Shot through the chest, brain depleted of oxygen, surrounded by flames, unable to even stand… good thing he’s currently dead or he’d really be in trouble.
Still managed to get the hostage out though — and vanish just as flames roar through the scene. Because, y’know. Drama.
Oh hey! We got the nicest writeup last week from Shawn Gustafson over at Collective of Heroes — check it out!
Shawn also writes The Specialists, a longform comic about superheroes during WWII, which I highly recommend.
Bobservations
Looking Over Your Shoulder
Okay, wow, I am really reaching for a tie-in to the art with that title, but I am going for it anyway.
Like many people who are obsessed with privacy to the point where they don headgear made of tinfoil, I am philosophically against the idea of having surveillance cameras everywhere. I mean, I’ve read 1984, it’s fairly obvious that once the systems are in place, they will eventually be abused. And by “eventually” I of course mean “immediately.”
However, I recently had a couple more buttons fall off my Hawaiian shirts. I wear my Hawaiian shirts to death, and eventually they get so thin and frayed that the buttons start falling off. And even though Hawaiian shirts are so laid-back and casual that a button or two missing doesn’t render them useless, three or four buttons missing does start to look a little slovenly, even for me. My wife always feels guilty about this even though she works much harder than I do, because she has been Culturally Conditioned to believe that mending a husband’s shirt is something wives should do. However, she never actually has time to do it.
So one day, while glumly contemplating a closet full of unwearable shirts, I was struck with a revolutionary idea. Perhaps I could get a needle and thread and mend them myself!
I know, I know. Heresy, right? But such was my desperation that I decided to give it a try.
So I went off to the local Wal-Mart for some reading glasses. Now, normally I avoid Wal-Mart, but it does have a rather large selection of reading glasses at reasonable prices, and I needed some stronger ones because the ones I currently use are fine for reading but NOT for threading needles or stitching buttons. Also, I needed some buttons. And needles. And button thread. And small scissors. Oh, and while I was there, a new ream of paper for the printer.
So I bought these things. There was only one spool of button thread, and I dropped it while examining it, and it rolled across the floor trailing thread, but I wound it back up rather sloppily and took it anyway, since it was the last one. And I paid for them all at the register, and walked out carrying a bulky bag because a ream of paper has some mass to it.
Naturally, what with one thing and another, I didn’t get around to actually deciding to mend the shirts for a couple of days. At which point I opened the bag and discovered it contained ONLY the ream of paper. Apparently there had been two bags. I had only taken one. And of course it had been days since my actual purchase.
So with an air of hopelessness I went back to Wal-Mart with my receipt and explained what had happened. The lady at the service desk took me to a technician sitting at a computer, who entered a code from my receipt into his machine. And BAM, instantly yanked from the central servers, there on the screen was an image of the register as seen from the security camera, with me making my purchase, the clerk putting the items into two bags, and myself cluelessly walking out with just one.
The service lady nodded, checked the missing items on the receipt, handed it to me, and told me to go find them again. I did, too — right down to the button thread with the loose end carelessly wrapped around the spool. And the Wal-Mart people politely waved me out again.
So my very first experience with the Surveillance Society actually turned out to be surprisingly positive. And I was able to mend my shirts All By Myself, which had my wife absolutely writhing with guilt. (Bwahahahaha! Marriage points: Scored!)
I’m still suspicious of surveillance cameras. But at least while I am being surreptitiously observed without my knowledge, I know I am looking damn fine in my Hawaiian shirts.
–Bob out
I really like your comic. It moves a little two quickly for my taste and doesn’t have enough description (I’d have liked to see him wrestle more with the decision to become a hero and the motivations of the more dynamic characters, like Mr. Cicerone, aren’t explained well, something I prefer to be done up front in most of the entertainment I consume, and something I like to do in my writings myself) but if I take the approach that it’s like an action movie and let stuff be, it’s very well done. I especially like how you’re not afraid to deal with the spiritual side of stuff, which usually turns people off. All in all, good comic. I’ll be bookmarking it for future reading. Hope you guys get the views your writing and art deserve.
Thanks, Brandon! After spending way too much of my career writing for superheroes that were angsty from the get-go (Marvel characters in particular seem to come with more baggage than a TAS checkpoint) I wanted to do a character who is not technically a superhero (just has a small but handy physical quirk) and has been a professional soldier for so long that simply following new orders doesn’t faze him too much. No worries, we’ll be building to the things you mention. Enjoy the journey with us!
That makes sense, but if a soldier following orders I would expect him to have put up less of a fight. The real problem I would see is for Mr. Cicerone to have done something to establish himself as an authority worth following. Obviously the White House Gassing scenario he proposed is enough for my to like/trust him, but Max didn’t know about that. What, in Max’s mind, makes Mr. Cicerone worth following? (The death of his daughter is one but the connection between her death and Max’s guilt and resulting “following orders” wasn’t clear enough for me.) I know I must seem to be nit picking. I really do like the comic and I realize it must take sooo much effort to even get it to this point. I’m just trying to be critical to help you provide a better product (one that I’m not paying for so I should probably shut my mouth. XD).
you update on mondays but on sundays
plz dismiss the comment above. this is what i was trying to say
you don’t update on mondays but on sundays
Technically, we update on Monday morning East Coast time. The thing is, we’re in California, and that means we set the update to 9PM Sunday night local time. This is a fairly common Webcomic thing. We could set our WordPress to register East Coast time but that would mean constantly doing math in my head, and one of the primary reasons I became a writer is so I would never ever have to do math. 🙂
In the last strip, I just noticed some of the flames beside the armored truck look like somebody completely engulfed in flame.
It almost looks like Fynch managed to get out of the truck before the flames exploded.
Hm. I see what you mean, but just an illusion. I can assure you he’s still in the truck.
Also, it looks like demons have infested our Random Avatar Picker. Hopefully just an aberration, like when your Shuffle randomly picks the same song repeatedly, but if not I’ll FTP in and see if I can knock it loose.