I know this is terrible, but I find it fascinating in a sort of juvenile, teen magazine personality quiz, collect all the dolls type of way.

We've got our Businessman, Jock, Normcore main character, Sensitive Grunge Musician, Dweeb and Rebel.

Ignoring the manosphere bullshit and blithely viewing this as a team of characters planning a heist, or potential matches in a farming game or dating sim, how is this not kind of cool?

Here is the initial sketch of the same comic:

For the final version, I tried a new watercolour strategy this time: colouring in all the blue shadows first, then adding other colours for the areas in light. It helped make the whole thing less clashing and muddy compared to my usual approach. I like the businessman panel where the colours are minimal. Other panels may be a little overwhelming.

Thanks for your feedback. Here is a walkthrough of what I intended for the reader to experience. Perhaps it falls short.

First, she asks a group of five people if she can join their telepathy club.

At first they are all looking at each other, as if to gauge each others' willingness to accept her into the group. You may assume they are looking at each others' facial expressions to see what the other people think about her request.

However, then it shows seemingly random people in other places, doing other activities: swimming, business deals, hair salon, working on telephone wires.

Then it switches back to the first group, who have come to a decision. You realize that the random people were all part of the telepathy club too, and they were communicating telepathically to consider her request. It turns out that after long consideration, and perhaps many debates between them all that the reader doesn't get to see, the answer is a simple "no."

Oh look, it's the guy from this comic:

Thanks. With telepathy, I do sometimes wonder if the telepaths see no point in making external facial expressions for the benefit of their fellow telepaths. It may be that on the inside, in their own telepathic group chat, they are joking and singing and laughing and having fun.

I recall a scene in Gunnerkrigg Court along these lines (don't ask me to find it) and I also wonder if it's the case in Pluribus.

Maybe it's similar to when you text someone, "ROFLMAO" but you aren't actually smiling in real life.

Thanks. I made this. I am the artist. All credit goes to me. Gaze upon my shitty art and know that it is I, the very poster of the art, who made the work that I myself have posted.

If he had said, "I don't believe you. I think you're denying it publicly, but in secret you have probably already directed your engineers to lay out the groundwork," that would be fine.

He would be accusing her of lying, rather than assuming she was an ignorant female nobody whose knowledge could not compare with his insight of, "but other companies did it."

Your mom.

I agree. I despise Trump. But removing a lawn and putting in hardscape, in a spot where people often gather for events, is not an insult to heritage or anything like that.

If a president that I otherwise liked did this, I wouldn't have a problem with it.

It's not as if a lawn is super environmentally valuable. And I doubt people spread picnic blankets and play Frisbee on this lawn - they put chairs on it and walk on it with heels and hold events and stuff. A hard surface is the right thing for that type of use.

And if a future president decides to put lawn back in, they can! It's not as blades of grass and sandy growing medium are irreplaceable.

In this scenario, why is the reader "letting" their daughter do anything?

Presumably if she's old enough to have sex and get pregnant, she's old enough to give consent or withhold it. (If she's too young to give consent, then the sex should be forbidden and prevented based on age alone.)

How come the question is not, "You and a Palestinian are the last people on earth. Do you reproduce with each other?"

Nope, the question has to include a creepy paternalistic attitude towards a hypothetical innocent young girl under her parent's control.

It would be funny if earwax could be expelled intentionally, by clenching our ears and extruding a big ol tube of wax.

Yeah, that's what I like about the joke - you don't even realize what his hand was doing under the table, until the last panel

I don't have a website or social media with comics, unfortunately. I started making these recently to share with friends (as motivation). There is one other comic I posted on Lemmy, but it's in a different style.

Maybe in the future? :)

You should interpret it as me making this comic quickly and forgetting to fill in his hair colour in the second panel

The magic forest restored his youth.

Also, thank you for the nice compliment!

We’ve turned airports into shopping malls, because airline passengers aren’t an airport customer they’re the product to be sold to. Longer dwell times to fill with shopping, therefore, have become a feature not a bug.

Restaurants, too!

Even if you resist the urge to buy books and souvenirs at the airport, arriving 3 hours early will probably mean you need to eat a meal that you would have otherwise eaten at home or at a cheaper restaurant.

And even if you're not hungry, you might choose to sit in a comfy seat at one of the airport bars, having a few drinks and appetizers.

It means that AI tends to write in a dorky, friendly and informative way, even when covering negative topics.

And that's the way a lot of writers write. Especially in the past. And those types of sources are probably what AI was trained on.

V, as a character, is a giant dork quoting Shakespeare, constantly explaining things to a captive audience, and being an old-fashioned gentleman. Essentially an obnoxious neckbeard.

To put joking aside, I have been trying to make a sort of quilt pattern to add to one of my sweatshirts, but I'm not good at sewing and don't have a sewing machine. So I would probably listen to her talk about quilts and how to make the edges look good.

Yes, exactly! Thank you

I think that back then, people defined pedophilia in terms of the perpetrator's attraction, not in terms of impact to the victim. Essentially, "is it weird for the adult to be attracted to their body?" more than, "would the young person be harmed, physically or emotionally, by sex?" Now we are more evolved.

Back when I was a kid, pedophilia meant what she said - attraction to a prepubescent child. If someone was an adult who thought a physically developed 15-year-old was sexy, that was just logical. Because their bodies had secondary sex characteristics. (It wasn't considered a good idea to actually have sex with them, at least from what I could see. Maybe in Azalia's experience it was considered OK.)

But if an adult thought that a flat and hairless child was attractive, that was messed up on their part. The same way people think that furries or scat play or other fetishes were messed up. But even more so. There was just nothing to consider sexy about an actual child.

Now, we consider the impact to the victim. Pedophilia is defined as attraction to a victim under the age of consent. Because their brain is not fully developed, their body can't handle pregnancy, they are socially able to be manipulated, and a host of other reasons.

I am not trying to be accused of being an apologist, but from someone who grew up in the 90s, I find it strange that we use the same word for someone who rapes a toddler, as someone who "statutory rapes" (as it would be called) a 15-year-old. They are both wrong, but it seems to me that one is much worse than the other. Both because of the attraction (or I guess power fantasy) on the part of the adult, and the impact to the victim.

I think Azalia is wrong to say it was always totally fine. But she is right that it was considered right or wrong for a different reason back then. The definition was different.

Thank you for your thoughtful response.

I have to admit I had my doubts too. I could have just put these words over the Kombucha Girl meme, and called it a day. Then it would not be a comic.

But by the simple act of redrawing the meme, I get to claim it's a comic.

Words and images, paired together, in a way where each hopefully adds something to the other that it doesn't provide on its own...

Thank you for accepting my comic <3