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.

A wisdom of fonts

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Clint

Not too long ago I was one of many respondents to someone on a Webcomic Creators’ group who was interested in starting a webcomic and wanted advice from the veterans on possible pitfalls to watch out for.

Well, of course one of the responses was about making backup copies of your work. Almost goes without saying, right? Even if you physically draw your pages first and then scan them for upload, it’s good to have those digital copies preserved in a few different places to minimize any problems. If (heavens forbid) your house burns down, you’ve at least still got those Dropbox/Carbonite/etc. images. Hopefully in high resolution form.

But now, expand on that. What about the various promotional materials you’ve put together for websites or print? What about your tax documents? Your sales spreadsheets? All these are things that would be a serious bummer to lose, and if you’ve put together your operation over the years as piecemeal as we have, you may not have them all as consolidated as they perhaps should be. We still make the effort to ensure they’re preserved as much as the artwork is, and I would venture to say people by and large would still think of doing it.

And then again in our almost five years of production, there’s another matter that I never hear webcomic people talk about. It might be because it’s not as universal an issue as having good site navigation.

It’s about fonts. Ever heard the expression where someone’s a “font of wisdom”? Let’s talk some hard-learned wisdom of fonts.

Now first of all, if you hand letter your comics, this advice is completely irrelevant. But if you use any kind of digital lettering, even if you make your own fonts to use — in fact especially if you make your own — then every font you ever used in your comic’s production ought to be on the backup list along with everything else. You never know when you might need it again.

Seriously. You might be of the thought when a page is done, it’s done, but at least in our case, we’ve gone back and revisited old pages many times. Even if you never plan to change the lettering in any way, you might want to reuse a certain style of sound effect for consistency. You might be wanting to reuse part of a page as an advertisement.

This might also be a moot point if you’re flattening all your originals, but I really don’t recommend that. One of the whole points of going digital is being able to maintain the flexibility of a layered page. But the terrible thing is to go back to one of those pages with that font you really liked, and as it’s loading you get the pop-up that one or more of the fonts are missing. Where did you get them from originally? Even if you remember that much, is that site still there? Are the fonts still available? There could be years in between then and now.

It’s an easy thing to overlook, and I’m saying that because it’s a thing we overlooked. It’s only just recently, as we’re looking into putting together a trade collection, that I’ve really knuckled down and tried to track and consolidate and preserve all the fonts we’ve ever used. In that five year stretch of time Dawn has changed computers once and reformatted twice, and will soon be changing computers again. It’s my hope that we still have everything. Time will tell, since I have over 200 pages to review.

That brings up another point, which is that we’re not the only “team effort” out there. If you’re a solo act who does everything yourself on a single computer system, keeping track will be much easier than when multiple people with multiple computers are involved. You’ll need to work out a system where those mission critical fonts are kept up to date for everyone, because they don’t travel with the page.

This is not a big deal if you don’t want to edit or warp the text, because the program will usually still preserve it as an image,  but for instance on the comic page before the current one Dawn found a new font online to use for the sound effects in the final panel, and while it looked great, I didn’t have it and so when it came time for me to letter and I found a typo I had to call her back to her own system to fix things. It forced me to think how we had never put together a shared repository for such finds where I could just grab the font download, and that that might be something it was high time to change.

Now that’s just two of us working off two computers and it was still a headache. I can’t imagine the headache for someone who has a long-distance letterer on staff and then that letterer quits or goes AWOL along with all the fonts they used. It’s not as big a deal as having to redraw all the art but I imagine that would be a humungous pain in the ass.

So, long story short: keep track of the fonts you use for lettering, keep copies in a folder your whole comics team has easy and immediate access to for installation, and back that folder up along with all your other mission critical data. An easy, simple thing to overlook, but there may come a day that you will feel quite wise for doing so.