By: Annna
[2001-07-13]
The Complete Petey, Part Twelve
October 1970 - February 1971
October, 1970 - Never has a close-up come with such detail. Look at the distal swelling of his hairs! Conversely, the tiny dream figures are very basic. The ladder overlapping the speech bubble is interesting; more so is the concept of a speech bubble within a thought bubble.
I wonder why aliens have to be imaginary but robots can be real.
November, 1970 - An extra, drooping dot in the ellipsis! At least five eyebrows on Petey! An
enormous box of meat! Hand-lettered dialogue! Free-floating exclamation point! This is a very strange
Petey.
Judging by the size of the speech bubble, I think it was originally meant to have typed lettering, but something broke or the deadline loomed near. Patty, always the better-detailed one, is a mere sketch while Petey is polished, suggesting that this comic was grabbed off the artist's desk and rushed to
Good Housekeeping.
February, 1971 - The devolution continues. The title is down to two dots, perhaps in an attempt to keep the average at three. Petey looks a little primitive, but Patty has never been so crudely-drawn, oddly posed, nor has she looked so much like
Arthur. The seals hover oddly in the air; no attempt is made to incorporate them into the "real" world of the comic.
Whatever malfunction the lettering suffered, there is no cure in sight.
Tomorrow:
The End of an Era.
I'm still putting comments on part 11! I should be thinking about what I'm going to do with the lifeless husk of my car, too. this age of degeneracy bodes ill for those whose Peteyology ends up with late-era comics.
as i said yesterday, if they allow one robot onto the strip the whole thing goes crazy. now we have aliens, weird scribble people and underage marriage. what is the world coming to?
The first frame, I don't want to hear green unless it's veggies. The alien has probably chosen Petey to contact because of his antennae. The second frame, Petey's large package is likey a "Sampler" of rabbit parts, perhaps with chocolate-covered pituitary clusters. The third frame, there are plenty of seals, but two of them are duplicates. Missing are "As Seen on TV!" and "Underwriter's LaBORatory"
Downright creepy, all the things that are emerging from and hovering around Petey's brain. I think his antennae have finally been repaired and he's giving them a test in the first panel, communicating with his alien overlords. Naturally, since it's from Petey's perspective, the imagery is very pro-Petey: look how buff he is, like the last panel of a Charles Atlas ad ("Hero of Rogers, Arkansas").
In the next two panels he's trying to live among humans once more, but there's no denying he has been transformed. Even the fabric of the world around him is warping.
If I had to extrapolate, I would say Petey will become an almost Echidna-like character, giving birth to rabbit meat through sheer force of will. And this too would be something for literary critics to obsess over: how he started out as the great consumer of rabbit meat, only to become the great creator.
"Roger's Ark" could be an action/adventure series about a guy (named Roger, I suppose) who has an ark full of rabbits. And, um, has to save them. Or eat them. Yeah, eat them -- but he has to eat them before his arch-nemesis Herman Pelphrey can slaughter them for scientific research. Starring Danny Aiello as Roger, and Christopher Walken as Herman Pelphrey.
So, in your expert opinion, what is the plural of "nemesis"?
In typical usage, the plural is given as "nemeses". However, "Nemesis" was originally a proper name, and I have no reason to believe it was a matter of a root "nemes" plus an inflected ending "is".
We don't say that the plural of "Elvis" is "Elves". So what is the plural of "nemesis"?
I think that multiple Elvises are called "Elvii"
In fact, I recently saw a band in Oakland called The Elvii. They said it was the plural form of Elvis. So you're right, KoP.
And therefore, the plural of nemesis is nemesii. I like it.
You could have 'a plotting of nemesii', or possibly a scheming. To go with your pride of lions, murder of crows, glitter of rave chicks, and crooning of Elvii.
Nemesis is a
word as well as a name, derived from 'nemein', just as
'hysterein' - 'hysteresis'. (The only reason I know the word 'hysteresis' is because of the episode where the TARDIS was caught in a chronic hysteresis loop.)
Of course, the plural of 'Elvis' is 'Losvises'.
Yeah! I shop there!
HREF="http://www.cadenhead.org/book/java2411/java/ElvisPlus.java"
... I guess it comes down to: if we get the word "nemesis" from the goddess, then it's a proper noun at heart.
Re: hysteresis loops and Lalla Ward as Romana. In magnetic materials, as per their description, the hysteresis loop indicates degree of deformation. If memory serves, the area of the loop also directly correlates to the energy lost to heat. In this regard, I believe, it's a lot like the Carnot cycle (which Evil Knievel bought at Sotherby's for $15000).
Incidentally, Jon Pertwee was the best Doctor, and I have the Jon Pertwee underoos to prove it.
I just found out that some time after Lalla Ward divorced Tom Baker, she married Richard Dawkins, and has since illustrated some of his books.
In Smyrna there are two Nemeseis (the Greek plural), who appeared to Alexander the Great in a dream and inspired him to rebuild the city. So, nemeses as more than one non-divine retribution seeker, Nemesises as more than one goddess named 'Nemesis', and Nemeseis as more than one goddess with the title 'Nemesis'.
Now -- Romanas or Romanae?
I'm really, really sorry to have dragged Romana's name into this, because my head is starting to hurt big time. Now I've gotten to wondering:
What do you call more than one TARDIS? Is that like "tard" with a singular ending? So maybe it's a Yellow Bus of TARDISes?
What about more than one K-9? It can't be a pack because they have obviously been unpacked.
Why do ex-Doctors keep playing swamp creatures? (Worzel Gummidge and Puddleglum)
I feel like I need a shower. Funny, discussions of rabbit meat never did this to me ...
.
