Weird, this contradicts what we’ve seen in the past with Tyler’s father being shown not even really remembering he IS his son after he got back from his adventure in space. We haven’t seen any events to show them having suddenly remembered Tyler or care about him being powerless when they have a super-powered version of him. I wonder if this is an attempt to show his parents in a slightly better light by remembering him (albeit still obsessing over him having no powers) given how many readers (like myself) have found them extremely unlikable based on their neglect and abuse of their son.
It’s nice though seeing that he averts the ‘No Therapists’ trope by showing that quite contrary to many settings PS238 does indeed have therapists who’re apparently even trained in helping supers including situations like dealing with power loss. Definitely helps keep the comic on the more plausible and idealistic side of the scale.
True they’ve been doing things like this for a while to him but since the support group is obviously very recent it would have been necessary for it to have been set up recently (also based on his wording) yet clearly his parents by this point had been shown having almost totally forgotten him thanks to Toby existing to fulfill their fantasies. Which is why I wonder if it’s a bit of a retcon to try and make his parents look less awful than they already do (if so it fails on that point since even if they managed to remember him again they’re still acting like his not having powers is a horrible tragedy rather than just loving their son in spite of him being normal).
Really the ones who need therapy are his parents, they have their delusion of superiority over non-powered humans who they think have no right to try and improve the world and treat their son awful because he’s not super-powered like they are, even putting his life at risk at times thinking it’ll just make him super-powered instead of dead. Frankly I’d like to see an aversion of the ‘No Child Protective Services’ trope come about, because at a minimum his parents should have been forced into court-managed interactions with Tyler in order to protect him, because so far his teachers have shown more protective instincts towards him than his parents.
I can only snicker at the idea of Child Protective Services trying to tell the Powers that they can’t do whatever they want with their son. Their narcissistic delusions that everything already comports with their desires combined with their apparently overwhelming superpowers means that CPS would need supers actively willing to engage in violence, not because the Powers would overtly initiate, but because they’d simply ACT and assume it was okay.
It’s truly a miracle that they’re not supervillains already.
And I guess I was wrong about who “Sarah” was, vis a vis the mysterious customer of Power and Glory. I wonder if Herschel or another super-genius could help Dynamode; she HAD the capacity for powers, and comics typically treat it as easier to restore than to gain.
I wonder if Tyler is the one who said “Disappointing,” or if he’s more or less over it. He hasn’t really lived with his parents for quite some time, and the Revenant has been more a father figure to him.
Please note that there are eight words and six characters. Disappointing and squished are both Tyler. Broken is Dynamode and soft is Ron. Stephen Merrick (water based powers) if vulnerable, Skybolt is weak, and the villain is ordinary. The pictures of the characters are in the same order as their appearance in the group image. Stephen Merrick is front row, stage left and Dynamode is second row stage left. Can’t say for sure, but I always did well on those IQ tests where you had to determine how something would look from a different angle. (By stage left, I mean to the left for a person standing at the marker board and looking at the chairs.
No, helpless and squished are both Tyler. Squished gets confirmed in the next panel. Helpless — he’s a normal child stuck in PS238, surrounded by meta-humans who can so easily hurt him if they’re not careful. Tyler can’t be Moonshadow at school (not openly), and we’ve been directly shown several instances of things happening to Tyler there that hurt, a lot. “Helpless” is directly in front of Tyler, just as the front row words are directly in front of their speakers.
That makes “disappointing” belong to Ron, and that makes more sense than either of the other two in that row. You folks are forgetting what “disappointed” means.
Why would Tyler say “disappointing” as HIS feeling of loss? He hasn’t had any powers so far (that he remembers) to be disappointed with losing — he’s not coping with living “normal” after loss. TYLER’S not dissapointed over his lack of powers — dissapointed implies something hasn’t met your expectations.
But think about Ron. At first, he’s angry over losing his powers (on Argos), to the point of taking it out on Tyler/Moonshadow. But after he gets back to Earth, we see him being relieved: finally he’s “normal”. He doesn’t have the weight of having to “choose” between his music and being a hero anymore; he’s no longer has to live up to a future of taking over as Atlas. He can just be a normal kid. Now, though, a bit later, he’s finding out what losing his powers means in all the other areas of his life. He’s finding out that the “normal” life he wanted isn’t perfect, either. His former friends at PS238 act weird around him, he’s no longer in the classes he’s used to, he now gets hit in dodgeball (and hurts!), it hurts when he stubs his toe, etc etc. He’s disappointed; it’s not living up to what he expected.
From DictionaryDotCom:
Disappoint: to fail to fulfill the expectations or wishes of; to defeat the fulfillment of (hopes, plans, etc.); thwart; frustrate.
Tyler doesn’t have expectations of not-having-powers; it’s what he’s always been like. His hopes are to get powers so his parents will love him. The others didn’t have any expectations, hopes, or desires to be “normal”, either. Of the whole group, only Ron had those hopes of “normal” being a magic salve to fix his life. He’s the only one who would be “disappointed”: what he’s experiencing is not living up to what he’d hoped it’d be.
“Soft” could be either Ron or Sarah, maybe both. The placement of the other words suggests it’s Ron, though. Given that “softling” was the Argosian insult for a normal person, it’s more likely Ron. Soft doesn’t seem like a word Sarah would use for her experience of normality — her powers involved changing her form, not invulnerability to pain or injury (that we know of). Ron’s, though, were.
But the word chosen isn’t “disappointed”, it’s “disappointing”. As in, “I feel that someone else is disappointed with me. I am disappointing them”.
This fits Ron, whose father always expected him to follow in his footsteps.
But it also fits Tyler, whose parents always seem to feel he isn’t the son they wanted.
Sometimes I wonder if Tylers parents forgetting the clone that Toby made (and that they thought was Tyler) was just an unforseen side effect of Toby creating the clone in the first place.
Then again, I tend to give Ultima and Soverign more credit than their due. Up untill the end of volume 8 or so I never really saw them as much worse than Will Stronghold’s parents.
Well Toby can tell what side effects occur when he uses his powers (like the clothes all being filled with ABBA), he’d have known if his stand-in while Tyler was in space was causing their parents to forget about Tyler and said something so Tyler wouldn’t be so hurt. Instead when Tyler’s father’s left after making that ‘background check’ comment regarding his natural-born son Toby makes no mention of such a thing occurring.
Yes some people do give them more credit than they’re due, they look at the individual events and don’t add them up into the big picture, or give them the benefit of the doubt because they’re supposed to be heroes (even when Revenant makes it clear that they look down on non-powered people and think they’ve no business trying to better the world) and due to the more idealistic nature of the comic think them better than they are. They do the same with Principal Cranston, downplaying his repeatedly violating the minds of other people in order to manipulate himself into the presidency in his backstory because they grew to see him as a man suffering trying to atone for his past actions before that was revealed so they ignore the broader implications (which is why they were quick to demonize another super with similar powers for ONE misuse of his telepathic abilities, when they first see him they rate him a jerk so viewed everything he did in the harshest of lights) since anywhere else you’d see someone using mind-reading powers to manipulate himself into the presidency as being staunchly a super-villain of the Well-Intentioned Extremist trope.
Of course we don’y know what the supers/CPS has been doing in the background. They could have been reminding the parents that they should still interact with him. Forgetfulness might be superior to staged danger provocations. It may be a rationalization, but neglect is not the worst things they’ve done (endangering and clearing loving the clone more is worse to me) I think PS238 has been a godsend for for Tyler if you conpare his attitude and confident to the early issues.
Oh I quite agree that the school was a godsend, particularly with it leading to him getting training from Revenant and seeing that he doesn’t need powers to change the world (his adventures like his time travel escapades certainly helped as well). It just wasn’t the help his parents wanted it to be, he just lucked out that it was what he needed rather than what they wanted. Hopefully we’ll also see Tyler warm up towards Toby since currently he’s been treating him with resentment he doesn’t deserve since he never asked to be created or to have powers (curse those meddling agents of Order and Chaos) and he certainly doesn’t want Tyler’s parents treating him as if he’s the only son they had instead of Tyler and relegating Tyler to the Unfavorite trope location. Maybe there’s another support group for people who suddenly gain powers and to help them deal with the consequences of it so Toby could get help dealing with his sudden existence and quite against his will causing problems for his original clone source.
Eh, I don’t see Cranston as all that wrong for how he got the Presidency, given what we actually saw him doing with his powers. He wasn’t engaging in mind control, so far as we saw. He was invading privacy, and I won’t defend it, but he didn’t seem to be blackmailing people nor even using their private secrets to smear them publicly; he just used it to out-strategize them and to know how to persuade them or argue them into irrelevancy in public (which, let’s be honest, is only HELPED, not guaranteed, by knowing what they’re thinking).
He was doing something wrong – and apparently it’s illegal to be a metahuman politician – but if he’s a villain, he’s a highly sympathetic one. Certainly well within redeemability.
Well you kind of are excusing Cranston’s behavior when you say you think he didn’t do anything all that wrong, he was extremely wrong as he was stealing the most private thoughts from people to use against them, he used it as an extremely unfair advantage over his opponent who apparently played fair (as far as politics gets) but not hiring and using telepaths himself to do the same thing.
You do however prove my point regarding him, he was introduced sympathetically so when you find out what he did wrong you downplay the significance of it, he’s not the villain he’d otherwise be seen as just a man who thought he was right and doing it for the greater good when he was really doing great wrong.
Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I tend to analyze those presented in a villainous light to see if what they’re doing really is all that bad, and if their motives are evil, because it’s amazing how often … they aren’t ,except for being informed that they’re “evil.”
If Cranston were blackmailing people, or publicly humiliated people with largely irrelevant private details, that’d be evil. But that’s not what we saw him doing. I suspect, if we’d been watching that story with the Revenant investigating it, that I would still have thought him pretty mild. At worst, he was gray, morally.
You don’t have to be doing something card-carrying evil though for it to be evil, and when it comes to telepaths it’s generally considered more than just impolite to be reading someone’s mind, you’re violating the only private place that they have for their innermost thoughts and feelings. You’re stealing from their minds information that they most definitely do NOT want you or anyone else to know about. You don’t have to be blackmailing them with it or embarrassing them with it to for what you did to be totally wrong. He also did it repeatedly, easily hundreds of times if not thousands, insisting that stealing into their minds and taking their private thoughts was acceptable because ‘as president I’ll make the world better’, that’s classic villain justification. Which is why it all came crashing down on him as it did, and why he’d hoped to redeem himself (which sadly he’ll never get to do as he gave up redemption to see his curse lifted by Toby). Would you really be so forgiving if you found out someone was rummaging around in YOUR private thoughts whenever you were around him? Would you really go ‘well it’s not like he did anything but take my private thoughts from my head, he didn’t really do anything with it’? Because I can’t imagine very many people being so blase about someone reaching into their minds and taking from them thoughts that they intended to remain solely known by them and no one else.
A little thing on the Marlocke family as I see it. Mom and Dad are stuck in the hero society. They don’t seem to remove their costumes ever and just assume their child will continue to be great to show how great they were as well. The whole ‘the universe is biding its time’ thing. They are like the parents that shove their kid into sports and demand s/he be the best out there to support their view of superiority.
Toby meanwhile has only recently become sympathetic. Remember when he was first ‘born’ he was rather a jerk to the trapped Tyler. And he never even thought about his original until the powers of order and chaos made his power be a balancing act. THEN he wanted to talk to his ‘brother’ for advice. To Tyler, Toby is everything his parents assume he should be and thus thinks he will be kicked to the curb. And his parents practically prove this fact. If Toby and Cranston had not made it so they couldn’t. They probably would have. Simply because they have no time for a sign of weakness in Their line. The signing Tyler up for a support group seems in the same flavour as their initial sign him up for every class and see what wakes up his powers. Danger be damned.
So far the only one I think is sympathetic IS Tyler. At least in that family.
While it does nothing to excuse any of their actions, but I just realized that both Ultima and Sovereign could have been among the first generation to be born to Metahumans, since the generation that could be their parents – assuming kids being born in when the parents are in their thirties/ fourties – was the one where powers started popping up. Would that have had an impact as to how the Powers raise Tyler and Toby?
Plus, it seems that the First Generation (Mr. Extraordinaire and contemporaries) had to be really careful as to what to do unless they wanted the Government to loom over their asses, while the Second (Powers, Emerald Gauntlet Sr. etc) get the full backing of the Government. Does that mean the Third Generation (The Kids) gets a happy middle ground?
It could be a motivational lie by the staff at PS238. It’s possible that the staff signed Tyler up for the sessions so that he can safely spend time connecting with his peers. (i.e. people ostracized by the metahuman community due to their lack of powers but don’t completely fit in with the normal humans due to their connection with metahumans)
Since the Powers beam down Tyler’s permissions slips and don’t really talk to him, there’s no way for Tyler to find out the truth.
Tyler definitely needs the therapy, he has more than enough Freudian excuse to become a supervillain when he grows up.
Tyler’s always been shown as way too stable and decent a person to go super-villain (unlike that one mirror version of him), he recognizes that there’s something wrong with his parents and has had very good role models in both the teachers and Revenant to recognize he does have worth and can make the world better (the Principal even provides an example of beware the temptation of power as he lived the memories of the Principal through his loss of his presidency when he was discovered to be a superhuman and having used them to manipulate himself into the spot). The only therapy he’d really need if any would be to deal with his issues over his clone and those aren’t too severe and he’s working through them quite well on his own.
Remember that his father also stated that he planned to run a background check on his Tyler.
He probably did actually do that and find that he had a son without superpowers and is now acting on that knowledge.
I can’t help but feel sad for Dynamode. Okay, yeah, other superheroes lost their powers too, but what happened to her sounds quite traumatic. PSWarp didn’t just destroy her powers but even her identity by going the extra mile of changing her hair color. I also suspect that she’s not just a former redhead but a former adult. And her line of “Broken” (assuming it’s hers, since it’s next to her) just sounds more devastating than all the others.
I’m sure this has been foreshadowed, they can’t restore the person but can give them something to help them change their own destiny. They weren’t aware of the item choice the customer would make.
This isn’t that sort of webcomic, but… it would be a real shame if PSwarp’s head had somehow managed to intersect a bullet during his most recent arrest.
I’d be more inclined to favor him ending up with karmic punishment of having his own powers stripped away in a similarly traumatic fashion, so he could suffer like his victim is.
And so it IS Doctor Newby and not a male relative as theorized in the comments of the last update, based on the therapist having a male name (“Isidore”, as opposed to “Isidora”).
Not sure how you get that, they could just as easily inform a male sibling who happened to have similar features about Tyler’s parents as the female doctor we know about. I imagine just about everyone associated with PS238 knows about the Tyler situation by this point since all the teachers who had to interact directly with him had to find out he had no powers and that his parents were totally off in the head regarding him thinking the universe spoke through them and that he was certain to gain cosmic powers to dwarf their own.
Actually, the masculine is Isador. Feminine is Isadore in France, Isadora if Spanish (pronunciation is about the same). Similar to Louis and Louise, Francois and Francoise, or Jean and Jeanne.
Really? Humm… American spelling oddities? I went to school with an Isadore, and he wasn’t female. Though he was Jewish, which may also have effected the spelling…
It might not be the right setting for it, but I’d like to see a storyline like this where the hero DOESNT move past the loss of his power, like its just too big a loss to bother even trying to move on. All Fall Down came close, but wussed out right at the end. I mean, when you lose something that vital to yourself, whats even the point anymore?
Gee. Wouldn’t that be a shame. =_= A shock to those two yahoos. Like a letter from child services:
“We are reviewing your fitness to retain custody of your son in light of your neglect of your natural born son.”
Wait a minute – when did Ron lose his powers? Have I forgotten something, or did this happen off screen somewhere, and we’re just finding out about it? And is he upset or actually relieved?
Thanks, everybody. I love this comic, but the update scheduled is sometimes a bit drawn out … and if I haven’t re-read the back issues recently, I tend to forget things, obviously. Sometimes I may even have missed some of the updates, but in this case, I think I just forgot. (argh). Time to go read the back archives!
THIS is why I eventually get the dead tree books – I really like just getting to site down with the story book-style, and read a chunk of it at a time!
Anybody else seeing moderation issues? I posted a comment on the last panel, no problem. Post one on this panel, it’s awaiting moderation. Go back and post another one on the last panel, no problem. Not sure what’s going on here.
This whole group needs to be reminded of Revenant, a normal who routinely kicks super butt (although Lester from the previous page might not appreciate the reminder).
Well he’s considered more of a villain and the super-community has too many who think like Tyler’s parents so they aren’t likely to hold up the guy wanted in 27 states as an example to live up to. So apparently well-trained and/or tech-using characters who aren’t super-powered only get to be villains or will be seen as villains in the PS238verse based on what we’ve seen so far.
Well that and he’s actually breaking the law, though I’m sure he pays taxes on one of his identities.
I don’t think it’s JUST the superhero community that hate the Revenant, I think it’s the government as a whole who are helping to try and damage his image. The reason is because he answers to nobody, and that probably scares the hell out of them. Especially because he is incredibly skilled, canny, and has a ton of resources at his disposal. If he went bad, or at the very least, went against their agendas (which has likely happened, a lot, like for example with Cranston) they can’t predict or counter him effectively.
Well, if he’s anything like the Revenant in the Stackpole story and the PS238 RPG, he’s also occasionally willing to take deserving heroes down a peg, often in ironic and/or amusing ways, which would certainly win him no favors.
I hate to criticize the art, but I don’t like the way Tyler’s been drawn lately. Between the highlights in the hair and wide-open eye design, he just looks very artificial, like a plastic doll. Anyone else seeing it?
I also dislike that the “refresh” button for the verification system (Captcha? or something similar?) that gives a 404 error message. But I think I’ve figured out a work-around: Type out my post, select and copy it, then refresh the whole page, hit the Reply button if appropriate, paste, solve the new simple math problem, and hit Post. This usually works. ^_^
Maybe this is a platform error. I use Windows 10 and Google Chrome. The refresh button to the right of the math captcha (which is what it’s called) works perfectly fine for me. Type out the post, hit the captcha refresh, solve the problem, hit “Post Comment.”
There are six people with no powers in the room. Either the desperate stranger who wanted Power & Glory is in this room now, or their absence will be noted, or Aaron has decided to throw Chekov’s rule to the winds.
The desperate stranger can’t be Tyler (never had powers; wrong height; wrong everything else), or Steven (unless he grew that full beard overnight?). Lester looks too tall and lanky; Ron looks too short (although there’s been enough weirdly distorted appearances with some of the characters some of the time that it’s hard to be sure about that).
The desperate stranger certainly did look a bit like a slim woman/girl. Both Sarah and Paula look like possible matches.
But I note that Paula has her purse on her lap. Now, maybe that’s just a general security thing. . . but maybe she has a New Toy in there that she wants to keep hidden and safe. Hm.
Absence will not likely be noted, since before Tyler’s turn Newby said “… and we have one more …” (emphasis added). So either our mysterious customer is one of those who introduced themselves, or he or she wasn’t enrolled in the group session and we’ll get a comparison/contrast of experiences as the two story arcs go forward.
I’d suggest that it’s reasonable that “one more” can mean “one more [to be introduced at this time]”, and later have Newby say “Looks like [name] didn’t show” without being terribly inconsistent.
But I’m still looking carefully at Paula’s purse. Say, maybe the purse is the New Toy? Maybe a Bigger On The Inside bag?
I suppose that’s plausible, although in that instance I’d have expected the last panel to show an empty chair among the occupied ones (Aaron’s good with those little details). Unless our mysterious customer cancelled out of the group at the last minute? That would still be consistent with the details we’ve seen.
If it is someone in the group, I’d agree Paula makes the most sense; Sarah doesn’t look much taller than Tyler. The way Paula’s holding her purse didn’t trigger any flags with me, probably because I’ve known a couple of women who hold theirs that way as a kind of nervous habit when they’re feeling awkward or socially uncomfortable.
Even with the rather large number of metastatic in this world is expected it would be difficult to fill a group therapy session with only adults or only kids who had lost their powers.
Posting from the future, I will, without spoilers, point out that PSWarp is a dumb name, and wonder if it’s supposed to be a typo for PsiWarp, which would be more easily pronounced.
[since “psi” generally references the mind/mental powers, and he can presumably warp the minds of others]
Weird, this contradicts what we’ve seen in the past with Tyler’s father being shown not even really remembering he IS his son after he got back from his adventure in space. We haven’t seen any events to show them having suddenly remembered Tyler or care about him being powerless when they have a super-powered version of him. I wonder if this is an attempt to show his parents in a slightly better light by remembering him (albeit still obsessing over him having no powers) given how many readers (like myself) have found them extremely unlikable based on their neglect and abuse of their son.
It’s nice though seeing that he averts the ‘No Therapists’ trope by showing that quite contrary to many settings PS238 does indeed have therapists who’re apparently even trained in helping supers including situations like dealing with power loss. Definitely helps keep the comic on the more plausible and idealistic side of the scale.
Judging from what he said, they’ve been doing this to him for a while, so maybe it was an already-in-place plan?
True they’ve been doing things like this for a while to him but since the support group is obviously very recent it would have been necessary for it to have been set up recently (also based on his wording) yet clearly his parents by this point had been shown having almost totally forgotten him thanks to Toby existing to fulfill their fantasies. Which is why I wonder if it’s a bit of a retcon to try and make his parents look less awful than they already do (if so it fails on that point since even if they managed to remember him again they’re still acting like his not having powers is a horrible tragedy rather than just loving their son in spite of him being normal).
Really the ones who need therapy are his parents, they have their delusion of superiority over non-powered humans who they think have no right to try and improve the world and treat their son awful because he’s not super-powered like they are, even putting his life at risk at times thinking it’ll just make him super-powered instead of dead. Frankly I’d like to see an aversion of the ‘No Child Protective Services’ trope come about, because at a minimum his parents should have been forced into court-managed interactions with Tyler in order to protect him, because so far his teachers have shown more protective instincts towards him than his parents.
I can only snicker at the idea of Child Protective Services trying to tell the Powers that they can’t do whatever they want with their son. Their narcissistic delusions that everything already comports with their desires combined with their apparently overwhelming superpowers means that CPS would need supers actively willing to engage in violence, not because the Powers would overtly initiate, but because they’d simply ACT and assume it was okay.
It’s truly a miracle that they’re not supervillains already.
And I guess I was wrong about who “Sarah” was, vis a vis the mysterious customer of Power and Glory. I wonder if Herschel or another super-genius could help Dynamode; she HAD the capacity for powers, and comics typically treat it as easier to restore than to gain.
I wonder if Tyler is the one who said “Disappointing,” or if he’s more or less over it. He hasn’t really lived with his parents for quite some time, and the Revenant has been more a father figure to him.
Disappointing was probably Ron. Squished as definitely Tyler.
Given the when and where of how Ron was depowered, I think he might have been the one to say “Soft”.
Please note that there are eight words and six characters. Disappointing and squished are both Tyler. Broken is Dynamode and soft is Ron. Stephen Merrick (water based powers) if vulnerable, Skybolt is weak, and the villain is ordinary. The pictures of the characters are in the same order as their appearance in the group image. Stephen Merrick is front row, stage left and Dynamode is second row stage left. Can’t say for sure, but I always did well on those IQ tests where you had to determine how something would look from a different angle. (By stage left, I mean to the left for a person standing at the marker board and looking at the chairs.
No, helpless and squished are both Tyler. Squished gets confirmed in the next panel. Helpless — he’s a normal child stuck in PS238, surrounded by meta-humans who can so easily hurt him if they’re not careful. Tyler can’t be Moonshadow at school (not openly), and we’ve been directly shown several instances of things happening to Tyler there that hurt, a lot. “Helpless” is directly in front of Tyler, just as the front row words are directly in front of their speakers.
That makes “disappointing” belong to Ron, and that makes more sense than either of the other two in that row. You folks are forgetting what “disappointed” means.
Why would Tyler say “disappointing” as HIS feeling of loss? He hasn’t had any powers so far (that he remembers) to be disappointed with losing — he’s not coping with living “normal” after loss. TYLER’S not dissapointed over his lack of powers — dissapointed implies something hasn’t met your expectations.
But think about Ron. At first, he’s angry over losing his powers (on Argos), to the point of taking it out on Tyler/Moonshadow. But after he gets back to Earth, we see him being relieved: finally he’s “normal”. He doesn’t have the weight of having to “choose” between his music and being a hero anymore; he’s no longer has to live up to a future of taking over as Atlas. He can just be a normal kid. Now, though, a bit later, he’s finding out what losing his powers means in all the other areas of his life. He’s finding out that the “normal” life he wanted isn’t perfect, either. His former friends at PS238 act weird around him, he’s no longer in the classes he’s used to, he now gets hit in dodgeball (and hurts!), it hurts when he stubs his toe, etc etc. He’s disappointed; it’s not living up to what he expected.
From DictionaryDotCom:
Disappoint: to fail to fulfill the expectations or wishes of; to defeat the fulfillment of (hopes, plans, etc.); thwart; frustrate.
Tyler doesn’t have expectations of not-having-powers; it’s what he’s always been like. His hopes are to get powers so his parents will love him. The others didn’t have any expectations, hopes, or desires to be “normal”, either. Of the whole group, only Ron had those hopes of “normal” being a magic salve to fix his life. He’s the only one who would be “disappointed”: what he’s experiencing is not living up to what he’d hoped it’d be.
“Soft” could be either Ron or Sarah, maybe both. The placement of the other words suggests it’s Ron, though. Given that “softling” was the Argosian insult for a normal person, it’s more likely Ron. Soft doesn’t seem like a word Sarah would use for her experience of normality — her powers involved changing her form, not invulnerability to pain or injury (that we know of). Ron’s, though, were.
But the word chosen isn’t “disappointed”, it’s “disappointing”. As in, “I feel that someone else is disappointed with me. I am disappointing them”.
This fits Ron, whose father always expected him to follow in his footsteps.
But it also fits Tyler, whose parents always seem to feel he isn’t the son they wanted.
Sometimes I wonder if Tylers parents forgetting the clone that Toby made (and that they thought was Tyler) was just an unforseen side effect of Toby creating the clone in the first place.
Then again, I tend to give Ultima and Soverign more credit than their due. Up untill the end of volume 8 or so I never really saw them as much worse than Will Stronghold’s parents.
Well Toby can tell what side effects occur when he uses his powers (like the clothes all being filled with ABBA), he’d have known if his stand-in while Tyler was in space was causing their parents to forget about Tyler and said something so Tyler wouldn’t be so hurt. Instead when Tyler’s father’s left after making that ‘background check’ comment regarding his natural-born son Toby makes no mention of such a thing occurring.
Yes some people do give them more credit than they’re due, they look at the individual events and don’t add them up into the big picture, or give them the benefit of the doubt because they’re supposed to be heroes (even when Revenant makes it clear that they look down on non-powered people and think they’ve no business trying to better the world) and due to the more idealistic nature of the comic think them better than they are. They do the same with Principal Cranston, downplaying his repeatedly violating the minds of other people in order to manipulate himself into the presidency in his backstory because they grew to see him as a man suffering trying to atone for his past actions before that was revealed so they ignore the broader implications (which is why they were quick to demonize another super with similar powers for ONE misuse of his telepathic abilities, when they first see him they rate him a jerk so viewed everything he did in the harshest of lights) since anywhere else you’d see someone using mind-reading powers to manipulate himself into the presidency as being staunchly a super-villain of the Well-Intentioned Extremist trope.
Of course we don’y know what the supers/CPS has been doing in the background. They could have been reminding the parents that they should still interact with him. Forgetfulness might be superior to staged danger provocations. It may be a rationalization, but neglect is not the worst things they’ve done (endangering and clearing loving the clone more is worse to me) I think PS238 has been a godsend for for Tyler if you conpare his attitude and confident to the early issues.
Oh I quite agree that the school was a godsend, particularly with it leading to him getting training from Revenant and seeing that he doesn’t need powers to change the world (his adventures like his time travel escapades certainly helped as well). It just wasn’t the help his parents wanted it to be, he just lucked out that it was what he needed rather than what they wanted. Hopefully we’ll also see Tyler warm up towards Toby since currently he’s been treating him with resentment he doesn’t deserve since he never asked to be created or to have powers (curse those meddling agents of Order and Chaos) and he certainly doesn’t want Tyler’s parents treating him as if he’s the only son they had instead of Tyler and relegating Tyler to the Unfavorite trope location. Maybe there’s another support group for people who suddenly gain powers and to help them deal with the consequences of it so Toby could get help dealing with his sudden existence and quite against his will causing problems for his original clone source.
Eh, I don’t see Cranston as all that wrong for how he got the Presidency, given what we actually saw him doing with his powers. He wasn’t engaging in mind control, so far as we saw. He was invading privacy, and I won’t defend it, but he didn’t seem to be blackmailing people nor even using their private secrets to smear them publicly; he just used it to out-strategize them and to know how to persuade them or argue them into irrelevancy in public (which, let’s be honest, is only HELPED, not guaranteed, by knowing what they’re thinking).
He was doing something wrong – and apparently it’s illegal to be a metahuman politician – but if he’s a villain, he’s a highly sympathetic one. Certainly well within redeemability.
Well you kind of are excusing Cranston’s behavior when you say you think he didn’t do anything all that wrong, he was extremely wrong as he was stealing the most private thoughts from people to use against them, he used it as an extremely unfair advantage over his opponent who apparently played fair (as far as politics gets) but not hiring and using telepaths himself to do the same thing.
You do however prove my point regarding him, he was introduced sympathetically so when you find out what he did wrong you downplay the significance of it, he’s not the villain he’d otherwise be seen as just a man who thought he was right and doing it for the greater good when he was really doing great wrong.
Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I tend to analyze those presented in a villainous light to see if what they’re doing really is all that bad, and if their motives are evil, because it’s amazing how often … they aren’t ,except for being informed that they’re “evil.”
If Cranston were blackmailing people, or publicly humiliated people with largely irrelevant private details, that’d be evil. But that’s not what we saw him doing. I suspect, if we’d been watching that story with the Revenant investigating it, that I would still have thought him pretty mild. At worst, he was gray, morally.
You don’t have to be doing something card-carrying evil though for it to be evil, and when it comes to telepaths it’s generally considered more than just impolite to be reading someone’s mind, you’re violating the only private place that they have for their innermost thoughts and feelings. You’re stealing from their minds information that they most definitely do NOT want you or anyone else to know about. You don’t have to be blackmailing them with it or embarrassing them with it to for what you did to be totally wrong. He also did it repeatedly, easily hundreds of times if not thousands, insisting that stealing into their minds and taking their private thoughts was acceptable because ‘as president I’ll make the world better’, that’s classic villain justification. Which is why it all came crashing down on him as it did, and why he’d hoped to redeem himself (which sadly he’ll never get to do as he gave up redemption to see his curse lifted by Toby). Would you really be so forgiving if you found out someone was rummaging around in YOUR private thoughts whenever you were around him? Would you really go ‘well it’s not like he did anything but take my private thoughts from my head, he didn’t really do anything with it’? Because I can’t imagine very many people being so blase about someone reaching into their minds and taking from them thoughts that they intended to remain solely known by them and no one else.
Id guess the parents super group has a secretary or PA that deals with routine office work like signing up there son to such things.
A little thing on the Marlocke family as I see it. Mom and Dad are stuck in the hero society. They don’t seem to remove their costumes ever and just assume their child will continue to be great to show how great they were as well. The whole ‘the universe is biding its time’ thing. They are like the parents that shove their kid into sports and demand s/he be the best out there to support their view of superiority.
Toby meanwhile has only recently become sympathetic. Remember when he was first ‘born’ he was rather a jerk to the trapped Tyler. And he never even thought about his original until the powers of order and chaos made his power be a balancing act. THEN he wanted to talk to his ‘brother’ for advice. To Tyler, Toby is everything his parents assume he should be and thus thinks he will be kicked to the curb. And his parents practically prove this fact. If Toby and Cranston had not made it so they couldn’t. They probably would have. Simply because they have no time for a sign of weakness in Their line. The signing Tyler up for a support group seems in the same flavour as their initial sign him up for every class and see what wakes up his powers. Danger be damned.
So far the only one I think is sympathetic IS Tyler. At least in that family.
While it does nothing to excuse any of their actions, but I just realized that both Ultima and Sovereign could have been among the first generation to be born to Metahumans, since the generation that could be their parents – assuming kids being born in when the parents are in their thirties/ fourties – was the one where powers started popping up. Would that have had an impact as to how the Powers raise Tyler and Toby?
Plus, it seems that the First Generation (Mr. Extraordinaire and contemporaries) had to be really careful as to what to do unless they wanted the Government to loom over their asses, while the Second (Powers, Emerald Gauntlet Sr. etc) get the full backing of the Government. Does that mean the Third Generation (The Kids) gets a happy middle ground?
It could be a motivational lie by the staff at PS238. It’s possible that the staff signed Tyler up for the sessions so that he can safely spend time connecting with his peers. (i.e. people ostracized by the metahuman community due to their lack of powers but don’t completely fit in with the normal humans due to their connection with metahumans)
Since the Powers beam down Tyler’s permissions slips and don’t really talk to him, there’s no way for Tyler to find out the truth.
Tyler definitely needs the therapy, he has more than enough Freudian excuse to become a supervillain when he grows up.
Tyler would make an absolutely TERRIFYING supervillain… 0.0
Tyler’s always been shown as way too stable and decent a person to go super-villain (unlike that one mirror version of him), he recognizes that there’s something wrong with his parents and has had very good role models in both the teachers and Revenant to recognize he does have worth and can make the world better (the Principal even provides an example of beware the temptation of power as he lived the memories of the Principal through his loss of his presidency when he was discovered to be a superhuman and having used them to manipulate himself into the spot). The only therapy he’d really need if any would be to deal with his issues over his clone and those aren’t too severe and he’s working through them quite well on his own.
Remember that his father also stated that he planned to run a background check on his Tyler.
He probably did actually do that and find that he had a son without superpowers and is now acting on that knowledge.
Squished? Is Julie around to give Tyler another hug?
Note that “squished” has long been Tyler’s term for being a normal among metas.
http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/02252008/
I can’t help but feel sad for Dynamode. Okay, yeah, other superheroes lost their powers too, but what happened to her sounds quite traumatic. PSWarp didn’t just destroy her powers but even her identity by going the extra mile of changing her hair color. I also suspect that she’s not just a former redhead but a former adult. And her line of “Broken” (assuming it’s hers, since it’s next to her) just sounds more devastating than all the others.
Hmm, if she’s the one at the Glory and Power shop, maybe she traded her adulthood to get powers back instead of money.
I’m sure this has been foreshadowed, they can’t restore the person but can give them something to help them change their own destiny. They weren’t aware of the item choice the customer would make.
This isn’t that sort of webcomic, but… it would be a real shame if PSwarp’s head had somehow managed to intersect a bullet during his most recent arrest.
I’d be more inclined to favor him ending up with karmic punishment of having his own powers stripped away in a similarly traumatic fashion, so he could suffer like his victim is.
Maybe he should be stuck as a species that engages in autocoprophagia.
And so it IS Doctor Newby and not a male relative as theorized in the comments of the last update, based on the therapist having a male name (“Isidore”, as opposed to “Isidora”).
Not sure how you get that, they could just as easily inform a male sibling who happened to have similar features about Tyler’s parents as the female doctor we know about. I imagine just about everyone associated with PS238 knows about the Tyler situation by this point since all the teachers who had to interact directly with him had to find out he had no powers and that his parents were totally off in the head regarding him thinking the universe spoke through them and that he was certain to gain cosmic powers to dwarf their own.
I thought Dr Newby was always a slim female. It must have been less clear in the art.
Actually, the masculine is Isador. Feminine is Isadore in France, Isadora if Spanish (pronunciation is about the same). Similar to Louis and Louise, Francois and Francoise, or Jean and Jeanne.
Really? Humm… American spelling oddities? I went to school with an Isadore, and he wasn’t female. Though he was Jewish, which may also have effected the spelling…
It might not be the right setting for it, but I’d like to see a storyline like this where the hero DOESNT move past the loss of his power, like its just too big a loss to bother even trying to move on. All Fall Down came close, but wussed out right at the end. I mean, when you lose something that vital to yourself, whats even the point anymore?
Armory’s still in that mental institution so far as I know.
Maybe Toby made their parents remember Tyler – or the background check report came as a nasty shock to them.R
Gee. Wouldn’t that be a shame. =_= A shock to those two yahoos. Like a letter from child services:
“We are reviewing your fitness to retain custody of your son in light of your neglect of your natural born son.”
Wait a minute – when did Ron lose his powers? Have I forgotten something, or did this happen off screen somewhere, and we’re just finding out about it? And is he upset or actually relieved?
Back in Issue #44, “Green vs. Blue”, Ron gets shot by an argonite ray gun and loses his powers.
He got shot on Argos.
The shot: http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/05032013/
The fallout: http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/05152013/
Back in issue 44:
http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/05032013/ and http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/05152013/
You might have missed a whole chapter then. It happened in ‘Argos goes to War’
You forgot a major plot point and/or missed a few chapters. It’s mentioned in issues 44 (when it happened), 45, 49, 50, 51.
Thanks, everybody. I love this comic, but the update scheduled is sometimes a bit drawn out … and if I haven’t re-read the back issues recently, I tend to forget things, obviously. Sometimes I may even have missed some of the updates, but in this case, I think I just forgot. (argh). Time to go read the back archives!
THIS is why I eventually get the dead tree books – I really like just getting to site down with the story book-style, and read a chunk of it at a time!
Anybody else seeing moderation issues? I posted a comment on the last panel, no problem. Post one on this panel, it’s awaiting moderation. Go back and post another one on the last panel, no problem. Not sure what’s going on here.
Aaaand – this comment goes through with no issues, last one’s still awaiting moderation. I’m confused.
Did you include any links or LIGHTING swear words? That might trigger it.
Wow. That last panel gave me a real twinge.
Poor kids. :-/ All of them.
Umm. Except for the supervillain on parole…
This whole group needs to be reminded of Revenant, a normal who routinely kicks super butt (although Lester from the previous page might not appreciate the reminder).
Well he’s considered more of a villain and the super-community has too many who think like Tyler’s parents so they aren’t likely to hold up the guy wanted in 27 states as an example to live up to. So apparently well-trained and/or tech-using characters who aren’t super-powered only get to be villains or will be seen as villains in the PS238verse based on what we’ve seen so far.
33 states in fact, mostly for tax evasion though
Well that and he’s actually breaking the law, though I’m sure he pays taxes on one of his identities.
I don’t think it’s JUST the superhero community that hate the Revenant, I think it’s the government as a whole who are helping to try and damage his image. The reason is because he answers to nobody, and that probably scares the hell out of them. Especially because he is incredibly skilled, canny, and has a ton of resources at his disposal. If he went bad, or at the very least, went against their agendas (which has likely happened, a lot, like for example with Cranston) they can’t predict or counter him effectively.
Well, if he’s anything like the Revenant in the Stackpole story and the PS238 RPG, he’s also occasionally willing to take deserving heroes down a peg, often in ironic and/or amusing ways, which would certainly win him no favors.
Why? Tyler’s the only one of them who is going to go on to be a super-rich world-class athlete and genius.
I hate to criticize the art, but I don’t like the way Tyler’s been drawn lately. Between the highlights in the hair and wide-open eye design, he just looks very artificial, like a plastic doll. Anyone else seeing it?
Yes, they both have that glassy-eyed look and their skin looks like plastic. What gives?
P.S. I hate the “you’ve done it wrong, hit the back button, and oh by the way we’ve lost your post” error code! 4x!
I also dislike that the “refresh” button for the verification system (Captcha? or something similar?) that gives a 404 error message. But I think I’ve figured out a work-around: Type out my post, select and copy it, then refresh the whole page, hit the Reply button if appropriate, paste, solve the new simple math problem, and hit Post. This usually works. ^_^
Maybe this is a platform error. I use Windows 10 and Google Chrome. The refresh button to the right of the math captcha (which is what it’s called) works perfectly fine for me. Type out the post, hit the captcha refresh, solve the problem, hit “Post Comment.”
Same here, and I use Windows 10 and Mozilla Firefox. I think it worked fine in Internet Explorer as well.
I too am using Windows 10 with Firefox, but I get the 404 on hitting the Refresh image. This is weird.
Hm.
There are six people with no powers in the room. Either the desperate stranger who wanted Power & Glory is in this room now, or their absence will be noted, or Aaron has decided to throw Chekov’s rule to the winds.
The desperate stranger can’t be Tyler (never had powers; wrong height; wrong everything else), or Steven (unless he grew that full beard overnight?). Lester looks too tall and lanky; Ron looks too short (although there’s been enough weirdly distorted appearances with some of the characters some of the time that it’s hard to be sure about that).
The desperate stranger certainly did look a bit like a slim woman/girl. Both Sarah and Paula look like possible matches.
But I note that Paula has her purse on her lap. Now, maybe that’s just a general security thing. . . but maybe she has a New Toy in there that she wants to keep hidden and safe. Hm.
Absence will not likely be noted, since before Tyler’s turn Newby said “… and we have one more …” (emphasis added). So either our mysterious customer is one of those who introduced themselves, or he or she wasn’t enrolled in the group session and we’ll get a comparison/contrast of experiences as the two story arcs go forward.
Hmmm, I tried to underline “one” but I guess the HTML “U” and “/U” tags don’t work.
I’d suggest that it’s reasonable that “one more” can mean “one more [to be introduced at this time]”, and later have Newby say “Looks like [name] didn’t show” without being terribly inconsistent.
But I’m still looking carefully at Paula’s purse. Say, maybe the purse is the New Toy? Maybe a Bigger On The Inside bag?
I suppose that’s plausible, although in that instance I’d have expected the last panel to show an empty chair among the occupied ones (Aaron’s good with those little details). Unless our mysterious customer cancelled out of the group at the last minute? That would still be consistent with the details we’ve seen.
If it is someone in the group, I’d agree Paula makes the most sense; Sarah doesn’t look much taller than Tyler. The way Paula’s holding her purse didn’t trigger any flags with me, probably because I’ve known a couple of women who hold theirs that way as a kind of nervous habit when they’re feeling awkward or socially uncomfortable.
Are kids and adults supposed to be in a group therapy session together? I thought that was not allowed or at least not recommended…
Especially kids with an adult criminal…
Even with the rather large number of metastatic in this world is expected it would be difficult to fill a group therapy session with only adults or only kids who had lost their powers.
Posting from the future, I will, without spoilers, point out that PSWarp is a dumb name, and wonder if it’s supposed to be a typo for PsiWarp, which would be more easily pronounced.
[since “psi” generally references the mind/mental powers, and he can presumably warp the minds of others]