I’ve mentioned before how I’m fond of my grey areas in terms of heroes and villains, but it’s true that I’ve been building up Mrs. McCarty as the big antagonist of this first storyline since we were first treated to her delicate countenance and dulcet tones at the end of Episode 2. If there’s a sin on my part here it’s maybe that she’s an “easy” villain, displaying few redeeming qualities. It’s entirely possible that the presentation is skewed so that you’re only seeing her at her worst, but let’s face it — it’s not much of an accomplishment to get people to hate her. I just hope there’s enough twisted motivation evident in her actions that she doesn’t seem driven by pure madness. Unfathomable madness can be sort of boring in a villain, as is the whole idea of “doing it for darkness“, i.e. evil for evil’s sake.

It’s been pointed out (and perhaps not unfairly so) that Muriel and her posse come off more as caricatures than actual people. Is this a bad thing? Does every mook in fiction need or deserve a backstory? Should the writer(s) make you value them as characters, or is it enough that you want to see them fail?

On the other end of the spectrum, how much time as a writer do you need to devote to a character before your audience wants to see them succeed? Or at least not die? I have it on record that at least one reader felt sorry when Zeke met his end, and there was a comment back towards the beginning of Episode 5 where someone hoped “the ranch hands” (which I took to mean Brett & Lacey) would survive unscathed. But I’m fully accepting of the idea that putting Brett in mortal danger is not necessarily going to get the same sort of rise out of you folks as I’d get if Suzie or Frank were in his place.

For that matter, how many of you would care about Suzie or Frank being in mortal danger? That’s a good question, and one I dearly hope at this point would be answered with at least some of you giving a damn. You don’t have to love them, necessarily, but I’d like to think at least a portion of the current hate against Muriel is related to some feeling of wanting the young miss Zane and her crew to get through this intact.

This is one of the hardest things about writing a story, and at the same time one of the most crucial things. The twists and turns of your plot, the richness of your world… all of it still hangs on the balance of your characters being people your audience feels like they can give a damn about, whether that feeling is positive or negative. Then on top of that, you want them interested in seeing your protagonist(s) win and your antagonist(s) lose, even if your intent is to horribly subvert that and let the bad guys win. Or you might be George R. R. Martin and just play with your audience’s feelings the way a cat plays with a yarn ball, never letting them get comfortable. Dawn had to stop reading that saga because by the third book she was feeling downright abused by the constant obliteration or undermining of everyone she had allowed herself to identify with… but now of course she’s getting to watch it all over again on television.

I digress, though, because GRRM certainly makes you care, otherwise it wouldn’t hurt so much. The death of any story is if the reader remains no more invested in it than if they were reading an iPhone tutorial, and the tricky part about this is that the only way to discover whether you succeeded is to put it out there and have them experience it. Even if you have some friends, an editor, and/or a writing club to give feedback on your work, the ultimate test still rests in tossing your tale to the mercy of total strangers and seeing if your carefully baited lines reel ‘em in.

So in that sense, I’m quite gratified that Muriel McCarty seems to have struck a chord (or discord, if you will). I like my grey areas, but then even a series as grey as Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones has a place for its “Joffreys”, right?

Clint and I will be at the Long Beach Comic Expo this Saturday! Look for us at Artist’s Alley table 1032. In the program we’ll most likely be listed under our names this time around (Clint Wolf and Dawn Wolf, for those who don’t know).

I just also want to say that I love all your guys’ comments and sometimes reading where you guys think the story is heading.

Well, first, I guess you’ve got to get out of Hollywood, or at least get away from all the genre straitjackets Hollywood likes to lay down. Maybe it helps to be out of the United States entirely and approach it from a different cultural perspective. I’ve already sung the praises of Troll Hunter for making me appreciate the “mockumentary” format again, and now from Norway’s neighbor Finland comes a crazy spin on the story of the kid who believes in Santa despite the modern skepticism all around him: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale .

What’s the spin? This particular kid believes in the Santa of Old, before the propaganda of the modern age that turned him into a whitewashed, smiling deliverer of gifts. No, as the montage of old books in the opening credits shows us, to this young boy Santa exists as a demonic spirit sent to punish and torture the naughty; and he fears a nearby American excavation at Korvatunturi is about to set him free. All this is rooted solidly in Finnish folklore, including that their version of Santa is said to make his home at Korvatunturi, and is known as Joulupukki, a word that translates to “Yule Goat”. These days Joulupukki is more or less equivalent to Santa As We Know Him, but once upon a time…

Pagans used to have festivities to ward off evil spirits. In Finland these spirits of darkness wore goat skins and horns. In the beginning this creature didn’t give presents but demanded them. The Yule Goat was an ugly creature and frightened children.

With that ominously established, it’s no accident in my mind that some of the scenes around the expedition resemble the establishing shots of The Thing. Santa has been buried in the ice for centuries, but is about to be Woken Up.

I won’t spoil overly what happens next, but suffice it to say you may be surprised even if you’re approaching it now from the perspective of a horror film. Rare Exports has some great ideas in it, including some that warm the cockles of my Zombie Ranch heart; for example, once the rural reindeer herder heroes finally accept the boy’s insistence that Santa is real, one of their earliest thoughts beyond the immediate wonder and horror of that is, “How can we make money off of this?” I won’t say anything about the final ending, but if you watch you’ll understand why I loved it, and how it instantly crystallizes the title into making perfect sense. Like the denoument of Shaun of the Dead, it’s so wrong, and yet so right.

Like Troll Hunter before it, Rare Exports is available on Netflix Instant, and is just as deserving of a look if you appreciate a fresh, quirky take on what at first glance might seem to be a tired premise. Believe in Santa. Or else.

I think I’ve touched near this topic before when I was writing about what makes a horror comic, particularly in observing that so-called “camp” horror has a long and bloodily brilliant pedigree in comics like Tales From The Crypt or films such as Brain Dead/Dead Alive. It seems like a good portion of us enjoy laughter mixed with our terror and don’t have much of a problem switching the two up, or even feeling joyful and scared simultaneously. If that weren’t true, amusement parks probably wouldn’t invest in fun houses, much less rollercoasters.

Zombie Ranch is a much more low-key affair for the most part, in terms of both horror and humor. Arguably it’s more of a matter of serious vs. comedic, and from the start my intention was to swerve back and forth over the line between the two; sometimes gently, sometimes sharply. I hope I laid the seeds for that tone with the very first Episode/Issue, mixing enough light and dark so that no reader would get past that first arc without realizing what they’d be in for in the future. I think Dawn’s art also helps with this, since it’s not overly gritty while also not being cartoony (except of course, when we’re doing those TV cartoons).

Have we succeeded? Well, according to the comments on various pages we’ve evoked all sorts of reponses, and they’ve usually been the emotions we were aiming for, whether it was sorrow, or laughter, or even a mix of both. Heck, evoking any response at all is something of a victory for an artist, but it speaks much better to your meager skills if you’re not desperately backpedaling and claiming your piece is meant as comedy when it clearly wasn’t .

Zombie Ranch was never meant to be comedy or drama, horror or humor, but something that hopefully allows for all those aspects to co-exist and tell an interesting story. If you’re still reading I can only guess that you’re appreciating that mix. But hold onto something–the last few pages have been pretty light, and it looks like Muriel’s decided we’re about due for a dark turn…

We posted about this on our Facebook page already, but since we know at least some of you might be interested, there’s a Kickstarter project up right now for some guys trying to put together a true open-world zombie apocalypse game. It’s called The Dead Linger and they’ve already doubled their funding goal, but you have until Sunday to decide if you’d like to contribute. We’re not affiliated with them at all but it seems like a worthy cause.

THE DEAD LINGER

Now ironically enough, we did have the comic done on time, only to experience an unforeseen outage of our hosting service that took our whole site down for several hours… so if one was in the mindset to consider excuses, I reckon that does seem like a pretty good one. What was more worthy of thought is that he then left a follow-up statement that made it clear he felt it wasn’t just a matter of being late, but that there was no place on the Internet for story-driven webcomics that updated at the rate of a single page a week. That it was an impossibly slow pace for anything dependent on continuity. Zombie Ranch had been entertaining so far, but he was done with us, and I suppose also felt obligated to leave behind a warning, like a Dickensian spirit,  in hopes we would mend our ways before it was too late.

It’s easy to get angry or defensive in the face of such comments. My blog last week was all about the idea that creative arts are a matter of taking your inner thoughts and perspectives and throwing them out to the public, and criticism in response can sometimes feel like your soul is getting kicked around, particularly if you’re not getting any significant financial benefit as a buffer to the slings and arrows. As W.B. Yeats wrote: “But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”.

But the plain fact of the world is, if you put your dreams out there, there will be treading, and some of it may be wearing cleats and a heavy hat. If art is, as I argued, a way for people to communicate between disparate selves, then the manner of communication can matter as much as the audience. What frequency are you tuning them to? How much static is on it? And if they’re not satisfied, you better believe you may get some static in return. Some may, to put it even more colloquially, be all up in yo’ grill.

Frequency of course has a double meaning here, because I like to pretend I’m clever in that way. Dawn and I made our decision at the very beginning to run on a weekly schedule, on the basis that we’d witnessed far too many examples of webcomics attempting more ambitious schedules and failing to meet them, or worse yet, burning out their creators entirely. Better to go at a steady “every Wednesday” rate, possibly ramping up later if we felt we could handle it, than to start off three times a week and then have to give up and scale back after the readers were used to the faster pace. That always seemed to me like a much bigger recipe for disappointment, which would lead to reader complaints at just the wrong time (i.e. snarking on a creator or creators who were already by definition feeling overworked). In fact, a variation on this could be said to be exactly what happened in the ex-reader’s case, as it appears he was fine as long as he had archive comics to go through as fast as it suited him, but once he hit the end of those the sudden slowdown was too much to adjust to.

Now it’s entirely possible that we’d be more popular if we tried to update more frequently, but it’s also entirely possible that I’d just end up spending a lot of days making apologies and excuses. We do have weeks where we post artwork instead of story progession, but I always make a point of warning people ahead of time so that they’re not unpleasantly surprised. I don’t beg forgiveness for such breaks, but on the other hand I never want us to be one of those webcomics that just leave their readers hanging, or worse adopt the attitude of “You’ll get your new page when I damn well feel like it!”

Is it enough? It is what it is. Bizarre as it might seem to say, I actually do appreciate the former reader expressing why he was leaving us. I have to, because haven’t I lamented many times on how much of a vaccuum webcomic creators exist in despite all our statistic trackers? Having someone specifically express why they’re not satisfied is hardly as pleasant as having someone express why they think what you’re doing is great, but at least it’s feedback. Just in this case, stating that weekly updates aren’t enough happens to be feedback I really feel unable to address for the foreseeable future, even if I were to accept his opinion as fact. For the record, I do not, and I could list several webcomics with audiences who seem just fine with the slow but steady drip-feed diet, including critically acclaimed offerings like The Abominable Charles Christopher.

Interestingly enough, in my original, longer draft of last week’s blog I had intended to discuss a facet of “the insider perspective” that might have pertained to all this. As a writer, it’s pretty much my job to remember every character and every situation I’ve introduced as clearly as possible. Every few months I re-read the comic from top to bottom in a no doubt futile effort to not go off the rails with the narrative. So I have every line of Deputy Jimmy’s dialogue fresh in my head, when many readers would probably just wonder: who the hell is Deputy Jimmy?

And why not? His last appearance was not that long ago in terms of the comic, but in real world terms he hasn’t graced the page since 2010. So in that sense, yes, if it weren’t for the success of other weekly story comics I might succumb to that nagging feeling that I’m fooling myself anyone besides me has a sense of continuity about what I’m doing. I still don’t expect any of you, even Dawn, to have it to the same level I do, because I’m sure you all have better things to do than try to keep all this stuff straight over the years. Mind you it doesn’t stop me from doing subtle or even not-so-subtle callbacks to previous comics, but I knew better than to throw a fit because no one commented “Oh!” when Rosa answered Frank’s snark with some of her own. The two strips in question were originally published five months apart… it’s something that probably would only be noticeable in the print issue or an archive dive, assuming anyone noticed at all before I brought it up just now.

Speaking of which, I feel like it’s a valid point to consider that as every new comic is published, the time separations between them disappear. It’s a reason I don’t begrudge those who skip off for a few weeks or even months before returning to “catch up”. It doesn’t do our daily traffic counts any good, but that’s a perfectly viable alternative for those who aren’t comfortable reading at the pace of a page a week, and I’d much prefer that to anyone feeling they had to stop reading entirely, particularly if they were enjoying the story!

I have to say that as losing readers goes, “I like this but there’s not enough of it” is one of the mildest, if not one of the most positive, criticisms there can be. There will be more — and even if the frequency doesn’t satisfy, if the content connects there’s always the possibility they might tune back in down the road.

Say, we mentioned it on our Facebook and Twitter already, but in case you didn’t know: the digital versions of our print issues are finally available for download!

Issues #1, #2, and #3 are available off of Indyplanet Digital for 99 cents apiece: LINK

As always, the comic continues to be free to read right here on this site, but some of you have asked about the option for a digital collection, so we’re pleased to be able to provide. Thanks as always for reading!

(EDIT to add: Sorry about the late post. As noted on our Facebook (since we couldn’t post here), everything was ready to go on time, but our hosting service went down last night and still wasn’t up yet as of 3AM PST which is when I had to call it a night. Seems to be fixed as of this morning, so enjoy!)

Take a moment to think about your answer. Even for the most empathic of us, I would venture to suggest that “feeling someone else’s pain” remains a figure of speech rather than anything literal. We make our best guesses based on the feedback we receive, and react accordingly.

To put it bluntly (so to speak), there is no way I am going to know exactly how it felt for you when you stub your toe in front of me. At best, I will wince in sympathy by equating to that time I stubbed my toe, and recalling that man, that really sucked. I’m coming at your pain from my experience. And if I’ve somehow managed to avoid stubbing my toe for my entire life, then I’m having to find something else that seems to come closest… maybe banging my elbow?

Everyone starts and ends with the self. It’s not the same thing as saying we are all selfish, because selflessness can and does occur — but feeding your children before yourself, or rescuing strangers from a burning building still doesn’t bridge the islands of consciousness. We approach other people and the world from the ultimate insider perspective. Our own.

As Keanu Reeves might say: Whoa.

But seriously, I have this notion that the creative arts are our way of trying to reach out across those gaps that separate us. Anyone can dream, but the greatest artists are the ones who can make the best use of whatever their chosen medium or media might be to share their dreams with others. They can communicate that stubbed toe in such a vivid way that we not only recognize it from our own experience but can’t help but get a pang in our own foot. Or at least our elbow.

The insider perspective, brought out for all to see.