Category: Writer’s Blog

Bill Maher is a total a-hole. Now I was already of that opinion prior to his recent comments on Stan Lee’s death (and comics in general), but he does like to remind me every so often why it’s best just […]
Read More

I don’t think of myself as a composer by any stretch, and yet here I am fumbling my way through another song. I did some musical theater and glee club (yes, glee club) in my academic years, but that was […]
Read More

You’ve probably heard the news by now. After 95 years on this Earth, Stan “The Man” Lee has passed. I never actually met him. I could have. Over the years I’d seen him at various comic conventions, in fact so […]
Read More

Oh man. So I’ve written many times before about how this page-a-week serial format requires writing on multiple levels. I try to make each page its own thing, that also collects itself into the flow of an Issue/Episode installment, and […]
Read More

When this posts it’ll be Halloween time here in the States. An interesting Holiday, Halloween. Uncelebrated in any official sense, and yet possibly because it’s not tied to any widely observed religion here, the modern version is possibly the most […]
Read More

Serial comics. Long-form comics. Basically, what Zombie Ranch is: a tale told over weeks, months, or even years, rather than the more-or-less isolated punchlines of a gag strip. The payoffs for reading aren’t necessarily as immediate, but (hopefully) good enough […]
Read More

I don’t know precisely what I expected when Dawn insisted on watching Netflix’s latest binge-a-thon offering, The Haunting of Hill House. Probably not much. Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name has been adapted several times over the years, […]
Read More

To say I’m not a big sports guy these days would be an understatement. It was only a few days ago that I pretty much stumbled on the fact that my hometown baseball team, the L.A. Dodgers, were in the […]
Read More

I’m fairly certain I’ve written before about the kinds of epiphanies you can experience as a writer, at any time and place, where suddenly all the figurative obstacles of a particular narrative point blow away and a light shines through. […]
Read More

It’s a tad ironic that I started this chapter with the Robert Frost poem about favoring fire. Our world didn’t end, in fact we came out of things not too bad off for having raging flames and smoke pouring forth […]
Read More

“Art should be free from compromise” is a refrain you may occasionally hear. Sure. And flapping your arms and believing hard enough should be able to get you to fly. I think it is safe to say, though, that in […]
Read More

This past weekend at Long Beach Comic Con we tabled next to a gentleman who was relatively new to the exhibiting scene and he had plenty of questions for us since we seemed like veterans. Well okay, I guess after […]
Read More

“It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights! It’s time to get things started on the Muppet Show tonight!” It’s a refrain that has echoed down through my memories, and Jim Henson is to blame. Oh, […]
Read More

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t always have my finger on the pulse of zombie fiction, so to speak. I figure that’s forgivable seeing as a good chunk of the zombie genre’s specimens don’t have pulses to speak of. Still, […]
Read More

Man, you leave your blog unattended for one second… Okay, it was more like a few weeks, but still, as soon as a lull appeared in my weekly updates (for the first time in several years) the sleaze crept in. […]
Read More

I’ve just always referred to the shadowy bald dude apparently pulling the strings at ClearStream as “The Exec.” Enterprising readers have come up with other nicknames for him like “Mr. Clean” or just “That Bastard.” I remember pondering the whole […]
Read More

This week’s comic features some talk about technology and what should and shouldn’t be possible according to the characters’ knowledge, in particular on the topic of “active camouflage” — which in layman’s terms could best be described as being able […]
Read More

The sonorous opening narration of Jim Henson’ s The Dark Crystal proclaims, “another world, another time, in the age of wonder.” This isn’t about that. There is another Age of Wonder coming to a close soon, as Project Wonderful has […]
Read More

I’ve had a habit of singing praises of various movies and video games in this blog based on early impressions, some of which pan out and some of which don’t. Well, who am I to break with habit?   I […]
Read More

Warfare is certainly known as a time where man’s inhumanity to his fellow man (or woman) is often on full display. But we don’t necessarily dwell on this question in the history books: if we’ll commit atrocities on another human […]
Read More