Commander doesn’t really know exactly how old he is thanks to this kinda thing
October 12, 2015
2:50 am
It’s always tough on a relationship when one person goes off and has some kinda new personal growth or gets stuck in an intergalactic prison camp for some unknown stretch of time and the other stays where they are.
Damn, poor commander. Sometimes what you miss the most during a long trip is your bed.
Damn, 3 am.
Time zones.
Or time travel perhaps?
Check the link in these comments and find out
Has anyone else ever noticed that, more often than not, the word “mature” falls under the header of, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”
When you throw time travel into the mix, it puts a whole new level on the phrase “long distance relationship,” doesn’t it?
O.o
I can’t decide whether the commander is the type of guy to just sleep on the couch because the fight’s not worth his time or the type of guy to get in bed anyway cause damnit it’s his bed too.
Also where did his arm hair go in panel 3 D:
Ahahah I’ll fix it in the colour version.
He’d probably be more likely to just leave completely and find a motel.
He could just look at a tree, and it would mold itself into a bed for him.
In this case after giving his kids a good hug I imagine?
might not have kids yet
Arm hair restored, and oh my. That is a pretty striking eye injury.
oh, don’t worry, it’s not his blood.
He shaved it 30 seconds previous. That’s how long it takes to grow back.
…No wonder they got a divorce. I can understand having trouble letting go of the anger, but… lady, you KNOW he’s a time travelling soldier. He just showed up haggard, bearded, emaciated, his eyes haunted… whatever it was, it can at LEAST wait until he’s had a shower, a shave, a meal, and a good night’s sleep…
obviously he’s pretending. that’s just a wig, a fake beard and some makeup. he was actually in Space Miami Beach for 6 months, working on his tan and sipping on fruity cocktails.
All that is hard to pull you know? He still deserves to sleep in his own bed
Wait. There’s a Space Miami Beach?!?!!?!?
It took a Willenium to build it, but by god it’s getting jiggy with it.
Are we allowed to party after the break of dawn?
There’s a space Florida so why not?
Oh, sure, like you’ve never had yourself interred in a time-displaced prisoner camp for months just to get the upper hand in a household argument.
… guilty
Damn, Wish I had thought of that.
That would SUCK. Relationships are hard enough work as it is!
If I could time travel like his, I’d be tempted to use it to do things 24 hours a day and still have 12 hours of sleeping whenever I’d want.
But then if I kept doing that I’d age faster compared to everyone else. Shit.
Not if you went into the future and Un-Aged yourself :D
You could also send yourself little messages like “Don’t bother with that new movie” or “try the veal next time.” That might save you some time, or at least fill it up with better experiences.
Time Paradox!
You know full well it runs completely on bullshit. As long as you don’t think about these complicated kinda things, it works fine without paradoxes.
Not if you were just jumping ahead far enough to read reviews upon which to base the advice being sent back. Granted, you’d then be dependent on the reviewers, but still, nothing stopping you from following the advice and then jumping ahead to collect it and send it back.
but then you’re just experiencing stuff that reviewers like and you become part of the problem with modern mass media
Actually, isn’t one of the hang ups with time travel whether or not aging affects you during it? Due to how it produces a paradox in that events you would have done if you aged normally may not get done now?
So time travel would just make you not age because it runs on bullshit and thinking about it fucks things up :D
You’d tell yourself, “Don’t bother seeing that new movie, It has the same plot as the other Tom Cruise movie.” The only problem is you didn’t see that either because you told yourself not to. That shit is gonna get complicated!
Limiting yourself to 24 hours a day? You’re wiser than me, at least. I’d probably relive the same day from different places at least a few times over before I accepted the reality that I was going to miss out on something fun.
Huh, yeah you never really see how that works from the other side, usually you see it from the time travellers point of view, they get back from wherever and its only been a few minutes, while from everyone elses point of view, suddenly their friends have aged three years or they’ve become kings or something. I guess those Narnia kids were lucky they physically regressed back to their original age.
I like how they approach the “left behind” thing in shows like Doctor Who. Companion runs away with The Doctor and instead of being back 12 minutes later, Doctor fucks up and it’s 12 months later, leaving everyone to believe Companion is dead or otherwise missing.
Fun Stuff!!
This is a true work of art, I can’t even draw a straight line with the straight line tool on paint. (because I’m bad at drawing, not because Im bad with computers, I code things for a living)
It takes practice, same as coding.
This has to wreak havoc on emotional connectivity. The things that allow you to relate to someone is temporal integration. The complaints about people at their job, the latest gossip on tv, the bills that are going to be late if you don’t get to the bank. All of it seats you in the importance of that moment. If you are gone for literally years at a time and return 5 minutes later, you will have a serious problem connecting.
Yeah… starting to see why they divorced. I have a feeling Jones would be much more understanding than that on a situation like this.
Unfortunately it’s not something you can really check for without actually subjecting them to it.
Should they really be discussing this? I thought it was a bad idea to think about time travel. Last time this happened Jared started the Eldritch Apocalypse.
Hey, in their defense, last time they were able to put things in order. Also, last time Commander came back like a day later and this time it looks like they’ll be going back to the exact moment they left.
Not the same moment, but this will probably seem like something they did over the weekend.
It’s a bad idea to think about it while traveling through time. It runs on bullshit after all.
it’s only an issue if you think of it while it’s happening you can question all you want before and after just NEVER in transit
This used to drive me crazy about Star Trek. O’brien has spent twenty years in solitary confinement in his mind and one episode later he’s not bat**** crazy anymore. Meanwhile Picard is mentally, like, 40 years older than anyone else his age because he lived out an entire other lifetime thanks to an alien probe. Even in the future when people are living to be 100 or so, there’s got to be a limit to how long a normal human can live without going crazy, even without physical deterioration.
Picard didn’t go crazy because he had people around him in that lifetime of memories. It is not our mental capabilities aging that determine our lifespan, but the actual breakdown of our own body. Looking at people in the 80s to 100s, those who do not have a mental illness already, seem to be fairly healthy mental wise.
Didn’t the doctor from star trek voyager get stuck and had a family for 20-30 years on this planet which time was moving at 500 times that on earth?
When you’ve lived five years, a month is a age, an year an eternity because it’s a fifth of your life. When you’re fifty, a year is barely a blip on the radar. Roughly the same amount of memory is being used to store ten times as many events, not to mention the perspective brought by new experiences. That’s why immortals, or even people living to be 1000 or some crazy number like fantasy races often do, would never be able to form real relationships unless their minds were wired significantly differently. Years would fly by at such a breakneck pace that someone you knew for even a decade would seem like a stranger you bumped into one time.
For Picard, it’s not the years in the probe that would have driven him crazy. It’s the jarring back to his former age. How is he supposed to reform those intimate connections with people he hasn’t seen in so long? To say nothing of O’brien’s experience, where he was actually being tortured for that time…
Starfleet also has the ability to erase memories. While Picard wanted to keep his O’Brian was deeply traumatised and suicidal, I’m betting Julian erased a god portion, if not all of it for his own safety.
As for Picard, I imagine it’d be more like a dream, he wouldn’t remember every second of is lifetime and it’d fade into memory and there’s be a period of adjustment but ultimately he’d be fine.
I saw this episode pretty recently and Julian did not erase O’Brien’s implanted memories of his imprisonment. He just treats him for the depression and sends him back to work.
At first, sure. You don’t go straight to the mind wipes. But if the problems persist erasing fake memories isn’t going to be a problem and he’s right back to normal next episode (which is rather telling considering how big DS9 was on continuity).
Oh… oh geez! That’s horrifying! And I thought the couple from “The Time Traveller’s Wife” had it bad!
And I can see why Commander and his ex got divorced. How can she be so cruel!?
In a word, distrust.
Depends on if he ever used his time travel to win an argument before. If he has then she’s got no reason to believe him when he takes off in the middle of a fight.
That’s disturbingly cynical.
Nah, it’d be a temptation, just think an end to the nastiest argument is just an excuse away. He’s already used it to show off, an earlier error in judgement isn’t out of the question.
Lot of thinking about Space Travel in this comic, the beginning of a new ark?
I thought the Commander got divorced because of how extreme he tended to be about even the most simplest of things, before he started his employment agency?
I’m guessing that he mellowed out after a while. He probably was still on duty when he was married and so he was still actively dealing with the bullshit that his superiors were pushing on him, so of course he’d be a little bit more wound-up. By the time he started the agency I’m guessing that the divorce had finalized and he’d actually had the time (ironically) to see where things had gone wrong on both ends of their marriage.
And of course he’s never ever been an unreliable narrator. He’s also made of steak and American soil.
You never actually went into that level of detail about how the process that creates super soldiers works. I still choose to believe that they start with a vat of dirt and ribeye.
Of course, with cutbacks, they may have ended up pulling dirt from the wrong era, before America existed.
/canada guy’s origin story
considering he was grown in a tube from minerals and protean that’s actually a pretty fair description
Little o’ column “A”, little o’ column “B”.
Reminds me of O’Brien in Deep Space Nine. He’d get replaced by a version of himself from an alternate future that never came to exist, or get instant PTSD from a virtual-reality prison experience that had him live through a twenty-year sentence in five minutes.
This… does a lot to explain the reason he got divorced.
Agreed. This makes me wonder how well do spacefuture marine-civilian marriages do on avegare.
Well, as far as we know, none of the other Spacefuture marines are currently married to any civilians. So not well, I assume.
But given that that B is going to the future it is actually possible that maddie is right and he is just using “going to war” as an excuse…… he can timetravel so he could have left whenever he wanted to and not in the middle of a fight between them…..
Someone hasn’t been paying attention to how time travel works in this comic. You can’t just go to the future whenever, except when you can, but even then it’s all powered by bullshit anyway, and there’s chrome involved.
Poor B52. It’s easier to accept a divorce when everyone hates each other, not when your job is so complicated that there is absolutely nothing you can do to make the relationship work.
I can’t help but notice that she IS giving him a slight hug in that last panel (as much as positioning allows, given that I doubt she could shift his giant arms very much). My guess is that she IS sympathetic to what he seems to have gone through, but she’s still pissed at him. Conflicts of emotion are not easy to resolve. Still, there’s some love there. Good work on humanizing the both of them, Coelasquid.
Exactly – I really like the depiction of their relationship, where he flat out isn’t someone who puts her down because they’re divorced. He still sees the good in her, and she has no problem leaving the kids with him, so she clearly knows he’s a good guy – too few depictions of divorce are as healthy as this one.
That reminds me of Invincible when his Dad went into that portal and was apparently gone for months captured came back and turns out in normal time it was like a couple of hours
I remember that.
*walks to where son can’t see*
“Oh thank god.”
A temporal problem for certain, at least the commander can go back to the original timeline.
You’d be surprised how little changes back home during actual deployments to war, a year or longer, while you yourself are subjected to serious alterations of character or psychology due to environment and events. The Commander’s failing marriage due to spacefuture weirdness kinda resonates with that. Few relationships survive service, mine included.
Seems like a lot of people are shitting on Maddie for being cruel or whatever, but I can see her point. Does the Commander have a tough job? Hell yeah he does. But based on what I’ve just read, she’s been trying to have this discussion (and possibly others) for months, but his job gets in the way. Not his fault, but still. Then, when he repeatedly, but justifiably, brings up how difficult, important, traumatic, and HARD his job is, she sees it as him trying to deflect her attention away from the matter at hand. Anybody would be pissed off when dealing with that for months/years.
And then people are surprised when she’s not over it five minutes later? It takes a rare person NOT to get angry when someone walks out on your argument for the umpteenth time. At least the Commander had months to forgive and miss his wife.
That being said, she loses respect points for kicking him out of the bed. In my opinion, if you’re the one who’s mad, YOU sleep on the couch. If you’re not mad enough to put yourself through a night of discomfort, you can’t be that mad. Exiling yourself to the couch is separating yourself from a volatile environment. Exiling your partner is punishing them for not agreeing with you.
yea, like it’s not just 5 minutes fuming about the guy walking out in the middle of an argument it’s also about 2 seconds to process him coming back and dumping all the stuff he’s been through on her before pulling her in for a tight hug, like the fact she didn’t immediately push him away just from surprise is kinda amazing. (but also yea doesn’t excuse her for being a jerk) kinda weird they just dumped the traumatized soldier on his family and didn’t do any rehabilitation first, but it’s been established the guys he works for are a bunch of asshats.
Considering medicine would be able to expand one’s life span by a lot in the future, could it be that Commander is 90 years old by now?
He’s approximately 32 but he just guesses the date to the nearest month or so.
This is a well-thought out look into some of the potential hardships that come with time travel. But doesn’t this universe’s rules of time travel prevent anything that well thought out?
Thinking about time travel is only a problem while you’re in transit. You can think about it before and after, just during is the problem (because it runs on bullshit, and questioning the bullshit while it’s actively bullshitting constipates the cow, or something).
This is an excellent analogy.
Robert Heinlein played with this, especially in novels like The Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walked Through Walls. It is a real brain puzzle to work out the logistics.
Actually, given the Commander’s show of level-headed honesty and wisdom so far, with perhaps the exception of the coffee peacocking incident, I’m quite surprised he actually got into such a fight in the first place.
Their relationship was sort of like if Rowlf was dating Miss Piggy.
I both love that analogy but find it almost impossible to actually make a picture of it in my head.
He was younger and dumber back then.
I imagine being a designer tube grown supersoldier probably means one doesn’t age at a normal rate. That certainly is working against Commander’s sussing out his age.
“Space War is Space Hell…” ~ Space Sherman
Space lol
Space War. Space War never changes.
The space horror… the space horror.
I could make stupid comments on relationships but my lady gave me the boot after 15 years with no real reason given, so I pass.
They didn’t even rehabilitate the dude before dumping him at home? No therapy? Nothing? Man, the space future sucks.
Well, they wanted him to become a brooding antiestablishment antihero and go renegade so they could dakka him to hamburger and give him more robo-bits. So it was presumably deliberate, which is thoroughly worse IMO.
Didn’t you see what happened when they wanted to make him think all his friends/siblings were dead?
He wanted a doctor/lawyer. Space Military’s Asshole In Charge got pissy about him not being Batman.
If they offer therapy, it’s just a ruse to mod him into a gritty BAMF space-cyborg Batman.
3 hours sounds good? and yeah, 5 minutes is WAY too awkward.
Did Commander never take his ex on one of these things?
‘Course not. She’s a civilian and was the woman he loved, why would he bring her into Space War? Unless you mean time travel in general. Then I don’t know.
Is she a civilian? I could have sworn we saw her in one of the groups of young vat grown soldiers.
Of course, that begs the question why she decided to go hearth and home instead of fighting in the Space Wars. It could just be her choice, or that she was a bad supersoldier, but my as yet to be disproven *grins* theory is that the brass thought she tested better as the Commander’s damsel-in-distress love interest – planning to give him a ‘dead wife’ tragic background at some point. Only every assassin/bad guy/rogue soldier seeking revenge that went to the house either didn’t come back at ALL or were sent back in boxes.
I think the red head people were assuming was her is Wagner, who Jones is talking to in the first couple panels. She’s a lot more gangly than Maddie.
Ah – that makes more sense financially (I can’t imagine growing custom built soldiers and letting them retire would be cheap.)
I had meant one of the training things that they are currently doing.
As far as this specific interaction goes, I don’t know if I feel worse for Rock or Maddie.
Even with both of them knowing full well the implications of time travel, Maddie must look like a cold, unchanging wall to Commander, while Commander must look like an emotional trapeze artist.
… Are we sure Maddie even knows that the Commander is from the future? Given how much the Commander screws with Jones it’s entirely possible that the “oh yeah, real mature, just keep trotting that one out.” is her legitimately thinking that the Commander is full of making things up.
I’m reminded of a small-time sci-fi show called Seven Days. It aired alongside Star Trek TNG in the early 90’s. The government had a time machine, but it could only take you 7 days into the past max. The question was posed by a character: if you keep travelling back in time repeatedly, do you get older because you’re accruing an extra week of time that nobody else does, or are you aging normally because you get that week back? I don’t believe they were able to answer themselves.
LOL, that reminder me of the problems of Steins;Gate. When i watched that I was honestly surprised it took as long as it did for his mind to start to crack. I mean the guy was holding the entire knowledge of at least 4 or 5 different timelines in his head, and that was just for the minor sub-timelines not the Major ones.
To be honest I really feel sorry for Maddie, because this would actually be pretty stressful for her too. Think about the fact that if the Commander didn’t deal with issues she needed to talk to him with. He leaves, then five minutes, literally five minutes later he comes back shaking and wrecked by whatever they had him doing and then she has to deal with the fact that she is still (reasonably) angry, but also needs to comfort and help him.
The thing is that it isn’t fair to her, she can’t really deal with whatever the problem is without a feeling of guilt about bringing it up when he’s just coming back, but she would have few to no reasonable ways of dealing with what is bothering her. Also the amount of turnaround in terms of what is happening, even if she is aware of the fact that he’s from the future and all of this it doesn’t change the fact that it’s going to be jarring for anyone with the gap. And I bet Rock didn’t like doing it either because he does care enough to not want her that stressed.
It would also make discussing any issues difficult if not impossible to do and is probably a big part of what led to the divorce, though I could be wrong.
Nice comic as usual. On its content, all I can say is that I can understand more why B got divorced.
Yay! Color!
It sure makes the difference in panel 5 to show how badly Rock got f**ked up though…Especially his left eye.
:(
IKR? I saw it in color and I’m going “GAWD DAMN!”
Worst of all, they trimmed his beard poorly! The monsters!
WOW this was a really good joke to begynn with :) but how tormented B looks really sells it on the sympati for the commander front :O really great done :)
I should note that Maddy really dropped the ball here in a purely “machiavellean” sense. Here is your husband, who just left after having an argument and then went through months of war AND time in a prison camp. He’s completely forgotten about the argument, which now seems unbelievably petty compared to what he’s been through.
This is the point where Maddy could have fed him, bathed him, put him to bed, and then woken him up with sex… after which B would have done ANYTHING for her. There would be no more arguing. If she’d behaved like that, then all arguments would have ended with “you’re right Maddy, sorry.” That was her golden opportunity to turn herself into the ultimate Cheese Goddess of all things Good.
I need to get myself a Dairy Deity
I need to get myself a Dairy Deity
Hot, freckly redhead? Commander’s got good taste.
I would wait for more exposition on maddie’s character. Somehow it doesn’t smell rotten in Denmark yet. YET.
I look forward to when you involve the Valkyries more, if you do intend on that.
Wait, what were they arguing about right before he shipped out? She must have known he was going to be going soon because of the uniform right?
Oh God! I did not expect the eye! Have that checked Commander, that’s how the lead singer of the Gorillaz ended up looking the way he did.
Even when angry, Commander’s ex wife is smokin’!
Even though she keeps getting drawn during some blazing row, Maddie just always looks amazingly beautiful.
How has this comic gone so long without anybody from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure showing up? Those guys are the definition of Manly Guys doing Manly Poses!
Or something like that, anyway.
Amazing what you can do with some makeup and a wig…
wait…..the one with the skull, is a girl???…..the name made me think she was a man….can we have a full body image of her?
This looks a lot like the design for Commander when he was telling the story to Jared about how he was trapped on a Viking slave ship :D I wonder if its part of the same continuity