Chapter 2, Page 34

The end of Chapter 2! Thank you for reading. We’ll have an interlude starting this week, then begin Chapter 3 in January.

Obligatory Tame Impala song to wrap up the chapter.

If you enjoy the comic, please consider chipping in $1 on Patreon. I launched this support page in August, and it is the only reason I can continue updating my comics for free several times a week. I decided last December that Dec 2015 was going to be my deadline to decide to either go back to work a stable 9-5 job and dramatically cut back on updates, or continue with the audience-supported model… For the past year I have been updating as much as I possibly could given my side work, health and life surprises, etc to see if people would enjoy this kind of work from me. Given the weird subject matter, it was kind of a gamble, haha… Anyways, I am going full steam ahead. I still work several freelance jobs on the side, but the more that goes into Patreon, the more content I can bring you, and the closer we can get to the ultimate goal of regular 4x updates a week. Even if you can’t spare a few bucks, talking about the comic and sharing it with your friends goes a long way as well!

I appreciate all of your readership and support so far and can’t wait to keep the stories going.

102 Comments

  • Jojo

    Oh my gosh! What interesting anatomy. This will be fun.

  • Flancy

    What’s this? <:*

  • Flancy

    Also, Thighfriend is looking better, yay!

    • Joel

      It’s also looking scared, what with fluffing up like that.

      • shane

        Thighfriend is on the defensive, he is bravely acting as a shield for his earthfriend.

        • sweet_gardenia

          thighfriend: FLAPPING INTENSIFIES

  • Lorenzo

    HOLY HELLS
    IS THAT A REVERSE LEGSCHILLA

    • Flancy

      *looks up legschilla*
      *snorts*
      Well, I guess that’s certainly a thing. :j

      • shingworks

        Legschilla chooses to interpret that as a compliment :’3

    • Intile

      Armschilla!

      • shere

        Armzilla?

  • Ruth

    :00000000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • Eoin

    Awesome! Can’t wait for the return, and you know, exposition and aliens and stuff!

  • Fraaaaank...?

    So Bex is riding that, right?

    • Adam

      It would make sense, but I doubt it.

      • Ten Twenty

        I doubt it mostly BECAUSE it makes sense.

    • caribouchat

      I was wondering just that. Could be HER thighfriend…

  • Mal-L

    Mike is having a bad day.

    • Adam

      He just made first contact. There are worse days.

      • Aidan903

        And here we remember Micheal Fisher, who made first contact, and also first person to actually be consumed by an alien.

  • Draug

    Did facefungus grow in that short span of time between panels one and two, or is it reacting to dinobutt, or is it just flexing with Mike’s face?

    Go thighfriend, use Flash!

    • Adam

      I think he is expanding to his full size. We saw him doing the same when we first saw him.

  • Wereg

    I just listened to this album the other day.

  • Kitty

    S C R E A M I N G

  • JJ

    Quick, hide behind the thighfriend!

  • Goo

    More like th-EYE friend, rite?

  • Nightsbridge

    It can TALK?

    In ENGLISH?

    What.

    • Vert

      Maybe LEVi is lodged in it?

      • WeirderThanWeird

        Or maybe it learned from LEVi or possibly face-fungus is translating.

        • ProphetZarquon

          HeadFungus = BabelFish?

      • DatComment

        Or maybe eaten like the cellphone by the spinosaurus in Jurassic Park and it’s doing that creepy thing.

  • The great Irish SUSPENSEEE

    Shield me thighfriend ~

  • LostYooper

    That’s one hell of a hallucination.

  • Vert

    That’s some serious warning coloration. I don’t know what manner of senses Thighfriend employs, but it doesn’t seem to like our Leggy new friend *at all*.

  • metaceryn

    Good lord, Mike, keep it in your pants.

    • corvideye

      Applause!

  • corvideye

    Um!!!

  • JakeyBakey

    One of my favorite things with weird alien anatomy is when their massive arms are being used as legs.

  • Wreck Smurfy

    Outstanding. This story is utterly outside anything I’ve seen/read before and for that alone will hold my interest to its conclusion, whatever that may be.

  • Vestigal rear legs ? that’s… unusual.

    • Vert

      They may not be vestigial. Looks like they could be fairly effective graspers.

      Or mating claspers o_0 RUN MIKE

  • DukeBG

    In russian there’s a colloquialism — describing a person as “[he] has arms growing from the butt”. Funny coincidence.

    (The colloquialism means to be bad at doing things, doing something very poorly. I’m not sure, maybe English has the same)

    • shingworks

      lol XD No, we have nothing like that (maybe “he has two left feet” to describe a clumsy person), but that’s a great expression!

      • DukeBG

        Correction, though: it uses a harsh swear word for butt, so it should be “ass”, i guess. It can be used in variety of situations, e.g. “sorry for the poorly taken picture, my arms are [growing] from the ass!”

        It’s very wide spread and there’s a million of jokes about it, for example http://funkyimg.com/i/25FJF.png

        • shingworks

          lolll omg that is amazing

      • Ben

        Don’t know about US usage but the equivalent British English expression would be to describe someone as “being all thumbs”

        • jimpost

          The US has that as well, but I haven’t heard it used in some time. I believe the expression has fallen out of popular usage. Pity, that, as it’s so expressive!

          • Ben

            There is also the British English expression “talking out of your arse” which is self-explanatory in context.

            “To be all thumbs” is a bit old-school in British English, come to that, along with “to be cack-handed”. I suppose it has been superseded by the innumerable uses of “retard” or “retarded”, or just “to be shite at” some given thing

          • shingworks

            I hadn’t heard cack-handed before! I guess it means backwards/ “left-handed,” very interesting.

          • Tadrix

            Not quite…
            http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/cack
            Literally shithand.

            Also there is expression “to have bandy arms” or “to have bow arms”, which means the same as “having one’s arms growing out of one’s arse”.

            Where, if concurrent, the latter would explain the former, since literally “sitting on one’s hands” becomes a necessity.

          • shingworks

            This is my favorite discussion for a while. SHIT HANDS

          • Ben

            We seem to be digressing somewhat, “to sit on ones hands” is to stand idly by, to do nothing when one could, or should do something.

            I’ve never heard the reference to bow, or bandy arms; bow, or bandy legs are exactly that, a minor physical feature or deformity caused by habitual horse-riding or as the long term effect of rickets in childhood. There IS a rather good expression in that context “unable to stop a pig in a passage” but I think we’re getting a bit too far off the point, fun as it is.

          • DukeBG

            Tadrix, according to my quick research “cack-handed” is “left-handed” AND “shithanded” at the same time. Well, originally meaning left handed. It just developed out of idea in [some culture?] that people eat using the right hand and wipe their arse with the left one…

            The russian expression is about both hands anyway. It comes with a reasoning that, err… a person made something so poorly, it’s shit. So it was probably because their hands are on the same part of the body that produces that.

          • Tadrix

            To Ben & DukeBG:
            See, there is also Latvian language. There are many cultural influences in everyday usage, most prominently germanic (historical), russian (mainly cold-war era) and english ones (influence of contemporary Western culture). So, there certainly is a place for most likely adopted saying “rokas aug no pakaļas” (which means “руки из задницы растут” — that’s what DukeBG mentioned), but there also exists simple “līkas rokas” (meaning is the same, but literally it means “curvy/bent arms”; since “līkas kājas” is what “bow legs” describes best, “bow arms” would be logical translation, since the point is that one can’t do anything right.)

          • Tadrix

            I remembered, that in Russian there is also that second expression (about what I called “bow hands”) — simply “кривые руки”, so at least DukeBG should know what I’m talking about.

            Also, I tried to find confirmation to what DukeBG wrote and found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_people#Expressions_and_colloquialisms Cultural associations section suggests judgement by cack, Jesus! But there is also this: “However, other sources suggest that it is derived from the Old Norse word keikr, meaning “bent backwards”.” So that would be “bent arms” indeed.

          • DukeBG

            Yup, there’s “кривые руки” (bent arms) indeed. It’s much more lighter than “hands growing from the arse”.

          • Tadrix

            Well, I always imagined that primary reason for them to be bent is growing out of arse, since, you know, you need to use your “fifth point” for sitting, thus bending arms during growth. So, while not everyone having bent arms will have them growing out of butt, everyone with arms growing out of butt will have them bent. So “arms out of arse” is much more severe condition than simply “bent arms”. xD

          • DukeBG

            Heh, there’s logic in what you say, of course, but no, these expressions are not directly derived from on another in russian, even though they do have the same exact meaning and only differ in explicitness of language.

            Arms-from-the-arse don’t have to be very bent http://lurkmore.so/images/thumb/2/2e/66548.jpg/250px-66548.jpg

          • Tadrix

            He seems ready to be kicked down the stairs…

            I know these expressions aren’t derived from one another. I just happen to have vivid imagination and shared poor Washout Shithands’s life story with you.

            By the way, the condition is also known as “hands.sys driver failure”.

          • Corbie

            Heh. Thanks guys for the etymology lesson On The Origin Of Swear Words. =)

            Also thanks to Legschilla-T-Rex for bringing this up. ;D

            Just wanted to trow in something about “cack-handed”: “left” was considered bad / wrong for a long time, just consider “widdershins”. Makes perfect sense even without hailing from use of hands for different things, which is from middle-eastern cultures if I’m not mistaken, and that would have been a weird influence on a dated british colloquial. At least in Britiain. The left-is-evil-superstition is even older than Christianity.

  • capnoblivious

    AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH *flailing intensifies*

    I love how the last panel looks like Mike is a knight facing down a fearsome dragon. Was that intentional?

    • shingworks

      :]

  • KiffyBee

    DEPLOY THIGHSHIELD

  • Can I just say I love the semi translusent outer skin of the leggy armsforlegs :DDD
    Lovely page!

  • Thighfriend makes the spiral umbrella of friendship? (Or is it courting?)

  • Aidan903

    I really want this thing to be able to perfectly copy voices, like Bex’s. That would explain the fact that it knows English.

    • Aidan903

      Also, I really got to hand it to you, Shing. That’s some great character design.

      (pun intended)

    • fox-orian

      THREE PLAUSIBILITIES:
      1) It assimilates with other life (it’s “eaten” Bex and is using her to communicate)
      2) It learns. Levi has to do with this somehow.
      3) Mike is, in fact, dead.

      Bonus Plausibility:
      4) We the readers are dead.

      • Fourth plausibility: it parrots, picking up and mimicking english phrases from Bex and/or LEVi without actually comprehending them. If you can imagine Bex being the one talking, it’s not a stretch to imagine armschilla repeating words she said earlier out of context.

      • shingworks

        RIP readers :[

      • Ceceoh

        But none of those plausibilities explains the tail. (Which I cannot picture not wagging.)

        • AlpineBob

          Huh – yeah, it looks like a dog heinie to me too.
          Odd to find one attached to a martian, but assimilation does seem rather prevalent in the ecosystem…

      • Tadrix

        Why noone’s presenting a possibility that Bex rides that thing, whatever that is?

  • Bradford

    Hammerhead = Hide
    Armschilla = Mating Display

  • Royco Cup-a-Soup

    I can’t believe it took me until the end of the semester to realize the protagonist of Mare Internum has exactly the same name as my former english professor.

    • CrazyLady

      Lol, that is kind of amazing.

  • Awwwwwww, thighfriend is trying to scare it away.

  • Ceceoh

    Bitchin’ threat display, Thighfriend.

    • shingworks

      *flap*

  • caribouchat

    Tighfriend here is such a lovely shield. Gorgeous colors and patterns.

  • imcitcat

    omg the anticipation is positively brutal @.@

  • Vert

    Do Thighfriend’s patterns scroll across it, cuttlefish-style?

  • Lilian

    I- uhh-

    *feels like Stamping Armchilla is behind her* *knows that is completely ridiculous*

    I wonder if this voice Mike hears is even a voice at all. It could be an auditory hallucination – he hasn’t been taking his medication.

    Or it could be that what people thought were hallucinations/what he thought was LEVi controlling his thoughts was actually something from Martian life.

    Or LEVi is somehow fused with Stamping Armchilla. Or Bex is.

    Or Stamping Armchilla has learned English. Or is parroting as another commentator mused.

    It’s admittedly not a body plan I was expecting.

  • Lordmyrth

    Thighfriend! DEFENSE MODE!

  • DatComment

    Arg, whenever I see thighfriend like that I see an umbrella. And… now I’m imagining Mike Singin’ in the Rain. With thighfriend.

  • DatComment

    Also, I would of assumed those nails(?) would dig deeper into the ground with their narrow surface area for its weight distribution. It is either really light, or the damp beach is really solid under a small layer of dirt/sand. Interesting.
    Also Also, why no jokes about the alien being more ripped then Mike?

    • shingworks

      It’s official, aliens steal gainz

    • Vert

      1/4 earth gravity, too.

  • Vert

    Just saw this photo today: http://i.imgur.com/JMMHWWm.jpg

    Just spread that glow out a bit…

  • Actual Anon

    The first thing I thought of was also Legschilla…

  • Marcos

    Its just the blue cousin of Barney the Dinosaur, acting as a friendly ambassador to improve Mars-Earth relations.
    Just like “Galactic Civilizations”. “Your skin looks delicious”.

  • Neris

    Michael looks like he’s trying to defend himself with an open umbrella… Let’s hope he doesn’t actually try to use tighfiend as protection. Or an umbrella.

  • Sumnoid

    I don’t know if this makes Mars look more appealing or less so.

  • sweet_gardenia

    In the next panel I predict our unknown visitor will promptly guffaw and shout ” CHECK ME OUT LITTLE MAN I’M BUFF “

  • Gloryarrow

    Has anyone else noticed the “oh shit” expression on Mike’s face as he looks up? That’s exactly how I would look at that thing too Mike.

  • 7thSatellite

    Funny how the torso of this alien is somewhat reminiscent of the shape of the first gen LEVi we glimpsed earlier. Also something about the design for it’s fingers/claws is truly amazing, and I have to echo other’s comments at how great the design for the different martian creatures has been. I’m shivering with anticipation for the next update!

  • Manace

    This guy is quickly becoming a potted plant, or a pot of whatever that leg thing is.

  • Keetkeet

    That’s a big dog

  • Horrybull

    Oh my god it’s a T-Rex… thing

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