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Jul 19, 2017

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 875: Weather Woman #5, December 2000

https://www.comics.org/issue/340189/

And the poop keeps coming. I hadn't realized that so much of the action of this series hinged on characters spiking one another's food and drink with laxatives. Keiko maneuvers her rival into presenting the weather, but first spikes her tea with a little something. What follows is a sequence of utter awkwardness, as Michiko attempts to both be sexy like Keiko and not crap her pants.

She doesn't manage to succeed at either.

The incident ends up bringing the two women together, if not as friends then no longer as enemies, and hopefully this signals the end of the laxative wars.

I've commented on how the story has a strange flow to it, very quick and jerky and hard to follow. I'd mused on whether this was a translation problem, but I think it's actually intentional. There's a section in today's comic in which we get snippets of news reports and events from around Japan as Michiko is realizing that her gaff on air is yesterday's news and will be forgotten, and the narrative jumps around in the same way. Perhaps the form of the comic is mimicking the way that news jumps from story to story, never considering the consequences or doing follow-ups. The montage is intercut with Michiko feeling the shame and fear in the wake of her accident - we see that there are ramifications, but also that the world, for the most part, moves on.

To be continued.

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