The first review for Comic Bastards in the year of 2012! Let’s Go! Do you like zombies? Well there is no shortage of selection when it comes to comics and any other form of entertainment for that matter. What if I told you there was a ranch, a ranch where zombies are housed and harvested, crazy right? Well, welcome to Zombie Ranch.
The Great Zombie Plague has decimated civilization, leaving the human race to rebuild and continue. In a world with limited resources humans, zombies alike need food to survive too. Susannah Zane is a rancher that happens to deal in zombies. She is aided by Zeke and Frank her fellow ranch hands. As the day begins, a floating camera ball that films Susannah’s day for a reality television show. She walks the ranch and explains how the ranch works with tagging and branding and dealing with Uncle Chuck. When Uncle Chuck gets his screen time with the “crew” he explains that the zombies are used to feed the zombies. After the interview Susannah gets back to work just in time to hear a rifle go off. She and Uncle Chuck run to find that there has been an accident with Zeke and zombies.
Zombie Ranch # 1 is okay. It takes a while to get into due to the fact that there are no narration bubbles, it just kind of starts and you’re forced to just kind of buckle up and go. But it real doesn’t go anywhere. You just sit around the ranch a wait as the characters explain the world to you. This is somewhat understandable because it wasn’t written for a comic and the cliff hanger style of storytelling; it’s a weekly web comic that runs on its own pace. The art and coloring do a decent enough job in aiding to the story and by the looks of the web comic, it gradually gets better as the story goes.
Zombie Ranch is pretty much the definition of the indie comic scene. It is a comic book from the web comic by the same name (but you probably guessed that by now). Basically that means you can go to the website and check the book. The book is of course just the first 23 entries resulting in one issue of a physical comic. While you’re there you can catch up on the series too. Or you can go the extra mile and support the married creative team in Clint and Dawn Wolf buying the book and the other two full issues. As for me, I think zombies and I have had a good run but I can’t take the onslaught (over saturation) much longer ( Zombie Ranch isn’t to blame—We’ve talked about this on the CBMFPC) and it’s going to have take something very special, damn near epic to get me excited for anything that uses the “Z” word anytime soon.
Score: 1/5
Writer: Clint Wolf Artist: Dawn Wolf Self-Published