I’m not exactly sure that’s how biology works but they also resurrected walky from like a follicle of pube hair, so look just vibe with it
I’m not exactly sure that’s how biology works but they also resurrected walky from like a follicle of pube hair, so look just vibe with it
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What on earth is machete’s accent? Cajun?
Speaking as not-an-actual-linguist, I suppose it could be interpreted as an exaggeration of Walky’s sloppy speech patterns, with some inflections of Sal’s southern twang…
…Or it could just be 200X!Willis’s attempt at guessing what a kid from 2029 would sound like.
He reminds me of Robin more than anything. So… whatever ‘accent’ Robin’s supposed to have, I guess.
I did wonder where the duct tape came from…
In a not too distant past, somebody must’ve done a “How to Exorcise an Alien”
Head Alien retreats from Dorothy’s body because he THINKS whatever the hell Machete’s talking about will work.
That would be a funny twist.
Lamarck was right!
…W-Well that certainly is a horrifying power for this kid to have, and one rife with potential for abuse
I could definitely see Machete’s teammates distrusting him potentially being a major recurring plot thread in a hypothetical kids-vs-the-Martians-25-years-later story.
Yeah, having the capacity to do that to someone would be isolating. People wouldn’t trust you not to abuse it, hell you probably won’t trust you not to abuse it.
See, but if you make them forget you can do it, there’s no problem.
Oh, I would definitely abuse it. That sounds super useful. And more than that, super fun. I wonder if he can completely revert somebody back to a mental infant?
Not if it only works to cure people who have an artificial persona superimposed over their own. People generally aren’t worried about plumbers clogging their pipes.
But hey, name one so-called superpower that wouldn’t be alienating in the real world. If superpowers actually existed there would be no superheroes, only supervillains.
What if the superpower was to “force a peaceful negotiation”?
Jen: A guy in the Wild Cards universe had basically that power. He was destroyed by that universe’s HUAC. (House Un-American Activities Committee)
I assume Leslie is making mental notes about the Abductee duct tape thing for future playtime possibilities with Robin.
…I mean Leslie does make use of that knowledge at one point down the line, but… well, spoilers.
I thought it was jizz in a cock-sock, honestly.
There was a fair bit of discussion on the subject back when that strip ran, and yeah. Lot of us thought so.
Yeah, this was always what I thought. I didn’t even have to arrive there via “oh wait, it cannot be a pube”.
That’s certainly where I immediately went. I mean, you need someone’s DNA, and everybody looks at the lady he’s been boning so hard it’s destroyed at least one roomful of furniture … what else would someone assume?
I was kinda assuming that too for all this time.
Yep, same; I figured they got Walky’s genetic material from inside Joyce.
Does that make Walky his own son?
He’s basically a clone of himself at this point, so … whatever relation you would assume between a clone and the being it’s cloned from.
Ah yes. Science so soft you can spread it on a cracker.
I mean, it could be worse. At least this is just made up science nonsense.
Now, if you took a real science term and made up something random based on what the term sounds like instead of bothering to look up what it actually means, that would be much worse.
**glares at JJ Abrams**
Mind providing some context? My J.J. Abrams is a little bit rusty.
Basically anything in the first two reboot Star Treks that attempts to use any science.
JJ Abrams doesn’t know what a Super Nova is, for example, even though the first Star Trek reboot film relies on that as a major plot point.
He also doesn’t know what cold fusion is.
Both of these facts are infuriating.
That’s definitely a “don’t think about it too hard” kind of explanation
It’s funny. I know that Walky being mindwiped repeatedly so much that he became immune to said mindwipes was a plot point back in It’s Walky!, but I guess I kinda associate the mindwiper with Joyce more since Head Alien goading her into mindwiping herself was such a major part of her character arc. And, really, it might just be the biggest mistake that Head Alien ever made– otherwise Joyce would have become a mindless zombie during Year Zero, and I doubt that the conflict would have been resolved without her– not for a long time, anyway. Head Alien’s fatal flaw has always been his desire to be as big of a dick to his victims as possible.
It does make more sense to discuss it in context of Walky given the resurrection chamber angle, though. Even if DNA wouldn’t work that way in real life, it’s at least… internally consistent. I think.
My best guess is that when Walky was being resurrected, the machine “read” his soul and found the memory dickery, and built a body that simulated it. While it had a human DNA sample to identify the person to resurrect, it produces the new body by growing it from Martian DNA instead. The mindwipe immunity was part of his identity rather than his genome, but the resurrection machine PUT it into his genome in the attempt to produce the closest copy of his body possible– and Martians themselves can indeed tamper with minds on skin-to-skin contact (remember the zombies that Joe and friends encountered on the day of the Martian invasion?) so it’s not even that far of a stretch to say that Martian DNA can code for that particular power.
The result being a resurrected Walky with memory powers, coded into his DNA, that he simply isn’t aware of– and which his offspring could theoretically inherit if the right portions of the genome are all passed down together.
I see someone is going after the no prize.
Canon states that a resurrected body is a mirror image of the original – Walky came out left handed, for example — who knows what the implications are if that extends all the way down to the chirality of his proteins and molecules. Take Thalidomide, for example. reverse the chirality and it becomes teratogenic.
Left handed sugar is the holy grail of artificial sweeteners because it fits into taste receptors exactly like sugar, but the body can’t do anything with it. If Walky’s chirality and not just his organ arrangement were flipped, he’d have starved to death a while ago.
It might explain how he manages to stay thin on a pure junk food diet.
Hmm. Yes.
This all makes perfect scientific sense.
Abductee powers defy all known laws of science anyway. Robin goes on benders after eating Cadbury Creme Eggs as cereal.
So… sure, why not. Machete inherited mindwiper powers from his parents, and not just ‘being a second gen abductee kid of two abductees, one of whom was also resurrection chambered, might start throwing Weird Powers.’ Let’s go with that.
Also this was the first time we had Joyce’s math skills and her ability to use the jetpack linked, wasn’t it? Or am I forgetting one?
Also, I love that look of utter TERROR of HA’s as he realizes just how thoroughly he’s screwed, and how it’s almost all a direct result of his own actions fucking with the abductees as kids. (The only things he wasn’t directly responsible for here were giving Dorothy the abductee treatment and setting her up to be bodyjacked and Walky’s resurrection. Everything else? All on him.)
Deeply satisfying. DEEPLY worth putting HA in a body with a full face to emote with.
Abductee powers adhere to the known laws of narrative utility.
hadorothy: “with what? a MINDWIPER? good luck finding one of those ho ho ho my sides hurt from loling whee hee hee hee hee”
(jason pulls out mindwiper)
sal: “uh, why duz y’all have that”
jason: “does everyone forget i’m the one still fighting aliens on earth? i have a british billion security clearances. that’s more than an american billion, btw, because we’re better than you in every way, this strip really should’ve been renamed IT’S JASON by now”
sal: “uh, yeah, we do fergit bc you keep refusin’ to use ’em when yer friends are in danger”
jason: “shut up you sow”
sal: “make me”
(they kiss)
hatchetface: “but i had this whole thing where i was gonna use the power and experience of both my parents to do it, it’d be like hittin’ the bad guy with a fist made out of their marriage”
jason: “that sounds really confusing and stretchy, child, and you got to do the duct tape thing already, pip pip cheerio”