The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Achewood => Achewood => Topic started by: evan on January 23, 2007, 07:54:55 am
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http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=01232007
First of all, we were promised this comic over a year ago (http://achewood.com/index.php?date=01022006), and now that it's here it totally does not deliver. I wanted a boat and a guy shooting himself!
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Oh, man, not another zine I will waver about sort of wanting and then not buy. This is getting old.
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Now I know why Beef is so bad at getting ahead in life! He has no perspective!
Ah ha ha ha ha... ha... aha.
eh.
cough.
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Ah I forgot about that teaser strip from last january. So this is the origin of Molly huh?
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WHO ATE MY DANG NACHOOOOOOOOS!?!
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It's OK, R2. Molly lost her Welsh accent in all those centuries in Heaven.
This strip has caused much confusion for me. I hope this is not an omen for the rest of the day. As follows:
1. I check the board and become very cross that someone started a thread that does not use a line from the strip as thread title, despite way more material to work with than usual. While mentally preparing devastating smackdown, I click on link and find that said poster remembers relevant strip from year ago. Hella impressed by the connection but still cross that thread title is from that strip and not this one, can't decide what to think and start to get headache.
2. Isn't Tom Petty blond? I'm sure. Start to Google. Realize picture of Tom Petty first thing in morning will probably cause nausea on top of headache. Give up.
The tiny kite is excellent.
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I'm basically shocked that Onstad didn't contradict the ship picture from last year just to be contrary.
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The thread title is from the alt-text, as they frequently are.
Ninja edit: Cort, Onstad didn't remember the strip from last year. He thinks that he thought of her origin for the first time again. He just has a thing for drowned Welsh girls.
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Jeff Lynne, everyone's favourite Wilbury, is a brunette, whereas Tom Petty is blond. Hmmm. On the other hand, I do want to know what the Traveling Wilburys have millions of. I may have to purchase this zine.
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Hella impressed by the connection but still cross that thread title is from that strip and not this one, can't decide what to think and start to get headache.
As jough mentions it's the alt-text from today's strip, but I probably would have used the same title regardless.
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2. Isn't Tom Petty blond?
I think what's happening here syntactically is that Molly is saying "Tom Petty" in answer to the question "Who was the only blond member of the Traveling Wilburys?" She then lists the other Wilburys by way of contrast -- "all brunettes." (She leaves out Jeff Lynne.)
Note the period after "Tom Petty." This tells us that it is not part of the list that follows, of the brunette Wilburys, all separated by commas.
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I think what's happening here syntactically is that Molly is saying "Tom Petty" in answer to the question "Who was the only blond member of the Traveling Wilburys?" She then lists the other Wilburys by way of contrast -- "all brunettes." (She leaves out Jeff Lynne.)
Note the period after "Tom Petty." This tells us that it is not part of the list that follows, of the brunette Wilburys, all separated by commas.
Ah, well done. Serves me right for not paying attention to punctuation in the morning
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Note the period after "Tom Petty."
Ah! Now I see.
Clearly I did not get enough sleep. I should just take this as a hint to climb under the blanket fort and try again tomorrow.
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Onstad, being the master of the double-bait-n-switch continuity tease, gave the story of Molly Sanders without giving it... again.
There is still going to be a story with a gun and a boat but it may not be for five years.
And you may have to buy a zine to see it.
Which is totally fair in comics-ville. We have been wired to crave "origin stories" by DC and Marvel since we first picked up a comic book (my first comic book? ALF. does this explain things? many things.) even when the origin is meaningless for the purposes of the stories we're currently reading.
I'm as guilty as anyone. Knowing the exact story of Molly's pre-heaven fumblings would enrich my enjoyment of stories involving her in pretty-much zero ways and... yet... here we are. I wanna know too. But basically only by total fanboy reflex.
Also: Jeff Lynne is ALWAYS the forgotten Wilbury. It is because... he's Jeff Lynne.
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On the other hand, I do want to know what the Traveling Wilburys have millions of.
It's ocelots.
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Good lord. The Traveling Wilburys. I remember that music video for Handle with Care. I thought they were all going to die on top of each other in a big pile. There's something about the idea of Roy Orbison complaining to Bob Dylan about his enlarged prostate that depressed the hell out of me.
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I thought they were all going to die on top of each other in a big pile.
Its not like Petty's that old...although he always looked one binge short of an OD. Maybe that would have started the pile-up. Tom flops over foaming, George bends over to help him, blows an aneurysm from the effort and the rest crash over them like fiddlesticks.
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LFM-- I think it is basically a normal human impulse to know where people come from. think about this.
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True.
But how often are you let down, in fiction, when a tantilizingly hazy backstory is filled in with bold letters?
I'm going to say with comics here but... Superman, for example. If all you know is that he was sent off a doomed planet as a baby, as its last survivor, to Earth where his scientist parents knew he would have superpowers and thrive and so on... that's really really awesome. You can paint in whatever backstory you like as you go. Further, he grew up the adopted only child of caring upright farmers and...
When YOU walk in, he's a reporter for the biggest paper in the biggest city... but even that's just a cover because he's actually, like, if Jesus could benchpress oil tankers.
And then... invariably... various writers try and fill in the blanks with their distinct interpretations and... yuck. Just yuck. They can't agree if his parents couldn't even touch each other in a cold scientific distopia or if they were mad rebel lovers in a place that looked a lot like the future we envisioned in 1938 or... what. Was he a year old when they sent him away? Was he a feotus in a "birthing matrix"? Was his hot girl cousin sent out as his baby sitter? Were his dog and his hoss and his cat and his monkey and his goddamn paramecium sent out as tests before him?
Did an evil ***** spaceprobe blow up his planet? Did the core of the planet just explode in some weird atomic-volcanic nutjob natural causes nightmare? Did... anti-cloning terrorists do the dirty deed?
And, like, oh Christ... are his parents dead? Just one? Was he a superhero when he was a kid? Did he have a friend who knew his secret or a girlfriend who was catching on or... you know, did he hang out with SUPER-TEENAGERS FROM THE FUTURE? Did his girlfriend get powers too, every other months?
You waterdown the power of the narrative with every additional frill and... muddy that water still with every contradiction to a past storyteller every time you do it?
Or you can have... "Last son of a doomed planet, raised by simple farmers as a normal-if-overnoble man, now he's a reporter and... CURTAIN UP! SCENE ONE: IN WHICH DORIS GETS HER OATS!"
Wolverine turned out to have been, like, a little spoiled sissy-boy in Nova Scotia, for God's sake.
Cable's the son of Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey who was possessed by a demon, infected by *****-cancer and taken to the future where...
*deep breath*... he was raised by the SOULS of Cyclops and the REAL Jean Grey put into NEW bodies in the FUTURE, which was orchestrated by his "sister" from an alternate future (the daughter of real-Jean and Cyclops in a timeline where he'd never been born) where she is now... like... eighty... and the former possessor of the Phoenix force...
*deep breath*... where he was raised to be the Mutant Jesus battling an immortal from his parents time and, oh, HIS clone (Cable's clone) ended up the protege of the immortal and... at the end of it all, he travelled BACK to now-ish to defeat the immortal at a time when he was more vulnerable but at this time, his parents are in their late twenties and he's the age of his own grandfather...
And his grandfather is a space pirate sleeping with a cat girl.
Y'know? Seriously.
Even Batman... BATMAN... gets muddled up in... WHO killed his parents, was it the Joker, was it just some dude? Did he catch the killer, maybe he never did, maybe he thinks he did but isn't sure?
I mean... you know what I mean.
Onstad being the only writer who'll probably ever work on his characters... and being such a great writer of characterization... this probably WOULDN'T be the case?
But on a literary level, there's something to be said for mystery.
I mean... "The only place Beef could find a girl nerdy enough to love him was the afterlife and, even then, the girl LITERALLY from heaven, his HEAVEN-SENT GIRL, he comes close to screwing it up now and again."
That's maybe exactly enough. Maybe most of the rest of what we know about her SHOULD be told indirectly through her actions and asides and so on.
Complicating it with... the suicide of a sea captain and... the weird mental riddle of what she could've been doing hanging around in the afterlife for 250 years, what she could have in common with an Earth dude if she's been chilling in heaven reading manuals for 250 years, what the exact mechanism for her still being in touch with American popular culture is... all of this is muddies the water... in my imagination, anyway.
There is the slight chance that I overthink matters.
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Did an evil ##### spaceprobe blow up his planet? (...)
Cable's the son of Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey who was possessed by a demon, infected by #####-cancer and taken to the future where...
You know, I think I would like comics a lot more if Krypton had been blown up by an evil trouser space probe and Cable had come down with trouser cancer. (A slackanoma?)
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There is the slight chance that I overthink matters.
Nah, what makes you think that?
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What does E.E.H. stand for?
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What does E.E.H. stand for?
Ed E. Haskell... which is Beef's "bad boy" nom de plume.
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LFM, out of respect for basic human dignity, please do not invoke Cable in a discussion of inherent problems with origin stories. It's like invoking Hitler in a discussion of inherent problems with people who eat bread.
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Heh, that seems worth minting.
"The Nathan Christopher Charles Summers Dayspring Askani'son Rule of Fanboy Argument: If at any point you compare a confusing origin or continuity to Cable, you lose the argument automatically for using the nuclear option."
It is a good rule and bears repeating.
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I thought everybody knew the story of Sanders already.
Modified pressure cooker.
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I thought everybody knew the story of Sanders already.
Modified pressure cooker.
One extra-crispy can for you, sir.
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LFM, out of respect for basic human dignity, please do not invoke Cable in a discussion of inherent problems with origin stories. It's like invoking Hitler in a discussion of inherent problems with people who eat bread.
I have no idea what you are talking about but you get a can for that anyway.
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Wait, if Molly is from Wales, shouldn't her name be something like Llewellynfairdudnocymrwru and not Sanders?
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Wait, if Molly is from Wales, shouldn't her name be something like Llewellynfairdudnocymrwru and not Sanders?
I know two welsh people; one has the last name of Kelleher and the other has Farr.
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Perhaps back then, you got your name changed on your way into Heaven.
Such as Ellis Island.
"Molly Slllghlllghllllgh... now you're... Molly Sanders."
"But..."
"Look, I'm a functionary of GOD. GOD. Made the whole place? Ring any bells? GOD. I KNOW GOD PASSINGLY. HE GIVES ME A TURKEY AT CHRISTMAS AND EVEN THOUGH HIS ASSISTANT HAS TO REMIND HIM OF MY FIRST NAME, HE COMPLETELY KNOWS MY LAST NAME. God is my boss and you are Molly Sanders."
"...all right."
But in the ensuing years, things got kinda P.C. up there and everyone gets the exact name they believe is theirs.
Down to Beef getting a "C." at the front of his name plate.
My back-up theory is that she is a cartoon cat.
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yeah. Because God's functionaries would speak English, and act like Americans.
This fits in with my view of the world exactly.
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yeah. Because God's functionaries would speak English, and act like Americans.
This fits in with my view of the world exactly.
Well he could be speaking any language other than chinese and Molly would've instantly been able to understand.
Maybe Molly used to be married and took the guy's name because it was the olden days.
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There's a difference in from wales as opposed to being welsh.
::shrug::
Just trying to keep it all seamless in my mind is all. Ignore the hand in the puppet sort of thingy.
And why wouldn't god's functionaries relate to one in a way in which one was accustomed? They're prolly flexible enough, being deity powered and all, to go ahead and adapt to the audience at will.
WTF we all supposed to learn some heavens esperanto in a crash course to communicate? Gimme a brat in that case, it ain't happening unless it's done for me.
yabba dabba