03

Apr 2014

Chapter 4: Page 1 - The Big Reveal

Posted by / in Comic / 67 comments

Alright guys and girls (and everyone else? We’re learning to be gender neutral in med school), here’s the big reveal I’ve been having to hide from you for the past several pages. Who guessed it? ;)

Obviously this doesn’t reveal everything you wanted to know, or answer all of your previous conspiracy theories (I’m sneaky like that. Alright you caught me, this has been planned for years), but it should be solid fodder for some more guesses and theories. Do share them down in the comment section. If nothing else, I enjoy seeing how close you are (and how predictable I am. Curse realism!).

You can probably tell that this is Seba’s art style. Starting on Monday we’re back into a sequence of 8 pages in Matias’ style, similar to the chapter cover. You’ll see why we’re jumping around in styles on Monday’s page.

As always, vote for us on TWC (and favorite us if you’re registered), check out our Patreon for goodies, and like us on FB (I’m tired of real likes being drowned out by spam bots!). Man if only I had a sidebar thing of some kind to put all those links in for easy visibility ;P

EDIT: One more link, for fun. You can go look at TWCs spotlight/review for the 1st place contest winner, and after taking a look at the comic yourself, leave your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love for this guy to get some good honest feedback. ;)

  • Nate the Robot

    This is what karma does to you when you go out and ruthlessly destroy some poor robot that was just doing its job.

    Great page, can’t wait to see how it unfolds!

  • Legendary Sisters

    Hey Doc, my left foot really itches. But I can’t seem to scratch it.

    • “Well, uh, errr, you see… This is awkward…”

      • Sebastián Píriz

        “please dont try to scratch with your right hand”

  • Amberlight

    I told you someone is getting cyborgyfied.

    • Hehe. If we’re being honest, that’s actually just some fancy futuristic bandages and stuff. So no cyborgification, at least at the moment ;)

      • Amberlight

        But you aren’t leaving the protagonist a bedridden cripple, right? So he will become a badass cyborg at some point. Unless the entirety of the future comic will be flashbacks, which is doubtoble.

        • Well, there are other protagonists, and other ways for Tenzin to be involved than being a cyborg. That is some of the things we want to discuss/feel out thru the story.

          So, it is to central for the story for me to really confirm or deny anything. Tenzin dealing with how he is right now and how it resolves is too important to the story to reveal right now.

        • Hehe… reminds me of that past comment by someone to the tune of; “If you kill everyone off there can’t be a story!!!”

        • Jason Clayton

          Hey, Professor Xavier is crippled in a wheel chair and is still a badass

          • Amberlight

            Stephen Hawking is mostly paralised but is even more badass. Then again, Tenzin is not the sciency type.

  • The “assimilation” process begins…

  • PS - if any wounded warriors/amputees are reading or begin reading, please let us know if we are doing this well and/or if we should change something. We’ve consulted with a few people, and Dan is in medical school. But as you can see from our work thus-far, we are very much aiming for realism. You can hit us up in the comments or at [email protected]

  • Sebastián Píriz

    So, no one can tell wich pages teased Tenzin’s injuries?

    • Feature you, since I forgot to ask. 1000 MCs to whoever figures out which page(s) foretold these injuries :D

    • Amberlight

      Well, it’s obvious enough on page 13 of chapter 3 that explosive darts stick into Tenzin’s armpit and hip and the other two get deflected away.

      • Indeed it is. But that is not the “tease” that Seba is referring to, since it is obvious ;)

        • Amberlight

          Then page 11 - on the second panel Tenzin’s right arm is barely visible and left leg is shaded.

          • Of Chapter 3? Oh wow, I hadn’t noticed that one! @sebastinpriz:disqus was that one intentional? You get MCs for that one regardless, but there is a pretty major one from even earlier ;)

          • Sebastián Píriz

            nope, not really. I missed the chance, I’d have shaded the right arm too.

      • Perhaps a foreshadow would be a better word than a tease… It was shown significantly before the events of the final showdown.

    • Nobodies guessed yet… I’ll give a hint… its in one of the hi-res pages that you can get over at Patreon… ;)

      • Amberlight

        I was hoping that someone else will take time to flip the pages (100MC isn’t that much for someone with 100’000MC *boasting*), but the new page is about to come out and nobody will look here. So, I belive that the answer is the cover of chapter 2.

        • Congratulations! That is the earliest page that we had in mind, but its also amazing that you found those other pages as well. I’ll give you an additional 1000 MC’s out of my personal stash :D

          • PS - I’m totally working on the new store/cart/merchandise/pay-what-you-want stuff… and MC’s are gonna be like our version of discount/promo codes… So for now keep track of them… later I’ll be keeping track in your bank account at Minerva :D

        • Hehe is that how much you’re up to know? I didn’t know that Russian translation paid THAT well ;)

          But yes, that is the page Seba and I were referring to! It was kind of fun having it out there in the open and no one noticing ;) I’ll add another 1000 to your total.

          • Amberlight

            Well, come on, 10’000 or 100’000, who cares for one little zero!

  • Carina

    So… Does that mean Jane gets baked into the control for his replacement limbs? That would be interesting, in the sense of the chinese proverb. >:3

    I find it interesting that he lost arms and legs on different sides, from the shots I’d expected it to be on the same side, actually. Does that mean the line of fire crossed his body?

    • A perfectly valid theory that I shall also neither confirm nor deny ;) Which chinese proverb?

      If you take another look at that page, you’ll notice that Jane used her override function to try to twist his body out of the way. That he only lost these limbs is because of her last second attempt. Plus yes, the line of fire was all crossed-y. And we may have edited that page to make the injuries clearer since posting it.

      • Darek

        It’s not a proverb, it’s curse(ing) :). “You shall live in interesting times”. Or something like that.

        • Oh THAT saying. I feel silly now.

          Also, welcome guest Darek! Although since you’re a guest you won’t get notified that I responded to you…how sad.

          • Jason Clayton

            XC

        • Delta-v

          The full curse is:
          “May you live in interesting times.
          May you get everything you ask for.
          May you come to the attention of powerful men.”

      • Carina

        “May you live in interesting times” - Okay, less proverb, more used as a curse.

        I think the reason so many people ask about replacement limbs is because you have motorized powersuits (as shown as in Jane’s emerency override) and if you have solved the engineering problems of powersuits, you have solved most of engineering problems of limbs - and we’ve even today we’re making strong strides in natural control for limbs. I once knew a girl who moved her prostethic hand due electric signals from the remaining muscles of her stump. It was primitive and slow, but she easily could open and close her artificial hand and turn the wrist and pick up things and even use cutlery with it. We’ve already managed to connect primitive nerve cells to microchips - that’s not even getting into the successful experiments of people moving mouse pointers by thinking hard at them via electrodes.

        Artificial limbs are easy peasy compared to an AI like Jane.

        Funny, now Siendes and Tenzin could actually commiserate about traumatic limb loss, though hers was due an untreated infection. All MC’s everywhere live in interesting times, much to their dismay. *g*

  • mcmasters

    With the high tech maybe they could reattach his limbs…if they had found them. Probably in itty bitty pieces.

    • Who was it that did all that awesome math about explosion radius and forces a while ago???

      But yeah, basically a radius around where the flechette hit is essentially pulp… so if you imagine a hit to the knee, there would be about 6-ish inches both above and below that which would be fine red mist… But there are some nice high tech options available to Minerva. I think you’ll enjoy a lot of them, but you’ll see in the next pages that we’re planning on focusing on other “injuries” in the immediate future.

      • Delta-v

        That was Jason Clayton.

      • Jason Clayton

        Yea, i sat on the comment screen for like 8 minutes checking the math XP

        I don’t always get excuses to let my math nerd out.

  • Blorp

    Hey for some reason your website doesn’t display images in Opera. Had to switch over to Firefox to start reading this. Kinda weird.

    • Really? Crap. Webamster Nick! @demonarchives:disqus

      I think you might be at least the 2nd person who has had problems with Opera. Thanks for being willing to switch over and keep trying :D

    • Any chance you can shoot me your OS and Opera version. Last guy was opera 12 on XP. Hard to debug.

      • Blorp

        Might be opera 12 then, that’s the same version I’m running.

        • Nah, most likely CloudFlare, which we use for ridiculous CDN and other awesomeness, does a bit of trickery to load the images super fast. I’ll check if they have any known issues with Opera 12, since now thats the commonality amongst my dataset of 2. :D

      • Jason Clayton

        What are you using to create the site? If you’re using any live links with XHTML coding, that might be the reason. There might also be some CSS coding that might now be compatible with Opera. One that you might be using is the margin bottom tag.

  • I could see him being forced to take desk duty for a bit, even if as he re-integrates his new limbs or whatever… oh, the frustration that would entail! Especially if he falls to brooding and drinking (that’s a path I knew for about a year after I got back) while having to watch a new team cut their teeth out there… saying to Jane “These guys aren’t ready to face what’s out there…” as he mopes in his rye…

  • BuilderJim

    *Get me (AN) EEG machine..? ;)

    • “I’m a doctor, not an English major!” :P Or maybe English isn’t that doctor’s first language? Or grammatical rules have changed in 100 years?

      …or maybe I just mistyped…

      • BuilderJim

        Don’t sweat it!
        Although it’s a darn shame that we couldn’t beat such an unprofessional mess- who’s author can’t even take constructive criticism well. I bet his corporate publisher had something to do with it (I call foul!)

        • Yeah…but it’s ok. We got all the rewards that we wanted. All we didn’t get was a meaningless “1st place” title. Although we did get a “Contest Survivor” aware listed on our TWC profile page: http://www.topwebcomics.com/sample/15797/default.aspx

          And I’m not sure #1 had a corporate publisher. And in all reality the only foul he did was be better at getting IP addresses to vote from than us. The only thing that annoyed me about it was the complaining and whining, and then claiming innocence about it, as if he actually got that many distinct people to vote at midnight.

        • ……. but puppies and kid friendly and #all #the #hash #tags. It did show us that twc ads might be a good thing for our comic reader base, so that is awesome.

    • Muahaha! By the power of editing your comment is now invalid! ;)

      • BuilderJim

        …

  • Mark White

    We can rebuild him, we have the technology…..we have the six-million dollar man!

    • I was about to post a video to that, but then realized there was no point since you already knew what you were talking about ;)

  • SmilingAhab

    I was gonna make a joke about saving the girl costing an arm and a leg, but I wasn’t expecting literally, that just takes the wind outta those sails. Oi; I’ve seen hamburger in better shape.

    • Hehe, I’d forgotten about that joke. Only time will tell if she was worth it or not.

  • Matanui3

    He didn’t ask for this…

  • theRoUS

    Memory-foam cell mattress in ICU.. or else he’s lying on the biggest damn’ keypad I’ve ever seen.

    • He’s gotten really good at typing with his butt.

      • theRoUS

        Whoo! Merger of butt-dialing with personal bouncy-house! I *love* the new tech!