![[0187] Directed By M Night Shyamalan](/comics/2010-08-02-[0187]-directed-by-M-Night-Shyamalan.png "[0187] Directed By M Night Shyamalan")
The current story arc started with this strip: Hit-Boy.
Why did he do that? This will be shown later, … sort of.
- Nigel O’Sullivan: Cool costume, Mrs. Williams. Did you make it yourself?
- Ye Thuza: Yes, I did. We’re planning on going to the New York Comic Con this fall.
- Nigel O’Sullivan: You too? My daughter Jessie wants to go as Toph from Avatar. Her new life goal is to create a chasm that swallows Mr. Shamalamadingdong whole.
- Ye Thuza: She has the support of all of us.
- Brandon: That’s enough, you freaks! Now let me go!
- Nigel O’Sullivan: Ha, you wish!
- Brandon: I said LET! ME! GO!
- Nigel O’Sullivan: AARGH
- Ye Thuza: BAHAMUT ONE!
|
I like M Night’s movies myself. I haven’t seen the Avatar: TLA movie yet, but I’m open on interpretations.
Hmm, wonder what Bahumut one is?
Remember when we thought Woo getting yelled at (and implicity kicked) by his owner was racey? o_O
I kept expecting them to have some sort of revelation about how the law isn’t always right or just, and how things are never as black and white as “good heroes versus evil criminals”. Now though, I only see it spiraling out of control… Being from the city, this sort of thing hits home, with good-hearted citizens in a constant struggle with the cold-hearted law that is imposed on them. I keep wondering if Novil is seeing that side of this, and not just making a black-and-white, pro-police, pro-law statement without thinking of the implications of it.
IDK, I kinda wish Novil would revisit the stuff she was doing when I first started reading: the Calvin and Hobbes/Peanuts-type stuff. Housepets is pretty good about keeping its core as the non-serious comic it started as, even with the more serious arcs it’s explored, and I feel like Novil’s lost sight of the kind of stuff her comic started with…
Wow, longest comment on an internet comic I’ve ever wrote! XD
@RockstarRacoon I highly doubt this is supposed to be funny. It’s just action/storyline stuff. Just because it’s a webcomic doesn’t mean it’s always supposed to be humorous.
Also, although yes he should have patted him down first after making a drug bust, I think the implication here is that he really just wanted to scare the kid about drug dealing/use with the ten year threat and not actually arrest him.
Well at least in lots of places those butterfly knives are illegal… Least I’m pretty sure that’s what he stabbed the officer with anyway.
@Rockstarracoon I like the C&H style comics also, but I think the idea is that this comic explores youth life in general, and the youth experience nowadays also includes this kind of stuff. Calvin and hobbes explores elementary school age, this explores more of middle/high school age. Even calvin and hobbes had the house that got robbed and other serious story arcs that were several strips long
— merge of double post —
@Chase Butterfly knives are usually only illegal beyond a certain length, commonly 7 inches.
Assuming this takes place in the US, that cop actually doesn’t have the right to arrest him or search him for that pot because he didn’t have probable cause. Just because he ran away from a couple of people in freaky costumes with guns (I know they’re water guns but still),
Also, the 10 years thing could have been “assuming there’s no plea bargain”, which is how a lot of drug charges are handled.d
I like the “Bahamut One” thing. I believe it’ll turn out to be some kind of code word to Cloud.
He stabbed him with a butterfly knife? Funny……usully teens of his caliber have a flip knife and in the extreme cases a buck knife. It’s just a butterfly knife seems a bit too classy for him.
Lessee… The English & German content tells me that this is not happening in WhiteBread America, Red or Blue States or whatever.
The last time I was in Europe (Old Cold Warrior here…) the authorities worked under a different set of rules. Bill of Rights? Non-existent in the American version. Attacking an officer is really, really serious. One of the other factors that they told all of us Ugly Americans in Uniform was that we had to prove our innocence (Napoleonic System, not Jeffersonian) rather than the other way around.
If someone in one of our units pulled something this stupid, we would have just penciled him out of the roster and figured on never seeing him again.
Rules of the Road:
1 – Don’t piss of the Guardia
2 – If you have drugs, don’t ask your Unit to save you
3 – “I Was Drunk” carries no weight
4 – CYA, and watch your buddy if you can.
All in all I enjoyed my deployment, even brought a bride home!
I must correct myself. I said switch blade and meant butterfly. While I do own a switch it is not legal to carry, since you can only collect them in my state. Butterfly’s are legal to own and carry.
My favorite one is impractically large. It has a large disk just under the blade with a pair of shurikin (throwing stars) inside. fun for display, I’ll never use it though.
Come to think of it, he’d probably have to be strung out on something a lot worse than pot to go all knife-crazy wouldn’t he? I always heard marijuana made you trippy and goofy rather than “knife people who mess with you”.
if i owend a weapone it would probably be a cane with a blade inside it now that would be cool
The twist is that Sandra & Woo was actually Sluggy Freelance the whole time.
I just noticed, he used a butterfly knife! Even I carry a pocket knife around, but having a switchblade or a butterfly is just asking to get rousted.
I don’t think he’s on drugs. If there’s any drug that makes you flip out, it’s acid- but then he’d be a lot less coherent. He’s just terrified and desperate, like an animal in a cage. I don’t think this storyline will end well, but I’m looking forward to the next installment all the same.
It is concealed, but in most places, butterfly knives aren’t illegal.
Or so I think.
I also call him Shamalamadingdong! Have for several years now since I joked about how difficult his name was to remember while watching “The Sixth Sense”. 🙂
wait…i’m confused…wasn’t that his dad that he just stabbed? or am i mistaken and it’s just some random police officer that whose office he barged into?
On the contrary- in most of the US they’re illegal to sell, own or carry.
Nope, that’s not his dad. That’s just the first police officer he could find after his buddy went down for the count.
BOOT TO THE HEAD!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFldBVWFgWo
I just want to say that racebending.com saved my life like cloud’s mom did for the drug dealer. It prevented me from watching the horrible tragedy that was the last airbender. Otherwise, I might have started crying in the film. Let’s everyone say it AANG. AANG. AANG. NOT UNG.
P.S. I will from now on call that horrible director Shamaladingdong. God bless the policeman’s daughter.
That cop got lucky indeed, the youngster could have aimed at his heart. I guess the girl hero will do something stupid while trying to catch the guy. This comic strip is quite crazy but realistic in many ways and really fun!
I respect this comic so much more now for the Avatar references.
Booking someone always brings about an ungodly amount of paperwork, and I can understand why the cop would be reluctant to arrest a minor for possessing a few grams of marijuana (obviously for personal consumption rather than resale) so It seems to me that maybe he was just going to scare him a bit. That , of course, would account for his rather un-orthodox methodology – not patting the suspect down, lightly holding his hand rather than cuffing him, no Miranda warning (then of course, if this is indeed set in Europe, then no Miranda warning would have been delivered in the first place), chatting with Cloud and Ye Thuza rather than heading for the police station…
After all, the boy he’s holding came willingly to the police, is guilty of nothing more than a misdemeanour in any case and would be released shortly after a stern talking-to (“reprimand” in UK law). Not much danger there, right?
Of course, by this time Ralph is so freaked out by the whole episode he takes the “10 to 20” jape seriously and tries to get away through any means – understandably, it all goes downhill from there. If he’s apprehended he probably risks a brief stay in a youth detention centre, and the cop risks a rebuff from his superiors for improper procedure.
I don’t understand why people are complaining about the current story arc – sure, it’s not particularly funny, but then again, I’m not sure it’s supposed to be (except the obvious jabs at Shyamalan latest piece of cra… I mean film). Not all in this world is funny and in any case, it does come across as both realistic and believable.
Speaking as someone who is a big fan of Avatar the Last Airbender, and as someone who enjoyed Shyamalan’s work… To say I was disappointed by Airbender would be like saying the ocean is damp. Everything that made Airbender what it was was completely neglected or destroyed by the movie, and for what? To make room for special effects and bad acting. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive Shyamalan for this.
Good lord that summon won’t actually work will it?!!!
*Pictures Mass Damage to the city and a legendary fight stariing Sandra as Aerith and Larisa as Tifa and Woo as Cait Sith*
Yipes O.o
Ok, I see that my earlier post got hung up in moderation. Let’s try this again, with tags instead of TinyURL:
@James Rye:
I saw news of the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” sequel on the Wall Street Journal’s website:
“Avatar: The Last Airbender”: Nickelodeon Greenlights TV Spinoff ‘The Legend of Korra”
“Legend of Korra”: The “Avatar” Creators on the New Spinoff
cue the song we all love to hear that many confuse with the song they play at weedings c,c, c,c, d sharp, d,d,c,c,c,b,c,c, c(hold)
and to wolven paw i just happened to notice this, but is that starfox as your “avatar” irnoy considering the page da?
I’ve seen “The Last Airbender,” and while it wasn’t anywhere near as good as I’d hoped before the reviews started coming in, it also wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the reviews made me fear.
Shyamalan is a decent director, but he needs to never, ever, write another line of dialog ever again.
The acting really wasn’t too bad (well, the Zhao [yes, he was in it — boy howdy, was he ever in it!] wasn’t all that good, and neither was the Firelord Ozai actor). It was the lines they had to say that were bad. Noah Ringer was as dead-on as Aang as the awful lines he had to say allowed for.
Toph wasn’t in it because this movie adapted Season (“Book”) One: Water, and Toph didn’t appear even in prophetic vision in the animated series until early in Book Two: Earth.
So, M. Night = Judge Doom? ;-D
On the topic of this strip: marijuana indeed would not normally cause such behavior, but (#1) we don’t know for sure that that was marijuana in that packet, and (#2) there are exceptions to that rule.
One exception is that often drug dealers lace marijuana with other drugs, to get their clientelle hooked on the real stuff.
Another is that according to some studies, THC may trigger schizophrenic episodes in people who already have schizophrenia (even if it hadn’t been previously diagnosed). It wouldn’t affect a healthy person that way. Think of it as like how the considerable majority of us can eat peanuts safely, but for a small percentage of us, even a tiny, tiny amount (far less than a single peanut) can be deadly indeed.
It’s possible that such a schizophrenic episode triggered by THC is what happened here.
I don’t know who is the idiot in this one. Ralph for pulling a knife and STABBING a police officer in plain view of EMT’s and most likely other officers, (to say nothing of two people he knows for a fact could win a knife fight with him,) or the officer for not taking him down and frisking him when he found his stash. He exposed his fricking back to a suspect.
what a twist!
Yes! I thought I was the ONLY person calling him “shamalamadingdong”! Glad to see I’m wrong
That guy’s a crazy and insane!! Who would carry a knife and stab a police man!?
He just made the situation worse for himself by stabbing the police officer.
The only movie YOU’RE starring in is the one where you lose (Directed by M. Night Shymalan!) And the plot twist is… you’re adopted!
We’ll see about that!
@ The J.A.M.:
5-10 years? I didn’t think they’d keep someone in the electric chair for that long…I mean the idea is execution, not using someone as a high voltage fuse…
The Critic!!!
@ KrimsonNekros:
Don’t forget that (at least in the US) all drug charges get a number of secondaries slapped on, the conviction rate is obscenely high and the poor almost always get maximum sentences. Also, public defenders are paid to lose, he couldn’t afford bail (well, it’s not likely) and if he didn’t plea quilty they’d sentence him twice as hard for wasting their time. He was already looking at at least a decade. Then they would find the knife and throw a few more charges at him, making it more like two. His life was ruined already, he would be left with no job and no skills, in his forties at the very earliest. While stabbing the cop will get him aggravated assault and attempted murder (another automatic extra charge) it gives him a chance to escape, flee town, take up a different name and let the statute of limitations pass. The extra sentence is meaningless and gives him a hope for escape. He made the right choice.
Temporarily redacting previous comment to say:
Sweet butterfly knife.
Stick it to the man! Yeah!
I know I shouldn’t be laughing but that bahamut comment in the last panel had me cracking up
Someone else calls him “Sham-a-llama-ding-ding”? Thought it was just me 😀
I just have to say…Shamalamadingdong is catchy.
It’s kind of hard to feel too sorry for such an asshole cop. As has been pointed out, searches without probable cause are permitted on the basis of concealed weapons, and even if he reeks of the stuff that doesn’t give a reasonable suspicion that he’s armed.
It may also be worth noting that so far as we’ve seen, he hasn’t been arrested, and I’ve read that several states have actually ruled that under such circumstances a cop can lose some of the protections of his badge – you can’t be charged with resisting arrest or assaulting an officer, since technically you’re not under arrest, you’re being abducted. In theory, a SWAT team who have the wrong address (and therefore no warrant) are technically breaking and entering, although you would quickly end up dead if you tried to stop them.
This sounds extreme, but since cops who break the rules are far more dangerous to society than a few druggies, I kind of hope that it’s at least partially true.
Re-reading that, it sounds rather harsh, so I think I should elaborate. When I talk about feeling too sorry for him, I don’t mean I’m completely heartless about a guy getting stabbed. But I’m not going to be all “OMG, he stabbed a cop!” when the cop was being such a jackass. If he’d been behaving like a decent cop rather than a bully with a badge, I’d probably feel differently, but just look at his face in panel 3 and tell me he isn’t enjoying himself. A cop who grabs a kid, illegally searches him, taunts him about getting 10-20, but doesn’t actually arrest him? He’s toying with him, and that’s just sick. So rather than “OMG, he stabbed a cop!”, I’m feeling more “Ouch, that looked like it hurt. He kinda had it coming, though”.
Narcotics possession might be a bit less harsh because of an illegal search, but then he went and stabbed him. Round of applause for Ralph everybody!
huh Ms. Shama lama “oh whats this” “Ding Dong”
So a few strips ago, Johnny visited the hospital and was sad. My guesses are: His sister or someone was ill or died from an overdose; he found out that if he kept taking drugs he would die; or he was submitted to a drug test and the doctors told him if he kept taking drugs they would arrest him.