Endtown by Aaron Neathery for April 30, 2014

War with who or what?

They’re feeling a bit low right now…

Is it my imagination, or are there very few (if any) females in this community?

Beans Magical Fruit/ More You Eat means More you toot/ Fresh cans from Endtown.Dragon Queen Slithers/ Canned Beans give color and scent/ Jim maybe chicken.This green tries too new / Not today will scribbler know / How Level_Head rhymes /Bad haiku is much / Better than bloody lizards / Reptile Overlords.JusLostIt.

See, it’s stuff like this / Helps people recognise art / By lack of talent. (but is quite easy / To count five seven and five / Painting words is hard).

Someday regrets come/ At competency hearing/ Posts live forever.Vote before I start / Iambic pentameter / Much suffer for art.

. Vote ENDTOWN . Vote Doc Rat . Vote Hubris . Vote Kevin and Kell . Sincerely, . JusSayin I tried. I even took a mulligan. And yes, I opened with that.

As Arlo said, “I’m not tired. Or proud.” You can’t get anything you want, At Reptilians’ Restaurant I think these guys city was blown up with specific mutagen bombs. Because the mutagen was fresh and unadulterated, almost everyone mutated to similar critters. As the mutagen spread out, and different formulations escaped, different mutations happened. Maybe Apex®, (remember Apex?) wanted varies mutations, because one type mutation caused cohesion in the targeted society. Then, after their city was flattened, they used the broken glass, steel and concrete to build a barricade, or possibly a maze, around a domed stadium, that survived the demolition because of the theoretical structural strength and integrity of a Bucky Ball. Or maybe the giant egg they were flying through space collapsed the city around it, leaving shards of glass, steel beams, concrete and eggshells as sort of a protective barrier. JusSpeculatin

When the server gets there, maybe Holly can talk with him / her on his / her level over their shared occupation as waiters / waitresses.

Something tells me Wally and Holly will never see eye-to-eye with these people..

If it’s beans perhaps our Endtowners will go ballistic, or maybe we are about to find out where all the tamales went.When they were shooting the first Planet of the Apes movie in 1968, an unusual thing happened.The actors who played the simian residents of the world began to segregate themselves unconsciously between shots, and meal breaks. Orangutans with Orangutangs, Gorillas with Gorillas, and so on. Ultimately these actors were all human underneath the makeup and costumes, and would leave the set on the same bus together, sans costumes.Ultimately clothes make the man, err ape…. Err, Monitor Lizard.Like that Bugs Bunny short, where Bugs and Elmer were chasing each other through a rain of different hats, and their personalities would change with each change of headgear.Ultimately, we are a conditioned species, driven by the symbolism, of uniforms and hats, and assumptions.Would you trust a cop dressed as a janitor?Would you trust janitor dressed as a cop?This conditioning, is something of a problem.If you saw someone dressed as a doctor or an authority figure, but really wasn’t. You would not know if they really were the profession they were representing or some crazed lunatic, like a Congressman.We make conscious and unconscious assumptions based on what we primarily see. I get no shortage of wrong assumptions based on my appearance, I’m used to it.And sometimes I enjoy it, especially when someone makes the wrong assumption, and after talking to me for a few minutes finds out you cannot judge a book by it’s cover.I like blowing their minds!It’s like far out maaannn!

Probably beans.

or… hmmm, reptilian culture that treats mammals and potentially also birds as second class citizens?

Why do I think they’re gonna get things with eggs and milk (here’s hoping not also meat).

They could be… CANNIBALS! Wait, are you a cannibal if you’re a mutant human who looks like a lizard who is eating a mutant human who looks like a cat? You know what, a musical number would help me figure this answer out.

I can tell who the longtime readers are by the responses I read. Beans for the old timers, eggs and milk for the more recent readers. This could be fun.How about Aaron Marx’s comment “What? You’re all vegans?”(Or something like that.)

…

i wont be surprised if the war hes talking about isnt agaisnt topisders but agaisnt a “mammals only” colony

It’s good to be tall.

Someone apologized for the limited menu, but I’m betting tomorrow it won’t be just beans. In Endtown, Holly was put on trial for serving a cake made with milk from a cow mutant. Here we haven’t seen any species other than reptiles. I’m not sure what that means, if anything.

Heh. They’re so short…

Or, the locals are using an Orwellian slogan to rationalize austerity? Not that it isn’t true, but still, an over-used or automatic phrase like that would have my “what’s-really-wrong?” sense tingling.

Geez, they’re so short. They should be sitting in high chairs just to reach the table.

I’m starting to pick up what Neathery is doing here, and it’s storytelling genius. As Topsiders, Jim and Sarah thought mutants were subhuman scum. Then, when they decided they had no option than to become mutants themselves (because ONE of the two had a medical need), they still considered mutants to be subhuman scum. That’s how they treated Wally and Holly. We were waiting to see how they may be forced to change their minds, once they started to walk a mile on mutant hind-paws, so to speak. But Neathery has switched the rules of the game. Now, suddenly, they are in a society that treats Sarah as a real human being and the other three as her inanimate belongings. Treat ALL as dirt, and they could live with it. Threat THREE as dirt and elevate the one, and now watch the new dynamic. That’s not even to start mentioning Clive the plastic head. This is masterful stuff. I can’t wait to read on.

Neathery is really emphasizing how short the mammals are. Unless Sarah has been growing since her transformation. She was always taller than the others, but now Jim and Wally are about Holly’s size, and they barely come up to Sarah’s waist.

I sometimes wonder how good a grasp Aaron has of the character’s actual heights. I remember one strip after Wally and Holly subdued Doug and Linda where Wally was standing next to Flask and the top of his head was up to her waist. Assuming that Flask was a bit over 6 foot tall that would make Wally about 40-45 inches tall. In the Lizardland strips, Wally seems much shorter, almost Holly’s height. It may be that Aaron is consciously (or subconsciously) changing the character’s relative height at different points of the story, or that he decided that Sarah and the lizards needed to be much taller than the rest of the mutants. It did take a few strips for Aaron to develop a final form for his other characters, so it could be that Sarah ended up growing.It could also be that I’m an anal retentive engineer who is paying too much attention to minor details. That’s what happens when you do all of your drawings with a scale.

I’m surprised history buffs haven’t seen the apparent civil realtionship between species. It isn’t reptile/non-reptile. It’s citizen and non-citizen like Greco-Roman times. That would explain civility to all four of them, but acceptance only to Sarah.

And what about the “war” he mentioned? It can’t be against Topsiders or mammalian anthros because they would all be in trouble. MIght there be an insectizoid civilization? I do remember seeing at least one in Endtown.

I think the place might be without electricity, too…torches along the walls yesterday, and these lanterns today might be lit with candles or maybe gas lighting…did we see anything that looked like electric light earlier?

Maybe it’s a war with dittos. Even though Wally’s dittos were attacked by local dittos, those didn’t seem to be controlled by the reptiles. Sparkplug had his own war with dittos.

Can’t wait to see what’s on the menu…