Creator Spotlight: Clint and Dawn Wolf

This week’s interview is with Clint and Dawn Wolf, the creative team behind the webcomic Zombie Ranch, one of my favorites and a fellow post-apocalyptic tale 😀

Dan: Alright, Clint, Dawn.  Feel free to answer individually or in aggregate to any given question.  But first, tell me a bit about yourselves.

C: We’re just these guys, you know? Well, a guy and a girl. We got married in 2005. We both had (and have) day jobs, but ever since I knew her Dawn has been doing the art thing–

D: I draw.

C: What she said. At occasional times she’d get the idea to work on a comic book, but never felt confident enough to write one, and various attempts at collaborating with writers fell through for one reason or another. Meanwhile I used to do the occasional bit of writing but had largely abandoned the idea as either job or hobby, even though she kept not-so-subtly hinting that maybe we should try working on something together. Took several years, but that finally sank in to my thick head.

Dan: What do you do for your day jobs?

C: We’re both fringe functionaries of the educational system. Not terribly interesting, but it pays the bills.

Dan: Tell me about your creative projects.

C: Zombie Ranch is the big one, obviously. This year marks our fifth anniversary, since the first page went live on the web on October 2nd, 2009, the same day we debuted a preview mini-comic at the first Long Beach Comic Con. Our first time exhibiting, collaborating, comicking– yeesh did we ever jump in with both feet, half-blind and full of enthusiasm.

D: I’d taken a comic creation class not too long before so I was all fired up to try out doing it. So we avoided some rookie mistakes but not all of them.

C: We know a lot more now than we did, and we have other ideas filed away, if we ever get the time to work on them properly. In the meantime, though, Dawn continues to put her illustration work out there.

D: Ya, I have a journal comic called Bits of Nothing but I don’t update it all that regularly. My main gallery is Art of Dawn.

Dan: 5 years! Congratulations! How was jumping headfirst into the adventure of comic production? How did that con go? (I haven’t attended one yet, myself).

C: Trying to get the comic together was madness. We had the idea spark in July 2009 (more on that later), but hadn’t done much more than discuss bits and pieces and scribble some notes. Then towards the end of August we got the notice that our exhibitor application for Long Beach had been approved. Originally that was just going to be so Dawn could show off her artwork, but then in a fit of hubris we decided we could have a complete first issue of Zombie Ranch ready to go in a month, basically from scratch and with no real experience. Looking back I’m surprised we ended up with anything at all. A full issue intent was scaled back to 16 pages, then 12, and then eventually just a six page preview mini-comic, and even getting that much done and printed in time, along with setting up a website for the online part, meant a lot of sleepless nights.

That’s not even mentioning we had a near disaster where our external hard drive went corrupt. Dawn was storing not just the Zombie Ranch pages but all her other artwork on it. Thankfully we were able to recover most everything courtesy of a $50 DIY software program rather than the quotes we were getting from recovery services which were something like $700 just to take a look.

Anyhow, we made it through and ended up at the convention. Most of our scant sales were courtesy of supportive family and friends, but it was a positive experience. Fellow exhibitors really came to our rescue, too. One had all sorts of tips on how to improve our set-up, and another came by at one point handing out free PBJ sandwiches, which we scarfed down because I don’t think we’d brought any food.

Dan: What are some of the rookie mistakes to avoid?

C: Ha, so many. We didn’t know for example that conventions basically look the other way on bringing food in if you’re an exhibitor. We had this monstrous solid iron display rack we dragged in to hang things on. We paid for an electrical drop we didn’t need and a merchant account to take credit cards, only to find everyone was just using cash. It’s more common to take credit cards nowadays, but only because of Square. Square wasn’t around yet then.

Dan: What are some of your favorite comic making/con attending memories?

C: I suppose getting accepted as Professionals by Comic-Con International would count. We applied back in 2010 without thinking they’d actually take us, but they did, and that was a nice ego boost. We got to sit next to Amanda Conner at one of the Long Beach conventions and she asked us to watch her stuff while she went to a panel. She’s one of Dawn’s idols.

D: Ya, Amanda Conner was a high point. Also we did our first ever panel at Long Beach in 2010 where we talked about starting up the comic and had people show up and take notes and ask us questions, none of which I would have ever expected. I like being able to help others. It drove home that no matter how much of a newbie you may think you are, there’s still someone newer who might benefit from your experience.

Dan: What inspired the story of Zombie Ranch/why a post-apocalyptic story?

C: Dawn made a late night illustration for the SDCC Art Show that she ended up calling “On The Zombie Ranch”. If she’d said to me that the then nameless lady facing down the zombies was a “hunter” or “survivor”, that probably wouldn’t have registered on my radar. But a “rancher”? Dawn tends to just draw things out of her head and figure out details later, or never at all. I’m the detail and story man, and that idea really set me off. Who is this young woman? Why’s she ranching zombies?

It got weirder from there. But the most important thing was I felt like this was a story worth telling, as opposed to just another “survive the apocalypse” or even “Walking Dead” scenario. Even back in 2009 the genre was feeling a bit played out to me, but this seemed like a fresh enough take to actually go through with. I just did a podcast where they told me they thought it was an example of a “post-post-apocalypse”, which sounds pretty accurate.

D: Clint jokes that if someone were to ask him “Where do you get your ideas?” he’d just point to me. I’ll draw things and then ask him to make up stories about it. Zombie Ranch is just the biggest one of those so far.

Dan: I’m not normally a zombie genre person, but I love how you’ve thought through some interesting applications for having zombies in your stories. What was your thought process there?

C: Well, when thinking about a ranch, particularly one where the zombies have displaced cattle, the first thought is that they’re being raised as a food source. That’s a definite irony since usually it’s all about zombies eating people rather than vice-versa, but in the course of early research I came across another concept, an independent game called “Zombie Rancher”, where someone had done just that. I don’t think there’s ever been any confusion but I really liked some of their background ideas, so out of respect for that came up with another reason zombies might be a profitable commodity. That reasoning has been pretty well received. It’s one of those ideas that seems pretty obvious when you consider it after the fact.

Dan: How is working on ZR together as a couple? Is it a source of bonding, conflict, or both?

C: A little of column A, a little of column B. We don’t have kids, so I guess the comic sort of functions as the kid, except that we don’t have to explain that mommy and daddy still love it after a heated argument over the continuity of panel four.

Dan: So since you both work in education, what do you tell people when they ask “what do you do?”, the day job, or the comic creation?

C: We bring up one or the other or both, depending on who’s asking. I’d say at a party we’re much more likely to bring up the comic since it’s a more interesting conversation topic.

Dan: How do people in your life respond when they find out you create comics?

C: It’s been fairly positive. Mostly it’s the kind of positive where you can tell they’re not actually going to run out and read it, but we don’t mind that so long as no one’s crapping on the concept itself. Comic books and zombies have both arguably gone mainstream enough that there’s a dwindling pool of people that are going to tell you you’re weird for doing something related to that. Plus we’ve met our share of strangers who are jealous of us that we go to San Diego Comic-Con every year for free. Well, free admission, anyhow. SDCC considers us professionals for the work we’ve done and continue to do. We may not be on the level of Jim Lee, but we’ve got at least that much cred.

Dan: Any last tidbits of knowledge or thoughts to share with other creators, or readers of comics?

C: Well if you really want to pick my brain, I have over a hundred “Writer’s Blog” entries on the zombie ranch site. Not all of them are about making comics or reading them, and I can’t promise all of them are particularly insightful. In fact I’m not going to promise any of them are insightful at all, but I’ve occasionally heard good things, even from this guy named Daniel Sharp 😉

Dan:  Hehe, awesome.  Thank you both so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences.

Everyone, remember you can connect with Clint and Dawn at any of the links I’ve shared above 🙂