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.

Crossed “I”s

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Clint

It’s weird how you can be around something for years, and yet still miss out on details you didn’t even know you were passing up until someone points them out. For instance, there’s a certain feature of lettering in comics that I never noticed, and yet is considered a fairly important formatting consideration.

The issue centers around the way the letter “I” is presented in comics, at least in the traditional method where word balloons, captions, etc. are written in all capital letters. Basically, the rule is that you only use the “crossbar I” when the letter is being used as a personal pronoun or abbreviation. What’s a crossbar I? It’s the style of capital I being used in this very blog, with the tiny perpendicular lines on the top and bottom. Any other time, you’re supposed to use the “stroke I”, which is the one without the crossbars that people might confuse for a lower case “L”… except that in an all caps situation you won’t see the lower case “l”.

It seems like such a minor thing, and I admit I was a bit skeptical until I started going back over all my professionally lettered comics and discovered it to be absolutely true. I expect the convention came about originally for ease of both writing and reading (probably mostly writing) when most lettering was done by hand, but I’m not entirely sure of the origins. What I can tell you is that something as seemingly inconsequential as the shape of your I’s  is considered one of those dividing indicators between “pro” and “amateur”. Fair? Maybe, maybe not, but if you’re going to start up a comic (web or otherwise), be aware of the convention. I wasn’t until just this week, which means if we ever get around to doing a big TPB of Zombie Ranch I’ll probably be going back and doing a fair share of re-lettering.

The crossbar I rule is considered so important that most of the computer fonts out there intended for comics use have both the crossbar and stroke I as part of their library, usually one as the ‘lowercase’ and one as the ‘capital’ (this is possible since the comics fonts don’t have a true lowercase). It turns out that’s exactly what was tripping us up, since as you might remember from my script blogs, I had all my dialog set up to automatically be capitalized. Not to mention the script itself is written in plain old Times New Roman. The font we use for the comic does have both kinds of I’s available, but until I started checking into things I never knew!

Learn from my example, any of ye who would be comics writers. And if you do acquire (or buy) a comic-specific font, take some time to check out all the features it has: for instance, one other thing I discovered in the process of all this is that our font has built-in “fireflies” I can add using Shift-[ and Shift=], which was a timely find for Uncle Chuck’s expression of “pfft” in this week’s comic.

If you’re interested in further examples of “comic book grammar”, Blambot has a nice, easy-to-read summary on their site: LINK. I’m certainly not advocating slavish devotion to what’s presented there, but it’s good to be aware of so that any choices you make in a different direction are a matter of style and not just ignorance. I was aware of a lot of it already, but I have to admit, the crossbar I bit? Well, it crossed me right up.

So anyhow, one bit regarding Comic-Con I failed to mention was that I picked up a copy of The New Dead, a zombie fiction anthology I’d been meaning to get my hands on. When I bought it the lady at the booth informed me Max Brooks (who penned one of the 19 stories, and who y’all might know better as the author of the Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z) was going to be signing copies of it if I wanted to come back in about 15 minutes. Of course, when I came back there was a line, and I had a panel I dearly wanted to get to, so I didn’t stay for the autograph, especially since I figured also I wasn’t really going to have a chance to talk to him. I chickened out on the idea of shoving a copy of Zombie Ranch at him… he probably gets dozens of people trying to pitch Zombie related stuff his way, so it seemed totally obnoxious to do that during a signing appearance. Sometimes I think I have entirely too much shame to succeed.

Regardless of which, I have my zombie book, and so far I’m greatly enjoying the first two stories in it. Depending how much further I get, I’ll likely make it next week’s blog topic. For now, I think it’s about time for bed. My I’s are crossing.