She wasn’t ready for that.
In earlier strips Todd's head and Amanda's head were drawn very similarly, but over time Todd got a bit longer and more... adult-y. Obviously they resemble each other but it felt strange after awhile to draw a late-twenties man and an eight year old girl with exactly the same face shape. Some things stayed similar between them, though.
What emotion is Theo conveying? It may just be because it’s a rough draft, but he looks a bit sympathetic or maybe it’s pity? His look doesn’t have as much venom as Todd or Mari’s does I guess.
Also I sure hope they all can manage to at least pretend to like one another for the kid’s sake.
Theo looks wary to me. He knows the storm is coming, and he can either join it, be sympathetic, or get the kids out of there. That storm happens, I hope it’s number three he chooses. They don’t need to be there.
Wary! That’s a good word, more in line with what I was thinking. I’m hoping there isn’t any Andi bashing between them, or at the very least, they give her a chance to speak too before jumping to conclusions. Like what Coco is saying below, Andi seemed unhappy during her pregnancy and as far as we know no one addressed that.
Sure, maybe she hid her emotions well (if the flashbacks are any indication then she did NOT hide them well and the signs were blatantly ignored.) but even if she dodged the questions or tried to hide her feelings, you don’t just give up. I mean, think of suicidal or depressed people.
They were both too young and inexperienced for the whole thing to end well. My biggest concern is Andi didn’t want the baby, but knowing how Todd felt about children she was too scared to say she wanted to abort for fear of him rejecting her. Todd has a bit of a temper and if his vegetarianism ‘everyone who eats meat is a murderer’ phase is any indication, then Andi’s fear was just. Now her actions were not right or even just, but Todd seems a but more concerned with his own agendas and ideas, or he did when he was younger and Andi is a very passive person.
Honestly, they were just wrong for one another.
I figure he has such strong feelings in both direction at the moment he may not be entirely capable of compartmentalizing.
either that, or, like a stereo-typical MALE, he can’t/won’t SHOW emotions, and this is his “neutral” face… kinda like The Hyneman with his emotional range of facial expressions… or he’s giving Andi/Amanda his “That’s INTERESTING!” Spock-Face, and we’re all misinterpreting it… or maybe he just wasn’t REALLY invested in the whole urn-on-the-mantle-shtick in the first place (it was probably Mari’s idea and he just went along with it so as to not upset her), and he did his mourning way back then, and got over it and moved on, so this revelation is a definite surprise; yes, but not an EMOTIONAL surprise, if you follow my thinking… i can’t explain it really…
as for Mari… OOH! she is PISSED!!!…
It”s not that hard an emotion to figure out.
“I taught my kids, and hope to teach my granddaughters, that screaming profanities into people’s faces is never appropriate… and they’re watching, so you get ‘Hi’.”
You can just feel the coldness coming off of panel 2. Hoping Mari and Theo can help get Selkie and Amanda to play nice with each other, at least a little bit.
Soon coming: the “gang up on Andi” part, where she’ll crack under the pressure of three people at once telling her she was stupid and selfish and either one of two possible things may happen:
1: She’ll start crying
Or what I think it more likely, 2: She SNAPS at everyone and finally vents out her side of the story.
Yes. What she did was bad. VERY bad. But here’s the point I rose up a while back: Where the hell were these questions for her WHEN SHE WAS PREGNANT? Because it seems to me that Todd and his parents were all like “Yay, happy times, baby!” And completely oblivious to what Andi, the one CARRYING the baby, was feeling.
But whatever happens and if that even happens, I just keep my fingers crossed that it doesn’t happen in front of both of the kids, or even just Selkie or just Amanda. I have a feeling neither of them would really understand it.
Thank you Coco Kanade- that is what I have been trying to say about Andi, where was anyone ever caring about her feelings in any of the flashbacks? Maybe I’m just extra sensitive due to my situation, but finally hearing my birth-mother’s story and hearing how absolutely shitty the hospital was to her (they never let her hold me or see me after I was born, they didn’t even want to tell her I was a girl- she only knew because one of the nurses “slipped” and mentioned my gender in front of her) has given me several more levels of sympathy for Andi.
Would you believe that I actually am waiting for that scene where we get the whole story, without her glazing over anything while we all learn to sympathize with her like we’ve seen consistently except for so far Andi and the Hobbit?
I’m sorry your mom went through that experience Blue Coyote. She should have at least been able to hold you and look you in the eyes. It’s only the human thing to do.
And maybe my being a male makes me bias towards Todd. I just can imagine how I would feel being told my daughter was a stillborn and I missed the birthing. I wouldn’t be able to handle it and a part of me would crack. I….would take it very poorly. Then find out way into the self loathing and hatred stage of life that it was all a lie and I didn’t have to go through with it. Rage would be a very minor way to describe it.
I sympathized with the principal; he was hilarious.
I’m so sorry to hear about how the hospital treated your mom. 🙁 That’s just awful…
And I am glad I’m not the only one who isn’t on the overly-populated “hating Andi wagon”.
I seriously know more then my fair share of bad mothers. My uncle’s ex-wife, my eldest brother’s mother, two of my oldest friends’ mothers…
Yes what Andi did was selfish. But she also did it because she knew she couldn’t be a good mother for Amanda at age seventeen. THAT made her an, at least, DECENT mother right off the bat.
I’ve got a helluva doozy of “bad mom stories”. I sympathize more with Andi, then I EVER will with any of those women.
Oh, your poor mom! *sending e-hugs to you both*
I don’t she Andi as the type that would snap. She seems like she would let everyone walk all over her.
see, not she*
I sympathize with Andi being young and scared and not ready to be a parent. Parenthood is scary and not for the weak and it takes a lot of hard work.
What I don’t sympathize with is the 8 years of lies and manipulation. Todd, Mari, and Theo mourned for years over the “loss” of Amanda. That kind of pain is visceral and world shattering. You don’t recover from that. I can understand waiting until after the kid is given to the system to inform the father of what happened and why. But you just don’t like about something like that for so long. It’s why she knows Mari and Theo likely don’t like her anymore; especially after Todd’s rejection at the aquarium.
This is how I view it, too. Andi’s spent eight years digging herself in to a deep hole, but now she’s trying to climb out of it. Throwing dirt and stepping on her fingers is not going to help.
I don’t think anyone is blaming Andi for giving Amanda up? That was absolutely up to her and might even have been the right thing to do. It’s lying about it to the father (who actually wanted the kid and likely would have raised her herself if given the change) which is absolutely inexcusable.
Looking at it, I feel like we should have set a betting pool on how fast Mari started crying, because it was kind of inevitable, wasn’t it? Still, how many of us would have bet on “within the first three seconds”?
… come to think of it, why did I not see that part coming, too?
Although now that I look again, Todd and Amanda actually have the most squared jaws on the page, don’t they? Everyone else has distinctively narrower chins. As a girl who got her chin and jaw from Mama while a sister got them from a square-jawed Papa, that can actually be a really, really easy way to peg who’s related to whom, too. Now I sort of want to go back and see if that’s because this is the rough or if they’ve always been drawn like that.
I love it! You can just feel the emotion coming from Mari. Also Todd is hilarious.. it’s so great to see the transition from “this might be my kid” to “there’s no denying it. Just look at her.” Your art is really getting good, superb, even, in facial expressions. I’d like to make a few constructive criticisms, if you don’t mind. (please just remember these are all my own personal opinions):
1. The lineart is coming along nice but maybe try varying thickness in the lines? Each frame lacks the look of “depth” that makes pictures have a sense of space/3D (even with the backgrounds added).
2. In addition to messing around with thickness, if you use a tablet, try playing around with the stabilizer in your art program (I use painttool sai). This will help your lines be more smooth & less jagged.
3. Try letting your lines fade into curves/angles without boxing in your shapes (example: the hard line on Todd’s face and the one connected to Amanda’s hairline. Not every shape needs to be closed off. Doing this will give the illusion of more realistic bone structure).
4. Going along with #3, dont be afraid to overlap lines to make creases & bends in the body. When drawing hands, make fingers more rounded, less sharp, and vary plumpness. For fingers, add as much of the 3 finger segments that looks normal. Also put in some palm creases to help distinguish the fingers & palms.
5. Hair is flowy. Try using wispier, easy lines, less harsh hairlines, and layers/style lines on the hair (ex: spikey pieces on andi’s head, between the bangs & back head shape, have amandas pigtails end in a few points instead of one).
6. I like that youve started to add wrinkles & expression creases, but maybe a light, rounded line giving the look of a bottom lip? It doesnt have to be very pronounced, just enough to give the mouth some definition.
Once again, these are all suggestions. I fully support the choices you make for your art style… But I do hope you keep experimenting. Like I said in the beginning, you’re only getting better. 🙂
Shirt buttons, Dave. 😛
I love this comic’s body language. So good.
These are all really good tips! Just got a few responses.
Regarding boxed in lines: I actually do this intentionally instead of leaving them open, mostly as a functional thing. It makes things quicker to color (not that I’m particularly swift anyway) when each section is compartmentalized.
I draw in Photoshop CS5 on a 16in x 21in 300ppi canvas, reducing down to 8×10.5 72ppi for web display. I use the pencil tool at 7pt to keep the lines thin. I explicitly avoid a use of thick outlines because my style philosophy is to resemble animation: mostly-uniform thin outlines with cel-style shading on top of flat colors. I use some tapering-down of the lines but it gets lost in the reduction process.
Brrr, did it just get cold in here?
Yeah, I felt the chill in the room, but it’s goons get red hot in a minute. Someone is gonna goof, and someone will start to cry tears and then someone will “Cry havoc, and let slip the tongues of anger!”
I can see it coming:
Andi, Andi,… All those dreams we held so close, seemed to all go up in smoke.
Ah, Mari. On the one hand, this isn’t quite as seriously as making Selkie eat a grape, but on the othre hand, it is putting your foot in it pretty quickly. I take it you weren’t warned about Amanda’s prickliness.
There is no warning appropriate for Amanda’s level of “prickliness”.
Klaxons and strobe lights?
I am curious about one thing; was Andi’s decision to tell Todd Amanda was stillborn her own or was it “suggested” by her mother? Andi’s mom hasn’t struck me as being a compassionate person, so pressuring Andi into lying would fit her attitude. Heck, this woman doesn’t even want to know her granddaughter now that Amanda’s well past the diaper phase.
Until I see different, I believe it was. I mean, what kind of 17 year old could afford an urn—let alone a funeral? Sure the money could have come from a deceased relative or her own savings from having jobs, but it seems more likely it was her mom’s doing.
The funeral and urn actually could have been Todd and his family’s idea. Their daughter/granddaughter is dead, and they would want to do something to acknowledge/recognize/memorial that. Andi just had to supply the ashes which in a panic she would scrape out of her mother’s fireplace.
It’s not necessarily what happened, but it is a possibility.
Hard to say because all we got were those speech bubble style flashbacks, but it very much seemed like saying the kid died is something Andi came up so she wouldn’t have to explain or discuss her choice with Todd.
I don’t know if Andi panicked and came up with the lie herself, or was primed by her mom, but considering that when Andi’s boyfriend showed up, Andi’s mom was nowhere to be seen… What was she doing, signing the final paperwork as Andi’s guardian, to ship Amanda Marie off to the orphanage?
I do wonder how much her mom *approved* of the lie, I really do.
Patricia approved of the lie at least a little, or she would have done more to end it. Patricia was the one in a position to prevent a LOT of the drama we’ve been seeing, even with Amanda given up for adoption, and she didn’t do it. That’s what pushes her from “thinking of the best for ALL the kids involved” to “…I don’t like her, she’s not a nice person” in my eyes. (note: I am assuming Patricia didn’t advise Andi to tell the truth because it hasn’t been referred to in any of the flashbacks, even a mention of “I told you this might happen if Amanda Marie comes looking for you and Todd.”)
I agree. No matter who originated the lie (and yes, it’s quite believable the first impulse did come from a panic-stricken teenager), Patricia has to have been deeply complicit in encouraging Andi to keep it up, and convincing everyone else it was true. Like, what on earth was she thinking?
Yeah, if nothing else I’d say Patricia owed Andi and Todd the courtesy to be there that first time, so that she could back Andi up and say “You weren’t there, Andi panicked, and I’ve been through this before so I apologize for not trusting you but even if you were there I think this was the right decision because you’re so young.” But she wasn’t, and that’s one of the many reasons I think waaaay worse of Patricia than Andi. Andi’s made a lot of stupid mistakes, but I’m pretty sure Patricia’s actively manipulative.
Where is Selkie during all this???
My guess? Probably back watching Sue and Kathryn.
No way. This is a much better show. She’s just off-screen because she isn’t a natural part of this initial interaction. I bet we’ll get to see her reaction to it pretty soon.
I’m actually not on anyone’s ‘side’ here. Thanks to Dave’s writing skill, I now empathize with the feelings of everyone present, so I understand why some of them are justifiably angry, some are justifiably afraid. This is a pivotal scene that’s been carefully built up to.
As for the outcome… I think this meeting is going to include a few home truths being spoken. The air has to be cleared. I’d be surprised if the two girls didn’t each contribute to more honesty. (Amanda has a knack for demanding to know the answer to a critical question, and Selkie too has little tolerance for bullcrap.)
I expect a bumpy meeting. For sure it’s not going to be all happily ever after just because of this meeting tonight, but honesty can bring out the best in people, too, and there’s a lot of good in ALL the participants. I hope the net result will be a beginning of something better.
Am I the only one thinking that what’s making her cry is that the pain in Amanda’s eyes is the same as her fathers when they first adopted him? And they know what that means. 🙁
She’s more taken in by the appearance and realizing she could have had this child growing up with her, a little Mini-Todd all over again. It can be overwhelming.
I kind of read it that way, too…that it’s not just she looks so much like Todd, but she looks so much like Todd did when they first met him.
I’m hoping it’s Amanda that reminds everyone Andi went back for her. That above all it’s Amanda who has the most right to condemn or forgive.
It’s obvious that what Andi did was wrong. She SHOULD feel like crap about that. They have every right to be mad at her for it. But in the end she chose to have the child and give it up for adoption because she knew she wasn’t fit to be a mother yet. And when she was ready to try, she did.
That should count for something. Doesn’t erase her previous mistakes, but it matters. And I for some reason I’m really hoping it’s Amanda that reminds them of this.
And if they want any sort of relationship with Amanda they’re going to have to forgive or at least move on passed Andi’s mistake otherwise Amanda is going to hate them for hating Andi.
If they truly love Amanda, then they need to accept Andi, otherwise they can’t count on a relationship with Amanda at all, because Amanda won’t accept them otherwise.
I wouldn’t be surprised that once Amanda finds out what really happened she’ll hate Andi too…
Andi is the only one who COULD have gone back for her, because *SHE’S THE ONE WHO TOLD EVERYONE ELSE THAT AMANDA WAS DEAD*.
So if Amanda is going to try to remind everyone else of that in an attempt to make them give her mother a break, she’s in for either disappointment or a very painful revelation.
Except Amanda’s not the only one hurt by Andi’s actions. She may have been hurt the most, but the others are entitled to their hurt as well.
The reason Andi was the one who went to get her was because Todd and his family assumed she was dead. Amanda also knows that Todd and his family thought that b/c Andi admitted it to her on page 655.
https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie655/
And Andi didn’t fully fess up that she was the one who told Todd that Amanda was dead. So while Amanda is mad, she is aware of the partial truth. Learning Andi was the one who lied? Amanda would hate her forever.
No, I don’t agree. Amanda will not hate her forever. She will be angry and dismayed, and later, as an adult, she’ll have some serious issues to work through, but right now? She’s too needy, too scared of losing what she’s so desperately wanted. For an eight year old, ‘right now’ easily trumps ‘long ago when I was just born’.
It’d be cool if they straight up murdered her.
No it wouldn’t. She had her reasons for lying and that doesn’t mean Andi should be killed. Besides neither Todd nor his parents would want to kill anyone
She’s evil. Cleanse her from this world.
End the world with cleansing fire!
Andi? She’s screwed up. Seriously, grievously screwed up, and still way, way too far from realizing just how screwed up she really is. She has a lot to atone for, a lot of self-awareness to gain, and a lot of forgiveness to win – from others, and from herself.
But she’s not evil. Don’t insult her writer by simplifying her to that degree; Dave’s written her much, much better than that.
Gavin is this kid that comes every now and then trolling for reaction. Don’t pay him any harm.
I actually appreciate him. I think Andi needs a series of gibbs slaps upside the back of her head. He makes me look positively rational.
Attention, not harm. Don’t pay him any attention.
So we should pay him harm? 🙂
We should pay him much harm. 😀 Well you know how you take care of a troll in D&D? Kill it with fire. Lots of harm for trolls.
And a wise rat once said A Ninja’s first rule is to do no harm. Unless you want to do harm and then do plenty of harm!
I say we kill him. He’s an evil troll.
Oops. Wrong throwaway.
oh my god I love Andi’s face on the last panel. Of all problems that she expected, this was not one
This might just be my favorite page ever. I don’t even know why, I just love everything about it. Amanda and her Grandma are just perfect.
I just know it’s going to kill me once Todd and his family learn what happened to Amanda with the other family and their two boys. Especially Todd, from the insinuations of his life was like before being adopted we’ve been shown. Andi is drowning in trouble at this point. Her lie, what she said about adoption that probably brought on the break up (remember Todd didn’t tell his parents why they broke up yet), and then what happened to Amanda. All of this is going to have to come out and Andi will have no chance of being put in the same light ever again.
I was always a little insulted when people said I looked like my father. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood how that’s a compliment to my father. Aka: “You look nothing at all like the mailman!”