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And once again, the plot thickens...

And we get to meet another Onçano, this time of the negra colouration, and apparently missing a front leg...

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"Popular lies have ever been the most potent enemies of personal liberty. There is only one way to deal with them. Cut them out, to the very core, just as cancers are..." - Ragnar Redbeard, "Might is Right" (1890).

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Emoticons are the wheelchair ramps for the humor impaired.

Not surprising to find a gimp running a news stand - uh PC - differently abled individual.

So Brice the hospital attendant saved a life? Gotta love that.

And gotta love the leftovers on the plate, too.....

--lj

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Sometimes I wonder what tomorrow's gonna bring
When I think about my dirty life and times.
---Warren Zevon

Well Sam is a badger...
So a plate of yummy bugs and some nice strong coffee, really hits the spot.
And it was a good thing he put the cup down.

Hero? Can I be this lucky?

Makes it look like our buddy Brice failed at keeping his head down, doesn't it?

I admit I always kind of like Brice, sort of. He's cute. That's about all you can say in his favor. On the other hand, he reads as a spoiled kid who hurts other people not because of innate malice and evil, but rather because it has never occurred to him that his mistakes can have consequences. Consequences that even Daddy's money can't fix. That can cause as much harm as triple-distilled evil, but it is not, in itself, evil. And critters that are not fundamentally evil are far between in the Slop universe. I mean, look at the cast of characters. Sam. Uthy. Tony Fricking Ray, for rice's cakes. By their standards, Brice is sweetness and light incarnate.

I figured Brice is a goner, both because Sam doesn't make mistakes (or he doesn't let anyone prove that he has made any, which comes out to the same thing) and because Brice is a spoiled kid, who is going to screw up in the end. He's going to be an idiot, go back to his old ways, and he's going to get caught. However, since he does not read to me as actually evil, there was always some small chance of redemption for the guy.

Perhaps he has tried for his bit of redemption, and saved somebody's life, or done something else heroic. In so doing he failed the first rule of How Not to Be Seen: Don't stand up. Keep your head down, don't do anything that is going to, for example, get you into the papers.

I might have said that it is ironic that perhaps the one good thing he has ever done (if he has in fact done anything good; we don't know yet) would end up in getting him killed. But a good deed getting you killed follows exactly from the basic structure of the Slop universe. It's perfectly logical in a universe where everyone is either evil, or a victim, or perhaps both.

Just a little slice of life. Then again, life in the SLOP universe is more like that plate of half-eaten bugs there. Sooner or later something has to come crawling out from under its rock. The question is what....

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Every pimp is someone else's prostitute, and every prostitute has their price.

I posted on FA about how much I loved the 'sense of place' that the panels with (and without) Sam give to the structure.. but there is also this nagging thing that I wanted to say.

"No good deed goes unpunished."

This is a really well executed example of how a cliche can be used as a literary tool, without actually being a cliche in practice (which actually gives the idea of the cliche a 'sense of place' which can just.. go on for a while. Best not let me. Really.) The irony is well played, and the implications are subtle and exciting. Positively stoked to see where Muley is leading us.

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...make it shallow, so that I can feel the rain.

Our esteemed author IS chronicling a rural gothic horror story; he's written as much several times. Slop reads as a train wreck in motion where bad things are happening in an almost serial fashion (ironic since I intend no pun). The story focuses more on the bad people because they have interesting motives as opposed to good natured, salt-of-the-earth folks whom are by and large background characters and extras on the set. Good people caught up in the events of Slop don't deserve what is happening around or to them, Havoc, but that is often the point of the narrative.

On the other hand, bad things happen more often to bad people in Slop and bad people tend to frequent the same environments thus crossing the paths of other bad people more so than the innocent. The places in which Tony relaxes are not the type of establishments that Mr. & Mrs. Jones brings the kids or Roger 9to5er haunts: truck stops, segregated bars, cash-only dives, and other places where the violent and the desperate are neither conspicuous to Johnny Law nor isolated. Seeing who the Vepr, and now the Brock, interact with is a cast of ne'er-do-wells and victims.

Because of Brice three people are dead, perhaps four. I don't want to see the little reynard dispatched but he is far from an innocent in this story. It was only a matter of seconds that prevented Brice from being dead, unrepentant, at the hands of Uthalla and Sam. It was only the rough treatment of Tony Ray and whatever happened down by the river that changed the character of Brice. If he dies at the hands of Sam it seems like he will be better remembered than what his life would have amounted to earlier at the Dead Cow. It is the idea of redemption that makes Brice interesting to me despite what appears to be a looming end to his tale.

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"Y'know, if nothing else, living here has incredibly sharpened my 'Hey, there's someone coming for my dick!' defense skills." -

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Emoticons are the wheelchair ramps for the humor impaired.

This really is a fantastic new page... All the great little technical details that I enjoyed sussing out by getting in close and studying everything... I especially enjoyed Sam's upraised eyebrow,...no doubt hard to create out of a badger face. Nice!

I love all the scooters too, and recognized one of them as being similar to the design of a kind of purely electric (batterypowered) scooter I bought for a friend of mine...

Now I want to be able to zoom in and see all the magazine covers, to get a hyped-up view of that part of the world...

I just can't wait to find out what has surprised our friend Sam so much concerning Brice's apparent heroism...

Excellent job Mulefoot!

Jadugara ^_^