Actually Mephisto is just a name for the Devil from Gerkman Literature (Goetes “Faust” in particular).
The 7 Arch demons from the Diablo Series are just named after the Devil from different cultures. Diablo himself is spanisch, I think.
The thing is that in Marvel comics there actually IS a Satan, but he hasn’t been around in so long that a lot of people (and demons) aren’t sure if he’s even still alive. His throne still sits empty because his power is so great that even the most powerful demon lord (like Mephisto) don’t dare try to sit it, but still claim themselves to be the real deal and fight tooth and nail for control over Hell.
It isn’t even particularly clear in Christian mythology itself. Almost everything that people think of as the story of Satan/Lucifer, the fall, hell, et cetera, comes from non canonical sources and Paradise Lost, as well as other Christian fan-fiction throughout the ages. Hell, a good number of things that people would swear up and down are biblical sayings actually come from Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers.
You get a lot of confusion over Babylon, as well. Isaiah 14:12 is obviously speaking about the literal king of the Babylonian Empire, when it speaks about the morning star. The writers of the New Testament books that make use of the term took it an entirely different direction. I suspect that a lot of the early Christian writers who were trying to attach their new religion to the Jewish scriptures didn’t actually know shit about the Jewish scriptures. The messianic prophesies are particularly hilarious, since most of the Old Testament sources that they’re pulled from aren’t even prophesies.
A lot of Christian material makes for some good storytelling, although you have to skim from a whole lot of mindless repetition, particularly in the Old Testament. Numbers … holy crap, don’t even get me started on Numbers … or Chronicles, for that matter.
I particularly liked the movie Constantine, for example. The biblical material takes a good deal of rewriting, though, since a great deal of the book seems kind of slapped together.
Oh god, you actually read Numbers? We only have it in our bibles because it contains some old laws and thus is part of the Jewish Torah. Nobody actually reads it.
Cover to cover, man. Of course, when I say that, you have to assume a lot of skimming in parts.
Hell, take Numbers, of which we were speaking. I read and paid attention to most of it, but when it came to sections like the census, I read through the census of the first tribe, then just skimmed the other eleven. I think it was the first four-ish chapters.
There are other parts, like the description of the creation of the Ark of the Covenant, in Exodus, which I just took in at a glance, then moved on to something more meaningful. The Psalms and the other Wisdom books also started to blur after a while.
Numbers has some interesting bits, though. For example Numbers 5 has the prescribed magic spell that will force a woman’s body to abort her baby, if she’s been unfaithful to her husband. That one’s fun to bring up when speaking to religiously-motivated anti-choicers … which is essentially all anti-choicers.
This is actually not quite true. The demon from Goethe’s Faust is actually called Mephostophiles, which is Ancient Greek for ‘He who does not love the light’. And he’s explicitly NOT the devil himself in either Goethe’s Faust or Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (which is the work that renamed him Mephistopheles, because Marlowe didn’t know Ancient Greek), but an underling.
Keith has a powerful fuckit reflex which is why he’d generally neutral of alignment. He may have opinions about good and evil but he just doesn’t give a a shit about most of them either way (at not enough to go to the effort of taking personal action, at least).
He’d probably only actually do something if someone did something that directly affected him. Like, say, if someone, who is definitely not me, bought all of the beer in town, for example.
They better make a follow up joke where someone beats all the other heroes and decides to level a local bar to show off his power, and then runs into Keith who just happens to still have this power
Never underestimate the potential positive value of laziness and apathy. I can’t count how many horrible things I might have done over the years if I’d just cared enough to get off my butt.
Work, sure, but not that much more work than his day job, right?
As for responsbility I would have thought this kindly benefactor would be hoping for some *ir*responsibility. Selfishness, even!
And think of the perks! Muahaha!
Now that’s just not true I make it my policy to keep the stick in my hand visible, but only because I know there’s a guy behind me carrying a even bigger stick.
Sure, but how often do you actually need to swing the stick? And if you can set yourself up as a conduit for the neck-breathing, then you stay fairly cool.
Do a few meetings a week, check e-mails in the morning and a couple of times a day, and then just hang out and wait for something to come up. You get panic periods of course, but in some positions, 75+% of the time can be very laid back.
A few times I’ll have to admit, normally a lot of places you can adopt a more flexible and structured environment for getting the best out of everyone without having to breath down someone’s neck. Unfortunately security isn’t one of them, you never get the same staff and wrong first impressions affect your contract at the venues. Then you get people on casual work who are either brilliant or just don’t care as there only here to get a quick pay for uni. On the flip side I’m well aware their underpaid so I don’t always swing my authority just because I have a badge that says who I am. However I don’t have the luxury to deal with people who think there here to do nothing “or look out for terroists” rubbish when they should be focusing on providing safety and customer service for the venue.
Though on my second job at a hospital I would never adopt an assertive tone and approach because it’s not considered good patient care practice. Also communication is better because I have all the options you mentioned as well as working in a single unit.
I’m in network engineering/desktop support, and if you have things organized properly and running smoothly, there’s a whole lot of downtime, assuming you aren’t in the middle of a large, system-transforming project.
Hell, on my last contract, most of the employees — managers and drones alike — spent over half of the day reading web comics or playing video games, while the computers did their thing in the background, and other teams had to get things moved down to us so that we could do our thing. Particularly on third shift, I usually had maybe an hour or an hour-and-a-half worth of actual work, assuming nothing blew up.
Yes, Keith knows a lot about responsibility, in particular the part where people molest you because you’ve neglected one of your responsibilities. Very contraproductive to watching pr0n.
Heh. Obviously this Devil didn’t do his research. While he did a good choice – a person consumbed by one of the Seven deadly Sins – he didn’t check which sin was Keith’s forte.
While Greed and Lust are significant parts of Keith’s makeup, followed by Pride, Envy, and Gluttony. But Keith’s primary sin is Sloth. Wrath is a distant seventh.
No, iif this devil wanted someone to make the world burn, he should have picked Bad Good Girl.
BGG would smack that so called devil, while telling him to gtfo, ’cause she doesn’t need any stinkin’ power to see the world burn. She can light it up all by herself (insert random ‘jerk!’-insult in between any part of this comment)!
Next strip: “Nephasto” will recover from the shock and is sitting next to Keith, getting wasted with lot of beer around, complaining about how hard he works. Thus he succumbed to Keith’s temptation.
Note: “Nefasto” is a Spanish word for being disastrous and no one wants you around. I just wanted to play with this Mephisto’s parody’s name.
Wait, is that supposed to be satan? I thought keith WAS satan
Probably a Mephisto pastiche
Well, mephisto is actually the marvel version of satan…
That’s what he WANTS you to believe.
Actually Mephisto is just a name for the Devil from Gerkman Literature (Goetes “Faust” in particular).
The 7 Arch demons from the Diablo Series are just named after the Devil from different cultures. Diablo himself is spanisch, I think.
The thing is that in Marvel comics there actually IS a Satan, but he hasn’t been around in so long that a lot of people (and demons) aren’t sure if he’s even still alive. His throne still sits empty because his power is so great that even the most powerful demon lord (like Mephisto) don’t dare try to sit it, but still claim themselves to be the real deal and fight tooth and nail for control over Hell.
It isn’t even particularly clear in Christian mythology itself. Almost everything that people think of as the story of Satan/Lucifer, the fall, hell, et cetera, comes from non canonical sources and Paradise Lost, as well as other Christian fan-fiction throughout the ages. Hell, a good number of things that people would swear up and down are biblical sayings actually come from Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers.
You get a lot of confusion over Babylon, as well. Isaiah 14:12 is obviously speaking about the literal king of the Babylonian Empire, when it speaks about the morning star. The writers of the New Testament books that make use of the term took it an entirely different direction. I suspect that a lot of the early Christian writers who were trying to attach their new religion to the Jewish scriptures didn’t actually know shit about the Jewish scriptures. The messianic prophesies are particularly hilarious, since most of the Old Testament sources that they’re pulled from aren’t even prophesies.
A lot of Christian material makes for some good storytelling, although you have to skim from a whole lot of mindless repetition, particularly in the Old Testament. Numbers … holy crap, don’t even get me started on Numbers … or Chronicles, for that matter.
I particularly liked the movie Constantine, for example. The biblical material takes a good deal of rewriting, though, since a great deal of the book seems kind of slapped together.
Oh god, you actually read Numbers? We only have it in our bibles because it contains some old laws and thus is part of the Jewish Torah. Nobody actually reads it.
Cover to cover, man. Of course, when I say that, you have to assume a lot of skimming in parts.
Hell, take Numbers, of which we were speaking. I read and paid attention to most of it, but when it came to sections like the census, I read through the census of the first tribe, then just skimmed the other eleven. I think it was the first four-ish chapters.
There are other parts, like the description of the creation of the Ark of the Covenant, in Exodus, which I just took in at a glance, then moved on to something more meaningful. The Psalms and the other Wisdom books also started to blur after a while.
Numbers has some interesting bits, though. For example Numbers 5 has the prescribed magic spell that will force a woman’s body to abort her baby, if she’s been unfaithful to her husband. That one’s fun to bring up when speaking to religiously-motivated anti-choicers … which is essentially all anti-choicers.
This is actually not quite true. The demon from Goethe’s Faust is actually called Mephostophiles, which is Ancient Greek for ‘He who does not love the light’. And he’s explicitly NOT the devil himself in either Goethe’s Faust or Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (which is the work that renamed him Mephistopheles, because Marlowe didn’t know Ancient Greek), but an underling.
I thought Satan was the Lawyer from Good Girl’s case…
The Prince of Lies has many forms.
Strangely enough, he reminds me of Gannondorf.
Keith has a powerful fuckit reflex which is why he’d generally neutral of alignment. He may have opinions about good and evil but he just doesn’t give a a shit about most of them either way (at not enough to go to the effort of taking personal action, at least).
He’d probably only actually do something if someone did something that directly affected him. Like, say, if someone, who is definitely not me, bought all of the beer in town, for example.
Or closing his favorite strip bar…
They better make a follow up joke where someone beats all the other heroes and decides to level a local bar to show off his power, and then runs into Keith who just happens to still have this power
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of good is for evil men to be lazy good for nothings.”
Never underestimate the potential positive value of laziness and apathy. I can’t count how many horrible things I might have done over the years if I’d just cared enough to get off my butt.
“With great apathy comes great slacktitude.”
– the gospel of Uncle Keith.
Work, sure, but not that much more work than his day job, right?
As for responsbility I would have thought this kindly benefactor would be hoping for some *ir*responsibility. Selfishness, even!
And think of the perks! Muahaha!
A lot of mid-level managers get by with doing almost nothing on most days.
Or supervisors, that just breath in the neck of people doing the actual work.
Now that’s just not true I make it my policy to keep the stick in my hand visible, but only because I know there’s a guy behind me carrying a even bigger stick.
Sure, but how often do you actually need to swing the stick? And if you can set yourself up as a conduit for the neck-breathing, then you stay fairly cool.
Do a few meetings a week, check e-mails in the morning and a couple of times a day, and then just hang out and wait for something to come up. You get panic periods of course, but in some positions, 75+% of the time can be very laid back.
A few times I’ll have to admit, normally a lot of places you can adopt a more flexible and structured environment for getting the best out of everyone without having to breath down someone’s neck. Unfortunately security isn’t one of them, you never get the same staff and wrong first impressions affect your contract at the venues. Then you get people on casual work who are either brilliant or just don’t care as there only here to get a quick pay for uni. On the flip side I’m well aware their underpaid so I don’t always swing my authority just because I have a badge that says who I am. However I don’t have the luxury to deal with people who think there here to do nothing “or look out for terroists” rubbish when they should be focusing on providing safety and customer service for the venue.
Though on my second job at a hospital I would never adopt an assertive tone and approach because it’s not considered good patient care practice. Also communication is better because I have all the options you mentioned as well as working in a single unit.
I’m in network engineering/desktop support, and if you have things organized properly and running smoothly, there’s a whole lot of downtime, assuming you aren’t in the middle of a large, system-transforming project.
Hell, on my last contract, most of the employees — managers and drones alike — spent over half of the day reading web comics or playing video games, while the computers did their thing in the background, and other teams had to get things moved down to us so that we could do our thing. Particularly on third shift, I usually had maybe an hour or an hour-and-a-half worth of actual work, assuming nothing blew up.
Yes, Keith knows a lot about responsibility, in particular the part where people molest you because you’ve neglected one of your responsibilities. Very contraproductive to watching pr0n.
Heh. Obviously this Devil didn’t do his research. While he did a good choice – a person consumbed by one of the Seven deadly Sins – he didn’t check which sin was Keith’s forte.
While Greed and Lust are significant parts of Keith’s makeup, followed by Pride, Envy, and Gluttony. But Keith’s primary sin is Sloth. Wrath is a distant seventh.
No, iif this devil wanted someone to make the world burn, he should have picked Bad Good Girl.
BGG would smack that so called devil, while telling him to gtfo, ’cause she doesn’t need any stinkin’ power to see the world burn. She can light it up all by herself (insert random ‘jerk!’-insult in between any part of this comment)!
… and thus this comic avoided one of the most catastrophic attacks on general comic continuity as well as common sense…
Hmm?
Marvel’s “One More Day”-storyline… *cough*
But Keith is not married and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t care at all if any of his family dies!
I was thinking more on the line of “Deal with the Devil”-trope…
I feel like I remember way back when, somebody predicting that Keith’s apathy would save the world one day. Well, here we are.
Has he been watching Keith in the shower? I’m sure that a lot of atrocities happen there.
I’m sure he waited until he stopped watching pron…
Nuh-uh.
I don’t think he has actually been watching Keith for along time.
Next strip: “Nephasto” will recover from the shock and is sitting next to Keith, getting wasted with lot of beer around, complaining about how hard he works. Thus he succumbed to Keith’s temptation.
Note: “Nefasto” is a Spanish word for being disastrous and no one wants you around. I just wanted to play with this Mephisto’s parody’s name.
To be fair keith is already consumed with sin, not anger, but sloth.
In the next episode:
Keith and the devil buddy, watching netflix…
Further proof towards my theory that Keith is the most powerful super in Shitropolis and just doesn’t give any shits
I never get such kind of offers, why?
And so laziness saves the world.
Best answser to give him…