3.1.2017 Happy Birthday
Maybe if you turned on a light you could see, Beth.
COMMENTARY, WHOA-
Everyone’s getting a +1 to their ages! So, Beth is now 45, Mary is 20, Jam, Kate and Rachel are 21 etc. I don’t know if anymore future aging will happen, and if it does I don’t know if I’ll be so strict in keeping it in line with Beth’s birthday being Leap Day/March 1st. I don’t know about the former, but the latter, probably “nah.” The Leap Day gag is only really any good once.
Beth’s birthday is the only one that’s going to be acknowledged for this go around, as was the case 5 years ago.
I had actually wanted to start the aging process last year with a couple strips for Mary’s 20th birthday, but things didn’t pan out how I wanted with productivity. So, I tried to sort of fit in a bit of acknowledgement of growth with Mark’s reaction to the outfit Rachel made for Mary.
I must admit, for some reason, there’s a bit of hesitation for me to age my characters. Like, a shot of coldness goes through me. Which is odd, because 5 years ago, when I paused aging, I was overcome with some odd depression because I couldn’t update enough to warrant real-time aging. Being attached to these characters as their creator is emotionally strange, and I can’t quite explain my exact feelings on the matter, only that the feelings are conflicting.
It’s a bomb, isn’t it. This is the part of the comic where Mark reveals himself to be an undercover agent, contracted to assassinate Beth, kidnap Mary and her friends, and subject them all to secret experiments that grant them superpowers. The friends then use their powers to combat an alien menace as an elite fighting force, identified by a single yellow stripe on their clothing.
“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. We can’t give up our concept of who we were… Our way of getting nostalgic for what we just threw in the trash, it’s all because we’re afraid to evolve. Grow, change, lose weight, reinvent ourselves. Adapt.” — Chuck Palahniuk