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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s Douglas Adams, you ask?

Sigh.

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

Me: Holy crap, Roy Scheider died.

Them: Who?

Me: Roy Scheider.

Them: Rob Schneider?

Me: No, Roy Scheider. Jaws?

Them: What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now let’s, like, go shopping.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1: Is this format comfortable for you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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