Grrl Power #1094 - Exodon't (Patreon)

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I've lived in Texas for 40 years and to this day if someone says "Texas" my first thought is of desert and cactus. Granted, I'm old enough that when I was a kid, there were still cowboy shows on TV. They were mostly syndicated reruns, but you if you were flipping through the 4-6 available channels at the right time, you could watch the Lone Ranger in glorious black and white. I'm not sure where most westerns actually took place, but Texas was often mentioned. Man, I'm glad we're past the cowboy obsession. I never was or will be a fan of westerns.

And sure, if you drive far enough west through Texas, there's plenty of desert and cactus, but growing up in a suburb just north of Houston, it was evergreens all the way to the horizon. People joke about whatever place they live only having two seasons. In Houston, it was "Summer" and "two weeks of winter," but it was an extra kick in the teeth that the leaves didn't even turn.

Oh wait, I take that back. In addition to evergreens, there were gumball trees. Or technically they're called Sweetgums, and each and every one of them dropped hundreds of trillions of these caltrop things all over the place. Walking through your yard barefoot was a hazardous prospect to say the least. But at least their leaves turned.

I'm sure a lot of places are just fixed in people's mind thanks to media representation. If you say "LA" to me, I generally think of people roller skating near the beach, homeless people, and earthquakes. Oh, and also that concrete spillway where the T-1000 chased John Connor, and also the paved over LA River where the shuttle crash landed in The Core, which is one of my favorite dumb disaster movies.

I tried to do "air particles streaking past" to indicate motion in a few panels there, but looking at it now, it does kind of appear as though Sydney flew them through a swarm of locust at about 300 miles per hour, doesn't it? Well, I'll dial it in eventually.