Probably wearing a couple ACE bandage wraps on her hands, and maybe her forarms – thats where the flexors for the fingers are. Oh, and a nice handmade origami Tina as a broach….
Most likely just simple physics. Remember that for every force, there is an equal and opposite force; so the force that Shelly put into that…whatever it was..also went through Shelly, via her hands and forearms. That has got to hurt.
Her expression seems more enigmatic than pleading to me. Perhaps it’s just because AFAIK the Collective’s always behaved as if none of our ladies would hurt them (with the exception of Phix, to whom they’ve usually been deferential — or was that just Nudge talking? It’ll be interesting next time Tina and Phix meet); so to me, maybe she’s just cocking an eyebrow, dropping a cerebellum-related hint, and acting… a little cocky, maybe? She seems slightly less inhibited, now that she’s Nudge-less.
You just made me look up two words in the dictionary.
To me, Tina is evaluating. That comes across as a judging pose, with some satisfaction mixed in, because she’s smiling. I’m repeating myself, but I think you and some others are conflating Tina deciding that Shelly and Monica were friends with Tina loosing Nudge. There wasn’t much time difference between them (relatively speaking) but those were two separate events.
@SoWhyMe: The first panel on June 25, 2010 has a pose that is similar to today’s, but it strikes me as much more nervous because of the wider eyes and higher eyebrows.
The expression, “a new wrinkle in your brain” means you learned something new. I think “a few gray hairs” usually means you got them by being frightened or worried, but Tina may mean that having supernatural abilities is something new to worry about. Another possibility is that she may have noticed that Shelly actually has some gray hairs and she might have just suddenly changed the topic like she used to do, but is being more honest (not just positive) since Shelly is now a friend.
eschmenk I’m gonna go with “having supernatural abilities is something new to worry about.” I think that will give her gray hairs, which she doesn’t now have.
I figured the gray hair comment was an addition to the wrinkles in your brain. Because wrinkles are also a sign of age. So that was so much to think about it gave your brain wrinkles AND gray hairs. So she was being overly clever.
Clarification- I guess it’s better to say to sync with the first comment that the something new she learned was so big it gave her brain wrinkles and gray hairs.
I can’t reconcile the fold in the brain (good) with hairbrained or fuzzy brain syndrome (bad). Apparently, hairbrained came from harebrained, but some dictionaries consider it a legitimate spelling.
well apparently the long earlobes of buddha statues represent wisdom because ears grow through life so the use of certain body parts to indicate age or learning something enlightening is a legitimate metaphor
Okay, I have an issue with that. The engine she threw was basically stripped down to nothing. We also didn’t see if it was on a dolly or anything, and she just pushed it off the dolly, where it went flying. We also don’t know if it may have been an all-aluminum block engine, which would have made it (relatively) light.
I have liofted (more or less) a complete 1275cc four-cylinder engine (from an Ausitn-Healey Sprite that i wrecked in Italy).
I was much younger and in much better shape than i am today.
It still almost injured me.
Minus heads, the 3,5-liter aluminium V8 that Rover may still be building (which is, in fact, a 1960s GM 232 CID design that USAians couldn’t manage to figure out how to maintain) weighed about forty pounds less the iron four-cylinder engine that was used in the MG-B (A comparison that can be made because of the MGB-GT V8, which was never exported to the US, dammit.) … and its dry weight was 375 pounds.
Oops – that last paragraph changed in mid-composition, and i forgot to eliminate the “minus heads” part; the weight comparison is for complete engines.
Sorry about the wreck… but do you know how cool that sounds! You were driving an Austin-Healy Sprite… in Italy… and wrecked it. It could only be cooler if you were in a race on a course.
Heh. Eighteen feet, take-off to touchdown and landed facing the way we came from. I dislocated a finger and the other guy skinned his knee.
I was in the Navy, in Sicily, in 1971.
But if you want to talk coolness factor – it was apparently the only confirmed example of the rumoured “Mark 2.5″ type. Read the last two paragraphs of this section (Mark III); the one in parenthesis is the one i added after i looked up Spridgets for anything i was writing and discovered how rare that car really was…
And we won’t talk about the fact that i wasn’t able to raise the two grand to replace it with the fully-restored Big Healey 100-6 that a guy was trying to sell after he got transferred early. (He wasn’t high enough rank to get the Navy to ship it to the States for him – i was.)
Shelly’s reacting to this more calmly than I thought she would; kinda figured her response would be “How the FU@& did I do that!?!?”
Well, that’ll probably come up on Monday, once the shock wears off.
There is a good chance that I’m over-analyzing things, but I wonder if Tina means something different than we think. She keeps using the word “that,” but what does it mean?
I think it’s possible that in the first panel Tina was talking about Shelly not feeling a change to her brain or mind. In the second panel, Tina might mean that the physical pain was necessary for Shelly’s new ability. No pain, no gain, in other words. It may be that the physical (and mental?) trauma that Shelly went through was necessary to give Shelly her supernatural strength, so minor amounts of the same was necessary to give her a minor upgrade. It wouldn’t surprise me if an actual change to her mind and/or brain is part of this because of the way Paul blurs the border between mental and physical stuff.
OTOH, over-analyzing seems to be a major participating sport around here, so you have a lot of company (at least a third of whom could use a good copy editor; I can’t get through a day’s comments without my inner grammar-nazi pitching at least three hissy-fits).
Paul provides us with entertainment, of course, but does anyone else wonder how much entertainment we provide for him? I could imagine him sitting back with a beer, chuckling at what we’re saying, and occasionally yelling something like “Hey, Honey, get a load of this!”
I see him more as reading them and thinking/saying things like:
“Yeah? Well screw you too!”
“Oh comon! You can’t really believe that?”
“Geeze, these people make way too much of the dialog.”
“Who ties this guy’s shoelaces for him in the morning?”
“Come up with your own comic so I can comment on it. We’ll see how YOU like it!”
“Get bent, asshole!”
“Gag me with a shovel!”
“Kiss ass much?”
“That’s it! I’m not reading anymore of this horse s***!”
Or maybe I’m just thinking of his reaction to my posts.
@Xiutecuhtli – After a while it gets easier to ignore your inner “Grammar Nazi”…or you could just do what I do. Correct the person verbally, but say little to nothing in type.
Then again, there are plenty of people here who have no trouble unleashing their own grammar hounds on other commenters.
but as female she could be considered equal and opposite to Samson. Also where men have a tougher time keeping hair long (on battlefield: bloody trees) women get more trouble from cutting it so maybe it is part of recognizing the strength.
I agree: men, especially warriors, favor short hair because it’s harder for an enemy to grab it and deny you freedom. But some Kings also had to wear hair long–when the Merovingians were finally deposed to make way for Pepin the Short, the procedure was to shear the King’s hair and pack him off to a monastery.
(Here’s a reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childeric_III.) I also remember that in Andre Norton’s Witchworld, among others, women kept growing in (magical) ability until they married or had sex, and their hair was cut.
I do not know why, but Shelly’s having powers now actually bothers me. It just seems too token, and it might have been nice having a fully human character after appearing to lose Owen and Lakshmi and Amanda’s long absence. Maybe that’s why she has suddenly reappeared, to fill the human void Shelly is leaving… Not to criticize. This is your work, I’m just saying it seems a bit odd to me.
are we talking hormone imbalances/obsession to fill void left by mommy type natural, or that it may be supernatural just not necessarily should be what pops into our minds
I think people may be over-reacting to Paul’s comments, but I’m not sure. Captain T implied that Shelly wasn’t a “fully human character.” Paul may be meaning that Shelly is still fully human, but humans have natural abilities they don’t know about.
From my point of view, crushing the cup with her fingers (rather than flattening it using her arm muscles) and not slicing or crushing her fingers in the process would have probably been impossible, IRL, so it would still be supernatural to us.
I don’t think Atemisia‘s second suggestion is correct, because Paul said “don’t assume there’s anything supernatural. To me, that rules out even those supernatural things we’re not thinking about.
I think the rest of the collective must have learned a thing or two about tricking people into seeing things from another perspective from Nudge while she was there. This sure seems like something she/it would do.
Many Mars ago I wrote a proposal (ok… One page premise) for a TV series… Something like a ‘super Charlie’s Angels’.
Of the three women one would have physical powers. Super strength and invulnerability. One would have mental powers. Telepathy, telekinesis, and some kind of mental invisibility like the The Shadow. The third would have magic/new age powers like channeling deceased experts of any kind (Helicopter pilot, EOD)(Hopefully they didn’t die due to their incompetence!)
This covers body/mind/spirit.
So. Back on topic. Monica needs a team whose members possess a variety of skills, knowledge and attributes.
Uh-Oh, what’s Shelly going to look like on Monday?
Probably wearing a couple ACE bandage wraps on her hands, and maybe her forarms – thats where the flexors for the fingers are. Oh, and a nice handmade origami Tina as a broach….
I was actually worried about the grey hairs…but the bandages, yeah, that too…
Doh! Just noticed that we see her hair in the first panel…I was focused on Tina in the last panel…
that doesn’t mean she hasn’t changed… anyways if Tina can still read auras she may have noticed something that will manifest in a few weeks
Aww, poor Shelly.
Tina 2.5 doesn’t seem to be thinking things through before they act.
So Shelly has strength, but not invulnerability.
That could cause problems.
Why are you saying Tina 2.5 isn’t thinking things through?
Is Tina saying that Shelly learned that she can over-exert herself?
Darned Cliffhangers…wha’ happunt to poor Shelley?
Most likely just simple physics. Remember that for every force, there is an equal and opposite force; so the force that Shelly put into that…whatever it was..also went through Shelly, via her hands and forearms. That has got to hurt.
Higher durability, but not nigh-invulnerable.
If Phix gives out cookies, what does the demon-rista reward with? Demitasse?
Oooo Oooo Now it is time to check on Bud and Brandi…PBH
Is it just me, or is Tina looking in rare cutieness these last couple of strips?
Mmmm Has her personality change much since Nudge has moved out of the Demon dorm that is Tina?
PBH
I don’t think so. I think she’s acting the same as she did once she became an actual friend of Shelly and Monica.
Nope, not just you. Major cuteness. Last panel of the prior strip was EPIC
To me, this time Tina’s expression in the last panel is saying “please don’t rip my arms off for doing that to you.”
Her expression seems more enigmatic than pleading to me. Perhaps it’s just because AFAIK the Collective’s always behaved as if none of our ladies would hurt them (with the exception of Phix, to whom they’ve usually been deferential — or was that just Nudge talking? It’ll be interesting next time Tina and Phix meet); so to me, maybe she’s just cocking an eyebrow, dropping a cerebellum-related hint, and acting… a little cocky, maybe? She seems slightly less inhibited, now that she’s Nudge-less.
Edit: Sorry, used the wrong word. I meant ‘cerebrum’ instead of ‘cerebellum’… it’s been a long time since high school biology
You just made me look up two words in the dictionary.
To me, Tina is evaluating. That comes across as a judging pose, with some satisfaction mixed in, because she’s smiling. I’m repeating myself, but I think you and some others are conflating Tina deciding that Shelly and Monica were friends with Tina loosing Nudge. There wasn’t much time difference between them (relatively speaking) but those were two separate events.
@SoWhyMe: The first panel on June 25, 2010 has a pose that is similar to today’s, but it strikes me as much more nervous because of the wider eyes and higher eyebrows.
Oh God It Mutilated her hands and cut chunks out of her thumbs!! also Wrinkle in brain…? gray hairs…
Not only that, Shelly’s got two right hands now!! Oh wait … nevermind.
The expression, “a new wrinkle in your brain” means you learned something new. I think “a few gray hairs” usually means you got them by being frightened or worried, but Tina may mean that having supernatural abilities is something new to worry about. Another possibility is that she may have noticed that Shelly actually has some gray hairs and she might have just suddenly changed the topic like she used to do, but is being more honest (not just positive) since Shelly is now a friend.
Or maybe the grey hair comment is an attempt to fire up Shelley’s power again so she’ll forget the pain in her hands… or help take care of the injury.
eschmenk I’m gonna go with “having supernatural abilities is something new to worry about.” I think that will give her gray hairs, which she doesn’t now have.
I figured the gray hair comment was an addition to the wrinkles in your brain. Because wrinkles are also a sign of age. So that was so much to think about it gave your brain wrinkles AND gray hairs. So she was being overly clever.
Clarification- I guess it’s better to say to sync with the first comment that the something new she learned was so big it gave her brain wrinkles and gray hairs.
Are you saying Shelly is hairbrained?
I can’t reconcile the fold in the brain (good) with hairbrained or fuzzy brain syndrome (bad). Apparently, hairbrained came from harebrained, but some dictionaries consider it a legitimate spelling.
well apparently the long earlobes of buddha statues represent wisdom because ears grow through life so the use of certain body parts to indicate age or learning something enlightening is a legitimate metaphor
i mean certain body parts being aged ahead of their years
Hmmm . With the properly padded gloves . . .
To quote Terry Pratchet:
The truth will make you fret.
but that which you do not know can kill you
Yes, but it can also make you frep. ‘The Truth’ was a marvelous book
“the truth has got its boots on, it’s going to start kicking”
this particular truth looks like it has potential to beat shelley out of the boxing ring
Should have started with something easy–like, say, lifting an entire engine block unassisted?
Sore hands from squishing something beats the hell out of hurting your back.
Okay, I have an issue with that. The engine she threw was basically stripped down to nothing. We also didn’t see if it was on a dolly or anything, and she just pushed it off the dolly, where it went flying. We also don’t know if it may have been an all-aluminum block engine, which would have made it (relatively) light.
…Aw, who am I kidding? SHELLY SMASH!
Well, it did still have the headers on it…which means that a lot of the guts were still in it…I have faith in our half-pint Hulk…
I have liofted (more or less) a complete 1275cc four-cylinder engine (from an Ausitn-Healey Sprite that i wrecked in Italy).
I was much younger and in much better shape than i am today.
It still almost injured me.
Minus heads, the 3,5-liter aluminium V8 that Rover may still be building (which is, in fact, a 1960s GM 232 CID design that USAians couldn’t manage to figure out how to maintain) weighed about forty pounds less the iron four-cylinder engine that was used in the MG-B (A comparison that can be made because of the MGB-GT V8, which was never exported to the US, dammit.) … and its dry weight was 375 pounds.
Oops – that last paragraph changed in mid-composition, and i forgot to eliminate the “minus heads” part; the weight comparison is for complete engines.
Sorry about the wreck… but do you know how cool that sounds! You were driving an Austin-Healy Sprite… in Italy… and wrecked it. It could only be cooler if you were in a race on a course.
Heh. Eighteen feet, take-off to touchdown and landed facing the way we came from. I dislocated a finger and the other guy skinned his knee.
I was in the Navy, in Sicily, in 1971.
But if you want to talk coolness factor – it was apparently the only confirmed example of the rumoured “Mark 2.5″ type. Read the last two paragraphs of this section (Mark III); the one in parenthesis is the one i added after i looked up Spridgets for anything i was writing and discovered how rare that car really was…
And we won’t talk about the fact that i wasn’t able to raise the two grand to replace it with the fully-restored Big Healey 100-6 that a guy was trying to sell after he got transferred early. (He wasn’t high enough rank to get the Navy to ship it to the States for him – i was.)
Of course, that is two thousand 1971 dollars…
Mind if we flag you for “original research”?
Go ahead – i’ve been wondering how long it would be before someone at least demanded a source…
AGGGGH! The 1275 was from the ’69 Sprite i had here in the States! The ’63 in Italy was an 1100!
I hope she doesn’t plan to do anything involving manual labor today–including something like typing, using silverware to eat, and so on…
Shelly’s tough, she’ll just shake her hands a couple of times to get the blood circulating again and be right as rain…
Right as rain? Will she get a card from Jin?
“… shake her hands … and splatter blood over the walls and floor …
Shelly’s reacting to this more calmly than I thought she would; kinda figured her response would be “How the FU@& did I do that!?!?”
Well, that’ll probably come up on Monday, once the shock wears off.
I think she dropped the cup and was pretty much speechless yesterday.
There is a good chance that I’m over-analyzing things, but I wonder if Tina means something different than we think. She keeps using the word “that,” but what does it mean?
I think it’s possible that in the first panel Tina was talking about Shelly not feeling a change to her brain or mind. In the second panel, Tina might mean that the physical pain was necessary for Shelly’s new ability. No pain, no gain, in other words. It may be that the physical (and mental?) trauma that Shelly went through was necessary to give Shelly her supernatural strength, so minor amounts of the same was necessary to give her a minor upgrade. It wouldn’t surprise me if an actual change to her mind and/or brain is part of this because of the way Paul blurs the border between mental and physical stuff.
You’re over-analyzing things.
OTOH, over-analyzing seems to be a major participating sport around here, so you have a lot of company (at least a third of whom could use a good copy editor; I can’t get through a day’s comments without my inner grammar-nazi pitching at least three hissy-fits).
Paul provides us with entertainment, of course, but does anyone else wonder how much entertainment we provide for him? I could imagine him sitting back with a beer, chuckling at what we’re saying, and occasionally yelling something like “Hey, Honey, get a load of this!”
that’s what i look forward to when i get some people reading my comic it may be more fun than writing it
I see him more as reading them and thinking/saying things like:
“Yeah? Well screw you too!”
“Oh comon! You can’t really believe that?”
“Geeze, these people make way too much of the dialog.”
“Who ties this guy’s shoelaces for him in the morning?”
“Come up with your own comic so I can comment on it. We’ll see how YOU like it!”
“Get bent, asshole!”
“Gag me with a shovel!”
“Kiss ass much?”
“That’s it! I’m not reading anymore of this horse s***!”
Or maybe I’m just thinking of his reaction to my posts.
Hence the need for the beer!
@Xiutecuhtli – After a while it gets easier to ignore your inner “Grammar Nazi”…or you could just do what I do. Correct the person verbally, but say little to nothing in type.
Then again, there are plenty of people here who have no trouble unleashing their own grammar hounds on other commenters.
So we can type “ya’ll” and you won’t say anything?
I always thought it was ‘y’all’…
…or Julie can just let Jabberwonky correct me this time.
Just tryin’ to help Julie out….
We are not alone in overanalysis.
Wow! Freefall still going. I don’t know why I stopped reading it.
I can’t disagree with Winston’s comment. (I assume that’s who that is.)
Where would we be without the engineering/mechanical gene? We sure wouldn’t be able to read webcomics. To engineers, *lifts glass of Saurian Brandy.
Wait… I thought that cutting your hair made you lose your superhuman strength…?
but as female she could be considered equal and opposite to Samson. Also where men have a tougher time keeping hair long (on battlefield: bloody trees) women get more trouble from cutting it so maybe it is part of recognizing the strength.
I agree: men, especially warriors, favor short hair because it’s harder for an enemy to grab it and deny you freedom. But some Kings also had to wear hair long–when the Merovingians were finally deposed to make way for Pepin the Short, the procedure was to shear the King’s hair and pack him off to a monastery.
(Here’s a reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childeric_III.) I also remember that in Andre Norton’s Witchworld, among others, women kept growing in (magical) ability until they married or had sex, and their hair was cut.
Charles I, after joking with the headsman and counselling him to not fear and to strike truly, moved his hair aside to give him a clean stroke.
I do not know why, but Shelly’s having powers now actually bothers me. It just seems too token, and it might have been nice having a fully human character after appearing to lose Owen and Lakshmi and Amanda’s long absence. Maybe that’s why she has suddenly reappeared, to fill the human void Shelly is leaving… Not to criticize. This is your work, I’m just saying it seems a bit odd to me.
Who said that she has any powers?
Oh great! Throw a wrench into everyone’s mental gears whydontcha? So she is that strong from just working out?
She’s just kinda strong, that’s all.
Nothing unusual about that.
Throwing an engine block is not kinda strong, that;s freaky strong. But if the power is not hers, maybe Shelly is…
…occupied.
Tina. Tina is implying that Shelly has something unusual going on. At least that’s what I’m getting out of it.
But don’t assume there’s anything supernatural.
are we talking hormone imbalances/obsession to fill void left by mommy type natural, or that it may be supernatural just not necessarily should be what pops into our minds
I think people may be over-reacting to Paul’s comments, but I’m not sure. Captain T implied that Shelly wasn’t a “fully human character.” Paul may be meaning that Shelly is still fully human, but humans have natural abilities they don’t know about.
From my point of view, crushing the cup with her fingers (rather than flattening it using her arm muscles) and not slicing or crushing her fingers in the process would have probably been impossible, IRL, so it would still be supernatural to us.
I don’t think Atemisia‘s second suggestion is correct, because Paul said “don’t assume there’s anything supernatural. To me, that rules out even those supernatural things we’re not thinking about.
I think the rest of the collective must have learned a thing or two about tricking people into seeing things from another perspective from Nudge while she was there. This sure seems like something she/it would do.
Many Mars ago I wrote a proposal (ok… One page premise) for a TV series… Something like a ‘super Charlie’s Angels’.
Of the three women one would have physical powers. Super strength and invulnerability. One would have mental powers. Telepathy, telekinesis, and some kind of mental invisibility like the The Shadow. The third would have magic/new age powers like channeling deceased experts of any kind (Helicopter pilot, EOD)(Hopefully they didn’t die due to their incompetence!)
This covers body/mind/spirit.
So. Back on topic. Monica needs a team whose members possess a variety of skills, knowledge and attributes.
Welcome to the club Shelly! Hope you survive!
Sounds like someone stole your basic idea to create “Charmed.”
Sweet!