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5 thoughts on “558 – Cotton Clad Calamity”

  1. Raznaak

    Yup, he’s a bastard XD

  2. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    Are those pajamas available in XXXL in the gift shop?

  3. Otaku

    It’s been a while, so let me ask: Did we get a reason for him to WANT Susie dead? Not to backseat, but if we didn’t, I’m worried were about to move into “Stupid Evil” territory. Now, stupid happens, don’t get me wrong. It’s not bad storytelling for that to be the case here.

    You’ve just done a good job NOT having that be a driving factor, so the “Kill off the stars of my successful reality TV show.” seems shortsighted, otherwise. Oh, I guess I could be mistaken about the in-story reality TV show’s success. Like, if the company behind them is losing money, or they think a change in management at the ranch would make the whole thing more popular/profitable, then I can see the above scenario happening as well.

    I REALLY think I’m just forgetting something important, but that I don’t have time to deep dive to remind me of, hence the comment. >_<

    1. Deoxy

      It certainly has been stretched out over quite a while, but there have definitely been hints from quite near the beginning that whoever is running the reality TV show definitely wants her dead.

      But I certainly don’t recall any reason why.

      1. Clint

        Yeah it’s fair to not remember since it’s been a hot minute (many, many minutes) but if you feel like a refresher the most relevant bits would be the beginning of Episode 8 and the end of Episode 15. We haven’t explicitly spelled out exactly what The Exec means by his “side hustle” or who was on the other end of that phone call, though.

        I’m hoping that when the whole thing is eventually available it will make sense, or at least enough sense to have hung this narrative on.

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558 – Cotton Clad Calamity
Posted on August 26, 2026 by Dawn

What would you call this? Armchair assassination? Merk-from-home?

Well, Suzie ain't dead (or undead) quite yet, so we'll just have to see if his gloating is justifiable.

Letting nature take its course…

Posted on January 24, 2024 by Clint

The story Roberson tells in this week’s comic isn’t made up. It took me some seearching but I at last backtraced a vague but powerful memory of my youth of watching a documentary film where baby birds were dropping dead in a drought. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you even as all the hows and wheres and whys fade away, and yet I had so much trouble finding any sign of it that I began to wonder if it was just a nasty figment of my imagination, conjured up in the mind of a man writing a comic at least in part about the dark side of reality television. I’d say reality television is just a very biased and manipulated version of a documentary, but a lot of the documentaries I’ve seen don’t seem much better. In fact, reality television might actually be the lesser evil in comparison since it doesn’t have any agenda beyond creative editing to make someone look stupider than they are because the producers have decided they’re the comic relief dummy of the show.

But back to my search. I was on the verge of giving up. It didn’t really matter anyhow, right? Zombie Ranch is a work of fiction, so why not just make things up pertinent to my point? Why did I feel such a need to validate that this documentary did, indeed happen and did, indeed leave a mark on my impressionable young mind that still burbles occasionally to the surface decades later?

And then, Eureka. I found it. Animals are Beautiful People:

An ironic title, given the memory that led me back to it. Other memories flooded back. They showed this in class in Junior High. It wasn’t all horror, far from it. In fact we all snickered at the depiction of the annual pilgrimage of the wildlife of the African desert to a certain spot to chow down on fermented fruit, basically spending a few days getting smashed out of their minds drunk in a way human festival attendees might find very familiar. Getting to watch something like that in school, sanctioned by the adults, felt deliciously naughty.

But then towards the film’s end, your soul paid the price. In the midst of a sudden drought, a lake had dried up into cracked earth within a matter of days, leaving the pelicans that had nested there stranded. Well, they could fly of course, so they weren’t technically stranded — but dozens of their just-hatched chicks could not. It was definitely not business as usual, but the adults waited as long as they could before thirst drove them to abandon the hatchlings. I captured some images of what happened next and sent them to Dawn as references… the entire flock of those fuzzy baby pelicans set off across the baking sands on foot, and the documentary crew filmed them as they died. It was all very artistically done, with narration drier than the former lake speaking of the tragedy unfolding and literally referring to it as a “death march.”

Nature is cruel. But more than that, I just could never get over the fact that a whole film crew, presumably well hydrated and supplied, was observing the doomed migration like indifferent gods. It’s the kind of thing that really calls into question the traditions of non-interference with the subjects. Could you help? Should you help? Is this letting nature take its course, or is it ghoulish voyeurism? To borrow from particle physics, we might be changing the outcome just by observing, much less anything more. Compound this with the claims that a lot of scenes in these films are deliberately staged including the aforementioned drunken fruit party and you’ve got a real double standard potentially going.

Now rounding up a flock of pelican chicks and transporting them to wetter environs would probably have been a logistical nightmare that could end up with them dead regardless, but if you had been part of that crew, could you have held that camera over those little dead bodies baking away? And if you did, would that stay in your brain when you tried to sleep that night? Hell, it’s stayed in my brain and I was only watching it play from a shitty VHS tape years after the fact and thousands of miles distant. Imagine being there, sipping from your canteen as those chicks dropped in their tracks, one by one, gasping their last breaths as their all too brief lives were burned away. Would you justify it as the right thing to do? Would you be so callous and hardened that you step through the aftermath just finding the best angle to capture their bodies?

I suppose it’s the same sort of hardening that allows people to clean up battlefields without wondering who the dead were or what dreams they had cut short. Or the hardening that lets people ranch zombies. But man, I’d be terrible at the job, and maybe that’s a good thing, too.