Endtown by Aaron Neathery for June 03, 2015

…just when you thought she couldn’t get any ditzier!I sure hope she doesn’t end up leaving Lizardtown with our intrepid couple. She’d be a real drag on the story.

Time for Chic to show them the secret passage out of Lizardville.

It’ll be easy to forgive when they’re all blackened lumps of carbonization…

That better be a false wall, they and the story has reached a proverbial dead end otherwise.Will Aaron Marx come to their rescue?Or are there a squad of surviving lizard firemen headed their way?It does not look good for our intrepid heroes.Though it looks like there may be a left turn drawn ahead of them..

I notice Wally’s face has already healed.

In the immortal words of Ronald Weasley:

She needs to sort out her priorities.

“I promise the last words I say won’t be “AAAGGHHH FIRE DAMN YOU-GGGHHHH KIRBEEE-FIREFIREFIRE AAAAAH!”."

Also, this isn’t a dead end just yet, the corridor just makes a turn to the left here. Look at that ceiling panel thing.

Yes, the corridor turns left, but Kirbee was expecting it to go straight as well.

If she can’t get them out of there and they all burn to death, they’ll never speak to her again!

Kirb isn’t ditzy. She’s just VERY aware of how little time she has to get to the exit, and what the consequences are of taking a wrong turn.

ok…NOW the dittoes may come to the rescue…….

They won’t be angry for long, at least.

I hear Phoebe’s voice from ‘Friends’.

No one noticed?Kirbee is without Holly’s apron.She probably figured she could run faster with out it or tossed it at the fire in “Take that” moment.

Whatever the ceiling is made of, it burns. Don’t know what is above the ceiling, a hard-to-burn flooring or is it just one substance that we see both top and bottom of?

Chic hasn’t had a line for quite a few episodes now. Hmm.

The fire appears to be chasing them. As if it were alive or controlled by someone.

My take on the fire would be that this entire place is fake.Plastic, synthetics, and dry wood. Synthetic clothing, mattresses, sheets. Piotr alluded to the fact their swords were wooden.All of which highly flammable hence the no smoking rule.A controlled usage like lights and such acceptable with safeties. Jim just tore those down.Some where in this place is going to be a weapons storage area…….now when the flames hit that place??Kirbee is probably leading them right to it.My concern would be the children….where are they?Eggs are one thing….burning children??All because of Sarah and we all thought Flask was bad.Flask was driven by lost love…..Sarah had love and tossed it in the trash can.

I’m not sure if what Kirbee said is anything blatantly ditsy, other than a little bit of dark ironic humour amid the face of danger. I’m not sure if I’m explaining that well.

Whatever raccoon-boy had in that lantern, it sure was full of BTUs. Nuclear kerosene? And did they build the entire city out of papier mache soaked in gasoline or something?

She? Sarah didn’t cause anything. Jim is the one who burned down the damned place and murdered as many people as he could in it. Sarah had every right to leave a relationship she wasn’t compatible with anymore. That’s bad huh? Leaving a guy in favor of a more normal life.

Thing is, this might be some post apocalyptic story, but this isn’t a story women haven’t heard plenty enough in real headlines. Men kill women all the damned time for leaving them. Or sometimes even just for turning them down. Look it up sometime, there’s plenty of fresh articles from this year. In any given year, in the Us alone, there are over a thousand women killed by their exes. This is an all too real story in plenty of ways.

So Sarah left a man who felt entitled to her because he did her a favor and as such felt he could keep her forever even if life threw her an astronomically against the odds favor by providing a her colony she actually could live a decent life in. Sure there was work she’d have to do, it wasn’t perfect, but it was more workable than wandering a wasteland in hope that maybe she could scratch out a life. Especially with a guy that literally, physically, wasn’t compatable with her.

Jim got fucking dumped and responded by murdering unborn children and hundreds of people in an agonizing death by fire and left the survivors with a home he destroyed utterly. He made the choice to go out and kill people for her, she didn’t ask him to. He didn’t have to mutate himself, she didn’t tell him to there either.

Oh but it’s her fault and she’s the bad one. Pooooor poooooor Jim. Get real and stop victim blaming the woman when the man decided the appropriate reaction to getting dumped is murder and destruction. It is very tasteless.

@Fiammata I think that’s probably the best explanation of Kirbee really.

@Veteran aw I’m hoping not, as I’ve grown to like her but let’s wait and see. :)

Lol I love how a comic someone could view as a simple ‘funny animal’ comic can spark up debates on politics, domestic violence and who the REAL villains are in a storyline when compared to how it relates to real life. That’s one of the marks of good storytelling. Because it’s relatable. And it evokes an emotional response.

The Cheryl,I’m not sure how long you have been following this strip or how familiar you are with what happened. But after being dumped by Sarah, Jim underwent something called the Schism syndrome. Both Jim and Sarah had recently mutated to their current anthro forms (lizard and raccoon) and were vulnerable to upsets. When Jim (who was madly in love with Sarah) found that Sarah had slept with Piotr, it pushed him over the edge and turned him into something feral, dangerous and not particularly sane. Neither Sarah or Jim (who were Topsiders) were aware of the schism syndrome.If Sarah can be faulted for anything, it can be for being extremely insensitive in how she moved on. It seems that she and Jim learned that they were physically incompatible when they were “fitting suits” in the PT. She should have tried to find some way to let Jim know it was over before she bedded Piotr. That doesn’t mean she was responsible for what happened, but it would have been the decent thing to do. It should be noted that before they mutated, she asked Jim to stick with her, “no matter what happens”. Since Jim chose to leave the TS and mutate to be with her, one could argue that she owed him some consideration. The other reason a lot of posters fault her behavior is that her relationships with Jim and Piotr seem calculated to advance her cause with no concern for the other people involved. It is generally believed that she was with Jim because she needed somebody to mutate with her so that she could beat her cancer. It is thought that she is with Piotr because he could help her gain power in the colony and it is assumed that she would drop him for somebody else when it suited her.

I probably did come across a lot angrier than honestly intended. It’s more (a tad) wordily pointing out a common fallacy I’ve seen more often than you could ever imagine when it comes to female characters vs males.

Thing is, people will paint a female character in a lot harsher a light often times. People often are hypercritical of female characters because their standards are more narrow and rigid than a male character’s. You see less females often in stories, and they rarely hold significance beyond “love interest” as opposed to males. Aaron does marvelous with having flawed females. We wouldn’t be getting into a discussion about it if he didn’t tell such a grand story with such interesting characters.

As for sources for real life (something I opt to often not do as I don’t like spamming comments and am not sure how in the rules it even is): http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/domestic-violence-behind-half-deaths-women-killed-by-men-uk-1487659

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/09/men-killing-women-domesti_n_5927140.html

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/06/21/who-study-forty-percent-of-murdered-women-killed-by-their-partners

So yes, it very much is a thing, and that is a very scary thing to know. Is it an “all men are evil tirade”? No. It’s a “This happens all the time, actually.” explaination.

Yes, I pity Jim, and it is a damn shame what happened to him. But to lay it all on Sarah? He did make those choices. Yes, in the end he went insane, but those actions were still done by him there. It’s accountability. As for Sarah, she’s not blameless, but it’s not all her. It’s understandable at a basic sense. Yes, you could paint her in a harsher light, it’s easy because the situation is relatable. In the end what does it matter? Unless she wasn’t in that crowd like we saw several pages back, she and Jim were burned to a crisp in this proverbial bed that they made.

Well put, everyone! It’s made for interesting reading and a nice change from the usual.

Hey! Want an easy, fun way to promote Endtown and maybe get a free prize out of it?Go over to the GoComics Editor’s blog and in the contest for the free Pastis-Watterson posters, nominate Endtown as your choice for the next Watterson cross-over comic.