Didn’t he use the Decoder Ring Tracker to during the angel-demon-arc find Cecil when Cecil, Malphast, Toby and that other kid fled from the adult metahumans?
I’d say Revenant’s psuedo-surveillance tech is less sketchy than it seems at first blush, since most of it seems to be things that are useful for Tyler directly, rather than simply Revenant keeping an eye on him. Revenant just also has access for now, since Tyler’s still in training. It’s also all tied to his Moon Shadow gear, so it’s only keeping tabs when he’s probably doing something dangerous that he’d need help with anyway.
That’s actually Revenant’s final exam for Tyler: If he can find all the tracking devices and bugs on his person, he’s smart enough to “graduate” Rev’s training.
Wait…so that was the real “Moonshadow” on the previous page after all? What the heck was up with those weird proportions?
(and why hasn’t Revenant told Tyler about all that cool stuff in his helmet BEFORE this? This comes off as creepy as fuck — there’s cameras & monitors in Moonshadow’s gear that Tyler doesn’t know about. I understand that Rev as an adult wants to keep tabs on the kid, but that’s something Tyler really should have been told about in advance.)
To me, the previous kind of looked liked Moonshadow as others see him, the ‘the shadow-powered mysterious figure of mysteries’ as opposed to ‘Tyler in a football helmet’ which is how he sees himself.
He does seem to be learning the hard way and a lot of his gears functions have red warning labels he avoids using without having been trained first. This could just be that he hadn’t been informed yet as a situation for its function to be used hadn’t occurred. I’m guessing that it’s all standard for the Revenant and he hasn’t yet modified it to Moonshadows drop box if he has one.
Definitely an oversight but not creepy. Also very useful in specific situations.
As noted by other readers in the last update:
Moon Shadow just appears SO MYSTERIOUSLY COOL to others, especially to his fans. 🙂
(Said other readers noted something similar happened during the soccer match: update 07302012.)
Side note: Tyler, darn it, I’m so PROUD of how you’ve grown! 😀
Tyler: You have a camera in my helmet?!?! That’s creepy!
Revenant: Perhaps. But I’m teacher responsible for a ward who regulary finds himself in serious danger. A ward who also happens to have two FISS parents that would probably be very upset with me should something happen to him.
Tyler: I see your point.
To me its not so much the camera in the helmet its that seems Tyler learns about these types of things on a need to know basis. If R explained that by the way your suit comes with a built in camera to help me figure out what you need help with on solo missions and will also monitor and flag certain situations which might need my attention it would be different.
Also Tyler’s parents are FISS+ not FISS.
In the real world, certainly. But I suspect it’s a narrative tool. Aaron is trying to give us a reason as to why the Revenant can see the note, even as both of them have been a bit too busy to go through the more traditional methods of sharing data.
If you’re looking for a Watsonian explanation, Revenant is clearly based off of Batman, who is known for a penchant for drama. Revenant hasn’t told Tyler about all of this because he’s kind of a drama queen
Do they have speed? I don’t think that’s in their power list. Flight invulnerable and strong, yes but they haven’t shown speed. Not super power level speed anyway. I think the other power(s) are a trade off as FISS aren’t shown with extra powers even rarely. Not even weak FISS which could indicate something important regarding powers.
Flight speed being fast doesn’t mean having super speed. That’s just flight and some have higher speeds than others. If they could run at that speed then I’d agree with you. Fast reaction speed like catching a bullet hasn’t been shown either. They haven’t been shown physically moving fast. (Correct me if I’m forgetting a few pages, it’d be appreciated)
Any fast flight ability isn’t automatically a speedster ability.
I don’t think it’s as much a spying tool as it is helping Revenant help Tyler in situations like this. Tyler isn’t very good at describing things, as most kids his age are, and if he’s talking to Revenant mid-fight, Revenant needs to cut to the chase and know what Tyler is getting at so he can help. If anything, it’s spying on everyone else but Tyler. The non-powered vigilante keeping tabs on his super-powered bretheren is an age-old trope, after all.
The proportions could have been because of the same stuff Tyler was using to mask his getaway – perhaps those “refractive particles” from earlier. At any rate, there was SOMETHING doing weird things to the edges of his form (and to his face, for that matter).
As for the gear, I’m willing to believe that the Revenant is so used to being crazy-prepared that he just doesn’t think about it, turning things like this into simple oversight – especially when it’s something Tyler could have found out HIMSELF (at least in broad strokes) if he’d explored his HUD in more detail.
For Tyler’s part, he’s probably given up on trying to understand what everything he’s been issued does. Not the wisest course, but he’s a kid – and the Revenant DOES at least seem to have his best interests in mind, unlike some other adult figures in Tyler’s life.
There’s probably an owner’s manual in there as well. My Kindle came with that; I read it; I made notes; but I still don’t remember several things in it. (Such as how to get it back to read it again. I think I did write that down…)
Dammit, now I have something else to equip my next Caped Detective with.
Anyone else getting the feeling that THE REVENANT! is kind of continually surprised that he has to keep explaining Tyler’s gear to him? After the second or third time, I’m pretty sure my next mystery would be figuring out everything in the suit and what it does.
That depend on if you’re the sort of person who enjoys reading technical manuals and DIY and fixit guides.
Well, yeah, me too. But some people are more like The Greatest American Hero, and lose the first copy of the instruction manual, and forget where they left the microscopically miniaturized second copy, and…
If this were a Saturday Morning cartoon, every so often there would be a tutorial segment, like on Speed Racer when Speed would talk about one or another of the Mach 5’s onboard gizmos. I’m sure the helmet alone would probably take up a whole episode’s worth of segments. And then one segment for each pocket of the utility belt.
“It’s all there in the manual”
“You mean that book that is as thick as the last Harry Potter?”
“You read that, didn’t you”
“Yeah, but that was for fun, this thing is boring. It’s worse than my math book, and almost three times as big.”
“Hey, you’re learning fractions and multiplication. Good.”
Incidentally, I have a manual like that. I still haven’t read it cover to cover.
I’m sure this has been mentioned before, but I think Revenant qualifies as a meta-human soley based on his multi-tasking ability. All characters in the story have it too some degree, but the Revenant has downright super human levels of it!
Revenant doesn’t set of Cecil’s metahuman detector, so he is technically human. But he is sort of this world’s Batman – rich, skilled, driven, dedicated, intelligent, etc.
Regarding the helmet-camera: Tyler may well know of the camera, but have not assumed the Revenant was watching it 24/7. A very reasonable assumption, as Tyler knows how busy he is. Therefore, for that receipt to have come to the Revenant’s attention, he would have had to have had something draw his eye to it, AND be watching the camera when it came up…
…or, there would have to be a function of the camera that Tyler didn’t know about earlier which ensured the Revenant’s attention would be drawn to that receipt enough for him to remember it.
Heck, because it gets dropped to Dropbox, the Revenant may not have seen it, yet. “So that’s what that was,” may refer to the notification he received that his Dropbox had something added to it…when the Revenant isn’t actually doing anything to add things to it. It may have even come while he was in this very fight, which would explain why the distraction was notable.
He might want to find that camera and how to block it by the time he gets to be a teen. :p
By that point though, I guess his head will have grown enough the Revenant would have to get him a new football helmet with all NEW gadgets in it for him to find out about later.
While I get that you’re implying that teens get up to things they wouldn’t want adults spying on them for, you’re missing the obvious option of not being Moonshadow when he does any of that sort of thing. The camera is in his helmet.
Though if he takes to reading while on console duty, that could lead to a lot of dropbox entries of page after page of novel.
When he finds his equivalent to Catwoman, he’ll want to take certain precautions … and you can’t just shed your costume for Catwoman, well, not right away …
This is all very Spiderman: Homecoming, but I guess it predates that movie.
Eh, the Revenant catches him doing what, kissing her, at worst? Anything too shameful would require shedding the costume.
I mean, unless Catwoman is going to show him racy photos of herself, in which case, that’s “The boss is going to tease me about this” material, not “I’m in so much trouble for being caught doing this” material.
“Chapter 1: 84 and the Ones Before
Metahumans who are of the FISS variety (with flight, invulnerability, speed, & strength) are often seen as nothing special when it comes to foiling evil. One girl’s embrace of being just another samey-superhero is starting to have an impact, and not one she would’ve predicted…”
From the Archive page.
… Totes making Longcat in my next supers game.
How do you know his name?
It is an internet meme
As long as he’s only facing longcat, and not endcat, my money is still on The Revenant. But endcat will end you and all you love.
Jesus.
Ol’ Rev sounds frighteningly a lot like Google…
LONGCAT IS LONG!!!
Cat Scratch Fever…(air guitars)
I feel like Tyler’s teachers should really inform him about keeping tabs on him before hand. This is starting to feel like an invasion of his privacy.
I think Tyler is aware since http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/03012013/ that the Rev has a lot of gear to keep tabs on Tyler.
http://ps238.nodwick.com/comic/07062007/
And the school has a tracker in his decoder ring. Don’t think he knows about that either. 🙂
Didn’t he use the Decoder Ring Tracker to during the angel-demon-arc find Cecil when Cecil, Malphast, Toby and that other kid fled from the adult metahumans?
It seems most of the ‘adults’ in the series are sketchy or have done questionable things.
Just like real life, then
I’d say Revenant’s psuedo-surveillance tech is less sketchy than it seems at first blush, since most of it seems to be things that are useful for Tyler directly, rather than simply Revenant keeping an eye on him. Revenant just also has access for now, since Tyler’s still in training. It’s also all tied to his Moon Shadow gear, so it’s only keeping tabs when he’s probably doing something dangerous that he’d need help with anyway.
That’s actually Revenant’s final exam for Tyler: If he can find all the tracking devices and bugs on his person, he’s smart enough to “graduate” Rev’s training.
You know, Toby could make his cape try to eat Cecil if he wanted.
“I’m done with this living blanket fort” probably seems like a very bad-ass thing to say if you’re 9 like Toby.
Heck, I’m 44, and I though it was kinda’ bad-ass.
Wait…so that was the real “Moonshadow” on the previous page after all? What the heck was up with those weird proportions?
(and why hasn’t Revenant told Tyler about all that cool stuff in his helmet BEFORE this? This comes off as creepy as fuck — there’s cameras & monitors in Moonshadow’s gear that Tyler doesn’t know about. I understand that Rev as an adult wants to keep tabs on the kid, but that’s something Tyler really should have been told about in advance.)
Apparently so. I’m as surprised as you were. For now, I’d chalk up any weirdness to quirks of perspective.
To me, the previous kind of looked liked Moonshadow as others see him, the ‘the shadow-powered mysterious figure of mysteries’ as opposed to ‘Tyler in a football helmet’ which is how he sees himself.
He does seem to be learning the hard way and a lot of his gears functions have red warning labels he avoids using without having been trained first. This could just be that he hadn’t been informed yet as a situation for its function to be used hadn’t occurred. I’m guessing that it’s all standard for the Revenant and he hasn’t yet modified it to Moonshadows drop box if he has one.
Definitely an oversight but not creepy. Also very useful in specific situations.
As noted by other readers in the last update:
Moon Shadow just appears SO MYSTERIOUSLY COOL to others, especially to his fans. 🙂
(Said other readers noted something similar happened during the soccer match: update 07302012.)
Side note: Tyler, darn it, I’m so PROUD of how you’ve grown! 😀
Lessons are taught one by one.
Tyler: You have a camera in my helmet?!?! That’s creepy!
Revenant: Perhaps. But I’m teacher responsible for a ward who regulary finds himself in serious danger. A ward who also happens to have two FISS parents that would probably be very upset with me should something happen to him.
Tyler: I see your point.
To me its not so much the camera in the helmet its that seems Tyler learns about these types of things on a need to know basis. If R explained that by the way your suit comes with a built in camera to help me figure out what you need help with on solo missions and will also monitor and flag certain situations which might need my attention it would be different.
Also Tyler’s parents are FISS+ not FISS.
In the real world, certainly. But I suspect it’s a narrative tool. Aaron is trying to give us a reason as to why the Revenant can see the note, even as both of them have been a bit too busy to go through the more traditional methods of sharing data.
In game terms – I cannot help but see Revenant in tabletop RPG terms — he’s using one of his Gizmos to justify having that in-game knowledge.
@Moe Lane: So he is a gadgeteer who uses his powers specifically to meta-game to help his team-mates? I buy that.
If you’re looking for a Watsonian explanation, Revenant is clearly based off of Batman, who is known for a penchant for drama. Revenant hasn’t told Tyler about all of this because he’s kind of a drama queen
Do they have speed? I don’t think that’s in their power list. Flight invulnerable and strong, yes but they haven’t shown speed. Not super power level speed anyway. I think the other power(s) are a trade off as FISS aren’t shown with extra powers even rarely. Not even weak FISS which could indicate something important regarding powers.
They DID catch up to a stealth-plane thingy way back in the Rainmaker arc, so yes, they DO have speed.
Hence them being some of the strongest metahumans (adult) that there are. They are FISS WITH LASERS (or whatever their blasts are).
Flight speed being fast doesn’t mean having super speed. That’s just flight and some have higher speeds than others. If they could run at that speed then I’d agree with you. Fast reaction speed like catching a bullet hasn’t been shown either. They haven’t been shown physically moving fast. (Correct me if I’m forgetting a few pages, it’d be appreciated)
Any fast flight ability isn’t automatically a speedster ability.
What would the other “S” be, if not speed? The ps238 wiki thinks FISS = Flight, Invulnerability, Strength, Speed
Nobody reads the documentation that comes with their stuff anymore.
I don’t think it’s as much a spying tool as it is helping Revenant help Tyler in situations like this. Tyler isn’t very good at describing things, as most kids his age are, and if he’s talking to Revenant mid-fight, Revenant needs to cut to the chase and know what Tyler is getting at so he can help. If anything, it’s spying on everyone else but Tyler. The non-powered vigilante keeping tabs on his super-powered bretheren is an age-old trope, after all.
The proportions could have been because of the same stuff Tyler was using to mask his getaway – perhaps those “refractive particles” from earlier. At any rate, there was SOMETHING doing weird things to the edges of his form (and to his face, for that matter).
As for the gear, I’m willing to believe that the Revenant is so used to being crazy-prepared that he just doesn’t think about it, turning things like this into simple oversight – especially when it’s something Tyler could have found out HIMSELF (at least in broad strokes) if he’d explored his HUD in more detail.
For Tyler’s part, he’s probably given up on trying to understand what everything he’s been issued does. Not the wisest course, but he’s a kid – and the Revenant DOES at least seem to have his best interests in mind, unlike some other adult figures in Tyler’s life.
There’s probably an owner’s manual in there as well. My Kindle came with that; I read it; I made notes; but I still don’t remember several things in it. (Such as how to get it back to read it again. I think I did write that down…)
So, yeah, this is in the manual, probably.
I always like the camera angles of Rev action scenes
Dammit, now I have something else to equip my next Caped Detective with.
Anyone else getting the feeling that THE REVENANT! is kind of continually surprised that he has to keep explaining Tyler’s gear to him? After the second or third time, I’m pretty sure my next mystery would be figuring out everything in the suit and what it does.
That depend on if you’re the sort of person who enjoys reading technical manuals and DIY and fixit guides.
Well, yeah, me too. But some people are more like The Greatest American Hero, and lose the first copy of the instruction manual, and forget where they left the microscopically miniaturized second copy, and…
If this were a Saturday Morning cartoon, every so often there would be a tutorial segment, like on Speed Racer when Speed would talk about one or another of the Mach 5’s onboard gizmos. I’m sure the helmet alone would probably take up a whole episode’s worth of segments. And then one segment for each pocket of the utility belt.
I think Tyler would be trying – but currently he has just finished installing the flashlight app on his wire-cutting moonrangs.
“It’s all there in the manual”
“You mean that book that is as thick as the last Harry Potter?”
“You read that, didn’t you”
“Yeah, but that was for fun, this thing is boring. It’s worse than my math book, and almost three times as big.”
“Hey, you’re learning fractions and multiplication. Good.”
Incidentally, I have a manual like that. I still haven’t read it cover to cover.
Ah the baby Monitor protocol -seems Stark isn’t the only one with invasion of privacy issues
I’m sure this has been mentioned before, but I think Revenant qualifies as a meta-human soley based on his multi-tasking ability. All characters in the story have it too some degree, but the Revenant has downright super human levels of it!
Revenant doesn’t set of Cecil’s metahuman detector, so he is technically human. But he is sort of this world’s Batman – rich, skilled, driven, dedicated, intelligent, etc.
Revenant have the best enemies.
Well, I stand corrected. If Revenant is fighting Long Cat, then he can’t be villain-guy or “mysterious” Tyler, I disguise.
That was supposed to be “in disguise,” and I wasn’t even using my iPhone! *sigh*
Well on the revanents side if he doesn’t know he has a camera in his helmet he can’t accidentally tell a captor he has one if he is forced
Regarding the helmet-camera: Tyler may well know of the camera, but have not assumed the Revenant was watching it 24/7. A very reasonable assumption, as Tyler knows how busy he is. Therefore, for that receipt to have come to the Revenant’s attention, he would have had to have had something draw his eye to it, AND be watching the camera when it came up…
…or, there would have to be a function of the camera that Tyler didn’t know about earlier which ensured the Revenant’s attention would be drawn to that receipt enough for him to remember it.
Heck, because it gets dropped to Dropbox, the Revenant may not have seen it, yet. “So that’s what that was,” may refer to the notification he received that his Dropbox had something added to it…when the Revenant isn’t actually doing anything to add things to it. It may have even come while he was in this very fight, which would explain why the distraction was notable.
He might want to find that camera and how to block it by the time he gets to be a teen. :p
By that point though, I guess his head will have grown enough the Revenant would have to get him a new football helmet with all NEW gadgets in it for him to find out about later.
While I get that you’re implying that teens get up to things they wouldn’t want adults spying on them for, you’re missing the obvious option of not being Moonshadow when he does any of that sort of thing. The camera is in his helmet.
Though if he takes to reading while on console duty, that could lead to a lot of dropbox entries of page after page of novel.
When he finds his equivalent to Catwoman, he’ll want to take certain precautions … and you can’t just shed your costume for Catwoman, well, not right away …
This is all very Spiderman: Homecoming, but I guess it predates that movie.
Eh, the Revenant catches him doing what, kissing her, at worst? Anything too shameful would require shedding the costume.
I mean, unless Catwoman is going to show him racy photos of herself, in which case, that’s “The boss is going to tease me about this” material, not “I’m in so much trouble for being caught doing this” material.
Can’t even really do that with that face-guard in the way. As Revenant has alluded to before.
It may take pictures of love letters, but not of love. (Not by default).
OOh, I’m not the only one who has used a Gambado in their gaming . . .
Is it just me, or does it look like the Revenant has lost weight ?
FISS = Flight, Invulnerability, Super Strength. It’s defined that way in the official PS238 RPG.
“Chapter 1: 84 and the Ones Before
Metahumans who are of the FISS variety (with flight, invulnerability, speed, & strength) are often seen as nothing special when it comes to foiling evil. One girl’s embrace of being just another samey-superhero is starting to have an impact, and not one she would’ve predicted…”
From the Archive page.
I love that the Revenant uses Drop Box.
Wait a sec, is this implying that The Revenant is Tacgnol?