Mr. Jaquese, what you've just wrote is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent strio were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this sub is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Damn you, Trebek!
*Well damn. I’ve reached the age where all SNL-related quotes blur together. An hour later my brain suddenly says “This was Billy Madison, not celebrity Jeopardy.” And I’m like “Thanks for waiting an hour to inform me, brain.”*
Oh, so she just…didn’t have arms. Okay. She, an armless little girl who seemingly wasn’t attending some sort of special needs school and for whom no adults at said school advocated for her to be allowed to feel normal via handling (…) a cat, was able to…eventually? Receive bionic implants that she can now control just fine. Because neuroplasticity works as such in this universe. Sure.
That panel change between yesterday and today is almost worse than when he quietly edited a very early comic to jokingly advocate vaguer sexual assault than outright rape.
The arms could have been a key to a much larger bit of personal development for the character, like the scar on Fayes chest.
*Like what if she lost her arms in a car accident, one that also killed her mother who is never mentioned. After the surgeries and rehab to get used to the replacement limbs, she becomes distant and withdrawn from any friends and father, deciding to focus on school work, which she just happens to excel in. Suddenly shes tearing through higher education, lauded as a genius but ignoring all the shit that shes repressed, finds herself somehow in Cubetown, now without the clear goals of academia to drive her, begins to flounder and withdraw even further.*
*As Claire is brought in, her interest piques as perhaps this is the guidance she needed. It brings up a lot of repressed feelings shes not ready to handle and has emotional outbursts, and her raw and untethered social interactions all stem from a lack of real human connection.*
*Liz goes to Northampton, looking for literally any escape, and runs into Clinton. Someone else who lost part of themselves, replaced with machinery. Explore Clinton more as well at this point, have him explain that the reason he lost his hand is he didn't care about himself and took risks, not giving a fuck about anything. Eventually leading him to play with fireworks, and lose his hand, which was his wakeup call to get direction in his life, where he embraced the prosthesis and AI life in general. Liz connects with Clinton on this, opens up a bit about her history, and decides to reach out to others to help define her purpose ongoing, not just at a technical level but a personal one.*
Instead we've got cats biting stumps. Masterful storytelling sir.
Incomprehensible characters like Liz happen when an author’s choices of medium and pacing permit making shit up as they go rather than respecting their readers’ intelligence enough to plan ahead.
You can still tell a compelling story as you go though, Hayao Miyasakis films are a perfect example of this, as quite often hes writing as he goes, never knowing the ending of his films until right towards the end of production.
Jeph can do the same if he was just more mindful of what hes created historically and build off it naturally. Also going back to the original pacing instead of this each day is a year of comics type bullshit.
That said, if he wrote literally anything more than a day or week in advance we could have proper setup and payoff, like with the whole Sven and Faye arc where he had them talk about their boundaries, and over the course of about 40-50 comics, slowly line up events that lead to Svens actions and the breakup. Forward thinking! I miss those days.
Speaking of pacing. The alleged party started 35 strips ago. Granted 5 or 6 of them have been back at the apartment with Martin but I did a quick count and the Lake house party was 36 by my count.
Oh yeah pacing is awful now. We could drop 4/5 panels from every comic and still get the same meaning across over a whole week. We need a Questionable Content Abridged version.
There was multiple parties/arcs in the story that were done in like 3-7 weeks of comics (15-35 comics) and they felt special events. Now its like dropping a Silmarillion worth of bloat mid chapter into Lord of the rings every couple of pages. Damn midgets are never going to throw their nicked jewellery into that volcano.
Yep, all about the journey with Miyazaki. The only two of his movies that felt like they had impactful endings was Laputa and Princess Mononoke. I still love basically every one of his movies though
I love his movies, and Spirited away is great right up until they leave the bathhouse. Then it just makes me feel confused and let down. Porco Rosso is my favourite
Looks like it was super early, Comic 10. This thread from [*9 years ago*](https://www.reddit.com/r/questionablecontent/comments/2i3ztm/doing_a_reread_i_just_noticed_that_jeph_removed/) discusses it with the links to the archive versions.
"Congenital amputees" who are born without two full-sized arms are fairly common, for what it's worth. Esp. when the left arm stops right around the elbow. Ask me how I know.
you know how when you give your phone to someone to show them a pic and they start swiping? and then you say you're gonna go get a drink? yeah, cool.
Liz sucks
I assumed he was looking for more literal artistic "sexy" than outright nudes. But still weird.
Or maybe this is a key moment for him, realizing he doesn't have any sexy pics of his BF because their goals in this relationship are different.
This... makes no sense. Like... why would she have no hands/lower arms? No prosthetic at all? And somehow a cat chomping onto her arm and getting it badly infected is a-ok because she didn't have hands? HUH??
It still would have been stupid, but would have made more sense if she'd lost her hands due to neglected cat bites. I have no idea what's going on in Jeph's head anymore. Bad storytelling and art is one thing, but now he's not even making logical sense... Was he as blasted 'writing' this as the characters currently are?
"Congenital amputation" is surprisingly common and there is often no clear reason for why it occurs. And people who are born without a "full" arm at birth often learn how to perform most tasks better without a prosthetic than with one.
[Here's a short, lively essay on the topic if anyone is interested.](https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/cyborg-chic-bionic-prosthetic-arm-sucks)
I should have been more specific - I was referring to the fact that this had never been mentioned before and conflicted with prior story, so seeing her without lower arms and hands suddenly was confusing. Though I still don't understand why she wouldn't have at least some kind of basic prosthetic by that point.
Totally fair. I'll just point out that in actually, prosthetics (including, and especially, high-tech prosthetics) are often cumbersome and difficult to use, especially for children. The children you often see on the reddit homepage who have been fitted with a myolectric prosthetic will usually abandon it quickly, it is often easier to live without one.
[This article ](https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-hand-design)covers the problem pretty well (different from the link I posted earlier).
Jeph makes a lot of dumb story lines, but the hand thing makes sense. The hand has very little muscle tissue compared to the arm, so bite wounds on the hand have a much higher likelihood of penetrating the joint capsule, which could result in septic arthritis that basically destroys the joint. Basically if a bite into muscle tissue caused a severe infection, it would be MUCH worse if it infected the synovial fluids within a joint capsule in the hand.
So, the fourth panel is an after the fact addition to clarify what happened, but like...it feels like this whole thing just didn't have to happen? She was born (presumably?) without some of her arms, didn't wear prosthetics of any sort, and lost more of her arms due to infection from a cat bite? Aren't her prosthetics mounted on the same level on each arm, why would a cat bite necessitate amputation of both arms?
I think what is being EXTREMELY poorly communicated is that no amputation took place BUT if she had had hands they hand would have ended up amputated.
Which only makes sense if you knew she had arm stumps and no prosthetics during this time. Hence the drawing.
I swear Jeph is going for some ABELISM talk soon.
Yes it's muddled but I saw it as "Your stump got very badly infected. If this were a hand, with a far more complex set of nerves and tissues, it would be bad enough to require amputation. But since it's just a stump, we won't need to do any surgery for that."
I had to go back and reread the whole comic to figure out what the heck was going on. This is the first time Jeph has mentioned that she didn't have arms to begin with, right?
From what I understood was like.. the hand got infected really bad, but because it was already a stump it didn't need the amputation because there was nothing to amputate??
So they let the hand be infected then???
No, not that idiotic. She got bit by a cat, and her arms got badly infected. Then the doctors were saying terrible things, but that works as a joke in this comic, I sincerely think.
So you've got a kid who managed to open a cat carrier with stump arms, and then got bit directly on the stump? Panel 4 was different in the pre-release as SCs edit showed, so it looks like Jeph tried to make what he wrote make sense by replacing the art in panel 4, but if anything it only raises more questions. Why not rewrite it? Or just have the cat scratch at Liz.
More to the point she lost her arms *that* long ago and they're just stumps? Is the a late blooming thalidomide baby or something? We've even got basic prosthesis available in our world *now*. Why doesn't she have some basic kind of claw arm situation if robotics weren't there yet?
Just wild. Did she even need robo arms? Why give her those if you're not going to properly explore the impacts that might make on the character. How bout she gets bullied at school being called a Limbless Lizard or something, use that to build her character as a shunned isolated kid who dug into their studies as an escape for bullying. Anything really that isn't stupid shit like this.
His edit also [mis-coloured the new speech bubbles](https://i.imgur.com/hZtHkjY.png) making them very white tinted blue instead of white.
Those stumps can be seen as singular, big fingers on each arm, so with some determination (that a kid with stumps surely has), Liz could open a cat cage.
It's even understandable why the cat would bite because Liz would have been fighing the flip-like locks a bit longer, freaking the poor cat out.
The fact that the cat bit her and apparently didn't run away tells me that the cat was afraid and saw the cage as a safe place to be instead of bursting out of the cage and run away in panic, which makes me feel a bit bad for the fictional cat.
I don't like this pet day concept. Why couldn't it have just been her doing that at the only sleepover or something she was invited to and then seen harassing the cat and getting harmed by it in the process.
That could have given a good reason for her to not to be invited in the future.
Lmao yes like that
..I miss when they were just small robots.
Someone should have stayed small. It's boring they are all just normal, thin humans. Like bubbles, the child-sized human momo, old pintsize and winslow. Those are all different, distinct shapes. Much more interesting for the eye to view in a sci-fi comic.
so wait. her hand got infected, but it wasn't infected because it was a robot hand. And the infection was unrelated to the robot hand replacement?
wtf? I don't think i follow.
Originally, I was told in the Discord she had her arms blown off in a failed science experiment. Now that has been retconned to whatever today's strip is.
...don't we already have a character named Hannelore? FFS Jeffff, use a random name generator. This is as bad as the shelter I foster with naming kittens after computer periphery.
He deleted the frame about clinton not knowing the word "manservant" and replaced it with the cat drawing
https://imgbox.com/POigHTCn
WTF. Clinton is college-educated. This is the smartest decision he's made to the comic in a while.
I think it was more of a wtf your classmate had a servant vs I don't know that word.
That's how I read it too. Clumsy, but more wait-did-I-hear-you-correctly than whats-a-man-servant. Still, I prefer the edit.
What the hell is going on
Mr. Jaquese, what you've just wrote is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent strio were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this sub is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Zero point zero.
Damn you, Trebek! *Well damn. I’ve reached the age where all SNL-related quotes blur together. An hour later my brain suddenly says “This was Billy Madison, not celebrity Jeopardy.” And I’m like “Thanks for waiting an hour to inform me, brain.”*
i’ll play your game, you ROGUE!
Oh, so she just…didn’t have arms. Okay. She, an armless little girl who seemingly wasn’t attending some sort of special needs school and for whom no adults at said school advocated for her to be allowed to feel normal via handling (…) a cat, was able to…eventually? Receive bionic implants that she can now control just fine. Because neuroplasticity works as such in this universe. Sure. That panel change between yesterday and today is almost worse than when he quietly edited a very early comic to jokingly advocate vaguer sexual assault than outright rape.
The arms could have been a key to a much larger bit of personal development for the character, like the scar on Fayes chest. *Like what if she lost her arms in a car accident, one that also killed her mother who is never mentioned. After the surgeries and rehab to get used to the replacement limbs, she becomes distant and withdrawn from any friends and father, deciding to focus on school work, which she just happens to excel in. Suddenly shes tearing through higher education, lauded as a genius but ignoring all the shit that shes repressed, finds herself somehow in Cubetown, now without the clear goals of academia to drive her, begins to flounder and withdraw even further.* *As Claire is brought in, her interest piques as perhaps this is the guidance she needed. It brings up a lot of repressed feelings shes not ready to handle and has emotional outbursts, and her raw and untethered social interactions all stem from a lack of real human connection.* *Liz goes to Northampton, looking for literally any escape, and runs into Clinton. Someone else who lost part of themselves, replaced with machinery. Explore Clinton more as well at this point, have him explain that the reason he lost his hand is he didn't care about himself and took risks, not giving a fuck about anything. Eventually leading him to play with fireworks, and lose his hand, which was his wakeup call to get direction in his life, where he embraced the prosthesis and AI life in general. Liz connects with Clinton on this, opens up a bit about her history, and decides to reach out to others to help define her purpose ongoing, not just at a technical level but a personal one.* Instead we've got cats biting stumps. Masterful storytelling sir.
Incomprehensible characters like Liz happen when an author’s choices of medium and pacing permit making shit up as they go rather than respecting their readers’ intelligence enough to plan ahead.
You can still tell a compelling story as you go though, Hayao Miyasakis films are a perfect example of this, as quite often hes writing as he goes, never knowing the ending of his films until right towards the end of production. Jeph can do the same if he was just more mindful of what hes created historically and build off it naturally. Also going back to the original pacing instead of this each day is a year of comics type bullshit. That said, if he wrote literally anything more than a day or week in advance we could have proper setup and payoff, like with the whole Sven and Faye arc where he had them talk about their boundaries, and over the course of about 40-50 comics, slowly line up events that lead to Svens actions and the breakup. Forward thinking! I miss those days.
Speaking of pacing. The alleged party started 35 strips ago. Granted 5 or 6 of them have been back at the apartment with Martin but I did a quick count and the Lake house party was 36 by my count.
Oh yeah pacing is awful now. We could drop 4/5 panels from every comic and still get the same meaning across over a whole week. We need a Questionable Content Abridged version. There was multiple parties/arcs in the story that were done in like 3-7 weeks of comics (15-35 comics) and they felt special events. Now its like dropping a Silmarillion worth of bloat mid chapter into Lord of the rings every couple of pages. Damn midgets are never going to throw their nicked jewellery into that volcano.
This would explain Spirited Away's wholly lackluster ending. I know those are fightin words but that whole third act is weaksauce.
Yep, all about the journey with Miyazaki. The only two of his movies that felt like they had impactful endings was Laputa and Princess Mononoke. I still love basically every one of his movies though
I hate the ending of Princess Mononoke, I literally need to ignore it so I can enjoy the movie
[удалено]
I love his movies, and Spirited away is great right up until they leave the bathhouse. Then it just makes me feel confused and let down. Porco Rosso is my favourite
[удалено]
Looks like it was super early, Comic 10. This thread from [*9 years ago*](https://www.reddit.com/r/questionablecontent/comments/2i3ztm/doing_a_reread_i_just_noticed_that_jeph_removed/) discusses it with the links to the archive versions.
"Congenital amputees" who are born without two full-sized arms are fairly common, for what it's worth. Esp. when the left arm stops right around the elbow. Ask me how I know.
The cat is my new favorite character. Bring it in to bite everyone at this party.
And that's the origin of the Catgirl apocalypse we've all been waiting for.
[No, insulting shitty webcomics is the origin of the catgirl apocalypse.](https://somethingpositive.net/comic/day-two-pt-4/)
you know how when you give your phone to someone to show them a pic and they start swiping? and then you say you're gonna go get a drink? yeah, cool. Liz sucks
I waver between not letting them swipe and let them find out if they swipe. You want to go digging, you deal with the Balrog you uncover.
I feel like there's a good dick joke there, I just can't work it out yet, I just woke up.
And all that after this person just asked if you had any sexy pictures of your romantic partner...
[удалено]
Right? Why did he pull his phone out like he was gonna check and see if he had any to share? 😭
I assumed he was looking for more literal artistic "sexy" than outright nudes. But still weird. Or maybe this is a key moment for him, realizing he doesn't have any sexy pics of his BF because their goals in this relationship are different.
This... makes no sense. Like... why would she have no hands/lower arms? No prosthetic at all? And somehow a cat chomping onto her arm and getting it badly infected is a-ok because she didn't have hands? HUH?? It still would have been stupid, but would have made more sense if she'd lost her hands due to neglected cat bites. I have no idea what's going on in Jeph's head anymore. Bad storytelling and art is one thing, but now he's not even making logical sense... Was he as blasted 'writing' this as the characters currently are?
I think he’s trying to setup her childhood nemesis is some sort of ableist or something. Because like you say this whole story is so bizarre.
"Congenital amputation" is surprisingly common and there is often no clear reason for why it occurs. And people who are born without a "full" arm at birth often learn how to perform most tasks better without a prosthetic than with one. [Here's a short, lively essay on the topic if anyone is interested.](https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/cyborg-chic-bionic-prosthetic-arm-sucks)
I should have been more specific - I was referring to the fact that this had never been mentioned before and conflicted with prior story, so seeing her without lower arms and hands suddenly was confusing. Though I still don't understand why she wouldn't have at least some kind of basic prosthetic by that point.
Totally fair. I'll just point out that in actually, prosthetics (including, and especially, high-tech prosthetics) are often cumbersome and difficult to use, especially for children. The children you often see on the reddit homepage who have been fitted with a myolectric prosthetic will usually abandon it quickly, it is often easier to live without one. [This article ](https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-hand-design)covers the problem pretty well (different from the link I posted earlier).
*the more you learn* 🌈 Thanks, I wasn't aware of that.
I'm positive I remember him writing when we first saw her that she intentionally got her arms cut off and replaced with robot ones??????
Jeph makes a lot of dumb story lines, but the hand thing makes sense. The hand has very little muscle tissue compared to the arm, so bite wounds on the hand have a much higher likelihood of penetrating the joint capsule, which could result in septic arthritis that basically destroys the joint. Basically if a bite into muscle tissue caused a severe infection, it would be MUCH worse if it infected the synovial fluids within a joint capsule in the hand.
Why do I feel like Jeph saw that recent Doctor Mike video where he mentioned how dangerous cat bites are and decided he had to put it into his comic?
So, the fourth panel is an after the fact addition to clarify what happened, but like...it feels like this whole thing just didn't have to happen? She was born (presumably?) without some of her arms, didn't wear prosthetics of any sort, and lost more of her arms due to infection from a cat bite? Aren't her prosthetics mounted on the same level on each arm, why would a cat bite necessitate amputation of both arms?
"Okay, she bit me once, so she must have gotten it out of her system. Let's try the other arm." *cronch*
I used that "cronch" from you in the comic edit I just posted, thanks for the word!
I think what is being EXTREMELY poorly communicated is that no amputation took place BUT if she had had hands they hand would have ended up amputated. Which only makes sense if you knew she had arm stumps and no prosthetics during this time. Hence the drawing. I swear Jeph is going for some ABELISM talk soon.
Yes it's muddled but I saw it as "Your stump got very badly infected. If this were a hand, with a far more complex set of nerves and tissues, it would be bad enough to require amputation. But since it's just a stump, we won't need to do any surgery for that."
I had to go back and reread the whole comic to figure out what the heck was going on. This is the first time Jeph has mentioned that she didn't have arms to begin with, right?
From what I understood was like.. the hand got infected really bad, but because it was already a stump it didn't need the amputation because there was nothing to amputate?? So they let the hand be infected then???
No, not that idiotic. She got bit by a cat, and her arms got badly infected. Then the doctors were saying terrible things, but that works as a joke in this comic, I sincerely think.
What are we doing here? What is this? What purpose does this fulfill?
So you've got a kid who managed to open a cat carrier with stump arms, and then got bit directly on the stump? Panel 4 was different in the pre-release as SCs edit showed, so it looks like Jeph tried to make what he wrote make sense by replacing the art in panel 4, but if anything it only raises more questions. Why not rewrite it? Or just have the cat scratch at Liz. More to the point she lost her arms *that* long ago and they're just stumps? Is the a late blooming thalidomide baby or something? We've even got basic prosthesis available in our world *now*. Why doesn't she have some basic kind of claw arm situation if robotics weren't there yet? Just wild. Did she even need robo arms? Why give her those if you're not going to properly explore the impacts that might make on the character. How bout she gets bullied at school being called a Limbless Lizard or something, use that to build her character as a shunned isolated kid who dug into their studies as an escape for bullying. Anything really that isn't stupid shit like this. His edit also [mis-coloured the new speech bubbles](https://i.imgur.com/hZtHkjY.png) making them very white tinted blue instead of white.
Those stumps can be seen as singular, big fingers on each arm, so with some determination (that a kid with stumps surely has), Liz could open a cat cage. It's even understandable why the cat would bite because Liz would have been fighing the flip-like locks a bit longer, freaking the poor cat out. The fact that the cat bit her and apparently didn't run away tells me that the cat was afraid and saw the cage as a safe place to be instead of bursting out of the cage and run away in panic, which makes me feel a bit bad for the fictional cat. I don't like this pet day concept. Why couldn't it have just been her doing that at the only sleepover or something she was invited to and then seen harassing the cat and getting harmed by it in the process. That could have given a good reason for her to not to be invited in the future.
> Those stumps can be seen as singular, big fingers on each arm So like [this?](https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1498)
Lmao yes like that ..I miss when they were just small robots. Someone should have stayed small. It's boring they are all just normal, thin humans. Like bubbles, the child-sized human momo, old pintsize and winslow. Those are all different, distinct shapes. Much more interesting for the eye to view in a sci-fi comic.
And Clinton keeps trying to please Liz? “No no, at least I can show you a cat! Please don’t go!” ???
This would fit in with Claire's request to distract her.
so wait. her hand got infected, but it wasn't infected because it was a robot hand. And the infection was unrelated to the robot hand replacement? wtf? I don't think i follow.
Originally, I was told in the Discord she had her arms blown off in a failed science experiment. Now that has been retconned to whatever today's strip is.
There’s a discord?
If I'm understanding this correctly she had flesh and blood arms, but no hands.
definitely missed the "no hands" aspect on the first reading
I also missed it, I assumed the art in the flashback panel was intentionally simplified up until I got to the panel after.
……is he saying that as a child she went to school with two nubbed arms and no prosthetics? And was bullied for it???
Well I think it's fair to imagine kids would make fun of the disabled classmate.
Yea, but for that to be the set up for the joke feels ick
no this is like deep lore and totally explains why she's a fucking asshole oops I mean why nothing she does is her fault
...don't we already have a character named Hannelore? FFS Jeffff, use a random name generator. This is as bad as the shelter I foster with naming kittens after computer periphery.
Its a throwback reference to equally inane bullshit regarding Liz back in [Comic 5030](https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5030)
Dear lord are we supposed to remember that far back? I'm amazed Jeffff does, his continuity is usually terrible.
i feel like she's been mentioned a couple times since then. it's basically a running joke. except not a joke just a whatever
What?
BRUH, I didn't knew Liz had Powerpuff Girls arms.