Enlist the natives
on July 23, 2014 at 12:01 amChapter: The Big Sleep
Location: Duct tape table, Storage and Lockdown
Here’s more fancy panelwork. Â Also of particular importance here is the vague backstory of why these Aliens are on Earth. Â It was never said, throughout the entirety of It’s Walky!, the reason why these dudes are here. Â They’re exiles, you see, and their atmospheric containment suits keep them from doing what they enlist human children to do. Â Also we get the only look we ever get of their home planet. Â The continents on planet Alien, if you squint, kind of look like a helmeted Alien head, with the visor reaching across the seas. Â Or the lands. Â Whatevs.
I could write Head Alien monologuing for pages, and I do.
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“Hey HA, show, don’t tell!”
“SHUT UP I LIKE TELLING”
I could read Head Alien monologuing for pages, and I will.
Just…Punch the dweeb’s stupid helmet off and he’ll die. Why is our planet so damn acidic to aliens?
I think it’s the air, seeing as every time a helmet shatters we see some sort of smoke come billowing out of it.
>GRUNT<
(The same reason we can't breathe hydrogen. Our species evolved to utilize the vast supply of oxygen that was abundant as the plant species developed and spread. Because of this, we were able to continue and pass on this trait. In addition, our entire bodies are crawling with bacteria, particuarly our stomachs, and we've built up an immunity to the harmful effects. This is one of the reasons there's such a large panic about any and all viruses that "jump" the species barrier. Because our species hasn't built up as strong of an immunity to it yet. In addition, the many flora and fauna we ingest can prove to be toxic to some foreign aliens. More so then usual for some flora and fauna… Australia. Then there's the natives. Us. The people crazy enough to build nuclear bombs. And have over 200 stashed. In this country. Then there's the Russians, who don't know where they are. And seem to have elected or "elected", I'm unsure, a super villain.
To recap,
Atmosphere can kill
Bacteria can kill
Animals can kill
Plants can kill
We can really really kill.
)
Well, oxygen is a deadly poison. We tend to forget about this, what with it also being essential to our metabolic processes and all, but if we didn’t have a bunch of enzymes dedicated to protecting us from it, oxygen would kill us all.
To add to this, Oxygen is so good for our bodies because of its ability to react to things. Hence why “rotting” is actually “oxidization” and why its healthy to have a good supply of “antioxidants”
Its similar to how Chlorine gas doesnt kill you. It just reacts with the multitude of chemicals your throat cells are made of! Not destroying it but changing it into a throat/chlorine hybrid material known as Throat Goo!(tm). As a sad side effect its not very healthy for human’s throats and lungs to turn into Throat Goo!(tm) and they tend to drown in the stuff!
Also sodium lines our nerves. As a metal its a great source for putting sodium deposits on our nerves to better transmit electrical signals. of course if you put purse sodium with water then the two combine to form a sodium and hydrooxygen hybrid that happens to be on fire!
So from these facts we can extrapolate that any given alien race could be made of the right mixture of molecules to have any particular gas be dangerous to them, Especially since even we Oxygen breathing earthlings can be poisoned by most of them! Ozone is dangerous! And its just 2 molecules of Oxygen!.
Ozone is *three* oxygen atoms. Two oxygen atoms make up the closest thing to a (single) stable molecule of oxygen…
Oh yeah, I kinda forgot about the stuff on this page.
We will never see them without helmets, so we can imagine whatever we want.
I imagine a race of tiny Pee-Wee Hermans.
Frankly, I’ve always thought it’d be funny if their heads looked just like the helmets but fleshier, with one long eye where the visor usually is.
Don’t they have insect-esque pincer-mouths? I seem to recall that being a thing but for the life of me I can’t recall where I saw it.
Maybe you’re thinking of the Martians?
Nope, found the source of the confusion. Head Alien II uses his shapeshifting powers to add that feature to his helmet in an April ’09 Joyce and Walky! comic.
Man, I can understand the Head Alien being exiled, but all his minions seem kinda dopey and harmless. Was it a Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe kinda deal? Planet Alien just loaded up their most useless inhabitants and shot them at the nearest life-sustaining planet?
I can’t wait for technology to advance enough that we can launch all of OUR idiots to toxic planets.
Yeah, but then we all die from a disease we pick up from an unsanitized telephone. It’s not worth it, in the end.
The worst tragedy of all would be that no one would ever make a documentary about it.
Earth is Alien Australia!?
Now I want to see HA playing with a rubber ducky in the bath.
Could also be a Zim sort of deal. You’ve got this incompetent dude who wants to conquer a world, so you pack him off to some galactic backwater, and make sure to give him the dumbest possible help to ensure he won’t succeed and you’ll never hear from him again.
Check back in a year and a half.
See, I kind of assumed that Head Alien was the only exile (or the only surviving exile anyway) and that his many, many minions were some sort of vat-grown, dumbed-down, easy-to-control clones (either of him, or some sort of generic soldier template). Hence how he seems to have an infinite supply of them, why they’re so obsessed with earth pop-culture, and dumb as bricks.
That theory brings up another issue, which is that even without the clone thing being true Head Alien still has access to vast and incredible resources–he’s created two giant monsters (one genetic, the other robotic), has preformed genetic experiments on countless humans, and has god knows how many ships and shuttles. (Even if it’s just the one mothership, it’s a pretty damn good one, with tractor beams and everything.)
Even accounting for the fact that he may or may not have broken in to Area 51 and stolen a bunch of shit (clearly he planned to at some point but the comic’s a little fuzzy on whether he went through with it), he still needed to orchestrate all that, and that requires yet more resources given that It’s Walky! makes a big deal over non-SEMME conspiracy organizations being at the very least competent.
I suppose it could’ve been a self-imposed exile–see my comparison to the earliest American settlers further down–and they just happened to be stuck here. In which case I dunno why the Alien government never at least showed up to try and reclaim their shit.
OK, this is super-spoilery; reader beware!
Didn’t he get resources, at least for the human abductions/genetic experiments, from the Britjas because they orchestrated everything? Or were the Britjas only behind Linda’s changes and creating SEMME to gather up the kids Linda and HA abducted, but Linda and HA acted without the Britjas support?
Why I’m wondering about this: http://www.joyceandwalky.com/d/20040617.html
Was that clear? I don’t know if that was clear.
It doesn’t seem like Head Alien was in the loop on that, I don’t think. Only that the Britjas were aware of him, and of his interactions with Linda, and altered their plans to compensate.
That’s kind of what I mean though. I think I’m reading too much into it, but I just wondered if Linda and HA ‘just happened’ to have the resources they needed because of shady, behind-the-scenes Britja help that they didn’t know about. There’s just enough vagueness in the explanation that it could be, or it could just be ‘well, since you did this already, we made SEMME to make sure we had tabs on everything.’
… Oh hey, so they actually had REASONS for all of this.
(It might have been explained originally, but I read the whole old site in a few days at most and have basically no memory of the event. Honestly given the time frame involved I think it was while I was having a major thyroid/vitamin D deficiency thing. If so I’m honestly surprised I remember as much as I do.)
Also, love how there’s conveniently a panel break blocking the person next to baby Joyce. That’s not going to be relevant later AT ALL. Nor are they.
Nope. Nothing to see here, move it along folks.
oh that’s just a depression in the table, for the head ya know??
Did they really? “We were exiled here” is hardly a reason to conquer the natives–but then, didn’t stop [insert North American colonial group here], so.
Well, it certainly doesn’t explain everything, but it DOES explain why they made the abductees for reasons beyond *whatever the hell I thought rolling with it in my first bingeread*. Which is something, because… Seriously, I have like NO memory of major plot events. I may have just thought Head Alien was doing this because he’s Head Alien and he enjoys it. … Which actually WOULD explain why he’s trying to conquer the natives. Dude does love his psychological games.
So, they can’t operate their machinery with their telekinesis. So instead of just using their hands and operating it manually, they … create an army that can later turn against them?
I think the idea is that they’ve got far more machines than Alien staff. (Plus they can always build more machines. Where the hell are these exiles gonna get more Aliens?) So whereas a single Alien user could otherwise multitask and mentally operate several machines at once, now their mechanical army’s mobility is limited to the dwindling number of pilots they’ve got, thanks to being forced to use manual control. And they do use manual controls: their mechsuits have cockpits manned by Aliens, their weapons have grips and triggers, and even the Head Alien sometimes complains about having too many damn remotes in each of his bases.
So they recruit human pilots who, despite having weaker telekinesis and being able to operate one machine at a time at most, are nonetheless still able to pilot the machines in the first place.
If they can’t operate their machinery with their hands, how are they going to get out of that spaceship?
Science fiction story written long ago, The Marching Morons: as the intelligence of earth goes down thanks to overpopulation, technology, etc. soon most of the populations are truly morons and the few intelligent people are working themselves to death trying to keep the civilization running. Then they came up with a solution. So, they start a campaign about vacationing on this great (fictional) world in outter space. The morons happily fill up the ships and get shot into vacuum. A rather heartless way to deal with overpopulation, but sure to work.
So maybe HA and his minions are under the same sort of ‘contract’: a one way trip.
And then the smart ones all die of a disease contracted from unsanitized telephones.
The Dark Knight and Skyfall totally ripped off the ‘antagonist gets captured so he can enact plan and escape’ thing from this comic.
That is funny to read, considering this is hanging a giant purple lampshade on that particular older than dirt trope.
Fun fact:
Any species with interstellar transport capacity probably comes from a world with a oxygen rich atmosphere. This is because an oxygen rich atmosphere is required to create a controlled fire—which is essential in order to produce metal. Without metal, you have no infrastructure capability, and as such no spaceflight.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the locals can breath oxygen (like how we don’t breath carbon dioxide, but plants do), or that there our atmosphere doesn’t contain some harmful gas/chemical/bacteria.
Of course, if you could sterilize the atmosphere, leaving behind just the oxygen and some harmless inert gasses, you could potentially create an environment where several different aliens can breath the same air.
Mars Attacks features aliens that breathe nitrogen but can’t breathe Earth’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere, and cannot breathe oxygen yet would have required an oxygenated atmosphere to develop spaceflight…
…Did they research this stuff specifically to defy it in a way that the random theatregoer wouldn’t notice, yet a scientifically literate theatregoer would get a headache?
I generally assume that the answer to any question involving Hollywood that starts, “Did they research this…” is an emphatic “NO”.
Head Alien makes me think of the Archie Comics version of Doctor Eggman.
He’s a goofy laughable excuse for a villain when you don’t think about what he’s doing. Then you analize it and realize he’s terrifying and insanely more competent than you tend to think he is.
I think this is the first time I’ve actually read HA’s monologue, I just skipped it to get to the good part the first couple times I read this. And now that I have read it, with a brand-spanking-new engineering degree under my belt, I have to ask. WHY NOT JUST DESIGN NEW CONTAINMENT SUITS THAT WOULD LET THE TELEKINESIS OUT?
I hate “As you know” scenes. This would be ten times less annoying if he was monologuing to someone who wasn’t aware of this information otherwise it makes no sense. Sure the point is for the audience to learn this information but without someone in-universe to recieve this information afresh it just feels a little sloppy.
Head Alien is, for all practical intents and purposes, a monologue addict. He will monologue at the drop of a hat, to anyone, regardless of how unnecessary or impractical it is.
Well, that explains why I had no clue what someone was talking about when they referenced the contents of this comic last page — I never read the updated ones.
I do wish we got clarification of the scope of the “we” who were exiled and the reason why. Are these aliens criminals cast out from the society they wronged? Refugees of an invasion of their world who elected to pay it forward? The last hope of survival from a dead planet but with a less altruistic bent than Superman?