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9 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.

        1. Otaku

          Thanks for the replies, Deoxy and Clint. Yeah, I’d totally forgotten about those things. Good to know!

  4. Evervigilant

    Seems about time for the two people who aren’t there to make a surprise entrance as the ace Susie didn’t even know she had.

  5. Scarsdale

    There’s still 3-5 people on her side that might be planning something. This guy is a megalomaniac with a god complex, so letting him think he’s the sharpest tool in the shed sets him up for a fall. Everything depends on those cameras, and I suspect their little stop over by the charging coffins had something to do with her actual plan, not the one the a-hole thinks it is.

  6. lyra

    Really enjoyed the opening of Zombie Ranch. I like the combination of the western setting with the zombie concept, it gives the story a really distinctive atmosphere. I’m a freelance illustrator and animator, and I’d be interested in seeing how some of these scenes could translate into motion, especially as a short animated teaser or character scene.

    If you’re ever interested in something like that, you can reach me here:

    IG: eve_verse_
    Email: [contact.lilaclines@gmail.com](mailto:contact.lilaclines@gmail.com)
    Discord: Lyralilac_

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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.

Weathering the “finger of god.”

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Clint

Well, I must admit that so far it hasn’t been a great year for us at conventions. The Long Beach Expo seemed to have very little in the way of people buying, and then the bottom line similarly dropped out on WonderCon, which for the last four years has been rock solid for us from a sales standpoint.

We weren’t the only ones to suffer a surprising setback, and sometimes, when it’s five o’ clock on a Saturday and you’re at half the total you made at that same time last year (and you hope Sunday will somehow make up for it but you know that’s not going to be true) — sometimes the only comfort you get is the shared disappointment of your peers reporting they’re not doing so well either. Meanwhile you square your shoulders and just have to hope the next show will be better.

Theories will fly at these times. Is the local economy just down for some reason? Were the admission and parking fees so steep people had no money left for purchases? Is the market for what you’re offering saturated? Was your booth in a bad place? Or maybe your entire section of booths?

But unless a convention is so bad as to have no crowd, period, there’s usually at least someone who does okay. Or even phenomenally. I didn’t see it until I got home but two exhibitors I know (but didn’t get around to saying hi to at the show) posted that they’d had their best WonderCon ever, complete with exclamation points.

Were they exaggerating? Were their previous outings so bad as to make 2017 look great by comparison? I mean it’s true, we still sold quite a few things, enough so our total would have been quite decent or even excellent for, say, a Long Beach outing. But on a WonderCon scale by our past experiences, it was bizarrely low.

There’s of course a third option. I talked to one peer where the bottom dropped out of WonderCon for them last year, which didn’t happen to us. There were reports of an Artist’s Alley table being swamped with people seeking its product while the ones on either side were idle, and it wasn’t due to that middle table housing George Perez or some other luminary. Big booths and small reported feeling things were off, but there were probably still some of the big guys that won the jackpot or at least achieved their usual sales goals.

Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense, like how tornadoes have been known to destroy one side of the street and leave the other side perfectly intact. Sometimes people call tornadoes “the finger of god” because of this phenomenon, like some unknowable higher power is guiding them according to an algorithm mere mortals can’t understand, and would go insane trying.

When Artist’s Alley becomes Tornado Alley, there’s not much you can do in the face of what feels like human consumer habits rendered into a force of nature. Hard sell, soft sell, it doesn’t seem to matter. You just have to ride out the storm and hope that next time, the good side of the street is the one you happen to be on.