Tom Sewell

So Magus followed Nanase to France?

IMHO, best Susan face so far, Panel 3.

Any relation to Dick Shooter, the famous founder of the Dick Shooter Cattle Company of Dickshooter, Idaho? Look it up on Google Maps That's a question I've been asking myself for a long time, ever since Diane described her ideal man to Rhoda. Before that she was pretty much a queen bee/golddigger, but that got to thinking about a deeper backstory. Are her (adoptive) parents divorced? Maybe. Maybe it could be a legacy of getting so attached to Rick only to find out he was gay--which could help explain her hostility to Justin. Since it's clear Diane still loves Rick, displacing that anger onto Justin, someone who put his longtime friend Melissa through a similar wrenching experience sounds quite possible. Just how important is money to Diane, anyway? Even if she doesn't own a car, clearly her family can afford to let her use theirs which isn't a junker, and they have to be putting a big chunk of money to send Rhea to college. Rhea could still live at home; her college doesn't seem to be beyond commuting distance. When Diane talks about a meaningful relationship, I think her model may be the relationship she's seen between Susan and Elliot on their show. Elliot clearly listens to Susan and respects her opinions. Better than Rick, who still treats Diane like a little kid. In fact, Rick seems to treat everyone like little kids from what we've seen of him.

If you hasn't read Dan's post on tumblr,, story comic postponed until Monday.

Getting back firmly on-topic, let me say that I really think Diane's facial gymnastics between these six panels are awesome. Who else thinks so?

I'm afraid that person can't be me. Want to start a real-world-paranoia thread in Off Topic?

"Lights in the sky" that aren't identified pretty much qualify as UFOs, and that's what Magus and Sirleck were talking about when Ashley woke up. What I had in mind was finding an excuse to confirm your guess of "about an hour". I wasn't saying that only the United States was the only place in the world were UFOs appear as was falsely asserted in Monsters vs. Aliens. I'm sorry if I offended your Canadian feelings, especially in the year 50th anniversary of Canada's first official UFO landing pad .

Well, as we all know, UFO's always appear way out in the boonies, or at least more people notice them out in the boonies away from airports, and really getting to the boonies from Naperville in our world looks to me like it would take around an hour, say the intersection of US 34 and Illinois 23, according to Google Maps. Street View and Satellite View shows just fields stretching for more than a thousand feet along all four arms of the intersection. Of course, things may be quite different in the Moperverse.

Well, as those of us who remember The President's Analyst, it's a universal constant: Everyone has bitterness for their phone company.

This is just a story. Save your bitterness for real life.

It's "antepasto" meaning "before pasta" for those of you without three years of high school Latin. "ante", not "anti", as in "status quo ante" or "antebellum". Maybe not, but Diane will. Maybe not. Look at how much effort Dan is putting into making rules for Goomanji 2. Clearly he loves games, and he loves writing rules. Having the apocalypse actually happens allows him to write a completely revised rule set for El Goonish Shive (Second Edition) without being accused of more retconning. And with Tedd, he's created a potential in-story agent to make the new rules. Does anyone here remember how different the world of Negima! was by the end of the last volume? On the other hand, Dan has put more than a year of work that we know of into creating a credible scheme to stop Pandora's apocalypse. My magic 8-ball is definitely showing "Reply Hazy".

http://www.egscomics.com/?id=2429 Well, the girls finally got to the food court, but someone suggests a change of plans...

If Helen and Demetrius won't be at Elliot's house not long from now to catch Sirleck zapping Elliot, and Sirleck sent six vampires after Adrian, where do you think Helen and Demetrius are now?

Yes, Magus doesn't know, and Pandora should have tried to make amends a long time ago. She was already feeling ashamed of what she'd done when she visited her son in hospital. But then Adrian got in her face, and Pandora decided to make an apocolypse. As far as we know, that's what's she was concentrating on until five days ago, when she met the Emissary of Magic inside Grace's mind. Come to think of it, I wonder if Grace actually has some buried memory of that, since Pandora was inside of Grace's dream. Because it was in Directory 07, and it's actually in Directory 14, at least in my archives. If you're curious, or even if you're not, here's what the directory of my archives for canon material looks like: 1: Four Boys, Three Girls 2002-01-21, 1 2: Sister (I) 2002-05-26, 126 3: Friends 2003-03-03, 284 4: Painted Black 2003-10-13, 437 5: Party of Eight 2004-08-02, 569 6: Hidden Genesis 2007-01-01, 820 7: Sister II: Awakenings 2008-04-18, 909 8: Bringing Silly Back 2010-03-01, 1061 9: 9001% Serious 2011-08-01, 1296 10: Summer 2012-03-05, 1404 Marker/Escape From the Mall 2016-07-22, np490 This canon NP arc (actually two, but they form a continuous story) all take place at the Moperville Mall either on Halloween or a few days before it. 11: The Dawn 2013-02-04, 1555 12: Squirrel Prophet 2014-03-10, 1824 Playing With Dolls2014-08-04, np181 Takes place the same day as So a Date at the Mall 13: So a Date at the Mall 2015-03-02, 2023 Question Mark This story also takes on the same day as So a Date at the Mall and starts immediately after the last page of Squirrel Prophet, specifially when Sarah rises after sleep and discovers she has a magic mark. Her sister comes over for dinner in the middle of the story, so that part has to take place before Carol Brown rushes into the Mall just after the griffin leaves, Chearleadra leaves, and the various Immortals vanish. But then Sarah gets a visit from Pandora when she was about to go to sleep... 14: Sister III: Catspaws 2016-07-04, 2210 This is the ongoing arc, just a year old as I write. More Canon Newspaper Strips Zombie Plans This small arc hasn't been given a specific time, but it seems to take place in winter or late fall by the way the characters are dressed. Maybe the most significant contribution to the main story line is that Susan calls Tedd's dad at work, the only instance of direct contact between these two major characters to date. MV5 Sarah, Grace, and Ellen create male-themed tranformations as counterparts for the FV5 “Venus” form. Dan says that this takes place before Squirrel Prophet, but not long before. Since Sarah seems to already have broken up with Elliot, it would probably be after Christmas but before school began again, and maybe before Family Ties. Susan makes a cameo by phone. Ellen Demonstrates This arc, in progress as I write, is sort of half-canon. The action isn't “real”, but the information about magic is. It's pretty much a Q&A without being called a Q&A. Magic Comic Shop Dan said this was canon a long time ago, but Nanase being a fairy in front of Bill, Duck, and the rest of the Junior High geek squad doesn't seem like something that's stayed in canon. It's a lot of fun, though. Not a Date at the Mall This arc follows Magic Comic Shop in story time and in the newspaper series. Nanase, Ellen, and Justin go to the mall.

Pretty sure Magus knows this, since Pandora attacked him very shortly after revealing that Abraham had "hurt my son." They aren't French now, but they started out speaking French.

Andrea and Terra killed seven vampires. That was the A team. This bunch is the B team.

How do Aberrations find out how to become Aberrations? They're not contagious like werewolves, so they have to learn how to do it somehow. This sounds very much like the "selling your soul" trope, but who would be buying?

Easy explanation: Mom's the one with the money. Perfectly consistent with Dad gettin' his lovin' on the side.

To fit the definition given by that endless barrel of exposition, Tedd's dad, body snatchers would have to eventually kill their hosts. Anyway, the most awesome part of this comic is that not only Magus makes justifications. Sirleck comes up with a pretty good rationalization on behalf of his former humanity. Speaking of Sirleck, the last panel makes me wonder even more if Sirleck knows that the Immortal parent of Adrian Raven is Pandora. And we still haven't really heard anything more about Magus' vow to end Pandora. Magus does know that Adrian Raven is Pandora's son, but apparently he has never told Sirleck because Sirleck was surprised to hear about Adrian Raven being a half-immortal from Voltaire. Or at least Magus hadn't told Voltaire at the time of that famous call from that miraculous still-existing pay phone.

Unless he hired more to go after other targets. However, Sirleck's funds are more limited now, and he must have made very generous offers, especially if the B Team heard what happened to the A team.

Okay, but didn't you just say they didn't have a close relationship? They did confront the goo together, although Susan never actually fought it, even though she brought out her sword. Anyway, not ever being in Susan's house before is justifiable in several ways: Nanase reminds her of her traumatic experience in France; they don't go to the same school; maybe Nanase's mother wouldn't like it; maybe Susan doesn't want Nanase to notice how much her mother drinks. Maybe no friend except maybe Sarah has ever been over to Susan's house. But it's still kind of odd if they traveled to France together and were deliberately supposed to be always together, Nanase would be surprised that Susan lives in a rich neighborhood.

That's kind of the point I was making. And yet, the same night, the first person Nanase admit's she's gay to is Susan.

Unless it gets retconned out, this was the first time Nanase had ever been at Susan's house, about a year and a half since they first met. Nanase didn't even know Susan lived in Snoot Creek. Doesn't exactly bespeak a close relationship at this point in the story, does it?

The Moperversian calendar seems to have a superficial resemblance to our Gregorian calendar; same month names with no day-of-the-month beyond 31 shown as yet. And it seems to have 24 hours to each day, and 60 minutes to each hour. However, the minutes seem to have a variable number of seconds. For instance from the first scene in Squirrel Prophet set in after dark in Salty Crackers Comics until the last scene at the diner after the tournament, something like 25,920,000 seconds seemed to have passed. Say it's about five hours later, that's 300 minutes for an average of 86,400 seconds per Moperville minute. Curiously, this is exactly the number of seconds in one of our days, possibly because it is 300 days between April 15, 2014 and February 11, 2015. This also implies that the laws of physics must be different since the Earth's rotation and revolution would have to keep slowing down and speeding up, but, as is already in canon, these laws are more like polite suggestions. Or perhaps there are relativity issues between the Moperverse and our own.

The storytelling perspective that counts here is Daniel Elliot Shive's, so I suspect that Elliot Dunkel is not going to take a very long mental vacation. Here's something new to chew on: What if Magus' and Elliot's minds are actually merging? That is essentially what happened to Ellen. It's what should happen if the separation using the Dewitchery Diamond doesn't come off.