Endtown by Aaron Neathery for April 23, 2018

Nothing went wrong. Went off with the GONG.

No, No!!! Do Over!!! The neck ties clash. One small step for rat, one giant leap for Philo.

The worst Gong show ever!

No one can hear your sentence proclamation over the sound of the tower bell! All they can here is GONG!

Up the long ladder and down the short rope…

That rope looks too long- use of an over-long rope has been known to decapitate…

Hang on the bell, Nellie, hang on the bell

Your poor daddy’s locked in a cold prison cell

As you swing to the left, Nellie swing to the right

Remember that curfew bell must never ring tonight

Nellie may have been a little late.

There’s good noose and bad noose, but none of that matters as Foxworthy flies like a cooked goose…

You know what? Endtown’s not such a fun place anymore. Think I’ll head off into the Great Waste and see if I can hook up with Wally and Kirby. We’ve been through hilarity and tragedy, hope and despair, mystery and revelation. Now it’s just depressing. :P There don’t seem to be any heroes left…

We will find out on Friday whether Philo indeed dies or whether there’s a miraculous intervention (assuming it’ll be on Friday, unless Aaron draws this out even longer). Masterful artwork with the characters’ expressions. The vengeful glee on Freeman’s face, the agonized despair on Philo’s.

I’m still hoping Philo survives without injury…somehow. (This is a cartoon… hope is ever-present in a fictional story.)

Deus ex machina? 3… 2… 1…

Holly appears in a space ship?

It’s the rats who should be hung. Wish they’d get their comeuppance.

At the sound of the gong it will be four o’clock.

There he goes… He’s being punished for the crime he did commit, but he’s being labelled for the one he didn’t…

Where’s the justice?

Damn, so sad to see such a long-running character go. He’s been around since the first story arc, I think. Just a sign of how broken the society of Endtown has become. Jacob got the power he wanted and he made a mess of things. Foxworthy pursued a red herring to try and stop him and ended up contributing to a bloodbath, and ultimately destroying himself. The city has always been a dystopian mess, but now it’s gotten even worse. I wonder how all this plays into Jacob’s vision.

You do know those same rats who walked him out……have to walk back. The last ones never made back alive.

Aaron has said that he tells the stories he feels he needs to tell; he doesn’t do wish fulfillment.

Again, this is reminding me so much of the Rosenberg case.

Bile fascination

I am afraid that Philo will die and short after the real cannibals are found. And i suspect that there is a connection to the food shortage story that was orchestrated from the administration or maybe even from the security.

I have zero problem with Aaron telling the stories he needs/wants to tell. :) If Philo dies, it’s all part of the entire story and I trust Aaron’s story writing to skillfully weave this into the tale he’s telling. I have no idea yet where he’s going with this, but that’s part of the page-turning intrigue.

Still, it’s also a compliment to his writing and drawing skills that he’s created characters we care about and we are sorry to see them go when it’s their time to exit the story.

I got the impression that Marx helped Jacob get that position because bad times were coming in Endtown that he thought Jacob would be the best solution for. But, by the tone of his comments Marx also hinted that Jacob would suffer. Well the bad times are here. Jacob hasn’t fully played his part yet. And I think Endtown will be stable afterwards, but only after a bit more angst. Today’s strip feels like the push of a detonation button.

A Flying Fox!

This imagery isn’t much different from what Isis proudly presents on the internet of what they do in the name of their religion.

Remember, these are just mutated humans giving in to the ugly side that’s in all of us. Pig, fox, wolf, black, white, doesn’t matter.

@ MXY. What if the human condition is the mutation and the virus is just changing people back to what they really are?