We’ve left Beulah! On to adventures in the south throughout the holiday season. Including CAMEL FARM housesitting for a week. I am SO excited.
We’ve left Beulah! On to adventures in the south throughout the holiday season. Including CAMEL FARM housesitting for a week. I am SO excited.
I think Choan is almost certainly lying about Jabby dying if Mauricio dies, because lying about it is just as good at preventing Jabby from trying to get Mauricio killed as if it were actually true.
So Jabby is covering Mauricio’s arm and not replacing it?
I read that as both.
Yes, it’s as Nathanyel said. They are one, and theoretically inseparable. Let em think on it, maybe i can word it slightly better.
So Jabby is a cybernetic weapon who desires a more blood-thirsty host… and they’re taking it to YURI?!?!?!?!?
I smell a relapse coming…
Please, you sound just like Nogg.
You know, for some time I’ve been thinking about Nogg’s species. We’ve seen numerous fat-jokes about him, but he’s the only example of his species we’ve seen in these stories, as far as I’m aware, so we have no point of comparison.
I, for one, am accustomed to seeing Nogg as a typical example of his species.
It would be amusing to finally meet another one, and to find his species is naturally rail thin, in contrast to Nogg’s nearly spherical shape.
I read Nogg’s character as a collision between nominal team leader with idealistic motives and comic relief. E.g. craving his favorite food was pitted as violating his mission. So not sure there were “fat jokes” as such – which are about as funny as misogynistic jokes.
At most those were speciesist as in “Nogg moves as gracefully as a fish out of water”, or using him to play a prank on a fish restaurant, that sort of thing ;-). What difference would it make how variable members of his species look to our eyes?
I’m kinda with Andreas here, have I ever made a fat joke? Certainly jokes about him thinking with his stomach rather than his head, but I’ve never found that motive/act to be specifically weight-based but more about impulse control and focus. I would not be surprised if once or twice a character, meanly, called him a fat fish, maybe, I guess.
Still, yes, I’ve been myself thinking about both nogg and Krep (and a few other characters) and what their fellows might look like. 🙂
So, you think every alien looks alike? 😛 Explains why I can’t tell the Eebs apart, except by clothing…
Ah, the Nogg Danger Awareness Threshold.
It is impressive to me the amount of personality that is conveyed in every panel. Each of the various crew members and even some of the other people who show up in the strip are distinct. Even though it is a series of 2D still frames, I am getting a some of how each being might move in real life.
Each being has an energy about them that is very distinct. There is a lot of continuity of posture for each character and yet a great deal of variety of “posture sets?” (if you will indulge me in such a notion) overall.
It is uncommon to see this in very many graphic novels. Most people just don’t understand that different people move in different ways and that one of the things that set us aside as individuals is our quirks. Do you sit, or do you tend to stand? Perhaps you prefer to lean on things, or climb up them, and more importantly why?
ie. a fighter will tend to sit with the wall to their back in a place where they can view the entire room. This is known as the “Power seat” and most seating arrangements tend to have at least one. Likewise a person who has been incarcerated will tend to put their arm around a plate of food; as a subconscious reaction to the threat of losing their food and as a body language that says “No its not cool if you take my food”.
Both of these are seen by our Asian friend in the second to last frame. Not only are his arms crossed protectively in front of him; but he also has everyone right in front of him where he can see them.
I want to posit some questions to my fellow readers. Why do you think he has dark glasses on all the time? Is it because he thinks it’s intimidating, because he is a drug user, or something else? Also I wonder at the reason for his drug use. People who use are often running from something…….perhaps this is a foreshadowing of things to come?
Really I suppose that I’m just groovin on the attention to personality in this art-style. Well done dude, well done.
Go back and read Chris’s Bruno which is where I discovered his art. That strip is where Chris honed his skill at interpreting personality through ink.
Just noticed Choan’s gill piercing. Nice touch.
And I only just noticed that Pierrot and Emily’s baby has its very own tiny Pottybot.
Stephen, you might have missed THIS STRIP then!
So I see a lot of support for bringing back Yuri as the missing member. You may like it, I may like it, but what will her furryite friends think about letting her get back into a situation where she may be hurt, and more importantly, where she may hurt others (which implies that she WILL be hurt, emotionally, by hurting others)?
Yang Tomoe says it very well, regarding character. That’s what impresses me so much about this series in particular. Each character stands out and I want to know more about each of them. This is apparently extremely difficult to achieve even if a movie (for example) has hundreds of millions behind it. So, Christopher, do you explicitly create backstories for each character (the process preached in almost every writing technique) or are these just springing fully-formed from your prefrontal cortex?
Yuri with a new weapon? Since she went off the deep end once she killed. Some people are like that. They will harm no one, they will refuse to harm anyone and yet given the chance they turn into a very dangerous being. Almost like they had an inkling that would happen if they let loose the restraint….
Pretty much, yeah.
Camel farm? Dromedaries or bactrans, or both?
@War Pig; I see no reason why Mauricio can’t combine camel farming with running a tea plantation, using the camel … output … to fertilize the tea crop. And when it comes time for potential buyers to sample the tea crop, it gives Mauricio the opportunity to ask …
… (wait for it) …
“One hump or two?”
both. 🙂
Well, I think Mauricio’s doom is written out now. At some point he will kill himself to keep his weapon from doing something really awful.
Weak point of Jabby cyborg: A long-range sniper shot from a hidden location.
Two lessons about me as a writer. One, I’m not afraid to go dark and kill my characters, to spell our sure doom. Two, I am unpredictable in what way I’ll end up taking a story. Three, I add extra lessons. Four, I do it all with glee.
Mercurio’s fate isn’t written yet (!) till we see the adventure through. You never know what someone is working on in science. In each quantum dimension of a multi-ordinal system of parallel universes, only one quantum probobility can happen per unit of happening. So “fate” is possible to use even though it may be impossible to be fully certain of any one occurrence happening. I wonder why they aren’t immortal just full of useful nanomachines keeping things going and improve the matching search for faulty DNA being better at it.
In the meantime Mercurio has a task put upon him. And sending him back to Earth is impossible now. When he meets someone who is really bad he will destroy them.
I assume those nanites can also repair most any damage to him.
I think we have only seen the tip of Jabby’s potential. Remember that it is supposed to be the Peak of technical knowhow for the military police of an advanced space-faring multi-species intergalactic civilization!
Just to travel in space you need the kind of ordnance to destroy HUGE asteroids, move faster than light, conquer gravity, impeach inertia, and shield yourself from forces that boggle the noggin. Now considering thats just the tech needed for your average civilian to work, get to school or even do a bit of off-world grocery shopping; in a truly space-faring civilization its not as big a stretch as you might think.
Just think of the Jet Ski or the ATV. Both of these are mini transportation devices built for special forces so that they can get away easily while still being discreet. Its hard to believe that Jabby would not have transportation capabilities unless it’s creator was exaggerating it’s standing as the ULTIMATE weapon of war.
I assume that we will see more and more of Jabby’s capabilities as Mercurio starts to experiment. At the very least it need to be able to protect it’s host to stay alive….humans are pretty fragile so if Jabby can protect Mercurio in the vacuum of space it will have to be able to do some very specific things.
Space is: cold, lacks air, has nothing to eat, nothing to drink, is extremely low pressure, has massive levels of radiation, lacks bathrooms (not a problem for all species but humans seem to need them), and is exceedingly boring. Just to name a few problems.
All of these have to be accounted for. I mean it is not inconceivable for it to have it’s own propulsion system, otherwise you could just leave Mercurio out in the depths of space and let him die of exposure.
I am curious about how it would protect it’s user from being encased in something that solidifies….. like a solid block of concrete for instance. Just pour and forget…. Not everything that is lethal is a gun. I am also excited to see if it’s capabilities will evolve both in form as well as function.
Lastly I worry about the guilt that might accrue as Jabby kills more and more. Killing is wrong and it takes a toll on a human psyche like Mercurio’s. All we need is for him to say…”I’ve done wrong”, and for Jabby to agree and it’s “Game over”.
“Dumb ways to die” A comedic song
https://youtu.be/IJNR2EpS0jw
“Ways To Die In Space”
https://youtu.be/EQZYW2oBYr8
Actually, if you manage to cancel out inertia, FTL drive becomes quite possible and you don’t have to worry about hitting anything. Without inertia, you would come to a complete stop, harmlessly, against any inert object. Then just scoot or slide around it and back on course to the Crab Nebula or wherever. Without inertia there is no functional limit on speed. Your speed is balanced by your thrust and the density of the medium through which you are traveling. If you could generate, say, five gees of constant inert thrust, then inertialess you could exceed the speed of light by about (I’m trying to remember my physics problem) 270 times in interstellar space. The calculations are hairy and sometimes bite back. That’s Alpha Centauri in less than a week, allowing for the density of matter in both interplanetary systems (assumed to be a mean of 5 particles of dust per cubic centimeter) and the density of matter in interstellar space, which is assumed to be ONE ATOM per cubic centimeter (orders of magnitude less resistance). If you can generate more constant thrust, say, twelve gees in inert drive, you could them exponentially increase your speed. About nineteen hundred to twenty-two hundred times the speed of light, if I remember correctly. The problem was espoused by a student who had read EE “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series of books.
WarPig if you can be slightly out of phase with reality one could not be harmed by most things in space, or in a superluminal hyperspace tunnel you would skip all that debris. Without it the smallest nano-particle would destroy you your first jump. Unless you have very good deflector shields.
I was just thinking that panel 2 implies that the “arm/disarm” pun works the same in 3 different languages. Two of which are real, and therefore verifiable (though I don’t speak either, so can’t verify it myself).
Just ran across this video on YouTube that demonstrates why Bikkie is such a good choice for the team:
https://youtu.be/FIRT7lf8byw
Shouldn’t it be already all gone in the 2nd panel?
Pottybot Jr should be happier at Nogg’s “not needing laxatives anymore” face!