May 10th, 2011
Issue 8: Page 30
FAN ART INCENTIVE WEDNESDAY!
PETE: Strange how things always seem to happen for a reason. It looks like things are going to work out after all. Don’t forget to watch Joe’s series of ads. And the new Facebook Fan page is up. Check it out HERE.
INCENTIVE ART: Let’s give a big hand to Catherine for this awesome piece.
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May 10th, 2011 at 9:57 am
Look at Diva’s smile. Maybe she’s not SO bad at being a devil…*^_^*
May 10th, 2011 at 10:01 am
DARN IT TEAM DIVA! why did ya have to go and break that necklace again? i mean, seriously, i was hoping for a face plant and a bloody nose. and what in the afterlife has it in for those pearls anyway? poor abused pearls….
@incentive: that is darn surreal this time. i didn’t know Diva has skill in ballroom dancing.
May 10th, 2011 at 10:05 am
she’s not any worse than the rest of us, laughing as other people bad luck. <_<
May 10th, 2011 at 10:14 am
This is why you don’t go around wearing family heirlooms as if they were casual wear.
May 10th, 2011 at 10:27 am
Welp, there was the “Bye bye, pearls!” we were so worried about. I really like Diva’s take on it, though – guess she’ll have to explain to her friends now the concept of the whole idea of balance she just learned the hard way…
May 10th, 2011 at 10:36 am
Probably completely unintentional, but I like that you can read the sign on the grate as “No jumping ” if you only look at the top part of the message. :P
May 10th, 2011 at 10:36 am
Er, “No jumping the shark.”
May 10th, 2011 at 11:45 am
Pffft, nice facepalm in the second panel, Gabe.
May 10th, 2011 at 11:53 am
Love the shark jump reference, but “Drains to Strem”?
Nit picking, I know, but you can’t say I don’t read each page closely!
May 10th, 2011 at 12:54 pm
She wouldn’t smile like that at Michelle’s ill fortune, or Gabriel’s.
May 10th, 2011 at 12:54 pm
And you don’t string them on easily broken string.
May 10th, 2011 at 12:55 pm
“No dumping, drains to stream” — apparently the person who painted it couldn’t spell.
May 10th, 2011 at 1:19 pm
I think Cassandra throws that stuff in to keep us on our toes.
May 10th, 2011 at 1:22 pm
Oh bother, now the Wand is a bishonen too. A bishonen with a wonky head, but a bishonen NONETHELESS.
Is he (?) gonna be featured in future issues? Because that would be AWESOME.
The pearls are a lie. /portal
May 10th, 2011 at 1:46 pm
Being the weird, freaky minded individual that I am, I like to think it actually says…
NO DUMPLING
Dreams to Stream!
Okay, so it might not be as CLEAR as the real text, but let’s face it, if you read that anywhere, you’d back the hell up anyway out of sheer fear at the magnitude of random! O_o
Also, in spite of the severe lack of a face-plant, I do love the second panel.
Michelle: Gah!
Gabe: D’OH!!! >_<
Diva: Woaaaaaaaaaaah!!! The Universe came here to eat taco's and beat Angela's beHIND, and it didn't even buy any taco's in the first place!!! @o@
May 10th, 2011 at 1:48 pm
Diva ought to really punish Angela by being nice and retrieving her mother’s pearls.
I wonder how many broken bones that’s worth?
May 10th, 2011 at 1:51 pm
Just why not go around with untied shoe laces all over the place for that matter?
May 10th, 2011 at 1:53 pm
humm, if Angela herself went down to get the pearls… would Diva get hurt then? O_o
May 10th, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Velma: perfect! go! (pulls a rope and trap goes off and a ball of violence springs up over Bishonen wand)
Shaggy: zoinz, that was close! the trap worked after all.
(the dust settles and bishonen wand is tied up and helpless)
Fred: Alright you Bishonen wand, let’s see who you really are. (yanks mask off Bishonen wand)
Everyone: Mr. Malacoda!
Mr. Malacoda: Curses! i would have had a grand time with Miss Diva if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!
Diva: who are… (blank stare, then memory kicks in and she turns a bit green) excuse me for a bit, i feel a tad ill. (runs to the ladies room)
May 10th, 2011 at 2:13 pm
well, not outwardly or knowingly anyway….she is still a devil you know.
May 10th, 2011 at 2:28 pm
and there are dolphins in this strem?
May 10th, 2011 at 3:49 pm
“The ‘verse”? That’s cute the way she shortens it until she has to explain it to someone. Well, based on Diva’s clothes, the use of this unfortunate teen lingo that I never would have heard when I was actually in high school, and the fact that cheerleading is actually a big deal in this comic apparently, I’m compelled to ask: what time period is this comic set in? From today’s comic on its own I feel like the setting is something our grandkids would create in forty years, boldly assuming that the old pictures they’ve seen of us were probably taken around the fifties.
“Oh, yeah, alabaster skin? That’s totally an old person fetish. I think I read it in a history book once or Snow White or something. Make the main character pale.”
May 10th, 2011 at 4:17 pm
I am personally somewhat offended by that alabaster joke. I personally like my bishonens pale and lanky. Or blue. Preferably with fangs and elven ears.
Besides, Diva isn’t terribly pale anymore. Not as much as she used to be, at least.
Remember that this comic has some stereotypes – actually, a lot of stereotypes. ‘Cheerleaders are popular and loved/revered to by everyone’ is a main one, but in a backwards ‘make fun of/parodying’ sort of way. Besides, maybe Diva just likes retro (as in – 30′s through 80′s) clothing. I heard that’s popular with the Indie culture.
May 10th, 2011 at 4:18 pm
I guess – ok, let me take a step back here and clarify. What I mean is that I don’t really follow along with Team Diva in the new direction the comic is going. I’ve gone through a whole arc, and I can say it’s a pretty steep departure from it’s cartoony origins. It feels a lot stuffier, but there’s nothing to really justify the stuffiness. We’re not exploring any philosophical axioms – not that I’m saying we should – but usually when you focus on a serious social drama sort of deal, that’s what you’d hover around.
Then there’s Diva. So far in this comic we’ve seen her play a vigilante, which is really just fetishizing violence. I’m a guy who likes violence personally; unarmed combat is beautiful, and I don’t mean karate or anything flashy – I like military defense systems. Weapons are also incredible, and the depth that goes into making them is fascinating. Conflict itself is complex, elegant, and all too necessary in our every day lives. However, violence is a tool meant to be applied at certain times, namely when it is your best possible resource.
In this arc, we saw Diva beat up thugs purely because that’s all she could think to do with her power, then we saw her beat up Angela, because that’s all she could think to do to fix a problem she created in the first place. It’s kind of crude, really, shoving a girl to the ground and kicking her in the ribs until she gives in and accepts what you want from her. It doesn’t show any real finesse or understanding of the situation. Diva just had an issue and her first instinct was to go caveman on it because there were no repercussions. In short, as a main character, she’s kind of idiotic.
Then take Angela. Because she’s kind of an antagonist, the reader is meant to blame her for her shortcomings, but let’s not do that for a second. Let’s suppose that Angela is a nice girl deep down, but she’s actually just a little insecure, which causes her to act out and go out of her way to get noticed by people. People like Diva, who push Angela’s buttons because they think she deserves it, are really just asking to upset the girl. Angela’s reactions are probably pretty predictable, so a smart person could easily avoid being her enemy. And who’s to say Angela does deserve it? Maybe she’s under a lot of stress from home? Maybe she’s showing some signs of clinical depression and she’s trying to fight it by grasping at meaningless achievements and by pulling others down to her level?
What Angela does not need is some vindictive neanderthall like Diva looming over her. She probably needs an environment where she isn’t placed under so much pressure to succeed all the time. She probably needs friends who are more understanding to her personality, and if all else fails then maybe even some medicine to help her feel better. I mean, let’s think about it: wearing your mother’s pearls all the time, especially when you were probably told not to, is just asking to get them damaged or lost. Why would she do that? Again, probably just to get noticed or to make herself feel like she’s important. At the end of this comic we get to see that all go down the drain, though.
That’s just the “‘verse” balancing everything out, because Angela is a bad person, according to Diva. But man, when does Diva get hers? She’s the real villain in this story.
May 10th, 2011 at 4:26 pm
You know I get what Diva is saying and the fact that she knows that interfering would only make Angela’s life worse but the way she is smiling makes it far to easy for others to misinterpret her reaction. Looks like our little devil still has some work to do on communicating her goals to others.
@Incentive: given that the wand has transforming powers and seems to display at least some level of self awareness that image could theoretically become canon one day (or could make for an awkward scene where Diva explains to the wand they should just stay friends)
May 10th, 2011 at 4:39 pm
I suspect the artist really had to work to complete this page. Look at that dynamic pose! Look at those hands! (Actually, that last panel seems designed to specifically show off her hand-drawing capabilities.)
I feel like your team should have a strip label plastered at an angle across one of the top corners of the page, perhaps partially obscuring the title. “Now with 100% new artist! Since chapter 7″ People seem to ask about the change in art style almost every new strip.
May 10th, 2011 at 4:51 pm
So….is Evil Diva over??? Was the the end???
May 10th, 2011 at 5:23 pm
no my Lady, this is merely the end of this chapter, there is more to come.
May 10th, 2011 at 5:45 pm
Chapter 9 is set to start as soon as the final chapter 8 pages roll out! No delays!
May 10th, 2011 at 5:58 pm
bleah. i’m still trying to figure out why Diva needed to “fix things” and turn angela back into a bitch again. and her solution of beating her up until she says the right words to activate the wish just feels…wrong. NOT a fan of the chapter….leaves a foul taste in my mouth.
May 10th, 2011 at 6:13 pm
All those things – particularly the bad ones – are what keep Diva from becoming a Mary-Sue. She’s got all the other applicants for the horrid role – she’s cute, likes pink, and has special powers – but her inability to problem solve keeps her grounded and a believable character. So, yes, she’s a idiot, but that idiocy (like with the recent incarnation of Optimus in the Transformers films) keeps her from walking over that thin line known as ‘Mary-Sue’.
I do agree with you on the whole ‘weapons are fascinating’ thing. However, Diva probably never took a class in (defensive) Taekwondo or in any martial art, and thus never had the ‘use only if you’re being attacked first!‘ idea beaten (so to speak) into her. Maybe she needs to go have a talk with good ol’ Phoenix Jones?
As for Angela, she probably has issues with anyone wanting to be (friends) with her, especially after that little incident in ‘Hell’. Thus, the need to impose a air of authority and importance (via the pearls, somehow), even if her Mom said no (IF her Mom said no).
It’s been established before that Angela is at least a little more intelligent than Diva. That was established back in the alternate universe – if that counts.
I wonder if we (the fans) put more thought into the characters than Team Diva does. Hm.
May 10th, 2011 at 6:23 pm
not unless team Diva wants an angry torch wielding mob outside their homes, which I highly doubt they do.
May 10th, 2011 at 7:21 pm
*looks up, mutters, and puts torches away*
May 10th, 2011 at 8:14 pm
make sure to put them out first, I made that mistake once and believe me it is not pretty.
May 10th, 2011 at 8:21 pm
… whoops.
May 10th, 2011 at 8:34 pm
You don’t.
May 10th, 2011 at 8:56 pm
How long does it take to throw around (group?) ideas about a particular character’s traits, anyway?
May 11th, 2011 at 12:14 am
that’s some really mean “justice”.
May 11th, 2011 at 2:54 am
“the ‘verse” is not a new slang term. it was used regularly in the “firefly” series. i always figured that was a bit of a tip of the hat to that beloved short scifi series.
May 11th, 2011 at 3:10 am
i’m probably over thinking this, but i felt like i needed to respond to this.
even with the new artist, the art has been pretty fluid in change since the beginning. just look as Diva’s and Angela’s noses. another example would be at the very beginning of the series, Diva literally looked like a living doll. beside the painted on face look, in the first issue she had a very slim neck, which all but disappeared in the second issue. if you looked to compare the first issue and then the last issue that Brinson drew, you might have asked if there was a new artist.
so long as you read the authors notes under the comic (i know i do, ya never know when they’re gonna spill the beans about something you might have missed), it should be clear that there’s a newer artist working on this… but i don’t see why it should make any difference who drew the comics. so long as the story is still interesting. anyhow, although i prefer the first issue art style better than any other issue so far, i enjoy watching artists’ work evolve no matter who’s at the drawing board.
May 11th, 2011 at 3:56 am
Hate to say it, but Diva looks just a tad … pudgy … in the last panel.
May 11th, 2011 at 4:34 am
I think being a Mary Sue arises when your character is too strong or too good for the challenges they have to face. A character like Superman is so strong and so unstoppable, that one wonders why he doesn’t just slow down and talk to Lex Luthor every once in a while. Every time he punches through the wall and drops Lex in jail, Superman looks a little like a bully. Yes, Lex is evil, but only from that outside perspective we’re meant to view villains from. I remember that in the last Superman movie I saw, I was really seriously pulling for Lex to succeed, because he seemed to me like the downtrodden underdog, destroying civilizations because the poor man just didn’t know what else to do with his genius life anymore. It’s a wierd phenomenon, and I found myself angry with the civillians in the movie worshipping Superman like some great person.
And while Diva has no danger of looking like a bully because she’s too good and too crafty to be stopped, there is such a thing as just going to other way and being a literal bully. Diva has really been kind of villanous over the span of this arc. She hasn’t done good for anytone but herself, and all of her actions are self-centered. She created a new world where she and Angela got what they wanted out of her selfishness and Angela’s desperation, and it turned out Angela was rather enjoying it.
However, Diva didn’t like it, so she beat Angela up and forced her to send them back where they came from. What’s the message here? Diva will alter the universe on a whim, and if she can’t get her way she’ll force things? I wish Angela had learned to box so she could have popped Diva in the mouth when they had that fight. That scene when Diva ducked her head back away from the punch, stance rigid, face blank, and balance abysmal? Tha panel more than anything made me want to see that smug, plastic doll get really smacked.
Everything about that panel grated on my nerves. The bad fighting form. The pretentious “I am a badass” approach to the fight. The combination of bad fighting form and smugness – because every other dick at my local gym wants to be a professional fighter and nobody ever wants to put in the work. When you go to fight somebody, whether in sport or for a serious reason, you have to have the mentality that something can go wrong, and you have to know that you really intend to hurt the other person.
I don’t know. I just don’t see a lot of likability in a character who is not very smart, vaguely unattractive, not popular, and who is self-absorbed. At least not if the whole focus is going to be about her pronouncing judgement on people and causing problems.
May 11th, 2011 at 5:08 am
and don’t forget to put those pitch forks away too folks. we don’t want to get anyone hurt or get rusty tools for later.
May 11th, 2011 at 7:34 am
she looks like a healthy woman rather then an anorexic malnourished stick figure.
May 11th, 2011 at 8:54 am
Cao Cao, just because the authors haven’t shown Angela being the royal witch with a b that she obviously is (considering that the universe is dishing out that kind of punishment), doesn’t mean it’s not there. It’s implied. As for Diva being not very smart, vaguely unattractive, not popular and self absorbed?
Congratulations for being more judgemental than you make Diva out to be. You are commenting on her appearance, which I find to be much more shallow a thing than Diva has ever done, and her POPULARITY? Good god, how petty are you? So she’s not smart, pretty or popular, so obviously you can’t like her? Those are what you go by? You’re just as bad as the annoying people in high school who judge you by their values without understanding what you’re going through.
Seriously? How is she self absorbed? Throughout the entire series, her one major flaw is that she is constantly trying to make things right. She’s trying too hard to help others before thinking about herself and its constantly getting her and others in to trouble. She was trying to help Angela, screwed everything up and for the first time in this entire series was trying to make things right for herself instead of constantly trying to go out of her way to help someone who hated her guts and was constantly unpleasant to her. There isn’t a shred of self absorbed there that isn’t healthy. She decided to do it for herself.
Yes, she did something selfish. Good for her. Selfishness is something that everyone needs once in a while. If you constantly never think of yourself and only of others, you will live a sad life.
It’s plenty obvious from your post that the entire fight scene made you dislike Diva just because she resorted to violence because obviously you’re too amazing and awesome to -ever- make a bad judgement. You’re one of the people in that crowd. That’s very nice. But applying that without context just makes your argument as unsound as it can be.
As for her reaction? She showed she has some humanity. She’s not perfect. Read the chapter coming up to this. She tried to help. It failed. She’s learning that sometimes you can’t feel bad about the things that the universe does to other people. Sometimes you have to laugh. Did you completely disregard the entire fact of Angela attacking her verbally again? And before you say anything, I’m sure you were so perfect back in high school that people could never get on your nerves with things like teasing.
In fact, I’m sure you were so attractive, popular and smart that no one would EVER dream of teasing you.
But ya, I can’t say I hold anything to your comments at all from now on simply due to the fact that you judge her worth on her brains, her beauty and her popularity versus her character, her judgement and the fact that she constantly is trying to make things right, even if she has to do things she doesn’t want to do.
Yes, she’s screwing up. She’s learning. But giggling at someone who deserves it isn’t something to hate her for. Nor judging her for a set of actions within a chapter that has happened DIRECTLY after a time skip so you really can’t judge her as a whole.
May 11th, 2011 at 8:57 am
Diva’s a healthy girl.
May 11th, 2011 at 10:59 am
Yeah, but she’s been slimmer than that in most recent strips, and her face looks particularly puffy.
I agree that anorexia and other eating disorders are Bad Things, and i hate to see women and girls do that to themselves – ha d afriend who was five-seven and the most i ever knew of her weighing was something like 98 pounds. And the hell of it was that, unlike many anorexics, she looked GOOD that way if you weren’t aware of what it did to her health – she was long-boned with long slender hands and feet and a narrow face with a pointy chin and she looked like an elf – and people would tell her how good she looked. Which reinforced her problem.
So, no, i don’t want Diva to look like that. But that one panel makes her look like she gained some weight when the universe changed…
May 11th, 2011 at 11:27 am
Wow, finally caught back up after my Lenten hiatus (took longer to read all those comments than I expected), and now I find people nearly coming to blows in the comments.
Though I am tempted, I am not going to jump head-first into either side on any of the major disagreements. I will only say this (and it’s been said before, really): this is a story. Entertainment. If you’re not entertained, and you are put off bad enough to feel anger to the point of hatred, then you are better off in the long run leaving quietly than making an @$$ of yourself with hateful comments.
Sheesh.
In other news, the XtraNormal ads are pretty cool …
:)
May 11th, 2011 at 11:41 am
Just curious. Has everyone commenting here actually read all of the chapters or just the recent ones?
May 11th, 2011 at 12:14 pm
I’ve read them all; started reading when Chapter One was still in progress, as i recall.
May 11th, 2011 at 12:15 pm
BTW: I REALLY want to see the incentive – but TopWeb seems to be down (i checked another comic, and i can’t get to it from there, either).
May 11th, 2011 at 12:53 pm
I don’t think she’s smirking at Angela’s misfortune — I think she recognizes this moment as a sign that the universe is right again.
May 11th, 2011 at 1:27 pm
Pudgy people are very cuddly ~ and besides, I’d personally rather her be a little pudgy, because it just reinforces the cuteness factor.
May 11th, 2011 at 1:29 pm
Well, streams to river, river to ocean — and the ocean does have dolphins, so yes, dumping stuff there would get to dolphins.
May 11th, 2011 at 2:26 pm
I’ve been ’round for a while now, I think. can’t remember when I first started wit this comic, but I think it was before she got the wand.
May 11th, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Same, I heard ‘verse’ and automatically knew what she meant thanks to Firefly! And that series was created nearly a decade ago, so definitely not brand new slang.
May 11th, 2011 at 3:18 pm
Completely!
This chapter was a waste of space in my opinion.
Pure, utter filler. Lacking Evil Diva’s usual ingenuity and creativity.
May 11th, 2011 at 6:39 pm
Catherine, if you’re around, nice job on librarian Tia! It’s funny that when good looking people dress frumpy, it just makes them hotter.
May 11th, 2011 at 8:39 pm
tabitha is correct. It’s an intentional ‘Firefly’ nod.
May 11th, 2011 at 8:41 pm
Not canon. You’ll understand why someday soon.
May 11th, 2011 at 10:04 pm
Okay GOOD! I was starting to worry. LOL. Thanks!
May 11th, 2011 at 11:12 pm
that’s a good question because a lot of times I run into people (Like Cao Cao) who seem to not know anything what so ever about what’s going on
May 12th, 2011 at 2:04 am
I have been here for a while, I think i picked it up midway thou issue 1 but it is hard to recall for sure. Every now and then I will do an archive dive and not to long ago I read the entire archive just for fun.
May 12th, 2011 at 2:08 am
I like how her tail is a different shape than the heart you see on Diva, I will have to do a poke in the archive and see if I can find a shot of her tail to check it there as well.
May 12th, 2011 at 4:55 am
Thanks, Cassandra! Yeah, i seem to recall an Axe body spray commercial when the girl dressed like that.
May 12th, 2011 at 5:39 am
shiny! ^^ and here i was thinking i was going leaky in the brain pan and all…
May 12th, 2011 at 5:42 am
sorry tekserver that you had to see that. i guess we were rather worked up about our beloved comic after all.
May 12th, 2011 at 5:43 am
yea, i’ve been around here for awhile…
May 12th, 2011 at 5:55 am
Lady makes a good point, i wish more people would sit down and read the whole comic before posting.
May 12th, 2011 at 6:03 am
From the reference shots I can find (finding shots where the tails are visible is harder than one would think) it looks like they all have the same tail shape.
also (and I only think this hard on things that I like so nitpicks are a bit of an odd compliment) what are she and the books sitting on?
May 12th, 2011 at 7:20 am
Heck, as long as we’re blowing wishes, I wish everyone would read all the existing comments before posting their own (often repetitive) comment. But as the old saying goes, “wish in one hand and {censored by author} in the other, and see which one collects.” (Please note that this is a general observation and not intended as a dig – insulting or otherwise – at anyone in this comment tree. Actually, I’ve found that “Divans” are somewhat better about this than the readers for some of the other comics I follow, which will remain nameless to protect the guilty … )
;)
BTW, in my experience it often seems to be the readers that have been around the longest that make the most mistakes regarding early comic material. It makes sense if you think about it: new readers have just finished an archive binge, and all that material is relatively fresh; whereas for the “old-timers” it might be months or even years since they read “that particular detail”, whatever it might be.
:)
May 12th, 2011 at 8:19 am
I’d think she would just because the delivery of that misfortune was actually pretty funny.
May 12th, 2011 at 9:34 am
Cao – got an idea. Since what you see here obviously annoys you and you’re not enjoying it – why don’t you stop reading?
You know – have a nice life – somewhere else?
Also, to those tossing around the term “Mary Sue” – the most important part of Mary-Sue-ness, originally, anyway, was that the character was obviously an avatar of the writer (Like Mercedies Lackey’s “Herald-Chronicler Myste”).
I don’t think Diva is a doppelganger for anyone on Team Diva…
May 12th, 2011 at 9:39 am
REALLY!??! Hmmmmmmmmmmm… Virgil did mention that the wand doesn’t have ‘much’ of a mind of it’s own, his exact words being “the scepter doesn’t have a mind of it’s own… well, not for the most part, anyway.”
Soooo… we’re gonna find out just how much self-awareness etc. it does have, after all!?! REALLY!?!?! EEEEEP!!!!! ^_^
AHEM: Serious note, I’ve been waiting a LONG time to find out what Virgil meant by that, that’s SEVERAL ISSUES OF SHEER TENSION PEOPLE!!!!! O_O
May 12th, 2011 at 10:31 am
I never called Diva a Mary-Sue. I said her shortcomings and failures kept her from becoming a Mary-Sue.
May 13th, 2011 at 6:12 am
lol i guess some of use are just nerdy sci/fi lovers :)