Episode 835: On the Other Hand

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Dave

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Zombie Cliche Lookout: Pushing Back

With a zombie, there’s no negotiation. It wants to come and eat your face, and you, one assumes, don’t really want it to do that. Your options, however, are limited. You’re not going to talk the zombie out of its own nature. That means you can run, or hide, or fight. That’s about it. With people, talking is an option, and within that option are all sorts of different tacks you can take. You can play on their sympathies, try to strike some sort of bargain with them, or even intimidate them. There’s no saying how successful you’ll be, of course. In fact, you might just end up making things worse. It really breaks down to two things: the person you’re talking with, and how you present yourself. Broken down simply, it’s a sort of rock/paper/scissors kind of deal, except with far more than three available options.

About this Episode:

We don’t get to spend a lot of time with this new group of people. I’m not going to dive into their backstory or do any sort of mini-arc that shows how they function as a group, but I want to get something across about their personalities and how they work together. They are, all of them, aggressive in some way, but how they approach it varies a fair bit. Or, at least that’s what I’m going for.

Discussion Question: How to Proceed

Today’s question comes to us from BrickVoi, who asks: “Should Murphy stand his ground a second time and start complaining, or insist on an explanation first, as if he’s dumber than anyone Ned ever knew? Or should he play along for now? I don’t rightly know what’s happening on Wednesday, so discuss this here and now if you want!”

Clearly, the comic has already answered the question of what Murphy will actually do, but what do you think he should have done?

14 thoughts on “Episode 835: On the Other Hand”

  1. Wow this is building up quite a bit! I hope Dave wrote it to the best he could do with whatever LEGO he had on hand! 😀

    • I gave it my best.

  2. Even in a zombie apocalypse, talking like that to a law enforcement officer is going to get you shot at.

    I expect the action is going to heat up next episode, at least I would think Dave is going to have something happen without too much delay! 😀

    On the other hand, if he’s trying to draw this out into a suspense thriller, he could get to episode 1,000 if done correctly, so there’s that! 😀

    • Hah, I’m not going to make it to 1000. We’re very close to the end now.

      • When your done you should separate the actual comics from the extras that used to appear, so that if some one wants to they can go through the whole thing uninterrupted, or look at some of the cool guest comic strips and special features

        • I keep trying to do that, and it’s not working. I’m going to have to suck it up and get on the ComicPress forum to try to figure it out.

      • The end is just the start of a new beginning! 😀 There’s no excuse to not try and make it to episode 1,000 in some form or another! 😀

        • What I’m trying to say is you could do the backstory of this other group, after the end of the comic. By the way, are we going to find out what happened to Barb, Clark, and the rest of the characters who were last seen some time ago?

          Not getting to Episode 1,000 is one thing, but not cleaning up those loose ends? That’s a whole other thing! 😀

        • Also by doing the backstory, you could take six months or a year off, see if things settle down, and then do it in your free time over a long period of time. It would make sense if I were wanting to do it, anyway! 😀

  3. Dave, whatever you do next, we’ll all be there to read it! 🙂

    Hope you’ll continue you’re great work. Would had made my own Lego series comic if I had the bricks for it (sold mine to a friend of my brother’s and me as a teen, and when we met up years later I asked him about it; told me that he had to get rid of them! I told him I would had bought them off of him. 🙁 Oh well, life happens…)

  4. Work the plan but these guys are not going to walk away and blood will be split. Hope it doesn’t attract zeds.

    • I think a masterful way of showing just how scary zombies can be would be for several zombies to suddenly appear out of nowhere and surprise the members of Ned’s group that are guarding the others. Let’s say he gets lucky and half of his guards are zombiefied or eaten.

      If I were in that group I would be like “How now, brown cow?” after witnessing a surprise zombie attack like that! 😀

  5. Murphy is a cop. He’d be trained in dealing with situations like this (outnumbered by hostile, armed guys). He’d avoid no-win risks, look for an exploitable opening, and maintain a high level of situation awareness in the service of both those objectives.

  6. Judging from the build-up I wouldn’t have expected the end to be so soon :/