UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

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.

“Low” and the flow

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Clint

Here’s another in my series of posts about the flow of visual comic page navigation, so if you’ve been bored by the ones so far, then— well, truth be told I don’t think I’m stopping anytime soon, so I’ve got no consolation for you there. It’s just too rich and valuable a concept, in my opinion.

Last week I took a self-critical walk down memory lane with some of our own past pages of Zombie Ranch. This week I turn my eyes outwards again, specifically to this article by Dale Jacobs of the University of Windsor’s Comics Theory Class Blog. It’s a discussion of the concept of “Guided View” and how it can change the comics reading experience.

If you’re not familiar with Guided View, it’s a process used by Comixology and other digital readers whereby a page is broken down into discrete elements (often panel-by-panel) and presented to the reader in prepackaged sequential parts, mostly for the sake of reading on small screens like you’d get on a mobile device. The theory is that this is exactly what your eyes are doing anyhow when reading a comic, focusing on parts one after another, so why not just show things that way?

Well, I highly encourage you to click on the article and read it if you haven’t already, or at least look at the example of how the full page differs from the Guided View experience. I’ll imbed the full page example here, along with the added overlays by Jacobs denoting the paths described by art and text. From the Image comic Low by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini:

 

Low Arrows

 

In previous weeks I talked about using word balloons or captions to establish a pattern for the reader’s eye to follow, one that if done strongly enough can break the ingrained left-to-right-top-to-bottom defaults of most Western World readers. This is a really fine example of that, as denoted by the dark blue line marking out the sinuous serpent of captions (both bordered and borderless) winding its way downwards, and it’s doubly impressive to me for maintaining its shape and momentum while covering up a minimum of art. Meanwhile the art starts its own complementary path, as shown by the light blue line, even though it gets a bit more broken up towards the end. The overall effect has a dreamlike visual poetry to it which reinforces the surreal recollections of the character’s thoughts. I dig it. And Guided View utterly fails to replicate it. All the same parts are there, but without any sense of the whole. I’m not going to show all of it here since Jacobs already did a fine job of it on his own page (seriously, go look), but as a taste here’s how “Panel 1” appears in a reader:

 

lowguidedview1

Keep in mind that when you move forwards in the reader, you will no longer see this, but instead will be able to see nothing except Guided View’s decision on what constitutes “Panel 2”:

 

lowguidedview2

The overlap is somewhat aggravating in of itself, but beyond that it becomes much harder to discern the pattern that was originally there. Guided View does its best by eventually providing a full view of the top half of the page once it presents all the broken up text and images composing it, but compared to just having the full page available we are definitely, as Jacobs diplomatically puts it, having “completely different experiences.”

Now, true, you can say Guided View only breaks down when comics creators are gettin’ all fancy with their layouts, but… if you’re not doing a “newspaper style” comic where the panels are nothing to you or the reader but boxes where things happen, then I feel like if you’re not at least occasionally “gettin’ fancy”, you’re losing some unique opportunities for storytelling.

I get asked occasionally if we’re going to put Zombie Ranch on Comixology and I have to admit to people that I haven’t pursued it, even with their Comixology Submit program geared towards independent creators. Assuming we were accepted, their in-house team would be breaking up our pages for Guided View, and while some of our pages would do just fine, others would not survive the transition very well. I don’t honestly know what would be worse, letting complete strangers hack our baby to bits, or (like some other reader sites have occasionally offered) having them give us the tools to do the hacking ourselves. Probably the latter, since that’s a ton of work for 200+ pages in addition to the rough decisions and compromises we’d have to be making as we went along.

It doesn’t seem like Comixology or Guided View are going away anytime soon, though. They may even truly be the way of the future, and the art of comics will have to adjust to them accordingly. But for now, the “flow” of a well-arranged comics page is one of my favorite things to enjoy, both as a creator and a reader. So for now, I go with the flow.