|
Currently on hiatus :-(
 S&W in German/auf DeutschGaia (my fantasy comic) Scarlet (my science fantasy comic) |
|
|
![[1046] The Stuff Nightmares Are Made Of](/comics/2018-12-31-1046-the-stuff-nightmares-are-made-of.png "[1046] The Stuff Nightmares Are Made Of")
Here is the obligatory link to our ongoing Kickstarter campaign for the Sandra and Woo: 10 Years anthology and the art book The Art of Sandra and Woo!
- Ruth: Mmm, delicious!
- Mrs. Honeysun: This is just a bad dream! Just a bad dream!!
- Mrs. Honeysun: Whew, it was just a–
- Mrs. Honeysun: GYAAAA
|
Sandra and Woo by Oliver Knörzer is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. See the About page for details.
Privacy Policy | Impressum | © 2008 – 2026 Oliver Knörzer
This comic just took a very dark turn…
@ oralekin:
Animals get eaten. It’s not that much darker than usually. We know that all animals (at least the ones that we have seen) have self awareness. This makes this world kinda dark in general, because there is a lot of killing in the world.
Talk about biting off more than you can chew – but that’s nothing a little magic can’t fix…
HAPPY 2019!!!!
I’m not following.
Ruth is the apex predator because she has a gun.
Without it, she’s just a helpless squirrel.
I’ve seen no gun, just a knife and fork.
Why is Mrs. Honeysun freaking out?
Are we missing a picture in this strip?
Where did Mrs. Honeysun suddenly get the bump from? Did she run into the tree she is suddenly leaning against?
Was it the collision that caused the bump which shortly knocked her out, or the pain and blood loss from being eaten alive?
Well… anyway. Happy new year everyone and if you happen to roam around the woods in the new year be carefull not to end up like the bear above. Always be on the lookout for carnivorous rodents suddenly dropping on your back. 😉
OMG! This should be PG rated, call the sensors, cover the children’s eyes!!!
What I really like about S&W is the unexpected turns, sometimes of darkness and sometimes of magic (or a mix of both). Larissa’s illness, Luna’s mother being murdered, animals being actually being eaten or hurt. It is not something that occurs so often that it is expected but often enough to create a tension and it always done in a creative way.
Jeez, was this comics ever so…. graphic before?
Somehow I feel Ruth and Mrs. Honeysun got off on the wrong foot.
Gamesman wrote:
That’s because Ruth has arranged for Vega to get on the right foot with Mrs. Honeysun by chewing on the left herself.
@ Gamesman:
Can’t see it that way. Mrs. Honeysun asked for one of her children to devour and gets the appropriate response.
Law-of-the-jungle-style, no less. Appropriate to the bone (pun inevitable).
I am really impressed what that squirrel can do with a knife and fork.
Riiiiight…
@ Sam:
It’s the squirrel that makes the tool dangerous.
Also, HAPPY NEW YEAR, PEOPLE!!!!
Flowey:
@ Elchar:
Well, at least we’re not at ‘rainbow knife’ levels of gore, yet.
Sam wrote:
Man was the apex predator LONG before the invention of gunpowder, or even the bow and arrow.
Maybe not before the atlatl or boomerang. Probably not before the club.
Ruth does have a knife, and a sharp one at that.
Sam wrote:
Whoops. I didn’t realize it’d to dhat. Let’s try this again.
Man was the apex predator LONG before the invention of gunpowder, or even the bow and arrow.
Maybe not before the atlatl or boomerang. Probably not before the club.
Ruth does have a knife, and a sharp one at that.
Ruth is small, nimble, and used surprise to get onto Mrs Honeysun’s back in a location that is at least difficult for a bear to reach. If Mrs Honeysun were to try to turn around and swat her, Ruth could just run up her spine to her shoulders where she’d be in threat range of Honeysun’s neck with that knife. There’s also the fear factor, as Ruth is well known in this forest, particularly to predators whom she scares the hell out of.
Sympathy- that emotion I don’t have.
Wow, that went very dark very fast.
Regis Earsquake wrote:
Yes, the world is dark. However, come back to us when you see someone who is self-aware carving some meat off a still alive, self-aware animal.
Even if you see it in real life, and even if the world is dark in general, that shit is still dark as fuck.
This is way funnier to me than it should be.
@ Cobalt:
I was going to say I don’t believe amputation had ever been featured in a popular webcomic before (of Sandra and Woo’s maturity rating), but no thinking about it I can actually recall a couple.
You’re right that this is pretty dark, though. I think it’s not as much the awareness of the characters (in this specific instance) as it is the style they’re drawn in; like you could say this is almost Tom and Jerry styled violence if it wasn’t for the blood, or Itchy and Scratchy if it wasn’t for the realistic portrayal of the animals.
Oh god know I know what it reminds me of, a PETA commercial.
Has no body realised that the bear has some weird sort of egg thing on it’s head?
SeanR wrote:
Ignoring the issue of whether man is an apex predator (and whether the term actually works when talking about humans (anymore)), I don’t think there has been a time when Homo Sapiens had any predators (sure, people are eaten by other animals but so are lions and tigers and sharks). By the way, being a land apex predator is really easy – be a predator and you’re typically at the top of your food chain (even if it merely involves being hard to eat like the mighty apex predator hedgehog) – there are exceptions, of course, but food chains are much shorter on land than among ocean dwellers.
Previous human species may well have shed that sort of (population level) danger before ever thinking about leaving Africa. The invention of the spear (which was pretty much the definitive weapon of humanity until perhaps as recently as the renaissance if not the most powerful one for some time before that) not only predates our species but predates our species by more time again than our species has been around.
We’ve had no significant natural enemies for at least as long as we’ve had permanent settlements (sure, hapless humans, especially children, may have still been killed and eaten) but we’ve been forming tribes way longer than that and a tribe just isn’t a viable source of food (even less than, say, a herd of medium to large herbivores).
Calling us *the* apex predator, though, implies (to me, at least) the ability to confidently hunt any other animal on the planet. Such ability was not quite so easily won. On land we’re in our element but even here hunting big game or major carnivores was risky for a long time – I’m not really sure about this but I’d say it took refined communication methods and perhaps even the technology to work metal (bronze, perhaps) and/or animal assistance to make such hunts a relatively safe bet. Hunting big marine animals (mostly big whales) remained relatively risky much longer as they even remained dangerous when land animals were mostly risk-free after the introduction of firearms and only became risk-free for hunting in the late 19th or 20th century.
juust jumping right into the weirdly creepy gore I see
@ nikhilodean:
Methinks there’s a >thwack!blam< effect missing from between the first and second / third panels. Or maybe another panel entirely. But the 'egg' is one of those cartoonish effects from when someone's knocked out by a bash on the head. So either Ruth tried to knock her out or in her panic she ran into a tree.
MidoriLuna wrote:
I agree. My interpretation was that she ran into a tree.
MidoriLuna wrote:
Based on the drawing, I agree with the her running into a tree.
The missing effect is not really missing, if you think of the strip in terms of time laps and snapshots, from Honeysun’s perspective.
@ nikhilodean:
1) That’s a cartoon version of a goose egg. 2) Goose egg is a slang term for getting a bump on the head that gives you a bump on the head. The muscle swells and hardens in the impacted area, often the forehead, and sticks out a little. It’s a real thing. You must have had a very safe and uneventful childhood. Goose bumps are a skin reaction to sudden chills. That’s all for humans, not geese.
In other news, squirrel eats bear claw. I hope the foot’s intact, in a “just pull it out and run away” sort of thing. It would be bad for Mrs Honeysun’s survival chances if it wasn’t. She wouldn’t be able to run nearly as far.
I love the look on Ruth’s face in the last panel, LOL!
Ruth’s probably gotten enough to eat, but it is a cartoon after all.
On one hand I feel bad for her. On the other hand, she was wanting to casually kill a baby a moment ago, so…
@ Ferret Williams:
I get the feeling that Ruth is just Tarrare reincarnated.
This strip reminds me of an old one: http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2012/12/24/0440-important-lesson/
I’m having a hard time appreciating this strip when compared to that old one. The old one was brutal, but it was also funny due to subverting quite a lot of tropes in a clever way. This strip is just brutal (and graphic). I’m also not buying Ruth being a threat to a bear without having a gun, the knife should not be sufficient.
just out of curiosity would it be possible to order one or both of the books/prints after the campaign is over?, I cannot tell you how many times I have wanted to support a Kickstarter campaign but didn’t have the money at the time it was going on, and I am trying to save up for a convention I want to go to later this year.
In any case, I hope you and yours have a very Happy New Year.
THIS GOT WAY TOO DARK WAY TOO QUICKLY!!
Back in strip 0767 The Legend
It is stated that “she once tore a grizzly to pieces and devoured them in seconds”
And in [0884] Stupid Animals, Ruth only has a knife when attacked by a bear.
So the arc is canon to comic history.
@ Sam:
The bear is freaking out because she knows the squirrel is NUTS in the head and let’s face it. The truly crazy ones, even unarmed can be scary because of both reputation and behavior. So with that in mind, that squirrel still scares her because she knows, gun or no, that squirrel will eat her alive.(Which we see happening anyway.)
@ Egomane:
Yeah, the dropbears in Australia are something shocking. We lose a couple of dozen tourists every yeat.
Into the stomach of holding with ye!
What the fuck the Bovil?!
@ Nsinger998:
*Novil
@ Regis Earsquake:
Animals eating animals, okay that happens, but being eating alive in small bits at the time is darker than what nature usually does.
I think the part that makes this especially dark is that the bear is still alive. Which, is a level of cruelty that western cultures have found repulsive since biblical times. Ruth is interested in seeing the bear suffer, with physical and psychological torture. Do I blame her? No. Do I condone it? Hell no.
@ Crystalgate:
This, following: http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2016/04/04/0774-a-strip-for-peace-and-tolerance/ and the latest comic really make it hard to feel bad or shocked about the mrs. Honeysun wanting to eat one of the little ones. True, they are just little ones, but so far our heroes are just all too happy with lying, killing and apparently torture, so… Yay for the heroes? Sure, don’t blame kids for their parents, but in this instance I believe they’ll grow up to be pretty much the same tiny entitled overlords as the others. 😀
But one just has to wonder what the heck are all the other gods doing or is the raccoon goddess really only one going around? Now if we got to see the whole bunch of them being just destroyed by something, this all would make much more sense. *winkwinknudgenudgeanimalgodsinablenderbythedozenswink*
Umm, @Novil, this is pretty graphic. Could you put a warning or something?
@ SeanR:
I’d say it’s the spear that did it. You can’t kill an elephant or a tiger or… really, anything much larger than you are with a club. Bows weren’t much use against larger animals, either, at first. Spears, though… they’re like giant teeth with impossible reach! No defense, no hope for the beast.
Also, yeah, the blood was pretty shocking. Though, it’s only inferred that it’s blood. It could just be too much maple syrup. I’m sure that would be in the 4Kids dub.
@ Liah:
Actually, in nature predators don’t generally wait until the prey is dead, as such, to start chowing down. They just wait until it can’t effectively fight back, and tuck in.