14.12 Endstone Fantasy Comics
Dec21
on December 21, 2016
at 6:16 am
Chapter: Issue 14
Characters: Bennet Quandel, Colindra Montaine, Gog, Jon Montaine, Kyri Thunderhead, Lindy Montaine, Vandric the Grim
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Guess Dayton’s been Zombiefied!
Indeed. 🙂
Half the city answers with: “Yes”.
The other half with: “Brains!”
No, not “Brains!”….”Sammiches!!”
Baby zombie got it’s priorities straight. But this scene does have a fairly high Rule34 feel to it… 😉
Consuming liquid food out of an organic bag wrapped in fat has a Rule 34 feel to you? I’ll just be waaaaaaaaaaaaay over here then.
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What’s that rule to begin with ?
I didn’t know either so I googled “Rule 34.” Apparently it’s slang for “if it exists there’s porn in it.”
Originally, I drew the woman feeding the undead baby with a spoon and the baby was in a high chair. The page seemed tame so I erased and redrew it with the breast feeding. First and foremost, my intent was to take the premise to the extreme. She cares for her undead child, and what’s more caring than breast feeding? It’s completely natural and it conveys the idea much more effectively than spoon feeding, IMHO. Secondly, it is a bit shocking… and that’s good for storytelling. I hope.
But again, I leave it up to the reader to take from my work what they may. 🙂
LOL, *that* rule, i knew it when fully written, not as a number… xD
I don’t see that rule in here personnally, but i do prefer the breast feeding version for other reasons than yours Tony. For one the Stoneverse is set more or less in a medieval atmosphere and baby bottle feeding was not a thing yet back then. Your baby needs to be old enough for spoon feeding. So yeah, breast feeding seems simply more in-lore. 😉
While I agree that breastfeeding makes more sense thematically, remember *how* the Stoneverse came to be. There are a lot of things that carried over, and bottle feeding might have been among them.
With what plastics ? The problem with bottle feeding is that it’s highly dependent on technology and materials. Yes, some things can be carried over, but it’s still a medieval era that has cultural elements imitating the modern era. The Elvis priests for instance can easily imitate real Elvis’s outfit and haircut using their own cruder materials and methods. But some things just can’t be imitated that why, like the needed plasticity of the materials for a baby bottle. 😉
D’oh, didn’t think about that! XD
I think there are some natural materials that could be used to imitate plastic (Natural rubber, I think?), but I don’t think any of these are native to North America, so it’s a moot point.
There’s plastic everywhere in the ground. Metal too. In fact, the technique of metal smithing is probably lost. Swords and armor are fashioned from steel that is mined from the ruins of 21st century. Same goes for plastic. This is something I want to explore in later episodes.
Silly Name : natural rubber won’t do it anyway, you don’t want to give to your baby’s mouth something poisonous when ingested or licked, do you ? 🙂
Tony : it’s still the same issue even if you reuse burried pastics. “Plastic” is a very wide family of materials, it just describe roughly one property when, for a give purpouse, you need to know exactly all properties. You can’t use for the mouth part of a baby bottle the same type of plastic you find for grossery bags, it just won’t work.
As for reusing long lost plastic materials, sorry, but even we real-world have a lot of trouble with them despite actually understanding them, how do you expect Stoneverse people to handle it ? It’s not like metals like iron and alloys like steel that can easily be rediscovered due to their relative simplicity and sturdiness, plastics are easily deconstruction either physically or chemically resulting in a lot of pollution, in Stoneverse you’d get a lot of death and decease from that and trigger some wtichcraft hunts for it. Someone with knowledge of the lost modern world, like Jon or Simon (if he’s still alive), could bring back that lost knowledge, but otherwise it’s unlikely to be rediscovered until Stoneverse rediscover and understand more basic chemistry first.
I feel the need to point out that women have been breastfeeding their infants IN PUBLIC for literally thousands of years, and it’s only been since the invention of plastics (and therefore bottles) that anyone seems offended by it.
That, and the fact that both bottle feeding and infant formula carry potential health risks. A quick google search will give you the details, but the short version is that infants have pathetic immune systems, and the mother’s milk contains locally-relevant antibodies in record time. Not that anyone in the Stoneverse would know that, but it has IRL significance.
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I did not know about the “in public” part, thought they were hiding it a bit more and the other people around looking elsewhere if need be
I think antibodies are mostly in first days milk from mom, (I know because have to give colostrum to baby lambs before 24 hours, preferably 12 so antibodies transferred)… I think the big health benefit is good bacteria being transferred to gut of baby which helps digest milk and then transfer to solid food much earlier, with less diarrhoea problems.
Nope, there are other antibodies and the mother keep giving them all the way until baby stops beeing fed with milk altogether.
This actually raises (no pun intended) a somewhat disturbing question: those baby/child zombies… Would remain “stuck” at this age forever.
Also, this whole thing is making me incredibly sad, mostly because of the fact that people are so happy to have the chance to spend more time with those they considered lost, but deep down they must realize the zombies aren’t sentient. 🙁
Yes it is sad, and it raises all sorts of questions that will be explored. 🙂
Ummm… Wasn’t one of the zombies earlier actually working at the dress shop? That implies some kind of sentience. Also, these zombies don’t really seem all that “brain-eaty” to me… So, what’s actually the big deal?
Actually was stated in-story that they could do things they had been doing repeatedly during life, like a reflex thing, as well as get basic orders going. It’s not fully Romero’s zombies, not just because of the lack of taste for human flesh, but also because despite lacking sentience, they still have some degree of remnants of their former intelligence.
To me it seems like a sort of “muscle memory”. They feel compelled to repeat what they used to do before death, but they aren’t near the levels of sentience a “true” Undead like Pablo or Lindy have.
However, there might be a possibility there is a way to let them achieve it. I wouldn’t rule it out, but I figure it’s a pretty big stretch, and would burden all of them with the same questions that afflict Pablo.
I love this one. The balance between the mother’s love and the final scene is a delight.
Thanks. ?
Colindra cracks me up! XD