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.

I now pronounce you…(?)

Posted on December 16, 2020 by Clint

You know what’s wonderful about the Internet? You can type a word and “pronunciation” into Google and come up with an audio file of people speaking it. That’s not something I had as a kid, and oh how my reading and writing vocabulary often outpaced my ability to express verbally. It doesn’t help to be dealing with English, which even as a native speaker is a confusing mess where we pretend there are rules, but it seems like the only real rules are that there are no rules. Take for example the word “subterfuge,” which comes from the same root as “subtle” — the Latin “subter-” which as you might also guess is the root of “subterranean.” It’s all about being sneaky or unseen or underground (the last one literally in the case of subterranean). Alas, I first ran across “subterfuge” reading the Vampire: The Masquerade RPG in the 1990s and associated it more with subtle, thus for years pronouncing it with a silent ‘b’. It turns out that subterfuge and subterranean both quite vocally pronounce “sub” unlike subtle which sounds more like “suttle” when said out loud. You can kind of blame the French for this (as well as a lot of other weirdness in English pronunciation) since they took the Latinate word “subtilis” but somewhere in Old French -> Middle English it became the word “sotil,” discarding the ‘b’ sound and ensuring a very confused Clint hundreds of years hence. Unlucky King Harold took an arrow to the eye in the Battle of Hastings and the rest, as they say, is history.

Anyhow, this phenomenon can present some unique challenges when you’re writing books or comics or such where the words are not spoken aloud. Hell, it’s even cropped up during get-together parties back in the day where I met people I knew from an MMO and discovered I’d been pronouncing their character name all wrong all this time, and vice-versa. Sometimes you’re dealing with foreign languages and your reader may be totally unaware that “Siobhan” is a gaelic name pronounced to sound sort of like “Shuh-VON,” not “SEE-oh-bon” like I sometimes hear in my head to this day. Sometimes you’re making up entirely new words or languages and hoo boy, that’s something a reader can’t even look up unless you yourself put out a pronunciation guide. Tolkien did, but how many of us read it? Well, Peter Jackson I suppose, and bless his heart for it.

So Rosa first mentioned “specie” in passing back in Issue/Episode 3, and while that’s not a word I made up, it’s hardly in common use anymore. How did it sound it your head when you read it? Well, if you pronounced it as if it were the singular of “species” — SPEE-shee — you are correct! But species is always plural and refers to animals, while specie always refers to coinage. Same Latin root, “form or kind,” no French interpolation, and yet English breaks the rules yet again by having the meaning change completely depending on whether or not you stick an ‘s’ on the end.

But at least the pronunciation is consistent. On the other hand, in the comic before the current one I had the cops shout out “freeze, speecer!” at the would-be thief of said coins. But it would be pronounced “speesher” wouldn’t it? Here’s where I’m in trouble making up a word and would have to be generous if someone heard it in their heads with a straight “s” rather than “sh” sound in the middle. Specier or specer or spesher all lost out in my composition raffle. Perhaps I will regret this decision in the future, but onwards we go.

It is perhaps appropriate “specie” was first uttered in the comic by Rosa, whose own last name I am rather convinced a good portion of the readership hear in their heads as “am-uh-RILL-uh” when she uses the Spanish pronunciation of “ahm-uh-REE-yuh” and it does not help at all that Texas has an actual town called Amarillo which is pronounced the first way (with the “l” sound), because Texas. So if you hear it that way you’re absolutely forgiven, though I still reserve the right to joke about it in the comic at some point in the FYOO-churr.