Endtown by Aaron Neathery for April 11, 2016

I just had another awful possible thought. What if the baby was a mutant and she did away with it in panic?

Yup…mouse ears.

I can’t tell…is she on the outside or the inside of the tub? And isn’t she smaller if she is on the outside??? Bunners is right!

Man, that virus sure is contagious!

I think she “put down” the baby. The last thing Holly she could handle or accept is a mutant child.

She seems to have perhaps ears in P3 but they don’t show up in P4…..I’m so confused. Holly, Holly what have you done????

There had to be a time shift in panels 3 and 4 of Friday’s strip for this to make sense. Mutations don’t happen instantaneously.

Look again, folks. Holly is a mouse. She’s on the outside of the tub with her hands near the water. There’s blood everywhere… She most likely woke up in the morning, and found that she’d mutated. She’s not large enough to be able to hold a normal human baby in the final trimester, so she may have had to give herself a cesarean section and tried to wash the baby in the bath. OR, she saw herself in the mirror and decided to slash her wrists…

And it looks like she has only three fingers on each hand.

My guess: Holly’s transformation caused the loss of the baby, and she is contemplating drowning herself in the tub now.

That’s not blood, that’s chocolate syrup. I learned that from Alfred Hitchcock.

I suspect that she is still oblivious to her own state, just like Ethel.

Don’t forget, that water wouldn’t have just been sitting in the tub. She has to have just filled it. And her eyes really look as though she is staring at something very specific. I, too, think she gave birth to an aquatic. Maybe she didn’t get it into the water in time?

I love how Kirby is so protective of Chick!

Highest priority problem I see is whatever Buddibombs Holly may still have. If they begin to seek- they might be what destroys the baby ( after all Holly survives).

Small thought: someone spiked the vodka? X/

Is Holly staring at something in the tub, or is she looking at her own reflection, trying to mentally process what she’s seeing (her mutated self)?

That little statue of a crying man in the third panel (near the vase)…It’s the same one from Linda’s room back in Endtown.

Could he be seeing her mutat-ING? Her ears look furry and mice don’t have furry ears, her hair could be turning into mouse ears and still look like her hair.I guess not, it usually is pretty fast.I bet she did have a monster baby. I would not have been able to handle that either. A much loved baby in the womb comes out a mutant baby. It could have had razor teeth and 15 eyes, or a real long tongue like the mutant she saw. If so, she probably knew it would get big fast and kill her.Thankfully she was asleep, she must have mutated then and had the baby (monster) at about the same time. Baby would have been awake.She may have been awakened by labor pains, that happened to my with my 1st child, I was dreaming I had eaten too much rice.

Kirby and Chic have bonded. She is giving him what he has needed most, nearly constant touch. Kids who are never touched often die, and he was barely acknowledged. That is why the intense need for scale to feather contact. It would be nice if she were warm-blooded like Chic is, but by the way he loves to be held, and the love he feels from her, probably saved his life.

Poor Holly, she HAD TO have had a mutant baby, on top of the horror of seeing a mutant trying to kill her husband, the stress of the car-airplane crash, seeing her friend turn into a snake, the Buddibombs going after Ethel (or snake) not sure if she actually accepted it was Ethel, then realizing the B-Bombs would be going off, knowing they blew up the entire house, having the Law come asking about her, it’s almost a wonder that she was able to sleep at all, and probably hadn’t much at all.

It also makes clear why she is suicidal.

Anyone would be messed up mentally.

Another thought, if Lyn was telling Wally to “Take care of her, treat her gently” Then we might see Wally being Able to go comfort Holly now.And it might effect what happens from this point on, and helps Holly to heal.

It’s official… There’s a mouse in the house!

Holly is already changed. If mutation happens while conscious, you become horrible critter. Holly probably got infected when she entered Ethel’s house. Whatever causes the change is loose in the environment and not passes person-to-person. Although…it seems that whenever we’ve seen a non-infected change (usually a Topsider), anthros (or “normals” ((in Flasks’ case))have been nearby.

I’m just hoping that there isn’t a reason we’re not seeing Holly’s mouth in P4. Tho what we do see of her face isn’t blood-spattered..

I don’t know if it’s that she killed the baby, but I do think that the mutation probably caused her to miscarry

Been busy most last week. Car race details at Texas Motor Speedway.This has really been had to follow for me.My wife had a late miscarriage. It nearly killed her. 4 pints of blood in during an 80 mile ambulance trip to the hospital. Why not a chopper….took longer for that thing to fire up than for us to get going. I see Holly is now her mouse self….her journey to the darker side of herself is at an end. She caused the miscarriage by the alcohol consumption. She is in the throes of spontaneous abortion. She was probably trying to get in the tub to end her life. She has reverted to her mouse self like she was when she entered the warp. Now too small to get over the side.Now it is time to begin the healing….confront and accept what had happened. Get on with it.It is up to Wally now.Wally now knows her back history like she knows his…..time to heal.

I thought her mutation caused her to miscarry, this…is much darker…

Observations: Holly has both hands bloodied so she was carrying something bleeding, probably so covered that it was unrecognizable. There is blood on the walls so whatever it was certainly sprayed a lot of blood. Holly is splattered in blood up to her elbows and hair but no pool of blood on her gown. She is kneeling on a stool like you would if washing a baby. The baby would have been anthro or normal according to Cooper. Conclusion? Holly gave birth while asleep and woke up with an animal in her bed. First reaction is to use the vodka bottle in defense, then realizes it is hers.

The water looks clear to me, you can see the reflection of her arms as well as the side of the tub. Having watched my wife give birth to two of our children I don’t see how she could have slept through the birth. I look at her expression in p4 and I see a mom trying make sure her baby is okay. The Buddibombs may not see her as an enemy but they might see the baby as one. That would be a horrible way to lose your infant and would certainly place a huge burden of guilt on her.

Remember that Holly did subsequently bite off all of Psycho Jim’s fingers to disable him. She’s capable.

Think we need some camembert…. ;-)

We are looking at a scene shift here, Holly did not spontaneously mutate, she’s now probably “out of the loop”.

In first panels of the Wednesday strip, the light from the window did not touch the bed. The last panel of the Friday strip, just after Len passed, the light suddenly covered most end of the bottom of the bed. I’d say we had a time shift. At sometime during her nap, she mutated. The question is what happened to the baby and what is she doing now?

It’s life, Holly, but not as you know it.

Ear WORM. That’s what I get for posting from the phone. :P

From the pattern of blood on the outside and inside of the tub, it looks like Holly was carrying something heavy, and struggled to lift it over and into the tub. The blood on the inside of the tub under her head had to come from something sliding into the tub, and the “angel wings” of blood from her hands had to be from dropping it in.I think the water was already there from Lyn filling it for her before she slept. Either that or she left the baby in the bed, started filling the tub, and went back and carried it to the tub. It seemed she thought it had to have water right away.Or she had to drown it right away.

The dirty looks from “Lyn” may be from Wally having had signs from Holly all this time that she was hurting and needed emotional help, but he didn’t care enough to follow up on them. She said she lost the baby but he let it go. He could have taken care of the apartment while she was in prison, but he let it go. He was going to leave her in Endtown. He may have been considering leaving her after meeting Kirbee. In addition to “Take care of her” and “Don’t hurt her”, I think “Lyn” is telling Wally to “Don’t let her go.” Any more.

This moment might explain why she looked at her hands when remembering the past. She’s too short now to see into a bathroom mirror. But you can already see her hands reflecting in the water. One way or another, her pregnancy didn’t survive the mutation along with her.

There’s a little round thing sitting up on the shelf over the tub, next to the planter with the stalks of lucky bamboo. It looks something like that little Crying Buddha that was featured in Linda’s time in Maude Hefner’s boardinghouse…

By the way—-I think it’s been brought up, but I’ll repeat it—-I can’t say just what Holly did or didn’t do, what happened to the baby, or why there’s so much blood…but I think the reason she’s looking into the water in the tub is that she’s looking at her reflection.

It would be hard to think of Holly “killing the baby”. It would even have to be a real Horrible monster-mutation to drive her to that. If it was a baby panda, or raccoon, or opossum, a kitten or even a foal, and she wouldn’t kill it.If she did. It could have been born dead too.

Its hard to guess what really happened, but thinking of how Holly said, “I lost the baby.” when she jumped, I find myself feeling that it was more than a simple miscarriage.

It’s funny how we all think it is blood when it is black.

Pieces seem to be fitting together.

Holly was 6 months pregnant at the baby shower, and her friends probably did manage to get her to drink a bit.

Then the stress of arguing with Lyn, the hover car crash, and the death of Ethel and her husband (Which she obviously feels responsible for, since she had the Buddibombs.) caused her to drink heavily in secret from Lyn which could have caused or started a miscarriage.

The mutation (An exposure she could have gotten from contact with Ethel or something airborne from the plane crash) could have induced premature birth causing it to be stillborn when she was unconscious (Either asleep, but Im gonna say blacked out from drinking.)

That look is a look of pure shock, and her mind is snapping under the strain. Either way I know the next few comics are gonna be REALLY difficult… cause Lyn is still alive.

(EXCELLENT writing, Aaron! Keep up the great storytelling!)

The strip isn’t in color. A point that Aaron N. is exploiting for keeping us dear readers in suspense! :-)But I’ll go with ink on this one too.Nicely played, Aaron. Nicely played.