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I’m really liking this current arc and current Phil so much. It’s always nice to see a direct application of character development and growth. But he’s still the same affable goofball at the same time; and that’s why I’ve stuck with Yosh! for so long. It gets serious, but never sacrifices the light-hearted aspects to do so. Also getting to watch Phil be a straight up bad-ass is VERY cathartic.

Have I mentioned that I love the Outsider’s expression? It seems to go from a suspicious squint in the first panel to a “what the f**k are you, even?!” in the last panel.

I have seen a new power at Phil’s disposal! Magical Clothing repair! I mean, he was stabbed in the chest, and not only has his wound healed, but the hole in the shirt and the blood is gone!

Ok, ok, I know that’s being done for simplicity of drawing the scene, but, I had to make a joke about it. Because that’s something you see happen a lot in action scenes. They have a bad habit of forgetting the clothing damage that takes place. Well, unless its dramatically appropriate or the clothing damage is used to expose some skin anyway.

Though of course it raises the question of just how much damage can be inflicted before his Null powers are simply overloaded?

…The stab was an illusion. If you read the commentary on the previous page, you’ll see it mention both that Outsiders are the only source of magic his Null immunity has to adapt to instead of already being immune to; and that this particular illusion uses the target’s memories to make it harder to recognize, running into the problem that the worst similar pain Phil’s encountered is a kunai bouncing off him. So he broke out simply from the sheer dissonance of ‘this does not hurt anywhere near enough for what’s going on’.

Doh! Serious brain fart moment there.

Still, the question about whether his power can simply be overwhelmed by excessive power is interesting. And it would be good to see how he reacts in such a situation. If that has happened in the past, I don’t recall it (but this comic has been going a long time so its possible I’ve forgotten about such scenes).

If that is an Outsider and if they’re as Mythos-y as the rest of Lovecraft & Co.’s creations, then one of the main rules of The Call of Cthulhu RPG applies: “No one ever said Mythos creatures have to make sense.”
Of course, if Goblins are as varied and malleable as the comic has shown, this could be a powerful hobgoblin that somehow caught a whiff of an Outsider and got “infected”.

The first rule of magic worlds is that there are no rule … um, wait.

I wondered where the Lovecraftian popularity came from the other day/another comic, and it seems it was a fad a while ago. Those fads may be the only dynamic rules that apply, how popular some meme becomes. Still, we don’t need Lord Of The Rings to tell us that spiders are creepy crawlies that we presumably evolved to be wary of.

Lovecraftian monsters seem more about night fright and problems of riddling the world, but it was also picking up on New England society mores (AFAIU). I don’t understand the popularity at all, my personal “riddling” of it is that it is De Stoopid, and that may be why.

So either that outsider is both incredibly light and hard, or Phil somehow gained super strength on top of his Null capabilities? To my understanding, while Phil is very fit, he’s still in the human range of strength overall – His special staff has more to do with his Null capabilities then his actual physical capabilities to wield it.

Like the staff, most of the creatures mass is created with magic, as it’s normal body isn’t nearly that big, but it’s reinforced with outsider magic that Phil’s nullification doesn’t know exactly how to deal with it. It’s capable of interfering and negating a lot of it- as show previously, but it also doesn’t work the same way. The more Phil is exposed to it, the easier time it will have in responding to and dealing with it. Remember, like all the main sources of magic, the Nullification magic in Phil is alive.

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