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Grrl Power #1306 - Exposure therapy?
🕑 Added 2024-11-21 11:00:16 +0000 UTCThank you for the support! You guys are awesome!
In my eagerness to put this goofy page up, I have skipped an important transitional page, which would have shown - without dialog - a doctor talking to a forlorn looking Peggy, a doctor showing an X-ray of what was left of her leg and Peggy looking slightly green, then a series of panels where Peggy is psyching herself up to use a crutch for the first time to get to the bathroom. Not a funny page at all, but something to show that at least a day has passed since she woke up. Hopefully the limp hair, yellowy bruises and absent neck brace show that at least a little time has passed. I hope people don't read the previous page, then this one and think she's sitting in the hospital and no one has interacted with her since she woke up. If they do then it's my fault for rushing ahead to this one.
I honestly apologize to anyone who's had a catastrophic injury like Peggy here. But it also makes me laugh so… here we are.
Can you imagine sitting in a hospital on a ventilator, recovering from say, West Nile or something, you turn on the TV to the stacks of body bags scene in a plague-pocolypse movie like Outbreak? Then you change the channel and find yourself in the middle of Contagion, then on to The Andromeda Strain, 12 Monkeys, then... I don't know. 28 Days Later? People think of that as a zombie film but it's really a Super Rabies-ish film. Anyway, you'd think someone was playing a prank on you.
When this page occurred to me, I started working on it right away, looking for scenes in movies where people get legs cut off. While it does happen in movies, by comparison, arms and hands are ejecting from bodies like they're both positively charged magnets. If someone does lose a leg, it's because they're getting eaten by a shark of they stepped on a mine, and that's the last we see of them. There's very few leg-losers that continue to appear in media after the event, with some notable exceptions like Lieutenant Dan. (I've never actually seen Forest Gump so it wasn't upfront in my mind while googling famous limb-be-gone scenes.)
You know what sucks? The panels on the left obviously started as screenshots, but then I meticulously painted over them and rebuilt all the backgrounds like that Bespin shaft and the forest litter and creek and bridge and it just looks like I ran them through a slightly smudgy oil paint filter in PhotoShop. Maybe I'm a dumbass, because each one of those took me like two hours, at least. Well, okay, maybe the Planet Terror one took an hour. It's a simpler picture. I maybe should have tried to redraw them entirely in my own style, but I didn't want it to be ambiguous as to what she was watching if I couldn't quite capture it right. Ah well, maybe next time.
Comments
Anton Schleef
No, I wasn't. Punking, as I understand it, is more of a dark humor varient of pranking. To me, this scene comes across as Peggy feeling like the universe is poking fun at her, which is the point of a prank, and doing so in a way that feels 'dark'. "Pulling her/his leg", as I understand it, is more of a joke being told as if it were true. It literally doesn't apply here.
Kevin Wright
At least when i was an AR there was a magazine.
Person
To say nothing of Cherry's ammo supply. "What? No... clearly she's PULLING THEM PUT OF HER ASS!"
Person
I belive the phrase you were looking for is "the universe is PULLING HER LEG". Because dark humor is dark, and also humorous.
Marc Vun Kannon
Followed by Robo-Cop.
eddi_TBH
Peggy's reaction to the last scene is best. Peter Stuyvesant lost a leg fighting the Spanish. Mythology about him includes a gun concealed in his peg leg.
Eric Loken
It's the old adage "You either laugh or cry about it, I choose to laugh". Things can get pretty dark or at least stressful in the military, and they try to laugh about it. It can also be pretty silly. Have a friend who was in the USN back in the aughts, serving on Burke destroyers. They have these drills where you have to navigate the ship in the dark (representing power failure, possibly smoke) so they put these full hoods on - flash hoods I think he said - and navigate from their berth to the deck. Well, my friend put on a bag labelled "Dubs Happy Fun Time Bag" (he was called Dubs, I think because his last name starts with W - IIRC he couldn't find his hood, so just put on the bag instead, but also wrote that on it), he's doing the drill when suddenly the bag is yanked off his head and some chief with a stick up his arse is in his face "What the f*** do you think you're doing Welles!?" Fortunately a more senior chief or officer was also there - one who had a sense of humour - and calmly states "Looks like he's doing the blackout navigation drill to me, carry on sailor." So, as you say, some get it, some don't, no matter what the humour is.
JasonAW3
It can depend on what round hit it. A .50 cal? Yeah hitting the bone would cause it to explode, just not like a dynamite stick.
JasonAW3
Ok, there was a baron in the Middle Ages, if memory serves, that had his hand replaced with a workable prosthetic hand. He continued to serve and fight for around twenty years afterwards, so Ash using a working prosthetic hand? No real problem. The chainsaw? Well, that's a bit of a stretch, but, it might be possible...
JasonAW3
"OK Darth, when I said unhindered that Jedi, that wasn't what I had in mind..."
Kevin Wright
I always loved the hand-wavium that took place to (not) explain how Ash was able to operate the chainsaw and later the mechanical hand, and Cherry trigger the gun on her leg.
TexasTies
Forest Gump is a great movie. Definitely worth watching.
Hugh Eckert
Next channel is just reruns of "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Bionic Woman".
Richard Riley
I didn't recognize the first panel at all and found it very jarring. I didn't expect that much blood to start the day, and honestly with the repaint it looks like someone is torturing Jeremy Jahns. Poor fellow...
Sarazarus
Yeah, shot, and apparently the bone was a dynamite stick, seeing how it goes boom xD
Stephen Gilberg
I think you meant "shot" there.
ufgrat
On the TV series "JAG", Lt. "Bud" Roberts stepped on a landmine, and lost the lower half of one leg. Since it was TV, they did a couple of episodes with him as the main story, and then many episodes with him as the B-story, going through surgery, recovery, rehab, and eventual return to duty. Obviously, it's fictional, but they went far more in-depth than you would expect from a TV show.
Town Crier
Oh, and just add a "Three weeks later..." to the first panel, or however long that period of recovery should be.
Town Crier
Peggy has good friends who have taken control of her room's TV programming just to eff with her. With military friends, I would expect her to receive inappropriate gifts like a peg leg, a box labeled "Found it!" with a rubber fake horror lower leg, and other such silliness. Military humor IS dark humor at its worst and best, depending on if you get it or not.
Anton Schleef
You've made it clear multiple times that the series is set in a modern fantasy setting with all of the same pop culture references we have up until only a handful of years (if that) before the start of the series. Since you were using films made before the divergence point I would've been fine with you just using the raw screenshots. Would it create a contrast of images? Yes. Would it interfere with the tone of this specific strip? No. If anything, the contrast of the images would've helped with the tone of the strip. Lastly, would it be a violation of the Fair Use Act? No, as you aren't even showing the complete scenes being referenced and have your character very obviously and explicitly reacting to the scenes and how it feels like the universe is punking her with them, so you aren't trying to profit off of someone else's intellectual work(s).
Anton Schleef
My local hospital, the last I knew, had the next tier up from basic cable. No Pay-Per-View, but a modest selection of channels. Of course, where I live the local channels are just ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and Fox, so the next tier up from basic cable/satellite is actually very cheap.
Greg Morrow
The repainted panels look great! You are really delivering on the art, and I certainly appreciate the time you're spending.
Sarazarus
The last panel actually made me laugh out loud. Adding to the list of characters missing a limb; Hiccup from How to train your dragon, and I vaguely remember a revolting shit of a leg a-splodong in robocop?
Kizik Ucalegon
I spent a few weeks in a hospital this year. There was a TV, and it had basic cable on it. Christ did it make me happy I brought my phone and a charger; Peggy must be in a ridiculously good facility to have any of those movies available.
Mike
I've only lost one toe not a leg from the knee down, and its just from diabetes not combat, but I can sympathize. Losing any part of your body is traumatizing. It's been about 6 years now and I still get moments when I look at my foot and get a little dizzy. The page you skipped would have been a major character building piece for Peggy and I hope you work it in to things at some point, but I get about it not fitting the tone of the comic.
Torabi
Grindhouse is a double feature, containing two distinct stories, "Planet Terror", which that frame is a reference to, and "Death Proof".
Justaguy
Huh, I thought the last one was from Grindhouse for a sec... Anyway there's also the leg vanishing stuff (along with much of the rest of his body) from Looper, and there's a few anime legs going off (First that comes to mind is the soldier father before he's turned into a toy soldier in that One Piece Dressrosa Arc.)
Thomas Dorner
Well, I guess I would have recognised Bruce Campell, Monty Python and Star Wars anyway, they are classics that I've seen multiple times. (I didn't knew the last one though. ;-)
Jon Krupp
Definitely intrigued.
Michael Obert
You're watching the On The Nose Network; here at OTNN, we bring the 'Da Fuq' every day!
Matthew Dodgen
I had assumed time passed between scenes, but you could always do a "x days later" note at the top of a panel of you want to show time has passed without drawing it all out. 🤷♀️ Either way the last panel set definitely made me laugh. :)
