'Not A Villain' Webcomic - Bandit is TENka's best programmer and can read code.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 229

Bandit probably would have been the best programmer alive if a certain someone wasn't also still alive.

And alas, we didn't make into ComicMix's 4th round but it was fun while it lasted. Thanks to all who participated! Say 'hi' if the tourney helped to convert you into a new reader!

51 Comments

I love how the word “hacker” and “killing a bunch of people” shock Kleya back to reality. Yeah, she may have been the best programmer ever, but she was also a hacker and killed a bunch of people. She needs to be more careful about her competitive streak.

Also, I’ll finally get my hands on your book on Easter Friday! Can’t wait to read it. 😀

Yea, those two are SO going to get together. It will probably take a few hundred pages but it is going to happen.

And we just got confirmed Bandit did kind of cheat when he pushed Kat’s HP down to just above zero. He can read the code… (dun dun duuuuuuun).

Also: Kat’s expressions are spot on perfect. It’s good nobody was looking at her or she would have given everything away just by the way she looks.

And I bet the “yesss” is from Jane, who just entered.

Yessss.

Well, I could see Jane having at least glanced at Kat while this was going on. That could result in some pretty interesting conversation later on…

Or Jane could think Kat lost someone to hackers and talking about it makes her lust for vengeance.

On a side note, I don’t see what Bandit being a great programmer has to do with him and Kat not being friends. 😐

It’s why he knew how the special work. Not because they’re friends, but because he’s a programmer.

I love how they all twitch when Danni says ‘Hacker’
And how Hacker seems to be synomonous with ‘mass murderer’
No wonder programmers are jumpy just for being good at what they do (course, in Kleeya and Bandit’s cases, considering they probably HAVE killed people, they have reason to be extra jumpy about being called a hacker)

I’d have to go back and check, but I think Katt has done that one hand on the other arm pose before, nervous twitch? Old war wound?

Also, guessing the Yesssss, indicates Jane has entered the scene

well, coming clean makes long term questions on that note go away. apparently it doesn’t matter if they are open about their employers. maybe a hiding in plain sight approach? no way to tell right now.

Danni’s self-righteousness is gonna be a problem. I can see this being a reoccurring theme on some level. but hard not to be “OMGHACKER” when the world seems to have been sent to a ring of h***.

and oh yay. we get to see creepy personified soon. aren’t we just lucky ducks 😀

Aaaaand Jane just showed up.

Odd, I’ve never consider Kat as a jealous type. Were I in her place I’d be happy to hear that and have attention diverted from me.

Have you read the comic? Her whole personality is built on her pride and she is well aware she is a better programmer then bandit. Having people calling him a better programmer openly in front of her is rubbing her in all the wrong ways.

very well put. I kinda envy how well you said it. she is indeed a person for whom pride is just as necessary as water to drink, food to eat, air to breath.

Off panel talk balloon in the last panel. Let the speculation begin!

I suspect Jane.

well it was still awsome that you made it that far. and it also shows what an awsome comic that you have here as well. please keep up the awsome work that has me looking in every day (just on the off chance at bonus comics 😛 )

I know a lot of readers aren’t comfortable with Kat having been the leader of a group who were primarily responsible for directly and/or indirectly killing billions of people and ruining the biosphere, but I think it adds all the more pathos to her quest for redemption. It makes it a darker and sadder story, but the brighter moments spark more clearly to me at least.
It’s somewhat similar to that movie ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ who wanted medical emancipation because she was being emotionally pressured by her mother to be a stem cell and organ donor for her sister (she’d been raised to be as close to her genetically as possible to save her life), but towards the end of the movie it turns out her sister actually wanted to die. Not unrealistic, but it removed the whole conflict of her wanting to keep her health for herself.
This is different as Kat is just trying to be good right now and not acting out of understandable selfishness like the protagonist (whom I supported personally, it’s her body) in My Sister’s Keeper, other than the complicated argument of whether it’s ok for her to avoid social justice by seeking a more productive path of her own towards atonement. Can we really forgive her for being if not the worst criminal in the history of mankind the one with the highest body count? I’m leaning towards yes, since we see her thoughts and understand her as a person (doesn’t that make it so much easier in almost all cases?) but I’m trying to let it really sink in that in this world she’s probably regarded as worse than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Genghis Khan combined. It makes it hard for me to root for her, but all the more rewarding when I do and share her happy moment when reading this great work.

Yeah, the mini boxes work perfectly! Hehe.

… that is I’m leaning towards yes due to the person she is by the time the story started, but that’s because all of us probably understand her better than anyone else ever has except her mother, herself and possibly D.

Also, regarding whether the group she was the leader for, Deconstruction, in fact ended the world or not, well, there’s been some discussion on that, and I’ll archive trawl later today to show the posts I’m basing this on… but I should clarify though that I don’t think she meant to do this to the world, or to kill people, merely that she took actions that would clearly lead to the deaths of others and global catastrophe because all she could think of was winning. I’m not sure if she cared for other people more than just an eensy teensy bit in the back of her head, back when she still had her mother, but shorn of her mother’s emotional support perhaps she has begun to care for others (though I find such a change, even over two years, to be quite radical, losing what seems to have been the most important person in her life has clearly made her strongly evaluate and completely change the way she treats others – turning her into the present day Paladin hiding her identity.

Oh and btw., I like her clearly styled expression of fierce competetiveness, it’s so Kat/Kleya, and then it’s nicely juxtaposed with her nonchalant neutral look away in the last frame. 🙂

PS. It occured to me, I might’ve offended some of you by implying that thinking she’s not responsible for megadeaths is motivated by wanting Kleya to have been less of a villain. If I have I’m sorry, it’s just my opinion. I’ll be posting the pages later tonight when I’ve found all the ones that refer to her villainy (just to reiterate, I like Kleya as a character, I don’t think she’s a villain now, merely that if I’m right it makes it such a radical character plot – I love extremes that push the envelope like this!).

I personally have come to believe that while she had something to do with the deaths of an army, there is no evidence she caused anything else to happen. people just assumed it was the “evil hackers”. which is common, you blame the ones who seem different when things go bad. more than once in history the minorities have been both literally and figuratively put to the torch cause people needed a scapegoat.

Well, isn’t is just convenient that all the other hackers were killed off, which allows him to be the ‘best’ hacker in the world. I bet he wasn’t even in the top 100 before the Ending.

Perhaps he was more involved then people think. How did he even survive the hacker hunts anyway? Sounds suspicious to me. I bet he’s one of them super jealous types that can’t stand anyone better then him and so he made sure they got bumped off and now there is only one person left before he can truly take the throne. Clearly this man is the master villain behind it all!

This is totally unlike Kleya, who is so darn good that she totally didn’t need to kill off anyone cause she’s just too awesome to take second place to anyone.

I really can’t tell how to take all of that. are you being serious, facetious, or some combination of the two?

Well, I think Kleya is on another level then he is. I also doubt that he would have ranked as the number two hacker before the ending killed off 99% of all the programmers in the world (assuming Kleya really was number one at the time). Not to say he isn’t really good but certainly not the best in the world.

I’m also don’t think that Kleya deliberately wiped out the entire Earth out of spite or something (I’m hoping she didn’t do it at all), so I imagine someone else is to blame for it.

Since I don’t like Bandit anyway, I’d be perfectly happy to find out that it was his fault that the ending happened.

So I’d say the answer to your question is neither. It’s simply how I would like it to go but don’t expect it to. 🙂

ah, I see. well, in regards to Bandit’s skill…he had to be very good. Kleya is the self-professed peak, and he did work with her at some point. you think TENka would let some mere mortal work with their prized cyborg programmer? he was somebody special himself, for to work with her means he was in the same program with her.

Now I see Bandit’s diabolical plan to oust Kleya. Get the rest of the group to continue praising his abilities as the best and Kleya will eventually break down and prove he isn’t, because she is.

And looks like Bloody Jane’s finally here!

Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary

And Jane finally makes her dramatic entrance…I think

Bloddy Mary truly seems to have skill in picking the most creepy and akward moment to turn up.

Nice save, Sandra. I’m willing to bet you’ve got both of their identities figured out now…. And you’re probably still hoping to recruit Kleya as a programmer to help fix your City. (Which is, honestly, a much better way for Kleya to work off her moral debts than playing a game.)

Hi Jane! 🙂

random distressing thought. Jane might be the least freakish of the lot. she might be crazy, but she’s -normal- crazy. Kleya is an extremely competitive cyborg programmer, Jake is second only to Kleya in all those same qualities(I really think he might have hardware too, since he is so good and had worked with Kleya in the past), Sandra hen pecks everyone, her hubby is more than a tad eccentric and can see him being the benign daddy figure of the group, Danni can’t decide if she wants to do whatever it takes to win or be a halfway decent human being, Brandon switches between being an 80’s surfer wannabe and a Machiavellian villain.
Divine bless these misfits, this is better than daytime television 😀

Jane might even not actually be all that crazy; it might just be an act she puts on.

true…but my point stands. the rest of them are such odd fellows that by comparison Jane’s behavior is far more benign. I can’t wait to see the next page to see how Jane acts when not putting her game face on^^

Off topic for this particular comic, but I just wanted to say, Aneeka, that ever since I met you at LTUE and bought your first volume, I’ve been excited every time I realize it’s Tuesday/Friday. I’ve never been this hooked on a webcomic before; I just have to know what happens next! So thanks for the great read so far, and keep up the good work! 🙂

This should be the signal for Danni to bring up her old partner who Bandit sorta killed with his bots.

bots -> grief-bots

That’s a good point, actually. I’d almost forgotten that Bandit ran grief bots whose job it was to harass people for his own amusement.

And here I was starting to like the guy.

don’t be so hard on him. can you honestly say you weren’t an arrogant toe rag at his apparent age? I doubt the point was to make people seize up from lack of sleep and proper nutrition.

Kat on page 5: “Doo doo dooo! Just minding my own business… I have nothing to do with this conversation at all. Dum dum doo! Oh… look, it’s Jane. Let’s say hi to Jane everyone! And forget the conversation ever happened.”

Creepy “yesssss” is creepy.

I like how it seems to be that Kat is looking wide-eyed in the direction of the “yessss” speaker…

Who reads binary? And without spaces? That just cripples your information density and makes it needlessly hard to determine the alignment of what you’re reading. We write tools to extract the useful information and format it nicely (or at least format it in hex) so we don’t have to read through 8 billion bits of binary.

I’ve heard of (although never met) a team of about 4 people at MIT who can read binary without spaces. They do it in order to reconstruct (roughly) snippets of compiled code. From what I understand it’s incredibly boring and tedious and slow and expensive and the only reason anyone would ever do it was if you *really* needed a program decompiled. Like… if it was life or death or national security or something. Besides them… I don’t think anyone anywhere has the skill and education needed to be able to do it. This is, after all, why we have computers in the first place.

Or if you are an old timer like me who had to do it because there was no other tools available at the time. That was why we had pencils to help break the words/bytes/op instructions into their components. It is no worse than looking at 1’s and 0’s on the screen (divided by spaces, please) when looking at standard binary dumps of data.

Even then, it’s easier to read it if it’s in Hexadecimal instead of Binary. 😉

I have a friend who does. He mostly does it for show.

I assume that the whole page of binary thing is in The Dude’s imagination, since Dude probably doesn’t have a clue what code is.

I used to, as did a friend from school. Passing notes in class was never so well encrypted. I remember one time when a teacher caught us, and I had to read the note in front of the class… Everyone stared dumbfounded when I started just saying a string of 1s and 0s.

Wouldn’t kill a bunch of people? His name is friggin’ BANDIT.

Bandit. Not Assassin. He’s more likely to rob you blind with a knife to your throat, but would only kill if things went awry. At least that’s the impression I get.

I don’t know why I never gave this comic a chance….looked at it like 1 or 2 times before but man, am I glad I sat down this time. Honestly, couldn’t stop reading until there were no more updates.

very entertaining and well written, yeah? 😀

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 229