Grrl Power #1021 - The family tree contains several mobius branches (Patreon)

Thanks so much for your support! For serious!

I guess Sydney was excited to learn that she had a great-times-5 grandparent who was a native Maltan. She's been keeping that one in her back pocket for years in case she needed to trump someone else's genealogy tale. No offense to any Maltans out there, but I'm not sure it's quite the slam dunk she seems to think it is.

Okay, I don't know how the doppelganger pre-zygote thing gets haploid DNA from the second mother. The delivery system probably includes some sort of chemical chromosome scraper that integrates the DNA into the baby to be. It's an important feature for their race so the birthing mother won't give birth to something that doesn't look to share at least half her heritable traits. That way the doppel baby can grow up with a relatively normal childhood and not be immediately persecuted by superstitious peasants.

Of course, when the tween doppelganger begins to start taking on characteristics of the family pet, things can start to spiral quickly

I decided to make this page available to everyone over at Patreon so you can see all the stupid thank you cards Dabbler is looking at in panel 6.

In a universe that includes more than just humans and binary sex reproduction, the possibilities in the Hallmark space would become exponentially complicated. Even so, most of those cards I drew are so stupid. There's one for cordyceps zombies. "Thank you for inhaling my spores." Who is the zombie buying the card for? The long braindead meatsack it's currently piloting? Or the "Thank you for incubating me in your torso." card for the Xenomorph?

I don't know. Maybe if there were enough alien races that used a tertiary sapient maturation method, they would have some sort of collective Dia de los Muertos type holiday where they honor their incubation medium's sacrifice? Given that both examples above are either mindless or... hive mindless I guess... Well, not 'mindless' in the case of the Xenomorphs, but you know what I mean. I don't think they have any organized holiday schedule in the first place, but there are probably plenty of examples from sci-fi and fantasy that mortally parisitize a host in order to live. Generally they're evil, but I can imagine some that actually feel bad about their lifecycle.

Still. The idea that a Hallmark type industry would spring up so those sorts of lifeforms could buy their dead hosts meaningless scraps of sentiment both makes me chuckle and also now that I think about it, would definitely exist.

But hey, there are other cards there too. Like if your father was a (god turned into a) waterfall. A narrow demographic, but if you've got the shelf space, then why not?