I was going to go on a tangent about various systems of law enforcement on today’s page, but Achilles’s “Good enough for me” isn’t going to be the end of the “Aren’t you under arrest” issue, so I’ll save that discussion for a near future page.

Instead, I’ll talk about being careful what you name incidental characters if you have a habit of promoting them to tertiary status. All of the mercenaries names were: Detla, Agmoe, Madlab, Ips, Teza, Tabe, Crimoon, Lapha, and Garamm. Their names are all jumbled up Greek alphabet letters (except for Garamm because I’m a dumbass and for some reason thought Gamma had an “r” in it? Maybe it was late when I wrote the first page his name appeared on.) Sometimes alien/fantasy names come easy to me, but usually I’m sitting around for five minutes and all I can think of are words like Glib-flnr, Gubbus, Ralnvimborb, Flob Zilm, etc. I was having trouble with the merc’s names so I went the Greek Jumble route. Partially to amuse myself, but knew it would’ve been fun if someone figured it out, not realizing I had fucked up Garamm’s name at the time. (Just add a 10% dumbass factor in the future when you think you see patterns in the comic.)

I kind of like the name Crimoon, same with Madlab and Agmoe. Lapha’s name is fine, as is Garamm’s, I guess. Detla… eh. It’s okay. It’s not Glib-flnr, but it could be something a little cooler like Zandriel or Warsyl.

More relevant to this page, I have to wonder how societies that wear masks work. I actually didn’t get the idea for this from the Mandalorian, it was way back from the 2001 Justice League cartoon. Hawkgirl never took off her mask in the first two seasons, and even jammed it back on her head once when someone knocked on her door. But then the next two seasons, and everything else I’ve ever seen an iteration of Hawkgirl in, she barely ever wears her helmet, so I guess it was just a quirk of those first two seasons. Probably no one got around to designing her face with the helmet off. (Honestly with the simplified art style they used, all the women looked identical. The series had anime face syndrome, where characters were only identifiable by their hair and costume.)

Anyway, in a society where everyone wears masks, I guess you’d have to rely a lot more heavily on fingerprints or something. That, or everyone would have to have some unique feature on their mask, and you’d have to heavily rely on social mores that people wouldn’t switch masks or duplicate someone else’s. Also, you’d run into a problem once your population hit a certain level where you’d just run out of unique mask designs, and someone would have to wear a mask with a mark right in the middle that looked like a coiled turd.

Even besides the mask issue, if a race all looked basically the same, in ways that their brains weren’t specialized to differentiate, like if Starship Trooper Bugs evolved to the point of independent sapience and started up a society that was less based on obedience to a queen and a lot of tunnel digging and instead started inventing cars and TV and stuff, but they can’t visually distinguish each other because it’s all based on scents, would their driver’s licences have scratch and sniff patches on them? Would their TV’s be smell-0-visions? Or would that evolutionary path lead them to only invent radios and no one bothers with TVs because they can’t figure out the tele-scents angle?


The new vote incentive is up! I tried something different this month – instead of doing one well painted picture with a bunch of dress variants, I wanted to tell a bit of a story. Hopefully it makes sense without any dialog or sound effects. So, instead of one picture, you guys are getting nine. Well, you are over at Patreon. The vote incentive is just the first one. And yes, Pixel is bendy enough to do a full on T&A pose.

 


Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!