December 30th, 2014
31 Dec 2014 · page 450 of 1306
The purple hippo of happiness was the true hero all along!
Cast: Benjamin Thackerey, Jack O'Malley, Purple Hippo of Happiness
Comments (74)
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We have a wild evil genius puppetmaster in the making !
Ah yes, evil genius puppetmaster Ben, I can see it now. 'The O'Malley wants you to clean the room', 'the O'Malley wants you to tidy that mess', 'the O'Malley wants you to remove these noisy nuisances', 'the O'Malley wants you to fetch me several books from the library, let me make a list for you.'
I love the look on Jack's face in panel four: "I what?"
"And who the smeg are you talking to?!"
I want like a little icon of the purple hippo of happiness's yaaaay face
yaaaaaaay
May I use the full body one for my disqus avatar?
Sure! Anyone is quite free to use any avatars from the comic wherever they want!
Thank you :)
It's impossible to have a bad day when the Purple Hippo of Happiness is around.
It's certainly a bad day for Envy and Wrath.
Ah yes, but it gives them an opportunity to be angry at the good guys and envy their success, which to them is good? I think?
That is the most adorable thing I've seen all year. Probably the most adorable thing I'll see for the next year as well...
PLUSHIE!!!
I want a purple hippo of happiness plushie to be a Thing That Exists.
I do too! It would be beyond cute! (Did you notice the little blue hearts on his feet? A. DOR. A. BLE!)
It would be:
oh my god, I just laughed so hard my cat almost had a heart attack.
"A Dora bowl", omg XD Never would've thought of that
It is so cute!
love it! sweet whimsical and cheerful way to usher in silvester!
New page! Yaaaay! What sort of fuse is that though? They burn way slower in hollywood
Like many other things, they burn/move/happen at the speed of plot.
Well it is lit by magic- that is no ordinary flame.
I just did some searching, and I've found fuses burning at anywhere from 1 foot every 16 seconds to 100 feet per second. Based on how this fuse is being portrayed, I'm guessing it burns at around 20 feet per second.
Omg that was the most adorable Deus Ex moment possible
Yes, what just happened...? This is extremely unrealistic, I can't believe you put this on the page. Ben doesn't have the mental capacity to think quickly in situations like this, miss and or mister author dude. Extremely out of character. Also I LOVE YOUR COMIC Screeeeeeeeech it's so awesome yess i love you purple polka-dotted demon. we shall be the best of friends. the bestest.
I have to disagree. Ben has always had a lot of rational ability; it just hasn't been matched with physical ability. He has been changing in terms of thinking quickly as this episode has progressed and this strip represents his acknowledgement of his new gift and his realization of how to use it. Note that he invokes "the O'Malley". He got that much from talking with O'Malley over years.
Now, the Deus Ex is that the Purple Hippo of Happiness just happened to be right there outside the building. It's no Gollux, but it is an allowable happenstance, I think.
Hmm. I'm a bit too lazy to go back and check, but wasn't the hippo the one who distracted the guards earlier? It's not a big stretch to think would still be around the area, trailing after The O'malley.
Although some time did pass between the escape and the party, didn't it? Still, the Purple Hippo of Happiness is of such unbearable cuteness that in my mind it can be excused.
Agreed regarding Ben- his development has involved learning through practice to think on his feet more. It makes sense he'd get better at it as more and more situations force him to do so. I don't think it really counts as a Deux Ex Machina in any way when it's a situation where it could have easily been written as being resolved another way. The hippo of happiness is just one of the potential ways this burning fuse situation could have gone. Personally I like that it's so unexpected!
I think this was intended to be a joke, with the lead-in of "extremely unrealistic" leading to an expectation of Hippo Ex Machina type complaints, only to be deflected into comments on the characters, instead.
What this guy said.. This guy is smart. I like him.
just about died from teh cute!
Nice colors for Ben's spirit as usual! Orange/yellow for panic, and then cool pink for relief.
... Is it... is it not pink? Everyone is saying purple but I could swear the thing is pink. But, I mean, with so many saying purple... I must still be right because I'm always right, of course. The world readjusts itself, and history is rewritten, to make it so I am right.
Looks pink to me, too.
Of course it's purple. The Pink Hippo of Happiness would be silly. :-)
Pink--a dark dusky rose to my eyes. For whatever that's worth. :)
Either way, cute!
It looks pink to me but I was bowing to the artist's name for her own creation.
I thought it was pink too, but then again I thought the same thing about Barney the dinosaur. The "purple" dinosaur
Nice to have a sweet, innocent spirit's trusting nature NOT taken advantage of by a desperate hero to make the spirit do something it normally wouldn't want to do. I mean, usually at best there's at least a fib involved.
So 2014 ends with the great flomp of 1834 ... seems appropriate. Have a happy new year.
Ahh this is such a cute page. I was definitely not expecting a hippo of happiness based resolution to the fuse issue! But I'm actually glad it involved Ben recognising and using his new powers- and having the awareness to recognise he ought to make it O'Malley who was asking! Also a new colour for Ben's aura is nice to see- the pinkness of happy relief I assume! Incidentally, it is presumably only Ben who could resolve the issue of whether the hippo is purple or pink, since O'Malley up till this point couldn't have identified it!
Who better to help foil a plot to liberate Wrath than the Purple Hippo of Happiness, really?
Yaaaay!
The comic... it was good.
But "The purple hippo of happiness was the true hero all along!" is the best thing. It jus- it just is.
Well, that's the stretch goal for the next kickstarter sorted then.
Someone makes wasp weasels from Girl Genius under licence from Studio Foglio.
[https://www.etsy.com/listin...](https://www.etsy.com/listing/159086800/custom-wasp-eater-licenced-girl-genius "https://www.etsy.com/listing/159086800/custom-wasp-eater-licenced-girl-genius")
Might be worth asking them if they are interested in doing a Purple Hippo of Happiness. Could provide a little extra income for very little effort.
Oh haha, it's by Threnodi! She already reads this comic, too! Her work is very awesome, I keep meaning to commission her..!
Oh, only just saw this here! Haha, hi!
To me, it's sort of purple on the shadowed side. Where the light hits it, it's pink (considering that only one person can see it right now, how does that work?). I don't know which would be considered it's "real" color.
I was going to say it's decidedly salmon-colored, and then I remembered that I've got a thing adjusting my screen right now to take out blue hues after sunrise, so everything I see is heavily tinged with amber. Whoops.
I would say that this page was exceeding well received. Nice New Years gift. ;-) or should that be '.gif'?
it should be! In needs to roll back and forth, and maybe its tongue can go in and out....
adorable is easy, that's "adorabilis" in Latin. fairly standard transition there.
cute is more tricky cause it's a more modern word. it has to be transposed into something before it can be translated. and honestly i'm racking my brain but i'm struggling to come up with something other than "adorabilis"
How about 'bellus', used as a translation of 'charming'?
The classification of that little malform is woefully incorrect, as it is no mere Hippo of Happiness. That is a Happy Hero Hippo. ;)
I would totally buy a Happiness Hippo Plushie. o_0 MAKE THIS SO.
Wrath & Envy: "CURSE YOU PURPLE HIPPO OF HAPPINESS!!!"
(Yes I'm aware that they don't know this happened but I'm just sayin)
Happy Ben is pretty adorable.
Love the Hippo of Happiness!
And my undying gratitude to all of you with normal color vision, for explaining the comic's color-coding for me.
PHoH used Body Slam
It's Super Effective!
Yay, polka-dotted purple hippo of happiness!
Deus Ex Spiritus
Ahhhhh so cute!
Same here, id say its a bluish pink, so i could see some people seeing purple, especially with teh blue spots,
Aka "bright magenta". Which nobody can definitively say is either pink or purple... as it's really both. :)
I AM SO HAPPY WITH THIS FOR IT IS THE BEST POSSIBLE OPTION
and then a crowd appeared from nowhere to lift the purple hippo of happiness onto their shoulders and tote it around the town, huzzahing to the heavens. Everyone not in the know/unable to see said hippo is very confused about what they are doing
(ALSO LOOK HOW TINY IT IS I THOUGHT IT WAS BIGGER)
It is the perfect size for a plushie.
I suspect it can change size. (And may even do so depending on the amount of ambient "happiness" available.)
Fun Fact: The German word for fuse, "Lunte" is, in hunting language, also the word for the fox's tail. So the plan with the explosives and the fuse somehow is perfect for the green fox of envy...
Oh what joy and what surprise! I wanted a hippopotamus for Christmas and only a hippopotamus would do!
This is the second reference I've seen this a.m. How have I not run into this song before now?
...luck? ;-) (Mostly kidding; it's a fun song the first time I hear it each year.)
Oh no, it's too cute!!