Kinda reminds me of the movie ‘Paranormal Activity’, where the main girl gets up in the middle of the night and just stands there for hours at a time.
It turns out she’s demon-posses…
…oh, right. 😉
Okay, glad I wasn’t the only one who thought of that.
~~
The art style is interesting. I’m guessing it’s a picture, with Tina and the sun movement edited in?
1. Tina’s place is extremely empty.
2. That comment appeared to shut the rest of the demon horde up.
3. This situation might not be an uncommon event in Tina’s apartment.
The only time light goes up like that is when a car is pulling up in a driveway. I wonder who is showing up while Tina is a sleeping empty shell. I fear she may not be safe anymore….
The sun is close to the horizon and setting. I sat with my son when he was an infant and not feeling good, just looking at the wall as the sun was setting and watched the window frame rise on the wall then fade to nothing.
But… but… well in this case, a line from the bottom of the image on the wall just past the actual bottom of the window should point at the sun. So, either that window is *awfully* high on the facing wall, or there’s a mirror outside reflecting the sunlight upwards (since direct sunlight can’t be any more than horizontal). Well… or the earth outside became transparent, I suppose.
So it seems to me , anyways. I’d expect such an image to go up the wall until the bottom of the image is level with the bottom of the window on the facing wall, then fade out. It’s hard to picture the geometry of the image as is, if it’s the sun casting the image.
And then too… what happened to the “on top of spaghetti” scene, and the bed, dresser, and clock therein?
The movement that I witnessed was not this dramatic and it was channeled between two buildings. Tina chose not to be in her bedroom and instead is in the middle of her apartment.
Third floor? Tall hill? Um. I don’t see it. Look out from the top of the tallest skyscraper, and the horizon is right out there at 90 degrees, or close enough not to matter. Look out from mt everest, and you’re not go ing to see the sun more than a couple degrees below 90 degrees. To get the10 or 20 degrees it looks like, you’d have to be in low earth orbit. Or, possibly, on an orbital tower, or so-called “beanstalk”.
Unless, of course, as is always possible, I’m completely misunderstanding what’s going on. But pull back the perspective and try to draw the location of the house on a curved earth, and draw the line connecting that image on the wall with the sun. I can’t make it make any sense. Closest I can come is that the bottom sil of that window is at about 7 feet high on the facing wall.
Now, if the image had moved across the floor and up the wall to about 3 or 4 ft height, I could see it. But 7 or more ft height doesn’t seem doable on earth. At least not with an altitude of less a hundred miles or so.
I could be wrong, but so geometry seems to indicate.
Think about it from this angle (get it–angle!). If the window is higher than the sun when it sets, that would put the image of the window very high on the wall, toward the ceiling. When the scene begins, the image of the window projected by the sun appears to be very close to its actual height, or slightly below that, indicating that the sun is just above the level of the window. If you picture a third or fourth floor apartment, with the sun going from slightly above that level to below the horizon, the movement of the sun’s projected image of the window would be exactly like that. In a taller building it would be even more pronounced, but so would any horizontal movement, since it would have farther to go, and thus represent a larger arc segment of the sun’s path.
I thought it was moonlight since the rooms don’t seem to darken as the light finally fades away. They stay the same darkened state from first to last. To me, that’s how the transit of moonlight would be in a room.
The hair on the back of my neck is standing up, and I don’t know why. This is just eerie. Of all the behavior Tina has shown, this is the one thing that drives home the fact that she is simply an animated shell.
I’ve always viewed Tina as a nice normal girl who happens to be inhabited by a group of demons rather than a single human soul. But this is, yes, creepy; it’s more like a Terminator gone into sleep mode until someone jiggles its mouse. Also, we know from previous strips that she’s got stuff in her apartment, so the lack of it here brings home the feeling of emptiness.
I dunno. Seems a bit fitting, to me at least. I mean, if I was that crowded at all times inside, I can’t imagine I’d want the same clutter outside. It’d be nearly the only way to not suffocate in an argument. :\
You know…. I was thinking the same thing having seen it and now I am REALLY creeped out. I honestly half expected one of the later frames to have her lunging at the viewer.
So what happens to demons during this time?
they just … stop or disapear or visit the demon world?
Similar to humans in that respect i spose.
sure you twitch and stuff whilst sleeping but well…they are not aware twitches.
And this comic seems to say that that ‘voice’ is the most ‘human’ voice.
since when it stopped speaking tina decided to do a creey standing in one place all night. Maybe that ‘voice’ is the one which makes them go bed all the time insted of doing that? and its annoyed.
Either way – demon or not..that bodies muscles will be sore in the morning!
We’ve never really had it explained where Tina gets her energy from. Her “corpse” was messed up, but did her biologicaly body die off? If not, it’s possible she still functions as a “living” being, but without the mind and soul she used to have.
Alternatively, she might be powered by something else, “magic” or whatnot, much like the golem girls are. They have flesh and physical forms, but they are presumably powered by non-biological energy. Which isn’t to say they don’t still perform biological functions (they still eat food, for example), but merely that the source of the energy that goes into their biological functions comes from a non-standard source. So instead of digesting food and using the caloric intake to power their bodies, their physical forms might leech mana directly for purposes of production the physical forces necessary for locomotion.
Anywho, my point was that the soreness we feel in stiff muscles is due to a build up certain acids and whatnot. The process of maintaining muscle tension burns stored calories, causing chemical reactions of various sorts which load up the muscles with said acids.
The stiffness we feel is mostly mental. We detect the acids and our brain interprets that as pain and soreness. It’s an error warning, really, or a status advisory. The limb itself will still operate if you send a proper electrical signal through it, although our nervous systems lose efficiency in communicating to our muscles if we keep them tense for too long. Also the blood grows sluggish as well, and other various factors go into it.
Point is, dependent on whether she relies on these biological processes to impart physical force to move herself, or if she feeds off “mana” or whatever could make a world of difference.
Actually, Tina 2.0’s biological state is an interesting question. We know she drinks and eats, pizza, any way. And she apparently can at least mimic normal life signs, since she had dental work to fix her smashed teeth after the accident, and dentists tend to notice if their clients aren’t breathing or have no body heat.. Hence her objection to being called a zombie. But there’s little question Tina 1.0 was dead, they took her to the morgue instead of a hospital. So something happened to get her up and functioning again, and it would appear that ‘something’ was the mysterious entity who we just found out about, the one who appears to lead the other demons and may not even be a demon itself. I wonder if he/she is the one with the dramatic hands, and the wings…
I think the choker is a nod to Something Positive. There is a character in that strip who never takes off a choker. Even to sleep, tho her husband has been known to hold it for her while in the shower.
Are we sure that Tina ever actually had the dental work she described earlier? She volunteered the information about her unusually pointy dentition before she revealed that she was a melange of demons. The fangs may have come with the demons The story about accidentally getting some goth’s dental work story may have just been a cover.
Yes, she had dental work. She explained that to Heather. After she “bit” the steering wheel, she lost her teeth, but her replacements got switched with some goth girl’s order for fangs.
I’m less sure now. (My previous comment is currently awaiting moderation.) This strip indicates that Tina really did have her teeth fixed, although it doesn’t talk about fangs.
We know Tina has weird, unnatural, silver-colored eyes, but we don’t actually know the cause of that, either. Jin has weird eyes and fangs, too. I wonder if there could be a connection, somehow.
This is my favourite strip. I really really really like it. I didn’t even notice the light until someone pointed it out. And I love it even more.
It’s so perfect, such an accurate portrayal of Tina and what goes on with her. It’s haunting, but (and this is just me here) then you realise this is just how she is. And this works for her.
Much as i appreciate the amount of cleverness that goes into *Frog Applause*, i just don’t respond to it onanything other than that purely intellectual level.
Sort of like free jazz and a lot of “serious” music.
De gustibus non disputandum est. I’m sure Teresa doesn’t presume to think everyone will respond to her strip in the same way. After seeing her pictorial essay on child abuse, I tend to see her work in a slightly different light than I once did.
What was she lying and sitting on in the previous two days’ strips? It seemed to be a mattress, but very big for a bed. Is that a day bed or her regular bed?
When the demon group stops to think things over, they really stop to think things over!
In this case I believe we see how sad Tina’s “life” actually is. How her body is just a shell used by the demons at their pleasure and cast aside when they are busy with other things. It’s just standing there, responding to it’s last command with no free will or feeling. A puppet left on the shelf until it’s played with again. There’s really nothing there.
When I see the Tina character, the soliloquy delivered by Brad Dourif in Exorcist 3 often comes to mind. In it he describes how he painstakingly resurected a dead body after inhabiting it as a spirit. He does an excellent job in the part.
The empty apartment reminds me of an article some years back in the New Yorker about porn stars. The author was struck by the fact that their homes were inevitably barren – except for a big-screen TV and a oversized couch to flop on in front of it. He called it “porn-star chic” – and it seemed to imply an emptyness of spirit.
Not that I’m implying Tina is a porn star, though she is quite hot. But there does seem to be a great void there.
Taking something Fairportfan said yesterday one step further, perhaps the reason Jin had an empty hole at her center (now filled with a little girl) was because she gave that part of herself to Tina. If so, can Jin be fixed without Tina loosing her Nudge?
The open door somehow makes today’s strip so much more sad or creepy. I agree with the comment above about the void.
Interesting theory. Paul has woven a delightfully complex tapestry in his mind, and we just watch it get actualized thread by thread… would that I had such gifts.
That’s sort of what i was thinking, though i didn’t pursue it further in print.
And the part of herself Jin gave to Tina might not have been “given”, so much as “lost”, which would explain why Jin doesn’t understand that it happened…
Ah, a meat puppet. So what exactly is her physical condition anyway? Living or dead? Is she a well preserved perky Zombie? I’m not sure the health board would be too happy about the undead serving food.
Ohh! I knew that when Monica’s demons talk from inside of her, the speech balloons point at her gut, but it didn’t occur to me that the committee / individual demon thing applied to her, too. In the strip you mentioned, I think now that the committee spoke in the dark text (referring to Monica in the third person confirms it wasn’t Monica). The lighter text sure sounds different and unfiltered, though. Here is another case where the committee spoke and Monica refers to it in the plural. Makes sense, I guess.
@jwhouk Did you catch Paul’s reply to Fairportfan in these comments?
I guess that if Jin is saying Tina’s and Monica’s relationships with their demons were similar, their demon-speak might work similarly, too, for what that thought is worth.
The sun setting was what gave me the mental image, it could easily be the moon setting too. Either way, I wanted it to be something that showed the passage of several hours. 🙂
I’m not sure she is shutdown / sleeping / hibernating. You know how sometimes someone will say to you “Next thing, you’ll be saying I’m a…” and you say nothing because that is exactly what you were going to say?
Maybe the gesalt is trying to come up with a polite way to say “Yes”.
I couldn’t find the exact strip, but when Monica realises that Tina is … what she is … she says “zombie”, and Tina’s response it “We are not a zombie – we are a co-operative of supernatural beings with an entrepreneurial bent…”, or words to that effect.
I just had a thought, sorry if it was mentioned before…Remember way back when, Bud and Brandi got ahold of one of Monica’s demons, and shoved it into Jin, who then “Sent it somewhere. I doesn’t even know where.” Perhaps that’s where it went?
I didn’t see anyone commenting on the stylish shorts. Sure, the light effect is cool and the standing in the doorway all night isn’t exactly what the majority would call normal. I just like stripes I guess.
Great moldings too, but that’s my hatred of doing miter joints talking.
When Tina died in the car crash, the lien of her body was handed over to her demons and only an’echo’ of her personality remained for the demons to portray through the ‘corpse shell’. A lot like wearing a halloween costume 24/7 right?
I’m not so sure that the sudden silence is the other demons pausing to think over what she said.
When you say something leading like that, “Next thing, you’ll be saying that I’m a negative influence” the expectation is that the person will say something like “well no”. Imagine if they just sat there staring at you, leaving that comment hanging. The implication is that that’s exactly what they thing.
Dunno ’bout you, but I’m intrigued as hell and can’t wait to find out more about the collective consciousness we all know as Tina. Lots and lots of anticipation (;
I don’t get it…
Pablo tells us that Tina doesn’t sleep – they just go into a sort of “stand-by” state to rest their physical form.
In a completely empty apartment!
Check the light from the window!
How can the physical form rest of it is standing up?
replace “of” with “if” in the last one…perhaps my physical form could do with some rest…
It works for horses, I guess.
Kinda reminds me of the movie ‘Paranormal Activity’, where the main girl gets up in the middle of the night and just stands there for hours at a time.
It turns out she’s demon-posses…
…oh, right. 😉
Okay, glad I wasn’t the only one who thought of that.
~~
The art style is interesting. I’m guessing it’s a picture, with Tina and the sun movement edited in?
Wow .
Okay … creepy.
She is piloted by the former occupant’s inner demons…
Creepy-ER.
I’m noticing two things:
1. Tina’s place is extremely empty.
2. That comment appeared to shut the rest of the demon horde up.
3. This situation might not be an uncommon event in Tina’s apartment.
Minor art quibble – since the Sun’s path across the sky is diagonal, the sunlight on the wall should move horizontally as well as vertically.
OTOH, Pablo’s world, Pablo’s rules.
…that doesn’t appear to be sunlight, though.
Not just that, the sunlight through a window never goes up like that. So perhaps the better question might be just precisely where is her house?…
The only time light goes up like that is when a car is pulling up in a driveway. I wonder who is showing up while Tina is a sleeping empty shell. I fear she may not be safe anymore….
The sun is close to the horizon and setting. I sat with my son when he was an infant and not feeling good, just looking at the wall as the sun was setting and watched the window frame rise on the wall then fade to nothing.
But… but… well in this case, a line from the bottom of the image on the wall just past the actual bottom of the window should point at the sun. So, either that window is *awfully* high on the facing wall, or there’s a mirror outside reflecting the sunlight upwards (since direct sunlight can’t be any more than horizontal). Well… or the earth outside became transparent, I suppose.
So it seems to me , anyways. I’d expect such an image to go up the wall until the bottom of the image is level with the bottom of the window on the facing wall, then fade out. It’s hard to picture the geometry of the image as is, if it’s the sun casting the image.
And then too… what happened to the “on top of spaghetti” scene, and the bed, dresser, and clock therein?
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/morningdialogue/
The movement that I witnessed was not this dramatic and it was channeled between two buildings. Tina chose not to be in her bedroom and instead is in the middle of her apartment.
Second or third story.
Could be a tall hill as well in order to get the angle for the sun. Either way – artistic license applies – it’s an evocative image of time passing.
Third floor? Tall hill? Um. I don’t see it. Look out from the top of the tallest skyscraper, and the horizon is right out there at 90 degrees, or close enough not to matter. Look out from mt everest, and you’re not go ing to see the sun more than a couple degrees below 90 degrees. To get the10 or 20 degrees it looks like, you’d have to be in low earth orbit. Or, possibly, on an orbital tower, or so-called “beanstalk”.
Unless, of course, as is always possible, I’m completely misunderstanding what’s going on. But pull back the perspective and try to draw the location of the house on a curved earth, and draw the line connecting that image on the wall with the sun. I can’t make it make any sense. Closest I can come is that the bottom sil of that window is at about 7 feet high on the facing wall.
Now, if the image had moved across the floor and up the wall to about 3 or 4 ft height, I could see it. But 7 or more ft height doesn’t seem doable on earth. At least not with an altitude of less a hundred miles or so.
I could be wrong, but so geometry seems to indicate.
Think about it from this angle (get it–angle!). If the window is higher than the sun when it sets, that would put the image of the window very high on the wall, toward the ceiling. When the scene begins, the image of the window projected by the sun appears to be very close to its actual height, or slightly below that, indicating that the sun is just above the level of the window. If you picture a third or fourth floor apartment, with the sun going from slightly above that level to below the horizon, the movement of the sun’s projected image of the window would be exactly like that. In a taller building it would be even more pronounced, but so would any horizontal movement, since it would have farther to go, and thus represent a larger arc segment of the sun’s path.
… and that was a beautiful portrayal of just that. I’ve seen the same thing myself in RL, but never depicted as well as this.
The sun will do that this close to the Equinox, especially in the northern latitudes.
Yes it does. Sunset.
…through a west-facing window.
Only one problem: Doesn’t Tina keep her shop open until evening?
I thought it was moonlight since the rooms don’t seem to darken as the light finally fades away. They stay the same darkened state from first to last. To me, that’s how the transit of moonlight would be in a room.
Makes sense. The timing would be right, too.
The other light sources could be electronics, Like a T.V. or lamp as well. That would explain why they don’t change as the light on the wall does.
Oh, and 4. A rather significant amount of time has elapsed from first panel to last.
I dunno, I don’t find this so much creepy as very sad…
This is true. Very sad indeed… especially if Tina was some sort of psychologist prior to her accident.
The hair on the back of my neck is standing up, and I don’t know why. This is just eerie. Of all the behavior Tina has shown, this is the one thing that drives home the fact that she is simply an animated shell.
I feel sorry for her… nobody should have to go through that.
not “sad” like “pathetic” but “sad” like I want to jump in there and give her hugs.
OK, definitely time for rest if I’m going to sit here explaining my every comment…
I’ve always viewed Tina as a nice normal girl who happens to be inhabited by a group of demons rather than a single human soul. But this is, yes, creepy; it’s more like a Terminator gone into sleep mode until someone jiggles its mouse. Also, we know from previous strips that she’s got stuff in her apartment, so the lack of it here brings home the feeling of emptiness.
Tina mostly has stuff in her kitchen.
Anyone who keeps a proper kitchen is good in my book.
~D.
Tina’s place is missing something; and when I say “something”, I mean “everything”.
I dunno. Seems a bit fitting, to me at least. I mean, if I was that crowded at all times inside, I can’t imagine I’d want the same clutter outside. It’d be nearly the only way to not suffocate in an argument. :\
I think we all have negative influences as well as positive influences in our lives, whether we have demons in us or not.
Maybe she’s just running a virus scan.
ALso, she just ate a whole pizza. Shouldn’t every other frame have the caption )burrrp(
That would be some burb.
Still wouldn’t compete with Monica’s.
Or Katherine’s
So creepy because that house is SO Minneapolis. I feel like I’ve lived in that room all my life.
this.
Thirded.
I’m finally all caught up in the archives .
Again , wow . I love the window light creeping up the wall .
Creepy. Reminds me of that Paranormal movie where the girlfriend would stand in place for hours.
You know…. I was thinking the same thing having seen it and now I am REALLY creeped out. I honestly half expected one of the later frames to have her lunging at the viewer.
Time to go find my happy place! *shudder*
Sooo…the shadow growing out of the closet is just a side effect of the light disappearing, right?
…right?
Well…Someone saw “Paranormal Activity”…
…And, amazingly, just as creepy in still images.
So what happens to demons during this time?
they just … stop or disapear or visit the demon world?
Similar to humans in that respect i spose.
sure you twitch and stuff whilst sleeping but well…they are not aware twitches.
And this comic seems to say that that ‘voice’ is the most ‘human’ voice.
since when it stopped speaking tina decided to do a creey standing in one place all night. Maybe that ‘voice’ is the one which makes them go bed all the time insted of doing that? and its annoyed.
Either way – demon or not..that bodies muscles will be sore in the morning!
Muscles are machines, nothing more.
We’ve never really had it explained where Tina gets her energy from. Her “corpse” was messed up, but did her biologicaly body die off? If not, it’s possible she still functions as a “living” being, but without the mind and soul she used to have.
Alternatively, she might be powered by something else, “magic” or whatnot, much like the golem girls are. They have flesh and physical forms, but they are presumably powered by non-biological energy. Which isn’t to say they don’t still perform biological functions (they still eat food, for example), but merely that the source of the energy that goes into their biological functions comes from a non-standard source. So instead of digesting food and using the caloric intake to power their bodies, their physical forms might leech mana directly for purposes of production the physical forces necessary for locomotion.
~D.
Anywho, my point was that the soreness we feel in stiff muscles is due to a build up certain acids and whatnot. The process of maintaining muscle tension burns stored calories, causing chemical reactions of various sorts which load up the muscles with said acids.
The stiffness we feel is mostly mental. We detect the acids and our brain interprets that as pain and soreness. It’s an error warning, really, or a status advisory. The limb itself will still operate if you send a proper electrical signal through it, although our nervous systems lose efficiency in communicating to our muscles if we keep them tense for too long. Also the blood grows sluggish as well, and other various factors go into it.
Point is, dependent on whether she relies on these biological processes to impart physical force to move herself, or if she feeds off “mana” or whatever could make a world of difference.
~D.
Actually, Tina 2.0’s biological state is an interesting question. We know she drinks and eats, pizza, any way. And she apparently can at least mimic normal life signs, since she had dental work to fix her smashed teeth after the accident, and dentists tend to notice if their clients aren’t breathing or have no body heat.. Hence her objection to being called a zombie. But there’s little question Tina 1.0 was dead, they took her to the morgue instead of a hospital. So something happened to get her up and functioning again, and it would appear that ‘something’ was the mysterious entity who we just found out about, the one who appears to lead the other demons and may not even be a demon itself. I wonder if he/she is the one with the dramatic hands, and the wings…
Does Tina have a ring of stitches under that choker she wears?
It’s not visible here.
@txmystic: Thanks for providing that link the other day.
I do occasionally wonder whether it has something to do with keeping her head on, though that one does seem to indicate otherwise.
But it’s gotta mean something, since it’s the one item of costume ton any of the characters that never seems to change.
Um … maybe Tina is related to Agatha Heterodyne?
I think the choker is a nod to Something Positive. There is a character in that strip who never takes off a choker. Even to sleep, tho her husband has been known to hold it for her while in the shower.
So, basically you’re saying you wonder how she eats and breathes and other science facts?
HAW! Yess! “It’s just a strip, I should really just relax.”
Are we sure that Tina ever actually had the dental work she described earlier? She volunteered the information about her unusually pointy dentition before she revealed that she was a melange of demons. The fangs may have come with the demons The story about accidentally getting some goth’s dental work story may have just been a cover.
Ummm, i don’t think she had dental work – that’s just the explanation for her fangs she gives…
Yes, she had dental work. She explained that to Heather. After she “bit” the steering wheel, she lost her teeth, but her replacements got switched with some goth girl’s order for fangs.
@jwhouk: I think they are saying that Tina’s explanation to Heather may have been a white lie. I’m leaning that way, myself.
Tina has been known to dodge things, if not exactly lie, at other times:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/byyourself/
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/bouncesback/
I don’t know what to make of what starts here:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/dontknowyou/
I’m less sure now. (My previous comment is currently awaiting moderation.) This strip indicates that Tina really did have her teeth fixed, although it doesn’t talk about fangs.
We know Tina has weird, unnatural, silver-colored eyes, but we don’t actually know the cause of that, either. Jin has weird eyes and fangs, too. I wonder if there could be a connection, somehow.
This strip is beautiful, haunting and wistful all at once.
Agreed.
And CREEEEEPY!
This is my favourite strip. I really really really like it. I didn’t even notice the light until someone pointed it out. And I love it even more.
It’s so perfect, such an accurate portrayal of Tina and what goes on with her. It’s haunting, but (and this is just me here) then you realise this is just how she is. And this works for her.
Love it.
On another note, today’s Frog Applause seems very à propos…
Much as i appreciate the amount of cleverness that goes into *Frog Applause*, i just don’t respond to it onanything other than that purely intellectual level.
Sort of like free jazz and a lot of “serious” music.
De gustibus non disputandum est. I’m sure Teresa doesn’t presume to think everyone will respond to her strip in the same way. After seeing her pictorial essay on child abuse, I tend to see her work in a slightly different light than I once did.
Me, too, actually.
As i said, i truly appreciate the intellectual inventiveness, but that’s all that comes across for me
Hmm…I remember Tina having a kitchen and a cat I think… I don’t know if I ever saw a bed as well..
Yes, Tina has a bed.
What was she lying and sitting on in the previous two days’ strips? It seemed to be a mattress, but very big for a bed. Is that a day bed or her regular bed?
She seemed to be in the same room in these earlier strips (consecutive days):
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/funnythingaboutlif/
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/moreimportant/
So she does have a bedroom and a kitty! 😀 I wonder what happened to that cat..her apartment is so bare and well…like no one alive lives there.
Not only didn’t they have anything to say to that comment, they didn’t have anything else for Tina’s body to do……….
When the demon group stops to think things over, they really stop to think things over!
In this case I believe we see how sad Tina’s “life” actually is. How her body is just a shell used by the demons at their pleasure and cast aside when they are busy with other things. It’s just standing there, responding to it’s last command with no free will or feeling. A puppet left on the shelf until it’s played with again. There’s really nothing there.
When I see the Tina character, the soliloquy delivered by Brad Dourif in Exorcist 3 often comes to mind. In it he describes how he painstakingly resurected a dead body after inhabiting it as a spirit. He does an excellent job in the part.
The empty apartment reminds me of an article some years back in the New Yorker about porn stars. The author was struck by the fact that their homes were inevitably barren – except for a big-screen TV and a oversized couch to flop on in front of it. He called it “porn-star chic” – and it seemed to imply an emptyness of spirit.
Not that I’m implying Tina is a porn star, though she is quite hot. But there does seem to be a great void there.
Good use of silence…
Taking something Fairportfan said yesterday one step further, perhaps the reason Jin had an empty hole at her center (now filled with a little girl) was because she gave that part of herself to Tina. If so, can Jin be fixed without Tina loosing her Nudge?
The open door somehow makes today’s strip so much more sad or creepy. I agree with the comment above about the void.
Interesting theory. Paul has woven a delightfully complex tapestry in his mind, and we just watch it get actualized thread by thread… would that I had such gifts.
That’s sort of what i was thinking, though i didn’t pursue it further in print.
And the part of herself Jin gave to Tina might not have been “given”, so much as “lost”, which would explain why Jin doesn’t understand that it happened…
And the fun is going to be figuring out what was lost.
The background in this strip looks amazing, sir.
Ah, a meat puppet. So what exactly is her physical condition anyway? Living or dead? Is she a well preserved perky Zombie? I’m not sure the health board would be too happy about the undead serving food.
She got cranky when Monica called her a zombie…
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/educateme/
… and Monica warns Kevin about it here:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/knotholes/
Interesting – the next day after Tina explained herself is another that reads differently when you know what the screened text represents.
And the day after that, too, if it means the same thing when Monica’s demons start talking.
Interesting:
Over here Jin seems to change the topic off of Tina rather quickly.
Ohh! I knew that when Monica’s demons talk from inside of her, the speech balloons point at her gut, but it didn’t occur to me that the committee / individual demon thing applied to her, too. In the strip you mentioned, I think now that the committee spoke in the dark text (referring to Monica in the third person confirms it wasn’t Monica). The lighter text sure sounds different and unfiltered, though. Here is another case where the committee spoke and Monica refers to it in the plural. Makes sense, I guess.
@jwhouk Did you catch Paul’s reply to Fairportfan in these comments?
I guess that if Jin is saying Tina’s and Monica’s relationships with their demons were similar, their demon-speak might work similarly, too, for what that thought is worth.
How symbolic! A symbolic strip, symbolically devoid of symbols! Each non-symbol represents some non-thing that isn’t there! Totally Zen, dude!
This is quite possibly the creepiest Tina comic so far. Nice job, Paul.
Well Fairportfan, the apartment’s already dark so it’s probably a passing car. Light does *just that* when car lights drive shine through a window.
Nope – Pablo says the Sun setting.
And car lights move horizontally, not vertically.
Unless it’s the “car” that pulls up behind Richard Dreyfus in his company line truck.
The sun setting was what gave me the mental image, it could easily be the moon setting too. Either way, I wanted it to be something that showed the passage of several hours. 🙂
The darkness visible outside of the other window suggests the moon.
I’m not sure she is shutdown / sleeping / hibernating. You know how sometimes someone will say to you “Next thing, you’ll be saying I’m a…” and you say nothing because that is exactly what you were going to say?
Maybe the gesalt is trying to come up with a polite way to say “Yes”.
Tina was horrified by the thought that she might be a just a hollow shell or a zombie. Maybe because she is?
Maybe all that cheer and good advice really was just blowing sunshine up her own ass. Maybe she really is just another negative influence.
Hmm. I doubt it. But that is definitely the feel that this one conveys.
I couldn’t find the exact strip, but when Monica realises that Tina is … what she is … she says “zombie”, and Tina’s response it “We are not a zombie – we are a co-operative of supernatural beings with an entrepreneurial bent…”, or words to that effect.
That would be this strip: Educateme
Oh, Wow!, that was so cool. I was thinking that Tina was like the Borg, because they also sleep standing up.
I just had a thought, sorry if it was mentioned before…Remember way back when, Bud and Brandi got ahold of one of Monica’s demons, and shoved it into Jin, who then “Sent it somewhere. I doesn’t even know where.” Perhaps that’s where it went?
You got a link for that arc?
“And when things upset me, I send them somewhere even I don’t know where they go.”
I didn’t see anyone commenting on the stylish shorts. Sure, the light effect is cool and the standing in the doorway all night isn’t exactly what the majority would call normal. I just like stripes I guess.
Great moldings too, but that’s my hatred of doing miter joints talking.
Thank you, thank you, since I have a house full of crown molding to install over the next couple of months. And they are nice shorts…
Just to nitpick a little – i don’t think they’re stripes. I think it’s just shading…
Ah man, what a way to convey creepy.
She looks cut/pasted because she has no personal shadow. :/
About 95% of the Wapsi strips have lacked personal shadows. Just look at the last few previous comics. Just part of the art style.
When Tina died in the car crash, the lien of her body was handed over to her demons and only an’echo’ of her personality remained for the demons to portray through the ‘corpse shell’. A lot like wearing a halloween costume 24/7 right?
someone simply forgot to bury Tina after death…
Actually, like Maryjanice Davidson’s Betsy the Vampire Queen, i think she just got up and walked out.
I wonder. Do any of you ever draw a comparison between the comments section of the comic and Tina’s demon chorus?
Yes, quite frequently, and Monica’s and Jins too, sometimes.
Yeah. We’re what is known as a Geek Chorus
Omigosh, I just noticed the creepy bug with the giant wing and slithering tail crawling down the wall in the last panel!
Oh, wait, that’s a copyright symbol and Paul’s signature. Never mind.
I’m not so sure that the sudden silence is the other demons pausing to think over what she said.
When you say something leading like that, “Next thing, you’ll be saying that I’m a negative influence” the expectation is that the person will say something like “well no”. Imagine if they just sat there staring at you, leaving that comment hanging. The implication is that that’s exactly what they thing.
That or they may have just nodded off 😛
Ugh, exactly what they think*
Never more has it been portrayed, that one has a desperate need for someone with whom to share their life.
Dunno ’bout you, but I’m intrigued as hell and can’t wait to find out more about the collective consciousness we all know as Tina. Lots and lots of anticipation (;