Chapter 2, Page 7

Hi guys, been having mad computer issues all weekend. Page will be up probably Monday (8/17) morning/ midday, PST! Thanks for your patience.

Ew~

(Oh yeah, there was an update over the weekend as well, in case u missed it)

Today’s bonus art: there’s a lot of layers. I’ll probably do a Patreon post later about the suit details (or lack thereof).

101 Comments

  • charles81

    So not completely incompetent when it comes to self harm I guess.

    • charles81

      Actually I could understand that despite his attempts at suicide he might be psyched out by the leg injury. All the suicide attempts we’ve seen thus far have been about strangulation, suffocation, etc. Maybe that is his preferred end or there’s some significance to it for him. Death or injury by another means could be incredibly upsetting or even grotesque to him.

      • Emblin

        And I imagine, in most cases when people want to suicide, they want it quick. They don’t want to samurai stab their gut, or jump in front of a car and *hope* it’s instant. So dying by a broken leg *and everything else* is not his preferred way to go

        • Anton

          I read somewhere that even though people may plan it, it often comes down to a sort of impulse.

  • Paula

    Oh gosh, I thought that was a fish at first.

    …that’s not a fish, right?

    • Madeleine

      Whatever it is, nobody wants it to be there.

    • I thiiink its a compound fracture

      …But I actually thought “fish” first, as well.

      • ShinyBlueThing

        That’s what I see too and those are bad anywhere on the body. Open wound? Bad. Bones open to air? Very bad. Broken bones open to air? Super ultra bad.

        • driftwood

          Broken bones open to martian air at the bottom of an alien cavern? The worst.

          • madock345

            Actually this is probably the best place he could break his leg. (In theory) it should be totally sterile, not microbes that could give him an infection.

          • Sandy

            Yep. Totally sterile!

      • Emblin

        Now that everyone says his femur looks like a fish, I cannot unsee the fish everytime I look at it

    • shingworks

      This is one of those scenes that is excruciating for me to draw and post over the course of weeks, because it is hard for the reader to parse out of rapid sequence. Either way, it’s just your friendly neighborhood femur taking a visit outside for a bit.

      • DatDat

        Whelp better zip that back up and pretend that’s not a thing.

      • Jordan

        Well that’s never a good thing to hear.

      • Bellar

        He can push that back in and it should be good as new, right?

        Right?

        • shingworks

          Oh yeah defs :D

        • Anton

          It’ll buff out.

      • GUEST

        It’s just a femur! Thank God. I thought it was his wrecked penis at first and I was like “Shing wouldn’t do that.” But then there was the whole child molestation thing and…

        Thank god.

        • shingworks

          “Just a femur,” hahah.

          • Lilian

            A wrecked penis or set of intestines is indeed a big deal (because bleeding or tissue necrosis), but a wrecked femur is as well. The femur is a huge bone, and you don’t want shards of it slicing open arteries or chunks of fat getting in bad places in your bloodstream. Or an infection of the bone.

            And let’s not forget that femur injury tends to be very painful.

            Whee!

          • GUEST

            I stand by what I said. lol

        • Alex

          Well, I thought it was intestines. I’m glad it was just a femur, too.

        • Emblin

          *reads comment of how it coulda been a penis*
          *looks at injury*
          *uses up a life time supply of cringing*

      • Evilbob

        LOL. That moment when I felt relief it was a femur and not, well… the “family jewels”? …
        Then realized that I really had my priorities wrong since the femur situation is actually a lot more dire in terms of lethality…

        You know what? I think I’ll prefer if it was just a really red fish that somehow made its way into his pants.

        • Emblin

          Girl: “Hey baby, is that a really red fish in your pants or are you happy to see me?”

          Guy: “Actually it’s a broken femur”

          Girl: “Oh.”

          • shingworks

            Lol

    • Totally thought it was a fish. Laughed a bit. Looked again. Stopped laughing.

      Ouch.

      • Paula

        Yeah, I’m going to keep pretending that it’s a fish. *shivers*

    • LOL I thought it was a fish too. Then I thought it was his man-parts and he really needed to see a medic about some penicillin. (Sp?)

    • Ariel

      I thought it was a fish until the next comic came out. Totally thought this was about to be a story or discovering life on Mars.

    • David

      There’s a red, glowing thing inside his suit.

  • AKP

    …What is going on here?

  • Tindi

    This is going to sound repetitive, but that ain’t good. Go home, femur! You don’t want to be outside on Mars! Mars is DIRTY.

    • StClair

      Pretty much exactly what I was gonna say.

    • Hide yourself femur, Ruth is out to get you !

  • Ivan

    And judging by the sclera and nose bleeding he’s got a fracture of the base of the cranium, probably the sphenoid or the ethmoid.

    • Arianwen

      That does not sound good :( I had assumed that was just acute hypoxia / barotrauma.

    • shade

      The nosebleed came from the takedown, shown earlier. Not like he’s in good shape though, what with the amorous thighfish.

      What snapped femur?

      • shingworks

        The femur has officially been renamed “amorous thighfish” from here on out.

  • a.a.

    Okay so I’m not quite sure what I’m looking at here… is that the femur snapped and seeing one “point”? or seeing one of the ends of the bone? And why is it red? Is there muscle tissue in there too?

    • shingworks

      Yep… Your femur is a huge, strong bone and has some powerful muscles sheathing and attached to it. I don’t know if you’ve ever butchered a whole chicken or other animal but the flesh does “stick” to the bone to some extent. If you really want to see it for yourself you can also Google “compound fracture.”

      • Quill

        the thing about most people is that they have experience with meat only when it’s been cooked, which makes it seem like it just falls off the bone, anyone who cooks their own meat however knows that meat is sticky as frick. stuff has no boundaries.

      • Maria S.

        Haha, well, google image’d that, scrolled for a moment or so just quietly going “aaaaAAHHHH?????????” to myself, and am back. Poor Mike. Who really needs femurs anyway. (We do TT_TT)

      • Evilbob

        I think the word you’re looking for is “tendon” or “aponeurosis”.

        Honestly though, the angle at which the femur is protruding out, I’m surprised the leg did not appear more bent on the previous page.

        As another point of note, I’m pretty sure this is definitely not the typical open fracture for the femur, and something must have really gone wrong. Since the femur is angled (running superolaterally-inferomedially, a fracture which causes the two parts of femur to slide past each other seem very unlikely to cause such a dramatic angle change such that the lower half would then exit superomedially.
        Moreover, given the relative strength of the biceps femoris, semiendinosis, and semimembranosus (hamstrings), the femur fragments are usually pulled such that if there is an egress, the upper fragment would exit in an inferoanterior angle. And it seems that a quick Google image search on “open femoral fracture” seem to consist exclusively of these types of injuries: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, and Example 4

        • shingworks

          Yeah, some of the factors at play here are that 1) he was tumbling 2) in the presence of car-plus sized boulders 3) he hit the water with a lot of force on that side of his body and 4) that his suit is semi-rigid and mostly able to hold the leg in place. If you go back to the last few pages you can see a couple of them where is leg is kinda getting bent out of shape within those parameters.

          Oh, and also 5) that the exposed bone has to be pointing at the reader, because I am making this comic for my entertainment, and nothing is more entertaining than all the “aughghg” comments :]

          • DukeBG

            aughghg

          • Evilbob

            aughghg indeed.

          • That is evil

    • Echo

      I think that’s what you call blood.

      • shingworks

        Tell me more of this human “blood”

  • Danielle

    That doesn’t seem like a happy thing

  • Just wanted to say I really dig the “zzzzzzziip” sound effect. Lovely lettering there (Now back to femur-cringing).

    • xodipox

      I concur, that ‘zzzzziip’ is awesome. It’s crazy how the little things like that can make a comic seem so much more artistic.

  • Vert

    I don’t envy you the reference photos you had to look up for this page.

  • 7thSatellite

    I love the first few panels on this page. The almost confusing close ups do a great job of projecting the panicked, confused ordeal of trying to take off complicated equipment in an unfamiliar environment while injured. I am personally experienced with this kind of situation, you did an excellent job portraying it.

    • shingworks

      Thank you so much for noticing! It would be super disorienting to take off a heavy, airtight suit of armor in the dark with one hand (and in pain, haha)… I don’t have any personal experience with that other than knowing the frustration of trying to take wet jeans off.

  • I’m~ too sexy for my gloves,
    too sexy for my gloves,
    too sexy for my
    *look at bottom panel* AUGH

    • CrazyLady

      HOW DO YOU LIKE A COMMENT.

    • Captain-Delirium

      cRYING OH MY GOD

  • Quill

    did you know, there isn’t a skeleton inside you, you’re inside a skeleton.

  • Localized

    ow my leg D:

    It’s cool how you turned the “zip” fx into a zipper.

    Also I was promised kittens and there is an obvious lack of kittens in that panel >:|

    • shingworks

      I, uh, *runs*

  • Oh, I wish, I wish that was a fish!

  • Naama

    Zzzzzip! I love it. It’s visually onomatopoeic. The regular kind, too.

  • DarkMyste

    umm femur there nothing outside please go back inside and take all that blood that i need to survive please…with you

    Stop smiling at me femur this is not happy accident.. since i am still alive

  • The lighting in this page is terrific.

    • peppermill

      +1 on the lighting. The high value contrast, sharp edges and lack of gradients really goose the fear.

  • Infinity1201

    All these people talking about what bone it is. I’m just sitting here like OH so it noottt a fish?

    • shingworks

      I think most comments have been about what fish it is (the answer is of course sockeye salmon)

  • Jojo

    Looks like something serious to me. Not to mention something angry. Great page. I love the look on Mike’s face.

    • Well err, even before : They are stuck at an unknown depth, under a rock avalanche with little to no chance of anyone coming to their help.

      And even if help did come, they would lack the necessary extraction machinery.

      No really, the moment they fell it seemed like a dead end road for them.

      • Jojo

        It really does look that way. Its one of the reasons I like this story so much. Ha ha. I want to see how they manage to, or if they manage to, get out.

  • Thrawcheld

    It took me some time to parse panel 3 visually and figure out what part of his suit he was unzipping. The seam on his side looks confusingly like another shoulder :)

    It wouldn’t surprise me if that wound doesn’t actually hurt at the moment. When you suffer a serious injury, it’s more important to get somewhere reasonably safe than avoid further injury, so your nervous system starts just not feeling pain for a while. It’ll hurt in a few hours though, once the stress subsides.

    And I say this from experience. I’ve never suffered anything as bad as a compound fracture, but I once had an accident in which a patch of skin on the heel of my hand was partially torn away to a depth of maybe half a centimetre. First aiders cleaned it up and dressed it and there was no pain at all even as the swabs were touching raw, bloody flesh. It only hurt some hours later when A&E finally got round to doing the same thing.

    (and the subsequent suturing, in which the nurse messed up the local anaesthetic, was the worst pain I’d experienced up to then… now beaten by a back injury about a month ago.)

  • Vert

    The worst part about serious injuries is that they hurt *so* much more when you actually look at them.

    Poor Mike.

  • Roger

    Ah, not to ruin all the fun about what that mess is or may be…. But just when did Mars get a breathable atmosphere or have I truly missed something here??

    • CrazyLady

      Lol, look at some of the comments from the previous pages. These people reading are SMART.

      • shingworks

        It’s true! I’m scared because they call me on my bs right away XD

        • izzy

          No way! You totally have artistic license. And you also have an arsenal of entranced engineers and scientists at your disposal. Ask us anything, if you want sci-fi advice. Personally, I’m more into theoretical and quantum scale physics, but I am WFR certified if you want any info on femoral arteries and applying a tourniquet. I’m just impressed on how well you’ve done so far. (Well, I do have some thoughts, but they’re mostly opinions and totally irrelevant.)

        • Vert

          No amount of individual research can compete with crowdsourced nitpickers ;)

        • shingworks

          I like it a lot actually XD I feel obligated to do all the work in this comic by myself without any external help (hence: webcomics, land of no editors or content limitations) but knowing I have really smart readers keeps my standards high :]

  • This is all very well but since he was literally pop your helmet off suicidal just 10 minutes ago I’m not expecting major heroic efforts out of him.

    Actually without the unexpected atmosphere I was expecting you to just give us his life flashing before his eyes as he died.

    We can still get that I guess but the atmosphere is a bit of a Chekhov’s gun.

    • The lack of suit oxygen prevents him from escaping through the water ; and, even if the cave somehow continues to somewhere his leg pretty much prevents him from exploring far by land.

      …I don’t see any way out of this.

      • Assuming the water is drinkable, at this rate he’ll either die from cold, injury complication (blood loss?)… Ot, if he is really unlucky by starvation after several days.

        • Either looks like a pretty painful, slow death :(

          (oh, the oxygen in the cave could run out first, alternatively)

  • Jake L.

    Whew. It took me a read through the comments tofind out that, thankfully, that’s a compound fracture up there, as opposed to some kind of Martian parasite or Mike’s crotch or something.

    • shingworks

      lol, yeah both of those options are equally horrific

      • Jake L.

        To get to the subject of actual comic-praise, it’s a testament to your storytelling that, at this point, I’m not entirely sure that Mike is going to survive this bit.

        • Vert

          I think Mike will, if only because he started the comic by trying to die. What Mike wants, more than anything, is to have control over his life. If the planet kills him, it wasn’t his decision. Narrative convention dictates he ends up having to fight for his life, if only so he can get rescued and healed up, THEN kill himself. You know. If he wants to.

          It’s Bex I’m worried about. I’m not saying Der-Shing has a penchant for killing off strong female leads or anything. I’m not saying that. Someone else might say that, but I say, we don’t have enough of a sample size to say that. Phe could have just been a statistical fluke.

          • shingworks

            I’ve only killed one! So yes you are completely correct statistically speaking haha. I guess the ambassador too but she doesn’t really count as a strong female imho…

  • Jenny
  • Varflock

    I saw the last picture and thought of two different things it could present but somehow not about a bone. That was confusing.

    How can he breathe there anyway?

  • Flancy

    Hey, I don’t know if anyone else is having this problem, but for whatever reason I can’t access the Meek comic page on mobile… Just thought you should know, in case it’s an actual problem. If no, it’s likely just me and my dumb self.

    • Vert

      Meek and Mare both load fine for me on mobile. Better check your setup! :/

    • shingworks

      Hm, I took a look, didn’t see anything weird… Let me know if it persists, or if anyone else sees this!

  • Jojo

    Great visualization of the ‘zip’ sound by the way.

  • Clever zip onomatopoeia.

  • SotiCoto

    What is the glowy red thing? I can’t really make it out.

  • Saddust

    This comic is really interesting. But if I can do a (constructive) critic, the pages are a bit small to fully appreciate. Or maybe is it my screen def’…

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