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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 it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, had sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonalds, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. Arthur passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.
Comical? Yes. But also a recognition that horror and loss can be as subjective in their own way as art. Shortly after starting this comic, I posted a blog detailing some previous concepts of zombie ranching I had run across, like the game Zombie Rancher, and I mentioned how their idea of people eating the zombies as a delicacy made me look elsewhere for wrangling motivation. While there’s a fantastic dose of irony in the idea of people consuming zombies, out of respect for those who came before I chose from the beginning to move in a different direction, subverting the assumption that the “greenies” were being gathered for food. Admittedly I may have been too subtle about it, since at least one review of the comic proclaimed they were being gathered for food, and I remember on our first convention outing that Dawn was repeatedly stating to passerby “No meat like aged meat!” until I had to ‘splain to her that might give people the wrong idea (writers are such a buzzkill for artists).
I’ve already said as much in my World FAQ a long time ago, but with this week’s comic, here it is at last out in the open. Zombies, whether they were once people, cattle, or prairie dogs, taste like utter crap… and the more I thought about that second part, the more I realized I’d created a rancher’s worst nightmare.
Hell, it even kind of gives me the willies. Dawn and I both like our steak, and the idea that the last one I had might suddenly end up being the last one I ever had? Oh, sure, it wouldn’t kill me to go without, and for you vegetarians out there you’d give a collective shrug, at best, but that’s when we get back to the subjective horror thing, and you think about the impact on people whose livelihood for as long as they can remember has revolved around cattle. Not just them, but generations before them. That’s pretty damn personal. That’s the kind of thing that might have you sobbing for your mother.
So yeah, civilization as we knew it went to hell, people died, people didn’t stay dead, and humanity pulled through only after some very, very bad years. But the crashing realization of a Texas without beef? Submitted for your approval, that for one Chuck W. Zane, that was horror, indeed.
7 thoughts on “The meat of the matter…”
Andrew
Nice page! It really brings home what these people have actually been through.
Robert
I felt that pang upon reading the punch-panel, Clint–well done.
I’d like to add that the sense of losing it all at once (a la H2G2) is striking in comparison with, say, a Soylent Green world in which food had simply become more and more scarce until people had been weened from pleasurable eating. Fueled by the image of Thorn eating the entire core of his apple, I’ve often considered what aspects of food we choose(?) to enjoy. The “Texas vegetarian rancher” line had much more a “rug pulled from under you” feel… whoa.
I’ll be OK.
Robert
I don’t know where else to say this, but since I landed there again because of this day’s blog, I’ll choose here.
In the World FAQ, you say, “[H]opefully, the lack of information has been more intriguing than frustrating… .” I vote yes.
One thing that I really take pleasure in when it comes to storytelling is well considered exposition. I love it when a non-narrating storyteller manages to feed out world- and character-points without breaking the reality of action and interaction.
Cheap lines like, “As you know, your mother and I met at a spooky carnival where a crotchety fortune teller predicted your hidden birthmark and gave us the talisman your brother accidentally gave to Goodwill on Christmas Eve…” tend to instigate facial tics, and it’s so nice when a story can just develop as it might in real life–one puzzle piece at a time.
Clint
Robert, thank you, that means a lot to me to hear. Exposition is a really, really tricky thing to manage, particularly with a story like this where things have taken a detour from the world as we know it, but the story itself isn’t epic in scope.
I fear I haven’t been presenting things as well as I might in some cases, such as the sinfully dense Wall O’ Text I committed in comic #48. And on the flipside, I don’t know how many people get lost because they didn’t start by looking at the ‘About’ page and read through a couple dozen pages of comic without knowing why zombies are being wrangled or why the Death Star Interrogator Droids are following people around.
And yeah, I’m afraid I take guilty pleasure in knowing that dropping the “no more beef” bomb had exactly the effect on a current Texan such as yourself as I’d hoped. 😉
Robert
Ha! And you even labeled me favorably–“current Texan.” I have been a Houstonian for a number of years, but I don’t know that I will ever call myself a Texan.
But I love me some beef.
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