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But it doesn’t sound threatening enough to be a villain. It’s the name of some dude in tights who just goes around being a total dick to people. He doesn’t rob anyone or save anyone, he just has an amazingly smug sense of superiority.
Heh. “The Incredible Asshole” sounds no less threatening than “the Penguin” or “Ventriloquist” or any of the other totally-non-threatening-sounding Batman gallery of rogues. :p
Lol, that brings me back. Looks like someone isn’t familiar with Willis’s first run of these characters. (Also, I REALLY appreciated the coincidence of the very next commenter’s avatar pic.)
Pepper spray can work really well against an unarmed attacker, if your goal is to get away from him. Toedad has a rifle. Pepper spray’s maximum range, and this is for the really large cans, is about 25 feet. Also, pepper spray has to hit Toedad in the face. Bullets are effective (to varying degrees) everywhere on the body.
Don’t bring a can of pepper spray to a gun fight. If it’s an option at all (and in this case, it is), CALL THE POLICE.
I think she could do fine with pepper spray because he won’t necessarily open fire (and one miss means reload time), but she would be risking spraying Becky (and the wind changing and getting her, obviously)
It’s been speculated that it’s a specific (Ruger 1V?) single shot rifle (and it looked as though he reloaded after firing last time), so that’s what I’m going off of. What I’m mostly thinking is, if Amazigirl had been a minute earlier (Becky not in car, Amazigirl able to close the distance), I think pepper spray would be good despite gun. As it is, the gun isn’t the only concern.
It may be of modern manufacture, but in design terms, it’s not really a modern hunting rifle. It’s a Ruger No. 1 Varminter, a single-shot breech-loader with no magazine, and a falling-block action that hasn’t been “modern” since about 1885. The action has to be manually worked (that’s what the lever underneath is for) and a new round loaded by hand between shots.
Unfortunately, we saw butthole dad doing this after he fired it into the air, so he does have his one shot.
Def. a Ruger, and I’m still betting that it’s single-shottedness was chosen by the Willis for eventual dramatic significance. A Chekhov’s gun, if you will.
Not downplaying the insanity it requires to take on a mentally/emotionally unstable le man with a gun in the first place, she has a better chance against that rifle. Shot capacity aside, unless you have actively trained for it, using a rifle like that in close quarters. Omar is problematic. If amazigirl can come get close enough to him unawares, even hip firing something that long and bulky had low chances of hitting. After that miss, it’s now just a long hot metal club. Unfortunately, given Toedad’s physique, that still poses a considerable threat. Maybe she has a 1,000,000 volt tazer too.
I’m hoping that Amari – girl beats seventeen kinds of holy sh*t out of Toedad, and he wakes up next to Amber’s Dad. He just looks over and asks, “Yellow spandex? Big fu*clkng ‘A’ on her chest? “
And the nurses will all be dressed like Amazi-girl, just to see the fun reactions. (Toedad and Blaine are jerky enough that I don’t feel bad suggesting that we traumatize them just a little bit.)
I know she’s not the most experienced superhero so I can’t put it on Amazigirl*, but although I hope Joyce will (I mean, hopefully the police are already coming, but we don’t (/she doesn’t) know that other people haven’t had bystander syndrome and in any case more reports won’t hurt), I don’t think we can completely expect it of her seeing as she is probably in a kind of shock (and this is assuming she fully grasps that Becky, being 18, it really is a kidnapping).
*If Amazigirl was a ‘proper’ super I might put it on her, because a larger scale super should actively know that victims might not be thinking clearly
How? Clearly she’s going to track him down (Probably to Red Lobster where he and Becky are having dinner) and have a calm debate with him about how Becky isn’t really committing any sins, tell him Dina and Joyce love Becky and want her to be happy, and it will end with ToeDad enrolling Becky in college!
Then Amber will realize that Toedad’s misguided actions – while terrifying and wrong – stem from a place of love, use it as a catalyst to speak with her own father and find out that his actions came from their own place of twisted love. They realize together his mistakes and discover that he is not irredeemable. Amber’s father undergoes therapy and emerges as a complete human being with all traces of his former self eradicated.
And also Amber has a $50 gift card for Red Lobster so everything ends with no problems whatsoever.
I… honestly feel that if she does something relatively smart, saves Becky, and gets significantly injured (but not killed), that would be just about the perfect ending to this arc. She gets closure about “being brave enough”, has it effectively demonstrated that was never a good goal to begin with, gets to foil someone else’s asshole Dad, and does something legitimately superhero-y within the bounds of reason and this being an almost entirely non-fantasy comic.
Plus Becky gets to stay. Which is awesome.
(Triple word score points if somehow Toedad and Blaine meet in a way that gets them both arrested.)
Yep. And allowing for a fuzzy and shifting boundary between fantasy & reality. Plus, I’m pretty sure that the DoA-verse is almost, but not entirely like ours. Not as wierd as the QC-verse, but still…
Amazigirl has a utility belt, but so far we’ve only seen her pull condoms out of it. Hopefully she’s got a couple trinkets she’s been saving for a day like this.
If she puts an Amazingcondom ™ over the barrel of Toedads gun, then that bullet is not going to be able to …anyway, those are Amazicondoms ™; they’re bullet-proof. Made of Kevlar. Or, Amazi-Stuff ™ …
Guns are great for starting an offensive at long-range, but if you are being attacked first at close, they can quickly get in the way, become useless or be used against you – like when Dina attacked him, he couldn’t use it to shoot her until after she’d been thrown off because he couldn’t aim or control it while she was on him and right in his face.
People above have said it is a single shot rifle from what they can tell, and it needs reloaded after each shot, so it was great for pursuing Becky and being used to create terror.
But its length could be seriously be a hindrance in a tight space like a car, especially if he doesn’t have the time to aim (because he might crash if he takes his focus off the road) and because Becky will probably fight to keep him from shooting someone, even if it means crashing the car straight into a wall.
I dunno… the title ends with ellipses which indicate the next line is coming.
In this case, Toedad wants to ground Becky in the kiddie punishment sense but mkght be willing to put her in the ground.
The next lines of the song are “take a message back for me. Tell them how I am defying gravity. Kiss me goodby, I’m defying gravity. And you can’t bring me down.”
If that is the case, then we may be seeing the end of Toedad’s ability to control her in any way, shape, or form. I still think we’re going to get the shocked expression bang panel with no indication of who got shot…
But now I think the reveal is Toedad, taken down by a cop.
Amazi-Girl, I don’t know how to say this, but I know we all ASKED for someone to kill Toe-Dad but I don’t think any of us actually wanted you to show up and very possibly DO it.
If she manages without getting herself or Becky (and possibly Dina as well, but she’s probably not actually in the trunk) injured I’d be okay with it. Especially if it’s painful.
THE POLICE ARE BETTER EQUIPPED. Do these people not have any brains at all in their heads? Jesus, where is Sarah when you need her? Or Dorothy? Or even Billie? Any one of these people would call the police.
yea honestly i love you amazigirl but there is no reason not to call the police in this situation. It’s a school shooting, they’re gonna be here eventually
Not if she says pretty much anything other than “Yeah, let us go”.
“He’s my father, but he threatened me with the gun he’s got right there”, pretty much escalates the situation.
Which she might not do because she still doesn’t want him killed.
Even beyond that, the firing the gun on campus thing gets him hauled in, held and questioned at the absolute least.
I wouldn’t say *more* stupid and irrational than real people. They just happen to match the stupidest and most irrational of real people. Of which there are a disturbingly large number.
I disagree. People are stupid but fictional people tend to be an exaggeration of that. because if they made good decisions then there’d be no story. You give people too little credit.
Those things aren’t really stupid, though.
The audience knows it’s a horror movie, knows there are enemies or monsters, and recognizes genre conventions. The characters are more like “The Hell is that noise? Did I leave the TV on?”
If you think that fictional people are unrealistically stupid, then I congratulate you on managing to avoid jobs working with the public because good lord, some people actually, really are that stupid.
Like, one of the dumbest callers I had was a guy who had Internet with us, but refused to pay his bill, because while his package included like 80 GB/month, he was only using three, and figured he shouldn’t have to pay for the part he wasn’t using. Ran his bill up to like a grand, whereupon he got cut off, so, incredibly irritated that we would cut him off for not paying his bill for months and months, in a fit of pique he returned his modem to us.
And then got home and called tech support to find out why his Internet wasn’t working. Really, dude?
–Or there was the guy smoking out at the pumps at the gas station where I worked who, when told he had to put out his cigarette, decided to prove how non-flammable gas actually is by pouring out a puddle of gas onto the ground in front of the attendant, and tossing his lit cigarette into it. I shit you not.
Yes, true, the conditions have to be just right for the vapours to ignite; but if they do, everyone in a two-block radius dies, so, like, please put out your goddamned cigarette? And not in a puddle of gas?
I hate idiotic, unreal choices in movies. And then I end up with these idiots. Frankly, movies tone the stupid down for being too unbelievably unrealistic.
Wait, so are you saying it wouldn’t be a good story if, say, in Dark Knight rises, during the opening plane-jacking, the villains forgot to do proper safety checks on their harness gear?
They aren’t dealing in seconds right now. Becky got into the car and that deescalated the situation from “School Shooting: We’re Gonna Die Any Second” to “Kidnapping: also we know their identities and vehicle,” which probably gives them at least an hour unless Toedad has really prepared to disappear off the grid. More likely, they’re staying in the same vehicle, in which case the cops could catch up with them before he gets Becky to a camp or whatever is his plan.
It’s a figure of speech. I didn’t mean to say that the police literally show up in minutes, making them useless only in crises that are measured in literal seconds.
The notion that we have “At least an hour” is also optimistic. Becky is being held captive by an armed and violent man who plans to discipline the gay out of her. Every minute she spends with him is a minute too many. He could be doing anything to her even as we speak.
And yeah, an hour is optimistic. If I was ToeDad (shudder to think), I’d be meeting up with a pastor who would take her off to ex-gay-camp in another vehicle.
Remember that when Becky called Joyce (and when Joyce presumably called for Amazi-Girl), Becky did not know about the gun yet. So we don’t really know what Joyce would have done if she had known about the gun, but to deal with a father she knew who was doing something wrong but not, like, technically dangerous or anything (and remember, whom she thought she could reason with and *definitely* never thought would have a gun), Amazi-Girl may have seemed like just the level of help needed.
Joyce might call the police now. When she texted Dorothy she didn’t know about the gun and probably wanted to avoid involving the police and getting Becky kicked off campus.
Also, the Ruger No. 1 is a one shot falling block for two reasons: one shot is all some hunters want, and it can handle larger loads. If anyone is interested.
Your comment made my day. I loved Videl’s storyline more than literally anything else in the series, because it showed, for the first time, what a “normal” person’s perspective on all the crazy stuff might be. All the other humans had been along for the ride so long that they were gradually eased into it. Videl learns that Gohan can fly and aliens are real and about her father’s lie and that her boyfriend is half alien and that death is cheap and then she *meets God,* all in the space of like three months. Hell, most of that happened in the space of like a day and a half.
I love how she just…leaped into the frame like that. The only thing higher than the ground in the immediate area right now is the fountain. Did she just…run up onto that just to jump down?
She came out of the fountain. She has the ability to assume liquid form like Alex Mack, so she uses the university’s plumbing to get around undetected.
I just made an Alex Mack reference. I haven’t so much as thought about that show in 15 years, and now I may need to watch it. Why the hell do these things happen to me after midnight?
The tone’s been screwey since “Clever girl”, and there were issues even before that. I like that Willis is trying, but this level of seriousness may be too much for his style.
Serious is one thing (I’d be fine with this strip not being so serious, but whatever), but when you have super serious and then this, the contrast is pretty jarring. It’d like if Steve Urkel got drunk, beat the crap out of Laura (I think that was her name), and then got in a car and crashed into a crowded playground. And then got out of the car and said “Did I do that?” and the audience cracked up.
That’s what I mean. Willis has to do a joke every few pages. It’s just how the comic works, even Freahman Family Weekend had some laughs. Which was fine then, personal drama and humor going hand-in-hand is what this comic was built on, but this is a serious violence and risk situation where characters dying is supposed to be the focus and instead we’re getting jokes. That just doesn’t work for me.
I much prefer this strip when it’s not being so dark and serious, but I think, if Willis wants to go there, he needs to cut the jokes out entirely until that storyline’s done with. And honestly, even if he did that, some things you can’t really come back from that easily. Like, a couple months from now, if Walky’s making some wisecrack about his grades, it’ll seem kind of off to me in light of this plot, especially if a regular character isn’t there because they’re dead.
Also, to me, it seems like the seriousness is outweighing everything else lately. I get that creatively and personally people go through phases, but I haven’t looked forward to this strip as much as I used to, for a while now. Day after day of strips about attempted date rape, suicidal alcoholism, abusive parents, homophobia wears on me.
This doesn’t seem super jokey though? Like it’s definitely black humor, not a goofy “haha Walky turns into a buffoon when he sees a pretty girl” type joke. Seems like the sort of thing someone who dresses up as a superhero to deal with her anger issues might say.
Joke isn’t the right word. What Becky’s dad is doing is super serious and dangerous. And then you have Amazi-Girl, which has generally (not always, but initially) been portrayed as more exciting and fun than not. I guess it’s more the fantasy element of Amazi-Girl I’m referring to.
Like Toad said, the last line reads like an action movie one-liner. Not quite a joke, but it dials back the tension a bit and gives the audience a chance to relax. If this doesn’t qualify as enough of a joke for you, look at “Clever Girl” a few days ago, which is what made me give up on this storyline. In either case, this storyline has to be very tense due to the subject, so relaxing that tension at all broke my ability to buy the risk.
To be clear, this is still one of the best webcomics around today, I just feel like this story is too far on the dark side for how you write the comic.
The “clever girl” line really took me out of it. I couldn’t figure out what on earth he was talking about, and then when I got it it just seemed like a really weird time for a Jurassic World reference. Plus, from what I’ve seen of his character, he doesn’t seem like the type to be quoting secular movies.
This is literally the only webcomic I read regularly, but with this story’s it’s getting to be a bit much for me.
“Not quite a joke, but it dials back the tension a bit and gives the audience a chance to relax.”
Exactly what you said, but without sarcasm?
I mean, that reads like a passage from a Storytelling 101 textbook that explains exactly why breaking up long tense sequences with little less-tense bits is a fantastic thing.
I think part of the issue is the pacing of the comic. In something like an action movie, the pause in between sequences wouldn’t be as long. Hence a quick quip during the big cinematic fight scene doesn’t have as much time to sink in and feel weird. Here, we’re getting a full 24 hours between each strip and pausing the action/drama for a relaxing segue that takes just as much time as the action can end up affecting the atmosphere a bit.
Personally, the past couple strips also feel a bit off, because as an audience we want to focus on the immediate action. Aren’t there people about who should be panicking? Where are the police? Stopping for a couple strips to have Joyce finally breaking the swear barrier is a bit of a sudden stop.
I think on a strip binge, it wouldn’t feel as disjointed. But because each strip has an equal amount of screentime, it does on a day-to-day basis.
To clarify, I think scene/tone changes can work, but they have to be sufficiently gripping to distract the audience away. During Freshmen Family Weekend, the jumps between Ruth/Blaine and the Walkertons worked and ended up tying together nicely, because the audience managed to get sufficiently interested in both within a strip of switching. Joyce swearing doesn’t have the same grip, at least to me.
I have to jump in just to say I am really enjoying the current storyline; I find it really gripping; and I appreciate the lighter moments as a chance to catch my breath.
I know this is a heavy storyline, but so was the Blaine one; and honestly, with all the concerns about Becky’s situation, it would have been heavily anti-climactic and a real letdown to have her arc be “Becky applies for work. Becky gets hired immediately at Galasso’s where she earns decent money with tips. Becky moves in with Marcie, dates Dina, and saves up and gets to attend college again, only Anderson this time, with all her new (and old) friends, taking biology and learning science. And making fart jokes with Walky. Butts!”
For me it’s all about the contrast. You have: Becky angry to see her dad-dad pulls out a rifle-girls flee in terror-Jurassic World joke-Dina gets attacked and pinned down by gunman-dad fires rifle-dad abducts Becky-college student superhero swoops in.
Well, the final two lines of the strip kinda form a joke, in that Amazi-Girl’s response specifically makes for a pretty snappy punch line. Was I not supposed to laugh at that? Because if I wasn’t then I’m gonna feel bad.
Hmm… This… was intended to be a response to Willis’s comment just a little bit above, but I seem to have screwed it up somehow? Would kill for the ability to edit/delete my own posts.
Well there was that one time Steve Urkel was in a Superman costume and beat up some guy robbing a bank… except that turned out to only be his fantasy and when he actually stood up to confront the robber for real, the guy immediately told him to sit back down and he immediately did so. And then Carl Winslow, the actual police officer, showed up and handled the situation.
So yeah, there is potentially a pretty good parallel in Family Matters to this situation, after all.
I just remember so many older sitcoms being that way. You’d have joke after joke after joke and then something super serious and then more jokes.
Actually, All in the Family would have to take the prize in this area, now that I think about it.
Huh, this doesn’t seem like any shift in tone to me. It would be if Amazi-girl were genuinely a superhero, confidently swooping into our serious plotline like a deus off a machina.
Instead she’s a college girl with serious emotional difficulties she’s trying to resolve through superhero cosplay. Ok, she’s been granted an unusual level of skill. But her victories are against vandals and bullies, and more than once trying for more has just brought Amber’s issues to the fore.
In short: “Toedad is in over his head now” would be inconsistent. This is more “damn, it’s good Amber is trying to help but I hope she isn’t so deluded that she gets herself shot.”
I’ll grant that Clever girl was a little off, but that’s because it was just too excellent. I can hardly fault imagine faulting Willis for not wanting to miss that opportunity.
For her to hear “an armed man fired a gun in front of a crowd of strangers and then kidnapped his daughter at gunpoint” and think “sounds like a job for Amazi-Girl!!!”, rather than “I need to call 911 immediately and make sure Joyce is okay” just seems really strange to me.
It is strange, but it goes with how Amber has been characterized:
1. She’s not quite balanced, to the point of literally splitting her personality.
2. She has a past with an abusive father.
3. She failed to stop someone who hurt Joyce and committed herself to not failing that way again.
4. She does crazy things, even beyond the limits of vigilantism, when her past issues come up.
Yes, calling 911 would be appropriate, and it’s still possible she will. But for her to instead immediately commit to saving Becky from her abusive father makes perfect sense as how that character should react.
And it’s entirely possible that her first step towards saving Becky will be to call 911 while following the car and maintaining contact with it.
I predict that she will be parkouring over the campus keeping him in her sights while on the phone with the police (and griping that she really needs a headset), but when he reaches the public streets the cops won’t quite be there yet. She will therefore jump onto the car, Toedad will try to throw her off, the car will crash but not too horribly, maybe some broken bones but no broken spines, and Toedad will crawl from the wreckage to find it surrounded by cops.
For me, at least, it’s more that having Amazi-Girl in this storyline just feels ill fitting, and takes away from Joyce and Becky’s drama. She has an at most tenuous connection with Joyce, so it feels like if, I don’t know, Carla or Danny swooped in to save the day. And if this does end up being the moment where Amazi-Girl screws up badly, then it just seems odd to have that in a Joyce/Becky storyline. Her rage issues, growing reliance on her coping mechanism, and beatdown of Blaine were about her.
Clever Girl just kind of took the wind out of everything, though. Really bad time for an entirely comedy based strip. Jokes work well in dramatic set pieces (see Danny’s sheer obliviousness when he didn’t realize Blaine had kidnapped him), but it just fell flat.
Of course, that’s really just judging this strip on its lonesome. Willis could totally surprise me.
It’s not that I think Amazi-Girl is a comedy character; she isn’t, but she’s not an actual Batman-like hero or anything. She’s a messed up kid trying to compartmentalize her rage issues and self loathing and direct them in a flashy way, and it’s weird to have her come in all Big Damn Heroes-like in this strip, especially when it involves characters she’s barely involved with.
Mostly I think it’s unnecessary to drop Amazi-Girl into the plot considering she barely has anything to do with Joyce, and the idea of this caped nut actually having an impact on what was an incredibly serious, realistic storyline about parental abuse, the darkest side of religious fundamentalism, and campus shootings just kind of takes me out of the whole thing the same way Clever Girl did with its poorly timed Jurassic Park joke.
Having said all that, I’m being way too hypercritical of this development
considering it’s been all of one strip, so I think I should back off.
Well, as much fun as the concept of Amazi-girl is to the fans, it is a really bad way of dealing with anger issues, especially as she looks for excuses to get into altercations and be the hero, probably so she can run from the memory of when she wasn’t. With everything going the way it has been for her, i.e. pretty decent for a violent vigilante, including the fact that her boyfriend genuinely went for Amazi-girl over her, it will take something EXTREMELY serious to change her path now. This may be the horrible Willis induced wake-up call she needs, one way or the other…
It’s one thing when Amazi-girl is just hassling litterbugs or something. But when you have a real-word, serious problem like a homophobic, controlling, delusional on some level father abducting his daughter, I really don’t get it at all. Like, how the creative thought process would lead you there.
Also, given how he reacted to Dina “stealing” his daughter from him, I doubt he’s going to respond well at all to a woman wearing a mask and a skintight outfit.
Dude, controlling megalomaniacal kidnapper fathers are what Amazi-Girl is all about. Roughing up car thieves and douchebros is just how she kills time between daddy issues.
Either she’ll get shot, or some kind of incident will happen that will cause Toedad to get his face burnt or a huge scar, or some kind of injury that severely alters his appearance, and then he’ll become crazy and everyone will give him some nickname and he’ll commit incredibly high-profile crimes for Amazi-Girl to stop.
Unless she, for a reason I can’t possibly fathom, get a ride on the back of Sal’s car…I’m not sure how she’d catch up.
Amazi-girl ain’t got not batmobile.
I’m pretty sure that, if Joyce were to explain the situation, she’d volunteer to carry Amazi-Girl to the rescue. That’s when things start getting seriously weird. When the cops pick up a zip-tied Ross, he’s raving about being attacked by two costumed heroes. Amazi-Girl identified herself but all he knows about Sal is the Spider emblem on her gloves and belt buckle.
Thus the legend of Amazi-Girl and the Spyder is born.
How’s she even going to catch up to him? I mean she’s always seemed more of a parkour type of person, but Toe Dad is literally out of her reach at this point.
Also she’s…well Amb-Amazi-Girl doesn’t exactly look like she’s physically capable of catching a moving car on foot.
Wow. I didn’t think Willis would go this direction. I thought for sure it’d be handled by the cops.
It’s a good thing that this is a fictional world, Amazi-Girl. In the real world you’d end this with a hole in your midsection. Since this IS a fictional world, Godspeed.
I’m moderately sure she’s still gonna end up with a hole or two in her. Given that the author seems to be making deliberate parallels to real life gun violence I doubt this is gonna wrap up cleanly with a message like “Vigilantes are the answer to gun violence. So long as there are people like Amazigirl around people like Blane are harmless.”
Amber/Amazi-Girl has some baggage when it comes to dads being abusive, manipulative shitstains. Specifically the sort of baggage that ends up with those same shitstains being hospitalized.
Then again, Ross has a gun and has pretty well proven he doesn’t care who gets hurt, so long as its in the name of “fighting the Devil’s influence” or whatever. And Amber/Amazi-Girl hasn’t been in any of the preview panels since… September 19.
Well if we stick to the people on the site’s cast page, let’s see…
Joyce, Walky, Dorothy, Dina, Billie, Ruth, Carla, Joe, Ethan, Mike, and Sarah(?) are all accounted for.
Danny, Jacob, Roz, Sal, and Marcie aren’t shown, but they haven’t been particularly involved with this event aside from Joyce’s recent conversation with Sal.
ummm how are you going to catch them in a car? or are you just going to show up to the house later tonight and get her? i know!! time to debate the amaze-girl cycle!!!
Seriously, it’s something like 60 miles to the state border, so in 45 minutes this is FBI jurisdiction. Call the cops, report “Gun, Campus, Kidnapping, Hate Crime”, and wait for the helicopters.
Amazi-Girl is entirely capable of killing. Remember when she killed Dorothy to preserve her secret identity and started impersonating her so no one would notice? *pause* Oh, sorry, that was just a fanfic I’ve been meaning to write.
HIPAA ought to protect her, because they’re not supposed to even state that Amber O’Malley is there in the hospital unless she okays it, but it’s easy to mess it up.
Oh, but what if Amazigirl explained the situation and Sal was all “Okay, but me and the bike are a package deal” so they have to team up.
But that puts Amazirgilr in a messed up headspace for the venture because she keeps having traumatic flashbacks. Sal starts noticing the similarities between this and her earlier encounter with Joyce and the pieces begin to click into place as she thinks through the I’m sure very small list of people who might experience these sorts of flashbacks around her. One thing leads to another and they both begin a process of healing.
Man, everyone seems to forget about the fight Amazigirl and Sal had not too long ago, in the parking lot.
I do agree that Amazigirl is going to head for Sal’s bike. I also think that Willis has brought everything to a head very carefully–including the Sal/Amazigirl feud.
Amber recognized Sal and sent AG after her.
It’s not clear if Sal recognized Amber because she’s the sort that wouldn’t say unless there was a point to doing so.
Things that stood out to me:
-Sal fought AG, neither clearly came out on top.
-Sal has show that she’s easily stronger than Ruthless.
As someone with a mental illness (and several friends with the “scary sounding” MIs like DID, schizoaffective, etc) I am very grateful for that last clarification from Amazi-Girl.
Also, Joyce’s expression in the first panel kind of makes it look like she’s a tortured hero who’s just turned to the dark side and AG is swooping in for the confrontation in which she gives in and becomes a full blown supervillain.
(That said, I also think it’d still make a good comedic beat for AG to in fact turn around and call the police. Or call but also try to help.)
Ditto as someone with the same mental illness as Amber (DID). Toedad’s problem isn’t crazy, it’s that he’s an abusive asshole willing to put the excuse of his religion over the well-being and happiness of his daughter.
No it doesnt!
Psychopathy is a mental illness, but most people with mental illness would not want to be associated with that particular illness, there are dozens of mental illnesses that have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with each other!
Wanting to take another persons life is DEFINITIVELY one, but again, that has NOTHING to do with ANY other mental illness.
This really isn’t difficult to understand.
Which is why I believe that any murder, other than self defence or accidental ones, should not be a jail-able offence, but instead forced psychiatric treatment. It still baffles me how a court can rule a serial killer who eats his victims for breakfast with cereals can be ruled “sane” by the court. This is not acceptable normal behaviour people, and neither is what we are seeing here.
Call the cops, tell them to look for the green beater car with the neon paint stains all over it, chase the car, blast it with neon spray paint, get the hell out of range.
I’ve always been ambivalent about the presence of a costumed vigilante–even a non-powered one–in a comic that’s meant to be a more true-to-life version of Roomies!. So as much as I want to see Becky rescued, I really hope it’s not going to be at the hands of Amazi-Girl. Instead, I hope Amber tries and fails, without getting hurt of course. And that this failure will be the catalyst for her finally retiring the costume and getting some help. I hope, finally, that the comic will have the cops rescue Becky and bring Ross to justice.
I dunno, her getting a bit hurt could eb good. Can’t dress up and run around the campus like a crazy person when you’re recovering from moderate injuries. She’d have to learn to deal with things in a healthy way instead of compartmentalising everything.
I still would rather she didn’t get hurt. That wouldn’t be necessary for her to realize it’s time to rethink this whole double identity business. (I know, I’m a softie. I can live with that.)
that fourth panel. that moment of contemplation. it’s when the crazy person realizes that they have to make peace with their crazy to succeed in this impossible challenge because joyce has been possessed by the comments section and is suddenly hyper-aware of the reality of the situation.
but seriously, watch their eyes throughout this strip. especially in the last 2 panels, you really know where things stand
I think people are forgetting you can’t drive and shoot a rifle at the same time, she doesn’tneed to get her RIGHT now and can stake out the place, that amber KNOWS he has a gun AND how amazing she is.
You don’t have to when you opponents aren’t armed.
Against police in squad cars, with smallarms and sharpshooters, Big Toe Daddy is in a weak position because he can’t shoot without getting out of his car.
Against unarmed teenagers on a motorbike he’s in a strong position because he doesn’t have to.
There are still so many possible ways that this can end in disaster, and yet I can honestly say that I am feeling an overwhelming surge of relief knowing that Amber is going to take care of this.
Yeah, that seems like the only plausible answer. I mean… she’s coming down pretty vertically, and the statue is kind of low to the ground (it’s of Venus, and she’s lying down), and also there’s a bit of a distance from the statue to the edge of the fountain where Joyce is standing, but sure, why not.
It also really amuses me to think that the other students around the fountain area just sort of watched Amazi-Girl climb up there to sneak up on Joyce.
I think you’d do fine going with a heavy-weight spandex. You’d want something stretchy for the freedom of movement; but you’d want to stay away from things like lightweight jersey knits because of the tendency to run (the material, that is. Not the wearer).
Looks similar to the fabric they used in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and that was apparently heavy spandex turned inside-out so it wasn’t so shiny. Something like that would be perfect. Check the swimsuit material aisle of your fabric shop. Er, your friend’s fabric shop.
Ooh! Amzi-Girl can do the Shatner voice! (while Joyce does the Kirk hands thing! No, wait. Kirk does it palms facing each other) “Spock! We must. bring. Dina back!”
No, Amber. Amber, no. Amber, I admire your determination and your desire to protect people, but please, no. Amazi-Girl is immune to criticism, not bullets.
Whelp possible deaths.
Amazigirl
Dina
Becky
Oddly enough
Ethan I think will get caught up in this somehow.
hoping for no deaths of course since well honestly so soon into the semester I feel like that would just result in a lot of people quitting school and joyce mose assuridly quitting or being pulled out of school. so i’m hoping that’ll prevent death and doom moments..
though i suspect after this the parents will still want her out maybe
(1) Amazi-Girl is here as a result of the help that Joyce called for before she knew about the gun.
(2) Joyce realises that rescuing a kidnap victim from a gunman in a car is too big a job for a teenager on foot, even if she is a traceur and judoko.
(3) Joyce or Amber realises, or both realise, that whereas helping an 18-year-old runaway evade her father might have been a job that the police would not give sufficient attention to, rescuing a kidnap victim from a gunman is something in which they will be quite active and on the right side.
Therefore:
(a) Joyce will now phone 911.
(b) Or at least Joyce will stay here and wait for the police who come to investigate.
(c) Joyce will not rush off with Amazi-Girl on Sal’s motorbike, leaving the police without and source for:
(i) the victim’s name,
(ii) the perpetrator’s name,
(iii) information about the perpetrator’s state of mind,
(iv) knowledge that the victim is carrying a mobile phone, and the number of that phone
(v) the knowledge that Dina is missing, with reason to apprehend foul play.
Further breath will be saved for cooling porridge.
Plan A will be to assemble a war party of suicidal hot-rodders high on chrome spray paint fumes and tell them that whoever brings back Becky will be awaited in Valhalla.
Um, I vote plan B, with the addition of “follow the car and keep on the line with the police so you can tell them where the car’s going, but do not try anything stupid”. It’s real easy to pull out Dina’s cell phone battery, after all.
…. wow, that sounds boring and utterly devoid of punchlines / cool scenes, though.
Pretty much any rescue attempt must by necessity risk Becky’s safety at least a little bit. It’s pretty naive to think you can remove her from the gunman’s captivity without her getting caught up in the resulting mayhem.
Plus I suspect you’ll probably need at least a little bit of help for this job. It’s a bit above what you’ve been equipped to deal with so far. So you’ll likely be asking somebody else to risk their own safety as well, at which point they also become involved in the decision-making process.
I’m not sure which I like more in this comic. Amazigirl, doing the badass “I’ve got this” thing, or Joyce who is normally prone to flights of fancy and relying on other people pointing out the logistical dangers of the situation in a sorta angry-rational way that also implies concern for Amber and Becky’s safety ahead of wanting to get her friend back.
Also, just wanna say I KNEW SHE WAS GONNA SHOW UP SOONER OR LATER! Now we just need Dex and Moneky Master, and Toedad’ll get stubbed…. Yeah, not gonna lie, not proud of that one.
Umm, Amazi-Girl, you have the superhero persona, but not the actual powers like being bulletproof or regeneration. You really ought to stand down. (Although we all know you won’t.)
[If I remember Champions correctly (and it’s been 25 years since I last ran it, and 1st ed. to boot) Amazi-Girl needs a Pd of 12 and Full Damage Resistance to shrug off rifle bullets which are 2d6 RKA IIRC.]
Not just a gun, but Ross and Becky are in a car and had a good head start. I want to stay positive, but unless she has an Amazi-mobile I’m leaning towards something else thwarting his escape.
Yeah. I’m wondering if she’s gonna pull the keys to the Amazimobile out of that utility belt or how she’s gonna handle that.
It’s not just a matter of speed either. Amazigirl doesn’t even know what direction to head in right now. Joyce can tell Amazigirl approximately what direction Ross’s house is in but that’s not really enough. People have speculated that they’ll be able to track Dina’s phone but we’ll see where that goes.
Well, depending on the layout of the campus, he might have to take a roundabout way to the street while she can deke directly over to the front gates, assuming Joyce can confirm that’s the direction in which he was headed.
I figure she takes off after the car with 911 on the phone, to give them intel on his whereabouts, while Joyce calls in the details on her phone.
If it doesn’t end up with Amazi-girl flinging herself onto the car I honestly will be shocked.
Hey guys, know what would be terrible? If we simply never ever saw either Becky or Ross again. People ending up dead or in hospital after some kind of confrontation would be awful, but how much worse would it be if Becky got into the car, and that was simply the last anyone ever saw of her?
Pro tip: Even if they have a gun, NEVER get in the car. While you are outside, you have a chance. Usually they won’t want to wave the gun around or fire it off because of attracting attention; even then, your chances of getting help even if you are shot are much better if you are out of the vehicle.
If you meekly do what they say and get in, you are now in their complete control, and the odds are pretty much 100% that if you ever are seen again, it’s as a corpse.
NEVER get in the car! Yell! Scream! Run! But don’t get in the car!
OTOH, in this case, she was saving Joyce. She’s more at risk now, but Joyce isn’t. That’s a situation where it could make sense to get in the car.
And in this case, Ross maybe disturbed enough that he’ll be lulled – thinking she’s now going to be obedient. The rifle’s a lot harder to use in the car. He hasn’t even made her get in back where she’d be far more trapped.
One moment of inattention at a stop light or some such and she can be gone. With no risk to Joyce.
she does have a superhero utility belt though, with grappling hooks and who knows what else. She’s like Batman… but not quite as good and not as experienced
BTD’s rifle probably fires .223 Remington, which is 2d6 RKA with a +1 stun multiplier. But it could be as weak as .22LR, which is a d6 RKA. All according to ‘Dark Champions’ for 5th edition. resistantPD of 12 would be necessary to be quite safe, but rPD 9 will probably do if you count on the villain not rolling too well. Then 60 PD non-resistant to keep the stun out, though 36 PD and a decent CON would probably do.
I love how Amazi-girl tipped her hand by admitting to knowing that Dina is dating Becky within a day of it happening… I really hope everyone but toe dad remains unharmed.
The main reason I don’t want this to work has less to do with realism and more that I think it would be better (/worse for Ross) legally speaking for the police to get him with Becky in the car and a gun.
So, off topic of today’s comic, but I am now forced to wonder if Willis didn’t have Joyce get that set of boots because they reduce the need to figure out what she is wearing since she is the main character and appears so often. “Tuesday, boots. Wednesday, boots. Kicking Mike in the shin… socks… which ARE LIKE PLAIN WHITE BOOTS! GENIUS!!! Thursday, boots” etc?
“Go to the police, you stupid woman! Why does nobody ever just go to the police?”
But seriously, this is all happening really fast. Toedad’s only just driven off this minute. The fact that no-one’s called the cops yet – or at least, no-one’s been seen doing it – doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen at all. The passing of time is just being stretched out even more than it normally is.
Right. This whole incident, from when Toedad first pulled out the gun in “Deceptress” to now, has probably taken around 3 or 4 minutes, 5 minutes at most. Even assuming that the background guy that originally saw him pull out the gun called the police immediately, they’d still take a few minutes to respond.
Um, guys. Normally I’d agree with all of the “OMG CALL THE COPS” stuff, but seriously — do none of us see the problem(s) with calling the cops here?
Someone needs to maintain the status quo. The cops will not do that. The cops will expose Becky as being a homeless queer woman with no university status and Ruth will throw her out of IU’s housing.
Ideally if the cops were to resolve this matter satisfactorily the rest of that wouldn’t be an issue anymore. Becky wouldn’t need to hide from her father off the grid. They could set her up with some temporary accommodations until she gets a job and then she’d just be like Marcie. A non-student living off campus who hangs out with the cast a lot.
Heck, with her dad behind bars she might be able to look into going to school again. I’m sure when you’re looking for student loans there’s some accommodation you can sign up for that’s all “My dad’s in prison, let’s leave him out of this process”.
The police? The school? The “system”? The mysterious Queer Faeries who swoop in to save homeless gay youth? Oh wait that last one doesn’t exist.
Yeah. It’s that lovely nebulous “they” that people talk about, when they want to believe there’s help available for the helpless, because they don’t want to feel like it’s their responsibility to do anything. But there is no “they”, and precious little in the way of help available to anyone. In the real world, no one is going to set a homeless teenage lesbian up with a place to live and a way to support herself, because she’s simply not important enough to matter.
I’m sure Willis will treat his characters better than reality would… but if he treats them too much better, it will scan as “bad writing”, because human beings in reality simply do not treat each other as well as we’d like to believe.
The police, ideally, are supposed to do a bit more to help than just swing their gun around. Arresting an abusive husband might also be accompanied by directing the wife to a battered women’s shelter. That sort of thing.
Well, I guess A LOT depends on jurisdiction, but… it doesn’t generally work that way, no. The police station might have a pamphlet with a few phone numbers. Maybe. Presumably in a college town there would be SOME resources for Becky, but I’d imagine most of the really helpful stuff would be gated to actual students. And as for school… well, the issues that people under 25 face, if they’ve got abusive, neglectful or uncooperative parents who don’t want to cooperate with the aid process, are pretty damn substantial.
The thing I’ve noticed about this Willis dude is, he can write the hell out of a damn good story, so I have faith in whatever resolution he comes up with. But in terms of real life… yeah. There is so much less help available for people in all sorts of bad situations than most people would think or expect – and for a great many people, across a great many walks of life, the only thing the police can be counted on to do is make things worse.
Becky doesn’t need help from the system, she just needs her dad in jail so she can actually go home and get things. Grab some clothes and whatever cash she can get so she can rent an apartment, once she’s got an address she can apply for jobs. She’ll likely have to work fast food but she’s got the attitude for it, and as we’ve all guessed can probably get hired by Galasso.
The biggest problem up until now was having to both sustain herself and keep a low profile with no rescources. Getting her dad out of the picture eliminates two of those problems.
Yeah, because her dad being in jail means Becky magically has a credit history with which to rent an apartment, and funds to sustain herself with until she gets a job. It means she’ll get a job right away, in a college town, and be able to sustain herself with it. All we have to do is eliminate the hater, and everything else is gonna be A-OK.
…I deeply and sincerely hope that your life continues to be structured in such a way that you can sustain that naivete indefinitely. Or, maybe, that by the time you’re old enough and jaded enough to realize how wrong you are… you won’t be, anymore.
It took me two days to get a job with no prior experience or more than a highschool diploma and I’ve had apartments offers thrown at me. It’s not my fault if your system is shitty.
Becky has been kidnapped at gunpoint by her father, who has made it plain that he’s going to “save” her from being gay no matter what he has to do or who has to die. Even if the cops’ intervention does get her exposed and thrown out of IU, that is still better than her situation at present. Especially if we can get Ross arrested.
If I thought Amazi-Girl could handle this situation covertly on her own, in a way that kept Becky safe and didn’t leave Ross coming back with the shotgun again, I might vote for that instead. But I don’t. (Short of murder, which I don’t think she’s up for and raises all sorts of new problems.) So: call the cops.
I do like the fact that we’re taking a moment to denounce the “Scary Crazies with Guns” thing.
Amazigirl has mental illness. Her flashbacks have even driven her to violence on occasion, as we saw when she tried to take down Sal and company. Ultimately though she’s good and heroic and not to be feared.
Ross on the other hand isn’t driven by any mental illness. He’s driven by religious zealotry. He’s driven by bigotry. He’s driven by selfishness, by his ability to hold his daughter at gunpoint and contextualize this in terms of the “sacrifice” he’s making by putting himself at risk. He is as far as we know the picture of mental health. Just a bad person with bad values who does bad things.
That’s based on an old image I remember DW doing of her that gave her slight rolls of fat. Although I can’t find the image and thinking back, it could have been muscle.
But yeah, Billie has had several comments made about her weight, so surely she would count?
You know, narcissims, psychopathy and delusions can all be linked to mental illness.
The thing is, though, that there are some types of mental illness where the sick person is likely to never admit the problem and keep on doing damage around them.
Isn’t “a bad person with bad values who does bad things” one of the people that we pay the police to protect us from? It’s also the kind of person that needs serious help from a mental health professional. After all, Charles Manson could also be described as a bad person with bad values who did bad things. I’ll agree, in Manson’s case the psychosis added a whole new level of bad, but the description still fits.
Finally! I was wondering when someone would ask about Dina. When last we saw her, she was fighting with Toedad. Toedad reached the fountain with a scratch on his face, but what did he do to Dina? He’s big enough that he could have crushed Dina and left her dead under a pile of leaf litter. And what’s this about Satan taking Becky’s mom? Does that mean she’s also a lesbian? Or—given her daughter’s hair and complexion—perhaps she was a lapsed Catholic who left her whackadoo hubby and returned to the Church? Or maybe she’s become something really scary—like a Democrat.
Toedad told Becky that he hadn’t hurt anyone once he got to her at the fountain, but that still leaves the question of if he didn’t hurt Dina, then what happened and where is she? I also hope we get to find out more about Becky’s Mom because that bit about Satan taking her was so open to interpretation. There are so many threads going on at once here that I’m hoping they can all be wrapped up, and that was before Amazi-Girl got thrown into the mix. Just waiting to see what happens next and hoping that we get to see some police involvement at some point.
From the timing, easy to bet he high-tailed it to his car the second he saw Becky; and that Dina’s fine if not scared and a little bruised, but she still has to get all the way to the fountain on foot.
Given her experiences with her own dad kidnapping Danny, Panel 3 was always going to set off her “I need to act now” switch. But as we’ve seen in her encounter with Sal and friends, her in this mode is not very analytical and prone to silly mistakes, which is not the best place to be when going against a fanatic with a gun.
Hey, you know what the saddest possible conclusion to this would be, and therfore the one that Damn You Willis is most likely to choose?
It would be if Amazi-Girl and Dina and Sal’s Motorcycle mount an amazing rescue and subdue Toedad, but Becky, in tearful conflicted emotion, says to let him go and promises to never disobey him again.
Like when Superman beat Darkseid and tried to set his subjects free, only to find that they were too entrenched in their oppression to let him do that.
I mean, Toedad is even kind of shaped like Darkseid.
No, the saddest possible conclusion would be if they couldn’t catch up to him again and we simply never ever saw or heard from Toedad or Becky again. Just… nothing.
I think that Amazi-Girl’s expression is more like “Shit… this is crazy, what’s going on here!?” in a terrified, stunned way. But yes, the whole swooping to help her friends in need thing is pretty badass.
Inb4 Amber finds and teams up with Dina, and the two of them go through hell and fire, narrowly escaping serious injury and/or death and arrive just in time… To watch the police put Toedad in the back of a squad car with Joyce already on scene.
True. Though Amber’s assholishness is dependent on who you ask. I’m guessing Sal and her circle have a fairly low opinion of the self-proclaimed “hero”.
While Amber has something like PTSD, Toedad obviously leans towards psychopathy, which I think we can all agree is a more asshole-y (and a less neurotic) version of insane.
Remember Willis! You said you wouldn’t kill off anyone in this world. don’t make me pull a “Damn You Willis!!! ” out of the bottom drawer. i still have a gross of them left over from ShortPacked.
Well, Ross didn’t have the balls to kill anyone, aside from doing it out of emotion and what he found to be love. He probably got through to Dina somehow and told her his intentions, since there are always two sides to every story.
I dunno. I like to be a mediator. It’s a Libra thing.
I really didn’t expect the story to go in this direction. I have no idea what is going to happen next but something tells me that the superhero geek in Willis enjoyed every moment of writing and drawing it!
I find my mind echoing other commenters. Amazi-girl is not suited to this sort of thing (desperate men with guns are far away from her usual fare).
I have to wonder if this is just more setup for a deeper downward spiral. Amber badly wounded, her identity exposed, and in court ordered psychological therapy as an alternative to jail time for her criminal acts.
Though still good odds for Becky to eventually be rescued.
I’ll just wait to see what Amber’s plan is. She may have learned a little from her defeat at the hands of Sal and her friends to expand her equipment inventory a little.
FWIW, I can’t see Ross being willing to shoot initially. He’ll try to bluster and threaten and that won’t work too well with Amazi-Girl. By the time it occurs to him to shoot at her, she’ll be so close that the size of a single-shot long gun would be an immense disadvantage. His only viable tactic would be to threaten Becky but I’m not sure he’d think to do that quickly enough.
But seriously, Amber, be careful. :/ This is an incredibly complicated situation, and the law does not look kindly on well-meaning civilians, let alone masked vigilantes, complicating things even more.
To an extent, but I believe the law tends to look upon armed kidnapping (since it was coerced and she IS an adult by the law tmu) a little more harshly than well meaning vigilantism. Assuming this doesn’t go HORRIBLY south and end up with someone dead. Which might have been your original point in which case let’s just hope Willis doesn’t Willis this into a dark place.
Considering how, as commenters keep pointing out, it’s quite probable Becky is in danger RIGHT NOW, I don’t think the law is going to have much against Amazi-girl’s intervention here. Especially if she doesn’t have any weapons herself.
No, Amazi-girl’s REAL foil here is COMMON SENSE. And she’s immune to that, so.
1) Oh my god. Oh my god, she didn’t come because she knew about Toedad. She came because Joyce did what she promised to Sal and texted Dorothy about her walking problems, and Dorothy called Amazi-girl for THAT. That’s… that’s so sweet???
2) BAD TIMING, tho.
3) However. Toedad’s gun is pretty huge and unwieldy for inside of a car, and he has Becky sitting right next to him. I doubt she’d let him shoot at anyone – I mean, he’ll probably be able to discharge a bullet SOMEWHERE, but she is 100% in position to disrupt his aim. In the car with her, he has nowhere near the advantage he did near the fountain.
I strongly suspect that Amazi-Girl’s most powerful weapon will be Ross’s inability to believe that he had just been run over by what looks like two costumed heroes (Amazi-Girl and Sal) on a motorbike who just threw spiked balls under his tyres. He’ll probably try to resist but, at his size, two smaller, agile foes who know how to fight would be a serious problem that I don’t think he would be able to beat.
I’m wondering if Becky will surprise everyone by begging her rescuers not to hurt her father too badly.
If I’m right about Amber and Sal putting aside their issues with each other to save Becky, then it could easily be the start of a very, very odd and yet productive partnership.
I don’t think Amazigirl would appear in broad daylight to walk Joyce across campus. I think she came because Joyce phoned someone after Becky phoned her and told her about Toedad but not the gun. 11 October.
And they can BOTH be crazy. Beleive me, there is plenty of crazy to go around, there is no shortage, and no one has a monopoly!
Not sure the involvement of a vigilante will improve this scenario… But its a comic so she can do something, when in reality she probably wouldn’t even be able to catch up to them!
JJAbrams fans, plz dont read.
Lens flare: Then, genocide of 6 Billion Vulcans, but it’s ok because none of The 7 died, so, no big. Plus, they were bigotted, superior, sneering assholes, so …. Plus, the Federation still has their books and art and stuff. In the original Startrek, one persons life/death could matter a ton. In JJABRAMS Trek, 6 billion deaths don’t really matter at all. At least in Star Trek: Into Dumbness, it was only hundreds of thousands of deaths that didn’t matter. … (And, no, I am not wedded to Old Trek. I liked the tv, the movies ranged from ok to sux. I like the reboot. I like the re-imagined characters. I like the actors. But I dislike the plotting dumb as rocks, and I despise the morality of genocide as a lazy, unimaginative plot device.)
We know what kind of gun it is, but everyone in the strip just knows its a gun. Chasing someone with a replica antique single shot is different from chasing someone with an AR-15 or modern pistol. If only AG was crazy enough to read the comments.
Looks like an ensemble rescue, AG and her arch enemy Sal riding together to save the day.
Okay I could easily jump to conclusions about how dumb this could be but Willis has surprised me before so maybe it’ll turn out Amber, like, literally has a death wish and so this won’t end well for her because what do you expect for an unarmed college student going up against an armed man in a metal box going at least twenty miles per hour.
Yeah, this is pretty silly and feels like it’s coming right out of left field, but Willis is pretty good at throwing curveballs so I think it’s worth waiting and seeing before readying my waterski and a line-up of sharks.
Amazi-Girl has shown to be almost ridiculously athletic and powerful, though. She backflipped off a wall, quickly climbs trees, and then slid down a powerline using a pair of shears and landed onto a moving truck.
Fuck cars seriously why are more people not scared of them as I am.
Is it just that Americans are used to traffic laws? Is that something they take for granted? I was not raised in that environment. I grew up thinking traffic lights were just friendly suggestions.
Or Amazi-girl again fails Joyce. Just like before with Ryan, she takes off and doesn’t even find Toedad and Becky.
If she distracts Joyce from calling the police quickly enough, she could even be responsible for him getting away.
That might even be darker than her getting hurt fighting him.
I’m seriously hoping that Joyce asked for AmaziGirl’s help in being someone to talk to about her trauma prior to Becky’s panicked entrance, because otherwise she’s a special kind of stupid for not calling the cops and telling them what Ross did and giving them definitive leads on where he sped off to and where he might be headed, as well as alerting them that there’s a hostage in the car.
She texted Dorothy when Becky called her and told her her Dad had found her, but Joyce didn’t yet know he was chasing her around the campus with a gun. At that point, her response of, “Okay, meet me here; I’ll call in Amazi-girl” isn’t unreasonable.
Even if Police haven’t arrived at the fountain, how can there not be multiple sirens dopplering up as they converge at high speed? Last night I was listening to multiple emergency sirens screaming thru the night, BLOCKS away from our apartment, HELLA cacophony, but organized, can tell their vectors from the sound.
Well, it all happened pretty quickly there – I think the police would take at least five minutes from being called and the conversation from when toedad pulled out his gun near the fountain was pretty short.
Yes they haven’t arrived, but if they are on their way then the sound of sirens would already be reaching the fountain ahead of them, even if they are still minutes away, I believe: ‘all units, shooter reported at the fountain’ >>> activate the flashers and the screamers and go, go, go — would it not?
I have a feeling Toedad is not actually “on the run”, anymore. His guard is down, since Becky kinda surprised him with her capitulation (“Y-yes” and no more anger eyebrows). In his mind, he achieved his goal (first: get Becky. next: schedule Pray-the-Gay-Away intervention) The ride home, is probably an awkward silence, but he thinks all is well, and the rifle is on the floor behind his seat. He could actually not even consider there is still a chance on police, etc, since the family matter is resolved, with Becky leaving with him. Anything else will be a surprise to him.
What’s impressive is how all of their behaviour actually makes sense when you think about it.
Why did Joyce summon Amazi-Girl?
When Joyce got the call from Becky, she had Dorothy’s contact info already pulled up onscreen. Dorothy is Joyce’s means of contacting Amazi-Girl. As well, at the time Joyce called for Amazi-Girl, she thought the situation was just keeping Becky safe from her dad while also keeping anyone at the university from finding out about Becky’s living situation. Joyce already knows that she can trust Amazi-Girl with her secrets – Amazi-Girl never revealed that she had been the Whiteboard Ding-Dong Bandit (not that anyone believed Joyce when she told the truth).
After the confrontation at the fountain, Joyce no longer considers this a job for Amazi-Girl – indicating that she would not have summoned her had she known a gun was involved.
Why is Amazi-Girl still volunteering to help?
First of all, Amazi-Girl feels particularly responsible for Joyce, given that she inadvertently let Ryan escape at the party, a fact well established during their conversation in The Whiteboard Ding-Dong Bandit, and views this as a chance for redemption. As well, not only is Ross a bad and abusive (psychologically at the very least) parent, much like Amber’s own, we have a hostage situation involving an abusive parent – very similar to Amazi-Girl/Amber’s fight with Blaine to save Danny.
And at the same time that she is committing to act, she is conceding the bad judgement of such a move. Her reference to herself as crazy may be both an acknowledgment of her psychological issues and an admission that, in the colloquial sense, ‘I must be crazy’ for deciding to go through with such a risky course of action.
Why do you all think the police haven’t been called? Police do not come immediately. No emergency service comes immediately. It hasn’t been that long since Ross shot the gun. It has not been that long since Ross first pulled out his rifle. The police might be on their way, but it would not make any sense for them to have arrived just yet. Just because our main characters haven’t called the cops doesn’t mean that a background character hasn’t. Cool your jets people.
Also, man this storyline is good, I’ve been on the edge of my seat each strip! Can’t wait to see what happens next. I have a sneaking suspicion that someone gets shot…but I’m not sure if it will be Amazi-Girl! Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if she disarmed and shot Ross.
Just gonna throw it out there, if any of these characters watch the news they may have a very good reason not to call the cops – namely, they don’t want to see Toedad (or anybody else) killed. There have been too many incidents where police shot first and asked questions later, especially if a suspect is perceived to have a weapon.
If they don’t think Toedad would actually shoot a person, I can see trying to resolve this themselves rather than involve the authorities and potentially make Becky an orphan.
Am I the only person who thinks the ambulance is going to be summoned because of a car crash? That an upset Toedad is going to be distracted by approaching sirens, or attempt to pray while driving, and run an red light straight into another vehicle?
On one hand I’m happy that more of the cast is getting involved in this sub-plot. I understand Joyce is the main character, but I don’t want this event to overshadow everyone else.
On the other hand, what the fuck is Amazi-Girl supposed to do (that a squad of police officers can’t do a hundred times better)? I really don’t see her actions affecting the comic at all.
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“Shit just got real. Luckily, I have experience with incredible assholes!”
“Danny?”
“Eew, no not in that senseHOW DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT ANYWAY”
“Butts Disease?”
“WTF”
…
sorry
(not sorry)
So that’s what all the Butt Taco stuff is about…
“The Incredible Asshole” sounds like just the worst superhero name.
Might be a pretty good superVILLAIN name…
But it doesn’t sound threatening enough to be a villain. It’s the name of some dude in tights who just goes around being a total dick to people. He doesn’t rob anyone or save anyone, he just has an amazingly smug sense of superiority.
Better than her last one.
… Mike?
That *is* Mike’s superhero name.
Reed Richards, then?
I think Booster Gold used that one for a while didn’t he?
Heh. “The Incredible Asshole” sounds no less threatening than “the Penguin” or “Ventriloquist” or any of the other totally-non-threatening-sounding Batman gallery of rogues. :p
Barely started reading the comments on this one and I’m already laughing my head off!
Definitely Mike’s name.
Let us now proceed to not make suppositions about said superhero’s powers.
Fires rainbows from his anus.
Lets hope it has nothing to do with Capra aegagrus hircus
the incredible toehole
How did you know Toedad’s secret pet name for his wife?
So if Mike ever joins forces with Amazi-Girl in crime fighting…
Shit just got UNreal. Surreal? Absurd? Ridiculous? Oh, well: She’s Amazigirl.
Imaginary? Complex?
Amazi-girl is the hero we need right now.
Bulletproof?
Nope, immune to critiscism
Hope she has kevlar anyway.
…this is gonna end with Amazi-Girl getting shot, isn’t it?
I did wonder if Willis would ever face us to death in his comics.
Lol, that brings me back. Looks like someone isn’t familiar with Willis’s first run of these characters. (Also, I REALLY appreciated the coincidence of the very next commenter’s avatar pic.)
Immunity to bible quotes.
At least she’s realist about herself
AG has unlocked the Insight Into Her Insanity achievement!
Amizi-girl is an 18 year old in a costume chasing after an armed man in a car.
The hero we need right now is the police
Amazi-Girl is the hero we HAVE right now.
also she probably has pepper spray somewhere in her many bags of wonder. can’t shoot nobody accurately if your eyes are screaming in pain!
Pepper spray can work really well against an unarmed attacker, if your goal is to get away from him. Toedad has a rifle. Pepper spray’s maximum range, and this is for the really large cans, is about 25 feet. Also, pepper spray has to hit Toedad in the face. Bullets are effective (to varying degrees) everywhere on the body.
Don’t bring a can of pepper spray to a gun fight. If it’s an option at all (and in this case, it is), CALL THE POLICE.
I think she could do fine with pepper spray because he won’t necessarily open fire (and one miss means reload time), but she would be risking spraying Becky (and the wind changing and getting her, obviously)
Most modern hunting rifles can fire more than one shot before reloading.
It’s been speculated that it’s a specific (Ruger 1V?) single shot rifle (and it looked as though he reloaded after firing last time), so that’s what I’m going off of. What I’m mostly thinking is, if Amazigirl had been a minute earlier (Becky not in car, Amazigirl able to close the distance), I think pepper spray would be good despite gun. As it is, the gun isn’t the only concern.
It may be of modern manufacture, but in design terms, it’s not really a modern hunting rifle. It’s a Ruger No. 1 Varminter, a single-shot breech-loader with no magazine, and a falling-block action that hasn’t been “modern” since about 1885. The action has to be manually worked (that’s what the lever underneath is for) and a new round loaded by hand between shots.
Unfortunately, we saw butthole dad doing this after he fired it into the air, so he does have his one shot.
Def. a Ruger, and I’m still betting that it’s single-shottedness was chosen by the Willis for eventual dramatic significance. A Chekhov’s gun, if you will.
Not downplaying the insanity it requires to take on a mentally/emotionally unstable le man with a gun in the first place, she has a better chance against that rifle. Shot capacity aside, unless you have actively trained for it, using a rifle like that in close quarters. Omar is problematic. If amazigirl can come get close enough to him unawares, even hip firing something that long and bulky had low chances of hitting. After that miss, it’s now just a long hot metal club. Unfortunately, given Toedad’s physique, that still poses a considerable threat. Maybe she has a 1,000,000 volt tazer too.
It’s not actually practical to use a rifle or shotgun while driving, I imagine.
Not that I’m clear how Amazigirl expects to catch up to a moving car while on foot…
She’s all crazy parkour in this comic, but I’m wondering if she’s not going to acquire Sal’s motorcycle or some other bike to go after them.
Amazi-hotwire kit go!
Investing in Sal’s Amazi-Bike
She’s Amazigirl
Hey, a hero we have is the kind we need!
Yeah, Amber’s gonna get herself shot or something. We need the Amazi-police, not Amazi-girl.
Aw man, that would just be the cherry on top. Amazi-Girl gets shot, so Amber has to go to the hospital…
where Blaine is recovering.
I’m hoping that Amari – girl beats seventeen kinds of holy sh*t out of Toedad, and he wakes up next to Amber’s Dad. He just looks over and asks, “Yellow spandex? Big fu*clkng ‘A’ on her chest? “
Let this happen enough that the hospital opens it’s own “Amazi-girl recovery wing”.
And the nurses will all be dressed like Amazi-girl, just to see the fun reactions. (Toedad and Blaine are jerky enough that I don’t feel bad suggesting that we traumatize them just a little bit.)
I’m bothered that she didn’t say something like ‘You call 911. I will get her.’
I’m hoping Joyce has enough sense to call 911 on her own accord.
I know she’s not the most experienced superhero so I can’t put it on Amazigirl*, but although I hope Joyce will (I mean, hopefully the police are already coming, but we don’t (/she doesn’t) know that other people haven’t had bystander syndrome and in any case more reports won’t hurt), I don’t think we can completely expect it of her seeing as she is probably in a kind of shock (and this is assuming she fully grasps that Becky, being 18, it really is a kidnapping).
*If Amazigirl was a ‘proper’ super I might put it on her, because a larger scale super should actively know that victims might not be thinking clearly
But is she the hero we deserve
(I’m sorry)
(Are not.)
Can’t wait to see the rest, it’s getting all kinds of epic
She’s just the hero we deserve.
She’s the hero we have right now, Superman is the hero we need right now.
Or Supergirl, either one really, I’m not picky.
This is NOT going to end well.
Or it’s going to end perfectly, with a sexy Becky sandwich between one slice of Dina and one slice of Joyce.
And Toedad in jail. After “falling” a few times into Amazi-girl’s fist.
While Sal and Amber amiably discuss the transformer’s version of cards against humanity ?
I would totally play a CAH with Transformers cards.
And the Academy Award for___
A windmill full of corpses
goes to___
Whirl.
He ran into my fist. He ran into my fist ten times.
HE HAD IT COMIN’
How? Clearly she’s going to track him down (Probably to Red Lobster where he and Becky are having dinner) and have a calm debate with him about how Becky isn’t really committing any sins, tell him Dina and Joyce love Becky and want her to be happy, and it will end with ToeDad enrolling Becky in college!
Then Amber will realize that Toedad’s misguided actions – while terrifying and wrong – stem from a place of love, use it as a catalyst to speak with her own father and find out that his actions came from their own place of twisted love. They realize together his mistakes and discover that he is not irredeemable. Amber’s father undergoes therapy and emerges as a complete human being with all traces of his former self eradicated.
And also Amber has a $50 gift card for Red Lobster so everything ends with no problems whatsoever.
I sense… sarcasm.
You do recall the name of the comic, right?
Completely unrelated but that is the cutest puppy in the multiverse
His name is Fluffy. He is the destroyer of worlds.
OMG! It’s Fluffy! Run, run, run for your lives, AHHHHHHHH!
I rather enjoy destructive magical puppies!
*squees and hugs Fluffy*
End well? Man, this didn’t even START well. (Not a complaint about the comic. Loving this!!)
Did she climb the statue just to enter from the top of the frame?
Amazi-Squirrel can defy gravity
IN SPACE
…wait
She learned about making sure to waste time on ridiculous/dramatic entrances from Tuxedo mask.
The combination of that and Joyce’s rage!face make’s it look like she’s a super villain about to be thwarted once again by her nemesis.
I did wonder about that. I’m writing it off as artistic license for dramatic visuals.
Champion pole vaulter. Someone will find the pole later and be really confused.
Damn It, the Amazi-Girl signal.
Damn it Amber. I’m gonna be so fucking mad if you get shot.
Amber. Getting shot. Getting sent to the same hospital her father is in. Just… y’know. Willis stuff.
ah shit
OH GODDAMMIT
Ah ha, not the only one that thought that.
As shit that means she can’t NOT be shot.
I wanted to say “shoot”, but that would’ve been a horrible unintentional pun.
Please don’t get shot, please don’t get shot, please don’t get shot, please don’t get shot.
This is the chapter where we explore Amazigirl’s death wish. No guarantees on how far we explore it though… Or how far the bullets explore her.
A near miss is perfectly enough to explore mortality with.
I… honestly feel that if she does something relatively smart, saves Becky, and gets significantly injured (but not killed), that would be just about the perfect ending to this arc. She gets closure about “being brave enough”, has it effectively demonstrated that was never a good goal to begin with, gets to foil someone else’s asshole Dad, and does something legitimately superhero-y within the bounds of reason and this being an almost entirely non-fantasy comic.
Plus Becky gets to stay. Which is awesome.
(Triple word score points if somehow Toedad and Blaine meet in a way that gets them both arrested.)
Almost…but not entirely non-fantasy.
Plus or minus some allowance for dramatic effect. Such as the first panel.
Yep. And allowing for a fuzzy and shifting boundary between fantasy & reality. Plus, I’m pretty sure that the DoA-verse is almost, but not entirely like ours. Not as wierd as the QC-verse, but still…
………..He does have a gun though.
Amazigirl has a utility belt, but so far we’ve only seen her pull condoms out of it. Hopefully she’s got a couple trinkets she’s been saving for a day like this.
Like a cell phone. That she uses to call the police.
And a 3DS.
If she puts an Amazingcondom ™ over the barrel of Toedads gun, then that bullet is not going to be able to …anyway, those are Amazicondoms ™; they’re bullet-proof. Made of Kevlar. Or, Amazi-Stuff ™ …
That sounds uncomfortable.
*Toedad lifts his gun to fire*
*Amber sticks an Amazi-condom into the barrel*
This is why she carries Magnums.
(Note to self: scan previous replies B4 adding own…& think B4 posting.)
But whether it will be of use is debatable.
Guns are great for starting an offensive at long-range, but if you are being attacked first at close, they can quickly get in the way, become useless or be used against you – like when Dina attacked him, he couldn’t use it to shoot her until after she’d been thrown off because he couldn’t aim or control it while she was on him and right in his face.
People above have said it is a single shot rifle from what they can tell, and it needs reloaded after each shot, so it was great for pursuing Becky and being used to create terror.
But its length could be seriously be a hindrance in a tight space like a car, especially if he doesn’t have the time to aim (because he might crash if he takes his focus off the road) and because Becky will probably fight to keep him from shooting someone, even if it means crashing the car straight into a wall.
Shit just got worse.
I dont know what she jumped off of and i dont care BRING MY BABY BACK
wait fuck the hOSPITAL PREVIEW PANEL STILL LOOMS LIKE A SPECTRE IN THE DISTANCE
I’m so hoping that Willis is just trolling us, and Joe gets tonsillitis or something, and the other characters show up to deliver ice cream.
And Joe’s tonsils get removed by The Todd, so Joe gets to meet his spirit animal.
twenty one days later…
We haven’t seen Amber in any of the preview panels.
I’m worried we may have just found out who that ambulance is gonna be for.
It would fit the title of the chapter if the mortality of her hero alter was to made brutally clear, grounding her from the dream of its protection.
and she does seem to be defying gravity in that first panel…
I dunno… the title ends with ellipses which indicate the next line is coming.
In this case, Toedad wants to ground Becky in the kiddie punishment sense but mkght be willing to put her in the ground.
The next lines of the song are “take a message back for me. Tell them how I am defying gravity. Kiss me goodby, I’m defying gravity. And you can’t bring me down.”
If that is the case, then we may be seeing the end of Toedad’s ability to control her in any way, shape, or form. I still think we’re going to get the shocked expression bang panel with no indication of who got shot…
But now I think the reveal is Toedad, taken down by a cop.
I’m just relieved Dina seems to be on her feet, and that both her eyes seem fine.
YES!
OK now shit’s getting real, real shitty that is.
Amazi-Girl, I don’t know how to say this, but I know we all ASKED for someone to kill Toe-Dad but I don’t think any of us actually wanted you to show up and very possibly DO it.
This is why, you should be careful what you wish for.
If she manages without getting herself or Becky (and possibly Dina as well, but she’s probably not actually in the trunk) injured I’d be okay with it. Especially if it’s painful.
We have unleashed amazi-girl onto toedad. Now, we should just sit back and watch with popcorn.
Aw damn it, she’s going to end up in the same hospital as Blaine
That or Toedad will end up in the same hospital as Blaine. AND THEY SHALL COMBINE FORCES.
THE POLICE ARE BETTER EQUIPPED. Do these people not have any brains at all in their heads? Jesus, where is Sarah when you need her? Or Dorothy? Or even Billie? Any one of these people would call the police.
yea honestly i love you amazigirl but there is no reason not to call the police in this situation. It’s a school shooting, they’re gonna be here eventually
The only thing mr. Toe needs to tell the police is “I am her father” and they wont do anything about her being with him.
Perhaps if it was just the kidnapping, but because it’s an armed kidnapping where he fired the gun, I think they’ll still take him in
Not if she says pretty much anything other than “Yeah, let us go”.
“He’s my father, but he threatened me with the gun he’s got right there”, pretty much escalates the situation.
Which she might not do because she still doesn’t want him killed.
Even beyond that, the firing the gun on campus thing gets him hauled in, held and questioned at the absolute least.
If they know the full story they will take her anyway and separate her from him before questioning her.
No they do not. They’re college students. And they’re fictional. and all fictional people are exponentially more stupid and irrational than people.
I wouldn’t say *more* stupid and irrational than real people. They just happen to match the stupidest and most irrational of real people. Of which there are a disturbingly large number.
I disagree. People are stupid but fictional people tend to be an exaggeration of that. because if they made good decisions then there’d be no story. You give people too little credit.
For example: How many want to shout at the screen during horror movies. Don’t split-up/go there/open that/etc
Stoopid people.
Those things aren’t really stupid, though.
The audience knows it’s a horror movie, knows there are enemies or monsters, and recognizes genre conventions. The characters are more like “The Hell is that noise? Did I leave the TV on?”
If you think that fictional people are unrealistically stupid, then I congratulate you on managing to avoid jobs working with the public because good lord, some people actually, really are that stupid.
Like, one of the dumbest callers I had was a guy who had Internet with us, but refused to pay his bill, because while his package included like 80 GB/month, he was only using three, and figured he shouldn’t have to pay for the part he wasn’t using. Ran his bill up to like a grand, whereupon he got cut off, so, incredibly irritated that we would cut him off for not paying his bill for months and months, in a fit of pique he returned his modem to us.
And then got home and called tech support to find out why his Internet wasn’t working. Really, dude?
–Or there was the guy smoking out at the pumps at the gas station where I worked who, when told he had to put out his cigarette, decided to prove how non-flammable gas actually is by pouring out a puddle of gas onto the ground in front of the attendant, and tossing his lit cigarette into it. I shit you not.
Yes, true, the conditions have to be just right for the vapours to ignite; but if they do, everyone in a two-block radius dies, so, like, please put out your goddamned cigarette? And not in a puddle of gas?
I hate idiotic, unreal choices in movies. And then I end up with these idiots. Frankly, movies tone the stupid down for being too unbelievably unrealistic.
An awful lot of the time, fictional people are more rational than real people, because it’d be annoying otherwise.
Wait, so are you saying it wouldn’t be a good story if, say, in Dark Knight rises, during the opening plane-jacking, the villains forgot to do proper safety checks on their harness gear?
That sounds like a pretty boring way to resolve this arc!
When you have seconds to spare the police are only minutes away.
The spare seconds have all run out by now.
They aren’t dealing in seconds right now. Becky got into the car and that deescalated the situation from “School Shooting: We’re Gonna Die Any Second” to “Kidnapping: also we know their identities and vehicle,” which probably gives them at least an hour unless Toedad has really prepared to disappear off the grid. More likely, they’re staying in the same vehicle, in which case the cops could catch up with them before he gets Becky to a camp or whatever is his plan.
It’s a figure of speech. I didn’t mean to say that the police literally show up in minutes, making them useless only in crises that are measured in literal seconds.
The notion that we have “At least an hour” is also optimistic. Becky is being held captive by an armed and violent man who plans to discipline the gay out of her. Every minute she spends with him is a minute too many. He could be doing anything to her even as we speak.
Ah, that makes more sense.
And yeah, an hour is optimistic. If I was ToeDad (shudder to think), I’d be meeting up with a pastor who would take her off to ex-gay-camp in another vehicle.
My personal speculation is that Toedad’s planning to drive them both off a bridge so Becky can die before committing the horrendous sin of gay sex.
The car flies off the bridge, only to land on an artificial structure made of wood and mud.
Her life is saved by a beaver.
yey
In which case he’s already too late, since that’s how he found out she likes the ladies in the first place.
They only kissed. There are many more sins she could commit.
I think maybe Joyce does not trust the police to not fill Toedad full of unnecessary ventilation after what Becky said.
Remember that when Becky called Joyce (and when Joyce presumably called for Amazi-Girl), Becky did not know about the gun yet. So we don’t really know what Joyce would have done if she had known about the gun, but to deal with a father she knew who was doing something wrong but not, like, technically dangerous or anything (and remember, whom she thought she could reason with and *definitely* never thought would have a gun), Amazi-Girl may have seemed like just the level of help needed.
Exactly. Evil she knew about. The necessity of intervention she knew about.
“Physically dangerous violent criminal” is newer information she did not have when she made the very quick decision of who to call.
Joyce might call the police now. When she texted Dorothy she didn’t know about the gun and probably wanted to avoid involving the police and getting Becky kicked off campus.
When seconds count, the police are minutes away.
Yeah, you may have heard that one.
Also, the Ruger No. 1 is a one shot falling block for two reasons: one shot is all some hunters want, and it can handle larger loads. If anyone is interested.
Amazi-girl has been training with Mr. Son Gohan in order to learn how to fly. No big deal. It’s an elective class.
Dude, you don’t want Gohan teaching her. All he teaches is Jobbing 101.
Gohan has only lost 2 fights in the last 20 years. And one of them was against a god.
I’m just saying it’s pretty sad when your life peeks at 9.
Depends on what your goals are. Gohan doesn’t want to be the ultimate badass, he just does that because people won’t leave the Earth alone.
Your comment made my day. I loved Videl’s storyline more than literally anything else in the series, because it showed, for the first time, what a “normal” person’s perspective on all the crazy stuff might be. All the other humans had been along for the ride so long that they were gradually eased into it. Videl learns that Gohan can fly and aliens are real and about her father’s lie and that her boyfriend is half alien and that death is cheap and then she *meets God,* all in the space of like three months. Hell, most of that happened in the space of like a day and a half.
I love how she just…leaped into the frame like that. The only thing higher than the ground in the immediate area right now is the fountain. Did she just…run up onto that just to jump down?
Amazi-Girl, you are fantastic
Also, “Dina’s Becky”. That’s just adorable.
She came out of the fountain. She has the ability to assume liquid form like Alex Mack, so she uses the university’s plumbing to get around undetected.
I just made an Alex Mack reference. I haven’t so much as thought about that show in 15 years, and now I may need to watch it. Why the hell do these things happen to me after midnight?
Alex Mack was amazing and you have nothing to apologize for. Thanks for the nostalgia.
That entire ERA of television was amazing
As I remember it anyway.
You have a Tardis. Maybe you traveled back in time to when that show is popular, got it wiped from your mind, yet your subconscious remembers?
[Written by a person who has no idea what you’re talking about]
OMG. The sub-text! Was that a LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA reference?!
If it was you win the Internet.
A few days of emotional gut punches and we get Lost Skeleton of Cadavra AND Alex Mack in the same discussion. I love you guys
Welp, I think we know who ends up hospitalised now, maybe.
Mike, of course.
Sal, obviously.
Some random student who sprains their ankle walking into the shower in the residences.
In a way, you’re all right.
It’s Mike, Sal and Johannes (he’s on exchange) who try to do a three legged race in the residence showers.
Okay, the tone of this now just seems wildly wrong to me.
The tone’s been screwey since “Clever girl”, and there were issues even before that. I like that Willis is trying, but this level of seriousness may be too much for his style.
Serious is one thing (I’d be fine with this strip not being so serious, but whatever), but when you have super serious and then this, the contrast is pretty jarring. It’d like if Steve Urkel got drunk, beat the crap out of Laura (I think that was her name), and then got in a car and crashed into a crowded playground. And then got out of the car and said “Did I do that?” and the audience cracked up.
I admit, I laughed.
That’s what I mean. Willis has to do a joke every few pages. It’s just how the comic works, even Freahman Family Weekend had some laughs. Which was fine then, personal drama and humor going hand-in-hand is what this comic was built on, but this is a serious violence and risk situation where characters dying is supposed to be the focus and instead we’re getting jokes. That just doesn’t work for me.
I much prefer this strip when it’s not being so dark and serious, but I think, if Willis wants to go there, he needs to cut the jokes out entirely until that storyline’s done with. And honestly, even if he did that, some things you can’t really come back from that easily. Like, a couple months from now, if Walky’s making some wisecrack about his grades, it’ll seem kind of off to me in light of this plot, especially if a regular character isn’t there because they’re dead.
Also, to me, it seems like the seriousness is outweighing everything else lately. I get that creatively and personally people go through phases, but I haven’t looked forward to this strip as much as I used to, for a while now. Day after day of strips about attempted date rape, suicidal alcoholism, abusive parents, homophobia wears on me.
This doesn’t seem super jokey though? Like it’s definitely black humor, not a goofy “haha Walky turns into a buffoon when he sees a pretty girl” type joke. Seems like the sort of thing someone who dresses up as a superhero to deal with her anger issues might say.
That is, it’s more like an action movie one-liner than a “joke.”
i am extremely curious to learn what you think the joke in this strip is
Joke isn’t the right word. What Becky’s dad is doing is super serious and dangerous. And then you have Amazi-Girl, which has generally (not always, but initially) been portrayed as more exciting and fun than not. I guess it’s more the fantasy element of Amazi-Girl I’m referring to.
I meant jokes like the “clever girl” line. Wasn’t saying there was one in this strip.
Like Toad said, the last line reads like an action movie one-liner. Not quite a joke, but it dials back the tension a bit and gives the audience a chance to relax. If this doesn’t qualify as enough of a joke for you, look at “Clever Girl” a few days ago, which is what made me give up on this storyline. In either case, this storyline has to be very tense due to the subject, so relaxing that tension at all broke my ability to buy the risk.
To be clear, this is still one of the best webcomics around today, I just feel like this story is too far on the dark side for how you write the comic.
The “clever girl” line really took me out of it. I couldn’t figure out what on earth he was talking about, and then when I got it it just seemed like a really weird time for a Jurassic World reference. Plus, from what I’ve seen of his character, he doesn’t seem like the type to be quoting secular movies.
This is literally the only webcomic I read regularly, but with this story’s it’s getting to be a bit much for me.
“Not quite a joke, but it dials back the tension a bit and gives the audience a chance to relax.”
Exactly what you said, but without sarcasm?
I mean, that reads like a passage from a Storytelling 101 textbook that explains exactly why breaking up long tense sequences with little less-tense bits is a fantastic thing.
I think part of the issue is the pacing of the comic. In something like an action movie, the pause in between sequences wouldn’t be as long. Hence a quick quip during the big cinematic fight scene doesn’t have as much time to sink in and feel weird. Here, we’re getting a full 24 hours between each strip and pausing the action/drama for a relaxing segue that takes just as much time as the action can end up affecting the atmosphere a bit.
Personally, the past couple strips also feel a bit off, because as an audience we want to focus on the immediate action. Aren’t there people about who should be panicking? Where are the police? Stopping for a couple strips to have Joyce finally breaking the swear barrier is a bit of a sudden stop.
I think on a strip binge, it wouldn’t feel as disjointed. But because each strip has an equal amount of screentime, it does on a day-to-day basis.
To clarify, I think scene/tone changes can work, but they have to be sufficiently gripping to distract the audience away. During Freshmen Family Weekend, the jumps between Ruth/Blaine and the Walkertons worked and ended up tying together nicely, because the audience managed to get sufficiently interested in both within a strip of switching. Joyce swearing doesn’t have the same grip, at least to me.
I have to jump in just to say I am really enjoying the current storyline; I find it really gripping; and I appreciate the lighter moments as a chance to catch my breath.
I know this is a heavy storyline, but so was the Blaine one; and honestly, with all the concerns about Becky’s situation, it would have been heavily anti-climactic and a real letdown to have her arc be “Becky applies for work. Becky gets hired immediately at Galasso’s where she earns decent money with tips. Becky moves in with Marcie, dates Dina, and saves up and gets to attend college again, only Anderson this time, with all her new (and old) friends, taking biology and learning science. And making fart jokes with Walky. Butts!”
For me it’s all about the contrast. You have: Becky angry to see her dad-dad pulls out a rifle-girls flee in terror-Jurassic World joke-Dina gets attacked and pinned down by gunman-dad fires rifle-dad abducts Becky-college student superhero swoops in.
*mentally unstable abuse victim with self control issues swoops in*
I do agree with your point on the Jurassic Park reference though. Funny, but absolutely destroyed the atmosphere that can been created.
The “clever girl” line made you give up on this comic. And yet here you are.
Well, the final two lines of the strip kinda form a joke, in that Amazi-Girl’s response specifically makes for a pretty snappy punch line. Was I not supposed to laugh at that? Because if I wasn’t then I’m gonna feel bad.
Hmm… This… was intended to be a response to Willis’s comment just a little bit above, but I seem to have screwed it up somehow? Would kill for the ability to edit/delete my own posts.
Well there was that one time Steve Urkel was in a Superman costume and beat up some guy robbing a bank… except that turned out to only be his fantasy and when he actually stood up to confront the robber for real, the guy immediately told him to sit back down and he immediately did so. And then Carl Winslow, the actual police officer, showed up and handled the situation.
So yeah, there is potentially a pretty good parallel in Family Matters to this situation, after all.
The Family Matters episode was called “Dog Day Halloween,” by the way.
I just remember so many older sitcoms being that way.
You’d have joke after joke after joke and then something super serious and then more jokes.
Actually, All in the Family would have to take the prize in this area, now that I think about it.
Huh, this doesn’t seem like any shift in tone to me. It would be if Amazi-girl were genuinely a superhero, confidently swooping into our serious plotline like a deus off a machina.
Instead she’s a college girl with serious emotional difficulties she’s trying to resolve through superhero cosplay. Ok, she’s been granted an unusual level of skill. But her victories are against vandals and bullies, and more than once trying for more has just brought Amber’s issues to the fore.
In short: “Toedad is in over his head now” would be inconsistent. This is more “damn, it’s good Amber is trying to help but I hope she isn’t so deluded that she gets herself shot.”
I’ll grant that Clever girl was a little off, but that’s because it was just too excellent. I can hardly fault imagine faulting Willis for not wanting to miss that opportunity.
For her to hear “an armed man fired a gun in front of a crowd of strangers and then kidnapped his daughter at gunpoint” and think “sounds like a job for Amazi-Girl!!!”, rather than “I need to call 911 immediately and make sure Joyce is okay” just seems really strange to me.
It is strange, but it goes with how Amber has been characterized:
1. She’s not quite balanced, to the point of literally splitting her personality.
2. She has a past with an abusive father.
3. She failed to stop someone who hurt Joyce and committed herself to not failing that way again.
4. She does crazy things, even beyond the limits of vigilantism, when her past issues come up.
Yes, calling 911 would be appropriate, and it’s still possible she will. But for her to instead immediately commit to saving Becky from her abusive father makes perfect sense as how that character should react.
And it’s entirely possible that her first step towards saving Becky will be to call 911 while following the car and maintaining contact with it.
I predict that she will be parkouring over the campus keeping him in her sights while on the phone with the police (and griping that she really needs a headset), but when he reaches the public streets the cops won’t quite be there yet. She will therefore jump onto the car, Toedad will try to throw her off, the car will crash but not too horribly, maybe some broken bones but no broken spines, and Toedad will crawl from the wreckage to find it surrounded by cops.
For me, at least, it’s more that having Amazi-Girl in this storyline just feels ill fitting, and takes away from Joyce and Becky’s drama. She has an at most tenuous connection with Joyce, so it feels like if, I don’t know, Carla or Danny swooped in to save the day. And if this does end up being the moment where Amazi-Girl screws up badly, then it just seems odd to have that in a Joyce/Becky storyline. Her rage issues, growing reliance on her coping mechanism, and beatdown of Blaine were about her.
Clever Girl just kind of took the wind out of everything, though. Really bad time for an entirely comedy based strip. Jokes work well in dramatic set pieces (see Danny’s sheer obliviousness when he didn’t realize Blaine had kidnapped him), but it just fell flat.
Of course, that’s really just judging this strip on its lonesome. Willis could totally surprise me.
I don’t mind amazi-girl showing up, as we did see her in very serious arcs involving Blaine and Ryan where it didn’t ruin anything….
i do think the jurassic park reference was really not appropriate for the current storyline though.
It’s not that I think Amazi-Girl is a comedy character; she isn’t, but she’s not an actual Batman-like hero or anything. She’s a messed up kid trying to compartmentalize her rage issues and self loathing and direct them in a flashy way, and it’s weird to have her come in all Big Damn Heroes-like in this strip, especially when it involves characters she’s barely involved with.
Her tenuous connection to Joyce is centered around the question “Why did you let him get away?”
And Amazi-Girl is all about abusive dads. They’re kinda her thing.
Mostly I think it’s unnecessary to drop Amazi-Girl into the plot considering she barely has anything to do with Joyce, and the idea of this caped nut actually having an impact on what was an incredibly serious, realistic storyline about parental abuse, the darkest side of religious fundamentalism, and campus shootings just kind of takes me out of the whole thing the same way Clever Girl did with its poorly timed Jurassic Park joke.
Having said all that, I’m being way too hypercritical of this development
considering it’s been all of one strip, so I think I should back off.
Sounds like a better show already.
How about if he beats up all the characters, then committs hari-Kari in the second episode?
Well, as much fun as the concept of Amazi-girl is to the fans, it is a really bad way of dealing with anger issues, especially as she looks for excuses to get into altercations and be the hero, probably so she can run from the memory of when she wasn’t. With everything going the way it has been for her, i.e. pretty decent for a violent vigilante, including the fact that her boyfriend genuinely went for Amazi-girl over her, it will take something EXTREMELY serious to change her path now. This may be the horrible Willis induced wake-up call she needs, one way or the other…
It’s one thing when Amazi-girl is just hassling litterbugs or something. But when you have a real-word, serious problem like a homophobic, controlling, delusional on some level father abducting his daughter, I really don’t get it at all. Like, how the creative thought process would lead you there.
Also, given how he reacted to Dina “stealing” his daughter from him, I doubt he’s going to respond well at all to a woman wearing a mask and a skintight outfit.
Dude, controlling megalomaniacal kidnapper fathers are what Amazi-Girl is all about. Roughing up car thieves and douchebros is just how she kills time between daddy issues.
Yes ! She finally has the Amazi-cycle.
Can’t he be both?
SOMEONE GET THE TACOS!
I was gonna say! It’s not like they’re mutually exclusive.
Fine line, Amazi-girl. A fine line that is.
They’re two different things.
Either she’ll get shot, or some kind of incident will happen that will cause Toedad to get his face burnt or a huge scar, or some kind of injury that severely alters his appearance, and then he’ll become crazy and everyone will give him some nickname and he’ll commit incredibly high-profile crimes for Amazi-Girl to stop.
So you’re proposing something along the lines of… Toe-Face?
The face of Toe?
Booooooo!
WOOO, GO AMAZIGIRL!!!!
No, seriously though, just call the cops.
Unless she, for a reason I can’t possibly fathom, get a ride on the back of Sal’s car…I’m not sure how she’d catch up.
Amazi-girl ain’t got not batmobile.
Bike. not car.
Actually the Salmobile will be introduced in an upcoming strip.
She has shown an ability to get on top of moving vehicles.
That’s the best way for the driver to break suddenly and make her fall and injure herself
If we counted the number of ways Amber should be injured right now she’d probably be dead.
I’m pretty sure that, if Joyce were to explain the situation, she’d volunteer to carry Amazi-Girl to the rescue. That’s when things start getting seriously weird. When the cops pick up a zip-tied Ross, he’s raving about being attacked by two costumed heroes. Amazi-Girl identified herself but all he knows about Sal is the Spider emblem on her gloves and belt buckle.
Thus the legend of Amazi-Girl and the Spyder is born.
How’s she even going to catch up to him? I mean she’s always seemed more of a parkour type of person, but Toe Dad is literally out of her reach at this point.
Also she’s…well Amb-Amazi-Girl doesn’t exactly look like she’s physically capable of catching a moving car on foot.
next comic:
close-up of Toedad’s car, interior: cup of water
vibrations indicating VERY heavy footfalls
giant eye staring in the car window
it’s Dina
The Internet, you wins it.
“Must go faster!”
-Ian Malcom
In a previous comic, we saw her riding on a moving truck (I think it was how she escaped Dorothy and Walky?), so I think that could come into play.
The AmaziBicycle, perhaps?
Failing that Sal
or calling the Police.
Gonna show Toedad what true crazy looks like
Time to hospitalize a nother shitty father…and then he will be in the same hospital as Blain and they’ll have a team up.
The League of Abusive Parents – Coming to menace Amizi-Girl in 2022, or next week in universe.
Wow. I didn’t think Willis would go this direction. I thought for sure it’d be handled by the cops.
It’s a good thing that this is a fictional world, Amazi-Girl. In the real world you’d end this with a hole in your midsection. Since this IS a fictional world, Godspeed.
I’m moderately sure she’s still gonna end up with a hole or two in her. Given that the author seems to be making deliberate parallels to real life gun violence I doubt this is gonna wrap up cleanly with a message like “Vigilantes are the answer to gun violence. So long as there are people like Amazigirl around people like Blane are harmless.”
Yeah, I think this is going to be Amazi-girl biting off more than she can can chew.
Amber/Amazi-Girl has some baggage when it comes to dads being abusive, manipulative shitstains. Specifically the sort of baggage that ends up with those same shitstains being hospitalized.
Then again, Ross has a gun and has pretty well proven he doesn’t care who gets hurt, so long as its in the name of “fighting the Devil’s influence” or whatever. And Amber/Amazi-Girl hasn’t been in any of the preview panels since… September 19.
…Oh dear.
…wonder if someone made a list of the people who do not appear in the panel after today ?
Well now I have, I’m only counting characters who appear on the cast page though.
Amber
Danny
Sal
Becky
Roz
Jacob
Marcie
Clearly Jacob is in the hospital with a case of crippling sexy.
My hero <3
Well if we stick to the people on the site’s cast page, let’s see…
Joyce, Walky, Dorothy, Dina, Billie, Ruth, Carla, Joe, Ethan, Mike, and Sarah(?) are all accounted for.
Danny, Jacob, Roz, Sal, and Marcie aren’t shown, but they haven’t been particularly involved with this event aside from Joyce’s recent conversation with Sal.
That leaves Becky and Amber…
Whoops, guess I was beaten to the punch.
No problem ,you’re my hero too <3
Things are looking up!
Look out a-hole dads! Amazi-Girl’s coming for you!
Ass-holes, ass-holes, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when she’s comin’ for you?
There really isn’t many things an asshole can do.
ummm how are you going to catch them in a car? or are you just going to show up to the house later tonight and get her? i know!! time to debate the amaze-girl cycle!!!
Seriously, it’s something like 60 miles to the state border, so in 45 minutes this is FBI jurisdiction. Call the cops, report “Gun, Campus, Kidnapping, Hate Crime”, and wait for the helicopters.
Their destination is not out of state. And sexual orientation doesn’t count for hate crimes in Indiana.
Well, it bloody well should. How can any area consider itself part of the First World and not consider sexual orientation in hate crimes is beyond me.
Also wouldn’t kidnapping and forcible confinement be under federal jurisdiction regardless of whether or not a state line was crossed?
Man, so much easier to have a national police force. Y’all are weird.
Also, what roads out of Bloomington get you to the state line in anything like 45 minutes?
I want to apologize for the tone of my last few comments, I got caught up in factual issues and didn’t mean to sound insensitive of the context.
Amazi-Girl is entirely capable of killing. Remember when she killed Dorothy to preserve her secret identity and started impersonating her so no one would notice? *pause* Oh, sorry, that was just a fanfic I’ve been meaning to write.
Amazi-Girl is the hero we deserve.
Sadly, the heroes we need remain absent.
There in another universe, our best bet is for a portal to open.
Shit just got real!
C’mon Joyce, Becky pointed out how much legal trouble Toedad was gonna be in just a few seconds ago. Call the Cops!
People will say “I ‘lol’ed IRL”
I spun around in my revolving chair literally saying
” Yes. YES! Yaaaaaasss. Ahahahahaha!”
Careful, you’re turning supervillain.
I dub him MASTER CHAIR!
“I’ll have what she’s having”
So I have a new guess for who’s ending up in the hospital and I wonder what’ll happen when they figure out her identity there.
;n;
HIPAA ought to protect her, because they’re not supposed to even state that Amber O’Malley is there in the hospital unless she okays it, but it’s easy to mess it up.
Yeah, I guessed that a few days ago. Whoever the hospitalized person is going to be, things are going to be really really bad.
*plays Seal’s “Crazy” on the new improved Muzak*
Called it! Now if only I bet money on that song, darnit.
I’d be awfully conceited if I believed that David and Maggie bet on which songs the strips inspired me to “play”.
You’re humbly conceited if you do not think the DoA commentariat is betting as well.
Ssh! If he finds out about the pool he’ll want in on it, and then he can win all the money we have riding on it! Er, I mean–Squirrel!
Didn’t Muzak cease existing a couple years ago?
I hope this proves once and for all Amazi-Girl is better equipped to handle kidnapping than cops or the FBI.
Let’s just say that she’s the faster option. More cinematic too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg7X5_K7LhE
,,Quickly! To the Amazi-Cycle! …wait
Yep…
Well, it’s okay because it would have needed some decent them music to go with it.
Maybe, something along the lines of:
But, that’s just me…
Well, if you’re not gonna bother with the cops and all, what you need, right now, is a 600cc bike or somethin’…
I can see Amazi-Girl running up to Sal…”Pardon me, citizen, but I need this motorcycle to deal justice!”
I can also see Sal replying with two words, with the first word beginning with the letter “F”.
Feel free?
Probably.
Oh, but what if Amazigirl explained the situation and Sal was all “Okay, but me and the bike are a package deal” so they have to team up.
But that puts Amazirgilr in a messed up headspace for the venture because she keeps having traumatic flashbacks. Sal starts noticing the similarities between this and her earlier encounter with Joyce and the pieces begin to click into place as she thinks through the I’m sure very small list of people who might experience these sorts of flashbacks around her. One thing leads to another and they both begin a process of healing.
“Why should I wanna help you, White Man’s Privilege?”
“Because Becky McIntyre’s life may be in danger.”
Next panel is Sal racing along the road with Amazi-Girl on the pillion.
Man, everyone seems to forget about the fight Amazigirl and Sal had not too long ago, in the parking lot.
I do agree that Amazigirl is going to head for Sal’s bike. I also think that Willis has brought everything to a head very carefully–including the Sal/Amazigirl feud.
Amber recognized Sal and sent AG after her.
It’s not clear if Sal recognized Amber because she’s the sort that wouldn’t say unless there was a point to doing so.
Things that stood out to me:
-Sal fought AG, neither clearly came out on top.
-Sal has show that she’s easily stronger than Ruthless.
Sal DID just walk Joyce to the fountain. So she’s bound to be nearby.
Look, I know you like killing characters in tragic ways, but PLEASE not like this.
As someone with a mental illness (and several friends with the “scary sounding” MIs like DID, schizoaffective, etc) I am very grateful for that last clarification from Amazi-Girl.
Also, Joyce’s expression in the first panel kind of makes it look like she’s a tortured hero who’s just turned to the dark side and AG is swooping in for the confrontation in which she gives in and becomes a full blown supervillain.
(That said, I also think it’d still make a good comedic beat for AG to in fact turn around and call the police. Or call but also try to help.)
Ditto as someone with the same mental illness as Amber (DID). Toedad’s problem isn’t crazy, it’s that he’s an abusive asshole willing to put the excuse of his religion over the well-being and happiness of his daughter.
But that in itself is a form of insanity!
No, it’s not.
It really isn’t.
Rather the point of my first comment — that conflating willful awfulness with mental illness does a horrible disservice to the mentally ill.
No it doesnt!
Psychopathy is a mental illness, but most people with mental illness would not want to be associated with that particular illness, there are dozens of mental illnesses that have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with each other!
Wanting to take another persons life is DEFINITIVELY one, but again, that has NOTHING to do with ANY other mental illness.
This really isn’t difficult to understand.
Which is why I believe that any murder, other than self defence or accidental ones, should not be a jail-able offence, but instead forced psychiatric treatment. It still baffles me how a court can rule a serial killer who eats his victims for breakfast with cereals can be ruled “sane” by the court. This is not acceptable normal behaviour people, and neither is what we are seeing here.
Call the cops, tell them to look for the green beater car with the neon paint stains all over it, chase the car, blast it with neon spray paint, get the hell out of range.
Or just set up road signs and such forcing toedad to drive through a police check. Could be difficult to arrange in time, though.
HAHAHAHA… abusive fathers? Yeah, Amazi-Girl’s got this.
I’ve always been ambivalent about the presence of a costumed vigilante–even a non-powered one–in a comic that’s meant to be a more true-to-life version of Roomies!. So as much as I want to see Becky rescued, I really hope it’s not going to be at the hands of Amazi-Girl. Instead, I hope Amber tries and fails, without getting hurt of course. And that this failure will be the catalyst for her finally retiring the costume and getting some help. I hope, finally, that the comic will have the cops rescue Becky and bring Ross to justice.
I dunno, her getting a bit hurt could eb good. Can’t dress up and run around the campus like a crazy person when you’re recovering from moderate injuries. She’d have to learn to deal with things in a healthy way instead of compartmentalising everything.
I still would rather she didn’t get hurt. That wouldn’t be necessary for her to realize it’s time to rethink this whole double identity business. (I know, I’m a softie. I can live with that.)
Unessesary, true, but it’ll shave a few years off the process.
The cape looks like a tear in reality in the first panel…
that fourth panel. that moment of contemplation. it’s when the crazy person realizes that they have to make peace with their crazy to succeed in this impossible challenge because joyce has been possessed by the comments section and is suddenly hyper-aware of the reality of the situation.
but seriously, watch their eyes throughout this strip. especially in the last 2 panels, you really know where things stand
Their stares,are burning through my soul! *Ded.
I think people are forgetting you can’t drive and shoot a rifle at the same time, she doesn’tneed to get her RIGHT now and can stake out the place, that amber KNOWS he has a gun AND how amazing she is.
She is “Amazigirl” for a reason
Amber doesn’t know Ross doesn’t have a handgun.
You don’t have to when you opponents aren’t armed.
Against police in squad cars, with smallarms and sharpshooters, Big Toe Daddy is in a weak position because he can’t shoot without getting out of his car.
Against unarmed teenagers on a motorbike he’s in a strong position because he doesn’t have to.
Come on team up. Sal and amazing girl vs toedad and abusive father.
Joyce’s swear has summoned the uncanny AMAZI-GIRL!
There are still so many possible ways that this can end in disaster, and yet I can honestly say that I am feeling an overwhelming surge of relief knowing that Amber is going to take care of this.
Oh boy. One way or another this is NOT going to be pretty. Not at all.
Someone call the policeeeeeeeee ;_;
Act with integrity… no regrets.
That was the best I could do.
Okay where the hell is she coming from in that first panel? Did she gain the ability to fly?
Yeah,I’m asking myself the same thing. After she got the message,did she glide from her room to the fountain?
Yup, zipline from her room to the fountain. She installed it last week, because she is just that amazing.
That’s not flying; that’s falling with style.
+8
I think she’s jumping down off the fountain’s statue?
Yeah, that seems like the only plausible answer. I mean… she’s coming down pretty vertically, and the statue is kind of low to the ground (it’s of Venus, and she’s lying down), and also there’s a bit of a distance from the statue to the edge of the fountain where Joyce is standing, but sure, why not.
It also really amuses me to think that the other students around the fountain area just sort of watched Amazi-Girl climb up there to sneak up on Joyce.
Ross isn’t likely to be firing his shotgun while driving his car with Becky in the passenger seat.
If the Police got involved, questions are going to be raised about Becky being on Campus, and Toedad will probably end up dead or in custody.
Assuming Amazi-girl has a way of catching up to them, honestly, I’d give her better odds at resolving this without anyone getting injured.
She does have experience, after all, it wasn’t so long ago that her dad held Danny Hostage.
On second thought, giving Toedad a few bruises is fine by me, Amazi-girl.
Here we go Amazi-girl to the rescue!
First order of business: Amazi-girl uses her Amazi-phone to call the police and THEN she chases after the kidnapper.
So…
amazi-girl vs Indredibi-asshole ?
Fuck.
i want an amazi-girl costume so bad right now
…what fabric is that made of anyway? asking for a friend
rubber i think, however i would suggest kevlar
Mostly polyester.
I think you’d do fine going with a heavy-weight spandex. You’d want something stretchy for the freedom of movement; but you’d want to stay away from things like lightweight jersey knits because of the tendency to run (the material, that is. Not the wearer).
Looks similar to the fabric they used in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and that was apparently heavy spandex turned inside-out so it wasn’t so shiny. Something like that would be perfect. Check the swimsuit material aisle of your fabric shop. Er, your friend’s fabric shop.
bro
+100
You’re welcome.
It. IS. ON.
Little late, Amazi-Girl, but hopefully not TOO late.
Ooh! Amzi-Girl can do the Shatner voice! (while Joyce does the Kirk hands thing! No, wait. Kirk does it palms facing each other) “Spock! We must. bring. Dina back!”
Either becky or amber is going to end up in a hospital and toedad is going to be in jail before this is over.
“No I’m crazy. He’s just an incredible asshole.” sounds like a good book title to me.
No, Amber. Amber, no. Amber, I admire your determination and your desire to protect people, but please, no. Amazi-Girl is immune to criticism, not bullets.
This Amazi-Girl isn’t immune to criticism either. She can take epic roundhouse kicks better, though.
FUCKING FINALLY
“We really could have used you FIVE MINUTES AGO!”
No we really could have used a police sniper five minutes ago, but *ugh* I guess she’ll have to do.
Hashtag WAT?
This comic pulls goddamn 180s every week and I love it.
Initial thought: YES GO AMBER
Afterthought: Cops are a thing?
Seriously though, did no one call the flippin cops? Like I know they may take a little time to actually get there, but yeesh.
THIS IS GOOD. THE UNIVERSE APPROVES!
Whelp possible deaths.
Amazigirl
Dina
Becky
Oddly enough
Ethan I think will get caught up in this somehow.
hoping for no deaths of course since well honestly so soon into the semester I feel like that would just result in a lot of people quitting school and joyce mose assuridly quitting or being pulled out of school. so i’m hoping that’ll prevent death and doom moments..
though i suspect after this the parents will still want her out maybe
I’m pretty sure there’s no deaths and that’s one of the reasons there will be no deaths.
You forgot Sal.
And Ruth.
Dina’s in a preview panel from February.
I’m really glad I got the reference in the alt text. Also, I’m really glad someone else has seen that movie, because it’s wonderful.
there is a god. His name is David Willis.
Well it ain’t like the dame is wrong. GO FOR HIS LEGS!!!
Specifically his femurs?
Only his femurs. And give em to Ruth in order to appease her.
I love Amazi-Girl even more than before!<3
This is either going to be very good, or the next storyline will be “BREAKING: College Cosplayer Shot Confronting Gunman”.
She’s not the hero we deserve, by she’s t one we need.
She’s not the hero we deserve, by she’s the one we need.
memo from the Department of wishful thinking:
(1) Amazi-Girl is here as a result of the help that Joyce called for before she knew about the gun.
(2) Joyce realises that rescuing a kidnap victim from a gunman in a car is too big a job for a teenager on foot, even if she is a traceur and judoko.
(3) Joyce or Amber realises, or both realise, that whereas helping an 18-year-old runaway evade her father might have been a job that the police would not give sufficient attention to, rescuing a kidnap victim from a gunman is something in which they will be quite active and on the right side.
Therefore:
(a) Joyce will now phone 911.
(b) Or at least Joyce will stay here and wait for the police who come to investigate.
(c) Joyce will not rush off with Amazi-Girl on Sal’s motorbike, leaving the police without and source for:
(i) the victim’s name,
(ii) the perpetrator’s name,
(iii) information about the perpetrator’s state of mind,
(iv) knowledge that the victim is carrying a mobile phone, and the number of that phone
(v) the knowledge that Dina is missing, with reason to apprehend foul play.
Further breath will be saved for cooling porridge.
Let’s call that plan B.
Plan A will be to assemble a war party of suicidal hot-rodders high on chrome spray paint fumes and tell them that whoever brings back Becky will be awaited in Valhalla.
Joyce: remember me! Tears of toe dads face.
So she’s gonna go all Kamekrazee on his ass?
Plan B is MEDIOCRE!!!
Um, I vote plan B, with the addition of “follow the car and keep on the line with the police so you can tell them where the car’s going, but do not try anything stupid”. It’s real easy to pull out Dina’s cell phone battery, after all.
…. wow, that sounds boring and utterly devoid of punchlines / cool scenes, though.
Do not, my friend, become addicted to sanity. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!
With all due respect, this decision is mine to make. I’m risking my own safety, not yours, and not Becky’s.
Pretty much any rescue attempt must by necessity risk Becky’s safety at least a little bit. It’s pretty naive to think you can remove her from the gunman’s captivity without her getting caught up in the resulting mayhem.
Plus I suspect you’ll probably need at least a little bit of help for this job. It’s a bit above what you’ve been equipped to deal with so far. So you’ll likely be asking somebody else to risk their own safety as well, at which point they also become involved in the decision-making process.
He ain’t got a chance!
I’m not sure which I like more in this comic. Amazigirl, doing the badass “I’ve got this” thing, or Joyce who is normally prone to flights of fancy and relying on other people pointing out the logistical dangers of the situation in a sorta angry-rational way that also implies concern for Amber and Becky’s safety ahead of wanting to get her friend back.
I am glad Joyce is pointing out the dangers. Amazi-Girl is fine against unarmed muggers & vandals, but guns are another story.
Also, just wanna say I KNEW SHE WAS GONNA SHOW UP SOONER OR LATER! Now we just need Dex and Moneky Master, and Toedad’ll get stubbed…. Yeah, not gonna lie, not proud of that one.
Umm, Amazi-Girl, you have the superhero persona, but not the actual powers like being bulletproof or regeneration. You really ought to stand down. (Although we all know you won’t.)
[If I remember Champions correctly (and it’s been 25 years since I last ran it, and 1st ed. to boot) Amazi-Girl needs a Pd of 12 and Full Damage Resistance to shrug off rifle bullets which are 2d6 RKA IIRC.]
Not just a gun, but Ross and Becky are in a car and had a good head start. I want to stay positive, but unless she has an Amazi-mobile I’m leaning towards something else thwarting his escape.
Yeah. I’m wondering if she’s gonna pull the keys to the Amazimobile out of that utility belt or how she’s gonna handle that.
It’s not just a matter of speed either. Amazigirl doesn’t even know what direction to head in right now. Joyce can tell Amazigirl approximately what direction Ross’s house is in but that’s not really enough. People have speculated that they’ll be able to track Dina’s phone but we’ll see where that goes.
Well, depending on the layout of the campus, he might have to take a roundabout way to the street while she can deke directly over to the front gates, assuming Joyce can confirm that’s the direction in which he was headed.
I figure she takes off after the car with 911 on the phone, to give them intel on his whereabouts, while Joyce calls in the details on her phone.
If it doesn’t end up with Amazi-girl flinging herself onto the car I honestly will be shocked.
Hey guys, know what would be terrible? If we simply never ever saw either Becky or Ross again. People ending up dead or in hospital after some kind of confrontation would be awful, but how much worse would it be if Becky got into the car, and that was simply the last anyone ever saw of her?
Pro tip: Even if they have a gun, NEVER get in the car. While you are outside, you have a chance. Usually they won’t want to wave the gun around or fire it off because of attracting attention; even then, your chances of getting help even if you are shot are much better if you are out of the vehicle.
If you meekly do what they say and get in, you are now in their complete control, and the odds are pretty much 100% that if you ever are seen again, it’s as a corpse.
NEVER get in the car! Yell! Scream! Run! But don’t get in the car!
OTOH, in this case, she was saving Joyce. She’s more at risk now, but Joyce isn’t. That’s a situation where it could make sense to get in the car.
And in this case, Ross maybe disturbed enough that he’ll be lulled – thinking she’s now going to be obedient. The rifle’s a lot harder to use in the car. He hasn’t even made her get in back where she’d be far more trapped.
One moment of inattention at a stop light or some such and she can be gone. With no risk to Joyce.
she does have a superhero utility belt though, with grappling hooks and who knows what else. She’s like Batman… but not quite as good and not as experienced
BTD’s rifle probably fires .223 Remington, which is 2d6 RKA with a +1 stun multiplier. But it could be as weak as .22LR, which is a d6 RKA. All according to ‘Dark Champions’ for 5th edition. resistantPD of 12 would be necessary to be quite safe, but rPD 9 will probably do if you count on the villain not rolling too well. Then 60 PD non-resistant to keep the stun out, though 36 PD and a decent CON would probably do.
Amazi-Girl vs. the Toe Fungi Father. I’m placing my bets on the amazing one. Kick his ugly toe fungus face, Amazi-Girl!
Amazi-girl joins forces with her greatest foe, the Ding-Dong Bandit! Not a dream, a hoax, or an imaginary story!
If this ends with everybody being alive and healthy except for ToeDad having a dick drawn on his face in permanent pen, I will be pleased.
But you know those can be removed by writing over them with a normal marker, right? ;P
Again :
“I… I have never been so lesbian in all my life.”
(And again, thanks to Amber/Amazi-Girl.)
*points and screams at the alt-text*
“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” REFERENCE YES I LOVE YOU!
Also: You fucking go, Amazigirl!
I love how Amazi-girl tipped her hand by admitting to knowing that Dina is dating Becky within a day of it happening… I really hope everyone but toe dad remains unharmed.
Suddenly I want to rob a bank in this world where cops don’t exist and it’s only against the law of Amazi-Girl comes after you.
You know this whole thing has taken less than five minutes, right?
very good points on both sides
There is nothing I don’t love about this strip.
…I was not expecting this. Good. This resolves the situation perfectly, and probably won’t involve somebody getting injured in a car crash/shot
Sarcasm leads to parody. Parody leads to puns. Puns lead to SUFFERING.
… much sarcasm I sense in you.
I’m imagining anime fighting music beginning in that dialogue-less panel. This is good.
The main reason I don’t want this to work has less to do with realism and more that I think it would be better (/worse for Ross) legally speaking for the police to get him with Becky in the car and a gun.
So, off topic of today’s comic, but I am now forced to wonder if Willis didn’t have Joyce get that set of boots because they reduce the need to figure out what she is wearing since she is the main character and appears so often. “Tuesday, boots. Wednesday, boots. Kicking Mike in the shin… socks… which ARE LIKE PLAIN WHITE BOOTS! GENIUS!!! Thursday, boots” etc?
My bad, apparently they were pink, I think, when she kicked him.
“Go to the police, you stupid woman! Why does nobody ever just go to the police?”
But seriously, this is all happening really fast. Toedad’s only just driven off this minute. The fact that no-one’s called the cops yet – or at least, no-one’s been seen doing it – doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen at all. The passing of time is just being stretched out even more than it normally is.
Right. This whole incident, from when Toedad first pulled out the gun in “Deceptress” to now, has probably taken around 3 or 4 minutes, 5 minutes at most. Even assuming that the background guy that originally saw him pull out the gun called the police immediately, they’d still take a few minutes to respond.
*slow clap for the Blink reference*
I love Amazi-Girl so much right now.
I’ll take “Things guaranteed to escalate the situation” for $1000.
If Amazi-Girl manages to pull this off, I’ll put her in charge of Salem.
Um, guys. Normally I’d agree with all of the “OMG CALL THE COPS” stuff, but seriously — do none of us see the problem(s) with calling the cops here?
Someone needs to maintain the status quo. The cops will not do that. The cops will expose Becky as being a homeless queer woman with no university status and Ruth will throw her out of IU’s housing.
Ideally if the cops were to resolve this matter satisfactorily the rest of that wouldn’t be an issue anymore. Becky wouldn’t need to hide from her father off the grid. They could set her up with some temporary accommodations until she gets a job and then she’d just be like Marcie. A non-student living off campus who hangs out with the cast a lot.
Heck, with her dad behind bars she might be able to look into going to school again. I’m sure when you’re looking for student loans there’s some accommodation you can sign up for that’s all “My dad’s in prison, let’s leave him out of this process”.
>They could
Who’s “they”?
The police? The school? The “system”? The mysterious Queer Faeries who swoop in to save homeless gay youth? Oh wait that last one doesn’t exist.
Yeah. It’s that lovely nebulous “they” that people talk about, when they want to believe there’s help available for the helpless, because they don’t want to feel like it’s their responsibility to do anything. But there is no “they”, and precious little in the way of help available to anyone. In the real world, no one is going to set a homeless teenage lesbian up with a place to live and a way to support herself, because she’s simply not important enough to matter.
I’m sure Willis will treat his characters better than reality would… but if he treats them too much better, it will scan as “bad writing”, because human beings in reality simply do not treat each other as well as we’d like to believe.
The police. I thought I was pretty clear.
The police, ideally, are supposed to do a bit more to help than just swing their gun around. Arresting an abusive husband might also be accompanied by directing the wife to a battered women’s shelter. That sort of thing.
Well, I guess A LOT depends on jurisdiction, but… it doesn’t generally work that way, no. The police station might have a pamphlet with a few phone numbers. Maybe. Presumably in a college town there would be SOME resources for Becky, but I’d imagine most of the really helpful stuff would be gated to actual students. And as for school… well, the issues that people under 25 face, if they’ve got abusive, neglectful or uncooperative parents who don’t want to cooperate with the aid process, are pretty damn substantial.
The thing I’ve noticed about this Willis dude is, he can write the hell out of a damn good story, so I have faith in whatever resolution he comes up with. But in terms of real life… yeah. There is so much less help available for people in all sorts of bad situations than most people would think or expect – and for a great many people, across a great many walks of life, the only thing the police can be counted on to do is make things worse.
Becky doesn’t need help from the system, she just needs her dad in jail so she can actually go home and get things. Grab some clothes and whatever cash she can get so she can rent an apartment, once she’s got an address she can apply for jobs. She’ll likely have to work fast food but she’s got the attitude for it, and as we’ve all guessed can probably get hired by Galasso.
The biggest problem up until now was having to both sustain herself and keep a low profile with no rescources. Getting her dad out of the picture eliminates two of those problems.
Yeah, because her dad being in jail means Becky magically has a credit history with which to rent an apartment, and funds to sustain herself with until she gets a job. It means she’ll get a job right away, in a college town, and be able to sustain herself with it. All we have to do is eliminate the hater, and everything else is gonna be A-OK.
…I deeply and sincerely hope that your life continues to be structured in such a way that you can sustain that naivete indefinitely. Or, maybe, that by the time you’re old enough and jaded enough to realize how wrong you are… you won’t be, anymore.
It took me two days to get a job with no prior experience or more than a highschool diploma and I’ve had apartments offers thrown at me. It’s not my fault if your system is shitty.
Becky has been kidnapped at gunpoint by her father, who has made it plain that he’s going to “save” her from being gay no matter what he has to do or who has to die. Even if the cops’ intervention does get her exposed and thrown out of IU, that is still better than her situation at present. Especially if we can get Ross arrested.
If I thought Amazi-Girl could handle this situation covertly on her own, in a way that kept Becky safe and didn’t leave Ross coming back with the shotgun again, I might vote for that instead. But I don’t. (Short of murder, which I don’t think she’s up for and raises all sorts of new problems.) So: call the cops.
I do like the fact that we’re taking a moment to denounce the “Scary Crazies with Guns” thing.
Amazigirl has mental illness. Her flashbacks have even driven her to violence on occasion, as we saw when she tried to take down Sal and company. Ultimately though she’s good and heroic and not to be feared.
Ross on the other hand isn’t driven by any mental illness. He’s driven by religious zealotry. He’s driven by bigotry. He’s driven by selfishness, by his ability to hold his daughter at gunpoint and contextualize this in terms of the “sacrifice” he’s making by putting himself at risk. He is as far as we know the picture of mental health. Just a bad person with bad values who does bad things.
Yes! I, too, felt that the last panel was a middle finger to the ableism in comments.
Now just to have an unambiguously great main character who’s fat…
Marcie and Amber are both above average in terms of weight. How fat is “fat”?
Marcie?
Billie is the one who was called a “Tubbo” in-universe!
That’s based on an old image I remember DW doing of her that gave her slight rolls of fat. Although I can’t find the image and thinking back, it could have been muscle.
But yeah, Billie has had several comments made about her weight, so surely she would count?
You know, narcissims, psychopathy and delusions can all be linked to mental illness.
The thing is, though, that there are some types of mental illness where the sick person is likely to never admit the problem and keep on doing damage around them.
Isn’t “a bad person with bad values who does bad things” one of the people that we pay the police to protect us from? It’s also the kind of person that needs serious help from a mental health professional. After all, Charles Manson could also be described as a bad person with bad values who did bad things. I’ll agree, in Manson’s case the psychosis added a whole new level of bad, but the description still fits.
Nope. You can be a cockbag without having anything wrong in the system.
…and that’s the attitude that won’t ever help to prevent criminality.
Speak of the devil . . .
Climactic moment coming up, it would seem.
Well, she’s more aware of the situation than I gave her credit for.
Amazi-Girl is always prepared for anything. And i mean it,ANYTHING.
Seeing as how the police seem to be unavoidabley detained:
Yay, AG is on the scene-loved the entrance, all we need is Sal and her bike and Toedad is Toedead.
Good line Amber…’no, I’m crazy, he’s just an incredible asshole”. My new favorite line.
So when are we going to find out what happened to Dina?
I think we can safely assume that she’s already hiding inside the car and just waiting for the opportune moment to strike.
*facepalm* Of course! Cars have doors!
Dina knows how to open doors
But usually she just prefers to stand behind them.
If there is a door nearby, it renders Dina invisible. She would be undetectable in a car.
Finally! I was wondering when someone would ask about Dina. When last we saw her, she was fighting with Toedad. Toedad reached the fountain with a scratch on his face, but what did he do to Dina? He’s big enough that he could have crushed Dina and left her dead under a pile of leaf litter. And what’s this about Satan taking Becky’s mom? Does that mean she’s also a lesbian? Or—given her daughter’s hair and complexion—perhaps she was a lapsed Catholic who left her whackadoo hubby and returned to the Church? Or maybe she’s become something really scary—like a Democrat.
Toedad told Becky that he hadn’t hurt anyone once he got to her at the fountain, but that still leaves the question of if he didn’t hurt Dina, then what happened and where is she? I also hope we get to find out more about Becky’s Mom because that bit about Satan taking her was so open to interpretation. There are so many threads going on at once here that I’m hoping they can all be wrapped up, and that was before Amazi-Girl got thrown into the mix. Just waiting to see what happens next and hoping that we get to see some police involvement at some point.
As Willis has said on the dumblr:
Rest Easy.
(Does that look like a hospital visit to me?)
From the timing, easy to bet he high-tailed it to his car the second he saw Becky; and that Dina’s fine if not scared and a little bruised, but she still has to get all the way to the fountain on foot.
That is a line for the trailer. Make this a movie, put that on the trailer.
I can’t help but cheer (even though I foresee disaster.) Go Amazi-Girl, Go! (Also, that’s some pretty keen self-insight.)
Given her experiences with her own dad kidnapping Danny, Panel 3 was always going to set off her “I need to act now” switch. But as we’ve seen in her encounter with Sal and friends, her in this mode is not very analytical and prone to silly mistakes, which is not the best place to be when going against a fanatic with a gun.
Hey, you know what the saddest possible conclusion to this would be, and therfore the one that Damn You Willis is most likely to choose?
It would be if Amazi-Girl and Dina and Sal’s Motorcycle mount an amazing rescue and subdue Toedad, but Becky, in tearful conflicted emotion, says to let him go and promises to never disobey him again.
Like when Superman beat Darkseid and tried to set his subjects free, only to find that they were too entrenched in their oppression to let him do that.
I mean, Toedad is even kind of shaped like Darkseid.
I don’t think you can pull off that kinda of brainwashing in less than a day.
“Less than a day”? The man’s her father. He’s been doing his level best to brainwash her from the day she was born.
No, the saddest possible conclusion would be if they couldn’t catch up to him again and we simply never ever saw or heard from Toedad or Becky again. Just… nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqfHuaHvaT4
I really love the fact that ten minutes after Joyce is having a panic attack a friggin SUPERHERO swoops in. That’s having good friends.
Wow, look at Amazie-girl’s expression in panel four. “This is what I was BORN for.”
I’m not sure I believe more in Amazie-girl’s ability to handle this situation than Dina’s, but daaaamn if it won’t be awesome
I think that Amazi-Girl’s expression is more like “Shit… this is crazy, what’s going on here!?” in a terrified, stunned way. But yes, the whole swooping to help her friends in need thing is pretty badass.
Wait. They’re by the fountain, and the fountain is in the middle of a big clear space. Where the heck did Amazi-Girl jump from?
The top of the naked lady fountain, of course.
Inb4 Amber finds and teams up with Dina, and the two of them go through hell and fire, narrowly escaping serious injury and/or death and arrive just in time… To watch the police put Toedad in the back of a squad car with Joyce already on scene.
I don’t know… Toedad seems fairly crazy. Just a different kind of crazy than Amber.
A more assehole-y one. (Not to be confused with assholy)
True. Though Amber’s assholishness is dependent on who you ask. I’m guessing Sal and her circle have a fairly low opinion of the self-proclaimed “hero”.
No, no, I meant Toedad is more asshole-y.
While Amber has something like PTSD, Toedad obviously leans towards psychopathy, which I think we can all agree is a more asshole-y (and a less neurotic) version of insane.
It’s over Toedad. The Night will hunt you down.
Remember Willis! You said you wouldn’t kill off anyone in this world. don’t make me pull a “Damn You Willis!!! ” out of the bottom drawer. i still have a gross of them left over from ShortPacked.
Nice gravatar!
Amazigirl be like: “My biggest job ever”
Do it. Fucking do it. Fuck yes.
I wonder what happened to Sweet Dina…
I half expect her to pop out from the backseat for a rematch the moment ToeDad is distracted.
Well, Ross didn’t have the balls to kill anyone, aside from doing it out of emotion and what he found to be love. He probably got through to Dina somehow and told her his intentions, since there are always two sides to every story.
I dunno. I like to be a mediator. It’s a Libra thing.
I bet she’s bleeding in the woods.
He smacked her off him, spotted Becky and left. He was never after Dina.
……Got through to Dina? About kidnapping his daughter and taking her to a pray the gay away camp?
You’d have better luck convincing her evolution is just a fad.
It’s probably just me being optimistic, really. I doubt Willis would harm a character…..but he has been known to prove us wrong.
Toedad’s side is literally “I’m going to force my daughter to pray away her gay at riflepoint.”
Opinions can be wrong. Not everyone deserves a spot at the table.
I’m a mediator by inclination and a Libra by birth, and all I have to say in response to you is, ‘Dude, what the FUCK.’
I’m hoping that she shows back up soon and is okay. Surely what happened to her has to come up sooner or later.
I predicted the forcomingAmazi-girl /Sal team-up to rescue Becky , last week.
Its still ON!
By the gods, I hope so. I wanna see this turd’s eye get used for an ashtray.
Amazi-Girl is a truly astute, and somewhat psychic, judge of character.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3ALwKeSEYs
Someone gonna die tonight
Amazi-girl aint playin no games today
Aint nobody touchin her Dina
BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! TOE-SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!
No, it’s “TOE NAILS FOR THE NAIL THRONE!”
AG in Panel 1: “WHEEEEE everybody dogpile on Joyce!”
Back. The. Fuck. Up…
IZZAT SUM MUTHERFUCKIN’ LENSFLARE?!!!!
Amber’s gonna get herself hurt…
Last panel, she’s squinting, trying to see if she can spot the car, but one of her superpowers is nearsightedness.
So does anyone else remember Beeman from Dr McNinja?
He got to hang out with Benjamin Franklin as much as he could want.
Yes.
I really didn’t expect the story to go in this direction. I have no idea what is going to happen next but something tells me that the superhero geek in Willis enjoyed every moment of writing and drawing it!
https://youtu.be/lcCYhDu4_ZY
♪ You may be right
She may be crazy
But it just might be a lunatic we’re looking for… ♪
“AMBER Alert”, not “alert Amber”!
Seriously one call to police and everyone looking at a billboard, TV, or phone in the county will know to be on the lookout for the Toedadmobile.
I find my mind echoing other commenters. Amazi-girl is not suited to this sort of thing (desperate men with guns are far away from her usual fare).
I have to wonder if this is just more setup for a deeper downward spiral. Amber badly wounded, her identity exposed, and in court ordered psychological therapy as an alternative to jail time for her criminal acts.
Though still good odds for Becky to eventually be rescued.
I’ll just wait to see what Amber’s plan is. She may have learned a little from her defeat at the hands of Sal and her friends to expand her equipment inventory a little.
FWIW, I can’t see Ross being willing to shoot initially. He’ll try to bluster and threaten and that won’t work too well with Amazi-Girl. By the time it occurs to him to shoot at her, she’ll be so close that the size of a single-shot long gun would be an immense disadvantage. His only viable tactic would be to threaten Becky but I’m not sure he’d think to do that quickly enough.
Look, I know Amazi-Girl’s amazing and all, but I don’t think even SHE could catch up with a moving car.
Welp, I think we just found out who’s in the hospital.
My thoughts exactly. Come to think of it, have we seen *Amber* in any preview panels for upcoming comics? I don’t think we have.
*plays the Avengers theme*
But seriously, Amber, be careful. :/ This is an incredibly complicated situation, and the law does not look kindly on well-meaning civilians, let alone masked vigilantes, complicating things even more.
To an extent, but I believe the law tends to look upon armed kidnapping (since it was coerced and she IS an adult by the law tmu) a little more harshly than well meaning vigilantism. Assuming this doesn’t go HORRIBLY south and end up with someone dead. Which might have been your original point in which case let’s just hope Willis doesn’t Willis this into a dark place.
Considering how, as commenters keep pointing out, it’s quite probable Becky is in danger RIGHT NOW, I don’t think the law is going to have much against Amazi-girl’s intervention here. Especially if she doesn’t have any weapons herself.
No, Amazi-girl’s REAL foil here is COMMON SENSE. And she’s immune to that, so.
I applaud puuting Willis on the verb list (right next to Danny / dan this into the ground).
1) Oh my god. Oh my god, she didn’t come because she knew about Toedad. She came because Joyce did what she promised to Sal and texted Dorothy about her walking problems, and Dorothy called Amazi-girl for THAT. That’s… that’s so sweet???
2) BAD TIMING, tho.
3) However. Toedad’s gun is pretty huge and unwieldy for inside of a car, and he has Becky sitting right next to him. I doubt she’d let him shoot at anyone – I mean, he’ll probably be able to discharge a bullet SOMEWHERE, but she is 100% in position to disrupt his aim. In the car with her, he has nowhere near the advantage he did near the fountain.
I mean, the situation is still NO, but…
I strongly suspect that Amazi-Girl’s most powerful weapon will be Ross’s inability to believe that he had just been run over by what looks like two costumed heroes (Amazi-Girl and Sal) on a motorbike who just threw spiked balls under his tyres. He’ll probably try to resist but, at his size, two smaller, agile foes who know how to fight would be a serious problem that I don’t think he would be able to beat.
I’m wondering if Becky will surprise everyone by begging her rescuers not to hurt her father too badly.
If I’m right about Amber and Sal putting aside their issues with each other to save Becky, then it could easily be the start of a very, very odd and yet productive partnership.
I don’t think Amazigirl would appear in broad daylight to walk Joyce across campus. I think she came because Joyce phoned someone after Becky phoned her and told her about Toedad but not the gun. 11 October.
Ooookay…
Well, points to her for self awareness.
And they can BOTH be crazy. Beleive me, there is plenty of crazy to go around, there is no shortage, and no one has a monopoly!
Not sure the involvement of a vigilante will improve this scenario… But its a comic so she can do something, when in reality she probably wouldn’t even be able to catch up to them!
“Not sure the involvement of a vigilante will improve this scenario” – WHAT??? Don’t let The Batman hear you say that.
Panel one guest director: J.J. Abrams.
JJAbrams fans, plz dont read.
Lens flare: Then, genocide of 6 Billion Vulcans, but it’s ok because none of The 7 died, so, no big. Plus, they were bigotted, superior, sneering assholes, so …. Plus, the Federation still has their books and art and stuff. In the original Startrek, one persons life/death could matter a ton. In JJABRAMS Trek, 6 billion deaths don’t really matter at all. At least in Star Trek: Into Dumbness, it was only hundreds of thousands of deaths that didn’t matter. … (And, no, I am not wedded to Old Trek. I liked the tv, the movies ranged from ok to sux. I like the reboot. I like the re-imagined characters. I like the actors. But I dislike the plotting dumb as rocks, and I despise the morality of genocide as a lazy, unimaginative plot device.)
I admit, I’m surprised Amber’s actually getting involved in this mess.
Really? Being right on board with saving others from their abusive fathers seems right up Amazi-girl’s alley.
“Wait, Dina’s Becky?”
“No, MY Becky! She was mine first!” *flashback to their first meeting as toddlers* *break down in tears*
It speaks volumes about Joyce that her response WASN’T a possessive “MINE”.
Huh…wow. Good point. Go Amazi-Girl! Show him the difference between an incredible asshole and a crazy whoop bongo….just PLEASE don’t get shot.
I’m guessing that the current emergency is keeping Joyce from fretting over whether Becky is hers or Dina’s.
Lens flare!
I don’t know about this you guys…
I want to be excited about this. I really do. But I’m so afraid this will turn out horribly wrong. Damn you that teaser image of a hospital!
I will read this comic until Willis or I dies, whichever comes last. Best comic.
…Where the heck did Amber leap in from?
Amazi-girl is immune to criticism! Even artistic ones!
Uh-oh.
I think this is where Amber learns that dressing in spandex does not make her invulnerable to bullets, nor assholes.
It doesn’t? Good to know. *crosses “spandex” off of shopping list*
We know what kind of gun it is, but everyone in the strip just knows its a gun. Chasing someone with a replica antique single shot is different from chasing someone with an AR-15 or modern pistol. If only AG was crazy enough to read the comments.
Looks like an ensemble rescue, AG and her arch enemy Sal riding together to save the day.
Like many here, I see this ending badly for Amazi-girl.
Per Willis though, no one dies in this comic, so t’will be but a flesh wound.
And probably a busted secret identity when she hits the hospital.
Okay I could easily jump to conclusions about how dumb this could be but Willis has surprised me before so maybe it’ll turn out Amber, like, literally has a death wish and so this won’t end well for her because what do you expect for an unarmed college student going up against an armed man in a metal box going at least twenty miles per hour.
Yeah, this is pretty silly and feels like it’s coming right out of left field, but Willis is pretty good at throwing curveballs so I think it’s worth waiting and seeing before readying my waterski and a line-up of sharks.
Amazi-Girl has shown to be almost ridiculously athletic and powerful, though. She backflipped off a wall, quickly climbs trees, and then slid down a powerline using a pair of shears and landed onto a moving truck.
Willis likes to surprise us you know.
Maybe Amber WILL get hurt and end her superhero career and outing herself. But to be fair she is pretty good at beating shithole dads faces in.
And if anyone could do it, it’s Amber.
Fun fact: Toe-Dad’s deadly power at the moment is not carrying a (loaded) rifle, it is sitting in a motorized vehicle!
Fuck cars seriously why are more people not scared of them as I am.
Is it just that Americans are used to traffic laws? Is that something they take for granted? I was not raised in that environment. I grew up thinking traffic lights were just friendly suggestions.
Or Amazi-girl again fails Joyce. Just like before with Ryan, she takes off and doesn’t even find Toedad and Becky.
If she distracts Joyce from calling the police quickly enough, she could even be responsible for him getting away.
That might even be darker than her getting hurt fighting him.
Lawdy, don’t tempt lady fate.
I’m seriously hoping that Joyce asked for AmaziGirl’s help in being someone to talk to about her trauma prior to Becky’s panicked entrance, because otherwise she’s a special kind of stupid for not calling the cops and telling them what Ross did and giving them definitive leads on where he sped off to and where he might be headed, as well as alerting them that there’s a hostage in the car.
She texted Dorothy when Becky called her and told her her Dad had found her, but Joyce didn’t yet know he was chasing her around the campus with a gun. At that point, her response of, “Okay, meet me here; I’ll call in Amazi-girl” isn’t unreasonable.
The inability to vote for Leslie in the “Who Do You Want To See More Of” poll is a real travesty.
Appropriate grav is appropriate for your post.;-)
Even if Police haven’t arrived at the fountain, how can there not be multiple sirens dopplering up as they converge at high speed? Last night I was listening to multiple emergency sirens screaming thru the night, BLOCKS away from our apartment, HELLA cacophony, but organized, can tell their vectors from the sound.
Well, it all happened pretty quickly there – I think the police would take at least five minutes from being called and the conversation from when toedad pulled out his gun near the fountain was pretty short.
Yes they haven’t arrived, but if they are on their way then the sound of sirens would already be reaching the fountain ahead of them, even if they are still minutes away, I believe: ‘all units, shooter reported at the fountain’ >>> activate the flashers and the screamers and go, go, go — would it not?
Kinda giving away your identity a bit with that “Dina’s Becky” line.
Please tell me your plan involves calling the police.
I mean, he just took an adult somewhere against her will under threat of violence. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.
You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts.
Oh right we have a vigilante.
Its been a while since we’ve seen amazi-girl hasnt it?
The last year has kinda been all about Becky, after all.
Hmmm? We saw Amazi Girl at least once per chapter last book. One of them even opened up with a montage of her doing her thing.
Ok that is now my new personal motto
I love how Amazigirl/Amber IDs her as ‘Dina’s Becky’ that’s really sweet
Ah, Amazi-girl…. the Hit-Girl of the Walkyverse!
(Hm, Chloe-Grace Moretz as Amazi-Girl… rrraowr!)
I have a feeling Toedad is not actually “on the run”, anymore. His guard is down, since Becky kinda surprised him with her capitulation (“Y-yes” and no more anger eyebrows). In his mind, he achieved his goal (first: get Becky. next: schedule Pray-the-Gay-Away intervention) The ride home, is probably an awkward silence, but he thinks all is well, and the rifle is on the floor behind his seat. He could actually not even consider there is still a chance on police, etc, since the family matter is resolved, with Becky leaving with him. Anything else will be a surprise to him.
The panel showing them in the car, passing Joyce, he is not angry and has tears. Everything ended well (to him); now they are just going home.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/let/
Little does he know…
What’s impressive is how all of their behaviour actually makes sense when you think about it.
Why did Joyce summon Amazi-Girl?
When Joyce got the call from Becky, she had Dorothy’s contact info already pulled up onscreen. Dorothy is Joyce’s means of contacting Amazi-Girl. As well, at the time Joyce called for Amazi-Girl, she thought the situation was just keeping Becky safe from her dad while also keeping anyone at the university from finding out about Becky’s living situation. Joyce already knows that she can trust Amazi-Girl with her secrets – Amazi-Girl never revealed that she had been the Whiteboard Ding-Dong Bandit (not that anyone believed Joyce when she told the truth).
After the confrontation at the fountain, Joyce no longer considers this a job for Amazi-Girl – indicating that she would not have summoned her had she known a gun was involved.
Why is Amazi-Girl still volunteering to help?
First of all, Amazi-Girl feels particularly responsible for Joyce, given that she inadvertently let Ryan escape at the party, a fact well established during their conversation in The Whiteboard Ding-Dong Bandit, and views this as a chance for redemption. As well, not only is Ross a bad and abusive (psychologically at the very least) parent, much like Amber’s own, we have a hostage situation involving an abusive parent – very similar to Amazi-Girl/Amber’s fight with Blaine to save Danny.
And at the same time that she is committing to act, she is conceding the bad judgement of such a move. Her reference to herself as crazy may be both an acknowledgment of her psychological issues and an admission that, in the colloquial sense, ‘I must be crazy’ for deciding to go through with such a risky course of action.
All good points!
INB4 Amazi-girl (Who is obviously Dina) gets shot and ends up in hospital and her identitiy is revealed.
Why do you all think the police haven’t been called? Police do not come immediately. No emergency service comes immediately. It hasn’t been that long since Ross shot the gun. It has not been that long since Ross first pulled out his rifle. The police might be on their way, but it would not make any sense for them to have arrived just yet. Just because our main characters haven’t called the cops doesn’t mean that a background character hasn’t. Cool your jets people.
Also, man this storyline is good, I’ve been on the edge of my seat each strip!
Can’t wait to see what happens next. I have a sneaking suspicion that someone gets shot…but I’m not sure if it will be Amazi-Girl! Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if she disarmed and shot Ross.
A little haiku for the event that has transpired:
You have trouble near
Amazi-girl comes to you
When “DAMN IT!” is said
XD
Woo! First the Conservatives are trounced, then Amazi-girl arrives! Could this day get any better?!
the bluejays pwned and the new starwars trailer came out. this was the couple of days ever.
Wait … Amazi-Girl can fly???
No, I think she jumped off the statue.
Was she summoned by the cuss-word?
Presumably Joyce texted Dorothy to get ahold of Amazi Girl.
The last line in the last panel. that gets my vote for the best line in the comic so far.
Just gonna throw it out there, if any of these characters watch the news they may have a very good reason not to call the cops – namely, they don’t want to see Toedad (or anybody else) killed. There have been too many incidents where police shot first and asked questions later, especially if a suspect is perceived to have a weapon.
If they don’t think Toedad would actually shoot a person, I can see trying to resolve this themselves rather than involve the authorities and potentially make Becky an orphan.
That’s book title material right there.
Why do I get the ominous sense that this is going to go downhill, rapidly? And why has no one called the police?
just like there’s a fine line between insanity and genus, there also a fine line between brevity and insanity.
…wait, do you mean bravery?
Brevity is the soul of wit, right? So is bravery the soul of insanity? Or vice verse?
Am I the only person who thinks the ambulance is going to be summoned because of a car crash? That an upset Toedad is going to be distracted by approaching sirens, or attempt to pray while driving, and run an red light straight into another vehicle?
On one hand I’m happy that more of the cast is getting involved in this sub-plot. I understand Joyce is the main character, but I don’t want this event to overshadow everyone else.
On the other hand, what the fuck is Amazi-Girl supposed to do (that a squad of police officers can’t do a hundred times better)? I really don’t see her actions affecting the comic at all.
Be there fust with the moastest, as the saying goes.
Willis. Should there be a period in Amazi-girl’s sentence after the word “will”?
There is. It just gets lost in the end of the “L” if you don’t look closely.
Welp. I hope those bullets are made of criticism…
I still want Becky to play the lead/pivotal role in freeing herself.
Climbing up the fountain just to jump down from it for her entrance is pretty metal.
Amazi-Girl’s line is a 10 out of 10 on the badass scale
Is it wrong that both this strip and the one before made me giggle a bit?
This is now officially my favorite strip ever.