In that it was the most satisfying one, yes. But I feel I should point out that this is one of the worst responses to make to a situation like this unless you want to be shot, because the finger that’s already in the trigger will react much more quickly than you’ll be able to grab that gun; even if you know that the person pointing the gun doesn’t really want to shoot you they’re very likely to pull the trigger by reflex.
To be fair, since his index finger extends well beyond the others, it does not appear to actually be inside the trigger guard (although, to be equally fair to you, the front of the trigger guard is visible, so it’s hard to say for sure). Not only that, his thumb is clearly visible on this side of the gun, so he’s definitely not holding the weapon securely. As far as that gun is concerned, he’s as much or more of a danger to himself than he is to her.
Note also, that in panel two, we do not see Ginny’s thumb; it is quite properly on the far side of the barrel from the rest of her fingers. I also note that between panels two and three, she changed her grip so that while she pistol waps Ira, the barrel is pointed safely at the ceiling. Well, safely if the weapon is not powerful enough to blow through the floor above, and if there are no cats on the ceiling.
The worst danger is that the gun might go off on the moment of impact with Ira’s head, with the recoil causing enough of an additional impact to seriously injure him! So he’s lucky it hasn’t got a hair trigger, and/or the safety was engaged at some point.
The safety is useless on a gun when a sudden impact is involved. My bet is that he never had it loaded in the first place, as he never intended to shoot her. He works by intimidation and manipulation, not by actual violence.
It’s difficult to tell from a two dimensional rendering of the real action, but given that one’s only chance against a gun when empty handed is to be within grabbing distance, it’s worth a shot, There are ways to get out of the line of fire while controlling the direction the pistol is aimed, although it’s a bit of a hail Mary when doing it one-handed.
A good rule of thumb is that when disarming a gunman, the pistol will go off, so re-aiming it is essential. Not good if the room is full of people. Or cats.
Truthfully, I don’t think logic entered into Dr. Lee’s response much; it was a result of had-it-up-to-hereness being reached. She removed an obstacle by turning it into a useful tool (standard science response) and attacking the problem in front of her.
Well sure, if all the gunman wants is your wallet, then yes, give it to them. Your money is not worth risking your life.
But when the situation is more dire, you do whatever you can. And as Kermit pointed out, you move out of the way as you’re disarming them. That way, even if the gun goes off, it’s no longer pointed at your stomach. In all seriousness, I would recommend that everyone – men as well as women – take a class in basic self defense that includes how to disarm an attacker. Some police departments, and even some colleges, will offer the classes free.
Depends on the other person, how they move, and how you move. Is it dangerous? Absolutely. But hardly impossible. Gunmen can and do miss at point blank range with no superhero reflexes needed, if they’re surprised and firing by reflex.
Mr. Green’s ego would never let him shoot before finishing his monologue, and moreover would never consider her rejection possible, so he never intended to shoot either.
Plus chances are he didn’t even remember to take the safety off.
I have to agree with Ira, though I doubt his version involved bullets to the leg, groin, or skull. On the other hand, making a character a joke usually takes a few points of competence from them, if they’re villains.
Of all the hypothetical outcomes I considered for how yesterdays comic would play out, this was by far better than anything I thought of. Go G.I. Ginny!
Shaenon and Jeff ruin all the best ‘ships just to hurt us. Panopticon/Jonah, DARPA grade preservative/Nick (just you wait, they’ll ruin that one too), Whimsy/Aimee, Sweetheart/Dr. Engelbright, and now this.
You considered any of those combinations “ships”? Much less ships good enough to be called “ruined” when they didn’t sail? And you considered Virginia/Ira a ship, too? Are you mental?
Think in terms of this song and it will sort of make sense (Mind you, I would consider Hurahi Suzumiya to be the scariest shipper of all for some very obvious reasons! ^O^).
I guess she somehow knew Ira wasn’t a competant soldier, and I guess Nick really wasn’t feigning helplessness to get the upperhand, I was half expecting him to turnoff the lights and cause a peice of machinery to fall and kill Ira.
I’ve often wondered about that. If he rappelled out of the helicopter to deliver Nick’s present, how did he get back in. I think it’s more likely that Nick had actually landed on the roof, and he simply went along with Ira’s “delusion” of rappelling just to humour the old man.
I seem to recall other hints that he may have been something more than just a security guard in the past, but I don’t recall anything that led me to believe that he was ever a competent soldier. And like the previous comment said, he may not have kept in practice.
Probably because he’s a good enough hacker to not only recognise and escape the system, but to also bend it to his own will. Remember how quickly he broke the Whimsy VR game. Ira couldn’t risk it. Plus the fact that Nick just knew too much.
Would it do any good? Not only would he spot it immediately for what it was, but his hardware has an uncontrollable tendency to seize control of virtual environments and bend them around him, which makes playing computer games kind of pointless.
And before you point out that he didn’t do that to the Whimsy VR, they were probably able to construct it to counter this, while it’s doubtful that ASig had it in mind when they built their extirpation environment.
Like I said the other day, Nick would take that as a horrible insult, and she knows it. Back when she knew Nick as nothing more than her current project, she might have considered it, but she would never do that to him now.
Eliot: You see, this is why I don’t like guns. They have a specific range of efficacy. You see, most guys will make one mistake. They get too close.
[Knocks down the gunman and takes the gun, unloading it]
I was thinking of the scene in “Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles” where a carload of punk kids are trying to rob Mick and Jacko. Mick says “Son, do you know how fast you have to be to catch a tiger snake?” – and before the kids can even think about it, Mick and Jacko have taken their guns away and are pointing them back at the kids.
He’s my mom’s favourite character in that series. She likes the fact that while he doesn’t like guns, he’s very good with them, and will use them if he has to.
Yep, a bit like the climactic scene in “Quigley Down Under”, after Tom Selleck’s rifle marksman character has spent a large part of the movie telling people that he doesn’t have much use for pistols.
(And he only told two people in the movie that he never had much use for pistols. That’s hardly “a large part of the movie”. Of course, one of those two people did happen to be in that climactic scene.)
At this point, Dr. Lee is so very /done/ with everything that I’m surprised she hasn’t gone Mad yet. But then, nobody’s laughed at her (LAUGHED!), even those Fools at the Institute.
Be grateful that those scenarios weren’t the second to last things to go *through* your head, Ira. And Dr. Lee was being *nice* about where you got wapped. There are so many worse places to hit a guy in the head when you have a club to use.
I
Could make the world seem new.
I could hide in plain sight, whenever I wanted to.
I could take the innards from a helicopter nerd.
I could flush them down the pipes without another word.
But my great accomplishments aren’t what I want to do.
Since I can’t have sex with you!
I can’t have sex with you….
I
Could extirpate without a thought.
Hey, and I could rearrange your life whatever you’ve been taught.
I’ve got Anasigma at my beck and call.
I could bring out walnuts, if you want it all.
Unimpressed are you with all that I can do.
Since I can’t have sex with you!
I can’t have sex with you…
I could blind reality, you better not doubt I can.
I could make a VR jail, just by showing my hand.
Oh, I could origami and leave no clue.
The thing I want the most right now, you’re unwilling to do.
Unable am I, with the position I possess,
‘Cause, well, Doctor Lee I cannot impress.
And I…can’t have sex with you!
Lee, you’re hurting my pride ‘cause I can’t have (sex with you.)
Won’t you take my manly offer? I can’t have (sex with you.)
Lee, it’s just what I want, I gotta have (sex with you.)
That’s not the gun I had in mind. I can’t have (sex with you).
I, I, I, I, I can’t get (next to you)
I, I, I, I, I can’t get (next to you)
Girl, you’re hurting my head.
—from “I Can’t Get Next To You,” Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, originally sung by The Temptations.
The cast page for Virginia Lee says that she is non-enhanced, but I could see her testing out a few things some night when she got bored. In addition, Ira is an overconfident narcissistic jerk. Those traits tend to limit combat efficiency.
You can’t really tell much from that. Shaenon said some time ago that she wasn’t very adept at drawing realistic looking guns. She’s gotten a lot better at it over the years, but I still wouldn’t count on it.
No-one else has picked up on it, but Mr. Green says “return to us“. A hint that maybe he really is a bunch of whatevers in a human suit?
Another thought that occurs to me is about yesterday’s statement “I live enough in imagined identities–“. There’s an SF novel, “All My Sins Remembered”, by Joe Haldeman, where the protagonist has had his personality overwritten multiple times to make him a better assassin/secret agent in different contexts, with the inevitable mental breakdown and multiple conflicting personalities. I wonder if something similar is being implied to be going on with Ira?
Or maybe it’s just confident acting/roleplaying, like Frank Abagnale? But then why the “to us”? Could his roleplaying gotten out of hand to the point where he’s confusing himself?
And that’s the second time Gavotte has called ‘GreenWeen’ “great humbug”
so HE might not, ultimately, be human. Would explain a tendency toward cold-bloodedness, human overlays on an entirely different life form*. Lovetron probably has OTHER bugs on it, perhaps they compete.
BEST response! Laughing and loving this!
In that it was the most satisfying one, yes. But I feel I should point out that this is one of the worst responses to make to a situation like this unless you want to be shot, because the finger that’s already in the trigger will react much more quickly than you’ll be able to grab that gun; even if you know that the person pointing the gun doesn’t really want to shoot you they’re very likely to pull the trigger by reflex.
To be fair, since his index finger extends well beyond the others, it does not appear to actually be inside the trigger guard (although, to be equally fair to you, the front of the trigger guard is visible, so it’s hard to say for sure). Not only that, his thumb is clearly visible on this side of the gun, so he’s definitely not holding the weapon securely. As far as that gun is concerned, he’s as much or more of a danger to himself than he is to her.
Note also, that in panel two, we do not see Ginny’s thumb; it is quite properly on the far side of the barrel from the rest of her fingers. I also note that between panels two and three, she changed her grip so that while she pistol waps Ira, the barrel is pointed safely at the ceiling. Well, safely if the weapon is not powerful enough to blow through the floor above, and if there are no cats on the ceiling.
No cats but there may be an axolotl or two.
The worst danger is that the gun might go off on the moment of impact with Ira’s head, with the recoil causing enough of an additional impact to seriously injure him! So he’s lucky it hasn’t got a hair trigger, and/or the safety was engaged at some point.
The safety is useless on a gun when a sudden impact is involved. My bet is that he never had it loaded in the first place, as he never intended to shoot her. He works by intimidation and manipulation, not by actual violence.
It’s difficult to tell from a two dimensional rendering of the real action, but given that one’s only chance against a gun when empty handed is to be within grabbing distance, it’s worth a shot, There are ways to get out of the line of fire while controlling the direction the pistol is aimed, although it’s a bit of a hail Mary when doing it one-handed.
A good rule of thumb is that when disarming a gunman, the pistol will go off, so re-aiming it is essential. Not good if the room is full of people. Or cats.
Truthfully, I don’t think logic entered into Dr. Lee’s response much; it was a result of had-it-up-to-hereness being reached. She removed an obstacle by turning it into a useful tool (standard science response) and attacking the problem in front of her.
Well, yeah. My comment was not meant as criticist at Virginia but a “don’t try this at home, folks” warning.
Well sure, if all the gunman wants is your wallet, then yes, give it to them. Your money is not worth risking your life.
But when the situation is more dire, you do whatever you can. And as Kermit pointed out, you move out of the way as you’re disarming them. That way, even if the gun goes off, it’s no longer pointed at your stomach. In all seriousness, I would recommend that everyone – men as well as women – take a class in basic self defense that includes how to disarm an attacker. Some police departments, and even some colleges, will offer the classes free.
Depends on the other person, how they move, and how you move. Is it dangerous? Absolutely. But hardly impossible. Gunmen can and do miss at point blank range with no superhero reflexes needed, if they’re surprised and firing by reflex.
In this specific instance, it’s the right move.
Mr. Green’s ego would never let him shoot before finishing his monologue, and moreover would never consider her rejection possible, so he never intended to shoot either.
Plus chances are he didn’t even remember to take the safety off.
DIRECT ACTION
virginia is beyond done with this crap, to the point where nothing and nobody is going to stop her from getting the heck out of there.
Heh. ^_^
MUAHAHAHAHAHA!
Why did a hair metal version of ‘Vampire Killer’ (Castlevania) start playing in my head in the 2nd panel?
Honestly, Green, she has been trained by the best. Namely, Nick.
I have to agree with Ira, though I doubt his version involved bullets to the leg, groin, or skull. On the other hand, making a character a joke usually takes a few points of competence from them, if they’re villains.
Of all the hypothetical outcomes I considered for how yesterdays comic would play out, this was by far better than anything I thought of. Go G.I. Ginny!
Ditto
Bravo!
Likewise! As soon as I read this strip, four words appeared in my mind: “Didn’t see that coming!”
(That is, I, a reader, didn’t expect things to turn out this way. Admittedly, Mr Green obviously didn’t either.)
Is it just me or is she no longer cowed by authority? He’s lucky to still *have* an inside of his head!
Have we all been complicating their relationship unnecessarily?
Let me put your mind at ease. Yes.
Shaenon and Jeff ruin all the best ‘ships just to hurt us. Panopticon/Jonah, DARPA grade preservative/Nick (just you wait, they’ll ruin that one too), Whimsy/Aimee, Sweetheart/Dr. Engelbright, and now this.
You considered any of those combinations “ships”? Much less ships good enough to be called “ruined” when they didn’t sail? And you considered Virginia/Ira a ship, too? Are you mental?
I’d reply with the “that’s the joke” image from the Simpsons here, but I’m too lazy to go find it right now. Please pretend I did.
Think in terms of this song and it will sort of make sense (Mind you, I would consider Hurahi Suzumiya to be the scariest shipper of all for some very obvious reasons! ^O^).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdtTfQJCO2Y
That said, Rex is right. Ogden isn’t shipping any of these for real so much as he is satirizing those of us who really are shippers. ^_~
I guess she somehow knew Ira wasn’t a competant soldier, and I guess Nick really wasn’t feigning helplessness to get the upperhand, I was half expecting him to turnoff the lights and cause a peice of machinery to fall and kill Ira.
Actually, Ira once revealed an adventurous past…
He may not have kept in practice.
I’ve often wondered about that. If he rappelled out of the helicopter to deliver Nick’s present, how did he get back in. I think it’s more likely that Nick had actually landed on the roof, and he simply went along with Ira’s “delusion” of rappelling just to humour the old man.
I seem to recall other hints that he may have been something more than just a security guard in the past, but I don’t recall anything that led me to believe that he was ever a competent soldier. And like the previous comment said, he may not have kept in practice.
Oh snap I forgot, why didn’t they put Nick in the extirpation virtual realm?
Probably because he’s a good enough hacker to not only recognise and escape the system, but to also bend it to his own will. Remember how quickly he broke the Whimsy VR game. Ira couldn’t risk it. Plus the fact that Nick just knew too much.
Would it do any good? Not only would he spot it immediately for what it was, but his hardware has an uncontrollable tendency to seize control of virtual environments and bend them around him, which makes playing computer games kind of pointless.
And before you point out that he didn’t do that to the Whimsy VR, they were probably able to construct it to counter this, while it’s doubtful that ASig had it in mind when they built their extirpation environment.
Mr. Green claims to be a patriot, and seems to see Nick as a traitor to humanity (in that Nick sided with the machines).
The fact that Nick is also Mr. Green’s rival for Virginia’s affections probably helped prompt a hard dump response.
So satisfying, but wait! There’s more…!
Best unexpected reversal.
ROTFLMAO!!!
If you want the job done right just pizz off a woman! Dr. Lee,you ROCK!
The WAP WAP WAP really sells this. New favorite panel. WAP WAP WAP
She’s been studying fine points of hitting under Hitty.
Heh heh heh.
“Note to self: there’s a _reason_ I employ large numbers of muscular goons.”
Ira’s lucky she didn’t collect his corpus to house Nick’s brain.
Like I said the other day, Nick would take that as a horrible insult, and she knows it. Back when she knew Nick as nothing more than her current project, she might have considered it, but she would never do that to him now.
Eliot: You see, this is why I don’t like guns. They have a specific range of efficacy. You see, most guys will make one mistake. They get too close.
[Knocks down the gunman and takes the gun, unloading it]
I was thinking of the scene in “Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles” where a carload of punk kids are trying to rob Mick and Jacko. Mick says “Son, do you know how fast you have to be to catch a tiger snake?” – and before the kids can even think about it, Mick and Jacko have taken their guns away and are pointing them back at the kids.
That sounds like the Eliot from the show Leverage always liked the parts where he takes on five or six guys at one time.
He’s my mom’s favourite character in that series. She likes the fact that while he doesn’t like guns, he’s very good with them, and will use them if he has to.
Yep, a bit like the climactic scene in “Quigley Down Under”, after Tom Selleck’s rifle marksman character has spent a large part of the movie telling people that he doesn’t have much use for pistols.
Sorry, should have labelled that as a spoiler, but the movie did come out 30 years ago…
Also one of my mom’s favourite movies.
(And he only told two people in the movie that he never had much use for pistols. That’s hardly “a large part of the movie”. Of course, one of those two people did happen to be in that climactic scene.)
Oh, yeah… spoiler alert.
Honestly, Ira, most everything goes differently in your head.
I know it’s not in Virginia’s nature to do it, but she could probably save the world a lot of trouble if she’d just offed him now.
In the last panel, is that “Stomp – Stomp – Stomp” an expression of Ginny’s mood or the echo of approaching cavalry?
Cavalry for whom? o_O
Virginia Lee, Wap Gun For Hire.
Nice.
Bravo, Dr. Lee, bravo. (Applauds)
TWANG!
What was that sound? Oh, that was just Dr. Lee’s last nerve snapping. Look out, world…..
I did not think she could get sexier after being covered in filth and clutching a living brain, yet you did it. Kudos!
Every young scientist should take a course in GRAB! WAP.
At this point, Dr. Lee is so very /done/ with everything that I’m surprised she hasn’t gone Mad yet. But then, nobody’s laughed at her (LAUGHED!), even those Fools at the Institute.
Also, gotta say, that was enjoyable to witness.
Be grateful that those scenarios weren’t the second to last things to go *through* your head, Ira. And Dr. Lee was being *nice* about where you got wapped. There are so many worse places to hit a guy in the head when you have a club to use.
Hitty great role model!
(For a very narrowly defined set of circumstances….)
I
Could make the world seem new.
I could hide in plain sight, whenever I wanted to.
I could take the innards from a helicopter nerd.
I could flush them down the pipes without another word.
But my great accomplishments aren’t what I want to do.
Since I can’t have sex with you!
I can’t have sex with you….
I
Could extirpate without a thought.
Hey, and I could rearrange your life whatever you’ve been taught.
I’ve got Anasigma at my beck and call.
I could bring out walnuts, if you want it all.
Unimpressed are you with all that I can do.
Since I can’t have sex with you!
I can’t have sex with you…
Ooo-ooo,
Ooo-ooo,
Chicka wap, chicka wap.
Chicka wap, wap, wap.
I could blind reality, you better not doubt I can.
I could make a VR jail, just by showing my hand.
Oh, I could origami and leave no clue.
The thing I want the most right now, you’re unwilling to do.
Unable am I, with the position I possess,
‘Cause, well, Doctor Lee I cannot impress.
And I…can’t have sex with you!
Lee, you’re hurting my pride ‘cause I can’t have (sex with you.)
Won’t you take my manly offer? I can’t have (sex with you.)
Lee, it’s just what I want, I gotta have (sex with you.)
That’s not the gun I had in mind. I can’t have (sex with you).
I, I, I, I, I can’t get (next to you)
I, I, I, I, I can’t get (next to you)
Girl, you’re hurting my head.
—from “I Can’t Get Next To You,” Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, originally sung by The Temptations.
This is SO GOOD!
*wild applause*
Hitty would be proud.
Will be? Let’s hope so.
Most awesome scene!
YES! Oh gawd I want nick to have been able to see that some how!
The cast page for Virginia Lee says that she is non-enhanced, but I could see her testing out a few things some night when she got bored. In addition, Ira is an overconfident narcissistic jerk. Those traits tend to limit combat efficiency.
Also, that’s a particularly weird-looking gun. Virginia may have recognized it as a non-lethal weapon.
You can’t really tell much from that. Shaenon said some time ago that she wasn’t very adept at drawing realistic looking guns. She’s gotten a lot better at it over the years, but I still wouldn’t count on it.
*sobs*
Don’t worry. You did a great job on Shelby’s “don’t make me pretend I know how to use this” missile launcher a few continuities ago.
No-one else has picked up on it, but Mr. Green says “return to us“. A hint that maybe he really is a bunch of whatevers in a human suit?
Another thought that occurs to me is about yesterday’s statement “I live enough in imagined identities–“. There’s an SF novel, “All My Sins Remembered”, by Joe Haldeman, where the protagonist has had his personality overwritten multiple times to make him a better assassin/secret agent in different contexts, with the inevitable mental breakdown and multiple conflicting personalities. I wonder if something similar is being implied to be going on with Ira?
Or maybe it’s just confident acting/roleplaying, like Frank Abagnale? But then why the “to us”? Could his roleplaying gotten out of hand to the point where he’s confusing himself?
I assumed that “to us” meant to Anasigma, as a whole.
And that’s the second time Gavotte has called ‘GreenWeen’ “great humbug”
so HE might not, ultimately, be human. Would explain a tendency toward cold-bloodedness, human overlays on an entirely different life form*. Lovetron probably has OTHER bugs on it, perhaps they compete.
*Hints of a plethora of world-wide beliefs here.
I see she learned some things from Unity after all.
Grabbing the gun like that she also took a good sized chunk of skin off his index finger too.
Bad.Ass.
Gotta say, that is some impressive stomping for a barefoot woman.