[620]nice trick, making it disappear.

Are we all in agreement that Jack's smile in the last panel is the creepiest thing to date in the comic?

Yeah Annie's face in panel 4 does have that raised eyebrow, dropped head sort of look that says...


"...excuse me?"

Only 'cause you can't see her other eyebrow.

Well the way I read it was this: He said "Maybe if Carver wasn't such an ice queen I could have just asked her about it myself" (emphasis mine)... the unspoken corollary being "But she is an ice queen, so I couldn't have asked her myself, so therefore I had to steal it."

Others might see the same sentence differently though...

Maybe she wouldn't be an ice queen next time if you'd actually let her answer, Jack.
I wonder if the girls are going to fight now. It could happen.

The corollary I saw was: "But Snotty Ms. Ice Queen took it from me etherically, before I had the chance to".

But yes, now that you've shown me an alternative interpretation, I can also read it your way.

She took it because he scared her with the creepy spider stuff, not because she was like omgthief. I think Kat might've misunderstood Annie when she said to not go near him. Don't go near him because he's creepy, not because of this theft. I think even Annie would understand that picking up something she left on the ground and walked away from isn't really hardcore Bonnie & Clyde material.

In my opinion, for what it's worth, it doesn't appear to me that Jack is acting as if he's been unjustly maligned. He appears to me to be acting like he intends to do the unjust maligning himself.

Edit: and that's just my interpretation, and folks don't like it when I repeat myself, so I'll try to make that the last time I point it out.

Say! How does Jack know that it was Annie who made the blinker stone disappear?

Very interesting. Until panel 5, Jack has a point, y'know. After that, he's just being mean in a tit-for-tat way. Usually, when someone's very introverted, they tend to think nobody wants to talk to them. But the case may well be that they're not talking to people either, so they become hard to approach. Even if Jack was rude in their previous encounter, the fact still remains that Surma's prodigal daughter would be hard to approach, I dare say even if she wasn't so aloof.

Too bad we won't get a revealing little chat out of this scene, argh.

Well we know that Jack doesn't know what a blinker stone is, because he refers to it as "that red thing". We also know that Jack knew it belonged to her, or else he wouldn't be able to claim that he would have talked to her about it if she weren't "an ice queen". So he knew whose it was, but he didn't know what it was (and therefore, what she could do with it).

But the fact that no one came up and talked to him about it all day long until they did, would be a clear indication to him that she/they were the one(s) that did "the trick" to make it disappear. They would have to be, or they wouldn't be the ones accusing someone of stealing. Nor would they know to confront him about it, unless they were the ones to get it back from him. From his perspective, remember.

Furthermore, the fact that he reacted the way he did, to me is a very clear indication that he was knowingly stealing the stone, and wasn't just holding it for safekeeping for an unknown owner. He had to have known it was Annie's, as I demonstrated above. And instead of getting defensive about being accused of stealing, or saying he didn't know what they were talking about, he goes right into talking about it disappearing... thereby admitting that he had it.

These are the logical conclusions that I find in the text itself that lead me to the conclusion that Jack knowingly stole Annie's blinker stone with malicious intent. The interpretation of the third panel then logically becomes "well I wouldn't have had to steal it from you if you weren't such a cold unapproachable b****." As someone else pointed out earlier in the thread, this sounds exactly like something someone would say when they knew they couldn't deny guilt anymore, and looks instead to justify it however they can. One does not try to justify stealing something unless they actually stole it... otherwise they would deny and dispute stealing it... which Jack didn't do.

Just tell me if you're sick of my analysis. I personally think that it is useful and helpful to look at things closely, and I hope I'm doing a better job of not being offensive to anyone.

Two points we're all missing here: Kat told him it's Annie's in the first panel of this strip. Also, he saw Annie put it down and make a fire. It's kind of easy to slip into tunnelvision when dissecting only one page at the time.



He was just called a big creep. Why try to prove his innocence when he can make them think he's a villain anyway? Perhaps he's offended enough not to be interested in explaining himself to them. You do have a point, but I'm unwilling to think of Jack as a bad guy just yet. I don't see the need to jump into extremes at this moment, I'd rather stay in the comfortably gray area.

"They're going to think I meant to steal it anyway, so why should I explain the truth to them, they're not going to believe me."

I have to admit, if Jack was in fact only innocently taking the stone, then you do have a decent counterargument there. Or, as you said, maybe some people, when accused of being a bad-ass, decide to just let the bad-ass image ride whether or not it's true. I can see your point of view on that.

I think there's enough here to say with a reasonable amount of certainty that he meant to steal the stone, just as he means to be acting as hurtfully to them as possible in this panel. But I do see how other people could reach a different conclusion, and/or decide to reserve judgment until more is known. I have to remind myself that, in the discussion about whether or not Rey really meant to possess and therefore kill Annie, I was the one who also promoted the idea of reserving judgment until more was known. Tom has, cleverly enough, put in just enough information here to lend credence to either interpretation without making it ironclad in either direction, just as he did with the Rey/Annie/possession question.

So anyway, I'll find something new to talk about. Someone mentioned earlier in the thread that they wondered if this was going to cause a disagreement between Annie and Kat. What do you all think?

I'm thinking Annie's expression is actually one of pity. I think she's trying to get Kat to lay off because she understands that Jack is suffering some sort of ailment.