Force Magellan: They are the prime Magellan based team on Earth, Go!Anna was apparently offered a place with them straight out of Magellan Academy… much to the surprise of many and Ken Spence’s chagrin!
Doctor Anti-Christ: She was name dropped waaaaay back in the Bad Karma storyline…!
Tentacle people: Hm… wonder who they could be??
Next update: Sunday September 15, 2019: Special visit…
The story so far…
[1] Wannabe
[#] History
[2] Great Leap Forward
[3] Daze
[4] Bad Karma
[#] Gifford: Hero [back soon]
[#] Buying the Stairway to Heaven
[5] Worst Fieldtrip Ever
[#] Redux: Gola Beh
[6] Lock(e)down
[#] The Things That Matter
[7] PaRARGdox
Tales from the MagellanVerse…
Olga & Brelvis
Dr Spooky & Otto
The Olaf Mystery
Legacy
Crossoverkill [a crossover!]
Magellan stuff
About
Cast
Contact [email]
Fan Art [back soon]
Fan Fiction
Magellan Miscellany[back soon]
Magellan TV Tropes Page
Doctor Anti-Christ – I hate that I’m going to have to re-read that arc to find the reference😠
Tentacle people – I wonder🤔
Is Annie breaking the fourth wall? Promote her to the Alpha folder!😉
Maybe this chapter should be named Special Visit?
It’s 4.65, http://magellanverse.com/comic/inconvenienced/. Ken Spence takes down Charisma when she pulls some entitled shit before a surprise training exercise, referring to said villain.
Bless you, sir 😁
I was only up to page 40!
Go!Anna is the Deadpool of this universe? Or wait I guess that’d be Wombat Man…
no unfortunately the deadpool of this universe is neither, see Deadpool’s most important ability is to go through the forth wall like its paper, and the character here that does that is no hero nor is he an antihero.
Nope, that is a nutcase who got life for a death, on live television.
You would think that Sister Superior and Dr. Anti-Christ would be instant enemies with those names. Put them in cells across from each other on Locke Island.
Fortunately the supernatural and magic villains get a completely different place to do hard time. No accident there were none featured in Lock(e)down 😉
Oh, you PLACE-DROPPER! Now you gotta spill! What and where is it that they keep such villains? Why isn’t Locke Island good enough for them? Why do we have to learn such things in the Comments Section??
😂
Ken, you forgot xenophobic as well. After all that, it is surprising that Fatima turns out so well adjusted after all.
I guess the ones that made contact with Magellan were non-xenophobic, either refugees like Fatima or complete factions under a ruler more open to other worlds.
Fatima was definitely too curious for her own good…
I believe this is the first time we’ve seen the term “Magellanverse” in comic. Am I right or am I forgetting something?
As for Ken’s feelings about Go!Anna, here it is black on white that he is indeed proud of her. I think he thinks she is the best pupil he ever taught, really. And that explains how he is still angrily disappointed about her not being on Force Magellan a decade later, at the beginning of the comic, on the very page where Ken is introduced to the reader! http://magellanverse.com/comic/ken/
That is a page I have always remembered and for the longest time I’ve had a feeling that Kaycee is going to make him both proud and angrily disappointed in the exact same way. That is real far into the future and dependent on a few things we don’t know how they pan out in the main timeline, though.
It is the first time it’s been said – I was looking for a casual “i’m outta here” comment and I figured since everything is labelled Magellan This, Magellan That the term Magellan(Uni)Verse could reasonably be in use by the very people who inhabit it.
… ok, I must admit I didn’t realized who the aquatic tentacle people could be before reading the comments. Either I moved to comments too fast or it was too long ago …
Nah, you just don’t archive binge often enough! 😀 Maybe you’re not normally into reading a story that you’ve already read, but I do recommend starting from the beginning of Magellan if it was really long ago. This comic has a re-read value that is far, far above normal. It is a brilliant tale right from the get-go and it is full of interesting detail.
With the art consistency and the newly updated page size it is a rather special experience: you go back to the start and you’re enjoying it exactly like you enjoy the current pages! There are a few very long-running yet consistent mangas that deliver the same but in black and white. As far as I know that’s all that comes really close. Kevin & Kell and Sam & Fuzzy and Twokinds all make it obvious that the work was done over more than a decade, they do have high re-reading value too but it’s a very different experience.
This reader’s opinion: Ken screws up here, royally. He makes it all about him and Magellan with zero acknowledgment of Go!Anna’s concerns, which are well known to him. “I’m proud of ya” = as if she would be concerned about that, when the problem is that she already lost respect for him and the Magellan Council for their actions. Does he reflect on those actions or ask her to do so? No. To him, apparently, she’s still a cadet who stresses about whether Drillmaster Spence approves of her. “Just this week, Magellan (et cetera) …” is effectively a guilt-trip for her prior refusal to accept the invitation. Does that have one thing to do about her own reasons for staying away from it? It does not. It shows that he conceives of that invitation not as a request but as a favor that anyone should be grateful for, and that he would consider anyone’s “no” as a personal insult.
I’ve just gone through the entire comic to review my thoughts on Ken’s personality and actions. He’s not a bad person, but he’s completely terrible at dealing with people who don’t treat him as an authority, even when they have no reason to. His best judgments are always directed at people lower in a hierarchy who know their place, as he sees it. He reminds me of my experiences with older faculty who founded the departments they now preside over, and who often forget that they were not themselves subject to the standards they claim to represent when training and judging others.
The result here is a serious plot-moment that throws tons of light on the later events we know about. It sets up a decade of estrangement with fallout in all directions. I am often disappointed when stories “go back” to fill in gaps, as they usually turn out to be filler in the bad sense, but I’m loving this one – many causes for things we know about are getting illuminated, and many of the causees are very human moments.
Seconded, though Ken also strikes me as a “I am never wrong” type mixed with what I can only describe as an Efficiency Munchkin due to my gaming background. To his “expert” opinion, Go!Anna could be doing “so much more” where he wants her. And to his “expert” opinion, her handling Tk clowns and saving one girl are a waste of her abilities when she could be stopping Dr. Anti-Christ and her blood Spawn. And thus he feels he has the sacred duty to “correct” her bad decisions almost any time he sees her.
And he’s quite illogical there, too.
Annie listens to that same information and concludes that Force Magellan didn’t need her while Kaycee did–and she’s right. That’s the actual conclusion that follows about where her abilities are best put to use.
I don’t think he would take the no to the invitation quite as personally with just anyone, though. I think that he actually is proud of her, he feels that he really taught her a whole lot, and that makes a big difference. (As compared to some superhero that was not under his tuition or wasn’t really good right out of the academy.)
As long as we get to noodle around in dialogue here … first, hello to a fellow deep-diver and re-reader of the archives, because I agree with you that it’s more than worth it, it’s a gold-standard achievement for the genre. Second, about your thoughts on Spence, I can say … maybe? There’s no comparison on record, as Annie is the single person to have turned Magellan down (03 in this story; I don’t mean to patronize you, I’m sure you know that, this is just neutral citation). Motivated by respect for a cadet’s performance or not, my take is that he has little ability to respect Annie, or anyone probably, in terms of being someone who can make their own decisions and who is not obliged to agree with his notion that Magellan is the be-all and end-all of superheroing. But third, which is really why I’m replying, I realized how strong this whole sequence is, timed as it is relative to the last few pages of Lock(e)down, when Annie does indeed join Force Magellan. Whatever happens here in The Things That Matter, meaning, whatever we readers learn, it’s going to fuel serious content in how Annie and Spence treat one another, or choose to address between them, once we return to the “present.” It’s cool to know I have reader-buddies here who are paying attention too.
I think it has also been said in current time that she is still the only one who ever turned down an invitation to be on Force Magellan, no clue where though so that might be wrong. Maybe deep-diver and re-reader extraordinaire, VileTerror, has an idea?
As for Ken’s ability to respect that someone can have a different opinion than his own and still make good decisions, look e.g. at when Justine Keff orders him to work with Annie. (http://magellanverse.com/comic/module/) His initial reaction isn’t respectful at all, but I think respect happens at second thought for many people, just that for most of those people they tend to not open their mouth immediately. On the very next page you find Ken agreeing that Justine made the right decision and swiftly making sure Annie is on board too. This can be seen again and again when he interacts with those who are not students. He does respect other people and their decisions, just not as an immediate reaction.
I fully agree that he is bad at dealing with people. I think what he is attempting in this page is not a guilt-trip but rather to say that the action is better, more interesting, higher profile with the top force – he assumes she would be drawn to that. He has been giving her orders for six years but he never attempted to actually persuade her of anything before, he does not know what makes her tick.
And most of all I agree that this is brilliant content, brilliant storytelling. Certainly the gold standard for character depth, that we are having this discussion about Drillmaster Spence – a character that would be ostensibly one-note in pretty much any other comic – is just one of many many examples. Magellan is up there with the best epics ever told, if you ask me.
For another comic with superheroes, not long at all yet but fully focused on the characters and their relations, try Dude in Distress if you’re not reading it already 🙂
“Told you it wouldn’t work”?
Wait, that was a plan?
Prediction flash forward to present, and after congratulating Go!Anna, Kaycee tells her not to ever regret her time as a solo agent, with Ken in earshot.
Brilliant! I wonder how the thought of Annie having agreed to be on Magellan and therefore not saved Kaycee would land and continue in Ken’s mind.
Or it could go the other way around.
Ken: Well, Kaycee, or should I say, Maverick. Congratulations on being elected valedictorian for your class. Have you given any thought on which Magellan branch’s offer you are going to accept. I mean, I definitely see the attraction for you to join Oz Magellen, but you also got the invitation from the big team. What do you say?
Kaycee: I have been giving it some thought, but I am not ready to decide yet. I have been talking with some people, like my mom and Go!Anna to get a clear picture of what I want to do. I am actually thinking on being an independent to start with.
Ken: [ Expletive redacted. Okay, Expletives redacted! ]
I guess we’ll see… if I ever get to the end of year six!! Fingers crossed.
We are 2 weeks out from the last update and over a week from the last promised update and also the last comment from the creator, anyone got an update on Grace?
We’re not. Her last comment, in yellow, is from yesterday. The page is from last week, the 15th, but the “Next update:” line was not updated.
Wishing well to you and your dad Grace. Family always should come first. Pick up when you can 😊
best wishes for your dad!
First, good luck to your dad!
Second, I noticed in this strip that Ken is in a normal wheelchair rather than the hoverchair he is in modern day (and just went back to the beginning of the “The Things That Matter” story to realize he was in a wheelchar there too. :)). While it’s certainly possible that this tech was developed in the meantime, I’m a little surprised that it didn’t exist when she graduated given the ‘super science’ heros around and the fact that the timeline at the beginning of the strip is roughly, what, 10 years later? Basing that on Kaylee’s age change rather than any date specified in the comics…
In part it has to do with the availability of the components, applicability, safety and expense. That’s how I rationalise it anyway. As they develop ways to make their special tech more available to other supers and the general public without potentially tearing a hole in the time/space continuum or exhausting the only supply of ‘unobtanium’, etc then those items can be more widely used by everyone.