Month: April 2010

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 a contact form from my own website was spam and shunted it to the junk folder, where I only found it by accident a couple weeks later after one of Dawn’s emails shared the same fate. Fortunately, it was a case of better late than never, and Carter and I went on to have an interesting discussion about zombie flicks, in addition to doing the link exchange thing, etc. etc.

Carter’s site isn’t just his comic but the site of his rather prolific blog, which is actually where I learned about the site of the second group. You might expect that anything combining zombies and westerns pings my radar (and you’d be right), but so far most of the examples of the genre fusion I’ve run across have been on the campy side of the equation. I’ll probably talk about a couple of those in blogs to come…

Anyhow, enter Revelation Trail, a film and multimedia project in the works concerning the effects of a zombie outbreak in the American frontier of the 1880’s. I clicked on their “first look” link and was immediately drawn in, as I watched a scene depicting a man apparently so desperately lonely that he talks about the weather and his life to a zombie he’s caught in a bear trap. That sounds extremely campy as a concept, but it’s played straight, and–in my own damned opinion–it works. It’s the same sort of straightforward, humanistic style in the midst of the bizarre that I’ve tried to capture in Zombie Ranch. My only critical thought was it might have been even more powerful if he had gotten through his whole story and only then do we find out what he’s talking to, especially for trailer purposes… but that’s nitpicking. It was good stuff.

Even more impressive were the animated diaries of “Lilith’s Story” which are part of the website’s promotional materials. I can’t say enough good things about these little pieces of art, but I feel like I’d be destroying the experience to do so. So I’ll just say: go watch them. They’re not long, but they show a lot of care in every aspect of their craftsmanship, including certain subtleties you may miss the first time if you blink.

By the time I was done with the diaries, I had to write to the Revelation Trail team and gush. Then they wrote a long email back where, amongst other things, they said they came and checked us out here, and had some praise for Zombie Ranch in turn. Oh, and they mentioned they were greatly inspired by the movie Unforgiven, which if you know me at all (or have read this blog in the past), you know that’s a fantastic way to get on my good side. Not that they needed to after I’d seen their work, but it’s great to find that a group whose stuff you admire is as friendly as they are talented.

Anyhow, time to cap off the gush. But Revelation Trail is just getting started, and since I stumbled on them through pure word of mouth (well, word of blog), here’s some further mention. Check them out, tell your friends, join their Facebook. I think they’ve got something really memorable in the works, here.

http://www.revelationtrail.com/

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 largely (and probably very rightly) considered a not-so-entertaining topic. Besides, from the very beginning of the website I willingly exiled myself to the bottom of the page, knowing that the great majority of folks come by a webcomic to read a friggin’ webcomic, not read some random dude’s prattle about whatever’s ticked his fancy that week.

Uh, anyhow, you are reading this. So for you folks, I’ll just plead that it ain’t my fault! You see, after several weeks’ worth of my binging on various westerns and zombie movies, my wife put her foot down and banned further viewings in her presence, despite my protestations that Redneck Zombies was necessary research. Yes, the same wife that draws Zombie Ranch… meaning I have more than just the usual marital reasons for keeping her happy; if she burns out, my stick figure acumen just isn’t going to be a replacement.

I had to go cold turkey for awhile, but fortunately she’s 1) expressed that it’s okay again now that there’s been a break, and more importantly 2) she’s working Renaissance Faire on the weekends, meaning I get the apartment to myself. So I managed to sneak in a few movies, one of which I’ll talk about now.

Diary of the Dead is George Romero’s latest re-telling of his zombie apocalypse. Actually I should say next-to-latest since Survival of the Dead is now released, but I haven’t gotten my eyeballs on that one yet. Reviews so far (even from genre fans) seem to suggest I ain’t missing much, even though I’ve heard it tried to evoke a bit of a Western feel and had penned zombies. That interests me, naturally, but I’ll probably be waiting on Netflix.

Diary of the Dead also interested me because of the documentary aspect applied to zombies. For those who don’t know, Diary’s plot opens on a group of film students making a horror movie, who start seeing and hearing the early news reports of what turns out to be a zombie outbreak –a particularly nasty outbreak that combines the ‘death by bite’ motif with ‘everyone who dies for whatever reason becomes a zombie’. The remainder of the movie shows their attempts to get home or to safety, and does so purely by way of  “in the environment” means, including various hand held cameras and security footage. Never is the camera meant not to be an actual camera.

It’s an interesting conceit that goes a step beyond films like Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, or REC/Quarantine by not chaining all the action to the view of a single camera, but it still suffers at times from the stretches of credulity that crop up, a la “Why the heck are you still filming? Run!” Of course when they do run, you get that lovely shakycam blur effect which annoys the heck out of me if it goes on longer than a few seconds. Yes, I know this is supposed to immerse me in the chaos, but I’d like to at least see comprehensible images on the screen.

Now there’s attempts to lampshade this phenomenon in Diary by making out the main guy doing the filming as being obsessed with documenting the events to the point where he lacks all empathy and all common sense, but the way the film does that is very, very heavy-handed. You have characters basically spelling all of it out to us, when I think the point would have come across rather readily on its own. In fact, that’s the main failing of the movie; Romero feels the need to spell out everything, either in the dialog or in the intrusive narration of one of the characters. That character, by the way, is narrating everything as a flashback, which destroys the immediacy and intimacy of the idea of filming this “as it happens” right at the movie’s start.

Let’s put it this way. The end of the original Night of the Living Dead played out as casual, incidental talk, a terrible (but unknown) mistake, and then silent images of the aftermath. It’s powerful to this day because that silence allows you to think about what you’ve witnessed and come to your conclusions. But as evidenced in Diary, if Romero were directing NotLD today, that whole sequence would have had to have some disembodied narrative voice clearly condemning everything going on and declaring things like “We… we are the true zombies!”

No really, at the end the narrator character in Diary literally must muse, “Are we worth saving?”

I think Romero wanted to revise his formula to make a commentary on our current media-obsessed, viral video culture in the way he commented on consumerism back in Dawn of the Dead, but in Diary he’s just lost that whole idea of showing and not telling. There’s no room to ponder potential larger meanings when those meanings are being force-fed to you, at which point I was left with the impression of a zombie movie desperately attempting to be “deep and relevant” in between the gore shots.

That said, it wasn’t all bad… hell, Romero even gave me my much desired scene of a survivalist compound that was populated by people who hadn’t become complete sociopaths overnight. And when the students later get robbed by a different group, no one’s sexually assaulted and they even get to keep their guns, with the explanation that the opportunists wanted the food and medicine but allowed that taking someone’s guns at this time was a death sentence. “They’re thieves, not murderers,” one character observes, in one of the few comments on the action that I appreciated.

Remnants of human decency between strangers, even in the midst of total social breakdown? Hell yeah, that was nice to see. I just wish the rest of the movie had shut up long enough for me to decide if we were worth saving or not.

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 enough justification, can it?

You’re right, it’s not. As the trope goes, Our Zombies Are Different. Our zombies can cure cancer.

Now that’s simplifying things considerably — but you can get the gist, even through the haze of feel-good mass media fluff in that advertisement. Zombies are a pharmaceutical cornucopia. You ever heard of the term “black gold” applied to oil? Well, “green gold” might not be far off when talking of zombies.  Unlike with Jed Clampett it’s not something that’ll make you a millionaire overnight, but there’s enough potential reward to make the risks worthwhile.

Also, if you’re getting any vibes from the last couple of comics that remind you of the kooky ads seen in movies like Robocop, I will plead guilty to the influence; although I could just as easily plead influence from some of those medication ads that cheerfully list off dozens of horrible possible side-effects while puppies and children bound around in meadows.

The media, especially in advertising, has always been a strange beast when it comes to unpleasant topics. There’s a huge tendency to sugarcoat the situation. For example, there’s Speedy the Alka-Seltzer mascot, putting his creepy anthropomorphic smiley face to digestional problems since the 1950’s. Or the Massengill ladies fretting about their “not-so-fresh” feeling, or the Charmin bears frolicking with their toilet paper.

How about the Foster Farms chickens? Commercial after commercial featuring two puppet birds whose only purpose in life seems to be trying every trick possible to get themselves eaten — I guess because they have an inferiority complex to the chickens actually getting slaughtered for food. This is the kind of stuff that’s actually been out on the airwaves, to the point that when I’m writing my own versions of it I wonder less if I’m going too far, and more if I’m not going far enough.

In other news, I spent some time last week reorganizing the site to be more navigable, especially to new people. Some folks never look at About/Cast pages, but others do so before they even start reading, so I’m hoping the new layout gives a nice one-stop experience on that score. If anyone has further suggestions, feel free to speak up in the comments, email us, or even leave them on our forum.

Oh, and one more thing, per request the “Zombie Ranch Theme Song” has now been made available as a download link in our Extras section (in addition to the streaming flash version). Right-click-save-as, and enjoy!

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 for us to get around to it. Exposition is a tricky business, especially when you start in media res (fancy talk for “in the middle of things”) like Zombie Ranch does. I know a lot of people out there are still champing at the bit to know the big reason why the zombies are being wrangled and herded, and that’s coming up really soon. Again, those that wanted to brave the wall o’ text in the FAQ have the answers already, but I’m a big believer in making sure people don’t have to go outside the comic to understand the comic — eventually, anyhow. Like I said, exposition is tricky and I want to avoid clumsily shoving it down peoples’ throats when they’d rather be enjoying the story. Only time will tell if I’m getting the balance right.

Also, although the poll I put up last week has been steadily deadlocked between those who believe Zeke’s fate should be taken into account on the cast page, and those who think otherwise, by far the most popular response is from people unaware that there even was a cast page. Whoops. It appears our layout has certain flaws.

But hey, that was a question that nagged at me, so it’s good to have it addressed. Looks like we need to rearrange some buttons to make important elements more accessible. For all I know there are people who would have wanted to read the FAQ but didn’t realize there was one of those, either. Can you tell it’s our first webcomic?

So thanks to everyone who responded! I’m still not sure what to do about Zeke since it seems like either option is going to make a certain segment unhappy, though of course I’m trending towards the “don’t change it” crowd since it means less work. Maybe I’ll leave the poll up awhile longer, and see what people think once the cast page link is more visible.

Anyhow, we’re back, and if the level of technology evident in today’s comic surprises you, just remember those floating camera drones have to come from somewhere (not to mention there’s certain areas of cities today that already look a lot like the above). Life in the Safe Zones is wonderful, as those that run them will be quick to tell you. In this Zone, one of the more corporate examples, it’s possible you might feel a little intruded on by commercial interests. Maybe you might even consider it something of an eyesore. But hey, if being constantly bombarded by talking, animated ads in STUNNING 3-D isn’t your thing, you’re welcome to a life out in the Wild, Wild Waste.

“Comparable to or better than” can mean a lot of things, after all.