A fun lifespan
Maybe Rupert isn’t 100% vacant of substance. Years of playing rugged heroes on TV have given him a strong sense of cartoon right and wrong. — COLOURS BY SAMMY BORRAS
STEEPLE – A Scary Go Round Comic
by John Allison
Maybe Rupert isn’t 100% vacant of substance. Years of playing rugged heroes on TV have given him a strong sense of cartoon right and wrong. — COLOURS BY SAMMY BORRAS
I’m just a boy, standing in front of a girl on the steps of the Church of Satan, mentioning that there is some small possibility that love may have occurred but I can’t be quite sure
Um, that’s substance? “Make her break up rather than have it be on yourself” is the ultimate art of evasion. She’s got a ticket to ri-i-ide.
I don’t think he’s trying to make her break up with him. I think he genuinely believes he needs to rescue her from the “cult” she’s in.
Sincerity is so alien to most of us, we find it hard ti recognise or indeed believe in when we see it!
I think this is the first time we’ve seen Rupert’s true feelings about the Church of Satan. I’m pretty sure that before, he was trying to get laid and didn’t care if Billie was about to wear demon horns to bed, but now that he actually *cares*, he’s trying to save her – which of course will ironically result in the lad’s complete destruction, at least within Billie’s good graces.
“I am in love with who I’ll get some shrink or other to turn you into” just has a moderate amount of appeal to it. It’s the short form of “you’ll make do with a bit of work”.
I think in this case it’s more “I have to rescue you from this cult you belong to, and I’ve played this part on TV often enough to know that means I’m supposed to fall in love with you.”
I don’t think it’s that at all.
I think whatever Rupert saw under the docks scared him.
I think it scared him enough to wake up, to stop being so cynical and hedonistic, and to try to figure out what he cared about, maybe for the first time in years.
Rupert didn’t see anything untoward under the docks
I had completely forgotten about Rupert. Huh.
That’s OK. He forgot about you, too.
It’s not a cult, it’s a church. The steeple is higher
A church is a cult with an army and navy.
Unless it’s an imperial cult.
What is a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.
-Robert Altman
It’s all relative to the size of your steeple.
That’s what SHE said!
Ah, the old “what’s the difference between a cult and a religion” question. Reading this page inspired me to read Wikipedia’s entry for “Cult”. Which basically says there’s no single definition, and no way to definitively answer the question. Oh. well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult
I thought one of the big warning signs was they encourage you to separate from your family, friends, and support group, like abusive spouses do. By that metric, Billie’s not in a cult; they just dress like it.
I was dumped by my high school boyfriend because he got Religion and I wasn’t on a first-name basis with his savior. Most of the evangelical crowd disapproves of consorting with unbelievers. So yeah, lots of churches are cults. Not sure how the Church of Satan handles consorting with unbelievers, though.
They do what they wilst.
Yeah, Christianity fulfills most of the generally accepted characteristics of a cult. Some sects more than others of course, but the whole thing is pretty culty.
By the way, the “Charismatic individual” at the heart of the cult is not Jesus. It’s actually Paul. Modern Christianity (in the west) is the church of Paul, not Jesus. Most of the cult like characteristics of modern Christianity come by direct means and indirect from Paul, who by his own admission never met Jesus in life.
Eastern Orthodox is a whole different kettle of fish. (The Church of Jesus would look a whole lot more like Eastern Orthodox than any Catholic or Protestant church.)
I’m not sure if “Church of Jesus” is the accurate term. Are you talking about the pre-Paul Jesus Movement (which was still pretty firmly rooted in Judaism) or the first Christian Church after Paul showed up, or the Church by the time the Nicene Creed was declared?
Technically from a Historical standpoint, the Pre-Paul Jesus Movement that involved a bunch of Apostles roadtripping around the place with Jesus and then claiming he’d come back from the dead after he was crucified…was a pretty standard Resurrection Cult as well. Which some groups of worshipers of the Egyptian gods or well, Ra I think had a Resurrection Cult to him anyways.
So, yeah the difference is maybe more just that Rome decided they didn’t like that word, especially if they wanted to use it for people they didn’t like the “religions” of (possibly because those beliefs were relatively incompatible usually with a top down Roman Empire hierarchy?).
Regardless, Christianity could maybe use a little bit more of the Jesus teachings and maybe less of all the other ones if they want to claim to be followers of Christ?
I wasn’t trying to imply there was a thing called “The Church Of Jesus,” other than by comparative analogy. The various communities started by the followers of Jesus are fairly well documented, including their structure and behavior. They were each a little bit different but followed a common pattern, except for Paul who was building the Catholic Church with one guy at the top instead of a “Patriarchy of equals.”
They had their disagreements, which is why the First Council of Nicaea was convened. After that things were a little more codified for Christianity in general, until the Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Churches broke from one another in 1054 (To greatly simplify matters. There were constant arguments and more councils.)
I’m not convinced Paul is any more real than Jesus. If you read Acts, it’s clear that the Paul there is a fantasy superhero, not a real person.
There’s contemporary corroborating evidence of the existence of Paul (Saul) but basically none for Jesus. If the Romans were all that scared of him that they paid the Jews to betray him so they could kill him in a particularly horrific way, none of the great record keeping societies (the Hebrews, the Arabs, the Greeks, and the Romans) bothered to mention it very prominently.
There are surviving records of a few guys named “Jesus” in Jerusalem about the time this was all supposed to have happened. Only about 11 of them, and none of them really fit his description very well. It was a fairly common name at the time. None of those records mention any of these Jesus’s being arrested, tortured, then crucified. That stuff all comes for either Paul, who wasn’t around at the time, or other guys from the various groups founded by the followers of Jesus between 70 and 300 years later. And they all kinda copied each other and Paul.
In the US these days we can’t even agree on who won a well documented election a single year later. This makes me hugely suspicious of any of the stories about this guy written 70-300 years after his death by people that weren’t there.
The problem with Paul is that someone wrote some letters and was well enough known to have letters forged in his name in order to borrow authority. But we don’t know if *any* of the surviving letters are by this person. All we know is that they’re by several different people and various assumptions have been made as to which one is the “real” one when he might not actually be in there.
Similarly, what is claimed to be a biography of his actions is so full of ridiculous claims that it’s hard to know if any of it is true.
So all we know, really, is that someone probably called Paul/Saul was active in the early church. The *personality* that the church holds up as being that person is probably 95% fictional.
Paul’s connection to the gospel writers, a bunch of Greeks without access to a good map of the “Holy Lands”, is very hard to pare out but the writer of the third gospel (and we don’t know HIS name either) seems to have been a fan.
Well Billie is continually hanging out with the heretic Maggie (and indeed the outsider Rupert) and went to (CofE) church for the vigil for Jason. So if the Tredregyn Church of Satan is a cult, Tom’s not doing a particularly good job of separating Billie from outsiders. And rather than drag her back in, he’s trying to get rid of her.
Is Maggie actually a heretic or merely an apostate?
I don’t think anyone can speak for the whole CoS, but Billie’s policy appears to be, “She may be a heretic, but she’s our heretic, all right?”
“Not consorting with” isn’t always quite the same as “not having anything to do with”. They might leave you free to talk to unbelievers, but not be really keen with you getting close to or marrying such.
So there’s a grey area. Ironically, the Church of Satan in this comic may escape being called a cult because Tom isn’t half as charismatic as he wants to think he is, whereas Trident may be getting there because Bob is better at pushing people into line.
Oh my god, I’m a sucker for cartoon right and wrong. Specially good look on an otherwise vacant guy. So rugged. So dumb.
Has anyone told Rupert the “cult leader” would be ecstatic if he took her away?
I wonder if Tom will help him, wearing his Cupid costume.
So this is an intervention and chill?
Also, it almost sounds in the last panel like Rupert is applying the Intermediate Value Theorem.
“In mathematical analysis, the intermediate value theorem states that if f is a continuous function whose domain contains the interval [a, b], then it takes on any given value between f(a) and f(b) at some point within the interval.”
(?)
Well, that doesn’t even rise to the level of “clear as mud.” 😐 Probably just me, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_value_theorem
It’s just a complicated way to say, “If you draw a line from A to B, it goes through everything between A and B.”
Yes, it’s basically saying that the formal definition of “a continuous function” agrees with the intuitive one.
Or in this case, “If he didn’t love her before, and he loves her now, then at some point between then and now he must have started to love her.”
We all know that’s not how emotions work. At some point you discover that you’ve always been in love. The point of actually falling in love moves backward in time. Until you realize that you never actually loved in the first place.
Sort of a nightmare for function theorists.
Poor sweet Rupert. He seems to have just started to think about the whole situation with Billie. He looks so out of his element. So childish and so theatrical. Of course, Billie is really annoyed by all this. Time for him to leave.
I feel like Rupert is doing the mental equivalent of trying to fix a balky air conditioner, but all he’s got is a third-hand toolbox with most of the screwdrivers missing and a YouTube instructional video in Portuguese.
He’s presuming that someone NEEDS to be fixed with as far as I can tell no actual evidence to that effect. Never a good approach, certainly not with a romantic partner. 😐
Oh, something absolutely needs to be fixed: to wit, the encroachment of Trident. I mean, there IS a dangerous cult around. Rupert recognizes enough loan-words in the Portuguese video to get that part. But the only screwdrivers he has are all sized for Romantic Drama, and they’re not very good screwdrivers anyway.
…Hey, when I torture a metaphor, I make it *scream*.
Plus, it turns out the “balky air conditioner” is actually a fully working microwave oven.
That last line, though. Save something for the wedding vow.
Rupert seems to have overlooked the subtle point that, in her capacity as vicar, Billie is in fact the LEADER of a “cult.” Only Tom himself outranks her. Unless I’m wrong.
Exactly my thought!
(Imagine going to L. Ron Hubbard and telling him: “You got entangled in a cult, man. But don’t worry, I’ll free you…”)
I mean, if someone HAD managed to somehow pull that off by some miracle, quite a few people might be better off for it.
uh Billie is fired so… perhaps not?
Given that the CoS doesn’t pay her anyway, and charges her rent to stay there, I’m not convinced that Billie can be fired, as such. Especially when she’s the one who’s actually running everything.
A salesman works on commission; he can still be fired. A rented pays a landlord; he can still be evicted.
I mean, Billie took a job that she … pays for? Rupert may not realize that CoS isn’t the worst cult around, but Billie is indeed holding a major L here.
He may know a thing or two about cults, as I’d imagine there’s the Scientologists haven’t gotten to ol Rupes at some point. He has all the keen acuity of a young John Travolta.
Ah, that great Partridge Family hit, “I Think I Might Have Started To Love You At Some Point.”
For maximum irony, I expect that he wants her to leave the church and join him in the not-at-all-cultish Trident.
I wonder what will be the lifespan of Rupert’s “Tredregyn Nights” tattoo now.
It looks like he has never considered anyone else’s wants/needs/feelings in his life, and suddenly he finds that he is.
Tep – That’s love, son.
*Yep, not tep (just in case you couldn’t work it out for yourself.
I thought “tep” might just be some British slang I hadn’t heard before, with a derived-from-context meaning along the lines of “Welcome to the real world.”
Honestly I 100% love this turn, but I’m a sucker for cartoon right and wrong.
I’m a big fan of cartoon physics, myself.
Is that like when Wile E Coyote runs off a cliff but instead of immediately falling he hangs in mid air with his legs spinning around until, finally, he looks down, then looks at the viewer for a second before plunging.
One of my favorites is “all motion ceases in the shadow of an anvil”, but luckily (or unluckily) there are apparently no anvils in Tredregyn.
church of christ, church of satan, it doesnt matter- theylre all a bunch of cults
What a break for Rupert that the leader of the “cult” himself wants Billie to be gone from it. Unless he instead wants her to redouble her efforts to help him oust Bob Warren from town. If the latter, it might a great time for Billie to negotiate a salary increase by GETTING a salary.
They operate strictly on commissions (probably)
Shrug. I’m just going by what Brian said in an earlier strip.
Rupe may trigger Billie’s formerly expressed guilt feelings about her fling.
Though by telling her she is cult fodder he may instead get a CoS curse.
Rupert is probably new to the middle ground between “this person is cool, I enjoy the time I had” and “I love this person”.
I honestly think he believes every word he says but he lacks the observation skills to read the situation and such he is fumbling a lot here.