>I mean I haVE CROSS-STITCHING BUT THat's more of a jobby than a raison d'etre
>Hello, recently I am all about tabletop games and watching youtube videos of sound-based art installations. I hope you all are all about something right now too. Thank you for reading!
All these years and he's just standing down.
This is probably the best part of this chapter. Shame it took three years of what basically amounts to filler to get to it.
Fuck Lucifier is the best spirit character. He actually makes sense.
All that filler, all those years of being on the equivalent of fake Namek to achieve something that could've been explained in a satisfactory manner in what, 60-70 pages? But noooo. Zack wants to purposely destroy his own wrist so he can cry about it on twitter and tumblr. God, after all these years and this churlish mess of a webcomic still manages to make me this irritable.
This.
Why wasn’t this two chapters from the start?
>hitball and student council
>spender and lucifer and hijack
AAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH
...
He needed to establish that most of the cast is gay so that those misogynists on Sup Forums would be disgusted and stop reading his comic
So is this floating brain guy the possessing spirit who was in volleyball
Why is Lucifer so cool?
Also do you think Hijack is gonna be able to get away, or will those meddling kids ruin his plans?
Yeah, realizing that Hijack was puppeting Spender was retroactively fun, and his interactions with Lucifer are great, but there's no reason for Zack to have taken this long to get to this moment.
Because despite all his flaws and worsening art quality, Zack still understands how to make zany spirit-designs. Then again Lucifer was first seen years ago so it might not be no longer so.
>Why is Lucifer so cool?
Because He's the only character who realizes just how doomed Mayview is, and he doesn't try to hide it either.
>Also do you think Hijack is gonna be able to get away, or will those meddling kids ruin his plans?
The kids are almost certainly going to screw things up when they arrive.
...
How many goddamn years have we been waiting for something on the scrap dragon? Like five?
I want scrappy fucking shit up already.
Wait, how can Zack roll dice or hold cards with his fragile wrists?
>It'll be like five years before Zack gets into a spectral vs spectral fight that has both sides using the Trance ability
>Taking advantage of changes in scenery that exist for one person but not the other
>Each spectral's spirit being able to do a little to give them a boost, but not really effect the enemy spectral
>All the while moving too fast for someone not in Trance to perceive
this is basically all you need to know about both these characters
Trance is basically a super power that turns someone into a 1 man army.
That would require a lot of backgrounds. Zack's wrist would go nuclear.
I'm not sure though, like the mirror-whale-frog looked to be kind of made of stone when Max first used Trance. If Max just hit the frog like thirty times with his bat and then left Trance, would the frog be Fist of the North Star'd or would it not do anything?
I wonder if that spirit originally had a whole face.
It looks transparent to me.
Yeah you're right, I guess I wasn't looking at it closely. Still that's not really a selling point on its tangibility.
If Hijack were smart, he'd delete the texts now in Trance mode, move Spender towards a window, and then ghost downwards in-between the floor and ceiling of the lower floor.
Unfortunately, Hijack isn't smart.
>Not buying your clothes at the Soup Store
Poor taste, Lucifer.
No if it's actually a spirit, yes if it's some kind of corrupted sun spirit turned grudge
Maybe that is its whole face. Maybe it just has one normal eye and one gaping eye leaking black tears.
I still enjoyed last page's callback
FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY TWO DAYS AGO
>panels 7 & 8
If this was a television script, this would've been on the second half of the first season, or a second season - all this talk of joining sides and we're not even finished with the basic set-ups of the premise (e.g how the club operates under school scrutiny). Heck, we don't even get all the main protags' POVs (re: very lacking on Isaac's, Steven's), let alone the relationships!
>Isaac and Isabel get into a bitter soap opera-tier fight all of a sudden, a stark change from chapter 1 when they were all chummy and shit
>Max suddenly being a vague dumb cluck hiding the "agent" thing from Isaac - who'd kill for intel like that - for no shown reason, when he doesn't promise anything with Boss Leader
>Johnny being "I N T R O S P E C T I V E" when he's done naught all bullying (as far as we readers are concerned) to deserve being a host of an OP-d spirit
>B-but user, Max and the Club went out in Chapter 4...
It's too dramatic in tone for such a beginning chapter, and Zack was cramming it with a lot of mythology that should've been taken slowly and in bits just as the previous chapters did well. And I thought the chapter's unusual length was just an anomaly...
We're expected to feel - terror, glee, dismay, anything - for all the brewing conflicts that are going on, but we somehow missed the bean roasting...or the roasting wasn't done properly in the first place.
...
...
I think Max doesn't really trust easily, and that includes Isaac, so right now he's just keeping all his cards close.
These days the first panel would be the last one on a page, and the second would be the first panel of the next one, with a missed update or two inbetween.
So they finally resolved the infiltrator thing
Is there a chance chapter 5 could wrap up before 2018
All this build up for nothing,
There's no way he's going to get away from Isabel & Co, that would be way too easy. I'm willing to bet he'll be caught/destroyed and somehow Jeff will become his medium
Zarei will show up just in time and he'll get away because I think none of them know he works for her
Jeff is unlikely, seems more an excuse for Dmitri to get back in the game.
Lucifer is based, but the kids are totally gonna murder the shit out of the spirit, making this chapter completely pointless.
I hope he gets away, I want more spirit characters that aren’t stuck in tools/mediums. Plus I want to see Hijack playing Wii.
Or Zarei could intervene at the last second and inadvertently reveal her involvement in all this.
Basically is Zarei to the rescue but spender is super fucking mad about it and isabel is really conflicted about it so it ends up working for her and so does isaac without telling anyone
in the end the ranger is the fucking villain and kills spender to delete mayview from the maps and turns out it's 2062 and zack fucking dies before he can finish writing the fucking comic
...
I require more wristposting OC.
Fuck you Sup Forums
Few days ago I have seen the previous page of this, and you made me marathon it trough to catch up with it's present, slowly going updates. Now I have another story I won't know the ending of for almost ever.
Other than that, I think it's a 10/10 webcomic, so thanks
The way things are heading now, Hijack's probably going to get away, but Isaac won't know that and he'll end up taking all of his frustration out on what he assumes is a possessed Spender, talking about how much he'll enjoy it and shit
>the previous page where he mentions that the Ghost Train was yesterday
PACING.
I don't really think Spender would give Isaac the chance to do that.
Yep, seems that entire story arc is finally coming to a close now.
I said this in an earlier thread. But it's because he's possibly the only truly serious character in the comic (while still not being devoid of humor).
This is partially due to his character design. The whole bird face thing means Zack can't rely on WACKY FACES when drawing him. Instead he has to rely far more on conventional expressions. Ironically this almost makes him one of the more human characters in the webcomic, making him much more relatable and dignified as a result.
We spend a lot of time criticising it nowadays. The pacing and the downgrade in art has brought that 10/10 down a fair bit.
Oh absolutely, if I had to wait three years to get here from the train chapter, I would be pretty upset and disappointed too.
But reading it from the beginning, as a casual, it is pretty great.
Reminder that at the end of this month, Chapter 5 will be 3 years old. Will Hachary finish it before then?
I went on a hiatus from reading it around the start of this latest chapter and had the benefit of being able to read the entirety of hitball in one go and even then I found reading it to be a horrendous drag. You can still pick up on bad pacing even if you aren't stuck waiting for updates.
Not a chance. I wanna see it hit the four year mark. Just burn it all down.
>implying Isabel doesn't wanna join along because of feeling betrayed by her big brother figure's recent "consoling" behaviour
That is a very good point, Lucifer can't really emote the same way a human can, which means Zack has to try a lot harder to make sure he's properly conveying what emotions he wants Lucifer to demonstrate.
Lucifer is actually a pretty depressing character to think about. The dude basically has NO hope for Mayview's survival, and if his words from the last two pages are anything to go by, he doesn't have any hope for the World in general. The only reason why he's even fighting anymore is seemingly because fighting the Dark is all he's ever done, in fact, it might even be all he's ever *Known*. He can't stop fighting, No matter how hopeless things really are from his perspective. Because if he ever stops fighting, then what purpose does he truly have anymore?
It's a heavy burden, being a lightbringer.
So in theory it's very difficult for a spectral to hide their status from other spectrals due to the way they flare up whenever they're upset or surprised right?
There is no way Zack is going to let Hijack live, instead of becoming some new puppetmaster's tool. He is tragically doomed.
Although I wonder if it'll be easy for him to assume direct control of his symbiotic spectral when he pulls them into communion.
So Hijack barely even had to come to school at all, he got most of the scoop on the way on what happened last night. He failed to get anything more than a slightly clarifying rephrasing.
Eh, he got what he came for which was an answer as to why his brother was vaporized, and he learned that Spender was heavily injured by something, and I'm not really sure how much Zarei knows about Lucifer. Still probably not worth it though, especially considering how unlikely it is he's gonna get away.
Zarei technically knew he was injured but not that he literally got stomped on.
But yeah Lucifer was a lucky break for him. His planned method did not yield much from Isabel that he didn't already have.
>last night
Does anyone think the "draw bird in front of cage" thing was necessarily by the way? Or do you think Zack could have gotten away with doing it properly like in this shot?
I get why Zack doesn't draw it most of the time, and he can get away with it with spirit weirdness, but it worked in that panel because it made Lucifer seem small, and cornererd, jailed instead of jailer.
>Haha, Spirit Fusion? That's normal, he does that all the time
>We know that attempting spirit fusion makes Lucifer's job of keeping shadow spirit in check impossible
ZAAAAAAACK
I think the only reason it was a problem is that normally the Fallen Sun is more docile and Spender being injured and really stressed out made it more volatile than normal?
Man remember in pre pastel era when the shadows on the wall actually looked like shadows.
Zack was being coy and subtle before but now their artificial 2D nature is almost too obvious.
The part about
>doN'T WORRy at all, aND MAKE MY JOb a lot eaSIER!!
hints at a second source of stress. Spender's emotional state is somehow important to the struggle.
...does the Black Sun feed on fear?
Bets on the Black Sun being a grudge, or just not feeling like talking to lesser beings?
Yeah for starters there are actually two separate layers of shadows, Lucifer's projected cage and the Sun's tendrils. Also the tentacles themselves don't have outlines which makes them more ephemeral.
...They do seem to have suckers though, which makes them more like typical tentacles and less like the extended rays.
The Black Sun doesn't SEEM like a Grudge. Do remember that all of the Grudges we've seen thus far have been rather 'visceral' in appearance, more straight-out monstrous and hideous than anything else. Whereas the Black Sun is some manner of cosmic horror that even *Lucifer* knows absolutely nothing about, aside from it being a force birthed of the same Darkness that has "flooded the world" according to him. So it's more than likely that it just doesn't care for conversation more than anything else.
>birthed of the same Darkness that has "flooded the world"
That was a metaphor.
A morality metaphor.
A world filled with evil.
If I cared a little bit more I would make a spreadsheet to tally the number of backgrounds we get to see per number of panels.
He must be feeling well, we have seen one background per page recently!
Yeah the outlines are new. Would they look unthreatening without those, since everything is so washed out?
...Actually does Zack very seldom draw shadows in the recent artstyle, this is the first thing I could think of to compare against.
Was it though? Was it really? I mean, this is Lucifer we're talking about. The dude seems to mean things pretty literally most of the time. Hell, his whole view on Mayview and the word as a whole, being "doomed" could also be him over-exaggerating, but it definitely doesn't seem like it, especially when things like the Pixelhounds exist.
So what do you think the deal with Hotwire is? Is he the third type of "control" spirit consisting of him, Hijack, and the unnamed spirit that possessed the ghost train?
Like Hijack can possess humans, the deceased spirit could possess spirits, and Hotwire can do something similar with tools?
I think Lucifer is pretty certain that the town is doomed, if only because Spender can't keep the Black Sun inside him forever, but he thought it was more of a self-contained doom due to the barrier.
Though those pixel-dogs might have changed his mind.
Were these three characters even relevant ever again?
Yes, really. Explicitly. "the last moral high ground in a world flooded in darkness" is a moral metaphor that got extended from just 'moral high ground.'
>The dude seems to mean things pretty literally most of the time.
Are we talking about the same character. He's extremely verbose, fancy lecturer who uses extended metaphorical turns of phrase.
For a second I was really weirded out and thought this was a Sup Forums edit because I read Spender as Spencer.
The Black Sun being part of the Broken God seems fairly plausible, but the problem is that it seems as if gods are mostly synonymous with the most powerful spirits, and that seems to include the energy signature.
Like the shadow spirit presumably still has yellow spectral energy, while the entity presumably possessing Max's energy is probably black.
The shadows seems a bit better on this age, though the bars aren't as prominet as they are . Then again, it's brighter now than it was then.
Is it worth getting reinvested in this comic again?
I've been following this comic since 2014, and I approach any comic as I would reading an animation storyboard...for all the many pages this chapter has, it never justifies any of the jarring shifts in development character- and tone-wise.
Like we've got characters who we last see in chapters before being friendly with each other turning anguished (in a cringy way, see ), we've got unneccesary pages of action that could've been condensed and conveyed better, entire pages just to shoehorn details about particular characters that weren't even hinted at in the first place (!!!)...they're a far cry from whatever smooth, short and self contained narratives previous chapters had. Those aspects have soured Paranatural away from being taken seriously...I myself can't take PNAT seriously anymore. We're just giving a shit about this chapter because we're all desperate for closure from the long-winding drama that's all over the place.
At the climax of chapter 5, yes.
Now seems like an ideal time now that we're finally gaining some forward momentum.
Time will tell if Zack will follow through.
What manner of situation could ever cause Lucifer himself to become a Grudge?
Losing the last little bit of hope he didn't even know he still had? Yeah he's probably very unlikely to go grudge, but it's a cool speculative design.
Him finally, permanently giving up.
>Isable dragging along Spender
>All the bonding Isabel and Spender seemed to have was actually between Isabel and Hijack
>It was surprisingly genuine on Hijack's part, but Isabel doesn't know it
the thing he's containing breaks out of containment?
Then we'd have a Grudge match.
>Hijack was twice as good at being a teacher/role model than Spender
>He's only existed for three years
Shameful.
>Lucifer
>"Hope"
I don't think the guy even daydreams or fantasized about what COULD happen. Everything is just Doom and Destruction wherever he decides to look. I doubt he has anything left to truly lose at this point. Pic related isn't even canon, and it might as well be the closest we'll EVER get to a "Hopeful" Lucifer.
The one who does this is pretty good, even if they are working with limited information.
So why can't Spender tell Isaac why he's being shut out?
Like does he think that Montezeusma is too dumb to realize he can kill Isaac, or is for some reason counting on Isaac getting information? Because it doesn't seem like the thunder god wants Isaac to be involved with the Activity Club at all.
Also if Isaac was less of an angsty teen, he'd probably be able to connect the dots himself, even though I'm not even sure if Isabel has.
also the blacking out words is probably from the Black Sun and not Lucifer, right?
If so, that seems to indicate an ominous amount of range in abilities.
I don't remember this. Was this a guest comic or just some fan thing?