Judging from that look on Vitale’s face, I don’t think Billings had much of a choice.
Christer Johnsson
And everything became ugly :{(
Was Vitale really into this? D}:
KittyKross
I spot Naveed in the fourth panel!
Now we know how they met.
Looking forward to the next pages!
ShaedowDancer
Here’s hoping that Vitale was just playing the long game and step 1: Get the experiments out of stasis. Step 2: Have them grow up. Step 3: Uhhh…. Step 4: Hope that one of them is a moral super-powerful good guy? I really don’t want him to be a bad guy. :( He died as a good guy!
Yeah, man. Interstellar travel, laser guns, terraforming, psychic lighting explosions, artificial gravity, talking sentient AI systems, mind-altering technology, but WE DRAW THE LINE AT CHROMOSOMAL-ALTERATION!!! That’s the one impossible thing in this entire series!!
It’s so crazy, because you have to assume that he knew he was freeing a child who would grow up to kill him. But he saw something that made him do it anyway.
yay! I was worried no one would see her. You’ll see a bit more of her in the flashback! :3
ShaedowDancer
Better the devil you know? Maybe the alternative to having Gunner go all woo-ee was -worse-? Maybe it was a choice between two bad things and he chose the lesser bad?
ShaedowDancer
THAT’S why Gunner has long hair and is all rar. He has the girl parts and is NOT HAPPY damnit. He is a maaaaayn.
Not that I want to stereotype, being a girl, but PMS explains SO MUCH about Gunner. >_>
svartalf
Oh, there’s little doubt that we’d not spot our favorite psycho-kitty, Pascalle… :-D
safyrejet
Left abandoned for 50 years!? That’s just cruel. You really don’t want us to like this GEF government. I mean they invade, kill the mommy right in front of Zap, then leave him to sleep on that for 50 years, then wake him up to be sent off as tools of war in weird uniforms. Zap and his people must age differently than human people. Those boys look good for far older than 50.
safyrejet
That sounds like one of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t things. I would assume if he knew what would come from Zap, Gunner, and Efrem being allowed to live (Gunner would go psycho crazy and Zap and Efrem would fight to save the day, but a lot of people would die) then he must also have known what would come if the three died or stayed asleep and that the alternative would have been worse. Long sentence, hope that makes sense….Pretty much what ShaedowDancer said I guess, Vitale chose the lesser evil.
safyrejet
Maybe the GEF got too carried away with their genocide. Whoops, that was the last female….Darn.
mirrim
Or maybe in stasis you age a lot slower? That’s what I’m hoping for Reona’s sake at least. Nothing’s more awkward than aging a lot faster than your boyfriend. ; )
Brian Baker
Well, you don’t want them all going and BREEDING on you. That’s the fastest way to lose control of a population. If you want to control their genetics, you can’t let them spontaneously reproduce it on their own.
Just taking dudes (or different species for the ladies) is a pretty solid way of ensuring no unintended offspring. Other options (like genetic modification to avoid reproduction) might limit the ability to purposefully create new offspring, after all.
KittyKross
Also, this just hit me….
Why did Gunner’s hair grow out while in stasis but Zap and Efrem’s didn’t???
Speedy Marsh
Gunner as a hermaphrodite… Would that be the cause of, or the solution to, a lot of his problems? You could go both ways with that question…
I know you are joking but being transgender doesn’t make you a crazy sociopath.
This line of joking just makes me super uncomfortable. :(
Chi
I just stumbled upon your comic last night and power-read through the whole thing. I must say, it is impressive how much you have improved as an artist and story-teller from when you began. Often times, during the first couple of years, I found myself rolling my eyes quite a bit. lol I’m glad I stuck with it though, because I am really enjoying this comic and am now going through that fan girl withdrawal phase of being all sad that I caught up to what has been written, fiending for more, and having to wait, what? a week?, for the next comic.
Speedy Marsh
Sorry. I wasn’t trying to go anywhere near that. I was thinking that a genetic difference could cause problems with his self image.
What really turned Gunner into a sociopath was bullying about his long hair. When a GEF officer asked him how he got his hair so silky smooth for the umpteenth time, he vowed to wipe them all from existence.
Speedy Marsh
You’d think they would keep a few female psychics and samples from a number of males, in case they decided to breed more. Of course, there would be a problem with a limited selection of mitochondrial DNA.
Maybe the GEF just collected a bunch of blood samples during the genocide. If anything, they were probably trying to transfer psychic genes into humans (assuming that’s not the only difference between the species)
Speedy Marsh
Vitale probably realized that the GEF would be perfectly happy to annihilate any sentient (or non-sentient) race that caused them the least bit of problems in their expansion across the galaxy. The psychics, however, only wanted to annihilate the GEF. By sacrificing the GEF (and himself), Vitale saved countless species.
What Vitale did was probably the equivalent of dropping 2 atomic bombs to end a world war.
Speedy Marsh
Did y’all intend a double meaning when you named today’s post “Tools”? The psychics are being used as tools, and the GEF are “tools” for using them that way.
Man, it’s like an anime joke! Why do Zap and Gunner have the same haircut since they were babies?? haha.
sunphoenix
OMG! So much makes sense now with this one page…!!!
Poor Naveed! NOW we all know Why .. or more importantly WHO made her into a psycho killer assassin she is now! Zap Knows her ..she is a fellow slave of the CEF.. THAT’s Another reason why he did not hurt Naveed.. He knows whats been done to her, to all of them to make her what she is now!
ZAP must have a phenomenal amount of willpower to turn away from the CEF ‘conditioning’ and yet Still be a kind-hearted, compassionate person!
sunphoenix
Oh.. and by-the-way Pascalle… you are indeed Very attractive. I’ve been reading your tweets… I’m not on twitter myself… too much for my ‘child of 70/80’s’ sensibilities, but your next door neighbors 19-year old teen’s reaction is not unexpected. I’ve found some of the most attractive women who are my in real-life friends I associate with … don’t seem to realize how attractive they are… or the effect that has upon the young men around them.
Odd, but perhaps that’s just a male perspective.. men don’t make a habit of judging their physical attractiveness either and I’ll admit we are not always very attentive to noticing when a young woman is actually attraced to us… at least on more than a superficial level. I know its happened to me! {sheesh!}
And the adage of ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’, is Sooooo true!
This is part in reply to your comment on my observation on the last page that you have similar facial features to Zap’s mother! lol! I’m late in reply.. my internet’s kinda… no REALLY slow and jacked up.. really annoying…
Marduk
ZAP:*Kame-hame-yaawn*
GUNNER: *Hmph, I only need one hand… I look cooler that way… Is Naveed looking? Hope she is!*
I kind of see it being like some soldier didn’t quite have it in them to kill off some kids in person, so what do?
And the GEF has a history of keeping genetic specimens — hence the Satellites. Which makes Gunner’s disregard for them even worse, because they went through the same thing.
Haha! I feel like all these flashback pages are like “SO MUCH MAKES SENSE NOW!”
The last one in the sequence meets up with the events from the beginning of the comic, and drawing it was like, crazy surreal for me, to finally see it all put together.
It’s not so much the same hairstyle as, looking back at their appearance as kids, Gunner’s hair grew and theirs didn’t. Same style isn’t the issue for me, just that Gunner was the only one whose hair actually grew out; Whether they got a haircut when they came out of stasis or not.
It may seem a stupid nit-pick, but that’s just me.
Regardless, still loving the comic.
Bad analogy. The Japanese had already sued for surrender before the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
Psiberkiwi
Yeah, it’s all that beauty sleep he got. :P
Psiberkiwi
It’s one thing to happily bomb the crud out of a group of people when you can’t see individuals, but to kill them up close and personal? That’s something else.
Psiberkiwi
Here’s a thought…
Many years in the past, a group of humans with psychic potential left Earth and set up a colony on this far-flung world. Over time, their psychic abilities developed to where they are today. This would mean that they are genetically compatible with baseline humans (good news for Zap and Reona’s potential ‘breeding’ program) so the GEF didn’t need to keep female psychics – they’d just use baseline humans as surrogate mothers for more psychics.
Psiberkiwi
Another possibility is that you don’t age in stasis, so as far as the three are concerned it’s as if no time at all had passed from when their world was destroyed to when they were reawakened.
Speedy Marsh
What Really made Gunner go bad…
Speedy Marsh
Of course, now that they’re out of stasis, their real ages might start to catch up with them, like what happened to Mel Gibson in “Forever Young”.
See you at Wizard World! - 2014-11-05 Chris and I will be at Wizard World Tulsa this weekend (Novemeber 7-9!) at the Cox Business Center in Downtown Tulsa. Come see us if [...]
Volume 3! - 2014-07-22 Hey! If you’ve been waiting to get Volume 3, wait no more!
Vol 3 from Brainstorm Limited on Square Market
TGT Media Interview - 2014-06-28 Sarah from TGT Media asked us some questions recently. Read her piece about Zap! here.
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