April 28th, 2014
29 Apr 2014 · page 358 of 1306
Nice to know honesty when you see it.
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Cast: Heinrich Wolfe, Jack O'Malley
Comments (32)
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What I've always kind of wondered is how exactly Mal ends up wearing clothes in complimentary colors and not, like, orange pants and a purple vest.
I just kind of figure that he only owns clothes that are more or less in the same color scheme (I seem to remember only ever seeing him in earth tones). Whether he could see in color before this incident, and his wardrobe is mostly a carry-over from then, or if he just has someone help him avoid any garish colors when he goes shopping, I've been assuming that he just keeps his wardrobe within a relatively limited color palette.
Or he can see what people really think of his clothes and avoids anything that causes too much hilarity in their spirits :D
That would work nicely. Just hold up the clothes and go for the once that don't cause people to recoil in horror.
Maybe it's just that he's always broke, so he buys whatever is cheap that fits, and cheap clothes aren't brightly colored.
Pfft, he can literally see that
It's also possibly because they didn't have incredibly garish colors for men, at least not many of Mal's class. I think those sorts of colors were reserved for rich people, since purple was considered a royal color, and at other times I think both gold and red were to. That leaves colors that could horribly clash, but maybe he's just lucky in the fashion department ;) ?
For some reason I thought Mal was on fire the first time I read this and now I can't unsee it. Makes that conversation even more awkward... XD
Yay, new page full of awkwardness and crushing guilt! (but they already look BroTP here. So bloody endearing :-)
And now we know the incident had nothing to do with Mal's Sight! Progress!
I presume that the guilt is why Wolfe's spirit has that color?
...yeah, he can pretty much littérally see that :)
I confess I'm curious if Mal just developed his emotion sense or not.
The presumption is he did just develop it. At least his first reaction seems like he is seeing something weird, not what he sees every day. No explanation of why just yet. But the brush with death idea is looking better.
I think that if it had just developed Mal wouldn't have adjusted to it so quickly. I think he's surprised because Wolfe's emotional image is always playing a violin, and maybe because it's multicolored. Haven't most of the others been single-colored?
Now for a third alternative, Our previous/future visit with the lads started with several hints of O'Malley having some dealings with Widdershins. Quite vague, but it is possible his sight is related to some Widdershins event.
Yeah, I think from the dialog (-Your... -My what?) he's surprised by the unusual look of Wolfe's spirit, not by the fact that he sees it. From the last panel it sounds like he's used to reading people's feelings from the look of their spirits (he'd have to have adjusted extremely quickly if this is a new feature for him).
Seems that way to me too..that he had the soul vision prior, I mean. I get he wouldn't want to provoke what might be a hostile soldier if he was seeing spirits for the first time, but on the other hand that'd be weird enough I think he'd be alarmed more than one panel over it..? Wonder if he's dead or if it's a threat or if Wolfe sees it or something if it was new.
I took it as he was surprised by Wolfe's uniform...
O'Malley just got knocked down by a possibly fatal wound. In such cases, when he wakes up, he is told everything is fine and to go back to sleep, and in fiction or fact, he has little ability to disobey. In effect, O'Malley is just too tired to be scared or to stay excited about anything.
Dr Schtein probably had a wardrobe before the accident, so at least he'd be in with a better chance of guessing which shirt was which.
Also people who haven't read String Theory should fix that right now [http://www.stringtheorycomi...](http://www.stringtheorycomic.com/comics/chapterone/chapterone/ "http://www.stringtheorycomic.com/comics/chapterone/chapterone/")
Dr. Schtein probably also wouldn't care if he dressed in a mismatched fashion. Or at least he'd pretend not to.
Ditto Mal. Between the two comics we paint a pretty misanthropic view of colour blind folk!
Colorblindness in males covers a huge range of impairment. I can't tell certain tints of red/green/brown apart, but otherwise (I think!) I see color pretty normally.
Had a friend some years back who was monochromatic. His wife once let him go car shopping alone; never again...
Huh, first time I think I've seen the < > brackets for when characters were already speaking English but it works here so I'll just be amused at the idea that the comic has been "translated" back and forth.
The only other place I've seen it is "Love and Rockets", in stories where the main viewpoint characters are Spanish-speaking but there's some <english> dialogue too. Neat trick, not used nearly enough.
I think it's because the default language is German for this chapter, so <brackets> indicates not-German.
Of note is that "wuh" and "eh" were apparently spoken in German. :)
But then why not just say "Your back has a weird glowy thing..."? I think it makes more sense with "Your [stops mid-sentence remembering that he doesn't have a word for the things he sees that another person would understand, and because Wolfe won't be able to explain the fact that his spirit looks unusual anyway]". The dialog puts too much emphasis on the unspoken word that's supposed to follow "yer-" for that word to be "back".
Mal acts like someone who already knows from experience that what he sees isn't shareable with others. I think that if he were seeing things for the first time, he'd at least try to talk about them.
Probably Dr. Schtein goes to the same stores all the time and knows which ones have staff he can trust. Or he asks anybody who happens to be around. I've had total strangers ask my opinion in stores.
I think the White streaks in his hair came after the gunshot. I didnt see it before but, that doesnt mean it was not there. he looked a lot younger when they were bringing him over to discuss his possible hanging. imo.
He had them before, just hiding under much more black hair.
Did Wolfe tie O'Malley's hair back while stitching him up, because Jack did not have that adorkable little pony tail the last time we saw him
Hah, he did indeed. Had to get the hairmop out of the way somehow.
Re-reading the comic for the second or third time, and I just wanted to say that the second (...um third?) panel in this strip is my favorite picture in this entire wonderful comic. I just love Wolfe and Mal so much! :D