#Rambo the Dog

[justdealingwithsomeissues]

Since this issue is double-wide and we need to fill some extra pages, we get two Leonardi Sleepwalker pin-ups... the first is nice... the second is kinda... silly? but it probably would have made and interesting cover maybe?

[marichanmari]

[zoetheneko]

Animality!

[sirmidezz]

Dogs as Rambo because yes.

Thank you for watching.

[mayowayo]

I took my son to the library

[mykeowns]

[hyzenthlayroseart]

So with my Circus Story, I have the beginning and the end in my head but still haven't got the middle (just one of the many pains of having lots of stories, I end up neglecting some while focusing on others). Anyway, I decided to draw the ending.

So to recap, the story starts in 1910 with Steven and his pet monkey Rambo, two poor penniless friends making a living on the streets as peanut vendors. One day when the circus comes to town, Steven gets hired to travel with the circus to continue being a peanut vendor at shows. While in the circus he falls in love with the trapeze artist Dolores, the sad, abused niece of the cruel and greedy ringmaster James. 

Among the other performers he meets are:

Sydney and Carolina, the conjoined twin daughters of Dolores

Adonis, the lovable strongman who is a big brother type figure to Dolores and becomes one to Steven

Norman, a legless man and Adonis's closest friend

Helga, a warm and loving bearded lady who is an adoptive mother to Dolores

Madame Eugenia, a fortune teller with a pet monkey of her own named Esmerelda

Charlotte, an albino African-American woman who is a sister figure to Dolores

Lydia, a snarky, chain-smoking tattooed lady who is Charlotte's girlfriend and best friend to Dolores

Mina and Harold, a married dwarf couple

And Danny, a hyper and friendly 10 year old boy with hypertrichosis 

At some point in the story when Steven and Dolores fall in love, Dolores confesses to Steven that she has a fantasy of one day stealing all of her uncle's money and running away to retire in a big house with all of the other performers to live in together. Well sometime after that there's a climatic uprising against James which ends with James and Steven fighting each other which leads to James dying in a way I haven't thought of yet (I do know I want it to be a "Disney Villain Death" as Tv Tropes calls it (tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php…) because I can't imagine Steven as a murderer).

Anyway, the story ends with Dolores's fantasy coming true as everyone buys a big house to live in, Steven and Dolores get married and he becomes Sydney and Carolina's adopted father, and the two of them even have a son together named Benjamin.

Oh, and Rambo and Esmerelda end up falling in love and having three babies, Bobo, Bozo and Mimi (yes I reused previous drawings of Rambo and Esmerelda, I was tired once I got to them, sue me).

[jhsharman]

Baby sitter

You explain the substitution.

[e-mi-k]

Rambo 🐕

[justdealingwithsomeissues]

I have no idea why they keep trying to make Sleepwalker a big part of the Infinity Arcs, but him just randomly poisoning some of his Host's body's oj with sleeping pills so he can sneak out is super funny...

But also to be pedantic... in the main Sleepwalker book, Rick and Sleepwalker separated so this wouldn't even matter.

[marichanmari]

My first puppy. We grew up together. Today you take a piece of my heart with you. Thank you for everything, Rambo.

[zoetheneko]

Rambo plushy :3

(It nice to have dreams 😔)

Png ver. (+ shirtless & dog ears variant)

[narmothewraith]

Concept art for a new painting, based on a picture of me and my uncle's dog (he's a sweetheart 🥺)

[cerastes]

Habe you ever had a "did we even play the same game?" moment with someone?

My favorite game ever used to be Metal Gear Solid 4, it’s still up there in my top favorites, and this time at a party I met a guy that said he didn’t like MGS4 because he felt like it ruined Snake as a character and that it misrepresented him. I asked if he could elaborate and his response was that they took this Rambo dude, this super manly war hero and emasculated him into a weak old man.

I need you to understand that Solid Snake was without exaggeration fundamental in my growth as a person: I am from a latino country, grew up in what’s widely considered the wrong side of the tracks in the middle of nowhere, being macho, manly, tough was incredibly important to me, because that’s how it was in there, and Snake (plus “The Knight In Rusty Armor” by Robert Fisher) basically made me question all of what I’d grown up thinking up until then, because Snake isn’t a badass because grrr manly beef jerky I kill and swear, he is this incredibly solemn guy who hates what he can do, but is the only one that can do it, and if he doesn’t do it, then nuclear war happens, or worse. There’s a whole angle of expectation as a narrative arc in regards to Snake: Meryl expected a glorious, boisterous war hero, Otacon expected a grizzled, badass action hero, Liquid expected Himself But Better In Every Way, Ocelot expected a tool and nothing else, Naomi expected a callous and cold killer… And they were all wrong, he is, ultimately, an exhausted man that cannot stop no matter how much he wants to stop, because if he does, the world might likely go up in literal flames.

So to hear this self-proclaimed superfan of Snake say this just made me skip anger and go all the way to pity. In-universe, those in the know of Snake worship him as an actual God of War, and it’s a common thing that gets addressed in-universe: The whole point of MGS2 is that Raiden could never have won if he tried to be Snake, because you don’t want to be Snake. Snake hates being Snake. Snake isn’t manly because he beat a tank on foot one on one, Snake is admirable because he does the right thing, even if he’s breaking down molecule by molecule as he goes and he wants nothing more than to fuck off and raise dogs in the arctic, but keeps on going anyways because he can do something about it. The most important message he imparts on Raiden and Meryl is Don’t Be Me; Create A World Where Snake Doesn’t Need To Exist.

I felt pity because if you feel like MGS4 misrepresented Snake, then you really and explicitly are exactly the kind of fodder PMC nobody that feeds the proxy wars in MGS4. I think only by skipping every cutscene you can come out thinking that way. The only thing super about him was ficial.

[mykeowns]