Dig Page 25
False Positive: A Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy Webcomic Anthology
Webcomic Tales of the Surreal, Fantastic, & Macabre
Latest from the Blog
Good News for People Who Like Bad News
01-18-24
Dear False Positive Readers,
This is Ashley Walton, Mike’s sister and editor of False Positive. I have really terrible, awful news and a tiny bit of good news.
You might have noticed it’s been a couple years since we’ve posted anything on this website. Well, brace yourself for the saddest update I’ll ever share.
Are you looking at me?
Cattle mutilation…. an inside job?
Oookay, this end is just a little… wild. I mean, even wilder as usual. And raises many, many, many questions, as usual. Perhaps I should stop wondering.
For a moment there, I thought there were letters hidden in the ledge.
Also: this panel well-illustrates that Mike must be a robot. So much detail, yet without any of it getting sloppy or ill-defined. Unless you’re secretly Sergio Aragones, that takes a lot of time to do.
It’s good for children to experience outside influences. Such a loving parent.
Multi-cultural AND a classic Western Civ. reference (Romulus and Remus … or even Mowgli, since Kipling is Great Books cannon).
Hey, kid, don’t forget to eat your vegetables.
“And that is my story all about how
My life got flipped-turned upside down
Thank you for taking a minute
Just sitting right there
Listening how I became the prince of a mineshaft in the middle of nowhere.”
I wonder if they’re going to tell him he’s adopted
Reminds me of the end of Yolk. Also, I can see the sequel when, a la Dustin Hoffman in “Little Big Man”, he is captured and says “I’m really human!”
It is good to see that motherly instincts can cross species.
the kids have a new playmate
the first cave rhino was smaller and less wrinkled; my interpretation is that the humans killed a baby rhino, the large six-armer claimed the human child as a sort of adopted replacement, and perhaps a companion for its own children. It feels so significant that humans and the six-armer have basically identical eyes; ‘monsters’ in fiction almost never have human-like eyes
the fact that the six-armer was so large made it seem likely it would end up easily damaging/killing the child, but seeing as its own offspring are so small, I can understand that against all odds the six-armer must be used to handling smaller being with care. this now seems very sad for everyone involved. it doesn’t seem that any of the non-humans treat humans as prey, so the violence was fundamentally unnecessary; an unfortunate class of two cultures meeting in a frightening way. Perhaps the miners attacked first when seeing a monster, perhaps the baby cave rhino attacked first out of fear, further violence occurred because of an adult six-armer avenging the baby cave rhino’s death. We see now that the six-armer is capable of being gentle to humans; given the way it left seemed to leave the last native american alone, it probably would not have attacked the settlers if the violence had not already been initiated.
I see now the significance of having Native Americans present. This could be interpreted as an allegory for the unfortunate history of the violence between Native Americans and european settler. Two intelligent, self-aware societies, both capable of peace and civil interaction, but their respective foreignness to and fear of one another lead to massive, unnecessary violence between the two. Another detail: there were many instances of native american children and adults being ‘adopted’ into european culture, and vice versa, often forcefully (as above; the human child in this story certainly never consented to his ‘adoption’): some native american children were forcibly sent to non-reservation schools, and some settlers were captured and adopted in various native american tribes.
This story now seems scary in a very different way, and so deeply heartbreaking; truth is more frightening the fiction
what about having been initially hurt by the rhino? or having eaten the corpses of the dead settlers, i think other animals in general are prey but it is not unheard of in reality for predator to mother and nurture the offspring of prey.
W. T. F.!?!?!?!?!?!? ’nuff said. 🙂
Really?! Hah! So the monster took the boy to replace the dead monster? What?! Hahaha.
If these were real, sink holes would be as common as rain throughout the plains. How do they shore up the walls on that scale, especially as you get closer to Yellowstone, and quakes increase?
Those things, (Wendigos?), remind me of some Pokemon…
And there is the question of rickets…..
A Lovecraftian Mowgli, it seems.