He’s cut right in two!
on April 24, 2016 at 12:01 amChapter: Great Big Sea
Characters: Daisy Conrad, David Walkerton, Dina Sarazu, Jason Chesterfield, Lith, Mike Warner, Sal Walters, Zack
Location: Martian Embassy
Check out these swanky rebreathers everyone gets! They are probably magical and impossible, but they meant I only had to draw a cylinder over everyone’s mouth and call it a day without having to draw anything else fancy, so in that way they’re pretty awesome.
Equally magical are probably Lith and Dina’s hats, which somehow stay on underwater.
Sure, they get magical super-tech rebreathers, but they were so expensive that SEMME had to settle for monoschome monitors from 1983 for all their computers.
SEMME can breathe underwater!
…not as cool a ring to it
They’re Batman.
But can they breath in space?
Whether he was aware of it or not, Willis was merely invoking Clarke’s Third Law —
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Ha, and I didn’t even notice that Dina’s Sylvester McCoy hat (and the other character’s baseball cap) were still on until the description text pointed it out. She really just can’t go without something on her head in either universe, can she?
“Sylvester McCoy hat”
Dina’s hat is clearly her Chameleon Arch. The lab explosion destroyed the hat, returning her to her original Time Lord form, and simultaneously sending her through a wormhole to the year 2015. The Soggies are actually the consciousness of Anti-Dina, created via the Dup-O-Matic, possessing an universe composed entirely of soggy cereal after she ran out of regenerations.
Becky is secretly a Zygon
i can’t look at this without thinking about the similar-looking “aquata breather” they used in Star Wars episode 1.
They had something like this in Thunderball and Die Another Day as well. According to a Bond prop gadget documentary, the studio was approached by the Navy because they wanted tiny rebreathers for the SEALs. When asked how long they work, the prop designers said “until you can’t hold your breath anymore”.
Yep, I immediately checked to make sure this strip came out after Phantom Menace.
Gungans = Martians??
This is my last serenade ~
I always liked the design of the rebreathers tbh
Why couldn’t Monkey Master have cut Zack in half? He squeezed him to death didn’t he?
MM squeezed Hooper, not Zack.
Monkey Master is a cleric and thus forbidden from using edged weapons.
NEEEEEEEERRRD!
Aw crap … I know exactly what that’s referring to though.
…neeeeerrd….
Guys I just thought of the greatest idea ever, An It’s Walky! Movie, with John Oliver as Jason Chesterfield.
As wonderful as that would be, Oliver is too short. You need tall and lanky. Think John Cleese proportions.
Well, if it was animated, Oliver’s voice would be all that mattered.
“Hello, I’m John Oliver and welcome to Last Week Tonight.”
“Our main story tonight, is that apparently there are actual aliens that exist and 20 somethings that have superpowers. This is a problem, because apparently one said something year old, almost destroyed all of North America!
As much as I love John Oliver, Cleese is absolutely the right choice.
Magic rebreathers I can buy, what I want to know is why they aren’t wearing wetsuits? Being in completely soaked clothes is most unpleasant, and not easy to swim in.
Really, the most magical part of these things is that they can talk to each other while using them…
These “rebreathers” (I’m not going to assume you got the technical term right) emit bubbles, so it’s not a closed-circuit rebreather. It’s way too small to be an open-circuit SCUBA, and unless they’re using LOX or something, it’s probably too small for semi-closed circuit rebreather. Any pure-oxygen, non-rebreather source would be unusable at these depths, due to oxygen toxicity under pressure. And finally, it has nowhere near enough surface area to be an artificial gill.
It would be borderline magical, but if they have an extremely dense source of oxygen, they could have a rebreather filter out the CO2 (and exhaust it), replacing it with new oxygen. Could they use solid oxygen, maybe? That might give enough density for that to work. We need about 500L of oxygen per day, so that’s still 40cm^3 per hour, which looks like it would fit in there.
Anything sufficiently large enough to actually WORK would a) require a lot of drawing from a young, lazy Willis, and b) an older, more experienced Willis, were he to be redrawing this today, would recognize the narrative necessity of seeing the characters’ faces, thus necessitating sufficiently advanced technology to be indistinguishable from magic breathing apparatus.
Everyone focused on the breathing aspect of things, how about their ability to talk normally?
They’ve got zig-zag speech-bubble tails, which I assume indicates that the magic rebreather includes a magic radio.
Oh my gosh, this got so metal.
Given that my name is Zack, this strip is quite unnerving.
Given that Zack is a real dude, it was probably more unnerving for him.
SECOND APPEARANCE IN THE STRIP, SAWED IN HALF CORPSE.
Nah, those are the same rebreathers that the Jedi had in Episode I. Totally realistic.
What I wonder about is how they’re talking with them in…