They look very nifty!

The Ikea/Honest Ed's thing made me think of the one market around where I live - it's called the Quakertown Farmer's Market, but everyone I've ever known has just called it the Q-Mart. It's... something else. Not particularly in a good way. You step inside and your brain kind of begins to shut down a bit every step you take.

On the plus side, they have a really nifty fossil shop and a bunch of little booths that have old Army stuff for sale, so I guess that sort of makes up for it. Not much, though.

I'm the same way with Ikea/the mall/etc. D: Pretty much whenever I go shopping, I try to go in and out as quickly as possible, otherwise I get completely fried and drained. IKEA's swedish meatballs make me feel better, though. :D Om nom nom, so tasty. (Or, in the case of the mall, a stop at Teavana, whoooo!)

nothing makes me feel better after shopping and walking around what seems like a Wonka style maze than an ice cream cone

... but I'm the same way when it comes to malls and other shopping centers. As long as there's a Mrs. Field's or Starbucks for me to get something sweet I'm good to go.

I hope that's a Katamari reference as the title of the comic.

♫ Let's flat-pack up to beeeeee...
A single star in the skyyyyyy ♫

This is my life. Anytime I go shopping or socialize with a lot of people I start out like ":D" and then by the end I'm dead. I am glad to hear I am not alone.

Hey, me too!
I get the same kind of grossness when I'm at the mall for a while... I never thought of it as not being able to filter! That's amazing! Thanks for putting this on the wubs, it educated me AND made me laugh. THE PERFECT COMIC??? (please imagine that exclamation coming from second-panel T-Rex )

I can't help but agree with the feeling... going to big stores with lots of cool things can be fun, but it's not long before you are burnt out.

There's a few reasons I get burnt out... for starters it's the standing and walking... it's ok at first, but aft the first hour (which you will do in Ikea) you will start to feel the wear on your body.

Then there is the issue of shopping with others... where one person usually knows what they want, several people all shopping together can take even longer as each person has their own thing they are looking to buy, or browse. Some of which may not be be interesting to their fellow shoppers.

Then there's the draining affect of watching money disappear... I mean it's easy to spend 100 dollars very quickly. That alone is a sad feeling, lol.

Then you get into things like the environment... the lights, dry air, over scented areas... I get dry throat and eyes after an hour.

So all these things make shopping for extended periods tiresome. So that's why me and my pals usually head for a nice sit down meal somewhere, especially shopping in Toronto. If you are ever back around there go to Salad King... most delicious Thai food... I'm craving it right now. That is if you haven't been there before and don't already know about it.

I share the feelings though about shopping. You start to lose it after a while.

I'm the same way. At the mall, all my roommates can go for hours, and I get worn out pretty easy. Apparently all girls love shopping, except me. It sometimes sounds good, but always loses it's appeal about an hour in.

Ikea on the other hand, will be awesome always. <3

I was almost expecting to see some sort of hallucination along the lines of the sanity effects in Eternal Darkness.

Well, now I want to go to Ikea x_x

Buy a stool and convert it into a laptop table using a hand saw <3

OH yes IKEA is definitely one of those. HOOOOOOyes. Nifty useful stuff and tasty food. *wishes she had one near her*

I like the infinity goddess and her lion(?) companion. Beautiful job, Yuko!

Aww, that ink test is sooo cute. They look so comfortable together. You do such wonderful work, Yuko. I love your art, and I love the comic.

I have the same problem. Anytime I go to a place like that it tends to overwhelm my senses causing me to have dizzy-spells (bad enough that I almost fall on my face) and headaches that wont go away until I've been outside for a while.

Oh man, way to hang in there! Last time I went, there was an additional auuugh-where-on-Earth-am-I factor: clowns were everywhere, promoting the new Cirque du Soleil show.

The tasty treats made it totally worth it, though. ♥

I HAD TO SHARE THIS!

I was lucky enough to nab the Strength Tarot original, and I started thinking...In Persona 3, the team manager Yuko was the social link for the Strength Arcana! Yuko drew the strength tarot! Everything comes full circle. :)

It made me laugh to see you describe Ikea as a grown-up Disneyland, because just a little while ago I was getting a ride from my aunt and she told me a great story about my 6-year-old cousin.

Apparently my aunt and uncle told her to get dressed up because they were going somewhere special that night for her birthday, which was the next day. They took her to the Broadway Little Mermaid musical, but the whole hour-long car ride there, she was convinced that they were going to Ikea, and was super excited about it. That's right, my cousin thought she was going to Ikea for her birthday and was genuinely happy about it.

I'm the same way with any crowded place. I just get so drained D:

Next time you're in Toronto, let me know :D

After about 45 minutes in Ikea, I get so burned out I have to fight the urge to fall asleep on the display sofas...

I have lived in Toronto all my life and not once have I stepped foot in Honest Ed...or the CN tower. I am pretty much the same...go into mall walk around a few mins and I suddenly feel tired/dazed.

Everything looks like it's so efficient that you can't live without it. And sometimes I even get stuff I need :D Like my bed, and drawers, and cabinet :D

Ikea makes my head explode and go numb or something. I have the urge to touch everything in that store. I ended up with a roll of blueprints in my hands once. I was surprised to find them there too. Thankfully, I remembered where I got them still and hurriedly put them back.

I haven't been back since.

I absolutely despise shopping. I can't stand the mall. Unless it is a video game store. Video game stores are fun! I don't know much about Ikea though. I don't think we have one down here.

Huh . . . in the last comic, the alternate text said "oh hey let's go to IKEA," and Conrad was in the car with Ananth, Yuko, and John. In the current comic, you are actually at IKEA, and instead of Conrad you have Mike. Did something . . . "happen"?

That store is shopping overload. It's just too much stuff, I start to lose it in about an hour. Also the name of the comic reminded me of a katamari lyric, "I want to roll you up into my life!"

That's pretty much how I feel when I go to the mall, home depot...or anything similar. This is probably why I go to shop "like a man" and leave quickly, otherwise I just want to sit and zone out. I haven't been to Ikea though.

Shopping always burns me out after a while too, but icecream makes everything better! :D
As soon as I saw the infinity sign over the girl's head I thought "Yep. tarot card." Great design, as always!

Hurggghh.... IKEA... You certainly have more strength then I do Ananth. I'd end up going crazy and trying to set the desks on fir- You didn't hear that. Heh.

Also! I love your button selection, along with the t-shirt designs. I hope to order some soon! ^_^

Ananth that is EXACTLY how it's like for me when shopping with my husband and room-mate at Lowes. Except there is no frozen treat at the end for me.

Would Yuko consider doing more simple Tarot designs for ink tests? I like seeing how people can revise the same idea in so many different ways, and that lion is just the right combination of dangerous and cute.

Plus, Death on a tarot card with a fret-face would be utterly hilarious!

So ... what would happen if Ananth's sanity meter hit zero?

I don't know anyone who doesn't get this way after around an hour. It's likely from being such an artificial environment. You're essentially inside a giant soundbox with poor acoustics. Add to that, light, with two overboard methods that I know get to me:

1) A profuse amount of fluorescent lights, flooding everything with too much light
2) The dimly lit store with the super-intense halogen spotlights, making the price tags glare (even better are the chrome racks, mannequins, etc directly under a spot.)

Top it off with not taking a seat for the duration and usually having nothing to drink. One modern day body way outside its routine.

I totally understand where you're coming from. At first the store is exactly like a Disney land for adults (or people with an architecture/furniture fetish). Then you see things like "Dodo" and "Flygel" and your sanity starts to wain. It's about when you look at the light bulbs that you have a sanity CRASH.

I wish I could find an apt analogy for what it's like to hunt through the furniture retrieval section at the end. "This looks like what we need" "No, that's a 'myfner,' we need a 'tonbad', otherwise or 'cryngu' won't fit on it."

Waiting in the checkout line after the sanity crash is the worst, though. The combined smell of sawdust and Swedish meatballs usually haunts my dreams for a few days afterward.

I'm just glad I'm not the only one.

I can sympathize with this one, too. I went to IKEA with my mom and little sister recently, and it's kind of like over-stimulation. I'd have been more excited if I had been able to branch off and look around comfortably, but with so many people trundling importantly by with overfilled baskets, I was a little afraid for my safety. ._.'

Still, though, the way everything is named kept us in good spirits for days afterward, which was a plus!

I get this too, and so does my mom. We call it "mall lag." I think it has to do with sensory overload.

major sympathy, I find Ikea a hellish affair, until you get to the kid section where there's tunnels and bunkbeds with slides and swingy chairs!

the exact same mall sickness thing happens to me!!

You get frozen yoghurt at your IKEA??! In the restaurant or what? Not that it matters 'cos I've never seen anything resembling frozen yoghurt in ours... But then I live in IKEA's motherland and we don't really do that. (In fact, I've never tasted this mythical thing of which you speak.) We have hot dogs and plain ol' ice cream instead. Sigh.

I also want to go on a homocidal rampage-- er, I mean I also get annoyed at malls and the like. It should be a recognised medical condition or something...

Oh and OMG, leik, Ur comic iz awesummm!!11! *runs away with a fan girlish squeal*