A young woman pursued by bad luck is witness to the murder of the Fairy Queen of Summer. Can she get to the bottom of this mystery?
Lies Within
Lacey
Lysander's aimless and carefree life is turned upside down when he accidentally discovers that the cute boy next door, Simon, is a literal monster
Sakana
Mad Rupert
Our heroes must navigate a hazardous dating scene, overcome personal anxieties, and wrangle unruly seafood in order to find love, peace of mind, and a paycheck.
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Not Drunk Enough
Tess Stone
Logan Ibarra is possibly the unluckiest repairman in the world. A late night job should not have landed him in the middle of a mad scientist's squabble, but he soon finds himself surrounded by monsters and further madness with little tools to get out.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
Edison Rex
Chris Roberson
The adventures of the world’s greatest villain who, after defeating his superheroic nemesis, decides that he’s the only one left to defend the world.
Ozzie the Vampire
Eric Lide
Ozzie and her best friend Kimmy are your average everyday normal art students – except one is an immortal vampire with superpowers and the other possesses a magic talking grimoire. Also they have to save their town from a demonic invasion.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Peritale
Mari Costa
A fairy godmother with no magic tries her best to successfully fulfill a Fairytale and win the respect of her peers.
Three Panel Soul
Matt Boyd, Ian McConville
It's a pretty rigid format but we keep the content loose, you know?
ARISE, YE SKELETON KING
Brian Clevinger, Escher Cattle, Lee Black
A troupe of wandering "adventurers" down to their last silver "acquire" a map only to find the real treasure was the fiend they dug up along the way.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Freakshow
Scotty
A festival of broken people, blood flows in the center ring. Come one and come all, to the greatest show in all of Paris.
Monster's Garden
Ash G.
Champion pit fighter Kilo Monster was content to spend the rest of his days tending to his quiet garden alone... until he met a curious robot girl and her human family.
Novae
KaiJu
A historical romance with a touch magic and a dash of astronomy. It chronicles the romantic adventures of Sulvain, a sweet tempered necromancer and Raziol, a passionate 17th century astronomer.
Little Tiny Things
Clover
What are the little things that move us? The simple joys that warm our bodies and hearts? The micro life of insects that influence our world more than we think? The tiny steps we make everyday to have a happier tomorrow?
Saint for Rent
Ru Xu
Saint Halliday runs an inn for Time Travelers. Unfortunately, he seems to attract other supernatural "guests," too.
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Sleepless Domain
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
In a world where magical girls and their battles are commonplace, loss has become all too common as well.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Augustine
Winter Jay Kiakas, Windy
August and her ragtag group are just like everyone else, simply surviving in the treacherous Crater... When they stumble into what may be an artifact of the ancient past, their lives are thrown into a much bigger loop as they trifle with bounty hunters, monsters and gods.
Nigh Heaven & Hell
Scotty
Heather Vodihn is on a simple mission: find her father. However she becomes entangled with two strangers with mysterious powers being stalked by a group with bizarre demands. Heather must learn to trust her new traveling companions, even if she is untrustworthy herself.
The Messenger
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In a ruin-abound town cursed with bad luck, Kai and Kalla--a young boy and a fledgling dragonbird spirit--take on a quest in hopes the reward will solve all of their problems.
Heroes of Thantopolis
Izzy Strontium Hall
A living boy fights to save the City of the Dead.
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
The Golden Boar
Magnolia Porter Siddell
A young woman joins a group of summoners who call forth Guardian Beasts to protect their isolated magical island. Unfortunately, her Guardian Beast is nothing like she'd imagined, and he's about to change her life, and everything she thought she knew about herself...
Darkling Bright
Chris Hazelton
Kieran Bright is a college student home for the summer and roped into an online reunion with his old neighborhood friends in the most recent update of their favorite childhood MMORPG.
At least, he was, and that was the idea...
Join Kieran and his friends as they are pulled into another reality that may or may not be real and are forced to confront their own identities, the nature of simulated universes and reality itself.
Angel's Orchard
Harry Bogosian
After the events in Demon's Mirror, Gerda has accepted her role as a Demon Hunter, and Cezar has traveled back to the Demon City. Demons have existed alongside humans for millennia, so things begin to return to normal. But an impossibly powerful Relic has been taken by one of the Demon Masters, and a silent war enters its final stages.
Barbarous
Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota
A crummy wizard and an anxious monster have to get over themselves and bring order to an apartment building full of misfits.
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(well I would like to pray I have a good time at MAGFest and completely forget what time it is and break my “FIRST!” streak tomorrow and possibly Sunday and that y’all don’t miss me too much)
Perhaps she could redefine deferring to her husband to mean making him take care of things when it’s man’s work or by deferring to him in no win scenarios when she wants him to be the bad guy or just be the one that’s wrong.
Out of interest, any particular reason to bring up Howard? In this universe, IIRC, he’s a gawky, grieving 16-year-old kid who once got flustered when confronted by an older sexy woman with boobs.
Mary is probably of the Phyllis Schlafly breed. Claims that women’s place is in the home while conducting an extensive career outside the home, where she’s the boss instead of a man, men being bosses also being part of the natural order she supposedly promotes.
Phyllis Schlafly seems to hold some of the most regressive views I have personally encountered while justifying her own position with the classic argument of “except for me because I am doing the Lord’s work.” She is truly an appropriate analogy for Mary.
Phyllis Schlafly bears the brunt of the blame for the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment to be ratified. Basically, there is no larger example of this sort of hypocrisy in existence.
Oh can I help rain on her parade too? *clears throat* HEY MARY! ACCORDING TO TRADITIONAL GENDER ROLES YOU, AS A WOMAN, CANNOT BE AN ARTIST!! HYPOCRITE!!
(well I would like to pray I have a good time at MAGFest and completely forget what time it is and break my “FIRST!” streak tomorrow and possibly Sunday and that y’all don’t miss me too much)
Don’t worry, Ana Chronistic! We’ll never miss you!
Seriously. Like, you went for the blackmail and your target called your bluff and you had nothing to respond with. She beat you at your game…
Except, to do so, Billie and Ruth now can’t get together again less Mary try for round 2 and Mary is probably going to be stalking both of them even more for some sort of dirt to throw at them.
Even though Mary has lost, she has won in her primary goal which is constraining the happiness of others and getting them paranoid about her twitch-curtain style of busybodiness.
Ah, but Mary will be watched just as hard for any sign of bullying the other students. Ruth looked ready to tear her apart after her treatment of Carla and I doubt that’ll be a one time conflict.
… unless Billie fills out a change of residence form and moves to a different dorm, in which case she and Rose would be free to date openly.
Yeah, yeah, I know I should stop pointing that out.
I mean, do you do it every single time? If so, probably, I haven’t read too many comments the last couple of weeks. But it’s pretty funny in small doses, at least.
Yeah, but now Ruth and Carla can get her nailed (giggity) for the hate speech. It will be Mary’s word versus that of her victim, an eyewitness who’s an RA that they now have no reason to doubt, and an entire floor full of girls who will say “well, I didn’t see it, but that’s totally in character for her.”
I don’t know if they WILL do it that way. But it would be both the most effective way to deal with Mary and the right thing to do by Carla.
Yeah… She already blew her wad on that transphobic remark. As she guessed, Ruth’s covered her ass now, which means it’s over. No more cashing in anything.
For some it’s a place to learn a profession. For others, a chance to learn about themselves.
For one Indiana girl, it’s an opportunity to teach the right way to live. But when she attempts to steer others to follow her path, she is faced with individuals the likes of whom she has only ever read about in works of fiction.
For not everyone is what they seem… In the Twilight Zone.
Needfuldoer: good job capturing the tone of the introductions to Twilight Zone episodes!
I must say though – if Mary has only read about folks like these in works of fiction, she’s not very well read…
Also – as I perceive it, Mary thinks she is steering people when she’s really trying to shove it down their throats and FORCE them to live her way (not unlike some real people I’ve met – both religious and otherwise). They rather reminds me of “IT” from “A Wrinkle in Time”.
We seriously needs more Agatha and Sierra in this comic. They are super cheery like Joyce, but as far as we know nothing has completely broken them yet.
I don’t know whether Sierra or Agatha is doing this on purpose or if they’re genuine, but either way they are both amazing and adorable, and not just because they’re one-upping Mary. I love their smiles in the last panel. We don’t see people smiling enough in this comic.
If I remember correctly, Sierra (as “Tootsie”, apparently?) was in the same squad as Mandy and Grace, and that was the “lesbian orgy” squad that Joe got put into, and Willis has said sexualities remain constant. Agatha, however, was in the “happy happy” squad that Mike got transferred to, and no mention of her sexuality, non-straight or otherwise, was ever made.
Perhaps I have missed something in the archives, but I don’t recall Joe being stuck in a lesbian orgy squad. (Though I doubt that he would much mind!).
In IW! Joe’s transferred to Squad 48, which consists of Marcie, Mandy, Grace, Sierra and Guns (who isn’t in DoA), who basically just had orgies all the time but sorta developed more complex personalities as the comic went on.
Given that line break for Sierra… I feel like she’s almost definitely trolling the fuck out of her. Agatha seems likely too. I mean, whether or not she heard Mary’s shittiness earlier is… almost irrelevant. I find it very unlikely she only says that shit when she thinks she’s got Ruth blackmailed.
I have a feeling that Mary has been making shitty comments about Mormons (along with everyone else who doesn’t fall under her specific definition of Christian) all semester, so even if Agatha didn’t hear exactly what Mary said to Ruth I could still see her purposefully doing this as a dig at Mary.
According to my Mormon housemate, there’s a lot of problems that need to be ironed out, not to mention the recent uptick in gay teenage suicides within their church.
Mormonism is a strongly conservative church which has serious issues with gays, sadly, though some of the nicest Christians I’ve ever met have come from it.
I’m going to assume that’s sarcasm, because telling people how to talk does quite a lot of good for a lot of causes. It moves words out of the common vernacular. And while we tend to call ourselves that as mild sarcasm at how we’re frightening to the majority, the majority doing so is rather unalike.
” telling people how to talk does quite a lot of good for a lot of causes.”
Umm.. are YOU using sarcasm ? Because I can’t think of a SINGLE cause that has ever done anything good for!
Telling people how to talk will at BEST get those people to use those words even MORE, since we have a natural aversion to other people telling us how to use words. It feels condescending and frankly, a bit abusive.
You think the world is a better place for spic having been in the common vernacular? That we live in a lesser world for it? That ‘tranny’ becoming increasingly inappropriate is a bad thing?
Or did you perhaps not consider your belief? Because that’s not what happens when words exit the vernacular from people changing it.
I mean, referring to the entire queer spectrum as “the gays” is pretty dismissive, or even using that phrase solely in reference to gay folks is still wrong in the same way you don’t refer to black people as “the blacks.”
Besides, if telling people they’re using some problematic language encourages them to do it more, then there was never any hope for them to begin with.
Who said “the gays”? Harvey said gay teenage suicides and Charles just said gays. And PFLAG seems to think we should use gay to describe the entire community. Queer is triggering to older members and homosexual is too clinical. My personal opinion is take back the word queer to prevent confusion, but that idea doesn’t seem to have a lot of traction.
It’s not like “gays” and “the gays” have some kind of significant difference. It’s the same context wherein they’re being entirely defined by their sexual identity.
I’ve mostly started exclusively using queer when I started to think that LGBT+ was too restrictive, so I’m all for taking that word back, and I’m with you on “homosexual” coming off as too clinical, which is strange since I feel okay saying “bisexual” and “pansexual.”
It’s all in the connotations the words have gotten attached to themselves.
For example, pulling from “bisexual” and “homosexual”, “bi” is perfectly acceptable usage. “Homo” is not. Because “homo” has been abused by bigots for decades, while “bi” hasn’t.
And yet, “the gays” wasn’t the phrase objected to.
“Mormonism is a strongly conservative church which has serious issues with gays”.
And I don’t think “blacks”, “Mexicans” or “Jews” are beyond the pale outside of specific contexts.
At the very least, in my experience, there is nothing like a general consensus among people covered by the term that “gay” is offensive.
The point they’re making is that using “gay” as a noun rather than an adjective feels dehumanizing, not that the word “gay” is offensive. That’s why they’re comparing it to other adjectives used as nouns.
I can’t talk to the rest of them, but I don’t mind ‘jews’. Not sure about case-specific, but I think that sometimes these words are more offensive in theory than in practice. Though they are also often used offensively, which is a whole other confusing issue. Acceptable verbiage is a constantly shifting thing, and all I can say is that I think what we’re discussing here is just on the ok side of the line at the moment
I only said gay specifically because I don’t know the statistics of the other queer groups, but I do know that they saw a large spike in suicides because, IIRC, they are now requiring the children of same-sex couples to disown their parents if they want to remain Mormon after 18.
I mean, it’s also pretty crap to Straight Women. There’s a reason Twilight came from where it did. It’s mormon as fuck and represents the future SMeyers has been taught to view as ideal. But queer women do get it a hell of a lot worse.
They do it your parents don’t care. Seriously except for having to sit through a few visiting teacher visits and having an aunt and uncle who almost dragged me to church around thanksgiving I get little to no grief. It also probably helps that I’m gay and infertile thus completely failing my role and responsibilities as a woman.
Ah FRC, continuing their sterling record of absolute scum-sucking awful. Also, super happy to see all the professional homophobes migrating their hate rays transwards and making more intentional their attempt to kill us all. Just warms my cockles to see how much they care (about using casual hatred of us to fleece their flock).
I recognize that reference! 5 Man Electrical Band, early ’70s. I even know the rest of the verse “… but when they passed the plate at the end of it all I didn’t have a penny to pay. So I got me a pen and a paper and I made up my own little sign: Thank you Lord for thinking about me, I’m alive and doing fine.”
For food, for raiment
For life, for opportunity
For friendship and fellowship
We thank thee O Lord
Amen
(I memorized that specifically because I was voted Chaplain’s Aide in my Boy Scout hiking group so I had to lead grace despite being the least religious out of everyone.)
Oh man. I have serious Problems with the Mormon faith, but I have never been so appreciative of it as seeing it used to terrorize fundie protestants. (In a fight between two terrible things, I will nominally pull for the one I have not personally been oppressed by, and would have no problem with someone with personal experience with the LDS doing the opposite.)
When I was an LDS missionary, I tried to avoid antagonizing people of different faiths; we believe that every religion has truth. We were sometimes approached by JW’s and Seventh Day Adventists, and they were usually very polite. Every now and again, though, we would run into someone who wanted to bible bash, so to speak, and had no intention of actually having a constructive conversation. In such situations, I would often quote from the Book of Mormon just to grind their gears a bit.
I won’t lie, I’ve always wondered what happened when Mormon missionaries and JWs crossed paths. I assumed you just traded tips on which houses on your route had rude/angry people in them.
Generally, it’s like a friendly rivalry. We both know each others’ tricks, and we know what to expect, so there’s no point actually trying to convert each other. Sometimes we poke fun at each others’ weird beliefs (every church has some), and sometimes we just ask “Hey, how’s proselyting?”. Every now and then, they would invite us over to their church building and try to dig into us, tearing our faith apart, but we would just offer them a card and be on our way at that point. Some of the more overzealous missionaries would bash back, but that’s not how I roll.
…actually, I’ve always wondered, does door-to-door proselytizing work, or is it more of an exercise for the missionaries, or what is the endgame there?
My understanding is that it doesn’t work very well, but they do occasionally get converts. It tends to work better in foreign countries where they haven’t already been exposed to their particular Jesus stuff before.
But it is also an exercise for the faithful. It’s a way of showing devotion. In JWs, you just do it as part of your duty. Mormons go on actual mission trips.
(that question was not intended as disrespectful or snarky, I just realized it could be read that way, especially after I snarked at proselytizing in general. I meant it as a sincere question, though, coming from a non-proselytizing culture myself.)
Well, first of all, for Mormon missionaries, they are on a dedicated mission for two years, meaning that all of their time is devoted to evangelical work. Overwhelmingly, the missionaries knocking on your door would rather be talking with someone who is actually interested, but going out and knocking doors is more productive than sitting in their apartment twiddling their thumbs when they have nothing else to do, so they go out knocking. It is the least productive way for them to find people to teach, but it is more productive than doing nothing.
As a side note, the reason why they keep coming back, even when you told them to leave you alone a month ago, is because missionaries don’t stay in one place for their entire mission, so in just a couple of months, you can have an entirely new set of missionaries in a given area, who don’t know your door from any other.
I had a coworker who was a JW, who used to complain regularly about how angry people would get when he knocked on their doors early Sunday mornings. Then one day he complained he had been woken up early Saturday morning my some Mormons trying to convert him. “Who does that, anyways? I want to sleep in on my Saturday! And, like I would convert away from my religion that easily!”
We just looked at him and said, “Dude, when people are cranky when you knock on their doors, this is why!”
To be fair, he did get it, and did stop complaining about cranky people, lol.
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.
One of my all time favorites. I would have commented on it earlier, but I couldn’t think of a clever reference off hand.
Despite my love for Amber, Lord of Light is Zelazny’s best.
Speaking of Creatures of Light and Darkness, that’s the perfect punishment for Mary. Weave her still living nervous system into the hall carpet. Cue Stomping Carla!
Hmm, maybe I could have gone with something about
“Ruth has taken on her Aspect and raised up an Attribute”, though I suspect that’ll fit Joyce better in a few strips.
Pretty sure one of the early strips like, a year back say that Agatha actually is a lesbian, and I think in a relationship with the red headed girl who dyed her hair blue whose name escapes me at the moment?
Dina strikes me as pan. She has before expressed her sexual orientation as “unconcerned” and said she doesn’t really care about her partner’s gender. That’s a very pan way of looking at things.
She might be. She seemed unsure, which could lead to her realizing she doesn’t care. Certainly supported by a line from Becky /about/ Dina, but that could just be her misunderstanding.
Agatha (the blonde Mormon in this strip) and Grace (the blonde who’s dating/rooming with Mandy, the girl with the now-cyan hair) aren’t the same person.
Grace and Mandy were established in the Walkyverse to bi, and they’re in a relationship with each other in this universe. I don’t think Agatha’s orientation has ever been even hinted at in either universe, unless you count, “She’s Robin’s McAwesome’s counterpart, and Robin’s kinda indefinably queer, so Agatha must be too”, and I’m not entirely sure that holds water.
If true, it means that everyone in this strip except possibly Mary is bi, though.
Well, the significant non-bi characters that we know of are Joyce, Dorothy, Walky, Sal, Sarah, Becky, Ethan, Joe, Leslie, Jacob, Jason, Mary, Roz and Carla. Dina strikes me as pan rather than bi as well.
I deeply enjoy that there are enough bi characters to make a non-bi list.
This specific era is henceforth known as the ‘Fall of Mary the Bigot’. The immense amount of ‘meh’ from everyone around her will cause shockwaves and aftereffects for generations to come.
Step 1: Click the “Reply” link next to my comment (well, you could scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, but this is faster and these instructions stay in view).
Step 2: Click the “Get a Gravatar” link next to the “NAME” field in the response box that pops up. If you can’t see one, type into the text box until it shifts over.
Step 3: Click the “Create Your Own Gravatar” button helpfully provided by the other end of that link.
Step 4: Input your email (the one you used to sign in to comment), your username (ditto) and a password. Make sure you can remember your password! You’ll need it if you want to change your Grav. (Also, they totally lied about the “fascinating” terms of service)
Step 5: From there, you’ll be taken to “Upload new image”, where a helpful little button named “Choose file” will be located. Click it, but only AFTER having saved your desired profile picture, or the image it comes from, to your computer or some place navigable from there.
Step 6: A window will pop up that says “My Computer” or something like that. At any rate, it will access your computer’s files. Navigate to your saved image and double click it. This will upload the image.
Step 7: Click “Next”. This will take you take you to an image editor where you can crop the image you just uploaded however you wish. You will get “small” and “large” previews of what the Grav will look like (on a white background) under the crop window.
Step 8: Once your happy with the previews, click “Crop and Finish!” and you’re done. It recommends waiting five to ten minutes and clearing your cache to see the results, but refreshing the page impatiently a few times usually does the trick.
This helpful guide should get you enjoying such wonderful Gravs as “Laser Ruth” or “Glary Mary” in minutes. (Feel free to think up a better name than that. Please.)
SEE. Here are your Christian characters. Being demonstrably Christian and junk. Regard them, and cease whining about lack of non-villain Christian characters.
Yeaaah, no, the problem is that to said types, they fully agree with Mary that any one who isn’t homophobic Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist isn’t a Christian, so Agatha and Sierra being awesome Christian type people would be just as dismissed as noting Joyce or Becky as Christian type people.
What they want is Mary but with the narrative of the comic fully in support of her.
I really do appreciate the guy who straight up admitted that that’s what he was about when I pulled out Becky as an example. Cause the worst part of those BS sessions is the attempt to pretend that that isn’t exactly what they’re doing.
The really special one, who was like “We’re not all terrible” “I mean Becky’s Christian.” “She’s ‘wayward’ because she thinks women are attractive, she doesn’t count”?
Or were there multiple conversations of this sort that I missed?
And the thing is, with Joyce, we have a sympathetic portrayal of a fundamentalist Christian character. The story doesn’t portray the (many) problematic parts of her religion as sympathetic, but it does understand where her worldview comes from, and , and even shows how that worldview can be useful and valuable in places, if applied in a non hypocritical way (see Joyce using her knowledge of scripture to justify being friends with Dorothy). And the story does depict Joyce as a good person underneath the character flaws that come from being a part of a toxic community. Frankly, I think the story of her struggle with fundamentalist faith is one Christians of any kind should spend more time thinking about. Because it’s not an uncommon one.
OTOH, I can see how that wouldn’t count, since it’s apparently a story about Joyce losing her faith (In progress, but judging from the comments about it being semi-autobiographical and Willis’s current state.)
Suggesting good people can come out of Christianity, but the Good and Christian parts come into conflict and they have to give up the Christianity, isn’t really a positive portrayal of Christianity.
That makes Joyce not a good example. Becky on the other hand, does appear to be remaining Christian without much conflict. Of course, she’s a lesbian and is quite happy deciding on a version of her faith where that isn’t a problem. For most of the other girls, either they’re background characters or their religion hasn’t been enough of a focus to know how it affects their prejudices. (Mary being the obvious negative counter example, but again, not a positive portrayal.)
Hank is probably the best example at the moment of what these types of commentors are looking for – in the best possible case at least. He’s Christian, fundamentalist, Evangelical Christian. I’m sure he still holds to the parts of his branch of Christianity that condemn homosexuality, but he’s willing to love Becky anyway.
That’s the “Hate the sin, love the sinner” approach in its best form. It’s still hugely toxic and I’d love to see Willis dig into that a bit more, when we’re past the more obvious “Hate the sinner too” version Carol’s applying. I think individual’s with Hank’s approach could be shown positively, despite the culture overall being horribly damaging, especially to LGBTQ kids growing up in it.
Quite honestly Willis could make everyone else into a christian and wonderful and Mary just this person who doesn’t /really/ believe in Jesus- simply using it as an excuse to be bigoted (which she monologues about constantly while rubbing her hands with glee) and you’d still still get the same people complaining about it. Somehow.
(I mean that would be a godawful comic but not for the reasons such people would complain. Quite the opposite clearly.).
Two so far. 78 episodes, 11 minutes each. It starts getting a coherent plot around episode 45-ish, the ones before that are mainly slice of life with some hints towards the eventual main plot.
It’s worth noting that the slice-of-life is still pretty entertaining, you get a lot of alien weirdness and character development that gets expanded on later.
That alt text. My brother turned Christian some time ago and so did his family. He used to say a similar prayer to the one in the alt text: “Gracias Diosito por este taquito Amen”. “Thanks for this taco, God.”
Needless to say his ex-wife was not amused by that little prayer.
I love it. Mary wants a prayer circle, and now has people that want to pray with her…of course there is a fly in the ointment.
You should be careful what you ask for, you may get it Mary.
It’s the beginning of the united front against the Tyranny of Mary. Then things can get back to normal, where Ruth is the Tyrant. There can only be one.
I never thought I’d see the day where I agreed with that first sentence…
And no, if you ask Mary about that verse, she’ll just go off on how wrong Judaism is. Something about us being “spiteful heathens who know better” was the best one I’ve gotten.
Some 30 something staff member with a billion other duties outside babysitting RAs and thus more likely to allow them massive leeway so long as complaints aren’t flooding in?
I will like to pray for my feet, as day of walking from stuff from work and running to go fangirl over Kalafina all over one of the biggest cities of the world has destroyed them all D:
Give me that old time religion, it’s good enough for me.
It was good enough for Isis.
she will help us in a crisis,
And she never raises her prices.
And that’s good enough for me.
Give me that old time religion, it’s good enough for me.
We will worship Aphrodite,
She’s pretty, but she’s flighty,
She wears a see-thru nighty,
And that’s good enough for me!
Gosh, I’ve a load of those. My version of yours goes like this though:
We will sing to lady Isis.
She’ll stand by us in a crisis,
and she hasn’t raised her prices,
so she’s good enough for me.
… scans a bit better, I think. Then there is, for example:
All the Chinese pray to Yao
for he showed the farmers hao.
There are bumper harvests nao,
which is good enough for me.
Next to Yao they worship Yu.
He built roads and bridges tu,
and canals–there’s quite a fu,
and that’s good enough for me.
You want to face roughly 4.5 degrees east of northeast, and then angle roughly 81.5 degrees down, because there’s a lot of rock and magma and even metallic core between the two.
I don’t know about Mecca, but some Jews figure out which way is Jerusalem once, like when they move into a new home, and put up a painting to label the correct wall.
A solved problem, because there have already been Muslim astronauts:
“When the Astronaut and devout Muslim Sheikh Muszaphar Shukoor travelled to space he asked Muslim scholars how to pray in space. What resulted was a historical conference in which Angkasa (the Malaysian space agency) invited 150 Muslim scientists and scholars to answer these questions. When they agreed on what should be done, the verdict was passed and approved by the National Fatwa Council.”
“Regarding facing Makkah they said there are four options:
1. Face the Kaaba on the land (which will move relative to the ISS)
2. Face the projection of the Kaaba in the sky
3. Face the Earth
4. Face anywhere”
Captain Button: yes, there is. Just google “qibla app” and you’ll see a bunch. It’s often integrated with a prayer time app and digital copy of the Qur’an, with the appropriate verses.
As for Jerusalem, you can also google “Jerusalem Compass” or similar.
So now, we work on getting Billie officially transferred to a new floor so she’s no longer under Ruth’s supervision and they can date in safety, right? …right?
I don’t know if it’s different now, but back in my day we couldn’t change rooms just anytime we want (even if we could find someone willing to trade rooms). It could only be done between semesters, unless there was some kind of crisis (e.g. one roommate being evicted).
If they explained what the situation was, leaving out that they’d actually already started sleeping together (and the suicide pact and the alcohol and all the other problematic details), I suspect something could be arranged – extraordinary circumstances, avoiding potential conflicts with school policies, etc.
This however isn’t Smarting of Age, so that’s not happening.
Huh, dunno why, but I just tried to imagine the day from Mary’s perspective and it’s just been bookended (to her) by two queerfolk showing her great insolence by having no respect for her invocations of authority and the threat of punishment for “sins”.
Both of them equally calling out her bluffs and asking her to just put her money where her mouth is and report them if it matters that much to her and thus revealing her bluster to be the thinly-veiled attempt to control that it always was going to be.
And I’d feel better at how these two attempts at power backfired if I didn’t know that Mary’s response to being rebuffed by Carla was to destroy the possession Carla loves most of all and then dump a giant buttload of transphobia on her.
So what exactly will she have planned for Ruth when her pettiness and sense of aggrieved entitlement rev up?
I’m fairly sure gluing the skates is something just about every character in the strip would have done but is only angering and troubling because it comes from such an awful person.
Don’t agree. I’m not saying they would do it in real life. But the whole thing was presented as just slapstick comedy, not reality.
One of the deft things Willis did was take something that looked like Slapstick and Rule of Funny and turn it into something actually horrible.
It’s also the reason for how Ruth can be sympathetic to some of us. Her violence is interpreted as comedic slapstick, and not something that really happened.
Really? I see the rest of the hall as well-adjusted enough to ignore the quiet sound of skates on carpet outside their closed door, or just put on headphones.
I think the hall is full of people who love engaging in playful slapstick with everyone else. When someone is annoying to them, they’re annoying right back.
Hundreds of dollars ? Really ? I’ve never skated, but I’ve seen skates for sale here in NORWAY (the most expensive country in they year for the last 20 years now…) for as low as 18 dollars.
If you just want a cheap pair of skates, they’re cheap, yeah. But Carla is from rich stock, and while she’s not a jerk in general, she probably REALLY cares about skates and gets the expensive ones. And you can DEFINITELY get expensive skates for hundreds of dollars. It’s a pretty reasonable bet that Carla’s are the expensive variant.
Yeah, but outside of comedic violence, her slapstick prank likely ruined Carla’s expensive skates, and could have seriously hurt her.
And she’s just such a malicious —-, this sort of thing isn’t a funny prank for her. She wanted to hurt Carla. She probably would have loved it if Carla crashed and dislocated her knee or twisted her ankle, and been a vicious little monster over it.
This. The point was to hurt her and ruin something she loves.
And that last part feels super important, because it’s probably impossible to be a resident in the hall and not know that Carla is obsessed with her skates and is constantly skating everywhere. So, everyone knows at least that they are not just an expensive possession but also something important to Carla’s identity and self-expression.
Mary targeting the skates to hurt Carla feels even more deliberate and intentional in that context. Like, we see in the transphobia dagger that she’s willing to go the extra distance for the full scope of causing an individual she is targeting pain, so it would be completely keeping in character for her to have deliberately targeted the skates as a means of both physically and emotionally hurting Carla.
That’s also what worries me with regards to Mary being “ineffectual”. Like… yeah, she’s got a tenuous relationship with non-shitty human interactions and that means she face plants on her bad ideas like this, but she was also the comedic foil for Carla’s snark for a number of strips before she pulled out her glue gambit and then the later transphobia attack.
Her comedically failing now just feels like it’s majorly setting up her pulling out all the nastiness for a really awful attack (even if it’s just something designed to brutally hit Billie and Ruth with a bunch of concentrated homophobia and triggering behavior).
Mary is just such an unhappy human being. She doesn’t seem to experience any joy at all from what we’ve seen, unless it’s hurting someone she sees as beneath her, or being a self-righteous jerk. She’s just such a pitiful, nasty little person, and the way she lashes out at everyone insures she will never have a single friend or even ally on the floor. She’s isolating herself, and she will just become even more bitter and cruel and horrible, and she will blame everyone but herself.
Carla knows how to deal with hate, unfortunately. She’ll get by, and deal, even though she shouldn’t have to.
Mary? IDEK. She’s a vicious little person who is going to be terribly lonely very quickly. Who the hell knows what is going to happen with her. She might become even nastier. She might shoot up the campus. She might hurt herself.
People like Mary don’t know how to be happy. And it’s pitiful.
I’ve never understood why people keep assuming it’s carpet. Carpet of any kind of pIle that would muffle anything would not only be incredibly hard to skate on, she would be shredding the hell out of it, pretty much negating people talking about how expensive the skates are. Carla’d be liable for those damages (short of the glue spot) which would probably be far more than the skates.
Also I wonder how many people have actually heard repetitive skating. The sounderlying of skate wheels bother me and having it repetitive would drive me up the wall. Skating in a narrow hallway could have someone coming suddenly around the corner. And I’m guessing if Carla got distracted by arguing with Mary, and didn’t look where she was going and crashed, people would be laughing, not talking about her grievous injuries. Or go “Oh Carla”.
Mary has undeniably raised the stakes at current to becoming (or rather reasserting) her raging bongo self and is indefensible now, but really Im boggled at the amount of people who see it pretty one sided at the start.
Willis confirmed in an earlier comment thread that the hallway was thin carpet in direct response to someone saying that skates on hardwood is very loud. So it’s canon that the sound was actually very muffled.
And dorm carpet tends to be cheap and matted to all hell so I doubt Carla’s skates would have been able to do any damage to them.
It’s also been stated before that Carla’s always on skates. She’s skated up and down the hallway before, probably most of the times we’ve seen her there.
Now, she was probably being a bit more enthusiastic about it than usual because “New skates!”, but the actual skating in the hall wasn’t an aberration.
I don’t know, but I hope it destroys her. I may thirst for drama, and unhappy endings are part of it, but they’re not actually fulfilling when the unhappy ending is due to heterosexism and the like. That’s just real life. Yeah, real life sucks, and it’s important not to forget, but it’s what the news’ for. Unhappy endings are so much more filling and delicious when it’s ultimately because of the people involved (which can include them ultimately being stressed by a sexism or similar, but as a primary factor rather than just a catalyst feels.. blah.)
Important stories still, since they’re true, but not fulfilling ones for me.
” something bigger than a stupid prayer,” Mary if you were a real Christian you would stop and think about what the hell you just said you stupid judgmental elitist bongo
Wanted to chime in as a (socially progressive) Mormon who loves all three (four?) of your comics, I really guffawed at the use of Agatha being a Mormon to troll Mary. In fact, I’ve felt like you’ve been respectful to Mormons, even with the little you’ve used Agatha in the comic. So thanks, Willis!
My headcanon is that if Willis were to stop making comics for any real length of time, he’d explode. Kinda like that movie, Speed, where the bus can’t go below 50mph. Luckily for us, he likes making comics, so this has never actually been tested.
She died but then didn’t because it was her clone who wasn’t her other clone and then 23 years later Magneto gave her a seizure that didn’t not kill her and now she’s maybe Cyclops’ granddaughter from the present who was raised in the future.
Oh I forgot to mention that the Magneto who gave her a seizure was Xorn who was pretending to be Magneto pretending to be Xorn who was also possibly the real Magneto later reconstructed by the Scarlet Witch.
Of course you left out that the time traveling son was actually the son of Scott and a clone of Jean Grey. Who was raised in the future partly by a time traveling Scott and Jean (in disguise). Somehow Scott and Jean’s daughter from another alternate future was involved in that too. She’d previously traveled back in time to join the X-Men, but that was while Jean was dead.
There are at least two other versions of the time traveling son as well – a clone from the future and a version from yet another alternate reality.
And I’m sure there are twists in that family tree that I’ve missed. It’s been at least a decade since I followed it closely.
It could very well be all the punishment she gets… is she were to back off now. Of course that won’t happen. Things will keep escalating and there will be plenty of damage in the end for everyone involved as well as the bystanders.
Go Sierra and Agatha! That has to be the single most cheerful trolling ever. At the same time, I am now waiting for someone else, heck, anyone else to show up with a rosary for good measure, though that probably won’t happen.
Why do I get the feeling that when I’m 30 or something I’m gonna look back at some of my old posts and cringe a bit? They seem fine for now, but It seems everyone hates what they wrote as a teenager.
I feel like it’s a good sign for one’s ability to grow in life if they can consistently look back on their past self’s actions and be utterly mortified at how much of an idiot they were.
That’s basically what growing up is. When I was 15, I was certain I knew everything I’d ever need to know. When I was 16, I admitted that there were people who knew better than me on some things, but that was because they had lived different lives than me. When I was 18, I admitted that I said some stupid crap when I was 15, but was certain I finally had understood everything I would ever need to know.
When I was 24, I realized I don’t know shit. At 28, I finally realize I have a long way ahead of me before I can make a claim of wisdom.
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. – Probably not Mark Twain
There’s a bit of a strange disconnect between reality and comic in how Mary destroyed the skates. The sheer speed at which the glue hardened is in Looney Tunes-slapstick territory, which makes it hard to take seriously.
If the glue isn’t water soluble, removing it even before it hardens would be difficult. Especially if it get’s into the wheels and joints and axles which means the skates have to be taken apart before the glue can be removed. By then, it would have hardened.
Carla may have tried, but she couldn’t get all of it out in a short time.
Not really. Strong glues a) harden quickly, b) create hard to remove imperfections to surface that would ruin rolling ability, c) tend to melt plastic when treated with something to remove it.
Also is “glue doesn’t work how glue works” type comments going to be like the “trace over permanent marker with whiteboard marker to get rid of it” comments where it’s just endlessly repeated for months on end until eventually Willis makes a snarky alt tag about it?
And if so, I’ll take it any day over the week over the “but Becky got a haircut” refrain.
But wouldn’t the speed and friction of the wheels make sure that the glue was flung off before it had the chance to harden ? Thereby just leaving a hard glue puddle on the rug.
I’m sorry. I normally generally agree with you, Cerberus, but I can’t agree with you here. Because anything that hardens as quickly as shown would not have gotten on the skates, as it would have hardened on the floor when applied.
I do think Willis set it up to seem comedic, specifically for the gut punch when he deconstructed it, showing how bad Mary is.
I think some of us lost sight of that because of that one poster who tried to argue that no one should care about Carla’s property being damaged because Carla is a horrible person who deserved it, and who shifted it to the real world by bringing up cops and stuff.
I don’t think we were supposed to take it all that seriously until after we found out just how nasty Mary really is. Sure, some of you knew she was horrible from other comics, but she really hadn’t been shown to be all that bad yet in this comic–just an entitled butthole.
Did the comic change at some point? Mary squirts it onto the carpet just as Carla rolls over it, so there is no time for it to dry on the carpet. It got gummy pretty quickly, though, enough to toss Carla on her face.
Defying Mary really does bring people together. Hell, just now, I saw Billie smiling and giving a thumb’s up at Ruth even though they hate each other. /other students in the hall
Mary doesn’t seem to get it. She won’t HAVE a chance to make a bigger profit from it. She missed her window.
That window was also her escape route, and she missed that too, because now Ruth’s going to come down on her like the wrath of the angry God that Mary WISHES existed in Ruth’s place.
She’s blustering, putting up a defiant front now that her master (underpants gnome level) plan has been foiled. This is her basically shouting “next time Gadget! Next time!”
Now, a lot depends on how passive-aggressive Mary is. Violence can and does come from confrontations like this, even if only in the form of continual malicious anonymous complaints or destruction of property. Even tampering with food would not be unprecedented.
If there’s one thing that anthropology teaches us, it is that there literally nothing a human won’t worship if they genuinely believe that it is some kind of access point to the divine.
I’ve always wondered what a full third season of Moral Orel would have been like. It’s one of the only shows I’ve watched that has legitimately gone to a very realistic dark place.
Oh man, Moral Orel is one of my favorite shows ever and I think a lot of the way it visits religious topics is similar to how David Willis does and that’s probably part of why I love both Moral Orel and Roomies!/It’s Walky!/Joyce and Walky!/Shortpacked!/Dumbing of Age so so so so much.
So, now it’s “a stupid prayer”, hmm? They do say that stress can make people reveal truths that they mostly would not even reveal to themselves. In this case, what it reveals about Mary is that this isn’t about religion at all. It’s about controlling other people; her religion is just the framework around which she hangs her biases and allows her the self-deceit of believing herself to be acting on God’s will. Push comes to shove, though, it becomes ‘stupid’ and a secondary consideration to having control over others.
She’s a dangerous young woman. As I’ve already posted, I wouldn’t put past her becoming a poison-pen author, laundry slasher and rat poison in the cafeteria salt shakers type.
“Now, Mary, say after me: ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Good, good. Now, repeat that ten thousand more times.”
I don’t think Sierra and Agatha are intentionally trying to annoy Mary or protect Ruth here, but more that they thought having a prayer was a good idea.
The last panel reads a lot funnier to me if they’re just trying to be nice.
Sierra has to know that praying for the “dissolution of gender roles” won’t go over well.
And I’m sure Agatha has figured out her opinion on anything Mormon.
I doubt they’re protecting Ruth, but teasing Mary? Definitely.
I dunno, their faces in the last panel just look too genuinely happy to have any malice in them. I really think they just genuinely want to pray together because it’d be nice.
I would buy Agatha (maybe she’s just never been in the room when Mary expressed her views on Mormonism), but Sierra choosing to pray for a very specific thing that will infuriate Mary, who has made it pretty clear that she doesn’t like Sierra…I don’t know, that seems to be stretching coincidence.
(Also, that strip is another reminder of what a petty person Mary is. She thinks Dorothy is evil because she’s an atheist, not surprising, but as far as I can tell she thinks Joyce shouldn’t hang out with Sierra because Sierra doesn’t wear shoes.)
Ooooh, I had forgotten about that! Yeah, Sierra, at minimum, knows that Mary doesn’t want to pray with her. So even if she didn’t know that particular thing would bother Mary she knows that just coming over to join them would.
I’m a little surprised someone as conniving as Mary thought that someone as decisive as Ruth wouldn’t take immediate action to negate her attempt at blackmail. On the other hand, Mary clearly isn’t as smart as she thinks she is, because if she had been, she would have realized that someone as decisive as Ruth would have taken immediate action to deal with the problem.
possible weird parallel with Walky – back home she probably would have had an established group of “right-thinking” people to back her up with the shaming and social pressure, but now she’s alone, and actually has to work at it?
I assume David knew he’d get more of the “you don’t know anything about real Christians” BS that showed up in the comments yesterday. He does an awfully good job at addressing ridiculous reader complaints in universe.
I’m not sure if there has been a character I’ve loathed so much as Mary.
Mary vs. Toedad is a tough call. Mary hasn’t pulled a gun on anyone, but this is about personal loathing, not how bad the things they’ve actually done are.
To me at least, Mary really has nothing on the guy who pulled a gun on a college campus (Ross) Horribly abusive father (Blaine) and an actual hopefully attempted rapist.
Eh, to me, Mary is worse than Toe-dad and Blaine. People like Mary know how to hide their awful-ness to authority figures, meaning they can get away with their shit longer. IDK how sneaky rapist dude is though
*Re-reading in the afternoon* Heh, get a load of the holier-than-thou Fundie Christian calling prayer “stupid”. Mary, darling, your fundamental horribleness is showing.
Did Mary even think to get actual evidence of them together? I honestly don’t remember if she did. Because really it’s her word against Ruth’s. who seems to always have a tip top floor and has no problems with her residents.
We were never shown Mary getting actual proof. And having known Mary-types, I don’t think she thought she would need it. Because she’s used to getting her way.
I also doubt it. For the simple reason that what she did with Ruth did not seem to be some sort of calculated response, but just something she reached for to get her way with Ruth and Carla in the spur of the moment.
Plus, she doesn’t seem to have anticipated Ruth’s response here, nor did she say something like “You think I don’t have proof?” let alone show it to Ruth to intimidate her.
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Mary loves those traditional gender rolls
(well I would like to pray I have a good time at MAGFest and completely forget what time it is and break my “
FIRST!” streak tomorrow and possibly Sunday and that y’all don’t miss me too much)Somehow I can’t see her showing deference to her husband. Or anyone on earth.
Or God, for that matter. When they meet she’s going to tell him he’s doing everything wrong.
Starting with why he’s not punishing everyone she’s mad at.
…and then God gets annoyed and appoints her to be the new host of the Spectre, and we’re all boned.
Perhaps she could redefine deferring to her husband to mean making him take care of things when it’s man’s work or by deferring to him in no win scenarios when she wants him to be the bad guy or just be the one that’s wrong.
Especially considering her husband is HOWARD.
Out of interest, any particular reason to bring up Howard? In this universe, IIRC, he’s a gawky, grieving 16-year-old kid who once got flustered when confronted by an older sexy woman with boobs.
And those of us who are reading It’s Walky for the first time at itswalky.com right now try to forget the unwarranted spoiler.
It happened at the end of Roomies.
Ditto. UGH!
Just ignore it. It isn’t true, anyway.
Well, yeah. Mary’s a dickhead. Her religiosity is besides the point.
Mary is probably of the Phyllis Schlafly breed. Claims that women’s place is in the home while conducting an extensive career outside the home, where she’s the boss instead of a man, men being bosses also being part of the natural order she supposedly promotes.
See also Ann Coulter, who legitimately believes that women’s suffrage is a bad thing that should be repealed.
Phyllis Schlafly seems to hold some of the most regressive views I have personally encountered while justifying her own position with the classic argument of “except for me because I am doing the Lord’s work.” She is truly an appropriate analogy for Mary.
Phyllis Schlafly bears the brunt of the blame for the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment to be ratified. Basically, there is no larger example of this sort of hypocrisy in existence.
Having a man just means she can claim any mistakes are his fault.
Like why he hasn’t brought back Star Trek Enterprise?
Gender rolls. Now in cinnamon butterscotch!
Is that any better than a gender biscuit?
Ha, it’s an undertale reference.
(Beep boop)
Not the gender roles, they are her one true love!
Oh can I help rain on her parade too? *clears throat* HEY MARY! ACCORDING TO TRADITIONAL GENDER ROLES YOU, AS A WOMAN, CANNOT BE AN ARTIST!! HYPOCRITE!!
Actually, wouldn’t art be iffy in the first place due to the whole graven images thing? Hope she doesn’t get a sculpture assignment.
Gender rolls are tasty with socioeconomic butter and jam.
They come free at restaurants, but only if the man pays for the meal.
Traditional gender rolls are awfully bland. I like my gender rolls spicier, maybe with cheese inside.
Great, now I’m hungry
good luck at Magfest
Don’t worry, Ana Chronistic! We’ll never miss you!Enjoy MAGFest! I love Magazines, too.Have fun!
Have an awesome time! As an aside, your Gravatar’s reveal was truly everything I hoped it would be.
The ‘traditional gender role’ Mary is working on emulating is that of a Moabite woman named ‘Jezabel’. She went quite far… on a pile of corpses.
And hates those Mormons (I remember having to read Nephi in Sunday school… ahh the glowing stones and seal boats)
“cashing it in for something bigger”
mary, see, if you cant even get a stupid prayer that means youre not gonna get anything
also these people are standing right there did they not hear the stuff about the blackmail
TBF, hey probably also strongly dislike Mary enough to do anything in their power to hurt her. Ruth is mean, sure, but Mary is just a…well.
I’d place a bet they offered like that specifically because they knew she’d hate it. You get what you want, she-devil, but AT WHAT COST??
Seriously they probably had a mind-meld moment of “The time to wreck this *****, let us proceed together”
Seriously. Like, you went for the blackmail and your target called your bluff and you had nothing to respond with. She beat you at your game…
Except, to do so, Billie and Ruth now can’t get together again less Mary try for round 2 and Mary is probably going to be stalking both of them even more for some sort of dirt to throw at them.
Even though Mary has lost, she has won in her primary goal which is constraining the happiness of others and getting them paranoid about her twitch-curtain style of busybodiness.
Ah, but Mary will be watched just as hard for any sign of bullying the other students. Ruth looked ready to tear her apart after her treatment of Carla and I doubt that’ll be a one time conflict.
… unless Billie fills out a change of residence form and moves to a different dorm, in which case she and Rose would be free to date openly.
Yeah, yeah, I know I should stop pointing that out.
I mean, do you do it every single time? If so, probably, I haven’t read too many comments the last couple of weeks. But it’s pretty funny in small doses, at least.
I don’t think Rose lives on their floor anyway.
But, but, but, Mary had the MORAL victory. The evil lesbian is not allowed to fight back after that, right?
Silly, Mary, “evil” cheats.
Yeah, but now Ruth and Carla can get her nailed (giggity) for the hate speech. It will be Mary’s word versus that of her victim, an eyewitness who’s an RA that they now have no reason to doubt, and an entire floor full of girls who will say “well, I didn’t see it, but that’s totally in character for her.”
I don’t know if they WILL do it that way. But it would be both the most effective way to deal with Mary and the right thing to do by Carla.
A few more tickets and she might be able to get a sweet Voltron collectable ring.
Yeah… She already blew her wad on that transphobic remark. As she guessed, Ruth’s covered her ass now, which means it’s over. No more cashing in anything.
Well, as far as comeuppance goes, it’s a start.
Petard, Meet Hoist
That doesn’t make an awful lot of sense ; )
It’s from a saying: hoisted on your own petard. It’s a fancy way of saying someone’s plan backfired.
If only Rachel-1 and Asma were there, it’d be sweeter.
Wait, what does Rachel have to do with this?
I think she’s Jewish.
Mary’s been caught in a Twilight Zone of her own making!
College.
For some it’s a place to learn a profession. For others, a chance to learn about themselves.
For one Indiana girl, it’s an opportunity to teach the right way to live. But when she attempts to steer others to follow her path, she is faced with individuals the likes of whom she has only ever read about in works of fiction.
For not everyone is what they seem… In the Twilight Zone.
I would definitely watch that episode!
Needfuldoer: good job capturing the tone of the introductions to Twilight Zone episodes!
I must say though – if Mary has only read about folks like these in works of fiction, she’s not very well read…
Also – as I perceive it, Mary thinks she is steering people when she’s really trying to shove it down their throats and FORCE them to live her way (not unlike some real people I’ve met – both religious and otherwise). They rather reminds me of “IT” from “A Wrinkle in Time”.
The heroes DoA deserves
We seriously needs more Agatha and Sierra in this comic. They are super cheery like Joyce, but as far as we know nothing has completely broken them yet.
Absolutely! And they are super friendly and inclusive. I would love for the prayer circle to a thing from now on, to the endless annoyance of Mary.
That’s we don’t get to see more of them, duh u_u
why*
If we saw more of them, they would be. Clearly DoA fans are demons, for our attention blights peoples’ lives.
I don’t know whether Sierra or Agatha is doing this on purpose or if they’re genuine, but either way they are both amazing and adorable, and not just because they’re one-upping Mary. I love their smiles in the last panel. We don’t see people smiling enough in this comic.
I think they are both genuine and doing it on purpose.
I’d love it if the canon was that they overheard Mary’s shitty comment about Mormons from before and decided to spring this on her in “response”.
I’d put money on that being canon. Like, Sierra overheard it and told Agatha because they’re (I’m assuming) good friends.
Especially since it would seem to fit with the whole secret underground queer girl community Mandy, Grace, Sierra, and Agatha seem to have going on.
Somewhat off-topic: Underground Queer Girl Squad should be a band name. Or a superhero comic. Not sure which. But one of them.
Or at least a blogging team.
How underground is it? We haven’t seen Sierra in ages; and we don’t know much about her except that she doesn’t wear shoes.
Does that make you queer beyond the traditional definition of the term?
If I remember correctly, Sierra (as “Tootsie”, apparently?) was in the same squad as Mandy and Grace, and that was the “lesbian orgy” squad that Joe got put into, and Willis has said sexualities remain constant. Agatha, however, was in the “happy happy” squad that Mike got transferred to, and no mention of her sexuality, non-straight or otherwise, was ever made.
But she’s also the counterpart of Robin at McAwesomes, which means she probably ended up bringing in a manager and dating her too.
Wha?
Perhaps I have missed something in the archives, but I don’t recall Joe being stuck in a lesbian orgy squad. (Though I doubt that he would much mind!).
In IW! Joe’s transferred to Squad 48, which consists of Marcie, Mandy, Grace, Sierra and Guns (who isn’t in DoA), who basically just had orgies all the time but sorta developed more complex personalities as the comic went on.
Short answer: different comic.
I hope so. Because some part of me badly wants this to be a Reap What You Sow arc for Mary.
I would love even more if they genuinely want to help Mary and miss the spiteful intent behind the words.
Mary: “Let’s be ‘inclusive’.”
Sierra and Agatha: “Let’s be inclusive!!!”
‘Like what you said, but without the spite!’
“What you said exactly but without being *spiteful.”
I spent ten minutes looking for that in the archive, let me have this one.
I vote for letting you have it, especially since you currently have the best possible avatar for it.
Given that line break for Sierra… I feel like she’s almost definitely trolling the fuck out of her. Agatha seems likely too. I mean, whether or not she heard Mary’s shittiness earlier is… almost irrelevant. I find it very unlikely she only says that shit when she thinks she’s got Ruth blackmailed.
Even if they didn’t hear it, they heard Mary demanding prayer and they know Mary’s opinions. It works out to the same thing.
I mean, they’ve seen other instances of Mary’s pettiness, they probably know EXACTLY what they’re doing here.
I have a feeling that Mary has been making shitty comments about Mormons (along with everyone else who doesn’t fall under her specific definition of Christian) all semester, so even if Agatha didn’t hear exactly what Mary said to Ruth I could still see her purposefully doing this as a dig at Mary.
Killing with kindness and subtle digs it’s the Mormon woman way!
latoya jackson and family guy: my top two sources for prayer
Yay God!
That scene is the only place I’ve ever heard that prayer, so that’s exactly what I thought of too! XD
it’s the only place i’d ever heard it with the ‘yay god!’ on the end
I think I heard of it as a Navy thing from my brother-in-law. Regardless, I guess I was a day early bringing it up.
My grandparents on my mom’s side taught us that one with the “Yay god!” on the end.
My brother taught it to me. Of course, I used it when my Baptist grandmother was at the table, resulting in my Baptist grandmother LEAVING the table.
Look at those grins. Sierra and Agatha know what they’re doing.
They’re both naturally cheery people!
… I’m not ruling out that they’re also trolling the fuck out of Mary, mind.
It can be two things.
Por que no los dos?
A Mormon reference? I’m kind of impressed actually.
And here I thought this was another fake verse to piss Mary off, like the Hermesian thing from yesterday, but actually, It’s Real!
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zFOdQYmTrk)
Dunno about “Hermesian” — but the “Shepherd of Hermas” is a very Real Thing. It almost made it into the Bible.
Yep, Agatha is Mormon. She mentioned it to Joyce.
and that…is…fantastic!
agatha is mormon. also, willis studies.
to me, the most appealing part of the church of latter day saints is how recently the history starts
According to my Mormon housemate, there’s a lot of problems that need to be ironed out, not to mention the recent uptick in gay teenage suicides within their church.
Mormonism is a strongly conservative church which has serious issues with gays, sadly, though some of the nicest Christians I’ve ever met have come from it.
If you’re not LGBTQIAP+, please don’t refer to use as gays
And who would “use” be?
Don’t tell people how to talk Seer, that’s just silly and does the cause no good
I’m going to assume that’s sarcasm, because telling people how to talk does quite a lot of good for a lot of causes. It moves words out of the common vernacular. And while we tend to call ourselves that as mild sarcasm at how we’re frightening to the majority, the majority doing so is rather unalike.
” telling people how to talk does quite a lot of good for a lot of causes.”
Umm.. are YOU using sarcasm ? Because I can’t think of a SINGLE cause that has ever done anything good for!
Telling people how to talk will at BEST get those people to use those words even MORE, since we have a natural aversion to other people telling us how to use words. It feels condescending and frankly, a bit abusive.
You think the world is a better place for spic having been in the common vernacular? That we live in a lesser world for it? That ‘tranny’ becoming increasingly inappropriate is a bad thing?
Or did you perhaps not consider your belief? Because that’s not what happens when words exit the vernacular from people changing it.
I mean, referring to the entire queer spectrum as “the gays” is pretty dismissive, or even using that phrase solely in reference to gay folks is still wrong in the same way you don’t refer to black people as “the blacks.”
Besides, if telling people they’re using some problematic language encourages them to do it more, then there was never any hope for them to begin with.
Who said “the gays”? Harvey said gay teenage suicides and Charles just said gays. And PFLAG seems to think we should use gay to describe the entire community. Queer is triggering to older members and homosexual is too clinical. My personal opinion is take back the word queer to prevent confusion, but that idea doesn’t seem to have a lot of traction.
It’s not like “gays” and “the gays” have some kind of significant difference. It’s the same context wherein they’re being entirely defined by their sexual identity.
I’ve mostly started exclusively using queer when I started to think that LGBT+ was too restrictive, so I’m all for taking that word back, and I’m with you on “homosexual” coming off as too clinical, which is strange since I feel okay saying “bisexual” and “pansexual.”
It’s all in the connotations the words have gotten attached to themselves.
For example, pulling from “bisexual” and “homosexual”, “bi” is perfectly acceptable usage. “Homo” is not. Because “homo” has been abused by bigots for decades, while “bi” hasn’t.
If you want to say that something is offensive, then at least take the time to explain it.
Referring to people as “the gays” has an unfortunate history, similar to “the blacks” or “the Mexicans” or even “the Jews.”
And yet, “the gays” wasn’t the phrase objected to.
“Mormonism is a strongly conservative church which has serious issues with gays”.
And I don’t think “blacks”, “Mexicans” or “Jews” are beyond the pale outside of specific contexts.
At the very least, in my experience, there is nothing like a general consensus among people covered by the term that “gay” is offensive.
The point they’re making is that using “gay” as a noun rather than an adjective feels dehumanizing, not that the word “gay” is offensive. That’s why they’re comparing it to other adjectives used as nouns.
Don’t say “blacks” or “Jews” either. Like. You’re just wrong about this not being generally-recognized as offensive.
I can’t talk to the rest of them, but I don’t mind ‘jews’. Not sure about case-specific, but I think that sometimes these words are more offensive in theory than in practice. Though they are also often used offensively, which is a whole other confusing issue. Acceptable verbiage is a constantly shifting thing, and all I can say is that I think what we’re discussing here is just on the ok side of the line at the moment
I only said gay specifically because I don’t know the statistics of the other queer groups, but I do know that they saw a large spike in suicides because, IIRC, they are now requiring the children of same-sex couples to disown their parents if they want to remain Mormon after 18.
I think that is fair to say, but it has steered the conversation a bit away from the original point…which was also interesting
Yeah, how the Elders and the Church treat queer members and youth is still pretty awful. Especially for queer women.
I mean, it’s also pretty crap to Straight Women. There’s a reason Twilight came from where it did. It’s mormon as fuck and represents the future SMeyers has been taught to view as ideal. But queer women do get it a hell of a lot worse.
Also, according to an ex-Mormon I used to know, once you leave the church, they *never* stop harassing you to come back.
Unclear if this is better or worse than what scientology has family do.
They do it your parents don’t care. Seriously except for having to sit through a few visiting teacher visits and having an aunt and uncle who almost dragged me to church around thanksgiving I get little to no grief. It also probably helps that I’m gay and infertile thus completely failing my role and responsibilities as a woman.
Looks like I shouldn’t have prayed on that MONKEY’S PAWWWWW
+1
Anyone else think that Mary in the 4th panel is kinda adorable, I mean look at her little frowny mouth!
I know! She’s so small. So small and hateful.
She’s like a little angry little slice of pie
Peridot??
yep
EXACTLY like Peridot
So what you’re saying is she’s gonna reform and develop a crush on a loud, fun lady.
…Well, yesterday’s shipping looks to be working out.
Im still going with it, combined with anguished declaration of love
Carla: Why do you hate me so much?
Mary: Because if you’re really female…than what does that make me!
Actually I think the anguished declaration would come from Mary!
Watch those walls dissolve!
I just like it because of how much it would explain about her personality, also it would kinda make her an evil counterpart to Becky.
mary’s always KIND of adorable- in a shit-eating secondary antagonist sort of way
Looks like an expression Peridot would wear in Steven Universe.
Which means yes, it’s adorable.
Last panel Mary is also pretty damn adorable
Bigots like her aren’t adorable, they are killers and are totally warped in the head.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brynn-tannehill/and-then-they-came-for-tr_b_9258678.html
They are real and they harm people for fun.
I hope Willis will allow that link.
I literally threw up reading this. I mean it. I have the flu.
well thats fucking horrible.
I meant to reply to Stacie, Still sorry about the flu
Ah FRC, continuing their sterling record of absolute scum-sucking awful. Also, super happy to see all the professional homophobes migrating their hate rays transwards and making more intentional their attempt to kill us all. Just warms my cockles to see how much they care (about using casual hatred of us to fleece their flock).
Um, what did the First Robotics Competition ever do to you?
(Federal Records Center? What?)
I’ve read that. And it scares me muchly. I fear for my American friends
Love the character design, hate the character.
I want Mary to ride up to me in crusader armour, sweep me off my feet, place me in her saddle and sweetly whisper in my ear “DEUS VULT”
The Sign says “Everyone Welcome/Come inside and pray”…
I recognize that reference! 5 Man Electrical Band, early ’70s. I even know the rest of the verse “… but when they passed the plate at the end of it all I didn’t have a penny to pay. So I got me a pen and a paper and I made up my own little sign: Thank you Lord for thinking about me, I’m alive and doing fine.”
Man, your alt-text already used both the prayers I know.
You still have
God is good, God is great, thanks for the food we ate.
Here’s one more! It’s called the Philmont Grace.
For food, for raiment
For life, for opportunity
For friendship and fellowship
We thank thee O Lord
Amen
(I memorized that specifically because I was voted Chaplain’s Aide in my Boy Scout hiking group so I had to lead grace despite being the least religious out of everyone.)
Oh man. I have serious Problems with the Mormon faith, but I have never been so appreciative of it as seeing it used to terrorize fundie protestants. (In a fight between two terrible things, I will nominally pull for the one I have not personally been oppressed by, and would have no problem with someone with personal experience with the LDS doing the opposite.)
When I was an LDS missionary, I tried to avoid antagonizing people of different faiths; we believe that every religion has truth. We were sometimes approached by JW’s and Seventh Day Adventists, and they were usually very polite. Every now and again, though, we would run into someone who wanted to bible bash, so to speak, and had no intention of actually having a constructive conversation. In such situations, I would often quote from the Book of Mormon just to grind their gears a bit.
I won’t lie, I’ve always wondered what happened when Mormon missionaries and JWs crossed paths. I assumed you just traded tips on which houses on your route had rude/angry people in them.
Generally, it’s like a friendly rivalry. We both know each others’ tricks, and we know what to expect, so there’s no point actually trying to convert each other. Sometimes we poke fun at each others’ weird beliefs (every church has some), and sometimes we just ask “Hey, how’s proselyting?”. Every now and then, they would invite us over to their church building and try to dig into us, tearing our faith apart, but we would just offer them a card and be on our way at that point. Some of the more overzealous missionaries would bash back, but that’s not how I roll.
I’m fine with putting all the evangelicals together to let them try and convert each other all day long.
…actually, I’ve always wondered, does door-to-door proselytizing work, or is it more of an exercise for the missionaries, or what is the endgame there?
My understanding is that it doesn’t work very well, but they do occasionally get converts. It tends to work better in foreign countries where they haven’t already been exposed to their particular Jesus stuff before.
But it is also an exercise for the faithful. It’s a way of showing devotion. In JWs, you just do it as part of your duty. Mormons go on actual mission trips.
(that question was not intended as disrespectful or snarky, I just realized it could be read that way, especially after I snarked at proselytizing in general. I meant it as a sincere question, though, coming from a non-proselytizing culture myself.)
Well, first of all, for Mormon missionaries, they are on a dedicated mission for two years, meaning that all of their time is devoted to evangelical work. Overwhelmingly, the missionaries knocking on your door would rather be talking with someone who is actually interested, but going out and knocking doors is more productive than sitting in their apartment twiddling their thumbs when they have nothing else to do, so they go out knocking. It is the least productive way for them to find people to teach, but it is more productive than doing nothing.
As a side note, the reason why they keep coming back, even when you told them to leave you alone a month ago, is because missionaries don’t stay in one place for their entire mission, so in just a couple of months, you can have an entirely new set of missionaries in a given area, who don’t know your door from any other.
I had a coworker who was a JW, who used to complain regularly about how angry people would get when he knocked on their doors early Sunday mornings. Then one day he complained he had been woken up early Saturday morning my some Mormons trying to convert him. “Who does that, anyways? I want to sleep in on my Saturday! And, like I would convert away from my religion that easily!”
We just looked at him and said, “Dude, when people are cranky when you knock on their doors, this is why!”
To be fair, he did get it, and did stop complaining about cranky people, lol.
That explains a lot about the Mormon missionaries I’ve met. Nice folks, and pretty open to critically analyzing scripture.
Been years since I heard someone quoting any of the Nephi. I left Utah in 1978…
But didn’t she say she didn’t want anything Mormon?
Ah… nevermind. I just noticed I misplaced the speech balloon. It makes a bit more sense that way!
Suddenly the alt text is Latoya Jackson.
Then Mike wanders in: ALL HAIL SATAN!
Look, sometimes you just gotta give your life to the Lord of Light.
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.
OMG, we have to be ancient or SF/Fantasy scholars to get that. I am old. Love the book, the author and the reference.
I want to see Amazi-Girl hanging out with Frederick Cassidy.
One of my all time favorites. I would have commented on it earlier, but I couldn’t think of a clever reference off hand.
Despite my love for Amber, Lord of Light is Zelazny’s best.
Speaking of Creatures of Light and Darkness, that’s the perfect punishment for Mary. Weave her still living nervous system into the hall carpet. Cue Stomping Carla!
Hmm, maybe I could have gone with something about
“Ruth has taken on her Aspect and raised up an Attribute”, though I suspect that’ll fit Joyce better in a few strips.
Mary would not do well against Mike, since he doesn’t seem to give a damn about anything.
Oh, please, Willis, MAKE THIS HAPPEN. If ANYONE deserves to have Mike Inflicted on them for an extended period of time, it’s mary.
You go girls! Drown her in prayers different from her own!
Hail Odin!
“What is dead may never die.”
“But rises again harder and stronger.”
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Give me that old time religion
Give me that old time religion
Give me that old time religion
It’s good enough for me
Let us worship Zarathustra
Just the way we used to
I’m a Zarathustra booster
He’s good enough for me
Let us worship Aphrodite
She’s beautiful but flighty
She doesn’t wear a nightie
But she’s good enough for me
(a lovely song with thousands of verses)
I know this one!
It’s great. But the Aphrodite verse is the only one I ever can remember, heh…
Sierra and Agatha are my new favorites.
*Reads Alt Text*
I almost thought it was gonna say, “Rub-a-Dub-Dub, three women in a tub.”
You know, ’cause of Sierra, Agatha and Mary in that last panel..
Well, I know Sierra is also into women and Agatha being Robin’s double in Shortpacked means she’s probably also into women as well. So… “recruitment”.
Pretty sure one of the early strips like, a year back say that Agatha actually is a lesbian, and I think in a relationship with the red headed girl who dyed her hair blue whose name escapes me at the moment?
Nah, Grace and Mandy are canon in a relationship. Not Grace and Agatha. And both are bi (or at least were bi in the other universe).
And therefore, are bi now. You could say that in terms of choosing their sexuality, willis was in a… bi-nd.
(Unless between their appearance last universe and now Willis learned what Pan was, I guess. Someone’d have to be, besides maybe Mike.)
Dina strikes me as pan. She has before expressed her sexual orientation as “unconcerned” and said she doesn’t really care about her partner’s gender. That’s a very pan way of looking at things.
She might be. She seemed unsure, which could lead to her realizing she doesn’t care. Certainly supported by a line from Becky /about/ Dina, but that could just be her misunderstanding.
Agatha (the blonde Mormon in this strip) and Grace (the blonde who’s dating/rooming with Mandy, the girl with the now-cyan hair) aren’t the same person.
Grace and Mandy were established in the Walkyverse to bi, and they’re in a relationship with each other in this universe. I don’t think Agatha’s orientation has ever been even hinted at in either universe, unless you count, “She’s Robin’s McAwesome’s counterpart, and Robin’s kinda indefinably queer, so Agatha must be too”, and I’m not entirely sure that holds water.
If true, it means that everyone in this strip except possibly Mary is bi, though.
Well, the significant non-bi characters that we know of are Joyce, Dorothy, Walky, Sal, Sarah, Becky, Ethan, Joe, Leslie, Jacob, Jason, Mary, Roz and Carla. Dina strikes me as pan rather than bi as well.
I deeply enjoy that there are enough bi characters to make a non-bi list.
Get wrecked, Mary.
I love Sierra. So much!
I don’t even think that’s Scripture Mastery. Agatha’s been brushing up.
Oh wow haven’t heard scripture mastery in years. Of course I wasn’t very good at careing.
at alt-text: this is my favorite prayer
Yeaaaaah, like I thought (and said before) – she’s not very good at this.
Most of all, she’s not nearly as good as she thinks she is.
Sierra would fit in well at my church. We’re a bunch of hippies out here.
Hahahaha! Oh my Glob, yes.
Yesss everyone is perfect
This specific era is henceforth known as the ‘Fall of Mary the Bigot’. The immense amount of ‘meh’ from everyone around her will cause shockwaves and aftereffects for generations to come.
No broken femurs, but Mary’s day is gettin’ ruined… Her figurative femur gets broken by Agatha, Sierra and Carla. Good one, Sierra!
Seeing Sierra and Agatha trolling Mary has greatly improved my day.
Mary is like the Wicked Witch of the West, except with prayers for the dissolution of gender roles instead of water.
That last panel is funnier if you crop it
You’re right! It is funnier!
And that crop just so happens to be Gravatar-shaped.
Now, if only I knew how to make one of those…
Step 1: Click the “Reply” link next to my comment (well, you could scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, but this is faster and these instructions stay in view).
Step 2: Click the “Get a Gravatar” link next to the “NAME” field in the response box that pops up. If you can’t see one, type into the text box until it shifts over.
Step 3: Click the “Create Your Own Gravatar” button helpfully provided by the other end of that link.
Step 4: Input your email (the one you used to sign in to comment), your username (ditto) and a password. Make sure you can remember your password! You’ll need it if you want to change your Grav. (Also, they totally lied about the “fascinating” terms of service)
Step 5: From there, you’ll be taken to “Upload new image”, where a helpful little button named “Choose file” will be located. Click it, but only AFTER having saved your desired profile picture, or the image it comes from, to your computer or some place navigable from there.
Step 6: A window will pop up that says “My Computer” or something like that. At any rate, it will access your computer’s files. Navigate to your saved image and double click it. This will upload the image.
Step 7: Click “Next”. This will take you take you to an image editor where you can crop the image you just uploaded however you wish. You will get “small” and “large” previews of what the Grav will look like (on a white background) under the crop window.
Step 8: Once your happy with the previews, click “Crop and Finish!” and you’re done. It recommends waiting five to ten minutes and clearing your cache to see the results, but refreshing the page impatiently a few times usually does the trick.
This helpful guide should get you enjoying such wonderful Gravs as “Laser Ruth” or “Glary Mary” in minutes. (Feel free to think up a better name than that. Please.)
If you interpret the nose shadow as a mouth, then she looks like a Lego character.
It gets hilarious-er the longer I stare at it. Yes, hilarious-er is now a word. Deal with it.
I’m all for dissolution of traditional gender rolls. Croissants, too. Just dip them in your cocoa and watch those babies dissolve.
SEE. Here are your Christian characters. Being demonstrably Christian and junk. Regard them, and cease whining about lack of non-villain Christian characters.
Yeaaah, no, the problem is that to said types, they fully agree with Mary that any one who isn’t homophobic Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist isn’t a Christian, so Agatha and Sierra being awesome Christian type people would be just as dismissed as noting Joyce or Becky as Christian type people.
What they want is Mary but with the narrative of the comic fully in support of her.
True. But at least now we have a convenient source to show future whiners, and make them admit that that’s what they want.
I really do appreciate the guy who straight up admitted that that’s what he was about when I pulled out Becky as an example. Cause the worst part of those BS sessions is the attempt to pretend that that isn’t exactly what they’re doing.
The really special one, who was like “We’re not all terrible” “I mean Becky’s Christian.” “She’s ‘wayward’ because she thinks women are attractive, she doesn’t count”?
Or were there multiple conversations of this sort that I missed?
And the thing is, with Joyce, we have a sympathetic portrayal of a fundamentalist Christian character. The story doesn’t portray the (many) problematic parts of her religion as sympathetic, but it does understand where her worldview comes from, and , and even shows how that worldview can be useful and valuable in places, if applied in a non hypocritical way (see Joyce using her knowledge of scripture to justify being friends with Dorothy). And the story does depict Joyce as a good person underneath the character flaws that come from being a part of a toxic community. Frankly, I think the story of her struggle with fundamentalist faith is one Christians of any kind should spend more time thinking about. Because it’s not an uncommon one.
OTOH, I can see how that wouldn’t count, since it’s apparently a story about Joyce losing her faith (In progress, but judging from the comments about it being semi-autobiographical and Willis’s current state.)
Suggesting good people can come out of Christianity, but the Good and Christian parts come into conflict and they have to give up the Christianity, isn’t really a positive portrayal of Christianity.
That makes Joyce not a good example. Becky on the other hand, does appear to be remaining Christian without much conflict. Of course, she’s a lesbian and is quite happy deciding on a version of her faith where that isn’t a problem. For most of the other girls, either they’re background characters or their religion hasn’t been enough of a focus to know how it affects their prejudices. (Mary being the obvious negative counter example, but again, not a positive portrayal.)
Hank is probably the best example at the moment of what these types of commentors are looking for – in the best possible case at least. He’s Christian, fundamentalist, Evangelical Christian. I’m sure he still holds to the parts of his branch of Christianity that condemn homosexuality, but he’s willing to love Becky anyway.
That’s the “Hate the sin, love the sinner” approach in its best form. It’s still hugely toxic and I’d love to see Willis dig into that a bit more, when we’re past the more obvious “Hate the sinner too” version Carol’s applying. I think individual’s with Hank’s approach could be shown positively, despite the culture overall being horribly damaging, especially to LGBTQ kids growing up in it.
Quite honestly Willis could make everyone else into a christian and wonderful and Mary just this person who doesn’t /really/ believe in Jesus- simply using it as an excuse to be bigoted (which she monologues about constantly while rubbing her hands with glee) and you’d still still get the same people complaining about it. Somehow.
(I mean that would be a godawful comic but not for the reasons such people would complain. Quite the opposite clearly.).
Karma’s a bongo, ain’t it, Mary? You should know, it takes one to know one. :p
Bongos were made to be slapped repeatedly and I did mean to say bongo not _itch.
B-O-N-G-O, and Bongo was her name-oh!
… wait, that’s not the way it’s spelled in the song? Dangit, that was some botch.
Mary sounds like Evil Peridot in my head.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who saw that.
*sigh* I’m gonna have to watch that. How many seasons are there now?
Two so far. 78 episodes, 11 minutes each. It starts getting a coherent plot around episode 45-ish, the ones before that are mainly slice of life with some hints towards the eventual main plot.
It’s worth noting that the slice-of-life is still pretty entertaining, you get a lot of alien weirdness and character development that gets expanded on later.
Aw, Dammit now I’ll be hearing that everytime.
That alt text. My brother turned Christian some time ago and so did his family. He used to say a similar prayer to the one in the alt text: “Gracias Diosito por este taquito Amen”. “Thanks for this taco, God.”
Needless to say his ex-wife was not amused by that little prayer.
The “-ito” being an affectionate diminutive — applied to both God and the taco. (Google is our friend)
I love it. Mary wants a prayer circle, and now has people that want to pray with her…of course there is a fly in the ointment.
You should be careful what you ask for, you may get it Mary.
As she enters … The Twilight Zone.
Mary: A force for good.
More divine justice is served
It’s the beginning of the united front against the Tyranny of Mary. Then things can get back to normal, where Ruth is the Tyrant. There can only be one.
Yeah but Ruth is a non -bigoted Tyrant…she hates everyone the same.
To be fair, Mary hates everyone too.
Dibs on Tyranny of Mary as a band name.
yayyyyyyy
Yay for ambush Mormonism! And , as always, yay for Sierra.
After that, see if you can get Mary to tell you what Matt. 6:5 says.
I never thought I’d see the day where I agreed with that first sentence…
And no, if you ask Mary about that verse, she’ll just go off on how wrong Judaism is. Something about us being “spiteful heathens who know better” was the best one I’ve gotten.
Who IS the res manager anyway? Is it Asma?
She was working the desk, so I doubt it. Although that would be some added fun when Mary comes ranting with her weird Christian problems.
Some 30 something staff member with a billion other duties outside babysitting RAs and thus more likely to allow them massive leeway so long as complaints aren’t flooding in?
Ninja Rick, didn’t you see him? He’s in the background of at least a couple dozen strips.
Get…. DUNKED ON!
Ruth rips out Mary’s femurs, just because she can.
I wonder if she gives the femurs to Papyrus to use as his attacks.
No one wants to pray the rosary?
omg yes
I will like to pray for my feet, as day of walking from stuff from work and running to go fangirl over Kalafina all over one of the biggest cities of the world has destroyed them all D:
May your feet heal well and quickly!
How’s Kalafina’s live experience?
Give me that old time religion, it’s good enough for me.
It was good enough for Isis.
she will help us in a crisis,
And she never raises her prices.
And that’s good enough for me.
Give me that old time religion, it’s good enough for me.
We will worship Aphrodite,
She’s pretty, but she’s flighty,
She wears a see-thru nighty,
And that’s good enough for me!
We will pray with those old Druids
They drink fermented fluids
Waltzing naked thru the woo-ids
And that’s good enough for me ^.^
Give me that old time religion and that’s good enough for me!
Montezuma liked to start out,
Rites, by carrying a part out,
He could really tear your heart out,
And that’s good enough for me.
Gosh, I’ve a load of those. My version of yours goes like this though:
We will sing to lady Isis.
She’ll stand by us in a crisis,
and she hasn’t raised her prices,
so she’s good enough for me.
… scans a bit better, I think. Then there is, for example:
All the Chinese pray to Yao
for he showed the farmers hao.
There are bumper harvests nao,
which is good enough for me.
Next to Yao they worship Yu.
He built roads and bridges tu,
and canals–there’s quite a fu,
and that’s good enough for me.
We will ride up to Valhalla
Riding Beetles, not Impalas
Singing Deutschland Uber Alles
But it’s good enough for me.
We will sing a song of Mithras
Let us sing a song of Mithras
But there is no rhyme for Mithras!
Still he’s good enough for me!
We will all be saved by Mithras
We will all be saved by Mithras
Slay the bull and play the zithras
On that resurrection day
It was good for old Jehovah
He had a son who was a nova
Hey there, Mithras move on ‘ova
A new resurrection day
the one with Valhalla I know goes to Odin:
One-eyed Odin we will follow
And in fighting we will wallow
Til we wind up in Valhalla,
and that’s good enough for me
or,
We’ll pray to a god named Odin,
in our wooden boats go floatin’
Filling Europe with forbodin’
And that’s good enough for me.
There are so many! Here’s one I just learned:
We’ll pray for New Age Aquarians,
and hang out in Planetariums,
Lotta ‘um’ are Unitarians,
but they’re good enough for me!
My favorite Odin one is:If you wanna worship Odin
You don’t have to have a coat on
Grab a sword and slap some woad on
And that’s good enough for me!
Then there’s also:
We will sing a verse for Loki
He’s the old Norse god of Chaos
Which is why this verse don’t
rhyme or scan or nothin’
But it’s good enough for me…
It was good enough for Dagon
a conservative old Pagan
Who still votes for Ronald Reagan
And its good enough for me.
We will worship Zarathustra
We will chant just like we used’ta
I’m a Zarathustra booster.
And that’s good enough for me.
This comic’s Mary prays to Jesus
every Sunday, on her kneeses
but then does what she pleases,
she’s not good enough for me!
One for the Discworld fans:
The gods of Dunmanafestin
May spend a lot of time restin’
The goddesses don’t have vests on
And that’s good enough for me.
Hallelujah! Prayers Have been answered!
Haaamen!
I tried those gender rolls before, one set were too salty and the other ones tasted too fishy.
Well played.
“Quick, does anyone know which direction Mecca is from here?”
You want to face roughly 4.5 degrees east of northeast, and then angle roughly 81.5 degrees down, because there’s a lot of rock and magma and even metallic core between the two.
Please tell me mosque youth groups include map and compass training because that would be adorable.
(I want all youth groups to include map and compass training because I was raised by Baden Powell but that’s beside the point)
I don’t know about Mecca, but some Jews figure out which way is Jerusalem once, like when they move into a new home, and put up a painting to label the correct wall.
Surely there is an app for that now.
I love living in the future!
What happens in the near future when we have a Muslim on the ISS, passing over Mecca every 23 minutes or somesuch.
A solved problem, because there have already been Muslim astronauts:
“When the Astronaut and devout Muslim Sheikh Muszaphar Shukoor travelled to space he asked Muslim scholars how to pray in space. What resulted was a historical conference in which Angkasa (the Malaysian space agency) invited 150 Muslim scientists and scholars to answer these questions. When they agreed on what should be done, the verdict was passed and approved by the National Fatwa Council.”
“Regarding facing Makkah they said there are four options:
1. Face the Kaaba on the land (which will move relative to the ISS)
2. Face the projection of the Kaaba in the sky
3. Face the Earth
4. Face anywhere”
http://www.muslimworldjournal.com/2015/02/how-muslim-astronauts-pray-in-space/
That’s so cool!
Captain Button: yes, there is. Just google “qibla app” and you’ll see a bunch. It’s often integrated with a prayer time app and digital copy of the Qur’an, with the appropriate verses.
As for Jerusalem, you can also google “Jerusalem Compass” or similar.
So now, we work on getting Billie officially transferred to a new floor so she’s no longer under Ruth’s supervision and they can date in safety, right? …right?
I don’t know if it’s different now, but back in my day we couldn’t change rooms just anytime we want (even if we could find someone willing to trade rooms). It could only be done between semesters, unless there was some kind of crisis (e.g. one roommate being evicted).
If they explained what the situation was, leaving out that they’d actually already started sleeping together (and the suicide pact and the alcohol and all the other problematic details), I suspect something could be arranged – extraordinary circumstances, avoiding potential conflicts with school policies, etc.
This however isn’t Smarting of Age, so that’s not happening.
Huh, dunno why, but I just tried to imagine the day from Mary’s perspective and it’s just been bookended (to her) by two queerfolk showing her great insolence by having no respect for her invocations of authority and the threat of punishment for “sins”.
Both of them equally calling out her bluffs and asking her to just put her money where her mouth is and report them if it matters that much to her and thus revealing her bluster to be the thinly-veiled attempt to control that it always was going to be.
And I’d feel better at how these two attempts at power backfired if I didn’t know that Mary’s response to being rebuffed by Carla was to destroy the possession Carla loves most of all and then dump a giant buttload of transphobia on her.
So what exactly will she have planned for Ruth when her pettiness and sense of aggrieved entitlement rev up?
Mary seems pretty ineffectual, I’m gonna go with Whiteboard Dingdong Bandit II.
The Return of the Whiteboard Ding Dong Bandit! Coming to a theatre near you!
The Whiteboard Dingdong Bandit II: Final Blackout!
I’m fairly sure gluing the skates is something just about every character in the strip would have done but is only angering and troubling because it comes from such an awful person.
But yes, I like to think of Mary as incompetent AS WELL AS EVIL so I’m hoping she ends up doing nothing but stew in her juices.
Yeahhh… no. Most people would probably ignore Carla’s skating and hell, some would probably want to join her in skating.
Don’t agree. I’m not saying they would do it in real life. But the whole thing was presented as just slapstick comedy, not reality.
One of the deft things Willis did was take something that looked like Slapstick and Rule of Funny and turn it into something actually horrible.
It’s also the reason for how Ruth can be sympathetic to some of us. Her violence is interpreted as comedic slapstick, and not something that really happened.
Really? I see the rest of the hall as well-adjusted enough to ignore the quiet sound of skates on carpet outside their closed door, or just put on headphones.
I think the hall is full of people who love engaging in playful slapstick with everyone else. When someone is annoying to them, they’re annoying right back.
Yeah, but destroying property that likely cost multiple hundreds of dollars isn’t playfully annoying.
Hundreds of dollars ? Really ? I’ve never skated, but I’ve seen skates for sale here in NORWAY (the most expensive country in they year for the last 20 years now…) for as low as 18 dollars.
If you just want a cheap pair of skates, they’re cheap, yeah. But Carla is from rich stock, and while she’s not a jerk in general, she probably REALLY cares about skates and gets the expensive ones. And you can DEFINITELY get expensive skates for hundreds of dollars. It’s a pretty reasonable bet that Carla’s are the expensive variant.
Correction: Not a rich jerk. Shes a normal jerk, jerk wise.
Yes, but these weren’t skates that any random person buys. These were a pair that a habitual skater was really proud of. Ergo, expensive.
Yeah, but outside of comedic violence, her slapstick prank likely ruined Carla’s expensive skates, and could have seriously hurt her.
And she’s just such a malicious —-, this sort of thing isn’t a funny prank for her. She wanted to hurt Carla. She probably would have loved it if Carla crashed and dislocated her knee or twisted her ankle, and been a vicious little monster over it.
This. The point was to hurt her and ruin something she loves.
And that last part feels super important, because it’s probably impossible to be a resident in the hall and not know that Carla is obsessed with her skates and is constantly skating everywhere. So, everyone knows at least that they are not just an expensive possession but also something important to Carla’s identity and self-expression.
Mary targeting the skates to hurt Carla feels even more deliberate and intentional in that context. Like, we see in the transphobia dagger that she’s willing to go the extra distance for the full scope of causing an individual she is targeting pain, so it would be completely keeping in character for her to have deliberately targeted the skates as a means of both physically and emotionally hurting Carla.
That’s also what worries me with regards to Mary being “ineffectual”. Like… yeah, she’s got a tenuous relationship with non-shitty human interactions and that means she face plants on her bad ideas like this, but she was also the comedic foil for Carla’s snark for a number of strips before she pulled out her glue gambit and then the later transphobia attack.
Her comedically failing now just feels like it’s majorly setting up her pulling out all the nastiness for a really awful attack (even if it’s just something designed to brutally hit Billie and Ruth with a bunch of concentrated homophobia and triggering behavior).
Mary is just such an unhappy human being. She doesn’t seem to experience any joy at all from what we’ve seen, unless it’s hurting someone she sees as beneath her, or being a self-righteous jerk. She’s just such a pitiful, nasty little person, and the way she lashes out at everyone insures she will never have a single friend or even ally on the floor. She’s isolating herself, and she will just become even more bitter and cruel and horrible, and she will blame everyone but herself.
Carla knows how to deal with hate, unfortunately. She’ll get by, and deal, even though she shouldn’t have to.
Mary? IDEK. She’s a vicious little person who is going to be terribly lonely very quickly. Who the hell knows what is going to happen with her. She might become even nastier. She might shoot up the campus. She might hurt herself.
People like Mary don’t know how to be happy. And it’s pitiful.
“Pity them. They’ll be their own company for the rest of their lives.”
I’ve never understood why people keep assuming it’s carpet. Carpet of any kind of pIle that would muffle anything would not only be incredibly hard to skate on, she would be shredding the hell out of it, pretty much negating people talking about how expensive the skates are. Carla’d be liable for those damages (short of the glue spot) which would probably be far more than the skates.
Also I wonder how many people have actually heard repetitive skating. The sounderlying of skate wheels bother me and having it repetitive would drive me up the wall. Skating in a narrow hallway could have someone coming suddenly around the corner. And I’m guessing if Carla got distracted by arguing with Mary, and didn’t look where she was going and crashed, people would be laughing, not talking about her grievous injuries. Or go “Oh Carla”.
Mary has undeniably raised the stakes at current to becoming (or rather reasserting) her raging bongo self and is indefensible now, but really Im boggled at the amount of people who see it pretty one sided at the start.
Willis confirmed in an earlier comment thread that the hallway was thin carpet in direct response to someone saying that skates on hardwood is very loud. So it’s canon that the sound was actually very muffled.
And dorm carpet tends to be cheap and matted to all hell so I doubt Carla’s skates would have been able to do any damage to them.
It’s also been stated before that Carla’s always on skates. She’s skated up and down the hallway before, probably most of the times we’ve seen her there.
Now, she was probably being a bit more enthusiastic about it than usual because “New skates!”, but the actual skating in the hall wasn’t an aberration.
Except any other person would apologize and promise to help Carla with something, like fixing said skates.
I don’t know, but I hope it destroys her. I may thirst for drama, and unhappy endings are part of it, but they’re not actually fulfilling when the unhappy ending is due to heterosexism and the like. That’s just real life. Yeah, real life sucks, and it’s important not to forget, but it’s what the news’ for. Unhappy endings are so much more filling and delicious when it’s ultimately because of the people involved (which can include them ultimately being stressed by a sexism or similar, but as a primary factor rather than just a catalyst feels.. blah.)
Important stories still, since they’re true, but not fulfilling ones for me.
I am loving so much this moment <3
Sierra is just the greatest (yet again) and I am so glad to have her for an icon.
” something bigger than a stupid prayer,” Mary if you were a real Christian you would stop and think about what the hell you just said you stupid judgmental elitist bongo
If Billie joins in, can the three Christian girls banish Mary to the Dark Dimension?
Like in Charmed?
Okay, now I like you. Because you like Charmed.
(which, oddly enough, is apparently really popular with otherwise strict Christian guys.)
As a wise skeleton once said…
Geeettttttt dunked on!!!
Yay, Sierra!!
What exactly has she left to “Cash in?”
Becky
Yay for Mary suffering. Best floor meeting ever.
Wanted to chime in as a (socially progressive) Mormon who loves all three (four?) of your comics, I really guffawed at the use of Agatha being a Mormon to troll Mary. In fact, I’ve felt like you’ve been respectful to Mormons, even with the little you’ve used Agatha in the comic. So thanks, Willis!
7 (Roomies, Its Walky, Joyce and Walky, Shortpacked, Slysirs, LAWsome and Dumbing of Age)
8 if you count the short packed strips that appeared on the toy news site as separate then the main website.
9 if you want to include the Ultra Car comics he did when he was 12 or something
10 if you count the It’s Pregnancy twitter series.
Dang, I only remembered Roomies, Shortpacked, Dumbing of Age, and Its Walky. Willis has done even more comics than I thought he had.
My headcanon is that if Willis were to stop making comics for any real length of time, he’d explode. Kinda like that movie, Speed, where the bus can’t go below 50mph. Luckily for us, he likes making comics, so this has never actually been tested.
I am of the opinion that trying to sort out all of Willis’s webcomics is like trying to figure out Jean Grey and Phoenix. That way madness lies.
Look it’s really simple.
She died but then didn’t because it was her clone who wasn’t her other clone and then 23 years later Magneto gave her a seizure that didn’t not kill her and now she’s maybe Cyclops’ granddaughter from the present who was raised in the future.
Oh I forgot to mention that the Magneto who gave her a seizure was Xorn who was pretending to be Magneto pretending to be Xorn who was also possibly the real Magneto later reconstructed by the Scarlet Witch.
wait Scott was dating his GRANDDAUGHTER
#comics incest
No no she maybe not really died and maybe reincarnated as Cyclops’ time traveling son’s adoptive daughter who grew up in the future.
Of course you left out that the time traveling son was actually the son of Scott and a clone of Jean Grey. Who was raised in the future partly by a time traveling Scott and Jean (in disguise). Somehow Scott and Jean’s daughter from another alternate future was involved in that too. She’d previously traveled back in time to join the X-Men, but that was while Jean was dead.
There are at least two other versions of the time traveling son as well – a clone from the future and a version from yet another alternate reality.
And I’m sure there are twists in that family tree that I’ve missed. It’s been at least a decade since I followed it closely.
Oh yeah I forgot about Nate Grey, the alt Cable clone who made out with an evil alternate universe version of his mom’s clone.
So, would be accurate to say the Summers-Grey family tree is like an…oedipal moebius step?
I think there are knots.
I sincerely hope this isn’t all the punishment Mary’s getting.
Honestly, if she doesn’t get expelled by the end of this arc, I’ll be pretty disappointed.
It could very well be all the punishment she gets… is she were to back off now. Of course that won’t happen. Things will keep escalating and there will be plenty of damage in the end for everyone involved as well as the bystanders.
IF she were to back off now…
Go Sierra and Agatha! That has to be the single most cheerful trolling ever. At the same time, I am now waiting for someone else, heck, anyone else to show up with a rosary for good measure, though that probably won’t happen.
Nah, that’d have to be in tomorrow’s strip, and making the gag last for any longer would be overdoing it ^^
Let’s add to Mary’s suffering with a recitation of The prayer to St. Augustine.
http://cdn.mspaintadventures.com/storyfiles/hs2/02775.gif
Why do I get the feeling that when I’m 30 or something I’m gonna look back at some of my old posts and cringe a bit? They seem fine for now, but It seems everyone hates what they wrote as a teenager.
I feel like it’s a good sign for one’s ability to grow in life if they can consistently look back on their past self’s actions and be utterly mortified at how much of an idiot they were.
You have foresight beyond your years.
Its hard to be as smart as me….yep that one will do it.
I dunno. Grover Norquist seems to like what he wrote back in 7th grade.
That’s basically what growing up is. When I was 15, I was certain I knew everything I’d ever need to know. When I was 16, I admitted that there were people who knew better than me on some things, but that was because they had lived different lives than me. When I was 18, I admitted that I said some stupid crap when I was 15, but was certain I finally had understood everything I would ever need to know.
When I was 24, I realized I don’t know shit. At 28, I finally realize I have a long way ahead of me before I can make a claim of wisdom.
when i was a teenager i thought i was wrong about everything and shouldn’t talk ever
now i am a crusty twenty-four-year-old and am embracing the freedom to be WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING AS MUCH AS I WANT
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. – Probably not Mark Twain
Stop posting things out of my head!
Told you not to cut off the cable TV in here.
I turn 30 this year. Facebook shows you old posts. 2007-2008 me annoys the shit out of 2016 me.
There’s a bit of a strange disconnect between reality and comic in how Mary destroyed the skates. The sheer speed at which the glue hardened is in Looney Tunes-slapstick territory, which makes it hard to take seriously.
Ehh, not entirely. Gorilla Glue hardens pretty quick.
I’d honestly be more surprised that Mary had a large quantity of glue of that quality just sitting around.
On the other hand, artist.
If the glue isn’t water soluble, removing it even before it hardens would be difficult. Especially if it get’s into the wheels and joints and axles which means the skates have to be taken apart before the glue can be removed. By then, it would have hardened.
Carla may have tried, but she couldn’t get all of it out in a short time.
Not really. Strong glues a) harden quickly, b) create hard to remove imperfections to surface that would ruin rolling ability, c) tend to melt plastic when treated with something to remove it.
That’s not “Looney Tunes”. That’s hobby store.
Also is “glue doesn’t work how glue works” type comments going to be like the “trace over permanent marker with whiteboard marker to get rid of it” comments where it’s just endlessly repeated for months on end until eventually Willis makes a snarky alt tag about it?
And if so, I’ll take it any day over the week over the “but Becky got a haircut” refrain.
But you know, if Carla drew over the glue with dry erase marker it would come right off her skates
The dry erase marker, or the glue? Because if either one of them doesn’t come off at that point, we’ve got a problem.
But wouldn’t the speed and friction of the wheels make sure that the glue was flung off before it had the chance to harden ? Thereby just leaving a hard glue puddle on the rug.
I’ve seen epoxy flash cure fast enough to stop someone like that. And the friction of the wheels would provide heat to speed up the process.
Seriously, stirring the epoxy in a plastic container when it was suddenly solid and the plastic melted. Freaky.
I’m sorry. I normally generally agree with you, Cerberus, but I can’t agree with you here. Because anything that hardens as quickly as shown would not have gotten on the skates, as it would have hardened on the floor when applied.
I do think Willis set it up to seem comedic, specifically for the gut punch when he deconstructed it, showing how bad Mary is.
I think some of us lost sight of that because of that one poster who tried to argue that no one should care about Carla’s property being damaged because Carla is a horrible person who deserved it, and who shifted it to the real world by bringing up cops and stuff.
I don’t think we were supposed to take it all that seriously until after we found out just how nasty Mary really is. Sure, some of you knew she was horrible from other comics, but she really hadn’t been shown to be all that bad yet in this comic–just an entitled butthole.
Did the comic change at some point? Mary squirts it onto the carpet just as Carla rolls over it, so there is no time for it to dry on the carpet. It got gummy pretty quickly, though, enough to toss Carla on her face.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/stomp/
Throughout this whole arc, Mary in general has taken a turn for the cartoonish.
Never mind forgot I can’t reply to people from my phone…
Mormon girl FTW
Now I have a filk of Island Girl running in my head.
NOOOOOO, Mary must not be a force for good!!!
Wait, I don’t get it. Where is she doing good?
She investigated a prayer circle which makes Agatha and Sierra feel good about who they are and helps promote community spirit on the floor.
That it’s the exact opposite of what she intended the prayer circle to be just makes it more delicious.
Defying Mary really does bring people together. Hell, just now, I saw Billie smiling and giving a thumb’s up at Ruth even though they hate each other. /other students in the hall
GRACE: I’m telling you, they’ve got something going on!
Mandy: Pfffft, yeah, right. Ruthless kicked Billie’s butt this morning.
More prosaically, I think that’s Billie telling Ruth the last of the laundry has been done.
Willis has set the chain in motion to force Becky to find a new home.
I hope Dina doesn’t suffer much more because of this …
So do we ship Mary and Mike now as the “Being assholes for the Greater Good” couple?
Of course. She’s on a mission from God.
(golf clap)
Well played, Willis. Well played indeed.
There she is; Sierra is reprising her precious cinnamon role :3
I have never seen someone backpedal harder in my life.
Mormons to the rescue!
I’m sure Becky is thrilled you’re willing to wait to ruin her life until you can make a bigger profit from it.
I know, I’m sure Becky will absolutely “love” how “kind and thoughtful” Mary’s being here.
Mary doesn’t seem to get it. She won’t HAVE a chance to make a bigger profit from it. She missed her window.
That window was also her escape route, and she missed that too, because now Ruth’s going to come down on her like the wrath of the angry God that Mary WISHES existed in Ruth’s place.
Ruth is Mary’s god now. And she’s all out of mercy.
To appease her she’ll have to offer her femurs as sacrifice.
She’s blustering, putting up a defiant front now that her master (underpants gnome level) plan has been foiled. This is her basically shouting “next time Gadget! Next time!”
Once again, pretty much the best way it could go.
Now, a lot depends on how passive-aggressive Mary is. Violence can and does come from confrontations like this, even if only in the form of continual malicious anonymous complaints or destruction of property. Even tampering with food would not be unprecedented.
I don’t think Mary does passive. At least not so far.
oh god do i want to know the story about someone tampering with somebody else’s food
i both do and don’t
Hahahaha, that was extra funny
Be careful what you wish for, Mary.
Mary, you suck at this.
That alt text makes me wonder if there’s a sect that worships beetle grubs for their cuteness. My mind goes weird places fast.
If there’s one thing that anthropology teaches us, it is that there literally nothing a human won’t worship if they genuinely believe that it is some kind of access point to the divine.
I’ve always wondered what a full third season of Moral Orel would have been like. It’s one of the only shows I’ve watched that has legitimately gone to a very realistic dark place.
Oh man, Moral Orel is one of my favorite shows ever and I think a lot of the way it visits religious topics is similar to how David Willis does and that’s probably part of why I love both Moral Orel and Roomies!/It’s Walky!/Joyce and Walky!/Shortpacked!/Dumbing of Age so so so so much.
That show was AMAZING. I bet the network didn’t see that turn the show took coming.
So, now it’s “a stupid prayer”, hmm? They do say that stress can make people reveal truths that they mostly would not even reveal to themselves. In this case, what it reveals about Mary is that this isn’t about religion at all. It’s about controlling other people; her religion is just the framework around which she hangs her biases and allows her the self-deceit of believing herself to be acting on God’s will. Push comes to shove, though, it becomes ‘stupid’ and a secondary consideration to having control over others.
She’s a dangerous young woman. As I’ve already posted, I wouldn’t put past her becoming a poison-pen author, laundry slasher and rat poison in the cafeteria salt shakers type.
Okay, so maybe I was right the first time. Mary is being set up as more of a recurring antagonist.
Oh, and if anyone wants to fix these stupid text boxes that scroll the comments, try this UserStyle (using Stylish):
textarea#comment { width" 98.5% !important; }or, converted to a UserScript (for Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey):
var style = document.createElement('style'); style.textContent = `textarea#comment { width" 98% !important; }
`; document.head.appendChild(style);
(add @run-at document-start to the first section if you want to make the userscript work faster.)
Oops. Those ” should be a :. I thought I fixed that. So it’s
textarea#comment { width: 98% !important }I wish Willis would do it himself, instead of having it set to width: 480px . It kinda breaks his site.
These 2 are covering for Ruth. Omg. The end of the world is coming.
The Mayans thought the same for 2012. Well, guess what…
“Ruth is a son-of-a-bongo, but she’s our son-of-a-bongo.”
“It’s probably better to have her inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”
“Now, Mary, say after me: ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Good, good. Now, repeat that ten thousand more times.”
It’s fascinating the way these fundamentalists embrace the ‘smite the sinners’ but conveniently forget the ‘love even your enemies’ bit.
“I’m only here for the part where I always get to be right, and call down supernatural powers on anyone I don’t like.”
MORMON FLASHBACKS AUGH
I love that confused look in Mary’s face in panel 6. For just a moment she seems… human.
Ahaha Willis, that alt-text was from a comment
That last panel is my favourite face so far in the comic.
I don’t think Sierra and Agatha are intentionally trying to annoy Mary or protect Ruth here, but more that they thought having a prayer was a good idea.
The last panel reads a lot funnier to me if they’re just trying to be nice.
Except that they know Ruth.
Sierra has to know that praying for the “dissolution of gender roles” won’t go over well.
And I’m sure Agatha has figured out her opinion on anything Mormon.
I doubt they’re protecting Ruth, but teasing Mary? Definitely.
I dunno, their faces in the last panel just look too genuinely happy to have any malice in them. I really think they just genuinely want to pray together because it’d be nice.
I would buy Agatha (maybe she’s just never been in the room when Mary expressed her views on Mormonism), but Sierra choosing to pray for a very specific thing that will infuriate Mary, who has made it pretty clear that she doesn’t like Sierra…I don’t know, that seems to be stretching coincidence.
(Also, that strip is another reminder of what a petty person Mary is. She thinks Dorothy is evil because she’s an atheist, not surprising, but as far as I can tell she thinks Joyce shouldn’t hang out with Sierra because Sierra doesn’t wear shoes.)
Ooooh, I had forgotten about that! Yeah, Sierra, at minimum, knows that Mary doesn’t want to pray with her. So even if she didn’t know that particular thing would bother Mary she knows that just coming over to join them would.
honestly the worst thing you can do to a malicious person is be completely and utterly happy in their direction
because you don’t have to deal with their junk, they do
I also prefer this reading.
I’m a little surprised someone as conniving as Mary thought that someone as decisive as Ruth wouldn’t take immediate action to negate her attempt at blackmail. On the other hand, Mary clearly isn’t as smart as she thinks she is, because if she had been, she would have realized that someone as decisive as Ruth would have taken immediate action to deal with the problem.
Mary is used to getting her way due to her use of manipulation. When it doesn’t work she throws a fit.
possible weird parallel with Walky – back home she probably would have had an established group of “right-thinking” people to back her up with the shaming and social pressure, but now she’s alone, and actually has to work at it?
What a bongo-loving-b1tch.
(aggressively headcanons Sierra as nonbinary)
The only cure for conservative Christianity…
is LIBERAL Christianity!
Genius.
Old problems gone, new ones incoming.
Dammit really wish I could just post that one face of Ruth right now. The one with the scheme-y hands. Because it seems all according to plan.
Literally what can you do Mary?
Hahahahaha buuurrrrrn. [insert Kelso meme here]
Fourth panel, they live in space confirmed.
Just a glitch in The Matrix.
Glorious non-shitty Christians proving their nonshittiness and Christianity by using it against a fundamentalist. AWESOME.
Indeed.
I assume David knew he’d get more of the “you don’t know anything about real Christians” BS that showed up in the comments yesterday. He does an awfully good job at addressing ridiculous reader complaints in universe.
Just think, he gets these complaints so regularly and so consistently that he’s able to preempt it months in advance.
I’m not sure if there has been a character I’ve loathed so much as Mary.
Mary vs. Toedad is a tough call. Mary hasn’t pulled a gun on anyone, but this is about personal loathing, not how bad the things they’ve actually done are.
Or at least, one written by David Willis.
To me at least, Mary really has nothing on the guy who pulled a gun on a college campus (Ross) Horribly abusive father (Blaine) and an actual hopefully attempted rapist.
Eh, to me, Mary is worse than Toe-dad and Blaine. People like Mary know how to hide their awful-ness to authority figures, meaning they can get away with their shit longer. IDK how sneaky rapist dude is though
I had a big laugh at that Book of Mormon reference.
And by “Book of Mormon” I mean the legitimate Book of Mormon. I’ve never read it but I’m assuming it’s read similarly to the Bible.
Yep. And 3 Nephi 18:19 is actually legitimately about praying always. So, yay, research!
*Re-reading in the afternoon* Heh, get a load of the holier-than-thou Fundie Christian calling prayer “stupid”. Mary, darling, your fundamental horribleness is showing.
Mary makes me think of Ann Coulter for some reason.
Yes. They seem to be cut from the same hateful cloth.
Welcome to your hell Mary. all your own Hell!! >: 3
Yeeeeessss. Mary I feed on every bit of your pain. with time I would normally use it to create an anti Mary, but I’m pretty sure that’s just Dorothy.
A savage revenge indeed.
Did Mary even think to get actual evidence of them together? I honestly don’t remember if she did. Because really it’s her word against Ruth’s. who seems to always have a tip top floor and has no problems with her residents.
We were never shown Mary getting actual proof. And having known Mary-types, I don’t think she thought she would need it. Because she’s used to getting her way.
I also doubt it. For the simple reason that what she did with Ruth did not seem to be some sort of calculated response, but just something she reached for to get her way with Ruth and Carla in the spur of the moment.
Plus, she doesn’t seem to have anticipated Ruth’s response here, nor did she say something like “You think I don’t have proof?” let alone show it to Ruth to intimidate her.
I need more Sierra in my life.
Don’t we all.
I spent a lot of time barefoot in college. But I wasn’t nearly so cute.
And my feet aren’t up to it these days.
Seriously. She hasn’t appeared very much, but she’s been pretty darn awesome each time.
I finally caught up to the comic! I love it
Well. Now you can play the Waiting Game with the rest of us.
SO MUCH WAITING
*has been staring and refreshing for the last twenty minutes* IT”S THIRTY SECONDS LATE! *gargle-hisses*
You forgot about getting into arguments in the comments!