Annotated 33-8
What a pleasant man! (That close-up of his smile… really does the job there, great work on John’s part.)
Otaking pointed out that the thirty-dollar charge paralleled “thirty pieces of silver,” and man, I wish I could say we had intended that, it’s great.
Many thanks to Joel Watson for appreciating/tolerating/benignly ignoring our portrayal of him here. Since these pages went up, he’s worked on the webcomic/animation series Cyanide and Happiness and created and starred in the Syfy series Purgatony.
I had completely forgotten this part. What a good lad. :D
I mean. He’s clearly a bad guy. But… It doesn’t mean he has to be a bad guy.
And in a way, whether you give him trouble or just help him, he sorta respects you. He knows people are motivated by different things.
If you’re someone who someone else wants to silence, you’re clearly doing something bigballsy enough that they go hire a guy like you. Gotta respect that.
You tell him where his quarry is, so you won’t come back busting kneecaps and other things from you or your loved ones? You just look after yourself and those around you. Got to respect that too.
You tell him lies and make him come after you too? Major balls. Got to respect that as well. Got to bust your kneecaps too, but…
That’s just business. Nothing personal.
Except, remembering the way he acts right before he exits the comic, I’m pretty sure it’s 100% a put-on. He doesn’t respect anything except people doing what he wants them to do. He’ll try to be polite about it if people are cooperating, but if they aren’t, not just the knife comes out but the aggrieved bellowing about the fact that you “made” him use it, too.
I’d be bummed out too if I was suddenly in a situation where I’ve been doing all sorts of hoops and whistles to get my job done and then suddenly notice I’m in a situation where my workload just exploded with all sorts added possibilities of career ending failures just because some randos who my work didn’t even initially concern decided to make my job harder.
Like a janitor noticing a guy eating messily and then asks them politely to stop messing, to which they respond by throwing the rest of their food all over. Okay. You start cleaning that. Then the dude gets their buddies involved and they start making a mess. You tell them to stop and when they don’t you even slap one of them for good measure for being such punks. That gets them going even more and they trash the place all over, then call your manager and tell them that the whole place is a pigsty and when they tried to get you to clean it up, you ended up beating one of their mates.
Yeah. I would be hella pissed as well. Granted, I wouldn’t kill anyone, but would strongly think about doing that.
…
Yes, the situations aren’t 1->1, but the point being, he still does come of as respectful and even understanding. He just simply has a job to do, he takes great pride in doing it and these ruffians just made his life every sorts more difficult.
Though I must agree with some other commenters, that the way he goes about his business, he really should have been in the type of trouble he found himself in in the end way sooner. XD
And yes, he’s still a very bad, even evil man.
I mean, forcing an artist to sign copies of their work to an admittedly generic-sounding first-name-only? That’s basically extortion if it ever becomes a collector’s item.
And counts as free money if the price shoots up after an “untimely” demise, wrought by “trying to be a hero”…
Shrewd, JJ, shrewd.
A very respectable psychopath indeed.
This scene is pretty much like the prototypical scene between some arsehole and his girlfriend, after he’s beaten her, and then he buys her some flowers as a token of his love or something because he totally didn’t mean it in a bad way or anything. And she goes along because somehow there’s this conditioning that prevents her from getting angry at a guy who gives her flowers, especially because she *wants* him to mean it.
And he thinks that if she goes along that means everything’s forgotten and it’s all fine now. And so he learns that he can balance abuse with symbolic acts. And so he continues doing that …
This scene is very similar to that, except JJ completely understands the dynamic, and he uses it deliberately. And Joel is of course not in love with JJ, but he desperately *wants* him to be a civilized human, so he will happily accept the gesture.
Yeah, showing your teeth just isn’t always the non-threatening display your brain tells you it is…
Especially when your lower jaw shows about twice as many teeth as should be visible for a normal person. I mean, I get that even these Sepia World sequences don’t necessarily strive for perfect anatomical correctness, but that’s just creepy.
Less of a natural smile, and more of a villainous grimace…
But you know, I think it’s possible to produce such a grimace, I don’t think it’s anatomically impossible.
“I certainly can” he said, ominously.
When I look in the mirror and grin wide, I can see twelve of my bottom teeth, same as in the comic. OTOH, the smile in panel 1 doesn’t really look like a full grin (compare pane 3). With a half-grin, I can see ten lower teeth at most, and I don’t have a luxurious mustache covering the edges of my mouth.