that they had completely sold out of exhibit space. For San Diego I turn in our application while we’re still at the convention. The same thing can go for hotel reservations if you need them — grab them early, especially if your convention has any special exhibitor deals negotiated with the nearby ones.

Do webcomics have a stigma at conventions? Maybe there’s some attendees and exhibitors who’ll avoid you, but there’s a lot more who are just fine with it. I mean, again, assuming they can even tell that sort of thing on sight. When you have a venue where a guest artist often shows up with a single banner for their plain white plastic table, how do you tell amateur from professional at a glance? For that matter, we live in a world where you can’t assume the guy wearing jeans and sneakers isn’t a millionaire. I wouldn’t even worry about it. The very fact you have that table should be evidence enough of dedication to your cause. Everyone starts somewhere, and if there are any convention organizers out there who refuse to respect or recognize that, then I have, thankfully, yet to meet them.

An elevator pitch (or elevator speech or statement) is a short summary used to quickly and simply define a product, service, or organization and its value proposition.

It takes its name from the idea that you can finish the proposal in no more than a minute’s time, for instance the time you might happen to be on an elevator ride with your busy boss or film producer or whatnot.

I’m terrible at it.

I remember at one of our early convention appearances where I tried to explain Zombie Ranch to an acquaintance of ours who works in the movie industry, and after I finished rambling he flat out told me, “You need to work on your pitch”.

Nearly two years later, I still haven’t found that perfect short-form alchemy that is both snazzy to the ear and presents all of what I consider to be the key concepts and unique aspects of this comic. I have our introduction blurb which is the closest I think I’ve come, but it sounds better written than spoken and is probably way too long for a world where a lot of pitches are boiled down to statements like ”Die Hard on a Space Station”.

If I try that I end up with “It’s Lonesome Dove meets Hatari! meets Deadliest Catch meets Night of the Living Dead meets…” and DING! the elevator has arrived and there goes the boss. But if I just say “Deadliest Catch meets Night of the Living Dead“, or worse, “Cowboys vs. Zombies”, they might end up intrigued in entirely the wrong way, with long-term disappointment for everyone.

I don’t know, maybe it’s actually a good thing that I have trouble condensing Zombie Ranch into a quick sound bite. Or maybe I’m just making excuses for being terminally long-winded.

So hey, you out there… fair assumption that you read the comic, right? How would you sell someone on it in sixty seconds or less? Or would you even bother to try?

If you’ve ever watched professional sports, you may know what I’m talking about here. The team has just scored again, they’re up by a really comfortable margin with almost no time left, the home crowd is on its feet cheering, the players are grinning and slapping each others’ hindsides…

…and the camera cuts over to the coach, and he might as well be carved from granite. Frowning, judging granite. I never was able to understand how someone could look that unhappy in the midst of a situation where everyone else was jumping for joy – like they’d just learned they were being audited instead of about to claim a victory after watching their people play a great game.

And then, somewhere along the line after we started Zombie Ranch, I realized that on some Tuesday nights I often ended up with that same face. It’s like I can’t allow myself to relax and smile until everything is ready to go, and poor Dawn is my quarterback (or equivalent) waiting for that nod which is the closest thing she may get to approval for the moment.

Before this ends up sounding terminally unfun, the reason I bring it up is because we watched something recently that made us both realize this phenomenon isn’t necessarily an aberration, but a more-or-less natural result of the creative process colliding with deadlines (self-imposed or otherwise).

The documentary, which I believe is currently still available for instant streaming on Netflix, is titled Six Days To Air: The Making Of South Park. Onion A.V. Club has an excellent review of it here, and I recommend it to any of you out there who are slugging away week after week to provide a story (or just some entertainment) to the masses, especially if you’re doing so as part of a team. You won’t feel so crazy anymore.

Well, you might still feel like crazy people, but you’ll at least take some comfort that you’re not alone. I recognize that hangdog, strangely almost depressive state Trey Parker exhibits on the day the episode is shipped off to air, even though everyone that it’s been shown to is laughing their heads off. He talks at one point about gorging on McDonald’s, not because it helps his creative process but because it makes him happy “for five minutes”. And one of his candid speeches should speak to the heart of any webcomic creator out there, whether you’re writer, artist, or both:

“I always feel like, wow, I wish I had another day with this show. That’s why there’s so many episodes that we’ve been able to get done, because there is a deadline and you can’t keep going. Because there’s so many times that I’d say, no, it’s not ready yet, it’s not ready yet. And I’d have spent four weeks on one show. All you do is start second-guessing yourself and rewriting stuff, and it’s over-thought. And it would have been 5 percent better.”

The next day, you can visibly see the weight come off his shoulders as the finished product has aired, and they’ve got another six days before crunch time comes around again. It’s important to note also that you can see him (and all the rest of the crew) having a lot of fun with the brainstorming sessions, voice recordings, and all the other aspects of turning an idea into an episode… but yeah, on that final deadline day, Trey has some serious coach face. 

I wonder if that’s where pro (American) football players came up with the tradition of dumping a barrel of gatorade on the coach after a big win, just to shock him out of his stoic state. Fortunately Dawn hasn’t started doing this to me yet, although it’s possible she’s been tempted on some of the more extreme days.

But anyhow, happy birthday to my favorite wife and artist! Oh and a heads up for anyone who doesn’t know yet, on Wednesday some big sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Boing Boing are all shutting down access for 24 hours in protest of the SOPA bill trying to be passed in the U.S. – details here. That means the barrel o’ gatorade link above won’t be working unless you read this on Thursday or later. As the skull on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride would say, “properly warned ye be…”

But you know, that’s okay. I find there’s entirely too much emphasis these days on twist endings and endings in general, where the destination eclipses all thought of enjoying the ride to get there. There are a lot of people out there who have come to a point where, if someone reveals the ending of a book/movie/etc., they feel as if their whole experience is irrevocably ruined. In extreme cases they now refuse to read/watch/listen, because why bother? They know how it turns out.

I’ve never been able to understand it. Is there really nothing to be said for the journey? Have our narratives become that fragile, that the moment Point B becomes clear, we lose all motivation to reach it?

Keep in mind that for thousands of years, the exact opposite was the case. If you’ve ever been to a production of Ancient Greek or Shakespearean drama, they employ Prologues as a matter of course, such as the famous one that begins Romeo & Juliet:

Two households, both alike in dignity
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage—
The which, if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

If the language is giving you trouble, let me just put it this way: Romeo & Juliet commit suicide, and that tragedy will finally convince their two warring families to make peace. The play is telling you that straight up at the very beginning; yet if you posted a summary like this for a modern movie, to a modern internet forum, you’d be raked over the coals for ruining the plot. Shakespeare and Sophocles weren’t afraid of telling you “Dumbledore dies”, they used it as a hook to keep your interest as they brought you on the journey. Like the Columbo mysteries where the culprit and crime was always revealed at the beginning, making them not so much “whodunit?” as “howdhecatchem?”

I had someone get legitimately mad at me for “spoiling” the end of the movie 300 for them, which for me makes as much sense as someone claiming you spoiled Titanic because you tell them the ship sinks. But I’m sure someone has done just that. This obsessive need to avoid spoilers at all costs has gotten way out of hand, and feeds back into creators who feel a need to throw in more and more ludicrous twists to keep their audience guessing. An infamous example comes from the DC Universe crossover event Armageddon 2001, where the identity of the mystery villain was leaked before the end, and rather than soldier on with the carefully constructed foreshadowing of the series so far, DC decided to chuck everything and insert a nonsensical last minute change to preserve the “surprise”.

And that was back in 1991, before the Internet existed in its current form. Nowadays entire messageboards exist to comb over the latest clues in an ongoing series in near instantaneous fashion. If you have enough fans, then guess what? Some of them are going to pick up on the trail of breadcrumbs, and it’s only human at that point to want to show the path to others. Should you derail your narrative because they’ve figured out where it’s headed?

I say no. I say, focus on the journey and let the destination stand. For one thing, there will always be things some consider blindingly obvious that others will completely miss. Never assume that “Everyone could see this coming” is any kind of true statement… usually it just means those who didn’t either remain quiet out of fear of being thought stupid, or aren’t really paying attention to forums and comments anyhow. For another thing, if the journey is good enough, then it shouldn’t matter, and those who figured it out ahead of time are going to just feel gratified rather than disappointed. Or maybe they’ll be disappointed… you can’t control every last opinion. But it’s better than chucking everything, isn’t it?

But let’s all take a breath and calm down about the spoilers. Yes, we love to be surprised and taken in unexpected directions, but that shouldn’t be the only thing, or fiction eventually just dissolves into a senseless mass of WHAM! moments. They’re great, but as a writer don’t make them the end-all-be-all or you’ll end up with an unsustainable case of Shyamalan Syndrome. And as an audience member, take the fact you know the truth about Keyser Soze or Malcolm Crowe before you watch those movies as a liberation rather than a disaster. It’s a lot less stressful on both sides.

Plus, even if you knew it was the McCarty gang, maybe you didn’t figure out it was their own bulldozer on fire…

With 61 votes tallied at the time I closed voting, the Wild Zoners had edged out the Safers, but only barely, by a margin of 32 to 29. It might be surprising in the sense that a lot of zombie fans are also what I suppose we could call “survival enthusiasts”, but then again we’re talking zombie fans who are reading comics on the World Wide Web, a medium which likely wouldn’t exist anymore if the apocalyptic hammer ever drops.

I honestly don’t know how long the Web would survive without regular maintenance. On the one hand, it’s extremely decentralized in its structure, so that failure of parts won’t affect the whole. On the other, some parts are more important than others, such as the telecommunications “backbones”… or the satellites, for that matter, without which things we’re already starting to take for granted such as GPS couldn’t exist. Even rugged mountain men and explorers have a GPS handy these days, keeping them constantly in touch with those invisible eyes in the sky.

And how long would those satellites last? Well, in Zombie Ranch we know there’s at least one still active, but jealously controlled by its masters. Even with the limitations involved in what’s likely much more limited satellite coverage, it’s a pretty big advantage. Getting signals to your drone cameras would require a lot of repeaters to compensate for the curvature of the Earth, and if those towers are mostly out in hostile wilderness, that gets tricky mighty quick. You might have already inferred from the ranch crew’s struggles with their old-school UHF walkie-talkies that cell phones don’t seem to be a consideration any more, at least not for the common man. There’s a lot of infrastructure required and a lot of men and women who are working on a daily basis to keep those cellular “footprints” in working order. For that matter, it can be positively terrifying to contemplate just how much our modern civilization has become dependent on the ready flow of electricity.

But hey, I’ll admit it: I’m a fan. I love my refrigeration, and my air conditioning, and my 40 watt bulbs and my Internet. I probably wouldn’t last long out in the wilds, and more than that, I might not want to, so despite my value of personal freedom I’m a Safer at heart. I run straight onto the rocks of Ben Franklin’s scorn and his famous quote, oft-repeated in the post-9/11 days of the Patriot Act: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Then again, that scorn could all depend on what he meant by essential Liberty, and given Mr. Franklin’s propensities that might just have been the Liberty to pursue French demimondes.

It’s interesting to go back to the original quote (the source of which is detailed here) and note the qualifiers of “essential” and “temporary”, words often left out when the phrase is regurgitated, as if there is no way Liberty and Safety could possibly co-exist. And maybe they can’t, at least not as absolutes, but human society does seem to balance best on a sliding scale between the two. The worst breakdowns occur when Liberty is curtailed but people still live in fear (the “Police State”), or when Liberty runs entirely free from law, at which point it’s oft been shown certain people will use their own freedom to oppress the freedom of others.

There’s a give and take we’ve been dancing with since our first tribal groupings, as we groped for some form of effective cooperation which would allow us to do more than we could do on our own, and that usually meant designating one person who seemed to know what they were doing as the person who told the rest what to do. That was the death of Freedom as an absolute. There was always the choice to leave, but even the most badass hunter would have a lot more trouble taking down prey on their own.

And then, of course, beer happened. I’m pretty convinced (and there’s early historical evidence to back it up) that beer really greased the wheels of the decision to stop roving around and establish cities. Sure, there was other agriculture, but I don’t think “You’ll have a lot more bread to eat if you settle down here and pay taxes” had nearly the same immediate impact as “Here, try this. We call it ‘Liquid Party’”.

From bread and beer to sewer systems and Xbox Live, we’ve always been ready to give up a little freedom for our luxuries. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with that, any more than I see anything wrong with the people who still do emulate the lone hunters of the past, taking themselves “off the grid” and working for self-sufficiency. It’s all about determining those freedoms we deem essential, the safety level we want, and how far we’re willing to go.

We’ve come to the end zone of 2011. There were ups and downs, but Zombie Ranch has persevered to its third print issue and fifth online episode. We celebrated our two-year anniversary and our 100th story comic. We got to exhibit at the San Diego Comic-Con, and over in Las Vegas I sat on a panel shoulder to shoulder with Neal Stephenson. We got to be special guests at Wizard World Anaheim, and would have been at Wizard World L.A. as well had that not been canceled.

Lest this begin to sound like some rock star lifestyle, it’s not. My email is not yet flooded with the adulation (or condemnation) of fans. We still pay our way to most of these appearances, and it’s only rarely we don’t also pay for the privilege of a table presence. When I talked briefly to Chris Hastings (the creator of Dr. McNinja), he’d never heard of Zombie Ranch, and probably forgot the whole encounter within a few minutes.

No, for the most part Dawn and myself continue our mild-mannered lives as nerds, working our day jobs. Neither of us are aces of self-promotion — I mean, look at how much spiritual searching I had to do even to decide to go ahead with adding Zombie Ranch to the TV Tropes site, despite their assurances that all published works are notable. I know Wikipedia certainly wouldn’t find us worthy of mention, they’re actually quite infamous for deleting the entries of webcomics much more well-known than ours.

There’s this balance we struggle with between wanting to let people know about what we’re doing, and wanting to make sure what we’re doing is worth letting people know about it. I don’t feel comfortable with that hyperbolic carnival barker style Stan Lee had in the 60s, declaring every new character a legend, every tale an epic (and that he was right about some of them ignores the fact that he was wrong about a great many others). 

We haven’t gotten rich off of doing this, and we haven’t gotten famous. We’re probably less rich (at least financially speaking) than we would be if we’d never started. But I do feel better about my life today than I did three years ago, because I’m applying myself in some sort of creative arts, and if the stats don’t lie there’s hundreds of you out there who are glad that Dawn and myself put our story out for you to read and enjoy. That’s a fulfilling thing to contemplate. There are people who have invited me to come talk to strangers, simply on the strength of the idea that I have interesting stuff to say. Better yet, I leave such occasions with nary a hint of tar or feathers upon my person.

What will another year bring? Well, if the Mayans are right we’ve got less than 12 months to make Zombie Ranch a household word. But then again, in that case such fame would really, really be fleeting since no one would be around to remember it. So I think we’re good with our progress so far. We’ve had experiences and opportunities we never would have had if we just sat back and let this story go untold, not to mention meeting some great people in the form of fans and fellow creators (and sometimes both!).

So here’s to the inevitable approach of 2012. Happy holidays everyone!

This is not really one of those times, I’m just going to weigh in without anyone having specifically asked my opinion. I’ve written before about the importance of keeping a balance between a satisfying single installment and the overall arc of the story being told. I think it’s absolutely crucial to a long form webcomic, particularly one like ours which updates once a week. I don’t expect you’ll be spending every waking moment between Wednesdays in a state of edge-of-your-seat suspense, but I definitely hope to keep you looking forwards to next time, and caring about where the next page updates takes you.

In the old days of the newspaper serials, it was all pretty blatant. The last panel would have something like the protagonist turning with a shocked look and shouting “YOU?!” while some silhouette in the foreground held a gun upon them. Tune in next time. And then next time, the first panel would start with a (re)caption — “While investigating the submarine base of Dr. Morbis, Sato is suddenly confronted by an old enemy!”. Three panels later the old enemy, revealed as Fang the Funkadelic, would drop the news that he’d taken pretty Miss Mingle as his hostage, and the cycle would start anew.

Long form webcomics usually get to breathe a bit more in this sense, but I still like to play around with the idea of connecting the previous comic to the last in some way beyond just a Back and Next button. I feel as though it’s worth the effort; that even if a reader doesn’t consciously make the connections, their subconscious will help carry the narrative.

I could also be totally incorrect and not a little full of myself, but that’s my theory. I do get a lot of comments on Zombie Ranch from people saying they were compelled to keep reading, often sometimes without knowing why (such as the rough beginnings). Is that a function of my clever lil’ transition efforts? Well, if nothing else it makes the writing more fun for me.

Sometimes it’s a visual, such as the ending the last panel here with a grinning cartoony zombie, and starting the first panel here with the much more glum reality. Sometimes it’s combining similar visuals with similar words, such as here to here, or what I’ve put together for our latest two comics where smoke defines the switch between two physically distant locations.

The flow and rhythm of the words are also very important to me. I nudge around my drafts of the script until I can achieve something which sounds good to me in recitation. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man who wrote my most favorite poem of all time in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, once declared that poetry was not just the best words, but “the best words in the best order”.

I realize comics writing is not really poetry, since for one thing you have accompanying imagery to pick up your sensory slack, but there are certain similarities in the idea of economy of expression. You just don’t have the elbow room a prose writer does to wax at length on topics, you need to get your points across in a more condensed form. And the rhythm, the order, is still important. The greatest speeches in history have an undeniable flow to them that grabs attention and stirs both intellect and emotion. Even prose writers are well advised to pay heed to the rhythm and quality, especially in the beginnings of their tales when they’re first knocking at your door for your time and attention. Dickens certainly knew it:

“IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

He could have just as easily written “In the time just before the French revolution, things were pretty chaotic and contradictory… which actually isn’t too far off from the way things are now”, but that might not have been quite so memorable. Even if you don’t get his meaning right away, the flow is still there, carrying you along, inviting you to come visit Somewhere Else and return, eventually, more fulfilled than when you left.

Or I could use a much more modern and simpler example. Watch the original trilogy of the Star Wars films and see how effective the scene transitions are, especially compared to the newer prequels. Part of the reason I feel the prequels lose me is they lack that underlying sense of rhythm, killing scenes too abruptly or letting them linger too long even with John Williams doing his best to still provide the audio cues. Whatever your feelings on Ewoks, I do feel that Return of the Jedi managed to quite effectively juggle an epic battle taking place in three different places at once in a way Phantom Menace did not, and a lot of that, again, I ascribe to the rhythm. 

“You… (ominous music)… like your father… (music builds)… are now… MINE!” (crash of music, jump cut to other battle in progress)

When done right, there’s this exhilarated sense of being swept off your feet and carried forwards, unable to look away/put the book down/stop listening to the speaker. You have become lost in the transitions.

I can’t say I’ve mastered it. I can’t say, truthfully, that I even feel like much more than an apprentice. But I keep at it because I feel like it helps and benefits the work, whether or not the audience takes conscious notice.

Of course there’s the other kind of becoming lost in transitions where you scene jump so poorly the audience has no clue where they are. I hope I’ve avoided that for the most part, and think, again, that the connector elements can help out. The answer lies with the majority of the readership, but I take some pride in the lack of complaint I’ve heard about the opening pages of Episode 2, where (with Dawn’s talented assistance, of course!) I really pulled some shenanigans with time, space, and even the very format of the information being delivered.

Then again it’s possible the people who hated it just up and left, and I’ll never know how many of those there were. Possibly many thousands more than those it worked for. But any time someone tells me they start our archive and feel compelled (sometimes against their intentions) to finish it, I like to think part of the answer lies in that thread I try to stitch between each and every page — sometimes obvious, sometimes barely perceivable even to myself. But in the sharing of a story, I feel it’s part of the crucial conveyance that keeps the fantasy alive.

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights

This is part of a speech from Julius to Marc Antony expressing his (rather justified, it turns out) concerns regarding one Senator Cassius, who has “a lean and hungry look”; in other words, a sense of ambition and purpose that makes Caesar nervous.

If only Caesar had had television on his side, perhaps his toga wouldn’t have ended up with all those unsightly dagger holes.

Which is not to say I believe television kills ambition. For one thing, these days the kids seem to be weaning themselves away from it. Well, sort of. Now they just stream the same content to their handhelds, leaving them more mobile but still occupying their attentions (a dangerous combination, if the new driving laws banning cellphones are to be believed). They go outside, but remain wired.

And by kids I of course mean “us”, it’s just that the kids are the ones who, as always, are the native sons and daughters of the new wave, their thumbs dancing on tiny key and touchpads with blinding speeds while someone like me is stuck doing the equivalent of the one finger typing I used to mock my own elders for.

Anyhow, I digress. It comes down to a simple matter of boredom, or at least perceived boredom. I’ve maintained for years that Boredom, not Money, is the true Root of All Evil. So assuming a person isn’t starving or taking care of other immediate survival needs, then their thoughts are going to wander to the question of “How do I occupy my time?”.

In a society that hopes to last, the Powers That Be had better seriously consider the answer to that question and how to guide it in a way that’s safe for their continued existence — a true irony considering that providing for their basic needs and securities is what even brought you to this point. That’s why it’s not just bread that rules the equation, it’s bread and circuses. Entertainment.

People are certainly capable of coming up with ways to entertain themselves, but O King, blame me not if you don’t like the result. It could involve setting fires and turning over cars, and I know this well from living in a city where people riot not just because corrupt cops get set free, but because our basketball team wins.

Juvenal was contemptuous of the idea of bread and circuses since it distracted the people from real matters of civics and government. It was appealing to the lowest common denominator of satisfaction. But at least in the short run, it works. And is it all bad? People have always desired escapism, especially in times where they felt most confined. We want to experience fantastic tales, perhaps safely quenching that desire for adventure in our own hearts with a minimum of disruption in our routines. Those that can best deliver such adventures to us, we reward with our loyalty and what wealth we can spare.

And they, perhaps, are content in turn that we are fat, and sleep o’ nights.

So how about this one? I look up the term “utopia” — I know what it means, of course, but I wanted to get some more sense of the history behind the concept. It’s a concept I’ve been skeptical of for a long time, possibly ever since I heard it. Possibly. That’s just leaving open that I might have heard it at a very young age, an age where I still believed in Santa. And astronauts.

Let me quote you the second paragraph in the wikipedia entry on the subject:

The word comes from the Greek: οὐ (“not”) and τόπος (“place”) and means “no place”. The English homophone eutopia, derived from the Greek εὖ (“good” or “well”) and τόπος (“place”), means “good place”. This, due to the identical pronunciation of “utopia” and “eutopia”, gives rise to a double meaning.

Wow. The damn word is skeptical of itself? That’s… well, I did not know that. This is like the Ancient Greek version of my fascination with the fact Operation: Just Cause could be easily reinterpreted as Operation: Just ‘Cause.

I would have loved to shove this insight into the comic, but Dawn was already casting a fishy eye at the climbing word count. So I did what I felt was the next best thing… pack the page with a bunch of other double meanings and then bring the whole utopia controversy up in this blog.

I mean, it’s all just suspect. Plato’s Republic is the first recorded instance of trying to describe an ideal society, and it:

proposes a categorization of citizens into a rigid class structure of “golden,” “silver,” “bronze” and “iron” socioeconomic classes. The golden citizens are trained in a rigorous 50-year long educational program to be benign oligarchs, the “philosopher-kings.” The wisdom of these rulers will supposedly eliminate poverty and deprivation through fairly distributed resources, though the details on how to do this are unclear.

That’s the ideal society? Holy crap, no, that’s Huxley’s Brave New World, which was written as a nightmare, drug-fueled parody of utopian ideals.

What about the modern revival of the concept of Utopia, largely credited to Thomas More’s 1516 book of the same name? Well, seems there’s debate on whether he meant the society he depicted to be something practically achievable, or just a vehicle for satire in the way that Dante depicted the afterlife? When I read that More’s vision depends on having two slaves for every household, drawn from the ranks of criminals and foreigners and weighted down with chains made of gold, then I make it my fervent hope he was, as the Brits say, “taking the piss”. I know that the 16th Century was a time when Europe still considered slavery to be no big deal, but even so, I see problems with a society that hinges on chained criminals taking care of your household needs.

How can slavery and rigid caste systems be part of an ideal human society? At best, it’s an ideal society for those who aren’t slaves, or are at the top of the pyramid of privilege. And in an imagined society where everyone is equal, and equally free to pursue their interests, who exactly is going to haul the trash?

Santone isn’t a utopia. But what is? It seems like from the start we’ve had trouble even conceiving of a workable version such a society in our imaginations, much less making it happen in reality.

Unfortunate homonym or intentional double meaning, it really does seem that the Good Place also remains No Place. But if utopia has betrayed itself, I at least can still take comfort in the closing statement of one Detective William Somerset:

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” I agree with the second part.

Word.

I’ve had that skyline vista of the last panel, with its contradictory pattern of welcome and isolationism, optimism and invasive authority, in my head for a long time now. Since before the start of Episode 2 I had the thought that San Antonio represented that big Safe Zone people were strutting around in, but we left it generic at that time while I fretted the details to figure out how feasible that might be. Isn’t it one of the sacred tenets of the zombie apocalypse that all major cities must be abandoned and/or wiped away? Certainly one recent book (which we’ve given a nod to in the form of graffiti) was very specific about San Antonio not surviving. How would that possibly work, especially for a bustling metropolis that in modern times is a big tourist destination?

Eventually I got over myself, considering I already have a world here where the dead walk (and are harvested for pharmaceuticals!), and there’s camera drones floating around with no more suspension provided than that of disbelief. Zombie Ranch is already not your usual zombie story, so why couldn’t there be the idea of a city that closed its borders early enough and policed itself effectively enough to get by?

Plus, the details of this particular city just kept drawing me back. The enclosing loops of highways that from overhead reminded me of ancient castles or fortified cities, with their interior palace or keep surrounded by an inner and outer bailey. An image of the Pam Am Expressway where I could envision steel or concrete barriers integrated with the underside to form not only an impenetrable wall, but one that was very easily moved around upon by its wardens.  Finding out the San Antonio River doesn’t just flow through the city, it actually bubbles up from deep underground only a few miles from downtown like a sort of gigantic natural well. The city runs its own power company, and is home to major military bases, medical complexes, biotech industries, and a certain broadcasting entity that inspires our own ClearStream Corporation.

Military and biotech? Hospitals? Wouldn’t those be ground zero? Well, think about that. Most of the apocalype scenarios involving these institutions hinge upon them not knowing what they’re dealing with until it’s too late. Not that I’m implying anything sinister here, but the Safe Zone of Santone responded in a lot of correct ways to the Great Plague, in very quick order.

Finally, I suppose I’ll just take cover behind those same rules of cool that allow me to have floating cameras. San Antonio is an iconic city of the Old West, a place many a hero of cowboy fiction passed through, and I want it. More than that, it’s a modern metropolis overlaid on those wild and dusty roots, where the Alamo is laid seige to these days not by Santa Anna, but by tall buildings and 21st century commercialism. All I have to do is tweak that to a starker contrast. So given the choice between Generic Safe Zone A and a place far more intriguing in past, present, and future, I go with Santone. If we’ve gotten some details wrong, I beg your indulgence for fiction’s sake. Trust me, I have to deal with the same thing every time I play a sandbox video game of Los Angeles, and those aren’t even set decades into a post-apocalyptic future.

What can I say? The last time a vision nagged at me like this, it was the start of this whole comic. And that was just a few months, compared to this concept kicking around in my skull for almost two years. I’m thrilled to finally be able to share it, and hope it was a fitting treat for those of you that have joined Dawn and myself on this continuing journey into a Weird New West.