An unfortunate run-in with a notorious bottle left a young German girl named Jehane transformed into an genie who looks just like Barbara Eden's famous character.
That IS a good question. The only thing I can figure is that the structure in the background of the first few panels wasn’t visible in the previous comic. That seems to imply that at least a number of years have passed, as there must have been enough time for that structure to have been built.
Well, considering it was 1972, and Aurik was maybe 15 TOPS (probably closer to 12), and judging by the lines around the face CD made sure to add, this man is in his mid-40s minimum, probably more. That would place this around 2002 at the earliest. This would make Jeannie 2 a contemporary to Jeanie, and not her senior. Remember, it was Jeanie and Alya (the perky one with silver hair in gray and blue) that were the two youngest Genies, not Jeanie and Jeannie. That means that Jeannie 2 has had some time to establish herself and learn the ropes.
So we don’t know what time the hunter opened the bottle or if kid that was walking with her grown up to be the fishermen that opened the bottle. We do know that it either 1972 or later and it either a few months later after she got sucked into the bottle and became a genie or it could be several years and a few month that she was transformed into a genie, because, it now winter time instead of summer time.
At this point, she doesn’t know that she a genie and she still thinking like a little girl. She lost and doesn’t know what going on. Great! Now we get to see a Jeanie look alike figure out what going on and learn to be a female Genie. But, she in luck, her New Master is on deck and ready to go and is in the business of taking care of her.
You say she doesn’t know she is a genie and she still thinking like a little girl, but time doesn’t stop while inside the bottle. She would have plenty of time to figure it out. She must’ve noticed that the bottle resembled the one in I Dream of Jeannie and her clothes were the same as Jeannie’s. She may not be aware that she can do real magic though because magic doesn’t work inside the bottle.
Magic doesn’t work from inside the bottle to outside of the bottle. But where did all those blankets come from when Araceli was sick inside her bottle? Possibly the stopper Araceli put on Jean’s bottle sealed affected her magic differently; I think the original stopper on that bottle looked like the one on Jehane’s bottle. (Jean’s bottle didn’t have a stopper when he first picked it up.)
Genie can still use there magic inside the bottle on a limited basses. They can sill order a Big Mac and Malt to satisfy there hunger or wipe up a few blankets if there cold or something. But, yes, principle Genie can’t use there magic while there in there bottle or lamp. But, the point is, Jeannie II doesn’t know she a Genie, so she doesn’t know what she can do yet. She going to act like a lost girl that 12 year old, but, has a female body of say 22 years old. So there going to be a discovery process going on until she find out who she is and what kind of powers she has.
But why would she not know she is a genie? She opened a bottle resembling one from a show she knew, was transported to a room formed like the bottle wearing the same clothes as the genie from that same show. 12 year olds aren’t dumb and children have a lot easier time believing in magic than adults. So throughout the moths/years in the bottle she would probably come to that conclusion at some point.
@Nebbdyr: Maybe the most realistic explanation is that experiencing subjective months or years isolated in a bottle which seems to be the size of a jail cell is that Jehane lost her mind. That’s the reason I theorized that magic must work inside the bottle for the premise behind this webcomic or, for that matter, Barbara Eden’s series from the Sixties, to really be plausible for anything other than a horror story.
The Wotch, to which this later webcomic and other webcomics owe a lot (Check out the early strips in Dan Shive’s El Goonish Shive and see how much the character designs resemble those in the early Wotch) had a much better back story for genie totems: Genies don’t really live inside them, they are just magical gateways from our world to the genie world. But to be more like the real Sidney Sheldon/Barbara Eden/Larry Hagman series, Jean’s bottle is a little round room inside with a circular couch around the circular wall. Araceli’s bottle was worse, only a cot with no blankets or pillows–at least while Jean was stuck under the sea inside it.
BTW, the bottle in the real show started out as just that: A used whisky bottle, made for one of those gift sets. If you look at the first episode now, you should notice that it was really shot as cheaply as possible. They didn’t build a set for the interior until long after the pilot was shot. That could also be why the fiancee that Captain Nelson had in the pilot never appeared or was even mentioned for the rest of the series; the actress who played her could have either asked for too much money or simply had other commitments by the time the show was accepted for full production.
Back then in the heyday of three network TV, a lot more pilots were shot, and the ones that weren’t picked up still often wound up being broadcast, usually as fillers. That’s how Happy Days got on the air. The unsold pilot was shown as part of the comedy anthology series Love American Style, and the audience reaction was so good, ABC decided to produce the series after all. So we would never have been talking about jumping the shark if ABC hadn’t saved a little money by sneaking what they thought was an otherwise useless leftover rather than spending more money on just one segment of a show that was making money. Star Trek had two pilots, and both of them were used as episodes in the regular series.
@Tom Sewell: I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at. Are you trying to disprove my theory, or add to it or something completely different? I don’t see how the original show was made is relevant to this comic strip. But I never watched the original show, so maybe that’s where the confusion comes from.
@Nebbdyr: Your theory is quite plausible as far as it goes. I was pointing out that when you think about it, any human who was confined for a very long time without any contact with anyone else or any distractions would likely go insane or die. The only significant exception are hermits and monastics who deliberately cut themselves off–and IMHO the sanity of anyone who does that is debatable.
If Jehane has only been in the bottle for a few days or even a few weeks, she’d still be thinking like a child, and being scared, would be likely to be even more childlike after being released by a stranger. But if she had spent years in the bottle and experienced those as years in the bottle instead of, maybe, taking a long nap, she’d come out babbling, or run away, or turn the stranger into something harmless, or kill him. The last is consistent with many traditions about jinn embodied in the “releasing the angry genie from the bottle” trope that was memorably used when nuclear weapons appeared (and was very memorably animated by Disney.)
This was ignored in the Barbara Eden series and in lots of Arabian Nights movies and seems to have been ignored by Araceli’s backstory about being in that bottle for ages and ages–she doesn’t act like she’s really been imprisoned for very long, subjectively, even if her bottle might have been in a wrecked dhow that Sindbad might have captained or served on. Think about Fry in Futurama spending a thousand years in cold storage, or either version of Planet of the Apes where a combination of cold sleep and time dilation by travelling near the speed of light allow the adventuring astronaut to leap over centuries. Or Rip Van Winkle, or King Arthur or Barbarossa sleeping in some magical hideout until they rise and rule once more.
If Jehane is still a little girl in a grown-up body, she isn’t putting on an act. But if she’s now grown up, she is, and the fisherman might be in big trouble come Tuesday, ja?
@Jaqui: But she’s not human any more. And Jean doesn’t seem to have any idea of how much time passes while she’s in her bottle, so it would likely be the same way for this girl.
Jeanie was aware enough of time passing that being trapped in her bottle by Araceli was a major trauma for her and for her to try and escape repeatedly when she agreed to swap bottles without realizing what that meant.
It would seem that all the genies created by a given bottle look the same. This on e seems to be an innocent genie. Not only doesn’t she know that she’s a genie, but she may not even realize that she’s a grown-up.
I recall it was said that humans who are changed into genies assume a form based on their own conception of what genies are supposed to be like. That’s why the Barbara Eden-form applied to both Jehane here and Jean, who are both fans of “I dream of Jeannie”, and others have become blue djinn-types because of the Disney movie.
Actually their looks do not depend on the bottle. It depends on the new inhabitant’s image of what a genie looks like. Both Jean and this girl were influenced by I Dream of Jeannie. So they both look like Barbara Eden’s genie from that show.
Fisherman: Was ist das?
Jehane: Hilf mir, bitte; Ich habe mich verlaufen.
Fisherman: Herrgott, Mädchen! Sie müssen frieren. Ihr Kids und eure verrückten Parties…
That all well and fine. But, I am betting that man is that boy that was walking with her, was the fisherman that opened the Genie Bottle and released her. That would give an interesting twist to the story. So it would be twenty or twenty five years later and that would make the fisherman about 35 or 40 years old.
Jehane had a flat chest when she found the bottle. I’d say they were between 10 and 12. And the fisherman has the protruding cheekbones and lines on his face that CD uses on all his old characters, so that would put Aurik at at least 50, which puts him in 2012. The range of the possible “now” of Jeanie Bottle was set in #94 when Jean told Melvin she was only 23 and that her costume was very close to what the genie in I Dream of Jeannie, a popular show in the 1960s. Melvin comes back with saying that the show aired 27 years before Jean(ie) was supposedly born. And together, that adds up to 50 years. But fifty years from what?
Melvin is pretty smart, but this doesn’t mean he’s a master of Sixties television trivia. If he means 1965, the year the show began it’s run on network television, than it’s 2015. If he means when it ended its network run, that would have been 1970, pushing “now” clear into 2020–only nine years into the future from when CD did #94 and ten from when he started the comic. But if Melvin just knows it was “the Sixties”, then he may have been counting since 1960, putting “now” at 2010, in line with when the comic started.
If it’s 2010 when Aurik finds the bottle (he didn’t see Jehane pick it up in 1972), he’d be 48-50 by my estimate, 53 by yours.
However, why didn’t people searching for the missing orphan girl find that bottle? The most likely explanations are that the orphanage didn’t report that Jehane was missing, or that Aurik claimed he didn’t know anything about where Jehane went, or that Aurik lied and made up a story that didn’t involve going through those woods. That’s something that we could forgive a 10-year-old orphan afraid of getting in trouble for, but maybe not a fifteen-year-old.
In your first two paragraphs, that’s pretty good math and I don’t see any flaws in that reasoning.
However, there’s no real reason to think that the fisherman is Aurik. That would be one hell of a coincidence. Aurik is likely somewhere else with a wife & kids by now, and this is just some random guy headed for the river to do a little fall fishing. And yes, you can fly-fish even in the winter; my father often did so.
And as to the last question you posed: any search party looking for a lost girl wouldn’t inclined to stop and pick up random bottles. They’d be searching the forest section by section, and only checking out things that would be potentially big enough for a 12-year-old to hide in. A bottle, no matter how fancy, wouldn’t be of interest under those circumstances. So they could easily have walked right past it. Assuming it was even visible. and not covered by leaves & such.
Actually I don’t think Aurik is the older fisherman. I was responding to Larry’s assertion that it is Aurik and his characterization of Jehane as a fifteen-year-old. There are still plenty of fifteen-year-old girls with flat chests in our world, but not in CD Rudd’s comics. Look no further than the (physiologically) fifteen-year-old Dawnie in his Sailorsun.org.
The way the man is talking, he hasn’t realized he just released Jehane from her bottle. If he just leaves the bottle in the woods, Jehane will go back to it as soon as she falls asleep.
I’m also wondering if time always passes the same way inside genie bottles. It’s seemed to for Jean, but she did ask Boss Hogg how long she’d been in her bottle. And Araceli acts awfully young for someone who has to be centuries old in terms of the outside world.
Since Guano showed up quite soon after Jean got genie-fied, shouldn’t there be some kind of magical alarm when a new genie is created? If that’s true, Jehane couldn’t have been in her bottle for very long. Yes, there’s snow, but I can tell you from experience fall can turn to winter pretty suddenly, and sometimes spring can turn back into winter just as suddenly. I have a childhood in Idaho to thank for that.
This is sort of a “13 Going on 30” scenario. A girl becomes an adult overnight and still retains her thoughts and personality as a girl. Since this transformation to adult is because her vision of what a genie should be is the Barbara Eden image she is *physically* an adult, but does her mind move forward and develop as a normal human, is it automatically changed to a more adult mind, or does it stay fixed in the young girl stage? We really don’t know. Perhaps she has been in the bottle for 30 or 40 years, but she still thinks and reacts as a 12 year old, or whatever age she was when transformed.
I do like the idea that the fisherman is a grown up Aurik.
We know nothing about genie biology. They don’t have the same hormone responses as they are not ‘earthly’ beings. No dopamine or whatever else as Jean might have thought. No.. biochemistry. It looks more like an avatar’ or video game scenario. People see you and you may feel a need to act a certain way… but it’s not instinctual as far as I can see.
They probably can be immune to cold, but only after they learn how to use their powers. Jean took a while to realize that he/she could use magic. (Of course, Jean isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, either.)
I find it weird that she has the same hairstyle as Jeanie, and that just because of the fact that Jean’s original haircut seemingly transferred when he ascended and because of an early comic panel where Jean was thinking about the what if scenario of Neil becoming the genie. That panel had a Jeanie-lookalike with a Neil-esque haircut.
News Paper or Television adds: Adopt a homeless Genie right here. Get your free Genie now and be the Mater with unlimited free wishes. One Genie per customer while they last. So sigh up early to be sure you get a Genie.
Yeah, about that: He witnesses a pink cloud of smoke come out of a bottle and take the form of a girl in a genie costume, and he thinks SHE was the one who was at a crazy party?
If it was me, I’d be questioning my own sanity not hers. At the very least I’d be feeling the back of my head for bumps and checking the ground for anything that might have fallen from the trees above.
The thing that worries me is that this new Jeanni might have the mentality of a twelve year old girl.
No not forget there may be more than one Jean lookalike rimming around 9in that intended Jeanie takes on the look of the first Jeanie that pops into his or her mind.
I know that looks like a fly fishing rod in panel one but with that kind of snow it is the wrong time of year. even in Germany. My guess is it is Aurik still searching for his lost Jahane.
His point is you don’t ice FLY fish. Fly fishing involves working a “fly” lure across the surface of the water in a way that entices the fish to bite. Ice fishing involves drilling a hole in the ice, baiting the hook, and putting it in the water hoping the fish are hungry enough to bite. If the river is too fast, you can’t fly fish properly as it tends make you lose control of the fly lure. And it’d have to be that fast not to freeze. The two are mutually exclusive, I assure you.
Ran-san, all I can say to that is: As a Canadian I have faced winters ‘at least’ as cold as the ones in Germany. And I have used a fly rod to drop a lure & sinker into the deep parts where fish like to shelter during the colder months. The term “fly fishing” is something of a misnomer as the “fly” can resemble number of natural invertebrates, baitfish, or other, that fish see as food organisms.
Now, is it “fly fishing” if you use a sinker? That’s up to debate, but I can tell you that if you are after trout success usually comes from fly fishing using flies called “nymphs” that are designed to drift close to the riverbed, also called “nymphing”. A trout feeds below the water’s surface nearly 90 percent of the time. [That last part I got from wikipedia because it’s quicker to C/P]
@al_vin: Yes, you’re correct about fly fishing using different types of lures – most people only think of dry flies, but there are also “wet flies”, which are meant to sink rather than float on the surface.
And for that matter, you can use a fly rod with bait, as well. Or even pure artificial lures, like spoons and wobblers.
And finally, that may not even be a fly rod. In the lower half of Panel 1, that first section, just above his hand, seems suspiciously short – I’m thinking that that may be a simple natural bamboo cane pole, Tom Sawyer style.
Thank you Katt. I would also like to point out the idea that fly fishing and fast water being mutually exclusive is wrong. For one thing the water in a river does not flow at a uniform rate, it flows in layers with the surface layer moving fastest and each layer under it moving progressively slower. A wet fly is going to be in much slower water. Even dry flies work in fast water, you just cast upstream and reel in as the lure returns to you. Nor does the water need to be that fast to stay ice free. Snow being on the ground is a function of the air’s temperature (and air temperature quite high up at that) while ice in a river or lake is a matter of the water’s temperature. The two can be quite different. Air temperature changes quickly, water changes temperature slowly. Around here we can have deep snows overnight and be shoveling it out in t-shirts in the morning while the local pond needs weeks of cold weather to freeze over.
If I recall right, the sex of the genie is determined by the totem. A lamp will give male genies, bottles will give female ones. Though what the genie looks like will depend on what the person thinks a genie should look like?
Neither, It was my tag for the look alike Genie of Jeanie and when I saw her, I needed a way to identify her so I tagged her as Jeannie II. Now that we see that she going to be a regular character, we can either keep call her Jeannie II or give her, her own name or what ever.
The point that most people miss is, there are some things that come natural to all Genie, for no other reason then because there Genie’s. All Genie’s have what known as a core being of who they are. We have primarily two types of Genie here, Male Core Genie’s and the Female Core Genie’s and they have a tendency to have kind of a Motherly type spirit about them. It there born Genie, the the appropriate type Genie spirit will be installed in them and everything will be fine. Baby Genie have to grow up the be big mature Genie, but, they have to be raised up like any kid does. They have to be taught how to be a Genie and the appropriate behavior of how to act, it doesn’t come naturally to them, it is a learned process. They don’t just magically know how to be a Male Genie or Female Genie. After we establish who has a Male Genie Core and Female Genie Core, we have the Hierarchy, this is a little more fluid and can change depending or who the strongest or who has earned the title or given the title like Lord Master. Then we have the supreme Genie which is Hiji or the biggest or most powerful Genie. Then we have a Rouge Genie, that is also powerful, which is fighting Hiji for most powerful Genie slot and to be top dog Genie here.
Now we will deal with the unassigned totem, bottle or lamp from either a desisted or disembodied totem that currently has no Genie in it. We basically have a totem with a “HELP WANTED” for a new “NEW GENIE WANTED” apply inside. With no available Genie that are Genie available, the totem will assign the first mortal that touches the totem, bottle or lamp to be the new Genie of that totem from that day forward. Minus the Help Wanted sign of course, it just does it and that the end of the discussion and all deals are final and absolute and there a no return policy here or changes. What ever your core is, male or female, it permanent and can never be changed. But, according to Kazom, if you don’t like being a girl or a guy Genie, you can over time learn to impose the opposing gender on yourself and be the other gender, but, it will never change your core being, you will still be either a Female Genie or a Male Genie at your Core, which can never change. When you re-lacks like go to sleep or get the crap beet out of you, you will revert back to your original core of who you are as a Genie. According Kazom, the determining factor to the kind of Genie you turn into, is determined by the person that being turned into a Genie while there holding the totem whether it a bottle, lamp type, doesn’t make a difference. If the person that being turned into the new Genie thinks that the bottle or lamp should have a female Genie in it, then it will have a female Genie in it or visa versa it should have a male Genie in it, then it will have a male Genie in it and is doesn’t make any difference if the person is male or female either that holding the totem. But, once the transformation Core been set, male or female Genie, it permanent and can never be changed. Kazom also informed us after the Disney film of the Blue Genie’s, there were a large number of mortals that became Genie Became Blue Genie’s, because, they thought that what a Genie was suppose to look like, they could be either male or female, depending on movie version they saw of what a Genie was suppose to look like.
In steps our protagonist womanizer who think he God gift to womankind. He identifies as a man and nothing but, a man, with absolutely no interest in being a girl and even has a very low opinion of womankind even. So he pick up the Bottle or totem and he thinking a Barbra Eden and how he would like to do her and what a lovely Genie she was in the series and that exactly what he is transformed into, A Female Blond Genie with Big Boobs on her. Now that was about six month ago from there time frame and not from our time frame. Remember that Jehane also thinking of Astronaut and the Genie or Barbra Eden too, that why she also turned into a Blond Female Genie too, with the not so big Boobs, but generally almost into a carbine copy of Jeanie.
But, remember, Jean still has his old nature of who he was and his identity as a man that he thought he was. His old nature didn’t just disappear when he became a she or Female Genie. So he or she has two nature fighting for control over whether he/she a he or a she. He has his mortal Male side that he would like to go back to being. Then she has her Female side that is a Female Genie Mother type, that is gradually wrestling control away from the male side of him.
But, remember from this point forward, almost everything else that Jeanie does as a Genie, is primarily a learned process for her how to be a Genie. That why Jeanie had to go to Genie School to learn how to be a Genie. Admittedly her train got cut short and she didn’t spend the several weeks that going to Genie School would require so she could learn to be a proficient and well adjusted new Genie in the Genie Society that she now in. That because, Kazom didn’t want to complete the training for the new Genie when he found out that her Lord Master was Guano or Bat Poop. He cut her loose early as much to cause Guano trouble, because of a past grudge match between the two Genie Master. Kazom also wasn’t that interested in doing the Schooling thing either, he wanted to play lazy cat number instead.
So when Jehane come out of her bottle after the fisherman let her out. Jehane is completely and totally clueless as to what going on. She may have the Female Genie Nature and maybe eventually figure out who she is and that she look like Barbra Eden and such, but, she going to have to learn that by experience, by the same way that Jean or Jeanie is learning it. It is primarily a learned process and not one that magically done across the board and now you are a working and functioning Genie. There is no, Poof, now you are all ready to be either Male or Female Genie now.
The djinn idea comes from Arabian legends. Djinni are from another world (parallel universe). They raised havoc in our world, so King Solomon imprisoned them in bottles and cast those into the sea. The bottles were secured with the Seal of Solomon, whose form is somewhat disputed but usually is a six-pointed star formed by two interlaced equilateral triangles, one white, one black. The notion of a djinn or genie in a lamp comes from a much later tradition. In the Aladdin story, there was not only a lamp, but also a magic ring. And the lamp granted as wish when rubbed without any genie being involved. The idea that a genie appeared when the lamp was rubbed and then granted wishes appears to be a synthesis of multiple traditions. The notion that the dichotomy between lamp and bottle is gender-related is novel–maybe invented here. The Solomon legend involved only bottles, and I’m not sure that djinni even had gender in that context, although being powerful and dangerous beings, were probably thought of as male.
The jinn were part of culture a long time before Muhammad. Possibly they’re a development from the Sumerian Lilu (male) and Lilitu (female) spirits/demons/minor gods. Sumerian writing is older than any other we know about, and it’s clear it wasn’t a Semitic language. Semites conquered Sumer and started using their cuneiform writing; we don’t know anything about Semetic-speaking people before the Sumerians started writing about them, and we don’t know very much for sure until the early Semites started writing their language using the cuneiform writing system the Sumerians had developed. This was all centuries before the Egyptians started building pyramids in their Fourth dynasty or even when Narmur began the First Dynasty in Egypt.
The first known reference to Arabs is in an Assyrian tablet from 853 BC. First evidence of Semites: Somewhere between 1500 and 2000 years before that tablet. Way before Muhammad.
And she has become his Genie also. But, neither one of them know it yet. They are both fly blind on this thing and neither one of them knows what kind of relationship there have with each other. They don’t have the Genie Manual for Dummies like what Neil order up so that he would know what a Genie is and how there suppose to operate. There going to be learning this cold turkey with no held from outside or any instruction on what going on. At least until some like Lord Guano show up to take care of the matter and that could be awhile too.
that was nice of him to lend her his coat.
Yes. Such a gentlemanly thing to do. He seems to be a good new master for this young new genie. I have high hopes for him!
I like the new vampire Jeanie. Thanks for sharing.
I’m loving this story so much, but I do wonder when the crazy murder genie will come into play
all in due time.
A key question.
The last strip was set in 1972. When is this one set?
That IS a good question. The only thing I can figure is that the structure in the background of the first few panels wasn’t visible in the previous comic. That seems to imply that at least a number of years have passed, as there must have been enough time for that structure to have been built.
But I could be wrong.
I have this awful feeling that the guy who found her was the friend she was with before she got genied.
@Nealend –
Well, considering it was 1972, and Aurik was maybe 15 TOPS (probably closer to 12), and judging by the lines around the face CD made sure to add, this man is in his mid-40s minimum, probably more. That would place this around 2002 at the earliest. This would make Jeannie 2 a contemporary to Jeanie, and not her senior. Remember, it was Jeanie and Alya (the perky one with silver hair in gray and blue) that were the two youngest Genies, not Jeanie and Jeannie. That means that Jeannie 2 has had some time to establish herself and learn the ropes.
`Good morning! Nice day for fishing, innit!`*
*translated from German
I wonders how many people will get this epic reference.
So we don’t know what time the hunter opened the bottle or if kid that was walking with her grown up to be the fishermen that opened the bottle. We do know that it either 1972 or later and it either a few months later after she got sucked into the bottle and became a genie or it could be several years and a few month that she was transformed into a genie, because, it now winter time instead of summer time.
At this point, she doesn’t know that she a genie and she still thinking like a little girl. She lost and doesn’t know what going on. Great! Now we get to see a Jeanie look alike figure out what going on and learn to be a female Genie. But, she in luck, her New Master is on deck and ready to go and is in the business of taking care of her.
Terrific!
You say she doesn’t know she is a genie and she still thinking like a little girl, but time doesn’t stop while inside the bottle. She would have plenty of time to figure it out. She must’ve noticed that the bottle resembled the one in I Dream of Jeannie and her clothes were the same as Jeannie’s. She may not be aware that she can do real magic though because magic doesn’t work inside the bottle.
Magic doesn’t work from inside the bottle to outside of the bottle. But where did all those blankets come from when Araceli was sick inside her bottle? Possibly the stopper Araceli put on Jean’s bottle sealed affected her magic differently; I think the original stopper on that bottle looked like the one on Jehane’s bottle. (Jean’s bottle didn’t have a stopper when he first picked it up.)
Genie can still use there magic inside the bottle on a limited basses. They can sill order a Big Mac and Malt to satisfy there hunger or wipe up a few blankets if there cold or something. But, yes, principle Genie can’t use there magic while there in there bottle or lamp. But, the point is, Jeannie II doesn’t know she a Genie, so she doesn’t know what she can do yet. She going to act like a lost girl that 12 year old, but, has a female body of say 22 years old. So there going to be a discovery process going on until she find out who she is and what kind of powers she has.
But why would she not know she is a genie? She opened a bottle resembling one from a show she knew, was transported to a room formed like the bottle wearing the same clothes as the genie from that same show. 12 year olds aren’t dumb and children have a lot easier time believing in magic than adults. So throughout the moths/years in the bottle she would probably come to that conclusion at some point.
@Nebbdyr: Maybe the most realistic explanation is that experiencing subjective months or years isolated in a bottle which seems to be the size of a jail cell is that Jehane lost her mind. That’s the reason I theorized that magic must work inside the bottle for the premise behind this webcomic or, for that matter, Barbara Eden’s series from the Sixties, to really be plausible for anything other than a horror story.
The Wotch, to which this later webcomic and other webcomics owe a lot (Check out the early strips in Dan Shive’s El Goonish Shive and see how much the character designs resemble those in the early Wotch) had a much better back story for genie totems: Genies don’t really live inside them, they are just magical gateways from our world to the genie world. But to be more like the real Sidney Sheldon/Barbara Eden/Larry Hagman series, Jean’s bottle is a little round room inside with a circular couch around the circular wall. Araceli’s bottle was worse, only a cot with no blankets or pillows–at least while Jean was stuck under the sea inside it.
BTW, the bottle in the real show started out as just that: A used whisky bottle, made for one of those gift sets. If you look at the first episode now, you should notice that it was really shot as cheaply as possible. They didn’t build a set for the interior until long after the pilot was shot. That could also be why the fiancee that Captain Nelson had in the pilot never appeared or was even mentioned for the rest of the series; the actress who played her could have either asked for too much money or simply had other commitments by the time the show was accepted for full production.
Back then in the heyday of three network TV, a lot more pilots were shot, and the ones that weren’t picked up still often wound up being broadcast, usually as fillers. That’s how Happy Days got on the air. The unsold pilot was shown as part of the comedy anthology series Love American Style, and the audience reaction was so good, ABC decided to produce the series after all. So we would never have been talking about jumping the shark if ABC hadn’t saved a little money by sneaking what they thought was an otherwise useless leftover rather than spending more money on just one segment of a show that was making money. Star Trek had two pilots, and both of them were used as episodes in the regular series.
@Tom Sewell: I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at. Are you trying to disprove my theory, or add to it or something completely different? I don’t see how the original show was made is relevant to this comic strip. But I never watched the original show, so maybe that’s where the confusion comes from.
@Nebbdyr: Your theory is quite plausible as far as it goes. I was pointing out that when you think about it, any human who was confined for a very long time without any contact with anyone else or any distractions would likely go insane or die. The only significant exception are hermits and monastics who deliberately cut themselves off–and IMHO the sanity of anyone who does that is debatable.
If Jehane has only been in the bottle for a few days or even a few weeks, she’d still be thinking like a child, and being scared, would be likely to be even more childlike after being released by a stranger. But if she had spent years in the bottle and experienced those as years in the bottle instead of, maybe, taking a long nap, she’d come out babbling, or run away, or turn the stranger into something harmless, or kill him. The last is consistent with many traditions about jinn embodied in the “releasing the angry genie from the bottle” trope that was memorably used when nuclear weapons appeared (and was very memorably animated by Disney.)
This was ignored in the Barbara Eden series and in lots of Arabian Nights movies and seems to have been ignored by Araceli’s backstory about being in that bottle for ages and ages–she doesn’t act like she’s really been imprisoned for very long, subjectively, even if her bottle might have been in a wrecked dhow that Sindbad might have captained or served on. Think about Fry in Futurama spending a thousand years in cold storage, or either version of Planet of the Apes where a combination of cold sleep and time dilation by travelling near the speed of light allow the adventuring astronaut to leap over centuries. Or Rip Van Winkle, or King Arthur or Barbarossa sleeping in some magical hideout until they rise and rule once more.
If Jehane is still a little girl in a grown-up body, she isn’t putting on an act. But if she’s now grown up, she is, and the fisherman might be in big trouble come Tuesday, ja?
Uncomfortable …
However at least the passage of time seemed swift for her? She didn’t go crazy from isolation…
Well, no. Genies live for many thousands of years. A couple of decades in a bottle would be the equivalent of a short nap for a human.
Right, but she used to be human.
@Jaqui: But she’s not human any more. And Jean doesn’t seem to have any idea of how much time passes while she’s in her bottle, so it would likely be the same way for this girl.
Jeanie was aware enough of time passing that being trapped in her bottle by Araceli was a major trauma for her and for her to try and escape repeatedly when she agreed to swap bottles without realizing what that meant.
@senko
Did she try sleeping or resting though? Maybe that’s the key. She feared isolation but didn’t endure it long enough to give up trying to get out..
It would seem that all the genies created by a given bottle look the same. This on e seems to be an innocent genie. Not only doesn’t she know that she’s a genie, but she may not even realize that she’s a grown-up.
I recall it was said that humans who are changed into genies assume a form based on their own conception of what genies are supposed to be like. That’s why the Barbara Eden-form applied to both Jehane here and Jean, who are both fans of “I dream of Jeannie”, and others have become blue djinn-types because of the Disney movie.
So a Dragon Ball fan would turn into a Majin?
Majin don’t grant wishes. A DBZ fan would turn into Shenron. 🙂
Or Porunga(Namekian dragon), but fair point.
Anyway, i said Majin because of the female Majins that were introduced recently.
Actually their looks do not depend on the bottle. It depends on the new inhabitant’s image of what a genie looks like. Both Jean and this girl were influenced by I Dream of Jeannie. So they both look like Barbara Eden’s genie from that show.
Back-translation:
Fisherman: Was ist das?
Jehane: Hilf mir, bitte; Ich habe mich verlaufen.
Fisherman: Herrgott, Mädchen! Sie müssen frieren. Ihr Kids und eure verrückten Parties…
That all well and fine. But, I am betting that man is that boy that was walking with her, was the fisherman that opened the Genie Bottle and released her. That would give an interesting twist to the story. So it would be twenty or twenty five years later and that would make the fisherman about 35 or 40 years old.
Jehane had a flat chest when she found the bottle. I’d say they were between 10 and 12. And the fisherman has the protruding cheekbones and lines on his face that CD uses on all his old characters, so that would put Aurik at at least 50, which puts him in 2012. The range of the possible “now” of Jeanie Bottle was set in #94 when Jean told Melvin she was only 23 and that her costume was very close to what the genie in I Dream of Jeannie, a popular show in the 1960s. Melvin comes back with saying that the show aired 27 years before Jean(ie) was supposedly born. And together, that adds up to 50 years. But fifty years from what?
Melvin is pretty smart, but this doesn’t mean he’s a master of Sixties television trivia. If he means 1965, the year the show began it’s run on network television, than it’s 2015. If he means when it ended its network run, that would have been 1970, pushing “now” clear into 2020–only nine years into the future from when CD did #94 and ten from when he started the comic. But if Melvin just knows it was “the Sixties”, then he may have been counting since 1960, putting “now” at 2010, in line with when the comic started.
If it’s 2010 when Aurik finds the bottle (he didn’t see Jehane pick it up in 1972), he’d be 48-50 by my estimate, 53 by yours.
However, why didn’t people searching for the missing orphan girl find that bottle? The most likely explanations are that the orphanage didn’t report that Jehane was missing, or that Aurik claimed he didn’t know anything about where Jehane went, or that Aurik lied and made up a story that didn’t involve going through those woods. That’s something that we could forgive a 10-year-old orphan afraid of getting in trouble for, but maybe not a fifteen-year-old.
@Tom:
In your first two paragraphs, that’s pretty good math and I don’t see any flaws in that reasoning.
However, there’s no real reason to think that the fisherman is Aurik. That would be one hell of a coincidence. Aurik is likely somewhere else with a wife & kids by now, and this is just some random guy headed for the river to do a little fall fishing. And yes, you can fly-fish even in the winter; my father often did so.
And as to the last question you posed: any search party looking for a lost girl wouldn’t inclined to stop and pick up random bottles. They’d be searching the forest section by section, and only checking out things that would be potentially big enough for a 12-year-old to hide in. A bottle, no matter how fancy, wouldn’t be of interest under those circumstances. So they could easily have walked right past it. Assuming it was even visible. and not covered by leaves & such.
@Kattgirl:
Actually I don’t think Aurik is the older fisherman. I was responding to Larry’s assertion that it is Aurik and his characterization of Jehane as a fifteen-year-old. There are still plenty of fifteen-year-old girls with flat chests in our world, but not in CD Rudd’s comics. Look no further than the (physiologically) fifteen-year-old Dawnie in his Sailorsun.org.
Dang… that’s some quick-moving puberty right there lol
The way the man is talking, he hasn’t realized he just released Jehane from her bottle. If he just leaves the bottle in the woods, Jehane will go back to it as soon as she falls asleep.
I’m also wondering if time always passes the same way inside genie bottles. It’s seemed to for Jean, but she did ask Boss Hogg how long she’d been in her bottle. And Araceli acts awfully young for someone who has to be centuries old in terms of the outside world.
Since Guano showed up quite soon after Jean got genie-fied, shouldn’t there be some kind of magical alarm when a new genie is created? If that’s true, Jehane couldn’t have been in her bottle for very long. Yes, there’s snow, but I can tell you from experience fall can turn to winter pretty suddenly, and sometimes spring can turn back into winter just as suddenly. I have a childhood in Idaho to thank for that.
I imagine the alarm might get overlooked sometimes …
That and Guano comes across as an incompetent blowhard. He may be behind on his work.
Jeanie, do you remember where you parked your car? (Light humor)
A genie with the innocent mind of a child… beware wishers..
“A genie with the mind of a child”.
Don’t we already have one of those? (Jean)
Okay, Jean is more like an evil child, but…
And now I’m thinking of Star Trek
“All that power and he was just a child”
Jean does not have the mind of a child.
He has the mind of a mysoginistic, sometimes borderline sociopathic narcissist.
@Rock:
A “misogynistic, sometimes borderline-sociopathic, narcissist“.
Yeah, I think that described most of the kids at my elementary school.
This is sort of a “13 Going on 30” scenario. A girl becomes an adult overnight and still retains her thoughts and personality as a girl. Since this transformation to adult is because her vision of what a genie should be is the Barbara Eden image she is *physically* an adult, but does her mind move forward and develop as a normal human, is it automatically changed to a more adult mind, or does it stay fixed in the young girl stage? We really don’t know. Perhaps she has been in the bottle for 30 or 40 years, but she still thinks and reacts as a 12 year old, or whatever age she was when transformed.
I do like the idea that the fisherman is a grown up Aurik.
Only if she were human.
We know nothing about genie biology. They don’t have the same hormone responses as they are not ‘earthly’ beings. No dopamine or whatever else as Jean might have thought. No.. biochemistry. It looks more like an avatar’ or video game scenario. People see you and you may feel a need to act a certain way… but it’s not instinctual as far as I can see.
…wonder how many years passed.
Sooo … is she freezing? I mean, she isn’t yet as she was in the bottle, but would genie get cold or are they immune to such things?
They probably can be immune to cold, but only after they learn how to use their powers. Jean took a while to realize that he/she could use magic. (Of course, Jean isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, either.)
She doesn’t (ahem) *look* chilly…
@Pygar: How can you say? His coat covers too much. 😉
Only in one panel…
Oh, how I hope Fearless Leader takes the hint…
I find it weird that she has the same hairstyle as Jeanie, and that just because of the fact that Jean’s original haircut seemingly transferred when he ascended and because of an early comic panel where Jean was thinking about the what if scenario of Neil becoming the genie. That panel had a Jeanie-lookalike with a Neil-esque haircut.
Good thing this guy doesn’t realize.
News Paper or Television adds: Adopt a homeless Genie right here. Get your free Genie now and be the Mater with unlimited free wishes. One Genie per customer while they last. So sigh up early to be sure you get a Genie.
Yeah, about that: He witnesses a pink cloud of smoke come out of a bottle and take the form of a girl in a genie costume, and he thinks SHE was the one who was at a crazy party?
If it was me, I’d be questioning my own sanity not hers. At the very least I’d be feeling the back of my head for bumps and checking the ground for anything that might have fallen from the trees above.
The thing that worries me is that this new Jeanni might have the mentality of a twelve year old girl.
No not forget there may be more than one Jean lookalike rimming around 9in that intended Jeanie takes on the look of the first Jeanie that pops into his or her mind.
Hey, Robert? Shouldn’t Jeannie II also be tagged in comic #440, where we first see her?
Aurik and Jehane were from an orphanage. That suggests that Jehane might have an interesting family tree she doesn’t know about…
I know that looks like a fly fishing rod in panel one but with that kind of snow it is the wrong time of year. even in Germany. My guess is it is Aurik still searching for his lost Jahane.
Never heard of ice fishing? In any case, all you need to fish during the winter is a river that flows fast enough to not freeze over.
His point is you don’t ice FLY fish. Fly fishing involves working a “fly” lure across the surface of the water in a way that entices the fish to bite. Ice fishing involves drilling a hole in the ice, baiting the hook, and putting it in the water hoping the fish are hungry enough to bite. If the river is too fast, you can’t fly fish properly as it tends make you lose control of the fly lure. And it’d have to be that fast not to freeze. The two are mutually exclusive, I assure you.
Couldn’t be ice fishing; he hasn’t brought any beer.
Thank you Ran-san. I do not remember any Germans trying to fish in the winter.
I’m thinking it’s not that hard to find open water to fish in, even during winter, near Berghof;
http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/e8362ae57db14f7b81754716e8862c8d/creek-brook-near-berchtesgaden-bridge-germany-europe-church-upper-bwyn53.jpg
https://images.interhome.com/AT6281.120/partner-medium/15576-1-24935-1437124346
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/05/d0/c3/78/hotel-berghof-zermatt.jpg
Ran-san, all I can say to that is: As a Canadian I have faced winters ‘at least’ as cold as the ones in Germany. And I have used a fly rod to drop a lure & sinker into the deep parts where fish like to shelter during the colder months. The term “fly fishing” is something of a misnomer as the “fly” can resemble number of natural invertebrates, baitfish, or other, that fish see as food organisms.
Now, is it “fly fishing” if you use a sinker? That’s up to debate, but I can tell you that if you are after trout success usually comes from fly fishing using flies called “nymphs” that are designed to drift close to the riverbed, also called “nymphing”. A trout feeds below the water’s surface nearly 90 percent of the time. [That last part I got from wikipedia because it’s quicker to C/P]
@al_vin: Yes, you’re correct about fly fishing using different types of lures – most people only think of dry flies, but there are also “wet flies”, which are meant to sink rather than float on the surface.
And for that matter, you can use a fly rod with bait, as well. Or even pure artificial lures, like spoons and wobblers.
And finally, that may not even be a fly rod. In the lower half of Panel 1, that first section, just above his hand, seems suspiciously short – I’m thinking that that may be a simple natural bamboo cane pole, Tom Sawyer style.
Thank you Katt. I would also like to point out the idea that fly fishing and fast water being mutually exclusive is wrong. For one thing the water in a river does not flow at a uniform rate, it flows in layers with the surface layer moving fastest and each layer under it moving progressively slower. A wet fly is going to be in much slower water. Even dry flies work in fast water, you just cast upstream and reel in as the lure returns to you. Nor does the water need to be that fast to stay ice free. Snow being on the ground is a function of the air’s temperature (and air temperature quite high up at that) while ice in a river or lake is a matter of the water’s temperature. The two can be quite different. Air temperature changes quickly, water changes temperature slowly. Around here we can have deep snows overnight and be shoveling it out in t-shirts in the morning while the local pond needs weeks of cold weather to freeze over.
If I recall right, the sex of the genie is determined by the totem. A lamp will give male genies, bottles will give female ones. Though what the genie looks like will depend on what the person thinks a genie should look like?
For some reason I thought his fishing rod was a rifle at first, and he was a soldier.
…didn’t quite make sense historically and I was quite confused.
BTW, you are missing the character tag for Jeannie II for that fist page where Jean sees her from across the room.
That’s number #440, the one I mentioned to Robert above.
@Robert: Is Jeannie II your tag or CD’s? I’d vote for her tag being her real name, Jehane. After all, Jean get’s tagged by her real name.
Neither, It was my tag for the look alike Genie of Jeanie and when I saw her, I needed a way to identify her so I tagged her as Jeannie II. Now that we see that she going to be a regular character, we can either keep call her Jeannie II or give her, her own name or what ever.
Well, then, add comic 440 to the list on that tag, please.
Maybe Jeanie should be a pumpkin genie for the banner.
The point that most people miss is, there are some things that come natural to all Genie, for no other reason then because there Genie’s. All Genie’s have what known as a core being of who they are. We have primarily two types of Genie here, Male Core Genie’s and the Female Core Genie’s and they have a tendency to have kind of a Motherly type spirit about them. It there born Genie, the the appropriate type Genie spirit will be installed in them and everything will be fine. Baby Genie have to grow up the be big mature Genie, but, they have to be raised up like any kid does. They have to be taught how to be a Genie and the appropriate behavior of how to act, it doesn’t come naturally to them, it is a learned process. They don’t just magically know how to be a Male Genie or Female Genie. After we establish who has a Male Genie Core and Female Genie Core, we have the Hierarchy, this is a little more fluid and can change depending or who the strongest or who has earned the title or given the title like Lord Master. Then we have the supreme Genie which is Hiji or the biggest or most powerful Genie. Then we have a Rouge Genie, that is also powerful, which is fighting Hiji for most powerful Genie slot and to be top dog Genie here.
Now we will deal with the unassigned totem, bottle or lamp from either a desisted or disembodied totem that currently has no Genie in it. We basically have a totem with a “HELP WANTED” for a new “NEW GENIE WANTED” apply inside. With no available Genie that are Genie available, the totem will assign the first mortal that touches the totem, bottle or lamp to be the new Genie of that totem from that day forward. Minus the Help Wanted sign of course, it just does it and that the end of the discussion and all deals are final and absolute and there a no return policy here or changes. What ever your core is, male or female, it permanent and can never be changed. But, according to Kazom, if you don’t like being a girl or a guy Genie, you can over time learn to impose the opposing gender on yourself and be the other gender, but, it will never change your core being, you will still be either a Female Genie or a Male Genie at your Core, which can never change. When you re-lacks like go to sleep or get the crap beet out of you, you will revert back to your original core of who you are as a Genie. According Kazom, the determining factor to the kind of Genie you turn into, is determined by the person that being turned into a Genie while there holding the totem whether it a bottle, lamp type, doesn’t make a difference. If the person that being turned into the new Genie thinks that the bottle or lamp should have a female Genie in it, then it will have a female Genie in it or visa versa it should have a male Genie in it, then it will have a male Genie in it and is doesn’t make any difference if the person is male or female either that holding the totem. But, once the transformation Core been set, male or female Genie, it permanent and can never be changed. Kazom also informed us after the Disney film of the Blue Genie’s, there were a large number of mortals that became Genie Became Blue Genie’s, because, they thought that what a Genie was suppose to look like, they could be either male or female, depending on movie version they saw of what a Genie was suppose to look like.
In steps our protagonist womanizer who think he God gift to womankind. He identifies as a man and nothing but, a man, with absolutely no interest in being a girl and even has a very low opinion of womankind even. So he pick up the Bottle or totem and he thinking a Barbra Eden and how he would like to do her and what a lovely Genie she was in the series and that exactly what he is transformed into, A Female Blond Genie with Big Boobs on her. Now that was about six month ago from there time frame and not from our time frame. Remember that Jehane also thinking of Astronaut and the Genie or Barbra Eden too, that why she also turned into a Blond Female Genie too, with the not so big Boobs, but generally almost into a carbine copy of Jeanie.
But, remember, Jean still has his old nature of who he was and his identity as a man that he thought he was. His old nature didn’t just disappear when he became a she or Female Genie. So he or she has two nature fighting for control over whether he/she a he or a she. He has his mortal Male side that he would like to go back to being. Then she has her Female side that is a Female Genie Mother type, that is gradually wrestling control away from the male side of him.
But, remember from this point forward, almost everything else that Jeanie does as a Genie, is primarily a learned process for her how to be a Genie. That why Jeanie had to go to Genie School to learn how to be a Genie. Admittedly her train got cut short and she didn’t spend the several weeks that going to Genie School would require so she could learn to be a proficient and well adjusted new Genie in the Genie Society that she now in. That because, Kazom didn’t want to complete the training for the new Genie when he found out that her Lord Master was Guano or Bat Poop. He cut her loose early as much to cause Guano trouble, because of a past grudge match between the two Genie Master. Kazom also wasn’t that interested in doing the Schooling thing either, he wanted to play lazy cat number instead.
So when Jehane come out of her bottle after the fisherman let her out. Jehane is completely and totally clueless as to what going on. She may have the Female Genie Nature and maybe eventually figure out who she is and that she look like Barbra Eden and such, but, she going to have to learn that by experience, by the same way that Jean or Jeanie is learning it. It is primarily a learned process and not one that magically done across the board and now you are a working and functioning Genie. There is no, Poof, now you are all ready to be either Male or Female Genie now.
The djinn idea comes from Arabian legends. Djinni are from another world (parallel universe). They raised havoc in our world, so King Solomon imprisoned them in bottles and cast those into the sea. The bottles were secured with the Seal of Solomon, whose form is somewhat disputed but usually is a six-pointed star formed by two interlaced equilateral triangles, one white, one black. The notion of a djinn or genie in a lamp comes from a much later tradition. In the Aladdin story, there was not only a lamp, but also a magic ring. And the lamp granted as wish when rubbed without any genie being involved. The idea that a genie appeared when the lamp was rubbed and then granted wishes appears to be a synthesis of multiple traditions. The notion that the dichotomy between lamp and bottle is gender-related is novel–maybe invented here. The Solomon legend involved only bottles, and I’m not sure that djinni even had gender in that context, although being powerful and dangerous beings, were probably thought of as male.
The jinn were part of culture a long time before Muhammad. Possibly they’re a development from the Sumerian Lilu (male) and Lilitu (female) spirits/demons/minor gods. Sumerian writing is older than any other we know about, and it’s clear it wasn’t a Semitic language. Semites conquered Sumer and started using their cuneiform writing; we don’t know anything about Semetic-speaking people before the Sumerians started writing about them, and we don’t know very much for sure until the early Semites started writing their language using the cuneiform writing system the Sumerians had developed. This was all centuries before the Egyptians started building pyramids in their Fourth dynasty or even when Narmur began the First Dynasty in Egypt.
The first known reference to Arabs is in an Assyrian tablet from 853 BC. First evidence of Semites: Somewhere between 1500 and 2000 years before that tablet. Way before Muhammad.
So this guy has now become a master….wow
And she has become his Genie also. But, neither one of them know it yet. They are both fly blind on this thing and neither one of them knows what kind of relationship there have with each other. They don’t have the Genie Manual for Dummies like what Neil order up so that he would know what a Genie is and how there suppose to operate. There going to be learning this cold turkey with no held from outside or any instruction on what going on. At least until some like Lord Guano show up to take care of the matter and that could be awhile too.
Will we be getting a comic this week?
Sometimes IDoJB isn’t updated until Thursdays.
I am aware. Typically the comic updates at 11pm CST Mondays/Wednesdays for me. It is very rarely ever late.
It is rare, But it happens. Because… well, life.
Hopefully he didn’t hurt his hand again.