Mind Control Comics Forum

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Script: Daphne • Inks: Plutonian Knight • Colors and Lettering: Octavia Moon

Coming right out to say I'm enjoying the "bad road" here. Things look tough for the good guys!

...But I can't shake this feeling like we're just waiting for Goku to arrive.

First Mallory and then Julian with the "I'm going in" - they aren't allowed to win in this Universe, we're waiting for Goku! Villain monologuing. Grunting noises (imagined). Vik even bulked up (before he got vanished).

My desperate hope continues to be that some form of consequences that can't be laughed away, victory-boned, or ignored come out of this arc. But, then, if you gather all the Dragonballs you can wish for whatever you want so...

Yes, this is a reaction to the title: "Empty Promises". I almost said this for "Proof by Example" because of the mouse-over but then I realized I'm reading the mouse-overs and trying to find meaning in them. Damn you, St. James Infirmary... you've got me.

Empty promises or empty threats?

Like you, I wonder about the endgame here.  I can see a range of possibilities.

• Zenon wins.  He finishes reprogramming Erin and Mallory and leaves with them.  Adrian, Julian and Cherry are left standing in an empty hotel to pick up the pieces.  The plot shifts to search and rescue.
• Our Heroes win.  Cherry gets rid of the monster, Julian kills the now merely human Zenon, Adrian pisses on the corpse and the women revert to their baseline personalities.
• Mixed victory.  Cherry severs the monster's connection to Zenon, turning him back into an elderly normal human, but Erin and Mallory are still reprogrammed.  Zenon is forced to ally himself with the SJI gang out of fear of Jakob and winds up living in the basement.  Wacky hijinks ensue as the gang tries to prevent Mr. Roper from finding out.
• Mixed victory two.  Zenon is killed but his reprogramming sticks.  The gang have to figure out how to undo the damage.

More seriously, though, I interpreted the title as a pun: Zenon promising to make Mallory empty.  Which does raise a tongue in cheek question: will he get his deposit back if and when he returns his empties?

There is a missed victory 3 that I am hoping for. They keep saying that the cloud is just Jacob and Zenon is being manipulated by him. Well Zenon is defeated but secretly or not so secretly Erin and Mallory now serve Jacob

Victory 4: Everybody wakes up from one ~crazy~ night on Mallory's Magical Mushrooms.

Still moving in a promising direction.  Just hoping we actually have a bit of an 'Age of Darkness' rather than a sudden hero reversal curb-stomp before the scene ends.

Another thought occurred to me.  Zenon wants Erin's powers, but doesn't seem to care about Mallory's powers.  This is a woman who pretty much negotiated a man back from the dead.  She's got gnarly voodoo connections.  Does Zenon really see no value in that?  Is he just unaware of what she can do?

I by no means dislike Mallory but I feel like I don't know her well enough to care if Zenon succeeds here. And I think that's draining the potential heat from this page for me too. Plus, if Mallory's going to have her mind wiped, we're never going to find out her backstory and all that stuff about Charlotte. And that means I'm never going to have a reason to care that this was done to her. So if this succeeds it means there's another chunk of the story that's never going to be explained, and if this fails it means it's ruined from a heat point of view. It's a lose-lose situation.