Sidekick Girl

20 responses to “Another World XXIII and XXIV”

• Mike on September 25, 2013 at 2:18 AM

  I really do 🙂

• Spliced on September 25, 2013 at 2:30 AM

  The look on the last page goes beyond What and into Am I always this distant?

• SentaiSoldier on September 25, 2013 at 2:40 AM

  Heh. “Double” page.

• Syncline on September 25, 2013 at 7:21 AM

  yup. Privileged and punned.

  It appears she may not be a morning person. Or grumpy is a power now?
  Should have brought a coffee perhaps?

• Dark Rose on September 25, 2013 at 5:21 PM

  How would she look with much shorter hair or even a crew cut?

• Xh-ji on September 26, 2013 at 12:20 AM

  “Schedule”? What was she expecting to be awakened for?!

• David Johnston on September 26, 2013 at 2:53 PM

  Possibly the thing that the Light and the Dark were created for is something that can’t be finally defeated but returns at regular intervals.

• Princess Puffy Pants on September 26, 2013 at 3:03 PM

  Or it could be that she’s in long term stasis, and gets woken up every however many years to reconnect with the world.

• TheGeek on September 27, 2013 at 5:14 AM

  I like how the tattoo on her neck matches the shape of the sarcophagus.

  Also she seems to be all, “You woke me up for this?”

• Schlagsahne on September 28, 2013 at 7:19 PM

  Errrm… Doesn’t she have HEALING powers?
  How and why are the tatoos lasting?

• xero on September 30, 2013 at 6:22 AM

  when you notice somthing like that a wizard did it

• Syncline on September 29, 2013 at 1:02 AM

  We had this discussion. It may be ink made from her blood. Maybe her hair was threaded under her skin. Or maybe just some seriously gnarly old-school tat ink got bitten by a radioactive spider and then sent to Earth from an exploding planet and was then exposed to a gamma-ray bomb.

  Hard to say.

• Princess Puffy Pants on September 29, 2013 at 8:31 AM

  Or it could just be tattoo ink. Remember, tattoo ink doesn’t cause an immune reaction in the human body (unless you’re allergic to it, natch.) It’s not like it’s foreign tissue, it’s just a stain. Val’s system is hyperefficient, not hypersensetive. So there’s really no reason that her body would react to the tattoo any more than a normal person’s would, except her skin probably renews itself faster so she’d probably need touchups more often. Unless the future has fade-proof ink. Which would be awesome.

• Syncline on October 1, 2013 at 8:24 AM

  If her healing factor works in the overly simple way you seem to believe, her skin would rapidly have ended up looking like a twenty-year old rug.

  Physical injuries always leave large amounts of debris deep in wounds; a significant amount of medical repairs to injuries in the real world is simply cleaning up and removing dirty tissue in an ER setting. I’ve spent a lot of time holding a squirt bottle over a wound and we cut a lot of dirty tissue out of people to stop potential infx and tissue discoloration. Close range gunshots leave GSR under the skin (actually called tattooing) and deep in tissues, fistfights involve rolling around on the ground and getting dirty while cut wide open, knives and bullets drive clothing under the skin and leave bits of themselves in there that normal humans have to deal with… but somehow Val doesn’t.
  If her body simply ignored everything pushed under her skin, she would rapidly end up looking like a monster. That isn’t happening (and clearly never will-look at her future self to see), so we have to assume there is a powerful cleaning and self-identifying transport mechanism at work in her skin.
  I doubt any serious deep research went into the specifics of her healing factor at SG- odds are there was a clear concept that was the motivation for the character and explanations evolved in response, but if the writer/artist says she has clear, youthful skin that isn’t completely full of crap from objects she was smashed into, she MUST have a mechanism to transport such debris out of her body whether they bothered to design one in or not.
  She has a healing factor- Occam’s razor says the same factor is likely responsible. Her skin is flawless and has no scars, or any sign she has ever been injured. Such a mechanism clearly exists, ergo tattoos have to be a little more complicated then “I went down to Sink the Ink and plopped in a chair”.
  Anything else is intellectual laziness and frankly makes no sense.

• Tower015 on October 1, 2013 at 9:27 PM

  I had this long winded answer all typed out but then realized I missed a step and may have been jumping ahead of myself I do want to ask – your comment “Anything else is intellectual laziness and frankly makes no sense.” – who is that directed at?

  On my reading of it, it runs a fine line of insulting the creators but I wanted to be sure.

• Syncline on October 2, 2013 at 11:17 PM

  Never.

  I would go the other way and say that the SG girls plan and think VERY carefully about the things they think are important. (ie as I put it: “…odds are there was a clear concept that was the motivation for the character and explanations evolved in response”)

  But those of us on the outside of the comic, sometimes… well I would say some of us oversimplify or perhaps don’t think too deeply about things we say, and some of us over think pretty unimportant things like frikkin’ tattoo ink because we are huge nerds.

• Storm on October 9, 2013 at 8:20 PM

  I’m thinking the self-cleaning mechanism is definitely there. It also plays into the whole “superpowers with consequences” thing.

  Just like she must wait to heal, she probably must wait for debris to be forced to the surface. I’m imagining how painful it would be to expel sand, grit, and chemicals through the skin, especially if there’s any lag time with her normal healing. Like Val has said, she just doesn’t die. That doesn’t mean the processes that happen are pleasant.

  As far as tattoos, I’ll say that the ink is tiny burrowing nanobots that constantly fight her skin-clearing abilities. Meaning that the painful memories memorialized in her tattoos are quite physically painful as well.

• The Vicar on September 29, 2013 at 5:21 PM

  Questions:

  1. Was Val summoned from the past purely to set off the entryway via biometrics? Other than that, there really hasn’t been anything so far which they really needed her for.

  2. Is that really Val’s mind in that body, or does the “Vigilante” simply control people as needed, and has taken her over for some reason? (If it’s her in there, why does she not instantly know why she has been awakened by remembering her trip to the future? Does this mean she’s going to awaken herself in the future repeatedly, so she needs to be told which particular episode this is? Or will there be a memory wipe?)

  3. Why is The Dark in stasis? Is it to keep her young (in which case she must go into stasis soon because future-Val doesn’t look much older than time-travel-Val)? Is it because her Dark-ish powers have some kind of horrible side effect which means she has to be locked away to keep her from hurting people? Or is she just so traumatized by all the deaths recorded on her tattoos that she can’t stand to live any longer, but can’t commit suicide?

• Xh-ji on September 30, 2013 at 2:00 AM

  One does wonder at the need for stasis. Val’s regeneration abilities could, in theory, keep her from adverse effects of aging, if not something approximating eternal youth. That would at least explain the relatively unchanged appearance, excluding intentional alterations like tats. I like the psychological-trauma theory.

  Mindwipe is comic-book Occam’s Razor, easiest solution. Dark Val ≠ “our” Val is another possibility I’ve considered. Or, this is a alternate/parallel universe, Dark Val’s past self didn’t experience this, and “our” Val won’t, because from her perspective (due to something that hasn’t happened to her yet, back in her native timeframe) this will never come to pass. Wibbly-wobbley timey-wimey.

• Computant on July 29, 2014 at 4:28 AM

  While I hesitate to dispute the opinion of an apparent medical professional, the idea that stuff stays under my skin conflicts with my experiences of wood and metal splinters gradually being pushed out of me by some sort of natural process. I don’t know how deep in my skin they were, so perhaps it was just dermal renewal, but still…
  I also got broken glass embedded in down to my bone once and it seemed to come out on it’s own?