Endtown by Aaron Neathery for February 05, 2016

Awwww. Poor Chic.

Poor Chic. This is what he missed.I’m not sure what he thinks of all the stuffed animals, though.

“so to speak” … guessing bun in the oven or something like that.

There is a shadow in front of Chic…….“Baking” I bet those were some good brownies!!Wally locked up in the brig on an APEX cruiser. He did not handle the Teacher killing very well. That explains his flashback to holding back monsters at the porthole door.

So “The X-Files” exists in this universe, too. Kinda feel sorry for them—-never much liked it.

I knew it! She was a hippie chick. She must not have actually been high when the virus struck her, though, or she would have turned into one of those blobs. Which leaves Wally, if he was sedated why didn’t he turn into a blob.

I’m guessing that “baking” might mean stoned. If Kirbee was having sex when the mutagen hit, she’d probably have turned into a monster. Besides, its really hard to have sex when binge watching TV — particularly if you get into a show. My guess would have been marijuana or something that would either put you in a mellow mood or leave you passed out. Amphetimenes would probably lead to a monster and I’m guessing that Cooper was tripped out on LSD or something like that when he mutated.Hmmm…this strip does make me question my country girl hypotheses. I tend to associate drug use and “The X-Files” with urban/suburban life.

Love the flying car mobile in panel 4.

Apparently I was right about something. According to the Urban Dictionary.BakingThe act of smoking or monging out on large amounts of marujuana.“I like to sit on my couch with a fat ounce baking all day”by Sir Smokesaltot May 07, 2009

So, that’s why they didn’t change into monstrous lookin’ beasts. I think it had been stated before that the body’s pulse rate and emotional state play a factor in the overall affects of the virus. But to be safe, Kirbee more than likely passed out from her, erm… recreational activity. Still makes you wonder what Holly and Lyn were up to… Hmm.

Chic was born after the war, or very shortly after. So the baby’s room is both alien and a view into a childhood he never had. Not good.

I notice that the stuffed toy mouse in the baby crib seems to have a passing resemblance to Holly (after she mutated).

Chic never knew what it was to be a wanted child.

On the toys…..in crib….similar to Linda still in “jail”….the close one…..Jacob?? Of course Chic does not know these folks but if Holly was to view them remembering her current condition…….interesting.

Where is Chic going?He’s going to have a look at the life he could have had if he was a lizard instead of a bird.His mother loved him. He knew that. But it was just her against pretty much everyone else, including his idiot father.

Maybe later… If Holly regains her senses more, perhaps she might consider adopting Chic.After all, Holly lost a child. Chic lost a mother.

Looks like Kirbee might be an old girlfriend of mine, we used to watch the X-Files and ummmm Bake things, like Neurons perhaps. It was all very innocent you see… Back in the 90’sBut alas, poor Chic…He knows not what his eyes now see before him..A proper environment for a child, not the sterile austerity of Unity.The look of shock is upon his visage!

Mmmmmm…brownies…

I wonder if Chic would even recognize this as a child’s room. I vaguely remember at least one of his siblings having a stuffed toy and he may have figured that this wasn’t Holly’s & Lyn’s room, noticed that it was set up from someone and figured out it was for the baby. I wonder what he thinks when he see’s this.

Wally mentions being in a battlecruiser. That brings to mind something from Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica. Wally being kept in something like that when he was an Engineer and a ground pounder makes me wonder if he had a serious reaction after the attack on the teacher’s residence.

The shadow probably just comes from the general lightning from the hall. If there is no light inside the room, the only thing you could point at would be that the way the shadow is would be a bit off.

Amongst other things, Neathery is an excellent comedy writer. Note the clever word play, back and forth, in two panels.I implore everyone to find and listen to Electromatic Radio, a comedy series that can be found on the web. It’s a 23-part radio series that Neathery wrote, acted in and produced essentially by himself. It is extremely good comedy (interspersed with public domain music tracks), and I find it never loses its freshness even after repeated listening. Electromatic Radio concerns the adventures in an obscure public radio station, which is a massive, nuclear-powered, computer-controlled building staffed by a crew of two: the grumpy and bewildered old announcer and the eccentric young genius technician.

Produced about ten years ago, the show is set in (surprise) a universe that is similar to but not exactly the same as our own current day world. And certain details resonate with what we now know of Endtown. In EMR, we meet a colony of comically disputative talking rats, which are certainly the template for Endtown’s security rats. Also, EMR is set in the fictional small town of Drakesville (unspecified state), which is the town Kirbee recently informed us she came from. EMR makes passing reference to a local city called Hillside. A mention is made of the radio station KVOX and also a university radio station. Hillside and Drakesville are mentioned in an emergency alert broadcast (although this is not the emergency warning we are expecting to see in the Endtown comic strip, as it involved a tsunami of Bengal tigers!) A few other interesting things about the EMR version of Drakesville is that its main sporting team is a group of veteran Monopoly champions, the Ocelots, it is the avalanche-surfing capital of the world, and on more than one occasion it has become dangerously close to becoming nothing more than a smoking, glass-lined crater.

Re: Everybody: I didn’t watch “The X-Files” because I didn’t like the restless 1990s paranoia, nor did I much care for the un-FBI-like behavior of the leads. (Wasn’t a case of not watching from lack of time—-my main problem now, as even stuff I record to watch later never gets played back.)

I recall, when Jim and Sarah mutated, it seemed they lost a great deal of their memory of what went before. I was wondering whether that was typical, or a rare occurrence, or just them. Wally seems to remember a great deal…Kirbee is being closed-mouthed about it but she seems to remember something…

As I recall Cooper’s words. If you’re fully conscious, you turn into a monster. If you’re unconscious you go anthro, including babies in the womb. In his case he was “self medicating” when he mutated. He never specified what kind of drugs he was using but I was assuming it was something like LSD. Kirbee said she was “um…baking” which suggests marijuana which has different effects than LSD. Thus, its possible that being high and conscious may still produce an anthro. Just speculating.

I’m liking this girl more and more.

It is just a bit odd though, or a single slip. At the start with the ditto flashbacks, the loner/professor/crazy guy ran into monsters, but also a guy turning into a duck … And he was fully conscious.

Hence the verse from Tom Lehrer (okay, apologies to TL):Oh, we’ll all roast together when we roast.There’s no contest for who deserves it most.And if by some stroke of luck youTurn into some kind of duck, you’llTaste as good still as Daffy does on toast.

The thing is you can’t expect the rules of mutation to be supported by the laws of physics or biology. Neathery has created a premise on which to build a story. The premise only has to be consistent enough to support the story during its telling, although it helps if it is robust enough to extend to subsequent stories as well. The purpose of this story-telling, as well as plain entertainment, is to put familiar-seeming personalities into unfamiliar environments and follow the resulting events. In so doing, it leads us, the readers, to ask ourselves “what would you or I do in that scenario?” That’s sort of like testing the circuits of a machine, one by one, by running it through tests in a workshop. That’s what I most like in my stories: a step along the road to self-understanding. As far as it needs to be explained, I think the mutation is patterned around people’s concepts. Wally didn’t change into a cat but his concept of a cartoon cat. His sleeping mind accepted that. A drug-addled mind has shattered concepts. A drug-sedated mind is similar to a sleeping one. Real mice don’t fixate on Swiss cheese, but cartoon mice do, and so Holly the mouse does. I think it’s based entirely on concepts, not on heart rate, DNA changes or even conservation of mass.

In regards to Holly being obsessed with cheese, it might have something to do with her being lactose intolerant in her human life and turning into a mouse it would also be fitting. Wether it is based on personality is hard to tell, since we don´t have more than a few examples that makes their personality fit within an archetypal personification of their animal parts.But then you can also get into the thing with schism syndrome – and some of the monsters being more friendly than others (being aware of their state, but still controlled by the more animal instincts we got).

Chic’s shadow looks to me like what it would be for a human child. The what mighta been -

all the sacrifices for the child certainly explains Holly’s near neurotic guilt for losing the baby.

Another re: everybody: comment. I’ve never heard “baking” used as a slang term for marijuana use—-must be later than my time—-but from the context presented, and the commentary below, I can see how it could come about. (I’m sometimes suspicious about new slang terms—-ever since the “macaca moment” thing in politics a few years back, when I’d never heard it used before, and had the suspicion it was made up to make trouble…)

I’ve never heard “baking,” per se but in the context of “He’s baked” or “They’re out back getting baked” I used to hear that way way back.

The lizard only recently turned. she had cancer, so her hubby open their suits and then they changed. follow the script

Kirbee “baking” during an X-Files marathon.

This does seem to suggest that Kirbee was mutating while conscious during her marathon bake and wasn’t even aware of it.

If you go by “being so immersed that you don´t discover whats going on around you” as being unconsious at least. :p

I’ve had a guess about The virus for a long time that it was a weapon, intended to target an individual by ideology/mindset. But that it went terribly wrong. So, instead it latches on to the chaos of the waking mind to make monsters and cartoons-as-dream images out of those asleep. This also helps explain the intensity of the TS hate-on for both mutants and immunes. The TSers represent a political/ideological sub-set that considers world-wide genocide to be in-line with their goals

… and if the pregnant mother is asleep, and her unborn child is awake…

Never caught that. Was it covered in strip, or by commenters? Sure would be horrible for unborn children of a mutated mother, then.

Just squeezing this in before the next update…Kirbee mentions “binge watching,” so there’s a 21st century phrase smack in the middle of their world, and with the implications that some form of video replaying is available to the masses…