2016-07-04
Posted on 2016-07-06 by Aaron

113 thoughts on “2016-07-04”

  1. somebloke

    So, so glad there are adults who value Tyler in his life.

    1. kaian

      Yeah but they seem to all be on the wrong side of the monitor.

    2. tom_gwynn

      Tyler’s parents are being manipulated. I don’t know by who or what or why, but *something* is influencing them to forget their first kid. Maybe it’s a hidden power of Tyler’s and it wants to stay hidden, maybe it’s a side effect of Toby’s powers (which are pretty random in their effects) maybe it’s the forces of Order and Chaos who fear his common sense, but something is playing mental games with them.

      1. RocjawCypher

        That would actually be nice. I really think they are probably just terrible though

        1. Wynne R

          I honestly hope they are just shitty people. I hate that they treat Tyler with such crap but I hate it more when a comic story tries to write off mind control or something.

          Something I fear even more is that earth is heading down the path of Atlas’ home planet and the divide between Tyler and the rest of his family are going to be at the core of it. I remember in an earlier issue where Substitute Atlas was impressed with that Earth had powered individuals that were not FISS.

      2. Nightmask

        They’re being manipulated by their own egos and inability to recognize that the world doesn’t revolve around them (remember they explicitly declared that it was cosmic destiny that their son would attain vast cosmic power and would not accept that he could be anything but a normal human) that’s all. There’s no outside power (outside of Aaron) making them behave the way that they do that’s who they are and is extremely sad Truth In Television. With the creation of Toby they now have their ‘favored son’ and Tyler’s just an afterthought to them and however much you wish they were better parents and feel it must be someone causing it truth is they aren’t better parents they’re awful parents and their behavior is totally, depressingly humanly normal.

        1. Mechwarrior

          Yeah, they’re special, and they believe that normal humans can’t be special, so they can’t accept the idea that they have a son who’s a normal human because that’s not special. Now that they have a special son, they don’t have any need to pay attention to the non-special thing.

        2. Nightmask

          Exactly, they’ve a son that can do all the things that they can so they’re off living the life as it were leaving the other son behind. Something far too common both in RL and in fiction, like the episode of L&O:CI where the wealthy father always favored one son over the other until it led to murder, resulting in losing both sons in the end and he promptly is shown at the end doing the same thing with his grandsons as he embraces the one as it runs up and totally ignores the other.

        3. Someguy

          They are just Meta-Supremacists who refuse to acknowledge that they have a “normal” son. Before Toby came along, they were no different from homophobic parents trying to “cure” their gay son.

          Now they’ve basically re-classified Tyler’s existence in their head as Toby’s “Evil (non-meta) Clone” trying to supplant their “real” sons’ place.

        4. evileeyore

          They aren’t going that far. If so Tyler would be dead, imprisoned, or his parents would be. No, now tht they have Toby, they can simply ignore Tyler as long as he isn’t directly in their face and arrange things so he’ll never be in their face.

          Real (terrible) parents do this sort of thing all the time.

        5. Dahigi

          The fun bit? Tyler DID attain a vast cosmic power, at least for a short time. He was the one person chosen to determine the future of humanity.
          http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/09222011/

        6. Dahigi

          The funny bit? Tyler DID attain vast cosmic power. He was the one chosen to determine the future of the human race.
          http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/09222011/

        7. Marie

          In their heads they don’t understand how their protection and lack of valuing Tyler is terrible. If he hadn’t been accepted at PS238, HE would have been ripe for manipulation by people like the Headmaster. He has a deep seated reason to resent powers because of the neglect/rejection, and could have become a Lex Luthor type character. I really think the charter for PS238 should be changed to include ALL kids of metas as they have special pressures and issues that the regular school systems simply cannot handle. Also if that’s changed then the fiasco where the class election was vacated won’t apply. The meta and normal societies need to interact in normal ways not just emergencies.

          I can’t think of a mundane way for them to learn to value him until he earns the Nobel prize, not in time to save his childhood. I suspect the only way to chip at those blinkers is if he rescues them as the known Moonshadow before they learn who he is. This is very much a disability theme.

        8. CountryMage

          I think just about every prominent Meta has been saved by the Revenant at some point, and it hasn’t helped their image of the “unpowered.” If anything, being saved by a normal, or anybody really, probably leads to more bigotry, due to insecurity.

        9. Devlerbat

          Doesn’t PS238 already include all metas? What powers aren’t being included?

        10. Devlerbat

          Never mind. Misread what you typed.

        11. WJS

          I do wonder how frequently powered people have mundane kids. All we really know of it is that the Headmaster said that “Metahuman offspring will likely have meta-abilities that are similar to their parents'”. If he really is the only normal kid to come out of a super-couple, that would somewhat ameliorate some of the things his parents have done. Not all of it, obviously, but it would at least make their insistence that he will get powers some day more reasonable, if not their attempts to speed up the process.

      3. Clell

        The Problem with the blaming their neglect on Toby’s powers theory is that they were assholes before he was decanted.

        1. Nobody

          But they weren’t THIS PARTICULAR KIND of asshole.

        2. Nightmask

          That’s because they only had the one, non-powered son they didn’t have the opportunity to degrade to this point until the super-powered clone was created.

        3. mccoma

          Well, Ultima doesn’t think things out very well, such as insurance will cover nuking the top of a building in a town full of people http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/12212011/ – The jump from extremely dense to asshole is a short one.

      4. Wanderer

        Well, in a way. Toby didn’t want to take the chance that Tyler’s parents would reject him just because they now have a super-son, so he used his powers to make sure they wouldn’t. Problem is, not only was the price the best friendship Toby could ever have — so much for Cecil — but Toby’s powers are kind of literal. You can’t reject something you don’t think about, can you?

        1. Nightmask

          That’s not what Toby did, he used his powers to remove the curse on the Principal so that he’d repay him by taking care of the paperwork and other issues to smooth things over with Tyler’s parents so he’d be legally part of the family he did not use his powers to affect Tyler’s parents in any fashion.

        2. Wanderer

          Think again:

          http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/04182012/

          The situation helped both of them, so half of the “bad” went to him; he had to give up the best friendship he would have had, one with Cecil. Notice that the Powers coupls are surprisingly rational and quiet, actually accepting the statement from a “mere mortal” that they’re better off not knowing?

        3. Nightmask

          I’ve read the comic including that part plenty of times, Toby does NOT use his powers to mentally manipulate Tyler’s parents, he uses them to remove Cranston’s curse while asking him to help work things out which since Toby’s also benefiting from lifting the curse due to the agreement some of the negative consequences the imp and cherub hard-wired into his powers also spill over onto him hence losing out on Cecil being his best friend instead of remaining Tyler’s.

        4. Thozmp

          I was looking over the comic you mention, http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/04182012/, and something occurred to me. We assume that “the Best Friend [he] could have” means Cecil, because of the rejection, but what if he was talking about Tyler? They’re supposed to be “brothers” but nothing Toby does, and possibly will do, takes away the resentment that Tyler feels, and keeps them separated.

        5. Nightmask

          Thing is it seems pretty obvious he’s talking about Cecil since he’s looking at Cecil when he says that, either way he’s lost out on a best friend or at least the best he could ever have and in many ways is suffering just like Tyler but Tyler can’t see that for his own pain. I think a step forward for Tyler will be if/when we can see him recognize that and embrace his ‘brother’.

      5. Guesticus

        No, they were pretty much ignoring him before Toby

      6. Jon

        Part of me wants to believe they’re infected with alien mind worms deliberately trying to cause an Omega-1 scenario, but I dunno. There’s something very (unfortunately) human about how terrible they are.

  2. With Respect

    So.. how different are they from many parents?

    1. Nightmask

      Not much different at all, outside the differences you have to remove due to them being supers compared to RL parents. While a certain amount of favoritism is almost inevitable after a point it crosses into abuse like we see here, it generates the ‘Why couldn’t it have been you that died?’ trope as well as the ‘well done son guy’ ones to name a few.

      1. Messenger

        Too bad they don’t know of all the stuff Tyler has already done, with or without powers.

        1. Nightmask

          Wouldn’t matter since even if it was established in the comics that he had an Obscurity field his clone Toby has flashy powers out the extreme so he’d still be overshadowed and if they found out thinking him just normal they’d react pretty much like they do to Revenant and everyone else who has no powers trying to change the world for the better, as people who shouldn’t be trying anything to make the world better as that’s only for the ‘heroes’ to do and try to jail him as a criminal.

        2. Messenger

          “… even IF it was established in the comics that he had an Obscurity field…”
          I thought- according to you- that he does have an identity obfuscation field.

        3. Nightmask

          Seriously, just drop it okay? That kind of thing is tacky and only leads to conflict and arguments and in any case we know that he DOES have a listed power in the RPG and even for us the readers KNOWING he has powers it doesn’t mean anything in regards to what the characters know or how they react. So it does not matter if he’s recognized as having powers in the comic because the power in question is so seemingly limited even if it were known and his parents did know he had a power it wouldn’t matter because they couldn’t see the power and have Toby who has super-flashy reality-warper powers around they’d still favor him since he actually has obvious powers they can see. So really, let it go and move on.

        4. Messenger

          Then end it with this:
          What is that listed power from the RPG?

        5. Lucario

          The listed power in the RPG for Tyler is Lucky Boy. He gets +1 to a lot of rolls.

        6. Messenger

          Thanks, Lucario. 🙂 I’ll take that.

  3. ThatOneGuy

    One simple problem that I see. Tyler’s parents are not throwing him a slumber party. No they are throwing the cloned super brother a slumber party.

    Clone flies in asks about party for Tyler. Parents hear it as the “preferred son’s request” to throw him a party instead of Tyler.

    Now everyone doesn’t have to guess if this is an attempt to be nice to Tyler because his parents didn’t even notice the request was for him.

  4. Seahawk270

    I’m torn.

    I have an honest desire to see The Revenant somehow get involved in trying to remind Tyler’s parents that they have two sons and shouldn’t be ignoring Tyler, because I imagine he could help teach them that lesson in many fun and interesting ways.

    However, I’d also like to see Tyler work it out on his own. He’s proven that he has a pretty level head and can be fairly resourceful, and I’d kind of like to see him hit a breaking point and somehow force his parents into a conversation about the way they treat him all on his own so it would have more meaning.

    1. Nightmask

      I get the feeling that those who recognize how awful Tyler’s parents are consider them too far gone to reach so do their best to endure them when they’re around and clean up after them when they’re gone. Perhaps because they fear if they forced them to confront their delusions they could turn violent (not like we haven’t seen it happen before in fiction and in RL) and violent Supermen running around isn’t a good thing especially if they’re former super-heroes who have the access codes to all those captured super-weapons.

    2. Mollyscribbles

      More than that, I want to see someone enter Tyler’s life who can offer the hugs and associated emotional comforts required to fill his emotional needs. The Revenant is an excellent mentor, but not really a parental figure. Even if his parents are shown the error of their ways, somehow, I can’t see them actually being good parents. Even with Toby, they treat him less as a son and more as a junior teammate.

  5. Prairie Son

    I so want most of the metas in this comic depowered, but Ultima and Sovereign are at the top of the list. Even the psychotic Elemental Powers from the alternate world is a better person.

    1. Nightmask

      I wouldn’t say that but would be nice to see Prime-Tyler’s parents see how their son COULD have gone by seeing what happened to Elemental Powers and get an idea where their upbringing could have taken their son.

      Unfortunately for all those other Tylers we’ve no idea how identical in behavior and thinking their parents were compared to Prime-Tyler’s, we’ve only a sample of three Tylers and two turned out decent so we don’t know if Elemental Powers turned out how he did because of his parents or in spite of them.

    2. Rock

      I disagree. That kid was bad enough that he gave his parents a much-needed wakeup call. Or at least his mum seemed to have had one.
      That may be a rare universe where they became better people…
      Anyhoo, while the Powers are horrible, horrible people and super supremacists, they — unlike E.P., AFAIK — do not deliberately go around traumatizing and injuring people for the lulz or to salve their egos. Of course their attitudes did lead to E.P. in the alternate universe, but still…

    3. Brainstorm

      I also want to see a lot of metas depowered, but not just for the taste of humility. (Sweet, sweet humility.) It would clear the field a bit and let the PS238 kids do some cool things in the public eye.

  6. kerin

    Is this a flashback? I’m kind of confused, because it looks like this is the source of the meta party we saw Tyler showing Ron a few pages ago? Sorry if i’m missing the obvious, but i didn’t recognize any obvious ‘this is a flashback’ signs?

    1. Psiberkiwi

      It’s a flashback that started at the top of the previous strip, albeit without a flashback sign (obvious or otherwise). It’s more implied from what Tyler was saying at the time. (“I went by the EDL building after school…”)

      1. Nightmask

        Took me a bit to realize it too, I first thought we had some pages out of order until things cleared up when I reread the page again.

  7. kaian

    I just had an awful thought.
    Toby took the idea to the parents and the parents invited all “Meta” kids in the area.
    Neither Tyler nor Ron are meta powers. So they are not invited to the sleepover they were asking for.

    1. Lucario

      He was going to ask about having Cecil over, too, and since Cecil is not a recognized meta but a MacGuffin collector he’s not invited either.

      1. David Nuttall

        Cecil is a super. His power is to detect other super-powered people. He has been augmenting his ability with various devices.

        1. Zech

          Cecil is a super, but not an ‘out’ super. He doesn’t go to PS238. Moreover, his powers are a flavor that makes most other Supers feel all squicky inside. Revenant says that most metas react strongly to any power that affects their own. I’d imagine that includes detecting and analyzing them.

        2. WJS

          You’re imagining things. At no point have we been shown that his powers make “supers feel all squicky inside”. As far as I recall, no supers even know he has them, and there’s no reason to think that a super detector would threaten them in the same way that stealing their powers does.

    2. Sewicked

      That is an awful thought. Maybe Tyler can get in, bringing Ron and Cecil, and they have fun while the meta-party occurs elsewhere in the tower. Apparently, they haven’t barred Tyler from the tower. Yet. That may be oversight on their part.

  8. Segev

    The problem with the “they’re just jerks” theory is that would mean that they’re LYING when they say they don’t remember Tyler. Which is possible, but unlikely, since the need to be reminded makes them look bad. Even if it’s just “bad” in the sense that you look bad if you don’t remember that it’s Tuesday and have to keep being reminded that that means it’s the day you have monitor duty. Given that they can get away with ignoring the inconvenience without ignoring the fact by simply saying “ah, yes, Tyler, about you…” rather than doing things that frankly make them look DELUSIONAL (e.g. “I will need to run a background check on this ‘Tyler'”), it seems unlikely they’d choose to deliberately make themselves look mentally deficient.

    The behavior I’d suspect from “they’re just jerks” is a bit of irritation and “yes, yes, we know” sort of handling of it. Yes, Tyler’s their son. Yes, yes, they remember (or at least claim to remember) that important thing for him that they’re not really interested in. That’s somebody else’s responsibility.

    But actually NOT REMEMBERING Tyler is… bizarre. It makes them LOOK bizarre. I suspect something is up with that beyond just them being jerks. (And don’t get me wrong, they ARE jerks. It just doesn’t explain this apparent inability to REMEMBER Tyler.)

    1. Prairie Son

      Apparently, Bill Clinton forgot there was a genocide in Rwanda by 1995. It’s amazing what people can forget if they put their minds to it.

      Also, they didn’t seem to remember Tyler often before Toby showed up.

      1. Nightmask

        You’re failing to consider some things there, such as the fact that Toby is more than just a clone so that he looks like Tyler he even has most of Tyler’s memories AND he’s got the flashy super-powers Tyler’s parents expected Tyler to develop. When they originally encountered Toby when he went fully-autonomous and powers fully activated they completely believed it to be their son finally come into his own. To them HE is their son, NOT Tyler. Tyler’s that non-powered kid that looks like their son and given how we know his parents are super-powered elitists and felt their son had a grand cosmic destiny (ironically they’re right as we’ve seen but THEY don’t realize it) they see the clone as their child and have marginalized their real son to the point that they barely remember he’s the original at times.

  9. Pax

    You know, something occurs to me, about Tyler. Something a bit unpleasant.

    Here we all are, loudly proclaiming our superiority over the boy’s superpower-obsessed parents for caring about Tyler, not about whether he has a superpower or not. But …. so many of us ARE trying to find ways to say: “He has a superpower after all, thank heavens! The universe is RIGHT again”.

    We’re just as bad about needing him to have a power in order to validate him as a character, as his parents are.

    Why can’t Tyler just be Tyler??

    1. Segev

      I think it’s more that we’re reaching for explanations for things that don’t seem to make sense. Some are reaching for “maybe he has a power that hides itself and influences people’s minds.”

      Precisely because this seems to fly in the face of the intent of Tyler’s place in the story, I think that a flawed hypothesis.

    2. Nightmask

      Tyler can be Tyler but as Segev notes we’re looking at events and trying to explain some things that just don’t make sense, after all if the supers were really so universally clueless that they can’t go ‘oh that’s just Tyler in a different costume’ then how do they survive? If they couldn’t figure that out how do they outwit all those super-villains and save the day? It starts making sense though if he’s got a subtle power that’s causing that blindspot so we can go ‘okay so they aren’t so mentally deficient that you wonder how they survive’ since it’d be more than a little strange that ALL these supers can’t figure it out, that somehow having super-powers makes them incapable of such basic reasoning and awareness.

      So it’s not about thinking he has to have a power to validate him, he doesn’t, it’s about making things more plausible. Whether he has a power or not he’s still the kid whose parents can’t accept him for who he is and think he’s only of value if he’s got obvious powers (which would include a super-immune system since that’s easily detected and proven), a kid who has to deal with a sudden copy of himself that has impressive super-powers and is everything his parents wanted and unable to see yet just how much he’s done that’s beyond anything his parents believe he’s capable of as a normal. He feels inferior to the clone even though the clone’s never managed anything as impressive as he has to help the world and worse CAN’T thanks to the imp and cherub nerfing him at a fundamental level. He still hasn’t taken the words of his alternate reality counterpart to heart, that he’s the most important Tyler of all.

      1. Moe Lane

        On the bright side, at least we know that it all works out for Tyler in the end. I mean, the dude will be partners with Batma… ah, the Revenant. That’d be the dream job of half the people reading this.

      2. Richard Grayson

        The fact of the matter is, though, that characters not getting recognized in their superhero (costumed) identity is a very common superhero trope. The way I see it, it’s not that Metas lack common sense to see through “obvious” disguises (Tyler’s costume really isn’t that bad compared to most other costumes worn by characters in this genre), but that Cecil’s “detect Meta” power gives him an advantage in seeing through people’s disguises. So I think Tyler would be perfectly capable of concealing his identity without having any innate “identity concealment” powers.

        Also, you have to consider that some supers actually have figured it out. The notable example of this is Alfred Cranston, the principal of PS238, who put two and two together when Coach Rockslide described a “mini-Revenant” fighting during the alien invasion arc.

        1. Richard Grayson

          Sorry, my bad. That response is supposed to be to Nightmask.

        2. Mike

          Exactly. I don’t see any need to give Tyler some kind of “identity obfuscation” power to make it more plausible that no one but Cecil has recognized him right away.

          By the time Tyler became Moon Shadow, not only was he known to have no powers by his friends, acquaintances and teachers, but he had already been seen in a costume that his parents made him wear, one bearing no resemblance whatsoever to Moon Shadow’s gear. The teachers, at least, also knew he was scared and not the kind who liked to take risks.

          Now, suddenly, this masked mini-hero appears, taking on (and defeating) super-villains, aliens, and what-have-you. If any of the kids even noted the resemblance to Tyler, it would understandably be dismissed with a “nah, can’t be” (especially after his reputation for having “ultra-darkness powers” started to grow). And the adults would have a hard time reconciling this little hero with the scared kid who “lost” his permission slip to try and avoid taking a trip into space. I’d imagine the teachers only expected his training under the Revenant to help him keep from getting splatted, not turn him into a hero in his own right.

        3. Nobody

          Didn’t the teachers pretty much figure it out immediately, not the least of which is because they suggested it to Cranton in the first place? Heck they were even lampshading it in the last time it came up.

        4. Mike

          Nope. During the battle with the invading aliens, with Cecil, Moon Shadow, the teachers and many of the other PS238 kids out fighting, there was no indication any of the teachers knew Tyler was Moon Shadow. And it appears Cranston only put two and two together because Positron Two mentioned the aliens had Tyler’s DNA right before Coach Rockslide described the three kids who were fighting the aliens. Even after he asked a pointed question about Tyler’s whereabouts, it didn’t look like Herschel or Positron Two got it.
          It doesn’t look like anyone else figured it out until Tyler had to take off his Moon Shadow outfit to be prepped for stasis – and only Doctor Newby, Cranston, and Miss Riley were present at that point. Presumably Cranston told Miss Kyle, or else she deduced it when she found out Tyler was infected and in stasis when it was Moon Shadow she had been taking to quarantine (the kids failed to make that connection, with Zodon speculating that Moon Shadow had passed the virus to Tyler somehow before getting squished by falling rocks).
          It does appear that Vashti may also know; I haven’t done a thorough dive through the archives so I don’t know who else might have figured it out, or been let in on the secret.

        5. Nobody

          Funny enough, when I hit Random it took me right to the time you were talking about. About Tyler getting put in Stasis.

          But I was thinking more about http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/2016-02-19/ , where 84 says “ALL the teachers say he’s in their classes.”

          and http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/05182007/

          where all the major players are in on it when it is suggested. And of course during the Invasion story arc, all of them pretty much see the revenant and Moon Shadow together and that was all Cranston needed to figure out the similarities.

  10. Moe Lane

    Jeebus, at this point Cthulhu-Man there is being a better parental figure to Tyler than his actual parents are.

    1. Marie

      That might be a good thread. He needs an adult, a powered one that is kinder and alert. His parents won’t fill that unless they get a major whack in the head. He might be the best one to get a handle on SEEing Tyler, as starting with the same soul/fingerprint should show up to a major mystic. Despite angst in comics, there should be be a few who aren’t self-centered outside the teachers.

    2. Nobody

      because he just turned around and walked away?

      I mean I guess that’s better in the sense that he never pretended he was going to care about Tyler, and didn’t throw any additional burdens on him.

      1. Mike

        I believe they’re referring more to the interactions on the previous page.

        But yeah, Ultima and Sovereign have set the “parental figure” bar pretty low.

  11. Refractionary

    I’m thinking this is a side effect of the time when Toby made the parents ignore the fact that Tyler was missing with his powers. When he got back they still ignored him and while Toby promised to fix it maybe he thought it would be better if he didn’t.

    1. Nightmask

      Uh what? Toby never did anything of the sort, he created an imperfect copy of Tyler to stand in for him while Tyler was off on his Argos mission with 84 in his Moonshadow guise and that was it and he undid it as soon as Tyler returned as we saw. He never altered the minds of Tyler’s parents to not notice he was absent or in any other fashion.

  12. Richard Grayson

    General question: How does Tyler feel about Toby at this point in the story? It seems to me that he has at least accepted the fact that he now has a superpowered “twin” brother, but what do you guys think?

    1. Segev

      It’s pretty clear to me that Tyler and Toby like each other. Toby has Tyler’s memories of WANTING parental acceptance, and now he has it, but he hasn’t rejected his brother the way their parents have. However, without the unusual experiences Tyler still has (and, apparently, memories related to the most formative ones Tyler HAD had), he doesn’t have Tyler’s level of cynical self-preservation. Children are malleable, and it’s easy to be swallowed up in the “invincible hero” culture of his parents when he’s so warmly included.

      That said, I think it would be fascinating to see a volume focused entirely on Toby and primarily from his perspective. Toby comes off, unfortunately, as a bit more clueless than Tyler, and it’s hard to reconcile the Tyler from when he was first introduced with the “Tyler” who changed his name to Toby. I think part of that is that we missed out on the points where the shift in perspective to up-beat, slightly prone to overlooking minor problems exuberance makes sense, whereas we saw all the development of Tyler from the scared kid who knew the world was out to kill him to a worried cynic who at least knows his own capabilities.

      Tyler always had that genre-savviness, too. Toby seems to lack it. It would be interesting to see if that’s true, or if it’s mostly a façade he wears for his parents’ benefit (and Tyler’s too, with a side-order of “I fixed it” mentality).

      We got a glimpse of Toby sharing Tyler’s inner personality when he mentioned trying to give Tyler powers, and what would happen if he did. That glimpse got all the starker when he made the comment that revealed it wasn’t…hypothetical. So it may be that Toby as we see him is a narrow façade on a deeper character, because we only see him trying to be cheerful and inclusive of his brother.

      If Tyler HAD powers, he probably would take refuge in the ability to brush off problems in order to not burden others with his worries. I think that’s what we’re seeing with Toby.

      And again, seeing a volume dedicated to Toby and letting us see how he “evolved” from what parts of Tyler he retains would be interesting.

      1. Nick

        I disagree. While Tyler doesn’t hate Toby, it’s painfully clear that he resents him. And Toby, for his part, is hurt because he doesn’t seem to understand why.

        1. Mike

          I think it’s a bit more complicated. I don’t think Tyler resents Toby, but the fact that his parents have pretty much abandoned him in favor of Toby, the super-powered son they’ve always wanted (as we saw in Tyler’s emotional outburst with Ms. Kyle in front of the Moon Shadow memorial). Toby wants to be friends with Tyler, wants to make him feel included, and I’m certain Tyler is fully aware of this and wants to like his “brother”. But Toby’s mere presence (especially in costume) has to remind Tyler, painfully, of how he “doesn’t measure up” in his parents’ eyes, making their relationship very emotionally confusing and stressful for Tyler.

  13. Brainstorm

    Alright, I’m done.

    Can we please, PLEASE drop this conversation about Tyler, the potential for his having/obtaining powers, and especially the notion that his power is specifically to avoid notice as a hero?

    It’s tempting, especially given the presence of Toby in this arc/volume, but we aren’t getting past it. The conversation has now bogged down into nonsense and minutiae. I’m sick and tired of it, and would like to move on to new conversations, new topics.

    How about this: Why is R. Kelly on a radio station titled “Metamuzik”? Are these songs from metahuman musicians, or just music (muzak) that is particularly inspiring to League members?

    1. Nightmask

      Or maybe it was just the ‘leakage’ problem Toby’s powers were cursed with by the Imp and Cherub, since we know it seems to favor ABBA and the song just ending was by ABBA it could be the music we see mentioned is a result of Toby like when Tyler returned from space and found that there was ABBA ‘in’ his clothes rather than some kind of ‘Please HOLD’ music.

    2. Richard Grayson

      If it were an actual radio station, then I would guess it’s just ordinary music marketed for Metas. More than likely all the songs they play are superhero puns of some sort (going by the pattern shown in the comic).

      Let’s play a game: everyone suggest a song or artist which would play on Metamusik (the punnier the better). I’ll go first. Superman by Five for fighting.

      1. Mike

        I was thinking the same thing about the radio station. They’d pretty much have to have “I Need A Hero” by Bonnie Tyler on the playlist somewhere.

      2. Mike

        After thinking about songs for a while, I got “Flash” by Queen (from the Flash Gordon soundtrack) stuck in my head. But while “Savior of the universe!” might tickle some egos, the more meta-centric supers would probably not like the “nothing but a man” line.

    3. mccoma

      I figured the comic itself covered the possibilities itself pretty well http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/07062012/ http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/07092012/

      As to the music, I would imagine there is one heck of a “support” industry around supers, and they of course have special editions of everything. Thus more background on Tyler’s problems.

      1. mccoma

        also http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/08112010/

        1. WJS

          So when someone asks people to stop harping on it, your response is to… keep trying to push the issue. Classy.

  14. Nightmask

    In regards to other matters, I’m surprised no one’s commented on the fact that Tyler’s now locked out of the Tower and only Toby and the rest of the super-group can enter. His parents have now reached the point that they’ve locked their son out of what amounts to their house so the only home he has is the dorm room at the school and the safe houses Revenant has made available to him. His father’s offhand comment about making sure Tyler was ‘background checked’ has now manifested as him being no longer welcome in the Tower.

    1. Guesticus

      No, it is just the Command Center he is locked out of

      1. Nightmask

        They’ve still locked him out of part of the building he used to have access to, they’ve rated their son as a security risk because he’s not super-powered.

        1. WJS

          [citation needed] At what point was it shown that Tyler used to have access to the EDL command centre?

    2. Mike

      I didn’t think it comment-worthy. I’ve worked in secure facilities before, and to me, limiting access to the command center to only EDL team members just seemed like an upgrade of security protocols.

      Of course, rational security protocols have provisions for exceptions (such as giving an on-site briefing to government officials or leaders of other teams, or even just bringing in janitorial staff to clean up). Apparently there is no provision that would allow Tyler in, even escorted, which lends another drop of evidence to your analysis below of the Powers’ criminally-poor parenting style in regards to Tyler. But again, this (sadly) followed naturally from what we saw the last time Tyler was shown in the EDL tower, so it didn’t seem comment-worthy.

  15. TeChameleon

    Y’know, as far as metas not recognizing Tyler-as-Moonshadow… there may be an even simpler explanation still; secret identities are secret for a reason, after all. It may be something as simple as a facet of super-etiquette that wound up being internalized. While this is obviously pure speculation, I can’t say I’d be even remotely surprised to find out that supers’ mental image of their colleagues were far more ‘iconic’ than the real thing- an abstracted representation of their strongest design elements that would be useless for identifying them in any other clothes (at least other clothes that didn’t share strong ties, design-wise, to their costumes. That might even explain why heroes so often wear outfits that are strongly reminiscent of their ‘hero clothes’ :P)

    All that being said, the elder Powers’ behaviour regarding Tyler has crossed the line from ‘neglect bordering on abuse’ to ‘have these people been lobotomized?’. It’s not remotely funny, so comedy-induced stupidity seems unlikely, and while we haven’t seen a lot of them, I don’t think they’ve really shown the symptoms of the mental illness that would cause them to decide that Toby WAS Tyler (I was *going* to say that they’re not calling him Tyler, for example, but they’re not calling him Toby, either- almost exclusively ‘Absolute’)- at least, the narrative doesn’t seem to be pointing that way.

    I can honestly see why a fair number of readers are suspecting ‘supervillain plot’ or ‘supernatural interference’; either one seems more likely than ‘Ultima and Sovereign Powers are severely mentally ill and perpetrating serious child abuse’, given both the setting and the tone of the story.

    Assuming that’s accurate (and it certainly seems to be heading that way), I’m putting my money on Tyler’s parents snapping back to being completely smothering out of guilt/making up for lost time once things get sorted out.

    1. HEB807

      Thank you! While I’ve never thought of Ultima and Soverign as particularily great parents, we’ve never seen them as bad as they have been recently. I’m sincearly hoping that something is effecting them. And I’m glad someone else sees it that way too. The comments section has never given them much benifit of the doubt. (Not that they diserve a whole bunch of it.)

    2. Nightmask

      That’s people reaching when they think ‘super-villain plot’ or ‘supernatural interference’ is somehow more plausible than ‘the Powers are just awful parents guilty of terrible child abuse because their natural son isn’t the success they expected compared to his super-powered copy’. Long before Toby even existed we saw how terrible they were, right down to insisting their son live in the school’s dormitories because they hoped it would cause him to get super-powers, signed a permission slip to expose him to deadly cosmic rays if any showed up while on the space field trip, and the recorded holographic message from his father in his costume they picked for him insisted the teachers treat him like he had powers in what would easily be a potentially lethal situation for PE and to do otherwise would bring down their wrath for trying to ‘hinder his cosmic destiny’. The only reason it’s gotten worse is because now they have the super-powered clone to replace him with, no malicious fairies or super-villains are responsible we saw this as part of them right from the start. This is totally, sadly 100% normal human behavior for too many parents where they treat a child as the Unfavorite and dote on the one that they favor until they practically forget the other exists.

      1. TeChameleon

        The difficulty being that the Powers haven’t ‘practically’ forgotten that Tyler exists; to all appearances, they HAVE forgotten that he exists. Yes, they’re pathetically bad parents, without question. But seriously, mumbling to yourself about needing to do a background check on someone when they’re a child that you raised (for a given value of ‘raised’, of course) for the entirety of said child’s seven years? That’s… more than a little abnormal.

        It really does read like something is gradually causing the Powers to forget Tyler’s existence entirely; and while they’ve consistently acted like overbearing stage parents with the whole ‘cosmic destiny’ nonsense, outside of that, it always seemed like more of a monomania sort of thing. Outside of that, they appear to have treated him well enough, at least up until fairly recently.

        Their recent behaviour, on the other hand… eesh. Those of us leaning towards ‘something vewwy scwewy is going on around here…’ are seeing this as a departure from their normal (albeit still kind of horrible) behaviour. Seriously, ‘unfavouriting’ a child is one (awful) thing, but LITERALLY forgetting that child’s existence, to the point that you don’t recognize them (despite them looking exactly like the child you DO recognize)? That’s freaking insane.

        1. Nightmask

          And yet that’s completely in character for human beings of a particular mindset to do. It’s totally normal to their behavior to replace the clone in their minds with their actual son and pretty much forget his existence because the clone is everything that they wanted in their son and he effectively IS their son with super-powers since Toby has the majority of Tyler’s memories as well (excluding everything related to the Revenant and his other adventures such as deciding whether supers would keep being born) as his physical appearance.

          So what it should be obvious as in reading is the decay with regards to the Powers with regards to their son over time as events have conspired to give them a clone with everything that they wanted. It’s a totally normal and believable progression given what we’ve seen of them throughout the run of the comic. I mean they even seem to spend all their time in costume and going by their super-hero names, they never seem to spend any time as normal people going by their original human names. From what we’ve seen of them it’s baffling to me that some people work so hard to defend them and try and make them out as not being as bad as they are (but baffling as that is to me I recognize that that’s also normal human behavior for many).

        2. Richard Grayson

          My theory is that the Powers are delusional and have been for the entirety of the comic series, going back to their first appearance. They first convinced themselves that their only son had some huge cosmic destiny to become as powerful as they are. Then Toby came along almost exactly like what they had always dreamed of. Remember, they had sent their real child Tyler off to live at Ps238 forever (well only until he got his powers, but the smart money’s on that never occurring ever). Tyler and Toby are practically identical, going down to having almost all of the same memories. Toby begins living with his parents and they begin to confuse him with Tyler, their real son, because they are quite similar (the only real difference is the powers thing). It gets worse when Tyler disappeared for those adventures on Argo/in space and Toby tried to replace him with a fake Tyler, who was apparently quite odd. Now, I think that at this point the Powers have experienced a Spider-Man’s Clone saga level of confusion as to which of the two is their “real” son. So they went with the idea that their real son is the one whose “cosmic destiny” has revealed itself–Toby.

          TL;DR:Because they always felt their child would have superpowers, they decided Toby was their “real” child and that Tyler was the fake a la The Spider-Man Clone Saga.

        3. TeChameleon

          Uhm… I’ve tried to make clear that I think that Tyler and Toby’s parents are fairly awful; however, no matter how lousy a parent one is, one does not LITERALLY (in the original sense of the word) forget a child unless one is suffering from severe mental illness. Thus far, there hasn’t been a lot of evidence pointing towards both Ultima and Sovereign suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s or some weird subset of fictional Amnesia.

          I’m sorry, but even the most neglectful parent doesn’t completely forget the existence of one of their children (the comic here- http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/04282014/ for reference).

        4. Nightmask

          Yes I remember the page quite well, along with the rest of the comic, and I’m at a loss how you might have missed my pointing out their various moral failings and mental defects? Including why they can forget Tyler’s even really their son and think Toby’s always been their ‘real’ child. It’s just an example of how much worse they’ve gotten since they acquired a son who was everything they wanted in a child. They barely spent any time in his life before Toby was created because he was normal, he was always an afterthought to them and when they got a super-powered version of him they immediately latched onto it to do everything they could with it. They dote on him because he’s exactly what they wanted, brag about him to every super in earshot, and rarely if ever manage to remember their natural-born son let alone bring up their (to them) dirty little secret that they *gasp* have a NORMAL child rather than a SUPER one.

        5. Segev

          “Moral failings and defects” don’t lead to “actually, literally, for-real forgetting that the seminal event (to you) in your lives as parents was ACQUIRING A SECOND son, who has super-powers.” It was made clear to them – and they acknowledged – that Toby is a super-powered clone of Tyler.

          It would be 100% in character for these jerks to – as another poster put it – “unfavorite” Tyler. I could see them “forgetting” about him in the sense that they have to be reminded he’s there. In the sense that they don’t think about him that much, don’t think to invite him to family events, and are happy to let him stay at the school (“for his own good,” of course, so he might develop the super-powers his cosmic destiny has planned for him, you see). But to go so far as to think, “I need to get a background check on this ‘Tyler’ person,” is a very different kind of forgetting.

          That’s what has many of us “spooked” about it. Not that they’re being neglectful, forgetful jerks. Heck, I could see them doing the “can’t come into the command center thing; sorry, rules are rules, Son” thing with Tyler and thinking it perfectly justified and not a cruel alienation of their child. What has people saying this seems like some sort of influence is that EVEN WHEN REMINDED, the reaction isn’t a mildly (to majorly) disappointed discomfort and “oh, right, um…Tyler, yeah…he should come to” or even “…no, he shouldn’t come, because…he needs to be doing this other thing to gain his cosmic destiny.”

          But to not remember that Toby – Absolute Powers – came into being as a clone of Tyler is…beyond monomaniacal self-importance and into active delusion. A level of delusion that actively impairs function, because it tends to creep into other areas of life. And we don’t see evidence of that. Imagine if Superman were the sort to selectively edit his perception of reality; it would be noticed and the Justice League would not trust him with as much authority as they do.

          So no, no amount of “but they’re awful people” is sufficient by itself to explain this. Sure, we agree, they’re awful people. Heck, I don’t think them being influenced by something to actively and completely forget Tyler existed provides them the least bit of moral excuse, because they wouldn’t be acting TOO much differently if they DID remember him.

          The only way “they’re just that awful” actually could explain it is if it was an act. If Sovereign Powers was “forgetting” Tyler’s name and such on purpose, to Tyler’s face, as a way to deliberately insult and hurt the feelings of his own son. If mumbling about a background check was, again, deliberately for Tyler’s benefit, with the intent that he hear it and realize his own father supposedly thinks he’s not real.

          Which would be truly, utterly vile. To not just neglect and ignore and smother with self-aggrandizing assumptions that all things must be as you wish, but to actively seek to destroy the feelings of a 7-year-old child.

          But I cannot buy a “he’s legitimately forgotten Tyler exists, to the point that reminders make him suspicious of a trick” as an explanation without some sort of influence being at play. Either there’s influence, or Tyler and Toby’s parents are worse than anybody has been suggesting. They’re actively evil people who feel a need to go out of their way to HURT Tyler, emotionally.

          Which I also don’t see; I can’t really see them wanting to spend that much mental effort on their “failed” son. Especially since that would mean admitting “failure.”

          The behavior I would expect, absent outside influence, is a casual “forget-until-reminded” business with Tyler, and then a continuation of the grand assumption that he, of COURSE, will develop powers.

        6. Nightmask

          Yes Segev moral failings and defects can indeed lead to what we’ve seen, there needs be no outside influence to explain how the Powers have acted and your unwillingness to accept that how they behave is totally on them and need to invent an outside influence to justify it because you don’t want them to be as bad as they actually are won’t change that. What we have are two awful parents, they know they had one child, they ‘know’ that he must have a Cosmic Destiny because he’s their child, now they ‘know’ that their son has achieved that destiny and to suggest anything else is blasphemy in their eyes. Hence no longer seeing their son as their son because of course THEIR son would have awesome powers and that boy that looks like their son well he has no powers he couldn’t possibly be their son. It all fits with their long-established mindset of seeing themselves above humanity and unshakeable belief that their son would have to be a being of cosmic power because anything else is literally unthinkable.

          If you’re going to invent some phantom menace deliberately manipulating them you better have a VERY good reason why they’d do anything of the sort, because those trying to blame some outside force seem to think so far that apparently for no other reason than for the evil lutz is required for why it’s doing so and that’s just not going to cut it. Otherwise there’s NO evidence whatsoever that ANYTHING is now or has ever been manipulating the Powers to make them treat their son as they have or to replace him in their minds with his clone, because ‘I don’t want to believe it’ isn’t evidence. Toby certainly can’t be doing it because he deeply desires for everyone in his family to get along and if his powers were doing thing subconsciously they’d be forcing Tyler’s parents to acknowledge him as their son not to forget him. That would only happen if Toby wanted to replace Tyler which he clearly doesn’t as we see with how desperately he tries to connect with Tyler and include him. Negative consequences of forcing them to accept Tyler wouldn’t contrarily cause them to forget him.

        7. Segev

          You’re still missing the point. I am in no way trying to mitigate the awfulness of the Powers’ parenting. Heck, the only reason I would balk at the notion that they agreed to forget Tyler entirely is because agreeing to do so would mean acknowledging that they are willing to do something undeniably awful.

          Let me repeat that: I think the only thing that keeps them from doing overtly awful things to sate their own egos is that their egos are wrapped up in the notion that they’re “heroes,” and heroes don’t do certain things. They therefore won’t do them if they have to acknowledge making the choice to do them. THAT IS THE ONLY REASON that I think they wouldn’t just overtly kick Tyler to the curb as a “failure.”

          I don’t see them as deliberately or “accidentally-on-purpose” doing something to hurt Tyler emotionally for both the above reason and…because frankly, that would require thinking TOO MUCH about him.

          I don’t doubt they’d be delighted to forget him, as they seem to have, if they could do so in a manner that wasn’t on them.

          Therefore, if some external force wished to, it could get them to do so very easily because it fits with what they WANT to believe.

          The reason I keep saying an external force SEEMS to be involved is just based on the KIND of awful they are: they’re self-absorbed egotists who are wrapped up in their self-image of “cosmic right” and morally beyond reproach. Deliberate emotional cruelty is not something they could countenance; they’d HAVE to find an excuse for it. Moreover, they aren’t the kind of egotists who thrive on others’ pain; they thrive on others’ adulation, and they ASSUME it is there even if it isn’t.

          The last reason I keep harping on this is because I don’t buy that the Powers can simply forget, as depicted, that Tyler is their son. I could see them convincing themselves, as you suggested, that he’s the mortal clone of their super-powered son (who developed powers in the events which created the clone), but I can’t see them having the vague “background check necessary” and “I forgot your name” business. They KNEW Tyler’s name for 7 years! They never got it wrong. If they were going to confuse the two, TOBY would be the one whose name they got wrong. Because he’s “really” Tyler!

          The “mortal clone of their superpowered son” would be something they’d be aware of, and remember. They might say things that indicated they didn’t think he was “really” Tyler. That would be in character. But to forget he exists to the point of being confused (rather than annoyed and embarrassed) when he’s brought up is…not believable, to me. It doesn’t mesh with their particular brand of self-absorption, doesn’t work with real people (no matter how awful) who have real memories, and doesn’t fit with their own self-images as they wish to project them (and believe in them).

          Thus, I keep saying it LOOKS like the set-up for some outside force creating this fog of confusion over Tyler’s very existence and history. Whether there is one…that remains to be seen. But if there isn’t, I’m disappointed in Aaron’s characterization, because it’s ham-fisted and sloppy. It doesn’t “work” with what we’ve seen before this.

        8. Arrogant Know-it-all

          What part I think is weird about the whole “some outside force is affecting them” theory is that I’m left wondering what could do that and why? Who hates Tyler enough to cause his parents to be even more terrible parents than they were before?

          Theory: Something Toby did had the chaotic effect of Tyler’s parents totally shutting him out. Or maybe he was evil all along and did it deliberately. Discuss.

  16. Richard Grayson

    Side Question: Since it is, in this comic’s Universe, illegal to clone a human (body and soul), should Victor Von Fogg face criminal charges for breaking that law, especially considering that it has basically led to Tyler’s parents abandoning him? We now know how similar Tyler’s soul is to Toby’s, thanks to the soul smeller guy.

    1. Nightmask

      Well as pointed out at the time technically he and Angie (I think that’s her name) followed the letter of the law; they created a partial, brain-lacking clone of the original that was like a remote-controlled autonomous drone ‘piloted’ by the original and not a true, law-breaking clone. They couldn’t foresee that the replication errors in creating the clone would result in a super-powered copy of the original that would actually grow it’s own brain and become autonomous let alone the outside interference of the Imp and Cherub that ensured the clone went independent.

  17. Lucy

    Is it just me who’s almost as worried about Toby with his parents as I am about Tyler with them? They took him out of school for several days to fight a nameless horror? He’s like eight! I feel like their expectations of him could become as dangerous as their neglect of Tyler.

    1. Nightmask

      Well to be fair Toby DOES have reality warper powers and while he’s crippled by that ‘every orderly thing has a chaotic counter-effect and vice versa’ limitation given we know he managed to give every non-powered person on the planet powers (even if he had to reverse it and make it so no one even remembered save himself) he’s powerful enough to manage pretty well against just about anything and he’s got an experienced super team as allies and kids do seem to start early in the super-business and people barely bat an eye.

  18. David Nuttall

    Let’s see. What else is on that radio? “Look what’s happened to me? I can’t believe it myself. Suddenly, I’m on top of the world. It should have been somebody else.” Also a song featuring a deep bass from Winnipeg about a flying brick not making any money fighting a Batman villain (it fit the rhyming scheme better than Lex Luthor, Brainiac or Parasite). That song got so much air time on radio and on the music video programming when DC actually killed off Superman via Doomsday.

  19. David Nuttall

    To webmaster: I am using latest Firefox on Windows 10. Thank you for putting up when the Captcha has expired, but clicking refresh on the Captcha gives two dialogs. The first says “404”. The second says “Not Found”, and the symbol just keeps rotating. Can you fix the 404 error message?

  20. Delver

    Well this….
    http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/02012012/
    ..is probably why the plans went goofy.

    Toby probably would be an intresting party planner.

    1. Nightmask

      No that’s just Tyler’s parents being who they are, Toby’s powers have nothing to do with it. If Tyler had tried a sleepover before Toby was even created it still would have happened like that.

  21. Richard Grayson

    I think the conversation on Tyler’s parents has just gotten to the point where nobody–myself included–is providing anything new to the discussion that hasn’t been said. How about we agree to disagree and wait to see what actually happens in the comic?

    1. Mike

      Aw, but that wouldn’t be as much fun!

      (cue Inigo Montoya – “that word – I do not think it means what you think it means”)

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