General consensus? People holding on to their wallets amid the uncertainty of the news, regardless of politics, since even the word from the currently in-charge Right was that there would be pain and sacrifice on the road to greatness.

And that was before April 2nd when the big board of tariffs came out. For better or worse, a lot of small-time and independent creatives have been getting their goods from China in the past decades, and that’s about to end hard. As I write this, the White House has confirmed the China tariff has been upped from 54% (which already had people freaking out) to 104% as of midnight tonight. This business is not one of big margins and also one of my first thoughts was “oh shit… Kickstarter” because you hear a lot about the ones that raise millions over their minimum but most squeak by with maybe a few hundred left after factoring all the costs for production and fulfillment — which you’ve done (or really should’ve done) before you launched it.

Futureproofing a project is also important, which is why I straight up explained to a long-time fan that plans to Kickstart and print a Volume 3 of Zombie Ranch were indefinitely suspended until I could have more certainty with the pricing. And again, that was before April 2nd. But how do you even begin to factor in the possibility that in just the span of one week the playing field would change this much?

So there are a lot of currently active and also already funded (but not yet fulfilled) crowdfunding projects suddenly looking at extra costs that they didn’t and maybe arguably couldn’t have planned for. Over the weekend Trump also signed an EO eliminating the “de minimis” exemption for goods from China, set to take effect May 2nd. What’s that you ask? Well, here’s the EO itself:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-closes-de-minimis-exemptions-to-combat-chinas-role-in-americas-synthetic-opioid-crisis/#:~:text=All%20relevant%20postal%20items%20containing,after%20June%201%2C%202025)

The most relevant bit for the indie set:

“All relevant postal items containing goods that are sent through the international postal network that are valued at or under $800 and that would otherwise qualify for the de minimis exemption are subject to a duty rate of either 30% of their value or $25 per item (increasing to $50 per item after June 1, 2025).”

So basically if your shipment was under a certain amount, you wouldn’t have to pay duties (including the new tariffs) on it. This is bad news for some businesses I won’t shed tears for, like Temu, but potentially catastrophic for the convention and Kickstarter set.

Sure, the answer would be get them made onshore, but for instance we don’t have any factories in the U.S. set up to make board games. Someone who funded their Kickstarter board game recently is therefore in a bit of a pickle at the moment, to put it lightly.

All in all, morale is not good and I’m very glad we didn’t plan to launch a Volume 3 Kickstarter this year. I hope things settle down soon and before anyone has to do cancellations or “close up shop” entirely, but a lot of indie folk likely won’t have the ability to weather this for long.

I walk outside and the neighborhood still smells like smoke. I look down the street and I see the flame-gutted skeleton of a less lucky neighbor’s once cozy home. I’d show pictures but… I kind of don’t want to. Let’s talk about something more pleasant.

Because that’s what you’ve got to do at these times, is eke out enjoyment where you can. In my case that meant once I got the computers back out of my car and hooked up, I had some escapism lined up in the form of video games from the Steam Winter Sale or before. I actually got a few finished, some of which like Disco Elysium have an amount of replay value but consarn it I just don’t have the time and energy to go through them twice, unless there was some really tantalizing reason to do so.

See, Clint Wolf has two main loves in his video gaming. Tactical turn-based gameplay and character customization. I can spend hours tweaking a character to my liking, a subject of ongoing mockery from my wife and peers. I don’t care. Sling your bullets of derision, ye plebes, I will have this eye shape to my specifications if the option be there!

Problem is I had played out everything I owned that had such options. And then — I don’t even remember how — I stumbled on a 90% off sale for the X-Com 2 expansion pack War of the Chosen. X-Com 2 was something I owned from way back when it released circa 2016 and hey, tactical turn-based gameplay, playing it through again for $4.99? With new twists? Maybe it wouldn’t hold up to my memories but for five bucks I couldn’t afford not to try, right?

So first off, yeah, pretty great expansion that makes the game play differently enough that even in my hazy recollections I wasn’t feeling repetitive… though the near decade-long gap probably didn’t hurt. Felt like greeting an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time… though now with mods! Yep, I didn’t know it but the modding community for X-Com 2 was robust over the years and even continues to be into 2025. Quality of life fixes, custom voiceovers, new hair and uniform options…

Hol’ up did you just say mah paper doll soldiers done got themselves more mix and match options for dress up? Shit, son, I came for the tactical alien fighting but now you’re gonna scratch my character creating itch as well? I’ve gone back and found an old blog post where I sang the praises of the customization and even showed off a version of Suzie I made: https://www.zombieranchcomic.com/2018/07/11/subliminal-rememberings/

But as far as verisimilitude would go, I had this in 2018 with no mods and no expansion:

And then with all my new modded bells and whistles in 2025, with the same engine, I was able to do this:

It’s still not 100% but that’s part of the fun challenge working with pre-rendered parts. You may also notice the addition of a “Photobooth” function into the game which lets you take post-mission photos and promotion photos and generates various propanda layouts. They can even end up randomly displayed as posters on walls in your base or even on a mission.

Anyhow, after I wrestled in a couple other mods to unlock any restrictions on my options, before I knew it I had amassed a whole crew of Zombie Ranch characters fighting to take back Earth. And that’s been about everything I wanted. So thanks for the distraction, X-Com 2, I’d much rather look at these pictures than the ones outside.

I didn’t buy it on its release in 2019 and continued not to buy it all through COVID. Maybe after The Witcher I just wasn’t down with another epic storyline starring a non-customizable character, despite the Wild West setting. I’d played  the original Red Dead Redemption and of course its DLC pack Undead Nightmare (y’know, the one with the zombies) and had a lot of fun but was I ready for more of that? Seemed that I wasn’t, even after I picked RDR2 up on sale over a year ago. So many games, so few finished. I remember as a kid visiting my aunt’s house and seeing games on her shelf still in their shrink-wrap packaging and finding it absolutely mind-boggling that someone would buy a video game and not immediately be playing the hell out of it. Now I understand. Bleah.

BUT. Delayed is not the same as never, and so I metaphorically broke the shrink wrap at long last and started playing RDR2 and its accompanying product of Red Dead Online. Both are largely abandoned by Rockstar these days but it doesn’t make it any less impressive to me what they brought forth, and that’s summed up in one of those words an Old West gentleperson might well have put in their journal: verisimilitude. To put it in more modern terms they are immersive as fuck, which has its downsides since RDO is in its Holidays phase right now which includes everything being really damn snowy and cold, even the Louisiana swamp biome. This happens to matter more than just in looks since there’s a survival element and if you’re not dressed warmly you can rapidly deplete your healthiness. The “story mode” of RDR2 which is the single-player meanwhile also starts out with you as part of a ragtag group of outlaws desperately searching for food and shelter in the midst of a terrible blizzard. And like I said, it’s an immersive game so my timing deciding to play it as Winter begins in real life is perhaps not the best.

BUT. I do live in the Los Angeles area and so can’t complain too much compared to what my in-game avatars are experiencing. Although RDO is most likely stuck in snow until the Holiday event ends, you do get out to greener pastures in fairly short order in the main game and that’s when the tried-and-true GTA-style adventuring begins, alternating free roam open world and scripted missions as you guide notorious outlaw Arthur Morgan through his paces. This is similar to guiding John Marston in the first game but RDR2 is a prequel where Marston is an NPC and where he was mostly a loner during his time, here is the time before when there’s a whole gang of men and women of all races, colors, and creeds, trying to stay alive and free in an 1899 America where law and order are increasingly encroaching upon their way of life.

This change is probably the most crucial difference I’ve found so far, because Rockstar really took their time breathing life into each individual gang member. They move around, they talk to each other, they do chores (and complain at the people not pulling their weight) and you get to react or not to all of them as you choose. You can roam out for days to do honorable or dishonorable deeds but you’ll always return to that outlaw camp of found family and little by little they’ve grown on me and sometimes I want to just sit down and listen to them instead of rushing to the next mission. Of course having played the first game I know there’s tragedy in store but I really credit the developers for putting so much detail into these virtual people and the setting itself. Cyberpunk 2077 (post patches) is the only game that’s come close for me recently but I feel like between the two they’ve really raised the bar for the future. They feel alive. Just the other day I decided to check out a theater in-game promising a Vaudeville-style variety show — now maybe there might be a mission that takes place there later but at the time it had no draw to it except my curiosity and whim, and I got treated to a genuinely great experience, and what’s more an experience that I could sit and watch or get up and actually interact with to change the outcome. Let’s just say as an example that the devs must have heard of real-life 19th Century incidents like the actors having to change the ending of Othello at literal gunpoint because an impressionable cowboy got up and threatened the man playing Iago with a loaded revolver.

So I’m running long at the mouth and have barely scratched the surface, but I think that’s one of the keys is that you feel like there’s so much you’re seeing but also so much you’re missing out on. Unlike real life you could reload a save or do a new playthrough but it feels so naturally presented that even a guy like me that sometimes gets really completionist can walk away from a confrontation because I don’t feel like Arthur gives enough of a shit at that moment. There’s a lot of choice in how to approach certain situations, but also times where it’s just going to go bad because Arthur is, well, Arthur, and Arthur is not what you’d call a born diplomat. He’s grown on me too, I suppose, as I continue playing.

And heck, I even figured out that there’s customization to an extent. It turns out that under all the hairyness he’s normally presented with Morgan is a blonde dude with blue eyes and with the right shave and outfit can do a half-decent Frank cosplay. Now I just have to find a bolt-action rifle to go with.

We still want to put together a Volume 3, but the landscape is so changed from 2019 that when people come by and ask at conventions I just have to dissemble. We have one more episode/issue to stuff in after this one to close out this current arc and at our current pace that may take most of the year, and the last thing you want to do is start a crowdfunding campaign late in the year because it makes for gnarly tax complications.

Also, regardless of your political alignment I don’t think most people would disagree a lot of changes are in store after Trump gets sworn back in, particularly if he goes through with his promised tariffs. We’ve always gotten our printing done inside the U.S. but who knows what the knock-on effects would be if those printers depend on any imports? And that’s presuming the companies we’ve done business with before are still intact, though thankfully that’s so far been the case. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there, and a hike of even a few cents in postal rates can become a big deal if you’re trying to ship rewards out to hundreds of backers.

So maybe it’s a blessing that we’re not even at the point where I’d try a 2025 Kickstarter (assuming we even go Kickstarter again, because who knows?) and instead I’m looking to 2026 for that. It’s slow and I’m sure is disappointing to some of our fans that have been “waiting for the trade” but I also figure by then things will have settled some, for better or worse, and we can look at the cost estimates with clear eyes. Crowdfunding lives and dies by realistic goals and I want the goalposts to settle down before going for another punt.

Why do I bring this up? Well, mostly because I love to be oblique and bury the lede. The lede is that during the writer’s strike we canceled our Netflix subscription. The days where Netflix was the only real game in town for streaming were long gone and the prices kept going up while the management was making some very questionable decisions with their “software,” i.e. their library both of existing titles and newly minted exclusives. Some of it wasn’t their fault or under their control as major players were getting their own channels into circulation and circling the wagons, calling their IPs home so that you weren’t going to see Disney and such available anymore. Other decisions like canceling the Dark Crystal prequel series made me feel like one of those anime protagonists who has to clench their fists with tears streaming from their eyes and declare “I cannot forgive you!”

But if I’m totally honest it was probably the costs. Some people can afford to buy all the consoles and some can’t, right? And there was nothing particularly compelling keeping me there. After cancelling of course I found out no one else did even though we’d all talked about it, and Netflix apparently got its act back together and was putting out some good apps again, but… I held out. Even with Dawn poking at me hopefully every so often and pointing to things our friends were raving over like Blue Eyed Samurai, I held out.

So Netflix called in the nuclear option and hit me with their ads for Season 2 of Arcane: League of Legends.

There was no defense. They knew of my love for Season 1 and my figuring they would just cancel it like they canceled all other good and right things in the world, and no, they renewed it and waved it before me and my dumb bull ass ran right into the anvil of resubscription.

But here’s the kicker. It’s good. It may even be better than the first Season, and that’s particularly surprising in a world where sequels and prequels so often don’t measure up to what we loved in the first go ’round.

No, good doesn’t quite capture it. Six episodes in and everything shows the hallmarks of not only a generous budget but the work of a creative team firing on all cylinders with the storytelling, voice acting, and especially the animation. It’s gorgeous. It’s moving. It was worth the wait, and worth my pride in crawling on back to the entertainment ex.

I still have a lot of worry for Season 2 of Andor, although for better or worse my Disney+ subscription just renewed for the year. Now that we can pick and choose there’s a lot more need to keep an eye on what we’re picking and choosing. But for now, I have found a new killer app, and I am content.

We kid, of course. We loved the little furball for all of her 21(!) years with us, even if her kidneys had been slowly failing her over the past few. Up until fairly recently she was still running and jumping and meowing, if not with the spryness of her prime years. Hey I’d like to see a human over a hundred years old (relatively) free climb or clear their own height in a standing jump, even if she’d started to sometimes miss her mark.

She had always been skinny in a world of chonk, but more and more we felt her bones through her skin. She couldn’t seem to lift her tail anymore, or even sit down comfortably. Epileptic seizures had started, about once a month, and cat epilepsy is a scary thing because their brains short-circuit but they’ll still try to run.

Still, it wasn’t until her latest episode that she finally seemed to go away, mentally speaking, and not really ever come back. So with great sorrow, we made the long delayed decision to have her euthanized. Even knowing she’d had a long, good life, even with the long forewarning that she was on her way out, onions were being cut.

We had already decided that another cat would be adopted when the current one went, but not the timing or circumstance beyond that we wanted a rescue pet. After coming back from the vet, Dawn figured she’d want to wait awhile.

She didn’t last a day before changing her mind. Despite all the interruptions and the fur in her oil paints and innumerable other consequences of being both artist and pet owner in a small dwelling space, she woke up the next day to a catless house and it was, in her words, “too quiet.” And then a mutual friend of a friend sent us pictures of a new kitten just out of fostering at our local humane society. We went over that very day, and long story short, came home with a new mew. He is a handful (literally and figuratively) and also absolutely adorable and probably the best possible medicine for the loss we felt, we’re just in the process of figuring out some things like, right at the moment while I type this, “no trying to go to sleep on Dawn while she’s drawing.” It was the saddest of times but also it is the best of times.The cat is dead. Long live the cat.

Take for example the lament of some critics and fans about the “Marvelization” of cinema. While I have my problems with blanket terms like this, I can see how people might come to the conclusion that the so-called Marvel formula, or at least characterization, has become a tedious mass of indistinguishable quippyness. It’s probably a bad example since I disagree and think the problem dates back at least as far as Joss Whedon, who definitely left his mark on Marvel but his style of every character being something of a one-liner machine can be seen on display as far back as the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series in the ’90s.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but there is a danger of character losing their individual voice and that’s when homogeny becomes a problem, whether it’s flippant snark or Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness sounding out from a dozen different mouths. If one of the holy grails of writing (in my opinion) is being able to distinguish a specific talker without any prompts whatsoever beyond what they say, homogeny in dialogue is the opposite of that. Maybe it’s why George Bernard Shaw would constantly indulge in phonetic accents in his scripts, jes so yew would naow a cockney wuz tawkin’. On account of his characters otherwise tending towards being mouthpieces for his various philosophical musings of the moment.

Homogeny in dialogue is more than just potentially confusing or flattening, it threatens to be the absolute death knell of any entertainment: boring. Maybe not in the short run, but sooner or later people are going to become aware of a certain sameyness. It’s true that in certain friend groups and subcultures in real life people can end up sounding very much alike, but I think that’s where it behooves a writer to pick out the differences and figure out what makes Sorority Pledge A someone distinct from Sorority Pledge B. Unless of course, your intent is to paint them as a blob of a mob, which is arguably the case for me back when I was writing the “background” McCartys. But I knew most of them were going to have a (literal) expiration date, so I don’t think anyone got to know them long enough to tire of their schtick.

I guess the point is, as usual, to be mindful, and if you make a first draft and feel like your characters are just sounding like you, you might want to consider finding some variation. Hopefully not enough to sound forced in the other direction, but variety is supposed to be the spice and spice can do a lot to liven up the same ol’ and bland which doesn’t seem to have that kick you wanted.

As a layperson comics reader, would you see anything wrong with this? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s intentionally designed to trip the twitch switches of pro or semi-pro letterers. A sampling:

1) Left-justified text, meaning the paragraph is straight up and down on the left side but varies on the right. It’s standard in writing novels and such but tends to look very odd within the word balloons that are the standard method of delivery for comics dialogue. That’s why the convention is to center the text and ideally go for a “diamond” shape where possible to complement the balloon that contains it.

2) Speaking of which, the word balloon (while nice-looking on its own) is way too big for the text inside. It’s something I still wrassle with occasionally but you try to keep it from being too tight or too loose with regards to whitespace. This paragraph is not only left-justified but not even centered within the balloon itself.

3) Lack of all caps for your dialogue isn’t a big deal these days, but having three capital letters in the same sentence is… oof. As a bonus one of the caps is a crossbar capital “I” which editors would often consider a no-no to use in comics at all unless it’s on its own or part of an apostrophe situation.

4) Comic Sans is the font choice. This might be the least sinful overall to me, in fact when we first started the comic we were using it and you can still see it in the first issue or so. But there are a lot of people who really, really don’t like it and consider it a sign of ignorance and amateurism. What’s been explained to me is that it’s not very well set up as a font design, which might be why there’s also the problem of the “g” in “Lettering” brushing up against the “a” in the next line. That could also be a line spacing problem though, everything just looks cramped.

Anyhow, lack of these lettering stylings is hardly a criminal act, and most are honestly there for the purpose of making comics easier to read, so if your audience can read it then so be it (barring of course an editor you need to get things past). I’ve seen all sorts of webcomics do all sorts of things and the above at least is still legible, even if it makes my brain itch. But if you truly do have a passion for comic book lettering, it’s worth figuring out some of the basics even if you plan to break them later on.

Whether you agree or disagree, this is likely one of the only places I could say that and have anyone know what I’m talking about. I’m not sure about the popularity of MAWS but being that it’s streamed by a major network it would be far more likely for someone nowadays to find Zombie Ranch and go “That’s Supergirl’s hair!”

There’s this concept of something or someone being “iconic” that gets arguably overused in our modern age. J.S. Sterling did a rant about it and they have a point.

The point being that something isn’t iconic just because it’s declared so. In fact if you have to declare something iconic, or explain why it’s iconic, it might not be as iconic as you think.

It doesn’t have to be global but there should be some critical level of recognition among the culture or subculture of the populace involved, the bigger the better. I would be brave (and bold) enough to state that a significant portion of humanity knows Superman. Less so Supergirl, but still a significant enough chunk that a Supergirl cosplayer will be recognized at your average comics convention. On the other hand Dawn was a Captain Marvel fan and until that movie came out most people misidentified her symbol for Wonder Woman.

It has to really stick in the mind, and be distributed widely enough for instant recognition and association before I would consider something iconic. Indiana Jones’s fedora and whip? Iconic. But prior to 1981 almost no one even knew of Indiana Jones, much less his preferred gear. And then there’s the question of if it’s going to last. Superman has been around for nearly a century and keeps returning to his classic look, but even though it’ll probably be one of the more popular Halloween costumes this year, I’m not going to lay money on Aussie breakdance “star” Raygun being considered iconic (you know, the one from the Olympics? No? Well, proving my point…)

So is Rosa iconic? I’ll come right out and say no. Suzie has probably one of the more potentially iconic looks of our cast but even she’s just going to look like some generic cowgirl to 99% of people at a comic-con, much less the genpop. We’d need a lot more inroad into the zeitgeist for that. Even with Supergirl above, how many people would recognize her just from that picture in her civvies? That hairstyle is not iconic to Supergirl (not yet, anyhow). Almost without exception when I see a Clark Kent cosplay they have their shirt open enough to show at least part of the blue top with the big “S” symbol that’s recognized the world over. Clark Kent is a just a guy in a suit, otherwise.

One game we used to play while sitting at our exhibitor booth watching people go by was the Three C’s game. You spot a cosplayer at a general pop culture convention in a suit and trenchcoat with a more or less rumpled air: are they Castiel, Constantine, or Columbo? All three are iconic, but have so much crossover in their look that Constantines would be well-advised to lean into blond hair or risk mistaken identification, which from my experience is a bummer for all parties involved.

But don’t mind me, I still remember dressing up as a sea turtle for one Hallowe’en, flippers, shell and all, and even in broad daylight everyone thought I was a parrot because their eyes went to the beak. So be ready for disappointment no matter how universally iconic you think something is. Or just stick to Superman.

Here I am at the half-century mark and still watching cartoons, and still not really motivated to give Emergency! and Adam 12 a go. For one thing it’s not like there’s ever been a lapse in medical dramas and police procedurals in the decades since so I might as well watch something in the genre that’s floated to the top, right? The 10% of “not crap?”

Opinions can vary of course, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to take a broader view of things and not outright dismiss entire genres or time-periods of entertainment. Not everything old is bad, and not everything old is good. What’s often true is that the merely mediocre fades away to leave only the memorable, and if you’re not careful about parsing that phenomenon you’ll end up in that all-too-common refrain of “music nowadays sucks” and similar blanket statements. Or the opposite end where “the youth” dismiss anything older than their own lifetimes as worthless and outdated and think every show tune originated with Family Guy. Then the older folk smugly assert “um, actually…” and the generational divide gets another fracture.

In terms of comics, there’s stuff from over 100 years ago that deserves study just as much as there’s stuff being produced now that’s worth a look, even if your jaded eye detects the influences of the past upon the present. 90% of everything is still crap, but just don’t make the mistake of cutting that last 10% out of your life.