Jeanie Bottle 441
Yay, Natalie’s back! That’s a very welcome surprise. 🙂
Though I do wonder what’s left her looking so adorably disheveled in the last panel.
Yay, Natalie’s back! That’s a very welcome surprise. 🙂
Though I do wonder what’s left her looking so adorably disheveled in the last panel.
***************************RED ALERT*********************
I just noticed something that might be a glitch. Look how strange Rodge’s index finger looks in the second panel. It’s squared off, wider than his thumb, and drawn with thicker lines. =
I think that isn’t Rodge’s index finger. I think that that “finger” is supposed to be white. I think it’s a card that Agent Anderson gave Rodge. In fact, given that it seems to be morning and fairly early, I think Rodge may have just met with Agent Anderson and Anderson might still be in the building. And while I hope Rodge is touching Natalie in the next panel, I think what he was trying to do is give Neil that card.
You make an interesting point. his finger does look a little odd. It could be he’s gripping a card and there is a coloring bleed over making it look like the rest of his hand. He can’t be boob knocking, because he was knocking with the other hand. If he’s not gripping a card and trying to give it to her, he *may* have done a boob-poke when she opened the door in a state of confusion, trying to ascertain that this is, in fact, Natalie and not his eyes playing tricks on him…
Hmm well Natalie is no stranger to having some mind/instinctual influences. Last time they just manifested as watching soap operas.
I bet it was the anchovies on the pizza that cause that.
Ok, now wait a minute here… I know my internet was out was a couple days, but what did I miss?!
Natalie? Good to see you, but how?
A doki doki scene?! With Rodge?!
I guess I am not in control of my horizontal or my vertical anymore…
Yeah, this page threw me for a loop as well. I’m really interested in seeing what happens next!
Hey, Robert!
Emailed you…
Nat seams to have not checked her twins. So Rodger tweaking them seems to have had quite a effect on her.
Not sure what exactly you would expect her to check them for. They don’t usually develop air leaks. 😉
Verify perkiness, cleavage, bounce , jiggle, sway, tune in Tokyo, adjust nipple height. You know the same things girls do when their boobs come in.
Well, I see there’s a bunch of “Rodge feeling Natalie” theories. I’ll have to burst that bubble, Rodge’s hand is in front of him, but not poking (or in contact) with Natalie’s goods.
Thanks for clearing that up. I think it was the blush that made me presume that. I guess I need to wait until next week to understand what it going on here. Or the week after if you go back to Jeannie. Whichever plot you follow up on. Dang. I want both plots followed up on equally, so I can’t win.
I still think that square finger is supposed to be Agent Anderson’s card.
It’s possible, Tom. Now that you mention it, it looks a lot like he’s holding the card between his index finger and middle finger.
Hmm, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if that square bit was supposed to be colored white.
Lord Guano may have cast a generic reset poof around Neil.
Don’t forget that when Guano first saw Neil he was actually Natalie.
I wonder if Callie had something to do with it..,
After all Araceli wouldn’t leave her mistress without somone to look after her too…
Well, Caley DOES have parents… And probably Araceli got poofed to the palace the same way Jeannie did – involuntarily.
Looked to me that when Natalie opened the door that Rodge’s hand was moving down to knock on the door again and he touched Natalie’s left breast and she reacted to it.
OK, there’s something interesting going on here. Several people are interpreting Natalie’s reactions as interest in Rodge, and as embarrassment at an inadvertent contact.
That doesn’t seem right to me. Neil, even transformed as Natalie, has never had any trouble with telling Rodge where to go, and her reactions now seem completely out of character. Particularly since CD has now confirmed, above, that there was no accidental groping happening.
I think that Natalie does not remember Rodge at all, because this is ANOTHER Natalie. That would explain the reaction in Panel 5 as being bewilderment, since she has no idea where she is or who the crazy guy at the door could be. And she’s “blushing” (already, in Panel 3) because she just rolled out of bed and probably just rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. Which is also why her hair is a mess.
And based on CD’s rejoinder to Bossrhino, above, I’d say that the Natalie transformation is NOT Jeannie’s work.
One final thought: everyone is ASSUMING that the “agent” Rodge is referring to, is “Ann” Anderson. But there are plenty of federal agents around, and that could simply be misdirection. We’ll see.
Natalie not being our Natalie was an early thought of mine, but now I don’t think that’s very likely. Rodge expected to find Neil on the other side of Neil’s door. Rodge does know that Natalie is really Neil–but there isn’t anyone else in the story that’s been shown to know that Jeanie changes Neil into Natalie. Neither Guano nor Araceli know Natalie is Neil as far as we know even though they’ve both seen Natalie. And C.D. hasn’t shown us any reason for Jean to turn Neil into Natalie this time.
Looking back to #436, the silent, eyeless figure standing over Neil in his sleep that looks like Jeanie from what we can see (pants are the same) but Neil is still Neil in the next panel when the maybe-Jeanie poofs away. I’m not the only one who’s speculated that the maybe-Jeanie in #436 isn’t our Jeanie. She could still be our Jeanie. But why would our Jeanie do that? Our Jeanie was surprised to wake up at Haji’s palace in the next comic, so it doesn’t seem like she would be taking a last look at Neil before leaving.
Taking another, closer look at the second panel in #436, the speech balloons coming out from the bottle have only one tail. This suggests to me that only one person is speaking. Magnifying, it looks to me like the balloons never contained actual text; they’re just lines suggesting speech. But that single tail still suggests only one person talking. Talking to who? Herself?
Assume that the genie in the fourth panel isn’t our Jeanie. Who is it? The Blue Djinn? Well, maybe, but how does the big BD know about Jeanie?
Araceli impersonated Jeanie before back in I Dream of my Old Bottle. She might have come in the night to take Jeanie back. And she might have taken Jeanie’s form again because she didn’t want to alarm Neil. If so, the second “Jeanie” in #439 can’t be the one in #436 because Araceli is there too. Possible–but messy. Two different impersonations of our Jeanie? And it doesn’t explain how Neil is Natalie now; Araceli wouldn’t do that even if she knew.
Now there’s one person who’s been in position all along to figure out that Neil is Natalie and who’s been in that bottle before: Ms. Eden. She’s still living right next door. Could her powers have been restored? But why would Rouyah have turned Neil into Natalie?
I’m flashing back to an episode of M*A*S*H where someone (I think it was B.J.) got a copy of a new murder mystery in the mail, and because people kept bugging him to read it themselves, began tearing off sections he’d read to pass around. Everyone in the 4077th wanted to know whodonit. But the last page turned up missing!
Continuing with that thought, this could be the alternate Jeanie look alike world that we are looking at and not the Jeanie that we know world that we are looking at. After all, Jeanie does have a double ganger here or somebody that look like her. We could be looking at her world right now. So we could still have Neil running around too.
If that the case, then this is going to be one twisted mess, before it over and everything been straightened out.
Stepping aside from the current confusing storyline, how would the rest of you respond to a future where Neil becomes Natalie and really gets together with Rodge, and maybe Jeanie with Araceli? Not any more outrageous than the romantic matchups at the end of Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers.
I am still holding out for Neil to end up with having Jeanie as his girlfriend. Jeanie still going to need a lot of work on her done, before that happens. Which will be the rest of this series of Jeanie of the bottle.
How about borrowing the Dewitchery Diamond from El Goonish Shive so we have Neil and Natalie? Reasons to support this:
(1) Grace from El Goonish Shive has already made a cameo.
(2) How else is Rodge ever going to get a real girlfriend?
This is really a joke, but both points listed above are true.
She did? What strip?
Jean summoned Grace in Comic #102, in I Dream of a Nerd.
(2) How else is Rodge ever going to get a real girlfriend?
Oh, come on, Tom – I’m sure Rodge already has a blow-up doll or three. And there’s always Rosy Palm and her five sisters.
However, I could go with Jeannie making a Natalie-duplicate as a birthday gift for Rodge.
Hey, Tom – I think Jeannie already has the hots for Ann Anderson. And it totally makes sense – they’re both transformed males, meaning they both like women, which makes them now perfect for each other.
Two problems with that:
(1) Anne Anderson wants to put Jean’s best friend in jail.
(2) You’re assuming that Anderson likes women because she used to be male. As the father of a gay son, I tell you that ain’t necessarily so.
@Tom:
(1) Actually, we don’t know that. All we know is that Ann is looking for Natalie. It could well be that she just wants to get changed back to a male, and figures Natalie is her best hope for finding out how to do that.
(2) It’s a pretty good bet, but yes, it’s not a sure thing. But come on, go along with the narrative; you have to admit that an Ann-Jeannie relationship would be cute, not to mention ironic.
By the way, love the avatar. What caliber is that?
I don’t know the caliber; I haven’t asked the penguin yet.
@Tom: Better ask nicely, otherwise you’ll probably wind up at the bottom of an Antarctic ice shelf somewhere.
So, I don’t buy into the theory that this is a duplicate in some way. I think it definitely is prime Neil, since it is emphasized in the earlier scene with the “evil” Jeanie that Neil was sleeping in bed, then in the first panel here we see that bed again. Implication is obviously that it is Neil, and he hadn’t woken up yet until Rodge showed up. Also Neil looks tired and flustered both times, indicating she just awoke. Also, if it’s a clone, where’s the real Neil?
So that aside, why the reaction? That I don’t know. But it could be that Neil has never had an attraction to men as a woman before, but now she does, and doesn’t know what to do with it (wouldn’t necessarily be specific to Rodge). Alternatively, could be a memory thing as some suggest, but even then I don’t get why she’d react like that.
My favorite idea is that she was looking past Rodge and saw an indescribable horror from the vast depths of space, the mere sight of which can drive a man mad because the tiny brains of humans cannot fathom the blasphemous visage of the primordial outer gods… But this theory is very unlikely.
Also, the “thumps” in the last panel are probably just Rodge knocking on the door again.
Maybe a time traveling Jean was standing over Neil a few comics back. It is not like Jeanie would age after all. When all the Genies got teleported to the castle for their protection both present Jean and future Jeanie got transported. That is my best guess.
I wonder if anyone found Eevi’s bottle?
That’s a good possibility, provided that it never broke or got lost. Maybe someone German could’ve had it happen to them too like Jean.
I’m wondering if that’s where the Jeannie look-alike came from. We’ll have to find out if she speaks Deutsche.
So far I think we have these candidates for the spare Jeanie in the palace:
(1) Rouyah’s daughter
(2) Just some person (gender optional) who was thinking of the TV show when they opened another vacant bottle
(3) The Blue Djinn in disguise
(4) Alternate universe/timeline version of Jean
(5) Rouyah herself
(6) Just another genie who by sheer co-incidence looks almost exactly like Jean and is dressed in an almost identical costume (nothing suspicious about that.)
I’m going to throw in some more nominees:
(7) Eevi who isn’t dead after all
(8) Eevi’s daughter (and guess who her dad was!)
(9) A clone/duplicate/twin of Jean; basically, making them both the real Jean.
I’d vote for either #2 or #3. Remember that someone who opens a vacant totem does NOT have to actually be thinking about genies at that particular time – rather, the shape they receive is simply whatever their idea is, of what a genie should look like. (It remains to be seen what form someone would get, who is from a genie-less culture, has never head of genies, and has no such concept.)
#2 would be interesting – Jeannie and her double could compare notes. But #3 feels more likely, given the way the plot is moving.
You mist one. That look alike Jeanie of Jeanie could be daughter. Since it a future event, it would be completely out of Jeanie’s knowledge or Jeanie of the future came back to the past ti find totem for her daughter.
I am sure there are other possibilities too.
Jeanie’s daughter could actually work. She could have come back to see her dad and then gotten swept up somehow. That kind of implies Neil is dead in the future Jeanie Jr. comes from, though.
Well, Genie can live thousand of years and we mortal only live about 70 years or so if we are lucky. Yes, so Jeanie Jr. could be a few years in the future or hundreds of years in the future. In which Neil would definitely be dead, cause, old age.
In the TV series Jeannie has a look-alike cousin, so perhaps it is Rouyah’s cousin
Actually a sister.
@Tom – Whoops, I got my wires crossed with Bewitched 🙁
I think that the door opened as Rodge was knocking and he got a good feel of nattlie breast and to her surprise it felt good
Well, CD says there was no groping involved, so that sort of settles that.
I do not think it was groping I think it was a brush as if he went to knock and the door opened suddenly look at the picture he is in mid swing
Could Neil have been Natalie so often that he turned into Natalie in his sleep all by herself? That could explain why she looks so surprised; remember, she just woke up.
If anyone’s wondering where this week’s comic is, expect it on Thursday.
thank you for clearing that up.
Thank you, Robert.
One way or an other, Neil will probably be in that form for a while, that is until Jean gets sorted out. Or accidently stops the Blue Jinn like Guano did?