Everyone is concerned about where Alan is, but Bud’s reaction was probably just as devastating as Alan’s. Is anyone else peeved at Bud? I wouldn’t be surprised if she hadn’t called Alan at all in the state she’s in.
So i could have said “done an Insull*”, “lit a shuck” or “hung it on a Limb”.
Also Anglicisms, so i could have said “scarpered”.
======================
*Huh. Samuel Insull (who created the Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago power company my dad’s father worked for, is buried in Putney Vale Cemetery outside London … which i visited in 1990 and 1992 to visit Sandy Denny’s grave.)
No worries Paula, we’re all a little crazy. For half a sec I was about to write Paul and tell him to stop this, that Jin doesn’t diserve this. 🙂
Its the mark of a good writer, getting you to care about your characters.
That moment after meeting Alan for the first time, which itself was prefaced with Jin watching Pretty In Pink, screaming, “He was in front of you the whole time!”
Were it Tepoz, I would have thought it would have already happened. Jin would have had someone to spend eternity with. Now that she’s essentially human again, I doubt she would see him making a good partner anymore.
I get where you’re coming from, Paula. But they’re both old enough to have witnessed every form of culture’s ethics and morality firsthand. As for being siblings…
1) Only insofar as one’s daughter and an invented character are sister and brother. A child of the body and a child of the mind.
2) Ancient elite exceptionalism. Kings and gods practiced quite a bit of incest. Though the Oedipus story shows that cultures over time came to reject this.
We don’t even know if Tepoz is anatomically correct – and then there’s the size problem, and if the scale challenges could be worked around. There may be some questions we don’t want answered.
I’d guess Jin’s still at the hospital, not her penthouse. She’s not on the top floor and those look like the windows of every hospital I’ve been in. Alan still has time.
that picture next to jin .. thats jins home i think 🙁
didnt think she would look somewhere so .. generic.
But again if she is trying to blend in generic would be correct.
Paula: putting my Freudian hat on..
the fact that you can empathize with a fictional character shows you have good imagination and feelings, and can carry them through to Real life… good normal positive abilities… 🙂
Now if you start stalking Paul, campaigning for the release of Alan, there madness lies… :O
You’re right. I missed that. And the unfinished brick wall wouldn’t be something you’d see in an institutional building, at least not in a common area.
As to Alan, I want to think better of him than this. Maybe the crazy was to much for him. I can just see the conversation Bud had with him.
“Oh, your girlfriend is human now and she tried to kill herself. She’s in XYZ hospital, Bye.”
I can’t believe that Jin would have an unfinished brick wall in the room with the art. She would have wanted everything finished. The windows in the room with the art were very different. The art is visible on the following update and the walls are obviously not brick.
We are seeing the inside of the window frame, which must mean the bricks are on the inside. I assume we are seeing the reflection of Jin in the glass.
Jin can’t be at Maya’s home because Maya seemed to live in a house where she could do gardening. Bud planted a back yard, so Bud and Brandi seemed to have a house, too. So where is Jin? Alan’s place?
You would think May would have gone looking for him. At least called. If not called Alan, called or found Bud to ask just what he really said. Bud may have lied to Jin as well and Alan actually said he was through.
Gotta wonder, though, is there more to this than it appears? Could May harbor some sort of resentment toward Alan we don’t know about and poited earlier to make sure he doesn’t show up? Are there other forces at work who have Alan now? Forces that know of Jin’s new weakness and are about to use it to their advantage? All sorts of sinister possibilities come to mind. Turning into a soap opus.
The more I think about this idea I think that Kevin might also get involved, after all, Alan is his friend from long before the girls came into his life.
Man, I wonder if Alan just rolled over and went back to sleep, thinking it was some kind of stupid joke. I mean, Jin, hurt? This is a joke, right?
Or conversely, stopped somewhere to buy an engagement ring …
That has got to be a very narrow hall, for Monica to sit with her shoulders against one side, and brace her feet against the other. With bent knees, yet. How did it possibly pass code?
Oh…that’s a thought. Alan does know that Jin was indestructible. It would be perfectly reasonable for him to assume that someone was playing a joke on him and ignore the call.
Granted, I’ll still be pissed off at him for a little while for not even checking on Jin…but at least this scenario ends with Alan not being a jerk who abandons Jin when she needs him.
Bud was the one who called him; he knows her voice (and accent) and knows she wouldn’t joke about this. She also probably told him enough for him to know things have changed. He should be there.
I’m assuming traffic, or some other unforeseen event. I see no reason for Alan to delay his coming (except for wicked, wicked Paul to wrench our hearts a little more.)
A) I have faith in Alan. He’ll come through. Probably in spectacular style, too. Unless Crispy is holding him hostage somewhere, in which case Jin may have to be the one to come through…
B) Bud’s anger is perfectly justified. When someone gets everything they’ve wanted for 80,000 years, and responses by trying to blow their brains out, what CAN you be but angry?
C) Nobody’s asked Maya yet what Jin’s new lifetime is. Before Monica and all start writing Jin’s eulogy, they better make sure we’re talking decades and not millennia…
I dunno, guys. It is terribly stressful being in a relationship with someone who swings betwen emotional extremes and can be suicidal; Alan’s human, like any of us. If Jin is feeling suicidal, she needs to see a shrink, not have the expectation laid that it’s her boyfriend’s job to make her ‘better’ or see the light. That puts a huge pressure on Alan. Also — we don’t know that much about Alan’s past. Maybe the reason that he was so angry about her pretending to kil herself, maybe the reason he showed such a low tolerance for her bullshit is that he has been in such a relationship before, with such a person, and he knows what a terrible place it can be for a person, and he did not want to be in such an emotional place again.
Considering where Jin met Alan, we can’t be sure we know *what* he is, let along where he is. Unless I’m forgetting something.
We know he has a life in the normal world and he makes decent money and he can get to supernatural nightclubs. That last one right there says there’s something to Alan we haven’t seen.
He was never happy about Jin’s self-destructive side and they’ve fought over it. This is exactly the sort of stuff Jin would pull that would tick Alan off. If the first thing Jin did after resetting to human parameters was try to kill herself, what does that say about their relationship?
Well, we don’t know that the Cerberus is strictly supernatural; it may be the kind of joint where ordinary/normal/human types wander in and mix with the supes without knowing it.
If it were a strictly supernaturals joint, Alan would have been less surprised when Jin did the knife trick; he would have known she was some kind of supe.
Also, if it were, the others would know thatAlan was – which i see no indication of.
Why did Bud say that Jin has existed far longer than the other GGGs? They all were the same age and created at the same time. Shelly existed even longer, if you count all of the time loops she experienced. And Maya may have existed longer than that, given the time expansion that Bud encountered when she rescued her.
I believe it is because Jin was affected by the calendar first before she became a GGG. That also gave her the ability to remember all the cycles etc. In that way alone she would have existed longer than the others because her memory was never reset.
Either way, Jin remembers all the calendar machine cycles. She has roughly 80,000 years of memory the other GGs don’t have. I don’t know if May has a similarly long memory, but I suspect she does, since she was trapped out of time in the demon realm. The same goes for Shelly, being trapped in the time forrest and living backwards through history through all 57 cycles. If anyone can relate to Jin, it would be Shelly. She also would have had a chance to talk to some of her alternate past/future selves in the making of the artifact. It might have taken a couple of cycles to figure out what was happening before she started getting the powersource together. Shelly would know that she and Jin were close friends in past cycles. Both have memories well past that of anything mere mortal humans can understand and both have a finite lifespan. It would be interesting to see them interact.
Mayahuel and Tochtli were turned immortal when the calendar machine was started. But we don’t know how long it was between that and when the three GGGs were golemized. There could have been quite a few thousand years between the events.
Okay, I’m not seeing this so I’m going to put it out there.
1) Alan surprised Jin. Not an impossible thing to do, but it’s gotta be hard. His attention, and persistence is something that came out of the blue for Jin.
2) He’s best friends with one of one three, counting Tepoz, (Okay four with Kulkulcan) males that are ‘in the loop’. Pretty amazing coincidence.
3) This was mentioned earlier in today’s comments, they met at Cerberus. I think it’s been brushed off, but the reaction of the security guy in it’s first appearance has always made me feel like there was some sort of supernatural connection to the place.
4) He just looks a little too lycanthropish for my tastes.
Still no Alan. Where is he?
Everyone is concerned about where Alan is, but Bud’s reaction was probably just as devastating as Alan’s. Is anyone else peeved at Bud? I wouldn’t be surprised if she hadn’t called Alan at all in the state she’s in.
Alan — where are you…?
That last panel just gets me in the feels, she looks so sad I’m crying…
So Bud apparently told Monica everything.
I don’t believe Alan just absquatulated without any word at all.
Not his style.
It’s at times like this i cling to pandoras box 🙂
Perhaps not his style, Fairportfan, and they have been through a lot else since their encounters at the club…
But, Panel Two: http://wapsisquare.com/comic/hurtingyou/
Pandora didn’t have a box. It was actually a jar.
A Pun Jar?
So you’re telling me the apocalypse is upun us?
So you have a very “close” friend named Pandora?
But it’s your style to use the word absquatulated? Good for you.
Sometimes.
I like odd and obsolete words.
So i could have said “done an Insull*”, “lit a shuck” or “hung it on a Limb”.
Also Anglicisms, so i could have said “scarpered”.
======================
*Huh. Samuel Insull (who created the Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago power company my dad’s father worked for, is buried in Putney Vale Cemetery outside London … which i visited in 1990 and 1992 to visit Sandy Denny’s grave.)
Ha! Old Sam won the game of life. He died with only a $1000 estate yet owed $14,000,000!
Hope Alan’s alright. I’m getting worried.
I hope Alan is NOT alright else i will be getting a baseball bat and using him as the baseball..
*sigh*
i really don’t like getting close to fictional characters. it makes me feel like a crazy person.
No worries Paula, we’re all a little crazy. For half a sec I was about to write Paul and tell him to stop this, that Jin doesn’t diserve this. 🙂
Its the mark of a good writer, getting you to care about your characters.
Nine out of ten voices in my head say you’re just fine, Paula. 😀
My tenth voice agrees that you’re fine! 🙂 Then again, I feel the same way you do about this… Yay for being the same kind of crazy as Paula!
hey, life is so £$%!&# that you have to be a bit crazy to survive it… 🙂
I’ve found that being a little bit crazy is the only way to keep from going insane.
So…? Of all the things we’ve lost, We miss our minds the most???
I’m stealing that. It will make a great signature line.
To be perfect would be the greatest flaw.
If nobody is perfect, and I’m a Nobody… then Obviously, I must be Perfect, right?!
I’m starting to get the feeling that something hinky is going on with Alan’ seeming absence. Hmmm
*ahem* if “someone special” actually shows up…
It may not be Allan who she’s waiting for – and it might not be Allan who Bud is talking about.
who else could it be?
tepoz?
All I can say is, it takes two to tango, and it takes two to make little girls, too.
A woman and a cloning scientist?
That still can only add up to 1.
Unless you include the offspring. And it isn’t an “…All You Zombies” sitch.
Actually, Paula, maybe it is Tepoz.
That moment after meeting Alan for the first time, which itself was prefaced with Jin watching Pretty In Pink, screaming, “He was in front of you the whole time!”
but arn’t they technically .. y’know.
brother and sister?
…and technically, different species? The term was ‘rats and weasels’, IIRC.
Were it Tepoz, I would have thought it would have already happened. Jin would have had someone to spend eternity with. Now that she’s essentially human again, I doubt she would see him making a good partner anymore.
I get where you’re coming from, Paula. But they’re both old enough to have witnessed every form of culture’s ethics and morality firsthand. As for being siblings…
1) Only insofar as one’s daughter and an invented character are sister and brother. A child of the body and a child of the mind.
2) Ancient elite exceptionalism. Kings and gods practiced quite a bit of incest. Though the Oedipus story shows that cultures over time came to reject this.
Anyway, draw your own conclusions.
Would the ‘All you Zombies’ reference be the Dean of SciFi R.A. Heinlein?? If so what a thought.
We don’t even know if Tepoz is anatomically correct – and then there’s the size problem, and if the scale challenges could be worked around. There may be some questions we don’t want answered.
Weren’t Bud and Brandi teasing Jin about having had a crush on Tepoz at one point?
Brandi? Nah. Bud, though…
I’d guess Jin’s still at the hospital, not her penthouse. She’s not on the top floor and those look like the windows of every hospital I’ve been in. Alan still has time.
that picture next to jin .. thats jins home i think 🙁
didnt think she would look somewhere so .. generic.
But again if she is trying to blend in generic would be correct.
Nope — that’s the Aztec image from Jin’s apartment.
So.. what happened to Alan?
*Sigh* And I had such confidence in that boy….
He doesn’t do right by her, half the forum’s gonna hunt him down for a good thumpin’.
Thumpin’ painful.
/agrees
i keep telling myself its only a comic..these girls don’t exist
but somewhere, some girl/boy has done something stupid and her/his jerk of a bf/gf has decided to let them down.
ugh this reminds me of Candi (and next day) when alex decided to break up with her after the fire…
people STILL hate alex and this was from 2007 😛
Replying to Paula:
Yes, but Alex DESERVES to be hated; not just for that, but for lots of other reasons besides. Not sure he deserves what Linda is doing to him, though…
We all still hate Alex because he’s an über-jerk…that’s all. 😛
Paula: putting my Freudian hat on..
the fact that you can empathize with a fictional character shows you have good imagination and feelings, and can carry them through to Real life… good normal positive abilities… 🙂
Now if you start stalking Paul, campaigning for the release of Alan, there madness lies… :O
@illiad
ooh good idea
FREE ALAN!
The readers aren’t the one he has to be afraid of hunting him down…
FREE ALAN with every golem purchased! Offer good while supplies last.
You’re right. I missed that. And the unfinished brick wall wouldn’t be something you’d see in an institutional building, at least not in a common area.
As to Alan, I want to think better of him than this. Maybe the crazy was to much for him. I can just see the conversation Bud had with him.
“Oh, your girlfriend is human now and she tried to kill herself. She’s in XYZ hospital, Bye.”
I can’t believe that Jin would have an unfinished brick wall in the room with the art. She would have wanted everything finished. The windows in the room with the art were very different. The art is visible on the following update and the walls are obviously not brick.
We are seeing the inside of the window frame, which must mean the bricks are on the inside. I assume we are seeing the reflection of Jin in the glass.
Jin can’t be at Maya’s home because Maya seemed to live in a house where she could do gardening. Bud planted a back yard, so Bud and Brandi seemed to have a house, too. So where is Jin? Alan’s place?
I believe the view is from the outside of the building looking in. The building reflected in the glass is the building across the way.
Jin looks like a lost little girl in that last panel.
Keep in mind that she, after countless thousands of years, is still a teenager.
If he doesnt show he will be showing at the nearby funeral parlour i suspect…
Oh not via jin but via Bud for sure.
The certainty in her voice.
I hope there has been crossed wires somewhere and Alan will show up later innocently.
“what voice mail message? i dropped my cell down the toilet”
Aw man, Alan has been incredibly adaptable, I wonder if he reached his limit? Where are you Alan?!
Awwwwww maaaan…Paul is really tugging at our heartstrings here.
It’s just .. Just … Tooo cruel!
Paul definitely has mastered the are of suspense. Mastered it a little too well. Dammit where is Alan?
I am far too much of a romantic for this type of thing. ;-p
The more I read this one the more I get the impression that Alan is about to have May visit him soon.
You would think May would have gone looking for him. At least called. If not called Alan, called or found Bud to ask just what he really said. Bud may have lied to Jin as well and Alan actually said he was through.
Gotta wonder, though, is there more to this than it appears? Could May harbor some sort of resentment toward Alan we don’t know about and poited earlier to make sure he doesn’t show up? Are there other forces at work who have Alan now? Forces that know of Jin’s new weakness and are about to use it to their advantage? All sorts of sinister possibilities come to mind. Turning into a soap opus.
…
oh great as if i didn’t have enough to worry about in regards to jin you add about a billion other things :p
you are working in coinjunction with Paul arn’t you! 🙂
I don’t think Bud lied to Jin…After all, she seems to be under the impression that Jin will get to enjoy her life with someone special…
The more I think about this idea I think that Kevin might also get involved, after all, Alan is his friend from long before the girls came into his life.
I am thinking way too hard about this one.
Damn.
That last panel. There is a whole world of story there. It’s magnificent.
Man, I wonder if Alan just rolled over and went back to sleep, thinking it was some kind of stupid joke. I mean, Jin, hurt? This is a joke, right?
Or conversely, stopped somewhere to buy an engagement ring …
That has got to be a very narrow hall, for Monica to sit with her shoulders against one side, and brace her feet against the other. With bent knees, yet. How did it possibly pass code?
The house might be old and built before the present codes came into effect.
Oh…that’s a thought. Alan does know that Jin was indestructible. It would be perfectly reasonable for him to assume that someone was playing a joke on him and ignore the call.
Granted, I’ll still be pissed off at him for a little while for not even checking on Jin…but at least this scenario ends with Alan not being a jerk who abandons Jin when she needs him.
Bud was the one who called him; he knows her voice (and accent) and knows she wouldn’t joke about this. She also probably told him enough for him to know things have changed. He should be there.
I’m sure he WILL be there. Eventually.
Why do I get this creepy feeling that Alan has been smeared into a thin paste somewhere?
I’m really trying to quell that fear. Although…another option is that he’s so pissed at Jin that he doesn’t care…
OR he’s just unfortunately caught up in traffic. I’m voting for that one.
Or, if he hasn’t (yet), soon will be?
I’m assuming traffic, or some other unforeseen event. I see no reason for Alan to delay his coming (except for wicked, wicked Paul to wrench our hearts a little more.)
looks like M is sitting in a doorway which are usually between 28-36 inches wide so even tiny M could possibly fit with her legs bent
Nope – Panel Two shows the doorway a good foot or two to her right (our left).
A) I have faith in Alan. He’ll come through. Probably in spectacular style, too. Unless Crispy is holding him hostage somewhere, in which case Jin may have to be the one to come through…
B) Bud’s anger is perfectly justified. When someone gets everything they’ve wanted for 80,000 years, and responses by trying to blow their brains out, what CAN you be but angry?
C) Nobody’s asked Maya yet what Jin’s new lifetime is. Before Monica and all start writing Jin’s eulogy, they better make sure we’re talking decades and not millennia…
I dunno, guys. It is terribly stressful being in a relationship with someone who swings betwen emotional extremes and can be suicidal; Alan’s human, like any of us. If Jin is feeling suicidal, she needs to see a shrink, not have the expectation laid that it’s her boyfriend’s job to make her ‘better’ or see the light. That puts a huge pressure on Alan. Also — we don’t know that much about Alan’s past. Maybe the reason that he was so angry about her pretending to kil herself, maybe the reason he showed such a low tolerance for her bullshit is that he has been in such a relationship before, with such a person, and he knows what a terrible place it can be for a person, and he did not want to be in such an emotional place again.
Considering where Jin met Alan, we can’t be sure we know *what* he is, let along where he is. Unless I’m forgetting something.
We know he has a life in the normal world and he makes decent money and he can get to supernatural nightclubs. That last one right there says there’s something to Alan we haven’t seen.
He was never happy about Jin’s self-destructive side and they’ve fought over it. This is exactly the sort of stuff Jin would pull that would tick Alan off. If the first thing Jin did after resetting to human parameters was try to kill herself, what does that say about their relationship?
Well, we don’t know that the Cerberus is strictly supernatural; it may be the kind of joint where ordinary/normal/human types wander in and mix with the supes without knowing it.
If it were a strictly supernaturals joint, Alan would have been less surprised when Jin did the knife trick; he would have known she was some kind of supe.
Also, if it were, the others would know thatAlan was – which i see no indication of.
Why did Bud say that Jin has existed far longer than the other GGGs? They all were the same age and created at the same time. Shelly existed even longer, if you count all of the time loops she experienced. And Maya may have existed longer than that, given the time expansion that Bud encountered when she rescued her.
I believe it is because Jin was affected by the calendar first before she became a GGG. That also gave her the ability to remember all the cycles etc. In that way alone she would have existed longer than the others because her memory was never reset.
I thought it was because she was in the room when her mom was zapped into the demon realm.
Either way, Jin remembers all the calendar machine cycles. She has roughly 80,000 years of memory the other GGs don’t have. I don’t know if May has a similarly long memory, but I suspect she does, since she was trapped out of time in the demon realm. The same goes for Shelly, being trapped in the time forrest and living backwards through history through all 57 cycles. If anyone can relate to Jin, it would be Shelly. She also would have had a chance to talk to some of her alternate past/future selves in the making of the artifact. It might have taken a couple of cycles to figure out what was happening before she started getting the powersource together. Shelly would know that she and Jin were close friends in past cycles. Both have memories well past that of anything mere mortal humans can understand and both have a finite lifespan. It would be interesting to see them interact.
WHich is why she was able to run a scam on Kukulcan and the others, pretending to be able to foretell the future … and why she is so rich.
(And, also, presumably, why she was able to help Monica get sufficiently-legitimate-looking ID for Bud and Brandi that they were able to get jobs…)
Mayahuel and Tochtli were turned immortal when the calendar machine was started. But we don’t know how long it was between that and when the three GGGs were golemized. There could have been quite a few thousand years between the events.
Poor Jin in the last panel. She is truly wounded both inside and out.
Alan better NOT be lying on the ground somewhere after having been hit by a bus with a dozen flowers around him that he was carrying.
Nobody play that song from the end of Futurama’s “Juassic Bark” episode! Otherwise, I’m gonna have to start biting! grrrrr!
Then don’t click on the link below –
http://youtu.be/MKNRfMyjcVo
Okay, I’m not seeing this so I’m going to put it out there.
1) Alan surprised Jin. Not an impossible thing to do, but it’s gotta be hard. His attention, and persistence is something that came out of the blue for Jin.
2) He’s best friends with one of one three, counting Tepoz, (Okay four with Kulkulcan) males that are ‘in the loop’. Pretty amazing coincidence.
3) This was mentioned earlier in today’s comments, they met at Cerberus. I think it’s been brushed off, but the reaction of the security guy in it’s first appearance has always made me feel like there was some sort of supernatural connection to the place.
4) He just looks a little too lycanthropish for my tastes.
Just my 2 drachma…
alan is a werewolf?
cool!!!!
Worse, I’m afrad. He is quite obviously…
…Dare I say it, but we must face facts. Alan is…
Scottish.
Huitzilopochtli’s blessings upon us all! It’s worse than even I thought!
Alan is young and may lack what it takes to deal with a goddess with a mental illness. This is understandable.
Jin wanting to commit suicide within seconds of being cured from tens of thousands of years of insanity, this is also understandable.
Seeing death as a gift, certifiably insane.
Suffering Plot Withdrawl — 1:30 and still no update….
Hey, wasn’t Alan Kevin’s wingman? Monica, get Kev on the phone! We got a missing boyfriend to locate…