So that guardian job they kept mentioning WAS MIB?
Well..cool 🙂
Nice to know they’ve been protecting us from the scum of the universe for more longer than is said in the film 😛
Monica has insisted they rediscover their mortal lives, which has led them to desire them again.
So while there’s no government problem now, what happens when they let go of their roles? Their retirement plan is going to have to include preparing responsible replacement guardians.
If the girls have MIB status, does that make the MIB agency a non-governmental organization? After all, it was founded some 56 parallel timelines away, and long before any current government was even a gleam in a bureaucrat’s eye.
His preternatural guardian senses have alerted him to what Monica has learned and how upset she is. In a desperate ploy to divert her from grinding him down into powder, he is frantically preparing a 25-pound ration of turkey in tequila-mole sauce, which he will Poit directly into Monica’s stomach the moment she leaves the Library.
He is also obsessively repeating a prayerful mantra to Triptofaan, a pre-Aztec god of sleep and tranquility.
Apparently yes, they didn’t know they actually did those things until they met M and she used the glyph for “remember” as a command. They remembered them as a kind of nightmare when they could recall them at all.
Either that, or EXTREMELY GOOD secret-keeping skills: they can keep secrets even from THEMSELVES!!!
remember that until Brandi gets the book she wrote to herself NOW, she only has the memory of the past of the 57th CM Loop, just like everyone else. Phix, Jin, possibly Shellinx, and May (depending on how they interacted with others in this realm during the 80k years of total CM Looping) have this cross-Loop knowledge but Brandi, Bud and Tepoz DON’T and since the CM Loops start occurring before they create the MIB, they basically recreated it from scratch each time. that is not to say that Jin may or may not have helped fund it though.
Does this sound like a retcon to you? this sounds like a retcon to me. Didn’t they sped a few centuries as drunks to keep them quiet and out of trouble until sometime in the 2000s?
They were in storage from just after 1479 (when tepoz was turned to clay) until they appeared before Monica. This was not counting Jin, as she was still a glyph reader and had more ability to move about as she wanted. Brandi and Bud formed the group before their time in storage.
I had a feeling that was the timing, after all there is the stories the girls mentioned about being guardians in the temples.I had faith that you would not ‘jump the shark’ Paul.
That retcons the MIB starting from the mid 1960’s (J was driving a 1965 Mustang when he met the aliens) to sometime before the end of the 15th century.
MiB is not a concept originally founded in the Tommy Lee Jones & Will Smith films.
It’s a concept more founded in the post WW2, Cold-War environment of the late 1940s/1950s/1960s when “Big Brother Government” notions began to enter the social mindset, and intelligence organizations became more common and powerful in US politics and policing.
The 2 (soon to be 3) films and cartoon series just popularized the term & concept again in the modern social mindset.
Personally can’t think of a reference to the typical “hush hush” style Men-In-Black that would date to pre-1940s, let alone multiple centuries.
Those that “deal with secrets” have a long long history. G-men in the roaring twenties. The Secret Service before that. Gen. Washington’s spy network on and on. Even in The Art of War spying and secrets were of utmost importance. All of these can be considered ‘men in black.’ The information and power they wield have made and broken many an empire. There is no big leap to imagine an autonomous network; Secret Societies are often thought to be such. The fact that one such network happens to have been started by a couple of immortal golems is just a bonus.
if i recall correctly, wasn’t the original intent of the groups The Masons and also The Knight’s Templar to both “protect secret knowledge”. The MIB is just their CURRENT cover organization for the same purpose.
If the MiB is just the current iteration of the past “secret shadow government” organizations like Free Masons and Knights Templar, does that mean technically Tepoz and Kukuclan are MiB, unknowingly working for Bud/Brandi who unknowingly are funded by Jin, all 3 of whom are knowingly escorted by Tepoz who…
I’m glad I belong to a movement with some organizations that have existed over 1000 years that has none of this foolishness about “protecting secret knowledge”. As monks, we just protect knowledge, period. (Of course, that’s not our primary purpose, but we’ve been pretty consistent in our behavior.)
Which movement? Monks. Primary purpose: to seek God. (In our branch, we do it primarily in community, which allows us to have libraries.) Secondary purpose: to live a quiet, settled life, usually with some degree of education for its own sake.
not stated yet in comic, or by Paul as far as i know, as to why he was stored. i believe one rumor was that he ticked off somebody in the Aztec Glyph reader community and they cursed him (reprogrammed him?) with that “must do a favor every calendar year” thing, and one year (1478-1479) he DIDN’T do the favor and thus was turned back to clay until Monica released him in 2002. I’m sure there are other theories, but I’m not recalling any right now.
Maybe. Tepoz was “out of commission for 400 years”.
Who was keeping them drunk then? And once they first appeared in the story, Tepoz didn’t have any real control over them.
Jin was free to make plans. Bud and Brandi had guarding programming that had to be fulfilled too. (Whenever one of them uses the word “answer” in a sentence, watch out.) We already know alternate Brandis were making all kinds of plans, and we still don’t know the whole story of the bus accident in Mexico.
Being accepted in mortal society is what’s throwing Bud and Brandi a curveball– they really have a hard time behaving as if they belong there.
I think we’re just seeing a very surprising reveal, not a retcon.
If past-Brandi had to employ Tina’s demons to manipulate the car-crash that nearly killed Monica & did kill Tina, but she had her own shadow-soldiers ready and willing to act, just… why?
Or, as I said above, how were they managing secrets about the supernatural and noone happened to blurb “Oh, you’re the girls who nuked half the Earth!”. Especially when we see how loose a certain Gorgon, Sphynx, and ancient demon are with their tongues. To say nothing of the world’s numerous demons that seem fully capable of interacting with the GGG despite their lack of demons themselves.
Giving benefit of the doubt, but, to quote Val Kilmer as Bruce Wayne: “It just raises too many questions…”
Could be Brandi 56 leaving a thousand notes for her cohorts to follow. Obviously, the whole story is available top non-humans at your local Library Annex.
Including ones to keep Brandi 57 confused and out of the loop.
But I am just guessing late at night, running on half-memory power.
And by frame three it seems Euryale isn’t as tall as Phix after all, but a pretty normal size for a human woman. Not counting her hair, of course. (Could a person bribe her hair with mice or something?) The hugs are fine; at least she’s wearing clothes now, for which Monica is probably thankful.
I am thinking that part of Euryale’s height is illusion. She might stand on her toes when startled sort of like an animal rearing its back to seem more massive or a snake in its pounce posture.
NOTDilbert suggested yesterday that Euryale is “one of THEM” – the fact that she knows about the MIB, that Bud and Brandi founded the organization, how the members feel about Monica, etc. is best explained by Euryale being one of the MIB herself.
Although this isn’t the only possible explanation (she could just be a freelance crazed stalker who has successfully bugged MIB headquarters and seduced several of its agents and fed them pentothal in their iced tea) it does seem to me to be a likely one.
Or, as others have posited, Monica’s life could be fairly well chronicled in The Library. This is even more likely now that we know there’s a secret government organization that’s been keeping an eye on her. After all, what government organization do you know of that doesn’t have endless reams of paperwork required to document what they do…and the Library gets copies of all written works…Bingo! Euryale has reading material! 🙂
The only thing that bugs me was the story arc of Bud looking for employment. If they were in charge of a secret organization, why did that need to happen?
-Munch “or am I not remembering things correctly” Wolf
Well, if you’re striving to be “normal”, I doubt you’re going to pull any strings with government organizations to get a job. *shrugs* Seems fairly logical to me. 🙂
The impression I have of the MiB is that it’s something that Bud and Brandi set in motion that mostly runs itself. They don’t really need to be directly involved. That’s not to say that haven’t checked up from time to time. Hard to remember, but we only see tiny slices of these peoples lives. And Paul only shows us what we need to know to give us a feeling of the characters lives and the over arching plot. It can be subtle ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ stuff sometimes. Monica learning to POIT. I thought M sneezing her bra off was for comic effect. And it was, but it was also heralding her newfound ability. The comic is full of these little details that after a big reveal you go back and read and say “OOHHH!”.
I think I may do another archive binge this weekend and see if there’s any hints of all this MiB stuff lying around in the comic.
There are players in this mystery that we know of and Monica still does not. A certain immortal politician could very well be the one running the secret org. and the girls are independent of it at this time.
MuchWolf makes a good point as it reinforces what Paul said above about the golem girls being “in storage” for the last 525 years. Unless this MiB group was formed by them prior to th 1479, which Paul said – which to me sounds very much like an “oops, I just wrote myself into a corner!”
All of this just is making it feel to me like watching the Dos Equis (Two X’s) guy. This one character has done so much over time that it really starts to push believability. The humor is in the ludicrousness of what is being depicted. It ends up being a farce.
We all have different ability to suspend disbelief. I am having a hard time attributing all that is being granted to the GGs. It is not that I do not feel it makes for a lame story but rather that it feels like weak writing. Especially when a brand new character is introduced just to provide a data dump of extraordinary actions secretly accomplished by a long running character.
Part of this hinges on my basic dislike of the GG’s. I have never liked them as a story telling device from the very start. Every time additional accomplishment, sacrifice or significance is attributed to them the more I dislike them. I find this interesting as obviously they have (and continue to be) a major part of Paul’s story. Yet, the more effort that the GG’s receive the less I like it.
At the moment I just can not accept what Ms. Gorgon is saying.
As I have mentioned before I must be wired backward to most who read the strip.
Creative retcon tends to look cool if done well, especially is you scatter enough “clues” beforehand.
Retcon is saying that Shego’s gloves give her the ability to shoot electrical beams from her hands, and then later in Kim Possible, say that the power comes from her body. You’re contradicting something said earlier that was a fact. I’m filling in the time before the girls and Tepoz (minus Jin) were turned to clay. Nothing is being contradicted, I’ve never specifically said what they were doing then other than security and guards.
I suspect that part of what is going on, with peoples’ reactions to Euryale’s information, has to do with “the blank pages in history” and what people have inferred about them.
In reading through the discussions, I’ve seen people draw some reasonable conclusions about what may have happened during certain time periods in Wapsi history that haven’t actually been described yet. These conclusions have usually been consistent with the published story-line, and there may have been a tendency among the readers (myself included) to believe that these conclusions were correct – but that doesn’t necessarily follow. There are a lot of things that you haven’t either confirmed, or denied (either directly, or by writing a story-line which refuted them)… so they’re just our own best guesses.
All of a sudden, this whole new plot-element has been Gorgon-startled into our awareness. What Euryale has said (and implied) doesn’t match up with what a lot of us may have concluded had been happening in the past… but as far as this one reader can tell, it isn’t inconsistent with what’s actually been written and shown.
So, if that’s the case, it’s not a retcon… it’s not a contradiction. Perhaps, at most, it’s an unanticipated interpretation of things we’ve read before.
In other words, we guessed wrong… and since I never do that in real life 🙄 I find the situation quite interesting.
My only retcon element actually was the statement that it was a secret “men in black” government agency that the GG’s set up for a government that did not exist until 1776 and not in the form that would support such a MiB agency until the 1940’s.
This is using actual dialog from the recent strips. There would be no way for the GG’s to do what was said because the raw material needed to make such a group did not exist. They would have had to accomplish what is attributed to them prior to 1479.
If it was not them, but some other agent, then say that, name that other agent and give them the credit due.
Give credit where credible credit is due or you risk a 2X man effect.
Retcon (RC) is “RETroactive CONtinuity” or coming back and filling in gaps, voids or exclusions to link otherwise disparate story elements in the hopes of smoothing over discontinuities that develop as a story evolves.
Revisionist history (RH) on the other hand is the deliberate reworking, ignoring or abandonment of previously established plot points or story elements in order to support the current line of the narrative. Like Shego’s gloves that Paul mentioned.
From what has been said here we are all talking about RC and not the examples of RH. Paul is smoothing bumps and not contradicting himself, which I never said he was doing.
Very interesting, and I think there’s a definite vocabulary drift/skew going on here.
Nimrod’s distinction of “retcon” from “revisionist history” is a very useful one, and it may be well used / understood in some literary circles.
However (if Wikipedia is to believed… always a scary assumption), “retcon” does have a very strong implication of altering or revising already-published “facts” about the history of a story-line – it’s “revising history” rather than just “embellishing history”. This appears to have been the meaning of “retcon” that Paul was referring to (and objecting to, in the case of Wapsi Square).
The Wikipedia article is interesting reading. Its etymology considers “retcon” to be the top-level class (i.e. any alteration to the previous description of the timeline / storyline) and considers “addition”, “change”, and “subtraction” as major sub-categories.
The Retcon::Change subclass is what Nimrod seems to be referring to as “Revisionist history” – a clear alteration or contradiction of already-published timeline/facts.
What’s happening in this Wapsi storyline would be a Retcon::Addition (adding facts to fill in the storyline, without contradicting), which meets Nimrod’s interpretation of “retcon” but isn’t a retcon as Paul uses the word.
So, all in all, I think we’re generally in violent agreement here – the new information being introduced by Euryale isn’t contradicting previously-published canon, only adding to it (although it may demonstrate as wrong, some non-canon assumptions that some of us have made).
Is it just me, or is Euryale a side-mouth-talker? I suppose it could just be fun positioning of her lips to make that lovely drawl visual as well, but in these frames, it almost looks like she’s talking out of the side of her mouth.
Monica has just been inducted into a government wide conspiracy and is getting treated like an industrial sized beanie baby.
Yep. She missed the brochure for her agency that listed the motto from ST: Voyager, “Weird is part of the job.”
So that guardian job they kept mentioning WAS MIB?
Well..cool 🙂
Nice to know they’ve been protecting us from the scum of the universe for more longer than is said in the film 😛
Yeah kind of misdirected us into thinking it was some overgrown Temple of Doom somewhere, keeping the tomb raiders out.
Monica has insisted they rediscover their mortal lives, which has led them to desire them again.
So while there’s no government problem now, what happens when they let go of their roles? Their retirement plan is going to have to include preparing responsible replacement guardians.
If the girls have MIB status, does that make the MIB agency a non-governmental organization? After all, it was founded some 56 parallel timelines away, and long before any current government was even a gleam in a bureaucrat’s eye.
That would depend on when it was founded. It may have been done after the time loop, giving rise to 57 different organizations.
Like the 57 varieties ketchup?
Mon: “Too much hugging….not enough breathing….finger in my eye….”
“Clawed finger in my eye…”
Poor Monica. The dials are all hovering up around “Overwhelm”, with an occasional excursion up into “Freak out!”
I think we’re in Freak out mode now. Begining countdown to loss of anti matter containment in in T minus 10..9..
Bahahahahahaha!! I didn’t even notice the finger in the eye until this comment. 🙂 Thanks for making me choke on my milk! 🙂
At least the side-hug does not threaten any bosom-containing devices with catastrophic failure.
Unlike October 28th’s hug.
Excellent points that you brought up – thanks.
Looks like you might have been wrong about that given the next page… 🙂
Yeah–par for Paul’s course.
Drunken Master? 😀 Shouldn’t it be Drunkard Master?
Nope. You may have been unaware of it, but Tepoz knows Kung Fu.
😛
And where is that little blue $#@% at right now?
In the kitchen.
His preternatural guardian senses have alerted him to what Monica has learned and how upset she is. In a desperate ploy to divert her from grinding him down into powder, he is frantically preparing a 25-pound ration of turkey in tequila-mole sauce, which he will Poit directly into Monica’s stomach the moment she leaves the Library.
He is also obsessively repeating a prayerful mantra to Triptofaan, a pre-Aztec god of sleep and tranquility.
Well…
Isn’t that… nice?
“Guardians N’ Keeper’s of Secrets”
… yet apparently unaware of previously turning half the world to glass?
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/yourenotamonster/
Calls into question their ‘secret keeping’ skills, don’t it? (>^_^)>
Apparently yes, they didn’t know they actually did those things until they met M and she used the glyph for “remember” as a command. They remembered them as a kind of nightmare when they could recall them at all.
Either that, or EXTREMELY GOOD secret-keeping skills: they can keep secrets even from THEMSELVES!!!
remember that until Brandi gets the book she wrote to herself NOW, she only has the memory of the past of the 57th CM Loop, just like everyone else. Phix, Jin, possibly Shellinx, and May (depending on how they interacted with others in this realm during the 80k years of total CM Looping) have this cross-Loop knowledge but Brandi, Bud and Tepoz DON’T and since the CM Loops start occurring before they create the MIB, they basically recreated it from scratch each time. that is not to say that Jin may or may not have helped fund it though.
Heck–I can keep secrets from myself. I have lots of things I know that I can’t remember.
Does this sound like a retcon to you? this sounds like a retcon to me. Didn’t they sped a few centuries as drunks to keep them quiet and out of trouble until sometime in the 2000s?
They were in storage from just after 1479 (when tepoz was turned to clay) until they appeared before Monica. This was not counting Jin, as she was still a glyph reader and had more ability to move about as she wanted. Brandi and Bud formed the group before their time in storage.
I had a feeling that was the timing, after all there is the stories the girls mentioned about being guardians in the temples.I had faith that you would not ‘jump the shark’ Paul.
That retcons the MIB starting from the mid 1960’s (J was driving a 1965 Mustang when he met the aliens) to sometime before the end of the 15th century.
MiB is not a concept originally founded in the Tommy Lee Jones & Will Smith films.
It’s a concept more founded in the post WW2, Cold-War environment of the late 1940s/1950s/1960s when “Big Brother Government” notions began to enter the social mindset, and intelligence organizations became more common and powerful in US politics and policing.
The 2 (soon to be 3) films and cartoon series just popularized the term & concept again in the modern social mindset.
Personally can’t think of a reference to the typical “hush hush” style Men-In-Black that would date to pre-1940s, let alone multiple centuries.
Those that “deal with secrets” have a long long history. G-men in the roaring twenties. The Secret Service before that. Gen. Washington’s spy network on and on. Even in The Art of War spying and secrets were of utmost importance. All of these can be considered ‘men in black.’ The information and power they wield have made and broken many an empire. There is no big leap to imagine an autonomous network; Secret Societies are often thought to be such. The fact that one such network happens to have been started by a couple of immortal golems is just a bonus.
I recall my big brother (ironically enough) and a friend having fun with MIBs and “MIB-dic numbers” back in the ’70s. So it was out there back then.
They also liked the island of Timor, but for other reasons.
*cough, cough* Illuminati.
if i recall correctly, wasn’t the original intent of the groups The Masons and also The Knight’s Templar to both “protect secret knowledge”. The MIB is just their CURRENT cover organization for the same purpose.
If the MiB is just the current iteration of the past “secret shadow government” organizations like Free Masons and Knights Templar, does that mean technically Tepoz and Kukuclan are MiB, unknowingly working for Bud/Brandi who unknowingly are funded by Jin, all 3 of whom are knowingly escorted by Tepoz who…
Oh no I’ve gone cross-eyed.
I’m glad I belong to a movement with some organizations that have existed over 1000 years that has none of this foolishness about “protecting secret knowledge”. As monks, we just protect knowledge, period. (Of course, that’s not our primary purpose, but we’ve been pretty consistent in our behavior.)
@bmonk; Good! Keep up the good work and make sure to keep it in a form that can be easily accessed after the fall of this civilization.
@bmonk
which movement is that?
Which movement? Monks. Primary purpose: to seek God. (In our branch, we do it primarily in community, which allows us to have libraries.) Secondary purpose: to live a quiet, settled life, usually with some degree of education for its own sake.
You’re really a monk? That’s cool! 🙂 I guess it says something about my education/exposure that I only ever think of monks in terms of history.
Shore am. What’s even funnier is when visitors (especially from England) come visiting and wonder “where the ruins are.” 🙂
Someone add that to the Chronology section at the Wiki, wouldja please?
So the MiB in this version are a 500+ year old, non-governmental organization protecting the world from monsters and too much knowledge.
Cools.
Have we ever found out who or what zapped Tepoz?
not stated yet in comic, or by Paul as far as i know, as to why he was stored. i believe one rumor was that he ticked off somebody in the Aztec Glyph reader community and they cursed him (reprogrammed him?) with that “must do a favor every calendar year” thing, and one year (1478-1479) he DIDN’T do the favor and thus was turned back to clay until Monica released him in 2002. I’m sure there are other theories, but I’m not recalling any right now.
Heh
Wonder if it was May :p
Maybe. Tepoz was “out of commission for 400 years”.
Who was keeping them drunk then? And once they first appeared in the story, Tepoz didn’t have any real control over them.
Jin was free to make plans. Bud and Brandi had guarding programming that had to be fulfilled too. (Whenever one of them uses the word “answer” in a sentence, watch out.) We already know alternate Brandis were making all kinds of plans, and we still don’t know the whole story of the bus accident in Mexico.
Being accepted in mortal society is what’s throwing Bud and Brandi a curveball– they really have a hard time behaving as if they belong there.
I think we’re just seeing a very surprising reveal, not a retcon.
According to what Paul just posted, they, like Tepoz, were in “storage” (turned to clay) during that 400 years.
Took me awhile to type that. Bud did ask at one point to be put back in storage.
Still, an organization they made before 1479, and not after, is even more intriguing. I suppose their retirement is in better shape than I had feared.
See. That’s the confusing part though.
If past-Brandi had to employ Tina’s demons to manipulate the car-crash that nearly killed Monica & did kill Tina, but she had her own shadow-soldiers ready and willing to act, just… why?
Or, as I said above, how were they managing secrets about the supernatural and noone happened to blurb “Oh, you’re the girls who nuked half the Earth!”. Especially when we see how loose a certain Gorgon, Sphynx, and ancient demon are with their tongues. To say nothing of the world’s numerous demons that seem fully capable of interacting with the GGG despite their lack of demons themselves.
Giving benefit of the doubt, but, to quote Val Kilmer as Bruce Wayne: “It just raises too many questions…”
Could be Brandi 56 leaving a thousand notes for her cohorts to follow. Obviously, the whole story is available top non-humans at your local Library Annex.
Including ones to keep Brandi 57 confused and out of the loop.
But I am just guessing late at night, running on half-memory power.
Con-fuzers! … Get into the van and take it out! … Wait for it … Take out …… the funny thing!
Monty Python’s Confuse-A-Cat sketch did come to mind.
Not positive, but I think it was Shelly, with Nudge’s help, who manipulated Tina’s demons into hurting Monica and killing Tina.
*hands you a cookie* =)
Well, she DID say she was a HUGGER…
Being a hugger is one thing, being a groper is quite another. She needs to learn boundries. I guess few are brave enough to tell her to back off.
It’s just something about Monica. She did just get her spine back in alignment from Brandi’s last hug.
And by frame three it seems Euryale isn’t as tall as Phix after all, but a pretty normal size for a human woman. Not counting her hair, of course. (Could a person bribe her hair with mice or something?) The hugs are fine; at least she’s wearing clothes now, for which Monica is probably thankful.
I think that Euryale has simply picked Monica up, and M’s toes are dangling a foot off the floor!
I am thinking that part of Euryale’s height is illusion. She might stand on her toes when startled sort of like an animal rearing its back to seem more massive or a snake in its pounce posture.
Hmm.. Considering her hand’s positioning, could we call her a…. Face Hugger?
😛
i guess it all depends on, if she gave tongue or not when she did the revivification kiss, a few strips back. ;-D
Hmm
Hope not.
Future strips might include an ice cube bursting through monica’s chest 😛
Eyryale is exciteable and demonstrative. Monica is soft, cute and irresistable. The power of the Busty Mom Hug cuts both ways.
I know she’s a hugger, but she needs to watch where those nails go….
Monica has already recalibrated her weird-shitometer to start at 9.5. She has just realized that her baseline should have been at 20.7…
The way things have been going for her, she’s going to need to start calibrating in aleph numbers before long.
Nah, She just needs to retcon the meters settings the way Star Trek did the warp numbers between the Original series and the rest of the franchise.
Well, if they hadn’t come up with that unfortunate rule that the maximum warp possible was 10, they wouldn’t have had the need to recalibrate. . . .
Euryale starting to get a little creepy with the amount of information she has on Monica. Where did she find all this information at?
NOTDilbert suggested yesterday that Euryale is “one of THEM” – the fact that she knows about the MIB, that Bud and Brandi founded the organization, how the members feel about Monica, etc. is best explained by Euryale being one of the MIB herself.
Although this isn’t the only possible explanation (she could just be a freelance crazed stalker who has successfully bugged MIB headquarters and seduced several of its agents and fed them pentothal in their iced tea) it does seem to me to be a likely one.
Or, as others have posited, Monica’s life could be fairly well chronicled in The Library. This is even more likely now that we know there’s a secret government organization that’s been keeping an eye on her. After all, what government organization do you know of that doesn’t have endless reams of paperwork required to document what they do…and the Library gets copies of all written works…Bingo! Euryale has reading material! 🙂
The only thing that bugs me was the story arc of Bud looking for employment. If they were in charge of a secret organization, why did that need to happen?
-Munch “or am I not remembering things correctly” Wolf
Well, if you’re striving to be “normal”, I doubt you’re going to pull any strings with government organizations to get a job. *shrugs* Seems fairly logical to me. 🙂
The impression I have of the MiB is that it’s something that Bud and Brandi set in motion that mostly runs itself. They don’t really need to be directly involved. That’s not to say that haven’t checked up from time to time. Hard to remember, but we only see tiny slices of these peoples lives. And Paul only shows us what we need to know to give us a feeling of the characters lives and the over arching plot. It can be subtle ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ stuff sometimes. Monica learning to POIT. I thought M sneezing her bra off was for comic effect. And it was, but it was also heralding her newfound ability. The comic is full of these little details that after a big reveal you go back and read and say “OOHHH!”.
I think I may do another archive binge this weekend and see if there’s any hints of all this MiB stuff lying around in the comic.
There are players in this mystery that we know of and Monica still does not. A certain immortal politician could very well be the one running the secret org. and the girls are independent of it at this time.
Yea
The future strips we will find out Stinky is in fact – Zed!
MuchWolf makes a good point as it reinforces what Paul said above about the golem girls being “in storage” for the last 525 years. Unless this MiB group was formed by them prior to th 1479, which Paul said – which to me sounds very much like an “oops, I just wrote myself into a corner!”
All of this just is making it feel to me like watching the Dos Equis (Two X’s) guy. This one character has done so much over time that it really starts to push believability. The humor is in the ludicrousness of what is being depicted. It ends up being a farce.
We all have different ability to suspend disbelief. I am having a hard time attributing all that is being granted to the GGs. It is not that I do not feel it makes for a lame story but rather that it feels like weak writing. Especially when a brand new character is introduced just to provide a data dump of extraordinary actions secretly accomplished by a long running character.
Part of this hinges on my basic dislike of the GG’s. I have never liked them as a story telling device from the very start. Every time additional accomplishment, sacrifice or significance is attributed to them the more I dislike them. I find this interesting as obviously they have (and continue to be) a major part of Paul’s story. Yet, the more effort that the GG’s receive the less I like it.
At the moment I just can not accept what Ms. Gorgon is saying.
As I have mentioned before I must be wired backward to most who read the strip.
Creative retcon tends to look cool if done well, especially is you scatter enough “clues” beforehand.
Retcon is saying that Shego’s gloves give her the ability to shoot electrical beams from her hands, and then later in Kim Possible, say that the power comes from her body. You’re contradicting something said earlier that was a fact. I’m filling in the time before the girls and Tepoz (minus Jin) were turned to clay. Nothing is being contradicted, I’ve never specifically said what they were doing then other than security and guards.
I suspect that part of what is going on, with peoples’ reactions to Euryale’s information, has to do with “the blank pages in history” and what people have inferred about them.
In reading through the discussions, I’ve seen people draw some reasonable conclusions about what may have happened during certain time periods in Wapsi history that haven’t actually been described yet. These conclusions have usually been consistent with the published story-line, and there may have been a tendency among the readers (myself included) to believe that these conclusions were correct – but that doesn’t necessarily follow. There are a lot of things that you haven’t either confirmed, or denied (either directly, or by writing a story-line which refuted them)… so they’re just our own best guesses.
All of a sudden, this whole new plot-element has been Gorgon-startled into our awareness. What Euryale has said (and implied) doesn’t match up with what a lot of us may have concluded had been happening in the past… but as far as this one reader can tell, it isn’t inconsistent with what’s actually been written and shown.
So, if that’s the case, it’s not a retcon… it’s not a contradiction. Perhaps, at most, it’s an unanticipated interpretation of things we’ve read before.
In other words, we guessed wrong… and since I never do that in real life 🙄 I find the situation quite interesting.
That is very true and well considered.
My only retcon element actually was the statement that it was a secret “men in black” government agency that the GG’s set up for a government that did not exist until 1776 and not in the form that would support such a MiB agency until the 1940’s.
This is using actual dialog from the recent strips. There would be no way for the GG’s to do what was said because the raw material needed to make such a group did not exist. They would have had to accomplish what is attributed to them prior to 1479.
If it was not them, but some other agent, then say that, name that other agent and give them the credit due.
Give credit where credible credit is due or you risk a 2X man effect.
Retcon (RC) is “RETroactive CONtinuity” or coming back and filling in gaps, voids or exclusions to link otherwise disparate story elements in the hopes of smoothing over discontinuities that develop as a story evolves.
Revisionist history (RH) on the other hand is the deliberate reworking, ignoring or abandonment of previously established plot points or story elements in order to support the current line of the narrative. Like Shego’s gloves that Paul mentioned.
From what has been said here we are all talking about RC and not the examples of RH. Paul is smoothing bumps and not contradicting himself, which I never said he was doing.
It is RETCON but not REVHIST as he said.
Ah, I understand now! 😀
Very interesting, and I think there’s a definite vocabulary drift/skew going on here.
Nimrod’s distinction of “retcon” from “revisionist history” is a very useful one, and it may be well used / understood in some literary circles.
However (if Wikipedia is to believed… always a scary assumption), “retcon” does have a very strong implication of altering or revising already-published “facts” about the history of a story-line – it’s “revising history” rather than just “embellishing history”. This appears to have been the meaning of “retcon” that Paul was referring to (and objecting to, in the case of Wapsi Square).
The Wikipedia article is interesting reading. Its etymology considers “retcon” to be the top-level class (i.e. any alteration to the previous description of the timeline / storyline) and considers “addition”, “change”, and “subtraction” as major sub-categories.
The Retcon::Change subclass is what Nimrod seems to be referring to as “Revisionist history” – a clear alteration or contradiction of already-published timeline/facts.
What’s happening in this Wapsi storyline would be a Retcon::Addition (adding facts to fill in the storyline, without contradicting), which meets Nimrod’s interpretation of “retcon” but isn’t a retcon as Paul uses the word.
So, all in all, I think we’re generally in violent agreement here – the new information being introduced by Euryale isn’t contradicting previously-published canon, only adding to it (although it may demonstrate as wrong, some non-canon assumptions that some of us have made).
Is it just me, or is Euryale a side-mouth-talker? I suppose it could just be fun positioning of her lips to make that lovely drawl visual as well, but in these frames, it almost looks like she’s talking out of the side of her mouth.
Seriously freaked out over how Euryale is knowledgeable, powerful and yet naive and submissive at the same time.
Everyone’s freakin out about MiB, Secrets, etc. I just think Euryale is the cutest fangirl.
I think lots of the freaking is about Euryale too–but I know some women (and a few men too) something like her. Well, at 10% of Euryale’s intensity.
Monica has just been inducted into a government wide conspiracy and is getting treated like an industrial sized beanie baby.
Yep. She missed the brochure for her agency that listed the motto from ST: Voyager, “Weird is part of the job.”
Part of that might be the fact that she was smuggled in, and still hasn’t gotten the brochure to read.
not smuggled in… POITED in, thereby missing the big carousel of the brochures in the lobby 😀
The League of Extraordinary Golems?
With a “resurrected “Shawn Connery” at say 35 I’m sure the ladies would approve .
Hells yes!
Eh – lets face it. the age he is now he is still georgous.
He is quite possibly the ONLY male on the planet to be able to use ‘gods gift to women’ with a straight face 😛
That’s Sean Connery. You’re probably half confusing him with Shawn Michaels. 😛
Yep! She is a Hugger.