Far Out There Looks At Christmas Lights – page 8
I was going to make a joke about how Tarkus is even more bundled up than Mariska, but that suit probably isn’t even about temperature. Tarkus is probably worried about radiation from the lights or something.
Anyway, I dunno what it was, but for some reason this one page here took me DAYS to finish. It’s not even that complicated, and the line art didn’t need any more cleaning up than the others, but for some reason everything just ground to an absolute halt while this one page was in production. For added context, there were other times where I was able to crank out two finished pages in a single day. My work flow is just that inconsistent.
Holiday get-togethers=’superspreader events’: Tarkus stays in this suit for the entire holiday season. If he’s got an extra I’d like to borrow it, beats being sick the entire first half of January.
Avi is in this mood the entire holiday season – it’s an entire season celebrating someone who is not Avi, during which people are, at least in theory, expected to be less selfish and self centered than usual, and he can’t even take solace in the idea of getting tons of gifts, since his parents buy him everything he wants the rest of the year anyway, there’s nothing out of the ordinary. Even though he does at least get a ton of extra gifts and a nice Christmas card from his parents (actually purchased by Mariska and signed with his parents names by her)
Avi: “This is an outrage! They didn’t put anywhere NEAR this many lights to celebrate MY birthday!”
As soon as I saw Tarkus in what I had to assume was/is a fully-functional environmental isolation suit, I wondered how he isn’t in the thing the rest of the year.
…then I realized that it probably doesn’t have any way to get food inside, and the first time the boys get into a fight it’s possible that glass-looking dome is getting shattered. And Tarkus is the kind of person who would hyper-fixate on the contents of the suit’s nutrient packs, and hasn’t found any that he would consider even remotely safe. Despite looking for a decent nutrient pack an average of three hours a week for the last four years.
The few closest to being safe, by Tarkus’s standards, have a tendency to taste like grass, when you’re lucky.
He’s also probably worried that being inside a suit like that for too long would be bad for his posture or something.
I would expect that isolation suit helmets a zillion years in the future would not be made out of the sort of thing that could be shattered by children scuffling..like ‘transparent adamantium’ or something. The suit itself is probably made out of some exotic plastic that, while it protects well agains germs, also offgassess chemicals that cause mutation and/or monsterization with prolonged exposure, so it can only be worn for no more than a few hours a day.