Zombie Ranch

Growing up in the 1980s, I was a huge Uncanny X-Men fan. I had next to no idea about who was writing and drawing it (although for the record it was the Chris Claremont/John Byrne dream team), all I knew was my big sister just happened to have a few issues lying around in her [...]

Verisimilitude, dear readers. Verisimilitude. Mouthful of a word, isn’t it? In fiction it speaks directly to the issue of “realism”, and how close or how far a story holds to how we understand things to function in our daily lives. It’s also tied into willing suspension of disbelief, internal consistency, blah-dee blah… The important thing to me here, this [...]

You know, I’m not sure if our weekly schedule has been harder or easier of late on those of you who are truly caught up in the throes of “What happens next?” Is it good to have a week to relax the tension while you go about your other business, or is it torturous? I [...]

The past few weeks this blog has been pretty heavy on the “business” side of my experiences, so I figure it might be about time to get back to discussing more creative matters. The idea of tropes raised its head again in the comic commentary recently, and this time for once it wasn’t me bringing [...]

Last week I went over my reasons for why Dawn and I have become leery of submitting to paid entry contests involving our creative work. Even if they’re not intended as scams, some of them just seem like little more than what could be termed “vanity awards”, where if you rise to the top of the heap you get to put a [...]

In case you trip over my pretentious (and possibly inappropriately used) Latin here, the basic translation is “I do not wish to contend”, or more simply, “no contest”. The term mainly comes up in U.S. courts where a defendant chooses to accept conviction on the criminal charges filed against them without actually admitting guilt, even though it [...]

I think I’ve mentioned before how lately I’d gotten somewhat pessimistic going into convention appearances. There have been occasions of terrible sales, terrible boredom, and on a couple of occasions a deadly combination of both, and running into one of the latter when you go in bright-eyed and full of hope is a disastrous toll [...]

You know about Shaun. But do you know about Juan? The oddest thing about the movie Juan of the Dead is that the pun of its title works far better in English than the original Spanish of “Juan de los Muertos“, especially when you consider that the international release of the original Dawn of the Dead [...]

A few weeks ago I was reminded once again that my perspective on this series is not that of the average reader. Now when I’m saying “average” I don’t mean that in a disparaging sense, because otherwise I’d be putting myself in that same boat with my readings of other peoples’ work. Sometimes I don’t [...]

I’ve had this poll on the site for a few weeks now asking people what their favorite method of reading comics is: online, or in print? And I acknowledged right up front that this is perhaps a silly question to ask on a webcomic site, but I myself fall into the position where I often [...]

Well, last week I spelled out all my reservations regarding the sudden expansion of Emerald City Comic Con. Was it as big a letdown as I expected? Thankfully, no. In fact, if it weren’t for the expense involved in getting there, I would have signed us up for another year. Yeah, we’re not headed back [...]

As stated in the text section below this week’s comic, this coming weekend will see Dawn and I returning to the Emerald City Comicon in Seattle for the second year. We also included a custom map showing our location, because the convention has become… larger. The press for the show says it’s their biggest ever, and they aren’t [...]

There’s a tab on several of the more popular TV  Tropes pages with the initials “WMG”, which stands for “Wild Mass Guessing“. If you’ve ever debated with your friends over something like whether Cobb is awake or asleep at the end of Inception, you’ve experienced this phenomenon. It can be a lot of fun to [...]

So I have a confession to make, and that’s that I was not exactly champing at the bit to see Django Unchained. Yes, despite Quentin Tarantino’s name attached (and actually directing rather than simply producing). Despite it being a modern homage to the Spaghetti Westerns of yore, with the added twist of bringing a Deep South [...]

There comes a time in every webcomic’s life, assuming it lasts past the first several months, that a creator will look back at the first pages and think, “Man, that’s some rough stuff.” Some people go so far as to completely redraw these pages in a frenzy of revision, which can lead to some real [...]

Last week’s comic represented a bit of a rarity for us, in that we actually went ahead and showed a person with his face half chewed off. For a comic named “Zombie Ranch”, we really don’t have much of a gore quotient, do we? Well, it’s one of my pet theories that constant gore gets [...]

There was a feature Wizard Magazine used to do back in the day, which many online geek sites still continue their own versions of: who would their speculative actor picks be for a movie based on a comic book? Sometimes the decision was based on the looks, sometimes it was the attitude, sometimes both. Sometimes [...]

I put up a couple of polls regarding comic conventions around the end of last year. One asked what your main reason was for not going to them… lack of money was the clear winner there, followed by distance. I hear ya. The poll was meant from an attendee perspective, but from an exhibitor standpoint [...]

I remember several years back, while I was still deep in the midst of my Left 4 Dead phase,  this delightful piece of artwork made its way to my attention via the various currents of the Internet (click the pic for the larger version): Possibly just because there happened to be four kids in the [...]

The main obstacle with webcomics isn’t getting them published. Even if you don’t have a lick of money to spare, you can score some free site space and start posting your creative output to the world. No, the main obstacle is actually getting the world to notice you. If you care about that sort of thing. [...]

I have long been a sucker for “real-time”, dramatic side-scroller platformer games. It’s not a big genre. I mean, technically we’re talking the same sort of gameplay that’s been around for decades (perhaps most famously in the original Super Mario Bros.), but there’s a certain specific vibe to the ones I’m referring to, which I [...]

This week marks the 150th story page of Zombie Ranch. That would mark another milestone of sorts, but one thing I’ve found in the process of writing this comic is that such events don’t necessarily line up with the opportunity to celebrate or even draw attention to them. I mean, if the whole Mayan Calendar [...]

The past couple of comic pages have been my opportunity to finally dip my foot into a subject that so far has been only present in my mind, my notes, and some scattered references in the cast summary and world FAQ. Suzie’s bio probably brings it up most prominently: “The young owner of the Z [...]

If you happen to be a grammar guardian who knows the difference between “discrete” and “discreet”, hold off on the torches and pitchforks— I’m actually using the word correctly. This post has nothing to do with being subtle or secretive, but rather the separation of elements. Namely, the usefulness of splitting a story into separate [...]

I originally titled this post “Happiness in Slavery” before deciding that was just slightly overblown as a headline, even if it makes for a snappy Nine Inch Nails reference. Last week I spent some bandwidth discussing the whole idea of the boundaries of “professionalism” insofar as making an independent comic goes, and in a sense you could [...]

There’s a constant, looming spectre that lurks just over the shoulders of everyone involved in creating webcomics. Were I hosting a social mixer where it needed a nametag, I suppose I’d call it “professionalism”. Sooner or later, it creeps into the thoughts and stress levels of everyone who decides to try their hand at the [...]

Feeling a bit under the weather this week, so my blog will be shorter than usual, but I definitely wanted to bring this up. I had a happy accident last week when I browsed back to a listing site that I hadn’t visited in awhile, looking to see how our entry was faring. Well, lo [...]

The Long Beach Comic & Horror Con holds a special place in our hearts. Zombie Ranch was jumpstarted into being when we were given our first ever exhibitor space in 2009, back when it was just called the Long Beach Comic Con and was a brand new venture. So were we. Untried, untested, but enthusiastic [...]

If you ever labor under the illusion that your childhood experiences have no effect on your adulthood? Forget it. I’m not just talking about the smell of cinnamon relaxing you because your mom made homemade buns, or a phobia of creepy crawlies you acquired when you picked up and drank from an “occupied” soda can. [...]

I can’t speak for all writers everywhere, but a lot of what I do seems to boil down to getting my characters and situations from Point A to Point B in what I hope is an entertaining and not too overly contrived manner. This week’s comic is risky in that respect. There’s a lot of things going [...]

According to our current on-site poll, which we’ve let percolate for several weeks now, not one person has ever discovered Zombie Ranch as a result of running into us at a “Live Appearance”, which naturally would include any of the conventions we’ve ever done; including Comikaze 2012 which came and went with the poll live for [...]

People have commented before that they had to get through the beginning of Zombie Ranch before it began to hook them and get them engaged as fans. Oh, we did our best to try to spark enough curiosity for that, what with the floating camera bot and undead horsie, but I won’t deny things were [...]

If Dawn and I were married to this comic, we’d have just passed our third anniversary, which some call the “leather anniversary”. I don’t know why I bring that particular factoid up, except it reminds me that I still haven’t really had time nor opportunity to address the issue of leather goods in a mostly post-bovine setting. [...]

By the time next week’s posting goes live, Zombie Ranch will have reached its 3rd anniversary. I reckon I’ll talk more on that once the occasion has arrived, but it does remind me that we have produced quite a few comic pages, and I’ve written quite a few of these blogs to accompany them. I [...]

So we’re back from Comikaze 2012… pardon me, I guess it’s full formal name now is “Stan Lee’s Comikaze - Comic, Anime, Gaming Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Expo - Shock and Awesome!”. We were there for the inaugural show last year, and since they let us be special guests with a free Artist’s Alley table, we were [...]

Sometimes it’s nice just to kick back and watch a movie for the sheer hell of it. Last week I got all deeply analytical and philosophical on the subject of Once Upon A Time In The West, a film made with meticulous care and a measured, operatic pace. This week, I popped open a cold [...]

Longtime readers will know of my love for Sergio Leone’s westerns, particularly The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I may have even gone so far as to call that particular film his masterpiece. If you’re familiar with Leone’s work, you might be about to argue with me… and I’ll admit, you might very well [...]

Fiction writers must drive the FBI nuts. I’m thinking about the research I did just for this current sequence of pages. Guns. Pipe bombs. Ways to sabotage heavy equipment. As I sat there on one lunch break at work, casually browsing an online manual of ecoterrorism, it occurred to me that this sort of thing must [...]

Came across one of my old college textbooks the other day. Seeing as I went to college in the early 90s, I can’t even really remember which class it was for, but it had an interesting guide to elements of fiction, with an eye towards analyzing and critiquing written stories. One of the elements it [...]

So a couple weeks ago, I got “freshly pressed” for the first time. The Satellite Show, which is the blog collective I post to most every Saturday in addition to my yammerings here, is hosted on the actual WordPress.com site. One of the things that can happen because of this detail is that a WordPress editor may happen across [...]

Don’t let T.S. Eliot fool you with his excoriation of April; in the webcomic world, indeed, the online content world as a whole, April is pretty sweet. It’s August and its partners in crime, June and July, that sneak up on you every year and sucker punch you. The worst is probably the first time [...]

This is going to be a weird piece of writing; a very subjective piece of writing. But then, aren’t they all? There’s this cartoon making the rounds of my Facebook acquaintances recently, produced by Shannon Wheeler of Too Much Coffee Man fame. How old is the cartoon? Good question. The Internet, especially in the form of social [...]

Hang around authors of fiction long enough and you’re bound to hear one or more of them express something along these lines: “My characters have taken over my story! It doesn’t matter what I want anymore… they’re writing it for me!” It’s entirely possible some of you reading this, being writers yourselves, have experienced the [...]

So as some of you know, we did not manage to score a Small Press table this year for Comic-Con International. We did what we could in terms of getting our paperwork and jury submission in early, but in the end we were put back on the wait list, and this time there was no [...]

Two weeks ago I was discussing the movie Tremors, and among other things praising the characters for reacting to their situation in a “fairly realistic” manner. If you’re wondering what I mean by that, I guess the core of the idea could be boiled down to this: – If a character puts their hand on a hot stove, [...]

When this article goes live, it will be July 4th in most of the United States of America, a.k.a. Independence Day. It is the freedomest of freedom times, though mostly we just end up celebrating the anniversary of our declared separation from the governance of the British Empire with beer, barbecues, and lots of bright lights and [...]

I’ve been asked several times about my inspirations for Zombie Ranch. I’ve gone over none too few of them in these articles over the years, and I’ve done enough of these articles I can no longer rightly remember if I ever gave Tremors its due. If I have, I apologize… but only somewhat, because I’m [...]

It’s always flattering when someone solicits for commentary on their work, but especially so if it’s another writer whose work you happen to respect and enjoy. If that writer also happens to be a good buddy? That’s pretty much a trifecta. Anyhow, for a few years now I’ve been helping my friend Justin Robinson with [...]

I wanted to talk some more about the concept of character depth in fiction. I think about this issue a lot, as evidenced most recently by my blog post from a few weeks ago on getting your audience to give a damn about fictional beings. So you may imagine my chin-scratching delight in finding a 2010 article at [...]

I have a confession to make. The following analogy is not mine. I wish it was. “It’s almost like every webcomic is a student on a college campus; we see each other everywhere, yet rarely talk.” No, that quote comes from Devin Blake, author of Monster Soup, after I emailed her with my compliments on [...]

Well, here we are at our latest cover week, otherwise known as the-break-that’s-not-really-a-break before we get started on the next chapter. I suppose we’re peculiar in that we use a placeholder in the episode we’re currently working on, then at the end of the arc is when we debut the cover and shuffle it into [...]

Sometimes there are inspirations out there you don’t realize until you find that you’ve been unknowingly trodding along in their giant footsteps. For years I’d been vaguely aware there were these highly regarded independent comics being published under the title Love and Rockets. I never paid much heed to the buzz, since most of the [...]

Last week I put a poll up asking what you readers would choose when faced with the same “one bullet” decision Suzie had to make. By an overwhelming margin, most of you opted for shooting Muriel. Couple that with the previous poll’s runaway answer that you didn’t care what her reasonings were, she needed to die, and [...]

Man. Santa Claus. If there’s one thing more played out than zombies, it’s Santa Claus, am I right? Seems like every Christmas, another glut of saccharine, kid-friendly movies come out to “celebrate the season” with the same old lessons in rediscovering childhood magic and believing in jolly fat men, ironically decrying the commercialism of the modern Holiday while [...]

Oh, you can complain, or quit reading, or both, but it isn’t really grounds for a lawsuit. What am I babbling about? Mood whiplash: when a work of fiction veers between emotional extremes so quickly it can leave your head spinning. One of the more well-known variations is the laugh spot that’s followed immediately by [...]

Last week, we had a reader leave us. He (and I will presume the gender simply because I don’t feel like typing ‘they’ or some clunkier pronoun option throughout the article) expressed a lack of satisfaction with our once-a-week update schedule, with the last straw being our late posting of Comic 118. There was no [...]

Are you self-centered? 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 [...]

In the throes of my March Madness this last month I was sitting one morning at my day job, sorting through paperwork, when a co-worker asked if “I was going”. After one of those long moments where you desperately sort through everything such a vague question might be referring to, I realized that it was [...]

“Karma owes us,” Dawn declared as we sat on an Alaskan Airlines jet waiting to take off from Burbank airport last Thursday. Somehow we’d managed to get everything together for our journey to Seattle, despite the last minute one-two punch of her badly spraining her ankle and coming down with a nasty cold. Karma delivered. [...]

I need to come right out and say it: Dawn and I make a good team. Don’t laugh, it’s something that we often forget, especially in the throes of a miscommunication in the face of approaching deadlines (“I told you he needed to be wearing a hat!” “No you didn’t!”, etc.), or the arguments trying to get ourselves [...]

The next action-packed(?) installment on our schedule for March was WonderCon, which happened this last weekend at the Anaheim Convention Center. Exhibiting at WonderCon was actually a fairly late decision for us, since even though it moved down to our neck of the woods for 2012, we had free professional badges all set to go [...]

Much of the United States (and let’s not exclude nerds here because I personally know several who also happen to be basketball fans) knows of the term “March Madness” as referring to the men’s college basketball tournament that occurs every year around this time. For me, it’s more the case that we just have a [...]

One of the things I find most fun about the zombie ranch concept is working out how similar (or in some cases, how different) they might be to a conventional livestock herd. Obviously close enough that Suzie’s daddy, the late Jonathan Zane, was able to adapt some of the tried-and-true methods of cattle ranching to wrangling [...]

I think it was approximately a year ago that a certain trailer made the rounds amongst my zombie and video game loving friends. Everyone was out of their minds over this 3 minute video, a promotion for the upcoming game Dead Island. It was artistic. It was bloody, and tragic, and scary, and heartbreaking, and [...]

Right around the time we were starting up Zombie Ranch, Dawn and I became aware of a reality television show purporting to show how people might survive and thrive in the face of apocalypse. Not a zombie apocalypse, per se, but still presented as a global-scale disaster which would leave small groups of survivors isolated from outside [...]

On the comments for last week’s comic, an interesting point was brought up. Can’t all this potential violence be solved by just handing Zeke (or technically, the zombie-formerly-known-as-Zeke) over? Possibly. Seems like it could work. Will it be tried? That’s for me to know, and you to find out. Right now, it seems like Suzie [...]

It may be very presumptive to expect anyone besides me to pay this much attention to the progression of the comic, but I wonder if anyone’s noticed that folks like Suzie and Frank don’t do things like say “ya” for “you” nearly as much as they did in Episode 1? It’s strange how that’s evolved– [...]

You buy a ticket. 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 [...]

Ever heard the idea of the elevator pitch? If you’d rather not let Wikipedia enlighten you, I can summarize by saying that, well… it’s a summary. 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 [...]

As I’m writing this blog, it is Dawn’s birthday. When it publishes, her birthday will be past, and I hope I will have achieved a sort of extra present for her, which will actually be more of an absent than a present: I’m going to try not to have ”coach face” for Tuesday evening. If you’ve ever [...]

So this week’s comic revealed that yes, Mrs. McCarty and her posse are responsible for the current smoky state of the Z Ranch. It’s entirely possible that this surprised no one. 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 [...]

On the poll before the current one I asked y’all what your preference would be in the world of Zombie Ranch: the order and security of a Safe Zone, or the freedom and risk of the Wild Zones? With 61 votes tallied at the time I closed voting, the Wild Zoners had edged out the [...]

Yeah, okay, that’s not much of a threat (or relief), is it? 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 [...]

Other comic authors, and aspiring comic authors, sometimes wonder about the topic of pacing their story. Occasionally they seek advice about it. Once in a very great while, I’m asked to give that advice. This is not really one of those times, I’m just going to weigh in without anyone having specifically asked my opinion. [...]

I guess I’ve had Ancient Romans on the brain lately. The previous comic referenced Juvenal’s famous passage regarding bread and circuses, and now with this comic I’ve been thinking back again on lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights This [...]

Writers tend to do a lot of research. I think we even take a perverse enjoyment in the activity. You might have gotten a hint of that after I spent most of my last blog giddily describing all the physical details of San Antonio that made me want to turn it into a futuristic city-state. [...]

Well, here we are. Comic #100 in the zombie ranch storyline, and the start of Episode 5. I wanted to do something special, both for us and for you. Up until now we’ve kept our locations purposely vague. We’re somewhere in Texas. Now we’re on the borders of Oklahoma, or looking in on a shadowy [...]

Unless you’re new to this blog, you’re probably well aware that I am… wordy. Locquacious. Trending towards maximum verbosity. Don’t worry about looking all those up, it’s just different ways of saying that for better or worse I tend to assault you with walls of text in making my points. Unless I try really hard, [...]

I still recall a singularly discouraging moment I suffered during San Diego Comic-Con 2007. It was around the time I had first started mulling over the idea of scripting a comic for Dawn to draw, but was still in the process of figuring out just how I might do that effectively. It also happened to be [...]

If you’ve been reading this blog even semi-regularly you’re probably aware of my ongoing love affair with the TV Tropes website. This entrancing siren is a user-maintained database documenting all the fiddly bits and techniques we love to use and recognize in the creation or appreciation of fiction (and sometimes non-fiction as well), and whenever I go [...]

This past weekend, at least according to the WordPress site stats counter, Zombie Ranch experienced its one millionth pageview. It’s a mark I saw approaching and figured would be hit by the end of the year, but I think this is better since it means by the time December 31st rolls around we should have [...]

Two weeks ago I wrote about the ideal of having artwork that meshes perfectly into the storytelling of comics, and how I felt the right choice and arrangement of panels was an inescapable part of that. At that time I included some scans of J.H. Williams III’s artwork to illustrate the possibilities, but this time around [...]

Netflix has been having its issues of late—price increases, bizarre business model alterations—thankfully the whole Qwikster idiocy has now been abandoned, but with all the rough patches it was nice to fire something up this last weekend that reminded me why I fell in love in the first place. Troll Hunter (original title: Trolljegeren) is a Norwegian film shot [...]

At APE I had an all-too-brief discussion with one of our neighbors about the balance of art versus storytelling in the comics medium. The premise of the conversation is already on shaky territory because ideally, any and all art in comics is storytelling, but I understood exactly what she meant when she brought it up. [...]

Not all nerd shows are created equal. Dawn and I have only been exhibiting for two years now, exclusively in California (and mostly Southern California, for that matter), but it’s a truth we’ve come to realize. You understand this phenomenon somewhat as an attendee as well… some conventions seem more cosplay-friendly than others, some have [...]

Let’s face it: we’re obsessed. Humans, that is. We’re obsessed with our own mortality, and have been likely since the first person ever had the conscious realization, watching their tribemates pass away, that one day they, too, would “move along”. It was only natural, sooner or later, that people would start applying this notion to [...]

I have a confession to make, and it’s that, despite my rambling on in recent weeks about the unique power and pacing of certain classic movies, I might never have seen this one were it not for my good friend (and Zombie Ranch enthusiast) Anthony. Even then it was almost accidental — Anthony just had [...]

Some of you may be aware of the on-again, off-again comic project Dawn has called Bits of Nothing. It’s basically a repository for any and all strange ideas she gets into her head that she feels a compulsive need to draw, like a slightly more structured sketchbook (in fact we do gather them together in [...]

Earlier this year my friends and I stumbled across a song from the Australian band Tripod called “King Kong“, featuring the insistent chorus, “Get to the F—ing Monkey” (so NSFW, unless perhaps you work in construction). On TV Tropes the sentiment they express falls under the Just Here For Godzilla heading: the idea that if, [...]

Readers of this here blog know I’ve had the Weird West on my mind for the past few weeks. Well, arguably I’ve had the Weird West on my mind since I first started writing Zombie Ranch, but I’ve been thinking on it lately even more than usual. One particular bit that kept hazily surfacing was [...]

The poll we have up for the site right now asks for readers to pick from a list of genres the one choice that most represents Zombie Ranch to them. The split so far seems to be fairly even between “Science Fiction” and “Western”, although the frontrunner is the non-answer “Sorry, my head exploded”. Which [...]

Those of you who’ve incorporated this blog into their weekly reads might recall that I believe heartily that the Weird West represents a fertile ground for all manner of fiction. Those that haven’t can probably hazard a guess that a guy writing something called Zombie Ranch would have such a belief. As a swift recap for [...]

I still have never managed to track down the original source, but I have oft repeated the following quote (or variations thereof): “The main difference between vampires and zombies in modern fiction is that good vampire stories focus on the vampires, while good zombie stories focus on the humans.” The point being that while vampires are [...]

Sounds a little dirty, don’t it? Or at very least, a little French. Horrible, horrible French. Frenchlish, in the same way there’s the concept of “Spanglish”. Though come to think of it, ever since that little incident in 1066 (“Hey England, you got any Norman in ya? Would ya like some?”), English is stuffed full [...]

So we’re back, and I can honestly say this was a very, very different Comic-Con than we’ve ever experienced in the past. I don’t know why that came as any sort of surprise, since I kept repeating that to myself and others prior to last week, but it’s akin to the difference between being told [...]

Every so often I run a google search on Zombie Ranch, just to see what might turn up out there in the wilds of the Internet. This past week I turned up a great review from a Western-themed blog called (cleverly enough) “Slap Bookleather”. Hang on before I give you any link though, and let [...]

This time next week, Dawn and I should be down in San Diego, steeling ourselves for five straight days of showing off Zombie Ranch to any and all that might wander by Small Press K-4. We won’t be in the schedule as Zombie Ranch, however. For the first time (but hopefully not the last), we’ll [...]

If you read my blog entry last week then you know I was a tad starstruck at the idea of being invited to speak on the same panel as someone like Neal Stephenson. I carried through with it in what I hope was a professional, and, more importantly, thought-provoking manner, but there’s that word: professional. [...]

This is one of those things I’m still trying to get used to. There’s my Hawaiian-shirted self up there as part of a panel of established professionals, discussing the merits and techniques of using violence as a storytelling tool. I’m sitting in between Bob Goodwin, the fight choreographer for Batman Begins, and Neal Stephenson, the [...]

The debate on writing vs. visual art in comics has probably been around for as long as there have been comics. I’ve already admitted that it’s possible to have a comic composed entirely of images, with no words attached… in fact, some of the most highly acclaimed sequences or even entire stories out there are [...]

It’s not much of a secret that in our household, Dawn is the much bigger anime/manga fan than I am. I would say I missed the era growing up that might have gotten me into it, but both Battle of the Planets and Robotech were readily available on my television during my formative years. Which [...]

Dawn and I both share a deep regard for cuteness where cuteness Should Not Be. She goes further than I do in finding abominations to be somehow adorable, cooing over such horrid things as lobsters, zombie horses, and of course, the man she married… but I admit to a dark appreciation for those who can [...]

First off, thanks to everyone so far who voted in the “favorite character” poll. Suzie’s winning by a landslide, which is probably a good sign considering she’s our leading lady, but I’m glad to see the rest getting a handful of votes as well (even a couple for poor ol’ Zeke!). I think the outcome [...]

Am I allowed to shout that without being on a golf course? Do they still shout that on golf courses? Doesn’t matter I suppose, it’s not even spelled the same in print (the golf shout is “fore!”, if you must know). Here, we’re moving on to Episode Four in the comic, and it will be [...]

So in case you haven’t been keeping up on the Facebook and Twitter stuff, we proudly announce that as of last week, Zombie Ranch #2 is “on the shelves” for purchase courtesy of Indyplanet.com. This is the full print version and comes directly from their site, which means some shipping and handling charges will be [...]

Well here we are with the end of ‘Episode 3′, and it doesn’t look like Mrs. McCarty cooled off, after all (did anyone besides the Sheriff really think she would? And even he was probably just engaged in some wishful thinking). As has become tradition we will be pausing for a snazzy cover image next week, [...]

Wow, did I double up on the strange references for this blog title or what? Mostly it’s a quote from the classic movie version of Wizard of Oz, as the “Wizard” is discovered to be just a small, mortal man operating the large, scary fake head and special effects the heroes were in awed terror of on [...]

So here Dawn and I are, having tucked away one convention last week, only to be moving on to the next starting this Friday. This plus being present and accounted for at our day jobs, and also making the decision to keep the comic rolling along. I guess you could see it as being “in [...]

As I’ve touched on before in my discussions here of Rango and Deadlands, the Old West (and its derivatives thereof) is a place that lends itself easily to the power of myth; a place where the reality of those crazy tales told ’round a campfire on the dark prairie doesn’t seem too far out of the question. When I [...]

Not too long ago, Scott McCloud posted in his blog praising a webcomic (not ours, don’t get excited…) for accomplishing a very simple, very crucial task: “It makes me wonder, on nearly every page, what’s going to happen next. Simple as that. A little thing, really. And yet, in the end, it’s everything.” It’s absolutely [...]

Can’t really call it an Age of Wonder, we weren’t there that long (and I didn’t spy a single Skeksis), but Dawn and I have concluded our “business trip” up to WonderCon this past weekend. On  the minus side, we spent more time driving than actually being out on the convention floor. On the plus [...]

If I haven’t outed myself as an RPG nerd in my writings yet, well, here we go with no more room for wrigglin’. I’m not just talking the computer RPGs (though I do like those), I’m talking the old school pen & paper, grab the Cheetos & Mountain Dew and hang out in the parents’ [...]

In this blog I’m partially going to tread onto Dawn’s turf, but hey, comics are a continual mix of words and pictures (even if sometimes you can toss words completely out of the mix, which is why comics writers are such an insecure bunch). She’s talked about writing before, and now I wanna talk about [...]

I’m gonna get this out of the way right now, so there’s no suspense. Rango. Loved it, and not just because the title character has great taste in shirts. Kinda wanna have its little gecko babies. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, not to mention scientifically impossible in a whole lot of ways… but there’s a [...]

There’s horror, and then there’s horror. Sometimes it’s the little things that bring the apocalypse home, as Douglas Adams knew when he wrote in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about Arthur Dent trying to wrap his brain around the destruction of the entire Earth: England no longer existed. He’d got that — somehow he’d got [...]

Even a genius can be wrong. And I’m not even a genius. Case in point, Stephen Thor found my review of Gone Zombie from last week and proceeded to prove me to be the opposite of prophetic on the subject of never seeing Zombie Ranch mentioned in his blog. Seems I underestimated the amount of [...]

It’s weird, but I suppose unsurprising, that you can browse the web for months and yet completely overlook something, even when it’s right up the alley of what you might be looking for. For example, while checking information for our visit to the upcoming WonderCon (no booth, just attending), I noticed an advertisement for something [...]

I’ve occasionally made mention of the other blog site I write on, I think most recently back just after Long Beach Comic-Con 2010 when I felt like I had so much to cover that I outsourced my review of The Walking Dead premiere over that way. Most of the time The Satellite Show remains the [...]

Can you believe it? San Diego Comic-Con 2011 finally got its online badge registration up and running this last Saturday, and sold out within 12 hours of the opening bell. Not only that, but “up and running” was a severely relative term for those trying to get their passes, as apparently there was a lot [...]

This week’s comic was hopefully worth the wait for you faithful readers. No dialog from me, but my oh my was there a lot of work regardless. That probably doesn’t make much sense, since you’d think all the burden of work in a wordless page would be on the artist. And truth to tell, I’ve [...]

Longtime readers of this blog may recall that several months ago I blogged about the movie True Grit. The original 1969 production starring The Duke, that is, although I had recently heard first word of the Coen Brothers remake and was excited for it. Weird, I was just thinking how John Wayne only managed to [...]

In one of our early brainstorming sessions for Zombie Ranch, we discussed how when the near-apocalypse was going down, huge swarms of zombies ravaged the countryside, devouring everything in their paths like two-legged locusts. Sure, they were still slow and uncoordinated, but most livestock abandoned in their pens were going to be some doomed critters. [...]

Oh, the wonderful Fallout of the Holiday season. Literally. Pictured on the right is the box art of my Christmas treat, courtesy of some Best Buy gift cards from generous relatives enabling me to forbear upon a certain amount of fiscal responsibility in favor of a new toy. I honestly was still hemming and hawing [...]

It is always darkest before the Dawn… But this time… there will be no Dawn! How dramatic was that? And now my wife & comic partner is going to ruin it all if she happens to make a filler post, but we’ll have to see just how much offishness she’s going to have with her week off. [...]

If Dawn hasn’t declared as such already, I’ll repeat the message here, which is that this coming week will be our brief “winter vacation”. I’ll most likely have a blog up, but the comic will resume on January 12th. Hope everyone had/has Happy Holidays! I had mentioned this pair of books a couple blogs ago, [...]

And not in the (arguably) good Internet way. No, for the past week I’ve been in the throes of a cold which has been repeatedly attempting to kick my ass up through my sinuses, and if not quite succeeding in that, it’s at least doing a fine job of being debilitating. So that said, I [...]

You know what the single most insidious feature of Amazon.com is? It’s not 1-click ordering, or their immense selection, or their discounts… it’s that Super Saver Shipping deal. You buy $25 or more of qualifying items, and they ship to you for free. Admittedly books have gotten expensive these days along with most everything else [...]

There are a lot of writing guides out there offering tips to those trying to step up their game with their own fictional offerings. There’s a lot of advice in those guides, presented with varying degrees of authority and mandate, and sometimes hoping you’ll be willing to pay for the privilege rather than just browsing [...]

Have I mentioned how many weird ideas come out of Dawn’s mind on a near daily basis? I believe I have. As evidence, this comic would not exist if it were otherwise. If not captured and turned into webcomics or art, these ideas tend to keep circulating and coming up every so often. One of [...]

Netflix Instant is a wonderful thing. For less than 10 bucks a month you get unlimited access in addition to your one-at-a-time DVD mailer allotment, with the only limitation being you need some sort of broadband-enabled hardware to stream it (your computer will do if you don’t have an Xbox or Wii to work with). [...]

This week’s comic delves a bit more into the moral/legal framework of the Zombie Ranch world, which I must admit is one of the main reasons I was excited with developing the concept in the first place. Let’s face it, there’s plenty of zombie fiction out there dealing with the apocalypse as it happens, or [...]

Last week I had three big zombie-related topics on my mind, and opted to write about our Zombie Ranch outing to Long Beach Comic Con 2010. That left out any more than just a brief mention of AMC’s premiere of “The Walking Dead”, and Rockstar’s DLC release of their Undead Nightmare pack for Red Dead [...]

There’s really just entirely too much to talk about this week, even for me. Yeah, I’m serious. “The Walking Dead” premiered as a series on AMC, the Undead Nightmare expansion came out for Red Dead Redemption, and then of course there was Long Beach Comic Con. I could probably do a whole blog on any [...]

Brand Z! Yeah, we don’t actually have them in hand yet, so things could still go horribly wrong… but the order has shipped, so dang it, I can’t wait any longer to say something. Last week I mentioned a special mystery giveaway item we were hoping to have for Long Beach this weekend. Well, the deal is [...]

Well here we are at last with the beginning of Issue #3 of Zombie Ranch. Dawn had less work to do than usual since I went ahead and indulged in some wordiness, and it’s not fair to make your artist try to cram in a lot of images if you’re also going nuts with the text. [...]

First off I wanted to again take a moment to thank everyone who voted in last week’s poll. I did my best to hold back my own opinions until the results were in, so as not to influence anyone, but it looks like the majority shared them: the zombie background won out, and several of [...]

So I’d been pondering our last poll, the one regarding Rosa, and coming to gratifying conclusions. Maybe I shouldn’t be… I mean, to be honest I set that one up mostly for entertainment, including providing a ready made “joke answer”. Little tip: if you want to get anywhere near receiving useful data from a poll, [...]

With this week’s comic we mark the end of what I consider to be the second “issue” of Zombie Ranch. Also, even though this site went live Sept. 25th, 2009, this coming Saturday will mark the first anniversary since we started posting the story, and then in about a month from now we should reach story comic #50. [...]

No, I’m not attempting to one-up discussing Shakespeare last week by randomly quoting Classical Latin. First off, the above phrase isn’t even proper Latin, a discrepancy which comes clear when I tell you it’s from words carved into a wooden plank by a half-literate former Texas Ranger: a Ranger who freely admits he doesn’t know [...]

So in this week’s comic, any of those of you out there who were still waiting finally got themselves a name to call our cheerful trespasser by. Is it her real name? Suzie doesn’t seem to think so, but what’s in a name? I’m reasonably sure The Lord Humongous was not given that name at his [...]

We’re coming up on the first Anniversary of Zombie Ranch. It’s not quite here yet. The site went live on September 25th, 2009, and the first storyline comic was published Oct. 2nd, timed to when the doors opened to the exhibit hall at the first annual Long Beach Comic Con. Zombie Ranch, more than anything, [...]

As I’m writing this it happens to be August 31st in the good ol’ U.S. of A., also known as the birthday of one Clint Wolf. Having a birthday fall in the middle of a busy work week is a bit underwhelming, but it’s possible I could con someone into at least taking me out [...]

Why, you ask? 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 [...]

In last week’s blog I brought up Twilight in an indirect fashion. Not long after, I followed that up by also discussing it in an email exchange with one of our newest Rancheros who spoke of his tweenage daughter’s disdain for zombies (but her love for the Edward, Bella, and Jacob). Apparently this topic is on my brain [...]

As I start writing this, I was suddenly deluged with the thought that telling someone about The New Dead out loud could lead to them thinking I’d recently finished reading an anthology called “The Nude Ed”. That would be an entirely different kind of book, wouldn’t it? Fortunately, the text-only medium of this blog ensures a [...]

It’s weird how you can be around something for years, and yet still miss out on details you didn’t even know you were passing up until someone points them out. For instance, there’s a certain feature of lettering in comics that I never noticed, and yet is considered a fairly important formatting consideration. The issue [...]

One of the things about San Diego Comic-Con is how drained it can leave you when it’s finally over. It takes awhile to adjust back to reality and the idea that you need to go do that day job again that pays the bills. Sometimes this adjustment overlaps with you being at said day job, [...]

So, curious ones, you return. Or perhaps you’re just joining us, if you picked up one of our Comic-Con fliers or otherwise are dropping in for the first time. In any case, welcome to the third and final installment of my blogs regarding my Zombie Ranch scripting method! You can check out the previous ones [...]

So as promised (or threatened, depending on your point of view), I’m going to continue talking about the evolution of my scripting process this week. With that in mind, let’s look at example #2, taken from a later draft of Zombie Ranch. Go ahead and click on the image below for a larger view. All [...]

A question I get asked a lot, even from other webcomickers (perhaps especially from other webcomickers), is how Zombie Ranch goes from thoughts in my brain to a finished page for consumption. Mmm… brains… consumption… wait, where were we? Well, first off, I’m only a portion of the process. According to our latest poll, the [...]

First off… print issue for sale at last! Including the super-duper Special Edition with extra stuff! Yes, this announcement is redundant with the comic blog, but I’m going to throw the link at you again regardless. Cuz I’m excited. LINK. In the comments to last week’s comic, the movie Fido came up. It’s about time [...]

So, I re-watched The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly the other night, and damn if it isn’t even better than I remembered from last time. Quentin Tarantino considers it the best movie ever made. I can’t agree with him there, on account of Jaws existing, but I can understand why he’d feel that way. [...]

I admit it. I’ve wanted to sneak in the phrase “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” since the comic first started. It’s just so cowboy. It is, in fact, cowboy enough to have its own wikipedia entry stating how cowboy it is. Also, we just recently went on a tangent to give y’all a first taste [...]

So, yeah, we’re having a bit of a reactor leak this week. On the plus side, this was the week we had already planned to skip a comic (and pre-warned y’all) due to Dawn’s final exams. On the minus side, both our Cable and Internet are completely kaput at home and the earliest a repairman can [...]

That’s probably what I’ll need down the road, now that I picked up Red Dead Redemption over the weekend. Such are the benefits of having a convention occurring so close to home and closing its exhibit hall relatively early. This game is frigging fantastic… glitchy at times, such as wagons and coaches getting stuck in [...]

So this weekend comes the first inaugural Pasadena Rock’N Comic Con. Will it be any good? We hope so, since we’re going to be part of it! It will be our second “first”, since we also exhibited at the first Long Beach Comic Con last year. LBCC was a great experience, but on the other [...]

This week’s comic features the long-awaited return of Zeke, or at least what’s left of him. No, we didn’t feed him into a wood chipper, but hey, we figured a little suspense never hurts. Wood chippers hurt, though. I mean, not that I would know from personal experience, I’m just guessing. I think it’s a [...]

Zombie Ranch owes its inspiration to many sources, not the least of which was that weird picture Dawn drew in the wee hours of the morning in July 2009. But that was just the beginning. When I started thinking about making a story out of people ranching zombies, there was a lot more that had to [...]

Those of you who were reading this blog around Christmas might recall that I mentioned a few previous places where the idea of ranching zombies for one reason or another had surfaced. Well, turns out I missed one, since a group of talented folks down Arizona way have a couple t-shirts regarding a “Zed’s Zombie [...]

I had the pleasure of some great email correspondence lately with some other zombie aficionados. First I want to give a shout to Carter Reid over at The Zombie Nation, who had sent me a contact back in March saying he was a fan of Zombie Ranch. Now, my email at that time somehow decided [...]

The other day I had a friend complain to me that I’d completely slacked off on my mini-reviews of movies in this blog. This probably surprised me the most in terms of someone actually caring enough about my blog to complain about its contents, but I shall not dwell on that, for creator self-deprecation is [...]

This week, courtesy of the TV Network’s ad for Zombie Ranch, we give you the in-comic answer to the biggest question people have had since the story started. Why ranch zombies? Why keep these horribly dangerous creatures around, risking death (or worse than death) every time you handle them? The occasional rodeo can’t possibly be [...]

Here we are, faithful readers, your first glimpse of a Safe Zone! For those of you who never read the ‘About the Story‘ section or the Setting FAQ, it might in fact be the first exposure you’ve had that there are Safe Zones. No big problem there, you just had to wait a bit longer [...]

So, a few weeks ago the Zombie Ranch theme song popped into my skull. A theme song for a webcomic? Preposterous, you say! And yet, this webcomic is in part about a TV show, and TV shows have theme songs. What could be better than some country-twanged gentleman regaling the Safe Zone audiences about the [...]

Turns out our break was well-timed, since Dawn ended up with a mild bout of RSI in her drawing hand. I recognized the symptoms from back when I was playing MMORPG’s such as City of Heroes/Villains or World of Warcraft obsessively. Fortunately a bit of rest and some ointment are doing wonders, and so we [...]

This week’s comic marks the end point for the first script of Zombie Ranch that I wrote up back in August-September 2009. Mind you, it’s gone through several revisions and extensions since then, but the core arc has remained the same. Poor Zeke has been doomed since the beginning, and anytime I started to get [...]

So now we see how the Z Ranch plans to deal with the question of what to do with a colleague who’s got “the bite”. It calls to mind one of my favorite exchanges from the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw: Higgins: Do you mean to say, you callous rascal, that you would sell [...]

One of the most terrifying aspects of the zombie genre to me is the idea of the inescapable doom that awaits once you’re “infected”. No matter how small or insignificant the wound might seem, the clock is ticking, and denial of the situation inevitably just ends up making things worse for everyone. Mind you, this [...]

Maybe it’s because I’m still a fresh-faced young turk as these things go (heaven knows I’m happy to have an opportunity to apply the adjective “young” to myself in anything), but I have to admit I get a thrill out of sitting behind an exhibitor table. Dawn’s always nervous because she doesn’t feel worthy of [...]

Well now, seems like things might be heatin’ up a bit at that there Z Ranch. Perfect timing for us to pull up stakes and head off to Long Beach, CA for the Comic Con Expo, right? Don’t worry, we still plan to get the next page up on schedule as usual. The Expo is [...]

Based on this week’s comic, it should come as no surprise that I find lawn flamingos to be creepy things. It’s probably the eyes, more than anything. They always put me in mind of a speech from my favorite movie of all time: “And, you know, the thing about a shark… he’s got lifeless eyes. [...]

Strange diseases are a staple of the modern zombie genre, at least since it moved away from radiation and voodoo towards something more infectious in style. Our latest comic brings up Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, better known as “Mad Cow Disease”. You’ve probably heard of it at least in passing. If not, a quick trip to [...]

This week’s comic puts a few more tidbits of zombie-related information out there for you readers, or at least starts to. Chuck tends to ramble on some. It’s probably all that drinking before noon. I have to admit, every time I actually get around to presenting more of what’s in my head (and in my [...]

Bit of a bizarre happening today, aside from Los Angeles threatening to drown under a short but very intense thunderstorm (more rain on the way, too, so we’ll see how that goes… every so often Mother Nature loves reminding the Valley that it’s, well… a valley). Back when I was trying to get some initial [...]

Actually it’s pretty cruel of me to mention the word “drill” today since the artist wife got two root canals done yesterday. She was feeling incredibly lousy and yet still managed to get this week’s comic finished up for y’all, so worship her. Or at least give her a pat on the back (but gently). [...]

All right, then, Holidays are over, everybody back to the grind. This week we’ve finally gotten around to debuting Suzie’s Uncle Chuck in all his food-stained glory. We thank you for your patience, although there’s as good a chance everyone was far too busy with new toys to be keeping up with the Ranch. I [...]

Ya, I took the day off. I know I sort of took the day off when I was sick…but not really because I still drew a comic – though it wasn’t of the greatest of quality. But it was still a comic. But this week we’ve been busy. I had my mother to drive out [...]

It’s the holiday season, and Dawn is already happy as a zombie in brains because her Cintiq drawing tablet arrived. Unlike her previous tablet, the cat hasn’t chewed on the connection cord for this one (yet), so it should much improve her ability to color the comic. One tradition of the holidays seems to be [...]

Here we see what happens when the artist, already smack in the midst of her final exams, catches the horrible head cold I suffered from last week. It’s a nasty bug that severely impairs your ability to do much more than lie around and groan, so I’m surprised she even got the little “sick day” [...]

This week’s Western, courtesy of the fine folks at Netflix, was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It’s another John Ford directed classic, starring John Wayne, although this time around John Wayne gets to share the film with Jimmy Stuart and Lee Marvin. It’s always a treat for me watching actors with a lot of [...]

It’s been an experimental week here at the Zombie Ranch. Some of you might know that Dawn goes live on Ustream from time to time, usually when she’s coloring the next page of the comic, and she’ll chat with whoever happens to drop by to watch. Well, this past weekend she roped me into joining [...]

The artist wife has been miserably sick this past week. It’s a fate I thankfully avoided, but if I tried to draw the comic as well as write it the results would be… well, let’s just say drunken chimpanzees come to mind as an analogy. So for this here Wednesday we’ve got everything but the [...]

The little girl zombie (or LGZ as I call her for short) does seem to be a staple of the living dead genre. Heck, Night of the Living Dead started the trend, as well as the associated trend of the parents-in-denial (PID?) that get murdered and/or eaten by the adorable tyke. The latter doesn’t always [...]

Hi all, Brief interlude here. Being listed on Topwebcomics.com has been helping us out a lot in terms of getting new eyeballs to our site (and thanks for all the votes! Keep ‘em coming!). Anyhow, they recently put out a call to member webcomics to help promote the works of one of their own who [...]

There’s a wee bit of an in-joke in the latest page, concerning the ‘tracking number’ of the zombie. In the interest of letting other geeks like myself feel special I won’t explain it until next time, although I confess the title of this post all but gives it away. I was having a conversation with [...]

I held off publishing any pictures of us from the Long Beach Zombie Walk, since the newest comic is really what gives the context for our appearance. You can’t see it from the photo, but the “bolts” actually did flash. They were made from some battery-powered magnetic raver jewelry that Dawn got hold of, and [...]

And so here’s Halloween and our first “holiday” sketch for Zombie Ranch, a break both from our normal update schedule and our normal continuity. Solomon Kane is a character that might not be too well known out there right now, although that may change once the movie debuts. As my wife indicates, Kane was created [...]

Well, we got mentioned favorably in another blog, this time at A World on Fire. A common mistake was made where he put down our URL as zombieranch.com, rather than zombieranchcomic.com, but I can’t fault him for that. Embarrassingly enough, there’s still times I make that mistake myself, and I’m writing the dang thing! Zombieranch.com, [...]

Now you might be wondering why I didn’t title our latest comic “Dawn of the Dead”, what with the obvious sleazy pun on the artist’s name. Well, that’s just it: too easy. I like to think I have my boundaries. Occasionally. Here we are just ten days from Hallowe’en, and in between writing and my [...]

Horses are terrifying. My artist has convinced me of this. Oh sure, I knew they could be dangerous. They’re big suckers. People can get crushed to death by a horse falling on them. There’s a good reason that for hundreds (if not thousands) of years, heavy cavalry charges could make or break an entire battle [...]

Last night Dawn and I finally managed to get out and see Zombieland. If you loved Shaun of the Dead, you’ll love Zombieland.  Okay, maybe some of you out there won’t. Maybe some of you didn’t even like Shaun of the Dead. In that case, I ain’t talkin’ to you… but we can agree to disagree [...]

The 1st Annual Long Beach Comic Con is over at last, and some of you reading this already have had a sneak peek of our first six Zombie Ranch pages! Or you just got the URL from a strip of paper, a sticker, or just plain’ ol word of mouth. However you got here, welcome! [...]

So the great John Wayne instructs his son in the movie “Red River“. Of course his son ends up taking the cattle to Kansas; similarly, we must defy The Duke’s command and drive our zombies down to Long Beach, instead. The sneak preview print run is done and came out quite nicely, as did our [...]

Now that the sneak preview is off to the presses, Dawn and I had a short chance to breathe and catch up on some sleep. We still have a ton of work to do before getting to our Artist’s Alley table (70A!) at the Long Beach Comic Con this weekend. I mean, people always need [...]

A good idea is much like a hungry zombie. It grabs hold of you and won’t stop until it has consumed your brain. My wife tends to have a lot of ideas, especially when she’s drawing in the middle of the night. Some are ingenious, some are just plain odd. But when I awoke one [...]