The fighting escalates. I hope you’re ready for a (steve harvey voice) family feud.
If you saw this page last week during the brief window that it was live, congrats! But this is the day it is supposed to be posted, lol.
The fighting escalates. I hope you’re ready for a (steve harvey voice) family feud.
If you saw this page last week during the brief window that it was live, congrats! But this is the day it is supposed to be posted, lol.
44 Comments
And this is where you impress potential employers w your de-escalation abilities.
No fights like family fights huh
Also damn I really love kevin’s jacket
Two pages today!? You spoil us Kory! <3
…Ohno. Is “the monster” in the chapter title generational trauma? I muchly prefer the mythical beasties kind of monsters. :C
Given what happened at the end of Obverse and Reverse, I thought that the “monster” of this chapter’s title would be a certain rogue demon (perhaps that’s too obvious and a misdirect?). But I wonder if Vera might have the power to sow discord among mortal beings, unseen or from afar, in the role of a trickster deity. I would think that’s probably not what’s going on between Alec and Kevin here, though—I’d guess they would have gotten into this fight on their own.
FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!
Kiss! Kiss!
They are first cousins
Ou-oh are we gonna have a fight about daddy issues?
Given that the comic’s set at least ten years before Steve Harvey started hosting Family Feud, wouldn’t the voice have to be (checks Wikipedia) Richard Karn?
Hopefully this family feud doesn’t ascend to Hatfield and McCoy levels.
Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of a Generational Trauma.
A fight between bugbears is properly called a ‘bugger-off’.
And once they show their other side and make up, it’s a “bear hug” instead? :-)
if we look at the other example of a bugbear the comic had (part of a maize maze attraction), then alec is in the wrong : being scary and unnerving is skill,power and tool
not the raison d’être
To paraphrase Kwai Chang Caine, the Younger, “In his zeal to learn the How, he has neglected the Why.”
As was recently explained to me by someone familiar with legend & folklore, the function of bugbears and the like is to scare children (and other vulnerable people) away from dangerous places, dangerous things, and dangerous people.
Alec could benefit from lessons taught by Myra, but I doubt he’d be very receptive.
If you have to be taught, then it’s not your nature, is it? You could argue Kevin isn’t embracing “bugbear culture”, if there is such a thing in a community where each culture has only a handful of representatives and no records are kept…
But it could also be that people like Alec are hell bent into wanting to believe their skills, powers and appearance have to also dictate their whole personalities and their place in a community.
This is a very interesting set of pages, I’m loving what the narrative is giving us.
Oh so Alec was fed some purity culture bullshit but because bugbears are so weird, it doesn’t get called out like that until it’s another bugbear. Huuuuuuh, that puts him in a slightly different light. Interesting, I enjoy that.
No, no! Alec 2 has a point here!
Alec is just rehearsing everything Daddy said. Like a parrot.
Up to a point that he has nothing left but stereotype behaviour anymore.
At least when you look at it from a little more extreme point of view.
Not sure if Alec has any space to judge. His idea of scary seems to be walking up behind people who aren’t paying attention and summoning insects where people aren’t expecting insects.
… oh.
Oh this one hit me very, very personally.
I’m on Kevin’s side here. You can do your “family thing” without it becoming your full personality.
I need to lie down.
Oh damn
Someone gotta clam this down before the claws come out
You know, this actually touches on a very interesting thing about this comic’s approach to fantasy.
The thing about folklore is that there’s a degree of teleology to it: these sorts of personified forces of nature have roles to play which, in turn, relate to our own relationship to the rest of nature and to each other. But, in Skin Deep, creatures of myth are just, like, a thing you can be. They have personhood and interiority and they find themselves arbitrarity Here And Now just like all of us do. Hell, even an entity like Ravi can’t simply be an extension of something grander and ineffable – his own telos, if any, is shrouded in (ahem) myth even to himself.
There’s a lot of back and forth you could have re: stuff like the idea of “disenchantment” vis-a-vis the modern era and the particulars of depicting entities from specific faiths and cultures, but I like the way SD’s approach interweaves the way we tell tales about the world and the way we do so about ourselves. Why are we here? What should we be doing? Where are we going? What can we be? Because the monster, the myth, the thing in the night is an Otherness, a non-personhood, it need not have anything to it beyond what we understand its ingrained purpose to be; and that is something we can find uncanny and baffling and maybe sometimes even enviable. But, in the comic, which has a big focus on slices of ongoing life amid the larger plot(s), they’re just like…people. They can guess why they’re here and why they’re doing what they do, but they can also be unsatisfied with the answers – maybe with *any* answers. Michelle can’t just be a symbol of the rebirth of a lost people. Ravi can’t just be an envoy of the cosmos itself. There’s angels and demons hanging around, but who on earth (or any other plane) do they truly answer *to* with no lingering feeling this might just be all arbitrary?
In the end, all the grand mystique you’ve built around yourself might just as well come down to “that’s what my dad did”. And now you can no longer be the chill in the deepest night. You’re just someone, somewhere, somehow.
I dunno if this makes much sense, it’s just, you know, one thing I really enjoy about this approach to urban fantasy.
No no, you hit the nail right on the head.
Alec needs his identity as a bugbear to be something beyond human (for lack of a better word), detached from the mundane, divorced from the social contract. While Kevin is seeking the opposite, a connection that makes him feel part of the whole, a bugbear experience that’s relatable and approachable.
Yes, I think that’s part of it, and generally both sides have their points: Wanting to assert your individuality is a valid priority in someone’s life, if they are ready to bear the consequences (sorry/not sorry!).
But valuing the connection to others outside of your inner comfort zone is also a valid priority with its own set of consequences.
The crucial thing is not whether one or the other choice is “more valid”, but that in my view one just should not impose one’s own choice on others without really substantial reasons, and just preferring it that way or having a personal idea of what you yourself want to be are not among those!
Kevin’s version is a good gateway to bug ear culture, Alec. There’s a time and place for everything, and while Kevin’s is less intense and commercialized, it can help introduce humans without causing them to get their pitchforks. I’m sorry, Alec, but humans do scare easy, and scared humans fight back….
But Alec doesn’t want humans to understand bugbears, he just wants them to freak out!
>8-D
True,…and that’s because Alec obviously has “issues” with his own self-worth rooted directly in whatever “cultural purity heritage” he was indoctrinated into by his father… That kind of “cultural purity” creates an unhealthy “us versus them” mentality that also alienates those who don’t pass those associated “purity tests”… Not only does that create a sort of “loner mentality” that makes Alex such a jealous friend with Ike, but it also fuels the sort of ass-hole-ish behavior that he often displays toward anyone he deems as “lesser”, based on the way he was raised… It causes others to look at him as a judgmental jerk with a superiority complex, while also causing him to retreat into a sort of “incel basement-chud” personality type that just makes him seem like a total scummy dick-head at times… He thinks he’s “too cool for school”, while everyone else just thinks he’s slowly becoming an intolerable a-hole…
Yeah, I can see that being at in least being behind Alec’s attitude!
Of course it can also be part compensation for his whole set of instincts by their very nature rubbing others around him the wrong way, notably with only Ike putting up with all of it enough to interact with him halfway normally but he still is a bit of a thorn in everybody’s side and it is indeed a question how much of that is by his innate bugbear instincts and how much as compensation for his (mostly) loner status on the outside of an otherwise mostly civilized avalon society…
Even among bugbears Alec seems to be pretty “hard core” quite a bit beyond just taking his “job” seriously.
Edit:
Yeah, I can see that being behind Alec’s attitude, at least in part!
Halloween is going to go greeeaat.
Uh-oh.. I have a feeling this is gonna get bloody.
Alec, you’re actually arguing Kevin’s case for being the entertainment for tonight, actually… You know, having a bunch of humans in there? And maybe needing someone LESS scary?
Kevin’s medallion looks (to me) like a coiled worm.
I’m curious about that because bugbears don’t need medallions, right? They can shapeshift iirc
So is this a friend’s? Maybe a regular/non magical medallion?
No, they need medallions. Head back to to The One-Eyed Bugbear.
Ah, the eternal conflict. Preserve tradition or adapt and move on with the times?
In one hand, culture will be lost if we don’t do an active effort to maintain it true to its original context. On the other, it will also be lost if one refuses to build bridges with the contemporary currents to make it more accessible.
And on the third hand, some aspects of certain cultures really need to die!
Although for bugbears that is tricky because other people’s discomfort and disruption is their whole thing so far!
That is SO true about some especially toxic aspects of certain “cultures” and “traditions”… And, honestly, the “issues” with Alec aren’t really “bugbear issues”, they’re “toxic traditions” issues that come with his “cultural purity” indoctrination… A jerk is just a jerk,….whether you happen to be a bugbear or not… And really, being a bugbear, according to the actual traditions that DO seem to be “healthy”, the “scary” part is really just a means to an end that is more about protecting the innocent (human children) than it is about creating discomfort and disruption… Alec, and perhaps his father too, seem to have conveniently forgotten THAT part of their “cultural heritage” along the way, and they’re focusing on the wrong parts of what it means to “be” a bugbear… It feels like Kevin’s a bit better about that, at least from first impressions…
At least Kevin is a lot more compatible with other parts of society, it seems. But their confrontation certainly shines a light on those points!
Oh dear, brothers fighting, lol. Finally, the confidence or the bugbears subside.
*of
Well Alec, its different when its your culture vs two ‘Monsters’ talking about old times is it?
And this is why we don’t see bugbears congregate together very often.
Look at Tim & Abby, the worried bystanders at the bottom of the first frame.