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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.

Home, home on deranged…

Posted on May 5, 2010 by Clint

Those of you who were reading this blog around Christmas might recall that I mentioned a few previous places where the idea of ranching zombies for one reason or another had surfaced. Well, turns out I missed one, since a group of talented folks down Arizona way have a couple t-shirts regarding a “Zed’s Zombie Ranch”, which are made using manipulations of vintage photographs that the proprietors had lying about. Fun stuff! Also that’s far from the only customized, geektastic merchandise available for purchase on their Etsy site at http://www.vampieoodles.com — we particularly like the “Free Range Zombies” sign.

Kelly and her partners from vampieoodles will be having a booth at the Phoenix Comic-Con the same weekend Dawn and myself will be at the Pasadena convention, but we’ve wished them best of luck and vice-versa. So if anyone’s at the Phoenix show and sees the Zed’s shirt, well, now you know the story there! Just another strange and wonderful case of parallel evolution.

Okay, now, I promised myself I’d get to a movie review in this blog. It’s been an especially long while since I talked about a western, so let’s jaw awhile about The Culpepper Cattle Co. Now one thing I’ll have to admit up front is that I have a chronically terrible memory for recognizing actors from film to film, especially on a name basis… so while some of the cowpokes in this 1972 flick looked powerfully familiar, nothing really clicked, even when I used the power of IMDB to attempt to compensate and find where else I might have seen them.

So it’s entirely possible I just fail, but otherwise the only memorable aspect of the movie up front is that one of the associate producers was Jerry Bruckheimer. In fact, it appears to be the first movie he’s got any sort of producer’s credit for… and for every Bruckheimer-involved movie I hate, there’s others I’m indifferent to and others I love, so I shrugged and settled in to see how things turned out.

How the movie turned out was pretty darned bleak, start to finish. Perhaps “bleak” doesn’t quite cover it. It was as if the filmmakers were driving for “gritty realism”, missed that offramp, passed up “nihilistic” while they were still cussing about the mistake, and ended up plowing through several signs warning “CARTOONISH CARICATURES OF AMORALITY AHEAD” before plunging into the ever-lovin’ ravine of WTF.

Tortured metaphors aside, perhaps I’m being too harsh, but it’s another of those movies you can’t quite figure out if you’re supposed to be taking seriously. I’ll be the first to admit that the Old West wasn’t the nice, squeaky clean place folks like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers wanted to portray, but CCC was so far in the other direction I was having separate but equal trouble sometimes in suspending disbelief. For instance, I hesitate to believe that any given strangers meeting each other in the wilderness will always rob and/or kill each other in cold blood, but this movie takes it as a given. Occasionally? Okay, it’s a rough time and a lawless land. But eventually it gets to be a little much, and certainly desensitizing.

Maybe that’s the point, since this is one of those coming-of-age “fresh faced greenhorn grows up fast” tales with our young, Zeke-esque protagonist joining up with a cattle drive run by the tough, trail-hardened Frank Culpepper and his band of roughnecks. The group gets even rougher when an incident partway through leads to the death and replacement of some of the hands with men I will generously term as “a mite psychotic”.

These are our heroes, who carve a bloody swath across the countryside that is only stifled when they finally run into some people who are even bigger assholes. Then they end up defending some Amish squatters or something from the wrath of the greater assholes. It’s a weird climax, and an even weirder message at the end… the psycho cowpokes all die defending a bunch of religious nuts who won’t take up arms in their own defense (and would have been slaughtered because of this), and somehow this convinces our protagonist, the sole survivor of the armed side, that the proper response is to give up his guns and head back home.

Mind you, this entire movie has been hammering home the point that if you’re not armed and sociopathic, you’re a victim. I gave the kid about ten minutes after the credits rolled before he was robbed, murdered, and possibly sexually assaulted, not necessarily in any particular order. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher.

Also, there’s no indication of whether or not Frank Culpepper got his cattle to market, since as far as I can tell he doesn’t come back to fight, and everyone else deserts him to do so. Given that the Old West in this movie is a land that Mad Max would be hesitant to wander, I figure the ol’ Cattle Co. doesn’t make it, either.

Now all that said, there are some good lines and interesting scenes in the film, so if you want to have, say, a Netflix gander at it, more power to you. Much more so than even Unforgiven, it represents one end of the western genre spectrum that can provide some perspective when you’re figuring out where on the range you roam.