This is probably about the best option. Amanda had been unwilling to talk to Selkie. A bit of harmless competition, which will almost certainly end in a draw (since the two judges are trying to be good parents and aren’t complete idiots), will bring out a bit of bonding between them. Bonus points if Todd lets them team up to do his hair.
Some folks are concerned Selkie might have a reaction to the dyes, but another possible problem would be if Selkie’s hair (due to different oils, maybe) just doesn’t take the color right.
Not entirely sure about that. As has been noted before (such as during the crayon ‘fight’) Selkie has no problems with some friendly and relatively harmless competition, but Amanda gets vicious.
After which Selkie responds in kind, because that’s how adolescent predators roll: Playfighting is a thing and helps build up reflexes and musculature and is regarded as “fun activity to do with siblings/litter mates” — but when it becomes clear that Amanda is playing “for keeps” so to speak…
Temp hair colors are essentially food coloring or chalk. I doubt there’s anything IN them for Selkie to react to, given the typical crap in Lake Superior, and the fact that Sarnothi generally just don’t get sick.
Good idea, Todd. Use temp colors, so it’s not a long term sentence if either of them end up hating their hair. Might also be a good bonding experience for the four of them.
Hair dye isn’t forever—even when it is permanent. Hair grows back. And I’ve yet to meet a child who would hate having rainbow hair (mine certainly doesn’t). 🙂
Right now, they remind me of my daughter and step daughter. My daughter wanted pink hair for her birthday. Naturally, my step daughter had to have it too, only she threw a fit and insisted that she have it first because she’s a year older. Yeah… I don’t play that.
But word for word, the conversation went as follows.
Daughter: It’s my birthday, I’m getting pink hair first!
Step daughter: Yeah? Well mine is gonna be pinker than yours! I’m gonna totally out pink you!
In the end, hers was more purple, and my daughter had neon pink hair for exactly 18 hours. Now, it’s bubble gum pink.
Each commiserated with the other that the color didn’t turn out as planned, and they’re best friends again.
Oh yassss! I can’t wait for monday! Will there be a montage?
As per Dying Hair: How permanent is it? I can assure you it is not very. You have to use low PH shampoo and baby it a lot or touch up a lot. It washes out very quickly. Also there is literally an entire aisle of hair dye in every possible natural shade you can think of if the wacky color doesn’t wash out.
Awesome family bonding experience. I’m glad Andi joined in.
Washable colors work well, especially when your daughter is on an all-girls robotics team and goes to a private school that doesn’t allow “unnatural colors”.
I would assume that their school will allow whatever colors they choose anyway, most public schools don’t care much.
I like the shading a lot! The lines give nice depth & body placement to discern background vs foreground. Remember to imagine exactly where your light source hits & work from there. Also when you’re ready for it, try sketching in quick outline shadows especially when directly leaning/laying against things. The closer you are, the bigger the shadow (depending on how much the body is eclipsing it).
You’re getting really really good with your line work, I love it 😀
Thanks! I’m planning to work shadows back in eventually, but for now I want to work on my outlining a bit and try to build up those a bit more. I’ve been really slack on my inking over the last few years, it’s kind of nice seeing it get fleshed out a bit.
I guess this takes place in an alternate universe where you can put temp color over unbleached hair and have it come out bright and vivid…?
Cuz this is not that universe. And if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to move to whatever universe that is, because I am so tired of all the bleaching…
Oh, I’m going nicely gray on the sides; that’s not a problem. It’s maintenance of the blue part on top that’s the issue. To get the really vivid colors, you have to strip the hair down to within an inch of its life, and gray hair is even harder to bleach, it’s more resistant. Bit of an inconvenience.
I do like the contrast between the greying hair and the blue part, though. It’s some kind of metaphor for youth and aging and flexibility of spirit that I could probably define more precisely if only I’d had a bit more coffee.
I talked about getting ruby red hair. My sister, a professional stylist and a punk said no, not a damn bit should I do this. It wouldn’t work for me. But for some it works, for others, less so.
I am fifty years old now, and I am old enough to do with my hair whatever I please, and to not give a damn whether it works for me or not. But to each their own. 🙂
The upside of having low testosterone: your hair stays put, even though it starts going gray. When you get testosterone replacement therapy, your scalp makes up for lost time.
I started going gray in my teens. Now I’m 34 and have seriously thinning salt-and-pepper hair. It doesn’t look too bad on my head, but on the barber’s cape it’s more gray than brown.
Also, I totally recommend a brand called Arctic Fox. It actually comes out very strongly over brown hair (at least their magenta-colored “RAGE” does). It washes out in a month.
Popping in to say that I love this comic and have been a reader from day one. You tell such a great story, the character development is totally realistic, and this strip is the best of all. I started laughing and couldn’t stop. It is wonderful to see Todd and Andi becoming friends again. It’s very moving to get a glimpse of what their relationship used to be like before Andi’s pregnancy and realizing what a huge loss the breakup created for both of them. Selkie is growing so much. It’s so cool to watch her use her snarky sense of humor to play Amanda like a fish!
What is this I see in the last panel??? The girls acting… *sisterly*?!?
Awesome!!! 😀
(This looks very familiar. My sister and I are less than two years apart. We fought like little tigers when we were young. Around the time we hit age 11-12 or so, we started looking at each other and thinking, “Hey, you’re not so bad!”. and our friendship grew from there. 🙂 )
Andi: Wide-eyed “Ooookay. Bad idea. Veeery bad idea.”
Tod: “I’ve always been supportive of equal rights, for anyone. I’m delighted they finally got the right to marry. That being said, taking 8-year-olds to a Pride parade is just asking for a whole lot of questions beginning with ‘why…’ that I don’t want to answer… presuming I even have an answer.”
Amanda: When I grow up I want a cone bra like her!
Andi: That’s not a her.
Todd: Amanda, go to your room.
Amanda: Only mom can tell me what to do!
Andi: Go to your room.
1: That last panel is like, exactly me during pride.
2: That comment got really closed-minded at the end. You take an eight-year-old to a pride parade to show them that you support the people in the pride parade, and that they should, too. I honestly don’t give a *censored censored* how comfortable you are or are not with “explaining” the things you see there to your child. The proper way to answer the question is almost always that the people are dressed/acting that way because they’re celebrating the fact they won’t be arrested for it. You don’t have to give a technical breakdown of why skimpy clothes have a sexual connotation any more than you need to explain to a child at a wedding that the celebrants will likely be having sex that night. It’s an eight-year-old. All the kid needs to understand is: those people like what they’re wearing/doing, other people like what they’re wearing/doing, everyone involved is having fun.
With the apparent exception of the guy scowling in the corner because children are being allowed to celebrate that consenting adults are allowed to love each other.
Hmmm… it IS a thing you’d be arrested to for exposing to a child. At least here in Italy. Granted, that happens if that’s not within a celebration, but that’s kind of silly: if it damages the child to expose him to such views, does it change because he views them inside a celebration? That could be debatable, at least (i’m using debatable with its semantic meaning – “something which might be debated upon, being more than one view possibly correct”.)
Not a good comparison with weddings. You normally do not expose children to anything with sexual connotations at a wedding (except the kiss, which kids are usually quite used to, being a display that is considered normal in public. Even if when 5 I used to go “eeeew” every time I saw my mother and father do that). A naked body (or near as it does not matter) carries quite more “eeew” factor. Not sure it goes away because of the festive situation. As I said, up for debate.
Drakey, it’s not closed minded as I wouldn’t take a child to a Pride event for that reason myself, I don’t want a child viewing things I am not that comfortable with them viewing. And before you get angry, I don’t take children to sporting events because of a douchebag doing that same thing covered in body paint.
There’s also the fact that people with children do have to explain such things to people to avoid uncomfortable situations with certain groups like CPS that don’t want children exposed to almost naked men in naught but a loincloth.
As to your wedding thing, to end it on a funnier note, if I was standing there watching the ceremonies and some dude in an almost nude outfit came walking in to chill would probably get popcorn thrown at them. Unless it was a swinger’s wedding. Though I do think there’s a dress code to these events.
I was going to end it, but I thought about what you said about showing kids you support gay rights. My niece asked me about a couple of men that she saw holding each other’s hands and walking down the street together when I don’t do it with my friends. She asked me and I told her the truth. “Those men are in love. This is a good thing, love is hard to find in this world. If they find it with each other rather than a man with a woman like your mom and dad, who are we to judge. And anyone that tells you otherwise, you send to me. I’ll punch them in the nose and set them straight.” Many ways to teach support other than Pride events.
Yea no, I’m an adult and I still don’t want to see that kind of thing myself. Though rather than tell people they shouldn’t do it or try ban the parade I just won’t go, even though I do support gay rights in general. I can still disapprove of the needless exhibitionism, just as they are free to do it regardless of what I think about it. 🙂
Having grown up in a nudist club, I find nothing inherently sexual about nudity. It’s normal and health for children to pal around with their siblings and parents in the buff, at least until a certain age. Fond memories from my earliest childhood include enjoying the cool of the back porch, and floating on an air mattress on a lake looking up at the stars, in both cases nude right next to my nude dad.
I think society has too many hangups about the human body. But, Drakey, what the HELL, man.
You think every parent ought to be comfortable taking their kids to an event that features the kind of stuff they can’t even watch in MOVIES? My extended family attends the pride parade. My niece, who was a good deal older than eight at the time, told us some of what goes on there, and there is no way I would take a young child to an event like that.
Our society layers sex across EVERYTHING. This parade is no exception. We can’t even have a woman breast-feeding in public (using a boob for its natural function) without some idiot going “Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?!”
Go ahead and explain why the internet is covered with rainbows that day (if the kid asks). Go ahead and explain why they ran across a photo of naked men strolling down main street. Fine. I speak pretty plainly to kids myself, when answering or explaining, because talking around things does them a disservice in most cases.
But it’s not up to you, Drakey, to decide the comfort level of other parents, or to judge them for wanting to keep their kids home.
P.S. One of the things to balance, as a parent, is the right of kids to know vs. the right of parents to hide. Because some kids are blabbermouths (I sure was), and explaining things to them much earlier than to their peers can result in parents ringing you up to demand why Johnny came home with the words XYZ and JKL, or asked about why Y’s go in X’s.
I speak not so much from experience, as from my mom telling me stories about my extreme youth, and the misadventures thereof.
So there might be a reason to consider other people — your duty to the community, such as it is, because no family is an island — before taking an extreme stance on your child’s education. That, and/or being very careful to school the kid in tact and secrecy before arming them with weapons-grade knowledge above their level.
I would have happily taken any child of any age to a gay pride parade, in support of civil rights, as I have said.
However, over the years, the Pride parade has gradually morphed into a sexual fetish show, and as such, it should probably have an R-rating 18+ admittance restriction. It’s not fit for kids anymore.
…Also I live in Canada, 3rd country in the world (after Netherlands & Belgium) to recognize gay marriage as legal. US homosexuals were crossing the border to have their weddings for more than a decade before it was legal in the US.
It’s not as a big deal up here anymore (and frankly there was nowhere near as much fuss or resistance to it as there was in the USA, even before). We have nothing to prove.
Competitive goobers. X3 I wonder how they’ll look though. Both will be so adorable and sweet.
This is probably about the best option. Amanda had been unwilling to talk to Selkie. A bit of harmless competition, which will almost certainly end in a draw (since the two judges are trying to be good parents and aren’t complete idiots), will bring out a bit of bonding between them. Bonus points if Todd lets them team up to do his hair.
Some folks are concerned Selkie might have a reaction to the dyes, but another possible problem would be if Selkie’s hair (due to different oils, maybe) just doesn’t take the color right.
Not entirely sure about that. As has been noted before (such as during the crayon ‘fight’) Selkie has no problems with some friendly and relatively harmless competition, but Amanda gets vicious.
After which Selkie responds in kind, because that’s how adolescent predators roll: Playfighting is a thing and helps build up reflexes and musculature and is regarded as “fun activity to do with siblings/litter mates” — but when it becomes clear that Amanda is playing “for keeps” so to speak…
Wash-out colours seem inconvenient for a swimmer. On the other hand, how often does Selkie get a chance to swim in the middle of winter?
It’s winter break. She’s probably not doing much swimming at this moment. 🙂
Please please please check with Pohl first to be sure Selkie can do this!
I can’t wait for the Wonder Twin Rainbow Barrage if he okays it. 😀
Temp hair colors are essentially food coloring or chalk. I doubt there’s anything IN them for Selkie to react to, given the typical crap in Lake Superior, and the fact that Sarnothi generally just don’t get sick.
Selkie wears clothes. Clothes are made from plants.
She is not harmed by plants being ON her, only IN her. Hair dye goes ON the hair.
Unless it’s touching her scalp, she’ll be fine.
Good idea, Todd. Use temp colors, so it’s not a long term sentence if either of them end up hating their hair. Might also be a good bonding experience for the four of them.
Hair dye isn’t forever—even when it is permanent. Hair grows back. And I’ve yet to meet a child who would hate having rainbow hair (mine certainly doesn’t). 🙂
Right now, they remind me of my daughter and step daughter. My daughter wanted pink hair for her birthday. Naturally, my step daughter had to have it too, only she threw a fit and insisted that she have it first because she’s a year older. Yeah… I don’t play that.
But word for word, the conversation went as follows.
Daughter: It’s my birthday, I’m getting pink hair first!
Step daughter: Yeah? Well mine is gonna be pinker than yours! I’m gonna totally out pink you!
In the end, hers was more purple, and my daughter had neon pink hair for exactly 18 hours. Now, it’s bubble gum pink.
Each commiserated with the other that the color didn’t turn out as planned, and they’re best friends again.
Oh yassss! I can’t wait for monday! Will there be a montage?
As per Dying Hair: How permanent is it? I can assure you it is not very. You have to use low PH shampoo and baby it a lot or touch up a lot. It washes out very quickly. Also there is literally an entire aisle of hair dye in every possible natural shade you can think of if the wacky color doesn’t wash out.
There’s basically “hair spray paint”, isn’t there? Temporary hair color in a can? I remember seeing it around Halloween.
Next time I see it, I’m going to get a couple cans of green and gold (my school’s colors).
Awesome family bonding experience. I’m glad Andi joined in.
Washable colors work well, especially when your daughter is on an all-girls robotics team and goes to a private school that doesn’t allow “unnatural colors”.
I would assume that their school will allow whatever colors they choose anyway, most public schools don’t care much.
It often depends on the grade, with the higher grades being more accepting.
wait…. did they just managed to make their daughters get matching hair colors O.o
holy shit they are parental geniuses!
I like the shading a lot! The lines give nice depth & body placement to discern background vs foreground. Remember to imagine exactly where your light source hits & work from there. Also when you’re ready for it, try sketching in quick outline shadows especially when directly leaning/laying against things. The closer you are, the bigger the shadow (depending on how much the body is eclipsing it).
You’re getting really really good with your line work, I love it 😀
Thanks! I’m planning to work shadows back in eventually, but for now I want to work on my outlining a bit and try to build up those a bit more. I’ve been really slack on my inking over the last few years, it’s kind of nice seeing it get fleshed out a bit.
Blue and silver for Selkie! Pale yellow roots for Amanda, working their way outward along the spectrum of colours in flames!
Wait, we don’t get a vote? It’s just going to be Pride Week rainbow? Ah well….
That is the beginning of the rainbowars
Now I’m rooting for Todd to get “rainbowed” as well, and for them to take pictures of all of them as a family.
I guess this takes place in an alternate universe where you can put temp color over unbleached hair and have it come out bright and vivid…?
Cuz this is not that universe. And if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to move to whatever universe that is, because I am so tired of all the bleaching…
Just do what I’m doing for my coloring. I used to have a big bold brown head of hair. Now it’s slowly turning silver on its own. Maaaaaagic.
Oh, I’m going nicely gray on the sides; that’s not a problem. It’s maintenance of the blue part on top that’s the issue. To get the really vivid colors, you have to strip the hair down to within an inch of its life, and gray hair is even harder to bleach, it’s more resistant. Bit of an inconvenience.
I do like the contrast between the greying hair and the blue part, though. It’s some kind of metaphor for youth and aging and flexibility of spirit that I could probably define more precisely if only I’d had a bit more coffee.
I talked about getting ruby red hair. My sister, a professional stylist and a punk said no, not a damn bit should I do this. It wouldn’t work for me. But for some it works, for others, less so.
I am fifty years old now, and I am old enough to do with my hair whatever I please, and to not give a damn whether it works for me or not. But to each their own. 🙂
Pretty sure I’ve mentioned this here before…
The upside of having low testosterone: your hair stays put, even though it starts going gray. When you get testosterone replacement therapy, your scalp makes up for lost time.
I started going gray in my teens. Now I’m 34 and have seriously thinning salt-and-pepper hair. It doesn’t look too bad on my head, but on the barber’s cape it’s more gray than brown.
Good hair chalk does a fine job. 🙂
Also, I totally recommend a brand called Arctic Fox. It actually comes out very strongly over brown hair (at least their magenta-colored “RAGE” does). It washes out in a month.
“I will out-rainbow you SO HARD!”
Best quote ever. XD
Popping in to say that I love this comic and have been a reader from day one. You tell such a great story, the character development is totally realistic, and this strip is the best of all. I started laughing and couldn’t stop. It is wonderful to see Todd and Andi becoming friends again. It’s very moving to get a glimpse of what their relationship used to be like before Andi’s pregnancy and realizing what a huge loss the breakup created for both of them. Selkie is growing so much. It’s so cool to watch her use her snarky sense of humor to play Amanda like a fish!
What is this I see in the last panel??? The girls acting… *sisterly*?!?
Awesome!!! 😀
(This looks very familiar. My sister and I are less than two years apart. We fought like little tigers when we were young. Around the time we hit age 11-12 or so, we started looking at each other and thinking, “Hey, you’re not so bad!”. and our friendship grew from there. 🙂 )
I have never been so entertained by the fact that a comic is in black and white. Good luck with the rainbow girls. 🙂
I’m definitely going to be in a lot of trouble if I’m late with the colors on the next strip! 😀
Dave> LOL on the strip and your commentary!
Andi: “Heh! Hey Tod? With both our daughters in rainbow hair, you want we should we take them to a Pride parade?”
Tod: Looks at her with a completely deadpan expression.
Andi: “What?”
Tod: Pulls out his smartphone and does a quick image search, showing her the result. http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1386524.1372695777!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/gallery_1200/new-york-city-gay-pride-parade-2013.jpg
Andi: Wide-eyed “Ooookay. Bad idea. Veeery bad idea.”
Tod: “I’ve always been supportive of equal rights, for anyone. I’m delighted they finally got the right to marry. That being said, taking 8-year-olds to a Pride parade is just asking for a whole lot of questions beginning with ‘why…’ that I don’t want to answer… presuming I even have an answer.”
Selkie: Dads… I haves a new fetish.
Todd: Go to your room.
Amanda: When I grow up I want a cone bra like her!
Andi: That’s not a her.
Todd: Amanda, go to your room.
Amanda: Only mom can tell me what to do!
Andi: Go to your room.
1: That last panel is like, exactly me during pride.
2: That comment got really closed-minded at the end. You take an eight-year-old to a pride parade to show them that you support the people in the pride parade, and that they should, too. I honestly don’t give a *censored censored* how comfortable you are or are not with “explaining” the things you see there to your child. The proper way to answer the question is almost always that the people are dressed/acting that way because they’re celebrating the fact they won’t be arrested for it. You don’t have to give a technical breakdown of why skimpy clothes have a sexual connotation any more than you need to explain to a child at a wedding that the celebrants will likely be having sex that night. It’s an eight-year-old. All the kid needs to understand is: those people like what they’re wearing/doing, other people like what they’re wearing/doing, everyone involved is having fun.
With the apparent exception of the guy scowling in the corner because children are being allowed to celebrate that consenting adults are allowed to love each other.
Hmmm… it IS a thing you’d be arrested to for exposing to a child. At least here in Italy. Granted, that happens if that’s not within a celebration, but that’s kind of silly: if it damages the child to expose him to such views, does it change because he views them inside a celebration? That could be debatable, at least (i’m using debatable with its semantic meaning – “something which might be debated upon, being more than one view possibly correct”.)
Not a good comparison with weddings. You normally do not expose children to anything with sexual connotations at a wedding (except the kiss, which kids are usually quite used to, being a display that is considered normal in public. Even if when 5 I used to go “eeeew” every time I saw my mother and father do that). A naked body (or near as it does not matter) carries quite more “eeew” factor. Not sure it goes away because of the festive situation. As I said, up for debate.
Drakey, it’s not closed minded as I wouldn’t take a child to a Pride event for that reason myself, I don’t want a child viewing things I am not that comfortable with them viewing. And before you get angry, I don’t take children to sporting events because of a douchebag doing that same thing covered in body paint.
There’s also the fact that people with children do have to explain such things to people to avoid uncomfortable situations with certain groups like CPS that don’t want children exposed to almost naked men in naught but a loincloth.
As to your wedding thing, to end it on a funnier note, if I was standing there watching the ceremonies and some dude in an almost nude outfit came walking in to chill would probably get popcorn thrown at them. Unless it was a swinger’s wedding. Though I do think there’s a dress code to these events.
I was going to end it, but I thought about what you said about showing kids you support gay rights. My niece asked me about a couple of men that she saw holding each other’s hands and walking down the street together when I don’t do it with my friends. She asked me and I told her the truth. “Those men are in love. This is a good thing, love is hard to find in this world. If they find it with each other rather than a man with a woman like your mom and dad, who are we to judge. And anyone that tells you otherwise, you send to me. I’ll punch them in the nose and set them straight.” Many ways to teach support other than Pride events.
Yea no, I’m an adult and I still don’t want to see that kind of thing myself. Though rather than tell people they shouldn’t do it or try ban the parade I just won’t go, even though I do support gay rights in general. I can still disapprove of the needless exhibitionism, just as they are free to do it regardless of what I think about it. 🙂
Having grown up in a nudist club, I find nothing inherently sexual about nudity. It’s normal and health for children to pal around with their siblings and parents in the buff, at least until a certain age. Fond memories from my earliest childhood include enjoying the cool of the back porch, and floating on an air mattress on a lake looking up at the stars, in both cases nude right next to my nude dad.
I think society has too many hangups about the human body. But, Drakey, what the HELL, man.
You think every parent ought to be comfortable taking their kids to an event that features the kind of stuff they can’t even watch in MOVIES? My extended family attends the pride parade. My niece, who was a good deal older than eight at the time, told us some of what goes on there, and there is no way I would take a young child to an event like that.
Our society layers sex across EVERYTHING. This parade is no exception. We can’t even have a woman breast-feeding in public (using a boob for its natural function) without some idiot going “Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?!”
Go ahead and explain why the internet is covered with rainbows that day (if the kid asks). Go ahead and explain why they ran across a photo of naked men strolling down main street. Fine. I speak pretty plainly to kids myself, when answering or explaining, because talking around things does them a disservice in most cases.
But it’s not up to you, Drakey, to decide the comfort level of other parents, or to judge them for wanting to keep their kids home.
P.S. One of the things to balance, as a parent, is the right of kids to know vs. the right of parents to hide. Because some kids are blabbermouths (I sure was), and explaining things to them much earlier than to their peers can result in parents ringing you up to demand why Johnny came home with the words XYZ and JKL, or asked about why Y’s go in X’s.
I speak not so much from experience, as from my mom telling me stories about my extreme youth, and the misadventures thereof.
So there might be a reason to consider other people — your duty to the community, such as it is, because no family is an island — before taking an extreme stance on your child’s education. That, and/or being very careful to school the kid in tact and secrecy before arming them with weapons-grade knowledge above their level.
I would have happily taken any child of any age to a gay pride parade, in support of civil rights, as I have said.
However, over the years, the Pride parade has gradually morphed into a sexual fetish show, and as such, it should probably have an R-rating 18+ admittance restriction. It’s not fit for kids anymore.
…Also I live in Canada, 3rd country in the world (after Netherlands & Belgium) to recognize gay marriage as legal. US homosexuals were crossing the border to have their weddings for more than a decade before it was legal in the US.
It’s not as a big deal up here anymore (and frankly there was nowhere near as much fuss or resistance to it as there was in the USA, even before). We have nothing to prove.
Say it with me: Hue fight! Hue Fight!
Rainbows for everybody!
http://dmfa.katbox.net/comic/845-happy-endings-may-vary-per-customer/
When they go back to school, are they just gonna have blonde streaks in their hair? XD
Royal rainbow!
Well Todd and Andi have certainly managed to figure out the whole co-parenting thing. Impressive.