2113 Desiccated.

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There was going to be another page of Thomas & Reggie going back and forth but I didn’t want to go into the weekend with not knowing what was in the room, so I truncated it. In an animated version it would play a little longer. Not that it matters, but in my head it was even better with more bickering, which amuses me. I wanted to do the reaction & once I drew it I knew I had to either do it this way or do another page & that seemed like punishment for everyone waiting on the outcome of everything.

I had to do research on corpses to make sure this was a legit thing that could happen & let me tell you I didn’t enjoy it a bit. I know more about corpses left alone in places than I ever wanted to & that’s in my head until senility takes it away.

55 Comments

So they DIDN’T find an underground porn studio?

[ The door’s not closed] on that possibility, yet…so to speak. :)

I’m sure some of them are open to all kinds of new experiences, but I’m not sure I’d peg any of them as “Necromantics”. Content warning — if you “google” that movie and then watch it don’t blame me!

Oh dear.
Maybe my idea didn’t come through.
I was trying to hint at a scene where- Reggie looks into a room, and the room is a now-abandoned porn studio, and that a dead guy is now in that studio.
But yeah- fiction, about paramours, with zombies or the departed, is not a place that I need to put my imagination to go to. :D

Necrophiliac was mentioned on a movie (Heartbreakers), and my (older) sister asked me what the word meant. I told her there was a dictionary by her chair. “Do you know what it means?” Yep “And you won’t tell me?” Nope “How do you spell it?” Necrophili-she slams the dictionary closed and,”Why is there a woooord for that?”

Once the initial shock wore off, there is a certain humor about seeing a body just SURROUNDED by piles of porno. Cranked out one too many. Not a bad way to go, I guess? Better than dying during sex, and traumatizing someone else.

Interesting that the radio would have not been heard throughout the rest of the building all those years. It is conceivable (but unlikely IMHO) that a well-built solid-state radio (especially one from the 1960s, which is evidently the time when the person who owned the building went missing) would actually last that long plugged in and working non-stop without a rest. That would have to be one very thick concrete floor.
Also hard to believe no one questioned the power and light bill charges due to the unknown extra usage from the lights and radio…

We know that’s when he went missing but it’s not necessarily when he died. He could have just stopped coming up at some point. If he got scared by like the missile crisis or other things that happened he could have decided to stay down there depending on how much food and water he had.

If anything, it demonstrates the dangers of being alone and isolated from anyone with no means of communication. If something happens to you health-wise (heart attack, stroke, aneurism, etc.), no one’s going to find you for a looooong time. Pretty horrible way to suffer, if death isn’t immediate.

What do you think the ghost is? It is probably the radio heard through the plumbing.

IIRC—. wasn’t that Myrtle … or the snake in the plumbing? I would figure the Ghost would probably be heard through the floors.

The lights are more likely to fail than the radio. If the power to the secret basement is tapped into someone else’s meter and that area has been consistently occupied then the power drain for a radio and a couple of light bulbs probably wouldn’t show up above the rest of the usage. The 1960’s would actually be a sweet spot for electronics durability, especially if they are using milsurp equipment. If the basement is dry enough that corrosion isn’t a problem Then the only thing to wear out is the speaker cone supports and those are really durable.

Not really, Concrete basement? Noise doesn’t travel well, and it wasn’t playing loud enough anyways until they got close to the door to hear it.
Electric bill… eh, there’s always been business’ operating above, would have just assumed the power usage was from those. A couple lights isn’t going to be significant. And if he was a prepper he would have bought the highest quality, longest lasting bulbs he could find.

Super long life bulbs at their rated voltage is anywhere up to 50 thousand hours.

Fun little factoid that is true for both incandescent and LED light sources, but not fluorescent, is that as you drop the voltage supply you extend the usable life.

I’m not just imagining that Reggie’s a shade paler in the last panel, yeah?

dang, dude…
that’s rough D:
(cool detail though!)

You are not. He’s definitely paler. Can’t say I blame the dude; a guy died at my job yesterday. If I had seen him I likely would’ve had the same reaction… and I’m about as black as you get.

Gosh. I’m sorry to hear about that. I have been told that I can get very sensitive, at times, but I think that people passing on can be a stunning thing to be around.
Sorry to hear about that.

is it weird that i have conflicting feelings about whether or not there should be a corpse shown?
on one hand… Ew.
on the other though… could be… eerm… kinda… cool?
~ignore me… i watch forensic science shows when i can’t sleep. so no, not exactly “narmol” over here, no.~

My wife considers “Bones” acceptable dinner time entertainment.

She enjoys reading the Center for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/ , and follows new disease outbreaks with a certain zeal.

A bit of it is her education and professional experience, but still…

That is a lot better than finding a fresh (or not so fresh) corpse
At least the smell will have faded somewhat

Humans are preternaturally sensitive to the smell of very dead monkey. Bloodhound sensitive. There are good evolutionary reasons for this, mainly to do with the habits of leopards.

I have it on good authority that 70 years after first encountering it, it hits you just as hard and as instantly instinctively identifiable.

Jackie, you have my sympathy for doing the research. I’m fascinated by the bugs involved, cause without moths and the like we’d have to deal with …like 2 feet of fur coving the land masses.so hurrah for dust mites and moths! But yeah, yuck! On the desiccation thing, but bonus points for the dedication thing.

We will have to see what Jackie hits us with but my guess is fermentation followed by desiccation.

A well built shelter has good airflow and filtration but not necessarily good humidification. Most air handling systems pull moisture out of the air.

The human body as one TV show quote puts it are “bags of mostly water”.

Also the micro-flora in our guts doesn’t shut down when we do unless we encounter something that shuts them down as well, they will storm the ramparts until their environment becomes hostile to their continued viability. That is usually a lack of moisture.

This made me think of Miyu Kojima, the japanese artist who cleans up scenes like this (died alone and not found for days or months) and makes dioramas of the aftermath, where the bodies are found. No bodies shown, so as to maintain privacy, but a beautiful way to capture a morbid scene. May be considered disturbing, fair warning. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/10/dioramas-of-death-tokyo-cleaner-recreates-rooms-where-people-died-alone

Actually, I kind of like her idea.

Maybe she doesn’t think of it this way, but- It’s kind of like writing out what happened in a bad dream, or drawing a comic of a bad dream.
In my view- writing out, or drawing out, what once was your bad dream, helps you to emitionally process the dream, so that the dream doesn’t bother you anymore.

I genuinely thought Reggie might be yankin’ his chain and that would be the big reveal on the next page until I read the under page comments. I suppose if he had been he’s an amazing actor to be able to make himself go pale with shock on demand!

I mean, if you’d like you could share with us what the cut bickering script would have been like? I can imagine it in my head, and it is pretty nice, but I would like to know what lines you came up with. I also don’t think bickering needs too much of a visual representation, we already are extrapolating movement from the poses and lines that already exist, it’s not too much of a stretch to do it to sole dialogue.

I love that you showed Reggie pale with fear! I also love your comic. Years ago, you were the first person I ever contributed to on Patreon. Your work and your self expression are beautiful, and I have a lot of respect and appreciation for you as an artist and as a person. The world is a better place because you’re in it. Thank you.

For those who don;t want to google desiccated:

adjective
1.
having had all moisture removed; dried out.
“the withered, desiccated landscape”
2.
lacking vitality or interest.
“a desiccated history of ideas”

Seriously- thank you for looking that up, so that we don’t have to. :)

I suspect it was a devious turn by Jackie to make us partake in his suffering.

I’ve come across rats like that trapped, or poisoned, under a house/attics, very indiana jones… on a rodent encounter scale

but i had never heard the term “desiccated” so i was at a loss.

I’ve heard of desiccant air filters, but ultimately had to call upon google to help

The fact that any of you need to google desiccated is very disappointing…

Ever seen a rat that died in a tunnel where there’s a gas leak?-completely white, and judging from what I saw, the consistency of a warm marshmallow. (I didn’t touch it.)

To be fair, the word Desiccated isn’t used very much in today’s day and age. Most people just opt for dried. The only reason I know what desiccated means is because of Dragon’s Dogma.

Moreover- what I was [really] worried about was my being tempted to look up “dessicated corpse” on Google, and then getting, [yuck], the horrible images that google likes to put with unpleasant subjects.
I really have a low, I-can’t-look-at-anything-squicky threshold.
I can be such a pansy, that I make Tony Randall look brave + macho. [Tony R.? Please look him up].

Huh.
Apparently some online-dictionaries think that ‘pansy’ is an insulting word.
So, please- if you like,…in your mind, replace “pansy”, with “shrinking violet”, in my above comment.

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