Month: February 2010

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 rubbing elbows with much more established, professional neighbors. Me, I think our layout looks pretty darn sweet for a second outing, and the LBCC shows are low key so far, with little in the way of the tightly regulated lines and restricted access you’d experience in San Diego. I’m not a big fan of Jim Lee, but back at the October con there were times Jim Lee was surrounded by no more than a small handful of admirers, smiling and joking as he gave out autographs.

San Diego? If Jim Lee was having a signing there’d likely be a queue, and you’d maybe get to exchange one or two sentences before being asked to move along. Although to be fair, that’s mostly for the scheduled signings hosted by DC or Marvel or whoever. If you know where to look you might be able to catch them at their own booth or table and have some quality time. Heck, I’ve had friends who had random meetings with big pros in hotel bars.

At Long Beach, and especially at this one-day Expo we were at, you didn’t have to go looking. The floor space was small, but clean and adequate for the traffic. Mike Mignola (creator of Hellboy) and Stan Sakai (Usagi Yojimbo) were just two rows over from us. Right next to us was Brian Haberlin, showing off a whole stack of artwork from a huge graphic novel he’s been working on, called Anomaly. Looking at it upside down would have been an option from where I was sitting, but I decided to sneak out and around to the fanboy side of the tables so I could get the full effect. It was that gorgeous.

I should make special mention of Tim Bradstreet as well. I’ve loved his art ever since I first ran across it in the early editions of White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade RPG, and since then he’s gone on to do very memorable images of The Punisher and John Constantine, two of my favorite characters in comics-dom. Tim was nice enough to do free sketches for myself and a friend, and besides that we talked long enough to bond over something as random as a computer game not many folk remember, called Myth: The Fallen Lords. Tim also has a very adorable tiny daughter who kept handing us sketches of her own, although I’m not quite sure what they were meant to represent.

Anyhow, it was also great to see all the folks we met in October once again (minus Amanda Conner who didn’t make it to this one), and talk to some new people as well, like Rebecca Hicks. Rebecca and her significant other have been in the webcomics business for many years now, but I was gratified that she seemed fascinated by at least the concept of Zombie Ranch (hah, wait until she reads it, then we’ll see…).

That’s enough self-deprecation out of me, though. Her own ongoing creation of the moment is called Little Vampires. There are also werewolves, frankensteins, and zombies involved, and if you desire some more light-hearted fare to pass the time, then click on over using that golden link above.

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 one day only and Long Beach isn’t all that far from our homestead; but hey, if anyone’s going and wants to stop by and say howdy, maybe I’ll tell you what happens. Or maybe not, but you can at least get a picture with our scale model Cam-Bot. I still happen to think it’s pretty neat, myself.

Besides the Expo, this week I’m all about the grass. Bluegrass, that is. You might recognize my blog title as a line from a little ditty name of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”, made famous by the Charlie Daniels Band. I’m not sure if TDWDTG counts as pure bluegrass, but let’s not split hairs here: it’s close enough, and more importantly, it’s a rockin’ song. Click here if you want a listen. Not the best recording, but you’ll get the gist.

There’s something about bluegrass that gets my toes tappin’ and my hands clappin’, despite being a city slicker. Maybe it’s my Irish side, genetically hearkening back to the immigrants who developed it out of traditional Scotch-Irish-English folk music, but I think I just find it… FUN.

Yes, this is the stereotypical “hillbilly” music. This is the kind of music that you might remember from Deliverance, and so it has an unfortunate association with… *ahem* non-consensual romance. Nevermind that the perpetrators of said act actually were nowhere near the kid who plays one-half of the “Dueling Banjos” duet with one of the city folk. That duet is actually a great scene where two people from wildly different walks of life find a moment of common ground, while everyone else is fumbling around trying to communicate.

I know who the real culprits who instigated this sudden resurgence of my interest are, though, and that’s Billy Hill and the Hillbillies, otherwise known as just “The Billys”. This last weekend Dawn and I went to Disneyland, and being faithful Zombie Ranchers we figured we’d catch a show at the Golden Horseshoe Theater over in Frontierland. Dawn had seen The Billys play before, but it was my first time, and man, it might have been only about 20-30 minutes but they put on a heck of a show. You didn’t get any of that sense of forced cheerfulness other Disney park performers often exhibit: The Billys are genuinely glad to be there, and genuinely impressive to watch perform. They are FUN. And they play bluegrass, which is FUN. So the FUN is squared. And the square is danced.

I checked out their website and, to be honest, it’s not as pretty as it could be, but then again neither are The Billys. But if you have any interest in this sort of thing at all, do like I did and pick up one of their CDs. I got mine at Disneyland, but they have it at places like Amazon.com as well. Here’s hoping they’ll be fiddling around still for awhile to come.

Late edit: I completely forgot to include a bit of bluegrass styling I’ve loved for many a year. It’s a cover of a Snoop Dogg song, so as you might imagine it ain’t all Safe For Work. But if you ain’t at work (or don’t care), you best give this a listen. Gin & Juice!

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. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be living… until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all the poundin’ and the hollerin’, they all come in and they… rip you to pieces.”

Yes, it’s true, my favorite movie is not a zombie movie. But it’s got great characters, great pacing, and every so often, someone gets eaten. What more can you ask for? I’ve loved Jaws to pieces (heh) since I was just a little tyke, and nearly 30 years later no movie has yet toppled that big, beautiful man-eating fish from its pedestal.

That said, I did dedicate myself to some new zombie viewing this week. Severed: Forest of the Dead made its way into the Netflix queue. I wasn’t expecting much, to be honest, but at first I was actually getting into it. The set-up was interesting (logging camp and eco protesters beset by the living dead), the acting seemed decent… but once the apocalypse scenario started it was all the same ol’ same ol’. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but in my opinion you really have to bring the A game if you’re going to trod over the same tired tropes of the genre. Otherwise all the jump cuts, film grain and shakycam in the world won’t save the film from getting a bit, well, dull.

You have the cowardly douchebag company man who abandons people to die, you have the ‘Apocasex Now’ scenario (female and male lead pork each other because… well, because they’re there… and they’re pretty…) … but I really started groaning when they stumbled into the makeshift survivalist compound and all its attendant cliches. Just once I’d like to see one of these where the “Alpha Male” does not attempt to rape the female lead the first time he’s alone with her, especially when it’s pretty clear no more than a few days have passed at most since everyone was isolated. At least 28 Days Later gave us a month.

The thing is, there was some potential here. There was one wonderfully ironic scene where the survivors were trying to rescue screaming eco types who had chained themselves to trees before the outbreak, and were now being set upon by the zombies of fellow tree huggers and loggers alike. That’s a moment arguably up there with the original Dawn of the Dead having a zombie hiding amongst the store mannequins, in being setting-specific and having some social commentary underlying the gore. But I could never quite figure out if the movie was being self-aware like that. For instance… and yeah, I’ve been giving lots of spoilers, but let’s face it, this isn’t The Sixth Sense… we have the following exchange of dialog after the douchebag scientist admits the company was performing genetic experiments to regenerate trees and make them grow faster:

Scientist: Only I can stop the clear-cutting of forests!

Eco-girl: You can’t stop it like this!

Well, actually eco-girl, this scenario is exactly how you can stop the clear-cutting of forests. In the better movie that could have been, the dialog would go:

Scientist: Only I can stop the clear-cutting of forests!

Eco-girl: You’re right. Once everyone’s a zombie, they won’t care about lumber anymore.

Ah well. Thus does Severed plod along to its oddly inconclusive conclusion, possibly making some point along the way. I think the point was that people are dicks, and zombies like to eat people regardless of whether they’re dicks or not. I just wish they’d found some new ways to express that.

For some time now I’ve been meaning to once again gush happily over the A World On Fire blog. Every day its proprietor, Brian, has new and exciting zombie-related entries. Oftentimes multiple entries. I know there’s plenty of zombie sites out there, but AWOF is the one I consistently find easiest to browse and cherry pick interesting movies, games, or toys to check out. I found AWOF when Brian first found and reviewed us back last October, and have been happily checking it out ever since.

Well, Brian hadn’t forgotten about us, either, and just last week he posted a new update praising what we’ve done so far. Perhaps then, my pimping his blog now will seem self serving. Perhaps. All I can say in my defense is that I’ve had AWOF on our links page for several months now. And that I enjoy being self-serving once in awhile.

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 wikipedia will let you know it was, and is, a quite real affliction. One that was definitely spread by the practice of grinding slaughterhouse leftovers and sick and injured animals into the meal used to feed other livestock. Thus, cows eating cows.

If that wasn’t bizarre enough, Mad Cow isn’t spread by a virus, but by mutated proteins called prions. In a mammal’s brain, they get bent out of shape, and then they start mutating all the proteins near them in the same way, eventually producing holes where tissue should be. Needless to say this has a bad effect on functions the brain controls, and eventually shuts down the whole system. It was never as big an epidemic in North America as it was in Europe, but in the United Kingdom entire cattle populations had to be exterminated to get things under control.

What’s that you say? People are mammals? Why yes, they are, and there are still people being diagnosed with the human equivalent of mad cow due to tainted beef they might have consumed years or even decades earlier. Prions can have a very long incubation period, you see.

Sleep well, children.

Anyhow, a particularly nasty strain of Mad Cow Disease is the whole premise behind the zombie flick Dead Meat. For one thing, the cows are out to get their own (human) happy meals, which I suppose is the extreme interpretation of the results of giving them a non-herbivorous diet. Something akin to Mad Cow might also be at the root of Zombieland, although we don’t get much detail beyond a mention of “Patient Zero” having eaten a bad hamburger.

Another disease often used as a zombie catalyst is variations on rabies. Off the top of my head, some super-rabies derivative was the culprit behind the outbreaks of the Left 4 Dead game and the movie Quarantine. Part of the attraction of rabies, again, is the easy transmission between mammals, plus hyper-aggression and being incurable once symptoms have set in. A disease that’s incurable is very important to an apocalypse scenario. Most everyone has probably experienced the frustration of going to the doctor about the cold making them miserable, only be to informed it’s viral and there’s nothing to be done for it except bedrest and fluids. Not only did you not choose to be infected in the first place, you’re at the mercy of the bug until it decides to leave you alone.

So of course, it’s an easy jump from that to the Superflu that doesn’t leave you alone. At least, not until you’re dead. And from there, you get the disease that won’t even leave you alone after you’re dead, and instead makes you get up and shamble after the still healthy and their juicy flesh. In a way, though, zombies could be seen as an invention that allows people to express some control over the idea of a killer plague. You can at least see zombies coming. You can’t chainsaw a virus, but you can sure as heck chainsaw a zed. It might still be a hopeless situation in the end, but not quite as random… and hey, at least you’re being proactive.

Let’s hope no zombie apocalypse ever goes the route of an old video game I owned, though, called Incubation. It was a science-fiction horror scenario where formerly peaceful aliens start mutating into ferocious killers after coming into contact with a human virus. You find out in the course of the game that the virus causing the mutations is Herpes Simplex. Now, I’m guessing this choice was made based on the fact that Herpes Simplex is incurable and remains in the body for life once infection occurs; however, the shuddersome question I have to this day is, “How did the aliens get herpes?”

Again, sleep well, children.

It could be worse. After all, you could have a significant other who once fed a hamburger to a cow.