page 1347 – This Is All Very Well-Adjusted And Positive
I say this every time I do a page with more than two panels, but it REALLY astounds me how much the time and energy required to finish a comic exponentially increases with every extra panel. Even with tiny little doodles like these, nine panels is a LOT of editing and coloring to do for one page. But it really felt necessary to squeeze in as much as I could this time because THIS IS (probably) THE LAST REGULAR FAR OUT THERE PAGE OF 2024! That’s right, after today, we’re plowing straight into a special Thanksgiving comic on Thursday, and then the Christmas stuff begins on Sunday! Admittedly, there’s a SLIGHT chance that I could try to crank out page 1348 on Tuesday the 31st, and then do a New Year’s page the very next day… but it seems far more likely that I’ll be so worn out at the end of the month that I’ll need to just do one comic rather than two in a row. So we’ll probably just have a New Year’s Eve comic on the 31st, then page 1348 will finally happen on January 7th.
In the meantime, I’m almost certainly not going to have the spare brain cells left over to get a new TWC Voting Incentive done THIS week, but they WILL be rolling out through next month. So even if you don’t give a crap about the Christmas stuff, you’ll still have SOME kind of regular (such as it is) Far Out There content to look forward to over the next few weeks.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have multiple more comic pages I need to draw before I pass out again…
Marshall isn’t a part of their group, and made a fancy dinner for numerous people simply because he likes cooking. Additionally, Layla is quite reasonably annoyed at the quartet, the leader of which (Avi) is actively antagonistic to Marshall.
Being friends with Marshall is easy. Being friends with any of the other four almost requires putting Avi into a box and hiding him so that they can have a chance to be themselves.
I mean, I pity Avi because I know that he’s acting out due to wanting direct contact with his parents. But all of the quartet have issues.
Hiro is highly competitive, but almost seems to target above his age and/or weight-class (there are alternatives: such as him actually being ineffectively trained, his inability to focus on one field of exercise causing him to be inferior to specialists that he competes against, or he has some sort of musculature issue that causes him to be physically inferior, be it that he is lacking bio-enhancements others have received, or that he can’t develop the required musculature).
Lynne is similar to Avi in that he wants attention, but he seems to want to get it from older “popular” children, who ignore him.
Tarkus… well, everyone knows Tarkus’s issues, but we don’t actually know their origin, so…
That’s an intriguing idea about Hiro, there. We don’t really have a clear understand of what “performance enhancement” in the Far Out There future entails, but there’s more than enough grounds for us to imagine some really wild stuff. That could have all sorts of implications on Hiro in plenty of different directions (especially since, as we’ve seen, he’s not very good at making decisions for himself)
My thought on Hiro & bio-enhancements is that, knowing that cosmetic bio-engineering is popular to the point of being commonplace, it would have LONG been standardized in sports. Even if we ignore subtle things like increasing the amount of testosterone produced in males, anyone could run faster over long distances by having their legs extended by a number of inches. And that’s before you take into consideration the amount of additional muscle mass those inches of leg length provide.
Then we have Stillez. Sure, she’s a bio-super-weapon made from secret technology, but she’s also incredibly lanky. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if she was designed using a template for a professional long distance runner or swimmer as a base, with everything else ramped up to 11 BEFORE the super-weapon additions allowing her physics-defying feats were put in.
The thing is, we also know that gene-splicing, at least in teens to adults, is incredibly dangerous and comes with a bunch of health risks. It would be shocking if that wasn’t the case in anyone above the age of a fetus, and sometimes even then. I would NOT be surprised if most of the Athlete’s Hiro’s competing against had been designed for that before/in the womb, and the rest willing got themselves modified simply to compete.
Layla objects to anyone who’s spineless and easily pushed around..except Marshall, the most spineless and easily pushed around guy ever…that guy she likes – we can only conclude one thing from this, the one key difference between him and the others: she must have a thing for Nitpickers! 😉
**runs and hides from wrath of Layla**
Marshall isn’t easily manipulated, which is what Layla meant by spineless and easily pushed around. Her problems with everyone but Avi is how easily Avi can get them to do whatever he wants, regardless of anything else.
– Hiro is so easily manipulated Avi hardly even needs to metaphorically dangle keys in front of his face. It’s not even manipulation at this point, Hiro’s just following Avi blindly.
– Tarkus has strong opinions, but won’t stand up for himself, to the point where Avi could insist that they do something the germophobe would obviously hate, like wade through raw sewage, and he’d do it.
– Lynne is the worst, though. Everything about how he presents himself and acts suggests that he should be the one holding Avi’s worst actions back, and he never follows through on that. He’d hate going through that raw sewage almost as much as Tarkus, simply due to how it would damage his clothes, but that just means that Avi needs to actually put a couple of seconds worth of effort into pushing his decision through, not that Lynne could actually stand up for himself.
Marshall, however, is willing to stand up for himself. Sure, he seems easy to push around, but Avi hates him, he is trained to be a Nitpicker, and wants to be a professional chef. Ignoring Avi for the moment, his Nitpicker training suggests that he can deal with big problems, and his desire to be a chef takes the one thing we have seen him easily manipulated into doing and puts a big “Marshall likes doing this anyway” stamp on it.
And then there’s the fact that Avi doesn’t like him. Oh, sure, Avi’s actions suggest that it’s because Marshall is cuter than him, but it’s just as likely that Avi can’t actually manipulate Marshall. When your entire friend group is based around you giving “suggestions” that everyone follows, having someone seemingly around your age who bluntly replies with a no and follows through on that is a threat to his leadership and has the chance to split the group. As being the leader of said group (despite him putting Hiro forward as the leader whenever there is trouble) is the only thing Avi has that they feel is a positive in their life.
I mean, the fact that they’re unimaginably rich aside, but none of The Super Stupendous Justice Hero’s Club count that as anything. Mostly because they consider that the default, and don’t know any better.