This is “tough love,” I guess.
I’ll be at Stumptown Comics Fest this weekend in Portland, at table 111. Here’s a handy con map, made by Bill Mudron. Come see me, okay?
This is “tough love,” I guess.
I’ll be at Stumptown Comics Fest this weekend in Portland, at table 111. Here’s a handy con map, made by Bill Mudron. Come see me, okay?
Man. Being told not to breed, by your own _mother_? Ice cold, Feather. And apparently advice you should have taken yourself.
Gee, Feather, where’d all Marcus’ stupid come from, anyway?
heredity?
Nothing better than a eugenics program run by batshit zealots.
Reasonably speaking, there has to come a point in which Feather stops getting progressively endearing and sort hits a plateau of utter evil. It’ll probably be around the point she treats to get Zora doped up on peyote.
Man- i just have to say that i really like Gene’s expression in the first and third panels: the contrast between the “normal” Gene and this one makes his facial expression utterly terrifying, and incredibly satisfying to watch. Hell, i actually love every expression on this page except Feathers. Besides this, i am curios on how Marcus will feel about Gene from now on. Fear, caused by the sudden attack from Gene? Contempt? caused by his dislike for being treated like this by Gene? Jealousy, because of the way Feather and Gene is “kin” that he cannot be? Simply a remainder of Feathers cruelty? There are plenty of options to go around, but I seriously doubt it will be a positive reaction.
Dude, I think she’s hit that plateau. By the way she uses the past tense, Marcus looks like he’s down for the Big Sleep.
If he were dead, she wouldn’t be saying that she was going to make sure his genes weren’t passed on.
Man, nothing hurts more than when your mother blames herself for your “shortcomings.” Fuck you, Feather, fuck you.
…Yeah. Gene is creeping me out right now. I’m pretty much reacting the way poor Zora is. *gives Zora a hug and hopes she doesn’t randomly take my belt*
I know Feather’s getting the lion’s share of attention, but damn, Gene looks like he could snap Marcus’ neck like a dry twig in Panel One.
I think he just did.
God, I really feel for Zora in all of this. That right there is shit that a little kid shouldn’t have to fix.
Jesus. Christ. Feather.
I can see Zora telling a therapist about this scene someday.
Yep. He dead.
FARRRMS.
If I was Marcus, at this point I would be seriously considering jumping ships for the Egyptians. They’ve got badass animal headed gods, Marcus!
-G.
And their marriage requirements are much, much lower! After all, Mose’s mom considers Mose a very eligible bachelor, and Mose was strongly encouraged by his uncle to start makin’ babies with a (preteen!) temple dancer. On the other hand, they do have that “you’ve got to be brown” requirement. Maybe Marcus could tan a lot?
I wholeheartedly agree with Feather on this. Well, not on the “yellow” part, that’s just stupid.
Also, I normally don’t really like Zora: she’s a good kid, and she’s a cute kid, but she’s also sort of annoying to me.
But right now I feel terrible for her, this is the kind of thing that leaves scars :/
WHAT THE FUCK!?
Only reasonable thing for a young man to do at this point is to say “fuck you” to the jakes and leave. And turn in fatso to the authorities.
Okay, Feather, let’s recap:
1) Your model of someone who’s truly Jake is someone with the impulse control of a three-year old, the willingness to apply deadly force for ruining a video game, and who has Asperger’s at best, mental retardation at worst due to lack of oxygen at birth.
2) You maintain a pretense of family while seeing your children and grandchildren as assets to be used or discarded depending upon their value to you and to Jake.
3) You’re the matriarch of a family in a religion aspiring to the destruction of all that is civilization, even acting to speed it up in any means possible.
Wow. The BIG surprise is that Marcus didn’t see this coming. The whole freaking family is a bunch of sociopaths and Feather’s the worst of them and Marcus gets all shocked and amazed when he finds himself thrown under the bus?
And geez, Zora is ringside while all this craziness is going down. A room full of people I wouldn’t feel safe giving an X-Acto knife to and she’s in the middle of it and a collection of cutlery. Makes my skin crawl and i’m justr WATCHING it.
Well, the Jake way is to live your life as close to “original human animal” as possible, for the day when civilization collapses. I think Eugene would be among the survivors.
Closest to the “human animal”, huh? Explains a lot, considering how many animals out their eat their young…
Waitaminute… You’re telling me that this isn’t the normal family dynamic everybody grows up with?
Dammit, Ma! I just knew that I had an older brother! And you told me he was a daydream.
You need to remember that Marcus is one of these ‘crazies’, too. The whole attack at the Israelite was spearheaded by HIM. He’s not going to be surprised at the craziness of his family, he’s going to be anguished that he is not in his mother’s favor; if he’s not KO’d from the story due to this turn of events I’m going to bet he’s going to do something to try to earn that favor back to prove his worth.
Yeah, that’s why it seemed so strange that he didn’t anticipate this turn of events. You’d think he’d have seen this coming a mile off.
Marcus is in the wrong and to be honest he wouldn’t have stopped flipping out until he got smacked down by somebody. Gene stayed above the fray until Marcus turned his aggression in his direction. Feather seems pretty sane to me, just very much in control of the family and unintimidated by violence.
OH MY GOD HE MURDERED HIM. IN FRONT OF HIS DAUGHTER, OH GOD
I love this webcomic.
Hahaha, that sequence of reactions sounds about right.
oh my god he’s dead.
eugene-tics at it’s best. (o_o)-b
I really doubt he’s dead, why would Feather tell him he’s not allowed to breed if he’s dead.
Judging from where Gene grabbed him, and the sounds made, Gene was “merely” trying to rupture Marcus’s testicles. If he succeeded, Marcus would be lying like that, and Feather’s instructions might well be moot, babies could already be gone from his future.
I’d hate to see Gene when he actually gets angry ;-)
ok so grab one was the balls but I thought grab two was his throat?
and Feather seems more like she’s talking to herself, “I blame m’self” while her favorite takes care of the misbegotten mistake.
noticing that Marcus isn’t flailing like he should be if he’s been taught anything about ground fighting when somebody’s got your neck. no going for the eyeballs under-chin or anything really (or is it only Gene who knows how to fight? unexplained)
…brain damage? Make Marcus more like Gene is the solution? XD
I love how she adds a disclaimer to him not having babies. He can have them, but they won’t be kin! …and a lot better off methinks.
I don’t care what anybody says, Feather is one of my favorite characters.
I actually really like Feather, too–Feather and Gene are both really interesting characters, especially from an objective stance; the whole of the Jake clan is, really.
Zora is, oddly, the least interesting by my standards.
Ditto. I barely notice Zora. Even Pippi is grating, but Zora’s just there. I love Feather to the bones.
Anyone else feel sympathy for Eugene? This can’t be good for his relationship with Zora, but he’s unaware of this, and none of his family mind. They approve of his rage and lack of impulse control (C Mage put it quite well). They probably think he’s setting her a good example! I’m amazed Gene has done as well for himself as he has, and is as nice as he is, considering how he was raised. The authorities may take Zora from him. If he’d been raised by decent people, he would have a much better chance of staying with his daughter. He would probably have better social skills. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have received brain damage in the first place if his parents weren’t Jake.
Shit, I thought for a second there in the third panel Gene was going to snap on Zora.
10 to 1 that if the guy’s dead, they blame it on someone else and seek vengeance.
I am reassured about Zora, though. That look in panel 4 tells me she has realized how much of a monster her grandmother, and perhaps the whole Jake religion, really is. One can hope.
If Marcus isn’t already dead, then I’m *prettttty* sure that Gene already took car of the “makin’ usre what he got ain’t passed on.” That crotchgrab a few panels back probably cleared that problem riiiight up.
I dont think he’s dead at all, probably just semi-conscious. Feather started out her monologue by asking ‘You awake?’; implying that she recognised a chokehold or whatever gene was doing to him. Zora’s more scared over Feather’s scary ass control and gene’s absolute blocking out of her during.
Oh boy is that last panel so sad. Zora sheilding her daddy from the others with her little body as if she’s trying to protect him from them. Kinda is really. Poor thing.
Life ain’t fair…
“Life ain’t fair” is gonna be the first thing I tell my kids.
A stunning comic, this one.
I like the Jakes more and more:-)
And, while by our disgusting modern “P.C.” culture’s sterilized fake-liberal standards they might look bad, they are re-learning and using things that helped mankind survive the first million years. The reason the matriarch was so pissed was that he’d found the people they were hunting, but went to try to kill them (1) himself and fell into an obvious trap versus just whistling for help. Note also besides clobbering him, they ran off with “His” (or rather the tribe’s) gun. That’s “Counting Coup” in one of the biggest ways out there. Now they’ll probably need to get the gun back also. -note the added stupidity, the “Gun” was a one-shot (at best, hopefully in the direction of the enemy!) and he took on two opponents, either one obviously capable of overtaking him.
The actions are also believable. He’s ignoring the insult, since it’s the guy getting chastised and the matriarch and it’d be bad to even talk unless the Matriarch tells him to. So he’s pretending not to notice, tuning him out. But breaking the controller, he might as well have hit him personally and he has to fight back.
Furthermore, the Eugenics shows the Matriarch thinks too, and she also admits she isn’t “Perfect”. She knows he as a “Male” will F-ck any female who’d let him (at least) do it, and though the clobbering will hurt for a while, males are surprisingly able to recover stuff quick. So she edited her definition, since he’s not good at following orders or staying with the group.
There’s not much worry of the Jakes getting ‘burdened’ by anything in that department he does. Imagine if he gets some money, dresses up and sneaks in a college party and into some slut’s pants? She tracks him down after a period or two missed and sees his “Family”… I think she’d RUN for a scraping, if she has a lawyer in tow he facepalms and hands her some money for one:-) That’d happen before the matriarch could say anything…Just “uh, hi…bye…”
It’d be really neat to make a “Templar Wiki” to make entries about the many subcultures and such! Like, I’m intrigued, probably just by the scarcity, on the “Wicker Heads” and why they got such sh-t at the coffeshop. ?disguise wearing in a “Truth Only” place? If I had a shop and had coffee, once I’d established they weren’t robbers, just ‘eccentric’ I’d likely give it to them, or at worst at slightly above cost.
1-I’m not the author, but I don’t think they were out to kill the guy, at least not the junky. They just wanted to bring back a ‘lost’ member. Also, it seems the Mexican might be good ‘recruit’ material after a thrashin’ for smacking the lady.
rough way to go, just like a jake
When I read this page, I flashed back to the conversation Reagan and Scipio had about how much influence Gene’s upbringing has had on him and Reagan’s opinion, and contrasting that with Feather’s statement that “he’s kin in ways you an’ me could never be,” saying that he’s a better Jake than her!
Also, the “no babies. Not kin ones.” statement. Does that mean that she’s okay with him fathering illegitimate children with city folk? Because that would raise all sorts of questions in my mind.
The Jakes ARE trying to bring down civiklization.. and spawning a herd of incredibly stupid (assuming they take after Marcus) children, then leaving them for the social system to pay for, seems like a good step in that direction.
Now thats some long term planning right there. (I’d still go jake for Feather.)
*Picks up Zora and hugs her tightly* One thing is certain, and that is that Zora is never gonna become a Jake. Jesus christ, these guys might as well be the Sawyers or the Firefly’s.
Well, thing is that I think she already IS Jake. I mean, just think about how we first saw her in the comic, where she just came into an apartment uninvited and helped herself to the things there? Sure, right now she hasn’t got the knife-wielding thing going on, but think about her all grown up – do you really see her taking any crap from some crabby husband? She might well wield a knife then. :-P
Marcus, he has no reason anymore to be Jake. And even more a reason to seek revenge upon his family.
She steals like the Jakes, but I doubt she has the apocalyptic isolationist worldview. That stuff probably went over her head, at her age. Also, she did attend public school sporadically, and didn’t spend all her life with the cult, so she’s been exposed to more than just Jake life.
Although considering the other tenants in the building, and thus the things she’s been exposed to, Jake’s Kin make just as much sense as the rest… XD
Well this cements Feather as my favorite character.
bloody hell……..is he dead?
Um, is there somewhere I can read up on this oh-so-odd religion/belief system? It sounds incredibly interesting to dig into.
Start here: http://templaraz.com/?p=227#pagetop
She steals like the Jakes, but I doubt she has the apocalyptic isolationist worldview. That stuff probably went over her head, at her age. Also, she did attend public school sporadically, and didn’t spend all her life with the cult, so she’s been exposed to more than just Jake life.
Actually, getting worn out by the Jakes. Ready to return to other parts of the story.