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"That Hurt"
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That Hurt
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That Hurt

by Paul Taylor on December 3, 2010 at 12:00 am
Story: Wapsi-Archive
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Discussion (85) ¬

  1. Jabberwonky
    December 3, 2010, 12:02 am | # | Reply

    Uh-Oh, what’s Shelly going to look like on Monday?

    • NOTDilbert
      December 3, 2010, 12:37 am | # | Reply

      Probably wearing a couple ACE bandage wraps on her hands, and maybe her forarms – thats where the flexors for the fingers are. Oh, and a nice handmade origami Tina as a broach….

      • Jabberwonky
        December 3, 2010, 12:13 pm | #

        I was actually worried about the grey hairs…but the bandages, yeah, that too…

      • Jabberwonky
        December 3, 2010, 12:15 pm | #

        Doh! Just noticed that we see her hair in the first panel…I was focused on Tina in the last panel…

      • Artemisia
        December 4, 2010, 9:45 pm | #

        that doesn’t mean she hasn’t changed… anyways if Tina can still read auras she may have noticed something that will manifest in a few weeks

  2. ShadOBabe
    December 3, 2010, 12:11 am | # | Reply

    Aww, poor Shelly.

  3. Fairportfan
    December 3, 2010, 12:11 am | # | Reply

    Tina 2.5 doesn’t seem to be thinking things through before they act.

    So Shelly has strength, but not invulnerability.

    That could cause problems.

    • eschmenk
      December 3, 2010, 11:30 am | # | Reply

      Why are you saying Tina 2.5 isn’t thinking things through?

      Is Tina saying that Shelly learned that she can over-exert herself?

  4. txmystic
    December 3, 2010, 12:12 am | # | Reply

    Darned Cliffhangers…wha’ happunt to poor Shelley?

    • ziggy78eog
      December 3, 2010, 8:02 am | # | Reply

      Most likely just simple physics. Remember that for every force, there is an equal and opposite force; so the force that Shelly put into that…whatever it was..also went through Shelly, via her hands and forearms. That has got to hurt.

    • kingklash
      December 3, 2010, 11:00 am | # | Reply

      Higher durability, but not nigh-invulnerable.
      If Phix gives out cookies, what does the demon-rista reward with? Demitasse?

    • PBHunnydew
      December 3, 2010, 11:42 am | # | Reply

      Oooo Oooo Now it is time to check on Bud and Brandi…PBH

  5. Bucc-i
    December 3, 2010, 12:27 am | # | Reply

    Is it just me, or is Tina looking in rare cutieness these last couple of strips?

    • PBHunnydew
      December 3, 2010, 12:25 pm | # | Reply

      Mmmm Has her personality change much since Nudge has moved out of the Demon dorm that is Tina?

      PBH

      • eschmenk
        December 3, 2010, 2:50 pm | #

        I don’t think so. I think she’s acting the same as she did once she became an actual friend of Shelly and Monica.

  6. polerin
    December 3, 2010, 12:34 am | # | Reply

    Nope, not just you. Major cuteness. Last panel of the prior strip was EPIC 😀

  7. SoWhyMe
    December 3, 2010, 12:56 am | # | Reply

    To me, this time Tina’s expression in the last panel is saying “please don’t rip my arms off for doing that to you.”

    • ProleBoi
      December 3, 2010, 7:35 pm | # | Reply

      Her expression seems more enigmatic than pleading to me. Perhaps it’s just because AFAIK the Collective’s always behaved as if none of our ladies would hurt them (with the exception of Phix, to whom they’ve usually been deferential — or was that just Nudge talking? It’ll be interesting next time Tina and Phix meet); so to me, maybe she’s just cocking an eyebrow, dropping a cerebellum-related hint, and acting… a little cocky, maybe? She seems slightly less inhibited, now that she’s Nudge-less.

      • ProleBoi
        December 3, 2010, 7:50 pm | #

        Edit: Sorry, used the wrong word. I meant ‘cerebrum’ instead of ‘cerebellum’… it’s been a long time since high school biology 🙂

      • eschmenk
        December 3, 2010, 10:50 pm | #

        You just made me look up two words in the dictionary. 🙂

        To me, Tina is evaluating. That comes across as a judging pose, with some satisfaction mixed in, because she’s smiling. I’m repeating myself, but I think you and some others are conflating Tina deciding that Shelly and Monica were friends with Tina loosing Nudge. There wasn’t much time difference between them (relatively speaking) but those were two separate events.

        @SoWhyMe: The first panel on June 25, 2010 has a pose that is similar to today’s, but it strikes me as much more nervous because of the wider eyes and higher eyebrows.

  8. Artemisia
    December 3, 2010, 12:57 am | # | Reply

    Oh God It Mutilated her hands and cut chunks out of her thumbs!! also Wrinkle in brain…? gray hairs…

    • SoWhyMe
      December 3, 2010, 2:07 am | # | Reply

      Not only that, Shelly’s got two right hands now!! Oh wait … nevermind.

    • eschmenk
      December 3, 2010, 8:45 am | # | Reply

      The expression, “a new wrinkle in your brain” means you learned something new. I think “a few gray hairs” usually means you got them by being frightened or worried, but Tina may mean that having supernatural abilities is something new to worry about. Another possibility is that she may have noticed that Shelly actually has some gray hairs and she might have just suddenly changed the topic like she used to do, but is being more honest (not just positive) since Shelly is now a friend.

      • Zaren
        December 3, 2010, 8:49 am | #

        Or maybe the grey hair comment is an attempt to fire up Shelley’s power again so she’ll forget the pain in her hands… or help take care of the injury.

      • W.
        December 3, 2010, 1:24 pm | #

        eschmenk I’m gonna go with “having supernatural abilities is something new to worry about.” I think that will give her gray hairs, which she doesn’t now have.

      • Tessa
        December 3, 2010, 1:51 pm | #

        I figured the gray hair comment was an addition to the wrinkles in your brain. Because wrinkles are also a sign of age. So that was so much to think about it gave your brain wrinkles AND gray hairs. So she was being overly clever.

      • Tessa
        December 3, 2010, 1:53 pm | #

        Clarification- I guess it’s better to say to sync with the first comment that the something new she learned was so big it gave her brain wrinkles and gray hairs.

      • eschmenk
        December 3, 2010, 3:09 pm | #

        Are you saying Shelly is hairbrained? 😀

        I can’t reconcile the fold in the brain (good) with hairbrained or fuzzy brain syndrome (bad). Apparently, hairbrained came from harebrained, but some dictionaries consider it a legitimate spelling.

      • Artemisia
        December 3, 2010, 11:10 pm | #

        well apparently the long earlobes of buddha statues represent wisdom because ears grow through life so the use of certain body parts to indicate age or learning something enlightening is a legitimate metaphor

      • Artemisia
        December 4, 2010, 9:41 pm | #

        i mean certain body parts being aged ahead of their years

  9. Jim
    December 3, 2010, 2:01 am | # | Reply

    Hmmm . With the properly padded gloves . . .

  10. Jayessell
    December 3, 2010, 2:28 am | # | Reply

    To quote Terry Pratchet:
    The truth will make you fret.

    • Artemisia
      December 3, 2010, 4:31 am | # | Reply

      but that which you do not know can kill you

    • ProleBoi
      December 3, 2010, 7:52 pm | # | Reply

      Yes, but it can also make you frep. ‘The Truth’ was a marvelous book 🙂

      • Artemisia
        December 3, 2010, 11:12 pm | #

        “the truth has got its boots on, it’s going to start kicking”
        this particular truth looks like it has potential to beat shelley out of the boxing ring

  11. J2P2
    December 3, 2010, 6:41 am | # | Reply

    Should have started with something easy–like, say, lifting an entire engine block unassisted?

    • Z
      December 3, 2010, 8:29 am | # | Reply

      Sore hands from squishing something beats the hell out of hurting your back.

    • jwhouk
      December 3, 2010, 8:44 am | # | Reply

      Okay, I have an issue with that. The engine she threw was basically stripped down to nothing. We also didn’t see if it was on a dolly or anything, and she just pushed it off the dolly, where it went flying. We also don’t know if it may have been an all-aluminum block engine, which would have made it (relatively) light.

      …Aw, who am I kidding? SHELLY SMASH!

      • Jabberwonky
        December 3, 2010, 12:11 pm | #

        Well, it did still have the headers on it…which means that a lot of the guts were still in it…I have faith in our half-pint Hulk…

      • Fairportfan
        December 3, 2010, 12:23 pm | #

        I have liofted (more or less) a complete 1275cc four-cylinder engine (from an Ausitn-Healey Sprite that i wrecked in Italy).

        I was much younger and in much better shape than i am today.

        It still almost injured me.

        Minus heads, the 3,5-liter aluminium V8 that Rover may still be building (which is, in fact, a 1960s GM 232 CID design that USAians couldn’t manage to figure out how to maintain) weighed about forty pounds less the iron four-cylinder engine that was used in the MG-B (A comparison that can be made because of the MGB-GT V8, which was never exported to the US, dammit.) … and its dry weight was 375 pounds.

      • Fairportfan
        December 3, 2010, 12:24 pm | #

        Oops – that last paragraph changed in mid-composition, and i forgot to eliminate the “minus heads” part; the weight comparison is for complete engines.

      • W.
        December 3, 2010, 1:17 pm | #

        Sorry about the wreck… but do you know how cool that sounds! You were driving an Austin-Healy Sprite… in Italy… and wrecked it. It could only be cooler if you were in a race on a course.

      • Fairportfan
        December 3, 2010, 7:22 pm | #

        Heh. Eighteen feet, take-off to touchdown and landed facing the way we came from. I dislocated a finger and the other guy skinned his knee.

        I was in the Navy, in Sicily, in 1971.

        But if you want to talk coolness factor – it was apparently the only confirmed example of the rumoured “Mark 2.5” type. Read the last two paragraphs of this section (Mark III); the one in parenthesis is the one i added after i looked up Spridgets for anything i was writing and discovered how rare that car really was…

        And we won’t talk about the fact that i wasn’t able to raise the two grand to replace it with the fully-restored Big Healey 100-6 that a guy was trying to sell after he got transferred early. (He wasn’t high enough rank to get the Navy to ship it to the States for him – i was.)

        Of course, that is two thousand 1971 dollars…

      • eschmenk
        December 3, 2010, 9:50 pm | #

        Mind if we flag you for “original research”? 😉

      • Fairportfan
        December 4, 2010, 12:40 am | #

        Go ahead – i’ve been wondering how long it would be before someone at least demanded a source…

      • Fairportfan
        December 5, 2010, 5:45 am | #

        AGGGGH! The 1275 was from the ’69 Sprite i had here in the States! The ’63 in Italy was an 1100!

  12. bmonk
    December 3, 2010, 4:01 pm | # | Reply

    I hope she doesn’t plan to do anything involving manual labor today–including something like typing, using silverware to eat, and so on…

    • Opus the Poet
      December 3, 2010, 4:26 pm | # | Reply

      Shelly’s tough, she’ll just shake her hands a couple of times to get the blood circulating again and be right as rain…

      • Fairportfan
        December 3, 2010, 7:12 pm | #

        Right as rain? Will she get a card from Jin?

      • Fatuncle
        December 4, 2010, 7:25 am | #

        “… shake her hands … and splatter blood over the walls and floor …

  13. MerchManDan
    December 3, 2010, 5:24 pm | # | Reply

    Shelly’s reacting to this more calmly than I thought she would; kinda figured her response would be “How the FU@& did I do that!?!?”
    Well, that’ll probably come up on Monday, once the shock wears off.

    • eschmenk
      December 3, 2010, 5:34 pm | # | Reply

      I think she dropped the cup and was pretty much speechless yesterday.

  14. eschmenk
    December 3, 2010, 5:24 pm | # | Reply

    There is a good chance that I’m over-analyzing things, but I wonder if Tina means something different than we think. She keeps using the word “that,” but what does it mean?

    I think it’s possible that in the first panel Tina was talking about Shelly not feeling a change to her brain or mind. In the second panel, Tina might mean that the physical pain was necessary for Shelly’s new ability. No pain, no gain, in other words. It may be that the physical (and mental?) trauma that Shelly went through was necessary to give Shelly her supernatural strength, so minor amounts of the same was necessary to give her a minor upgrade. It wouldn’t surprise me if an actual change to her mind and/or brain is part of this because of the way Paul blurs the border between mental and physical stuff.

    • Xiutecuhtli
      December 3, 2010, 6:21 pm | # | Reply

      You’re over-analyzing things.

      OTOH, over-analyzing seems to be a major participating sport around here, so you have a lot of company (at least a third of whom could use a good copy editor; I can’t get through a day’s comments without my inner grammar-nazi pitching at least three hissy-fits).

      • eschmenk
        December 3, 2010, 10:17 pm | #

        Paul provides us with entertainment, of course, but does anyone else wonder how much entertainment we provide for him? I could imagine him sitting back with a beer, chuckling at what we’re saying, and occasionally yelling something like “Hey, Honey, get a load of this!” 🙂

      • Artemisia
        December 3, 2010, 11:21 pm | #

        that’s what i look forward to when i get some people reading my comic it may be more fun than writing it

      • SoWhyMe
        December 3, 2010, 11:24 pm | #

        I see him more as reading them and thinking/saying things like:
        “Yeah? Well screw you too!”
        “Oh comon! You can’t really believe that?”
        “Geeze, these people make way too much of the dialog.”
        “Who ties this guy’s shoelaces for him in the morning?”
        “Come up with your own comic so I can comment on it. We’ll see how YOU like it!”
        “Get bent, asshole!”
        “Gag me with a shovel!”
        “Kiss ass much?”
        “That’s it! I’m not reading anymore of this horse s***!”

        Or maybe I’m just thinking of his reaction to my posts.

      • Artemisia
        December 4, 2010, 9:03 pm | #

        Hence the need for the beer!

      • Julie
        December 5, 2010, 1:42 pm | #

        @Xiutecuhtli – After a while it gets easier to ignore your inner “Grammar Nazi”…or you could just do what I do. Correct the person verbally, but say little to nothing in type. 🙂

        Then again, there are plenty of people here who have no trouble unleashing their own grammar hounds on other commenters.

      • eschmenk
        December 5, 2010, 3:43 pm | #

        So we can type “ya’ll” and you won’t say anything? 😉

      • Jabberwonky
        December 5, 2010, 8:05 pm | #

        I always thought it was ‘y’all’…

      • eschmenk
        December 6, 2010, 11:26 am | #

        …or Julie can just let Jabberwonky correct me this time. 🙄

      • Jabberwonky
        December 6, 2010, 1:42 pm | #

        Just tryin’ to help Julie out….

    • morven
      December 4, 2010, 11:26 am | # | Reply

      We are not alone in overanalysis.

      • eschmenk
        December 4, 2010, 1:49 pm | #

        Wow! Freefall still going. I don’t know why I stopped reading it.

        I can’t disagree with Winston’s comment. (I assume that’s who that is.) 🙂

      • W.
        December 4, 2010, 4:55 pm | #

        Where would we be without the engineering/mechanical gene? We sure wouldn’t be able to read webcomics. To engineers, *lifts glass of Saurian Brandy.

  15. StJason
    December 3, 2010, 7:07 pm | # | Reply

    Wait… I thought that cutting your hair made you lose your superhuman strength…?

    • Artemisia
      December 3, 2010, 11:19 pm | # | Reply

      but as female she could be considered equal and opposite to Samson. Also where men have a tougher time keeping hair long (on battlefield: bloody trees) women get more trouble from cutting it so maybe it is part of recognizing the strength.

      • morven
        December 4, 2010, 11:30 am | #

        I agree: men, especially warriors, favor short hair because it’s harder for an enemy to grab it and deny you freedom. But some Kings also had to wear hair long–when the Merovingians were finally deposed to make way for Pepin the Short, the procedure was to shear the King’s hair and pack him off to a monastery.

      • morven
        December 4, 2010, 11:32 am | #

        (Here’s a reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childeric_III.) I also remember that in Andre Norton’s Witchworld, among others, women kept growing in (magical) ability until they married or had sex, and their hair was cut.

      • Fairportfan
        December 5, 2010, 5:50 am | #

        Charles I, after joking with the headsman and counselling him to not fear and to strike truly, moved his hair aside to give him a clean stroke.

  16. CaptainTightPants
    December 3, 2010, 10:52 pm | # | Reply

    I do not know why, but Shelly’s having powers now actually bothers me. It just seems too token, and it might have been nice having a fully human character after appearing to lose Owen and Lakshmi and Amanda’s long absence. Maybe that’s why she has suddenly reappeared, to fill the human void Shelly is leaving… Not to criticize. This is your work, I’m just saying it seems a bit odd to me.

    • Paul Taylor
      December 4, 2010, 11:20 am | # | Reply

      Who said that she has any powers?

      • SoWhyMe
        December 4, 2010, 12:40 pm | #

        Oh great! Throw a wrench into everyone’s mental gears whydontcha? So she is that strong from just working out?

      • Fairportfan
        December 4, 2010, 4:00 pm | #

        She’s just kinda strong, that’s all.

        Nothing unusual about that.

      • Dusty668
        December 4, 2010, 4:26 pm | #

        Throwing an engine block is not kinda strong, that;s freaky strong. But if the power is not hers, maybe Shelly is…
        …occupied.

      • The Old Wolf
        December 4, 2010, 5:24 pm | #

        Tina. Tina is implying that Shelly has something unusual going on. At least that’s what I’m getting out of it.

      • Paul Taylor
        December 4, 2010, 6:03 pm | #

        But don’t assume there’s anything supernatural. 🙂

      • Artemisia
        December 4, 2010, 8:56 pm | #

        are we talking hormone imbalances/obsession to fill void left by mommy type natural, or that it may be supernatural just not necessarily should be what pops into our minds

      • eschmenk
        December 5, 2010, 3:39 pm | #

        I think people may be over-reacting to Paul’s comments, but I’m not sure. Captain T implied that Shelly wasn’t a “fully human character.” Paul may be meaning that Shelly is still fully human, but humans have natural abilities they don’t know about.

        From my point of view, crushing the cup with her fingers (rather than flattening it using her arm muscles) and not slicing or crushing her fingers in the process would have probably been impossible, IRL, so it would still be supernatural to us.

        I don’t think Atemisia‘s second suggestion is correct, because Paul said “don’t assume there’s anything supernatural. To me, that rules out even those supernatural things we’re not thinking about.

  17. SoWhyMe
    December 4, 2010, 12:45 pm | # | Reply

    I think the rest of the collective must have learned a thing or two about tricking people into seeing things from another perspective from Nudge while she was there. This sure seems like something she/it would do.

  18. Jayessell
    December 4, 2010, 10:43 pm | # | Reply

    Many Mars ago I wrote a proposal (ok… One page premise) for a TV series… Something like a ‘super Charlie’s Angels’.
    Of the three women one would have physical powers. Super strength and invulnerability. One would have mental powers. Telepathy, telekinesis, and some kind of mental invisibility like the The Shadow. The third would have magic/new age powers like channeling deceased experts of any kind (Helicopter pilot, EOD)(Hopefully they didn’t die due to their incompetence!)
    This covers body/mind/spirit.

    So. Back on topic. Monica needs a team whose members possess a variety of skills, knowledge and attributes.

    Welcome to the club Shelly! Hope you survive!

    • SoWhyMe
      December 5, 2010, 12:39 am | # | Reply

      Sounds like someone stole your basic idea to create “Charmed.”

  19. Ganon_lord_of_Shadows
    December 5, 2010, 6:38 am | # | Reply

    Sweet!

  20. rich
    June 27, 2012, 11:38 pm | # | Reply

    “by the way, you now owe me $20”

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