page 1226 – no clue at all
WHOOPS! I went through all the trouble of getting this page done ahead of time, then forgot to actually queue it up on the site! Sorry about that! But yeah, if you missed me talking about it before, both this AND next week’s pages were cranked out in advance so that I could spend the next week or two really focusing on getting Conventional Wisdom stuff done. And, well, it’s only the morning after Animazement, and I’ve already got two pages online, so I guess it’s working SO far!
But enough about other comic and behind the scenes stuff, let’s talk about THIS comic… except there’s still only so much I can say, because spooooooooilers! Well, okay, I’ll say this much: when I originally plotted out this scene, the payoff was going to be exactly what it seemed like it’d be. We’d have a splash page or two of Stilez projections tearing up eldritch abominations, which would scare the Short Pants Squad away from messing with her, and that’d be it. The first problem was timing, I didn’t realize these pages would be overlapping with Animazement (dang it, I’m talking about that again!) and big elaborate action sequences didn’t mix well with cranking pages out quickly. I mean, this is Far Out There. Action-based pages are a risky proposition even when I DO have time to work on them. But as I chewed on that, I realized I was overlooking a chance to do something different. See, I’m not kidding about there still being spoilers. This isn’t one of those things where I’ll be vague about details because I haven’t actually figured them out yet. I honestly DO have a payoff in mind, and realized this was a perfect place to drop a hint or two. At that point, the fact that doing so also wound up meaning I didn’t have to draw any violent action scenes was just an added bonus. Gotta love it when things work out like that! So yeah, have fun theorizing what any of THAT means.
Oh, and just ‘cos I can: remember that you can totally buy crap with that “Chemistry Deathmatch” design on it right up there in the store!
Edit: Tore myself away from Conventional Wisdom long enough to get the new TWC Voting Incentive posted, and lemme tell ya, it’s quite the total shift from the previous entries in this series!
A room with both Stillez and Tax in it containing an “outside variable with unknown properties”. Who would have ever guessed. I can’t even say for certain which one of the two is more likely to be the source of the variable, they both have displayed (for us readers, at least) highly unique traits that could result in being such a variance.
While my money would be on Tax being the variable in question, we mustn’t forget about Avatar being in the room. Who knows what influence whatever was done to her to make her what she is could have on Tabitha’s projection.
Oh yeah, this was totally a “something’s weird about Tax” moment. Stilez is weird too, obviously, but that’s a weirdness Tabitha knew about already.
…although now that it’s been brought up, I DO wonder what would happen if Tabitha pointed that thing at Avatar. That never even occurred to me before…
Avatar’s supposed to be immune to everything, and was made by Mad Scientists in order to be so. If it Tabitha pointed that thing at Avatar, it should either bounce off of her, or act like it hit a wall. Maybe not a literal wall, because I don’t know what that would actually accomplish if it hit a literal wall, but effectively just being stopped dead or otherwise having no effect.
An alternative to the “bounces off of her” is the “spread-shot”, where it hits Avatar, only to be split into half a dozen beams that hit everyone else in the room without actually affecting Avatar directly.