Wack’d’s Best Dumbing Of Age Character poll CONTINUES!
The entire first left hand side has gone through its first round of battles, with … everything being pretty lopsided along expected routes (Dina versus Raidah? GUESS!!!!), except Leslie/Ethan which is… dang close as I write this.
I believe the first column of the upper right quadrant goes live today! It’s, what, Becky/Faz, Penny/Jacob, Galasso/Sierra, and Carla/Robin?
LET THEM FIGHT.
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Jump! (clickme)
Be damned. Becky wasn’t bluffing.
I’m despondent over being wrong, of course, but not nearly enough to jump.
If every clif was jumping, would you, too?
If every jump was Cliffing, would you, too?
Wait, …wrong comic. Sorry.
Oh jeez. Probably.
https://xkcd.com/1170/
“An’ I don’t mean like eatin’ cans or nothin’, THE GOATEST OF ALL TIME 4/?”
Ya but does anyone but you know what this means?
Yeah, Maybe? Cause she’s the bait in the trap?
Good plan, Joyce. Anything Faz comes in contact with instantly becomes sticky. Less chance you’ll fall off when it’s your turn.
Not a fan of sticky Faz
He has many practical uses!
If you roll him on the floor of a barbershop, not only does it become clean, but now you can use him to stage Sasquatch sightings!
don’t do that unless you want your floor feeling like someone spilled room temperature soda on it and forgot to clean it off
Practical uses…
Like testing how likely it is to jump from a moving van onto a motorcycle carrying two people…
It is unlikely this would be joyce’s intent, but it is happy chance that there is a disposable body available to do a little beta testing…
Oops. One person.
Didn’t notice amber had made the leap onto the dadmobile.
Everything’s happening so quickly…
He’s a refugee too.
But he don’t have to live like one.
Faz is the Mineta of this comic.
I hate how right that statement is
…you are imagining four on a motorcycle ..?? Ummmmmmm
ooh beckys the greek chorus!
…I’m trying to get what “goat” means in this context…
“greatest of them all”?
Greatest of all time.
… nope, I’m dumb, that’d be backwards… And the comment up there explains it XD
Grammy
Oscar
emm -uhhhhh- Amy
Tony
You’re thinking of EGOT, the term given to people who have personallyu won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, AND a Tony (theater award).
…please tell me their jealous rivals call them “EGOTists.”
I’ve definitely seen that used in crosswords.
God Over All Things, this is a good christian twitter account yo
Great Omnivore Animal on Twitter
GOlly, A Turnip
Goat On A Tricycle
Getting Onto A Truck
As I thought. Not a bluff.
*stares at a certain commenter; you know who you are*
If it makes them feel better, they GREATLY amused me on Patreon last night.
Practices innocent who-me look.
It’s his phone!!!
PFFT, every time I remember that it gets funnier.
You’ve probably seen The Exorcist 157 times.
HAven’t even seen it once.
I was originally in the “not a bluff” camp, but that first panel could very easily be Becky compensating for a bluff by tweeting out the “scheduled” tweets manually
Nah, there’s no point bringing up her dad in that case, considering he’s worm chow.
Could be that she’s mentioning him to dupe Blaine- eh, you’re probably right anyways
Does raise the question, though: what’s going on in panel 1?
Carla is showing them the tweets going out because she’s the only one with a phone.
Ah, that explains it then
Thanks for clearing that up
Except that Becky’s there in the first frame, not manually tweeting.
Amber: standing on all vehicles.
You might assume she models herself on Batman, but this is her true idol.
How did he not fall though the roof during that sequence?
Could be worse, could be cheesier. Like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw4jftccllk
Everyone has the potentialities of a hero or a goat lying within them. Either you die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the goat.
But at what point are you a hamster?
When you end up being the strategic genius chief warlord commanding the goat’s armies.
Follower be all, ‘ So is she a hamster or a goat? This Animal Crossing fanfic is hard to follow.’
The twitter followers are generally not aware that Amber and Amazi-Girl occupy the same physical body. Amber is the hamster, Amazi-Girl is the goat.
this raises some really horrifying questions, thanks
goatster?
Better than Goatse or whatever that thing was.
Yep, Goatse. Easier to remember if you know that its original top level domain was “.cx”.
How could anyone forget that? Kids these days must have no idea how widespread it was back in the early 2000s.
2000s, that’s like the dawn of history. No-one really knows what happened back then, all we have are exaggerated legends, fossilised Blackberries and Tamagotchi.
Newgrounds, Something Awful, Fark, Weebl’s Stuff, Ebaum’s World, goatse, lemonparty, phpbb, Tourette’s Guy, Foamy, YTMND, Arfenhouse, Napster, Limewire…
It’s true. All of it.
I am the goatgirl
I am the hamster
I am the goatster
goo-goo-goo-joob
THE HAMSTER?!
When I was in college and pledged a fraternity, I learned the first rule of nicknames —
You get the nickname you are given, not the one you want for yourself.
If you’re clever, you tell them on pledge day “just don’t call me ____” and end up being called that. Briar patches, etc.
https://youtu.be/OKvq-GlvXb4?t=37
Yeah, Becky first called her that back in this strip, I believe.
It’s on Twitter, so it’s officially her nickname now!
Oh, Joyce, you sweet woman.
*plays the INDIANA JONES/RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK theme on a nearby car radio*
OR THIS.
This is how Robin wins the election!
See, Becky is evil for working for her.
My thoights wxqcrly
You know what i mean. Damn keyboard.
Joyce is pure, even when being kidnapped. I wish more people were like Joyve, with everything that entails.
So much going on here at once.
Let’s just hope social media is as powerful a force for good that everyone seems to THINK it is.
Only if one isn’t preaching to the choir.
Social media is a powerful tool, but like any other tool, it has no inherent morality. Good or evil is determined by how it’s used.
Yeah, but some tools lend themselves more readily to abuse than others.
Joyce is a good person.
True.
God damnit Willis!
I know you. You better not do what to know you will and kill someone!
It’ll be well done and emotionally devastating and I am bit ready for that, even knowing it is coming!
Let’s see. I’m counting death flags for…
Blaine, Faz, Amber/AG, and Joyce. Sal… maybe, but I can’t see this as her at the end of a complete arc. Death doesn’t happen unless it makes narrative sense. That’s how the world works, right?
Faz is a sympathetic villain in the middle of a redemption arc. That’s like the narrative equivalent of walking down a fire escape carrying a box of broken glass and knives.
There’s also no way Joyce will die without confronting her parents first
And DYW posted a Tweet with a panel of Joyce interacting with someone in a September strip well after this arc is complete. My memory is not real good on this but there was something blue on her forearm, maybe? Anywho, alive and conversing.
Obviously a flashback panel.
This world works however Willis wants it to.
We should be very afraid.
That is indeed how the world works! I have been carefully maintaining a tense unresolved love triangle in my life so I can continue wingsuit-jumping with no consequences.
…. but couldn’t your untimely hospitalization bring the conflict between the other vertices of your triangle to a head?
Nah, that’s how soap operas work.
Oh. This page has some dark dark narrative foreshadowing. I hope amber ends up okay and not super wounded by the end.
Yeah, the physics of that jump can’t exactly be the most comfortable
Or possible.
Wait yeah, what the hell is she standing on to get a jump that clear from a moving motorcycle?
Stuff happens between panels. One possible scenerio is Amber stands, places her hands on on Sals shoulders and launches herself forward with a double flip, grabbing the van just before the last panel. Sal doesn’t have a wreck because she is just that good.
Or she climbs onto Sal’s helmet and jumps off from there but it’s EXTREMELY well padded inside so she doesn’t break Sal’s neck doing that.
We still have yet to wrap around back to the flashback.
So where is that person who insisted it was a bluff and that there was no way she had scheduled the tweets.
They were on yesterday’s comic saying they were just enjoying annoying everyone, so I’m sure they’re around
That was more of a side benefit, but I would have bet she was bluffing.
Bet money she was bluffing. Damn you lack of edit.
That’s ok, you got to annoy the comment section for a week, and we get to lord it over you for eternity. Mwahahaha.
Seems fair.
Up near the top, saying “Oops, I was wrong.”
“It was Earth, all along”
I’m starting to guess Amber’s going to get thrown off a vehicle again, and this time while Sal’s got Faz and/or Joyce on the bike in a non-Amazi-rescue position.
(I don’t think she’ll be thrown in front of a semi again, but a number of broken bones incoming sometime between tomorrow and June 23)
Faz betrayed them twice.
Joyce is kidnapped because of Faz. This is foolish.
Of course it is. That’s the point.
A true hero rescues everyone they can, even if they don’t deserve it.
Faz is an abused child being manipulated by Blaine. He’s annoying, yes, but he doesn’t deserve to live in an unsafe household
Even a little knucklehead like Faz deserves a second chance. Question is: can he leap?
ah yes, sacrifice the emotionally damaged child
it’s not like people can grow and learn from their mistakes given time or anything
FAZ is clearly dissociating like Amber did/is. The plastic smile he wears and the cheery personality is the outer shell of an incredibly abused child doing the best he can in an awful situation. Self-preservation is the main motivation of such children; and by trying to help others against his father is an awful risk. I can’t believe it took me this long to see that he’s not actually an annoying little shit. Never mistake the persona a person presents to the world as their genuine personality.
Agree. Blaine is much less likely to kill Faz than Joyce – in addition to the fact that Faz is in the van by choice (he could have run, knowing that Blaine will go to jail by the end of the van ride). If you can only get one person out of the van, it had better be Joyce, and ASAP.
It’s been heavily implied that Faz is being physically abused by Blaine. I think that he’s got lower odds of surviving being alone with Blaine at this point.
But Joyce disagrees.
If you only get one person off the van, get Faz, because if you try to get Joyce first she’ll waste so much time arguing about it that you will lose any chance you had of getting both of them, and maybe any chance you had to get either of them.
Joyce will always have capacity for kindness.
she’s kidnapped because of his piece of shit father
And his piece of shit father isn’t still tied up on the floor because of Faz.
he’s a kid who is heavily implied to be abused and has to live with Blaine, and he wouldn’t have had to make that decision if Blaine wasn’t on a rampage
That is also true.
Well, if Faz goes splat on the tarmac, Joyce has more info on how to make the jump safely….
I am proud of Joyce, as well as Amber here. Err, Amazi-Girl, I guess, but she seems perfectly aware of Faz’s significance and willing to help him.
That’s Amber! I got confused for a minute yesterday, but she’s stayed Amber since Dina was talking to her on the stairs.
And Amber and Amazi-Girl were sharing memories until very recently, so Faz was no stranger to AG, anyway.
One of the handful of tweets: Amber’s dad is a notorious domestically violent psychopathic loser. *L hand gesture*
Go, Amazi-Girl.
I just thought of something, should Robin be tagged in this since her face is in this strip?
We’ve tagged an imaginary hat before, so probably
An imaginary hat?
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/02-but-the-sun-still-shines/guys-2/
Don’t forget Ryan’s blood.
I guess Becky wasn’t bluffing.
I knew it all along.
No?
Um, it’s clear that Becky’s alleged tweets are actually a mass hallucination caused by something Blaine put in the drinking water?
No?
Well, you see the Head Alien…
So the past few days has really, really sucked for me with all the turmoil and unrest and the protests and the police coming out in full force. Ducking into DOA is one of my distractions (which is funny because of all the sustained danger here). But seeing you, clif, respond to you being wrong with humor and grace gave me a much needed laugh.
Thank you so much.
No. Don’t want no scrubs.
Amazi-Girl’s hanging on the outside of his jerk dad’s ride.
Trying to rescue Joyce (and Faz).
heh
That’s a really convenient panel skip between 4 and 5. How exactly did AG get from the bike to the van? Uuuh… Look over there! …… Oh hey, she made it!
Nice try, but amazigirl is immune to criticism
And selectively immune to Newtonian physics.
Superhero stuff is just cooler that way.
Mind you it does drain away any tension in the strip
Tension here is about Faz, not action. Action is played for fun.
Naah its going to work out all right for everyone (bar Blaine) so theres no need to worry
Yeah, I’m glad some of y’all are feeling the tension, but for me, all the narrative tension vanished when a bunch of kids got abducted by invisible, teleporting ninjas. I might even have reached the negative tension zone.
Britjas?
If you had sent me this comic months ago and told me stuff was gonna be crazier IRL I would’ve just laughed and said “how?”
It has occurred to me that most of the people reading those tweets will have no idea who Amazi-Girl is.
Kidnapping on college campus by a man with a gun thwarted by masked vigilante, not making the news? Becky becomes campaign manager for a contoversal congress critter and it doesn’t get rehashed? I suspect some of them have heard the name before.
Amazi-Girl wasn’t found anywhere near the original kidnapping, thanks to Sal; unless Becky or Ross made mention of her in the police report, her involvement would’ve been unmentioned there.
Becky and Ross didn’t know Sal had spirited her away. But there were other witnesses such as the driver of the car that Amazigirl landed on. Hard to imagine it didn’t come up.
Maggie!
But they will know that Amazi-Girl is trending.
T-T Joyce has a good heart.
To be technical about it, this is the third time he tried to kidnapp you, counting when he tried to get you in the car after dragging you out of andersons.
Toedad was not a very good father, is what I’m saying.
No, that wasn’t a kidnapping attempt. That was just a father showing up and saying “Come home.” It’s not until she said “Oh hell no!” and ran away that hs insisting became criminal.
Sice we haven’t really seen the details of after what happened after panel 3 in this comic we can’t tell for sure, but I would like to point out how neither Becky nor Ross showed the least bit of surprise when he went straight to kidnapping when he found Becky and Dina on the sidewalk.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/fix/
This sure seems to be a really long drive on surface streets in a residential area with no stop signs or traffic lights.
Or is Blaine stupid enough to go blowing through stops despite not thinking anyone is pursuing him?
Wait, never mind. Yes, he’s that stupid.
I assume that traffic laws are not the first thing you’re concerned about when you’ve just murdered someone
If you’re smart you do. Especially with a kidnapped victim in the back. Last thing you want is to be pulled over for a routine traffic violation.
As the saying goes, never commit a crime while you’re committing a crime.
he definitely went the wrong way up a one-way already, as Sal pointed out
We already know from Rotunda’s sleuthing that the kidnap house is on South Lincoln Street. Blaine drove south on S. Lincoln (the wrong-way on a one-way street) to where it intersected with East Hillside Drive and then turned left (east) onto Hillside Drive. Using Google Streetview, Hillside Drive appears to be an arterial street; side street intersecting it all have stop signs.
There are three points at which there are traffic lights — Hillside and Henderson; Hillside and High (at which point Hillside Drive becomes Moores Pike); and if one continues east on Moores Pike the third light is at Moores Pike and the intersection of Sares Road/College Mall Road — so if he gets lucky and hits the lights just right he doesn’t have to stop or slow down. The first actual stop sign comes at the intersection of Moores Pike and Smith Road, and this is something like three miles from where he first turned onto Hillside Drive. And the speed limit is posted at 30 mph, so estimate he can drive for maybe six or seven minutes before he would HAVE to stop for a stop sign.
this is making me mildly weirded out because I lived on the corner of Hillside and Henderson in Victoria for a year (and nearby for another)
Maybe we’ll see your old house/apartment building!
Except that after murder and driving the wrong way, you think he’s going to balk at speeding?
Blaine is also ignoring what is going on in his mirrors. My head canon is that he is focused on escape to the extent of tunnel vision.
*Action sequence music plays*
Yeah, it always made sense that Willis would have to get the bystanders out of the way before Amber and Blaine had their final confrontation.
This is the best political twitter ever!
What the FUCK is goat?
“greatest of all time”
Thanks, I was just as confused.
I too learned this only recently and now I see it everywhere.
The exact opposite of what Charlie Brown meant when he used that word to describe himself.
I thought it was an Overwatch strat
*Smugs in Patriots*
(And now Tampa, I guess.)
Which means that a really great goat is officially a GOAT goat
A goat is a bovid in the genus Capra. Unlike their closely-related bovid cousins, the sheep, they have scent glands near the feet and groin, whereas sheep have scent glands in the face.
I trust this clears everything up.
At least saving Faz will give Amber one less thing to feel garbage about when rooftime comes.
Genuinely surprised Willis didn’t actually schedule these tweets on @repdesanto’s page 🙂
(But then, I guess laws about online threats of violence and stuff being what they are…)
Uh… There was a smile in the first sentence, but it got turned into a non-printing character and made the tone ambiguous.
On Android, I see the default gumdrop-shaped emoticon.
I guess it depends on how your browser parses the page? IDK I miss regular emotes written in text characters. Why overcomplicate things?
I’m seeing a round yellow smiley face.
it’s a smile for me
See, when this comic started, I would have been like “Yeah, Joyce can handle herself, she’s a grownup!” Now, five years out of college, I’m like “JOYCE YOU’RE 18 YOU ARE ALSO A KID”
At the moment most of the Twitter polls are fairly obvious wins, so i’m loving the ones where the answer is more uncertain. Galasso verses Sierra and Ethan verses Leslie have been the most interesting polls so far.
Other interesting match ups are going to probably be:
Sal verses Dorothy
Dorothy verses Billie
Mike versus Walky
Ruth verses Amber
Amber verses Joyce
Dorothy verses Becky (i’m really hoping this happens!)
Becky verses Dina (this one too!)
Well this looks dangerous. I hope none of them get seriously hurt.
With Blaine’s current state of mind, any outcome other than ‘dead’ is probably a win.
Faz could probably get seriously hurt without screwing up the comic entirely. There’d be some guilt and grieving, but it wouldn’t overwhelm the comic or sideline a major character for years of real-time.
The others might get hurt, but not anything that’s going to leave them in hospital or out of school for weeks. Might as well just kill them at that point.
It’d definitely fuck up Joyce. Amber too, possibly.
…Joyce…damnit, Joyce.
However Amber got up there, she probably made a hell of a noise doing it. Can’t count on Blaine ignoring the back of the van for long.
Blaine is strongly into a fight/flight response now. He’s basically fleeing in terror from only partially-real threats and I think that his most likely response is going to be to start swerving to try to shake off the monsters on the roof/back of the van. The most likely outcome from that will be flipping the van.
Guys (Girls? Whatever)… Guys, NO. Do NOT try to jump/cross from a moving vehicle onto another moving vehicle, no matter what the Fast franchise and Mad Max movies have taught you. That is INSANELY dangerous. Keep tailing Blaine; he HAS to slow down at some point or hit a red light/stop sign. THAT’S when you make a break for it.
Eh, it went pretty well last time.
I maintain that Joyce and Amber/Amazi-Girl have Abductee powers. Joyce can and has teleported, and Amber/Amazi-Girl keep making these improbable leaps AND I think their Iron Will might be backed up by a Body of Iron too, e.g. the I in FISS (Flight. Invulnerablity. Super-Strong)
FISS is Flight, Invulnerability, Strength, and Speed- at least according to 84.
We’re doing this the hard way. For the sake of Max Drama. Because that van is not stopping.
i’m in favor of gender-neutral use of “guy(s)”
F&F taught me that transport aircraft take, like, 8 minutes to fly the length of a runway.
Hey! Scrubs is (was) awesome, dont @ me.
I’m sticking with my theory that Faz will get onto the bike and Blaine, hearing the noise, panics and contrives to crash the van. Joyce and Amber/Mazie drag each other out of the wreck and Amazi-Girl is about to go back for Blaine (because heroes don’t leave people to die, even monsters like her father) when the van blows up.
Everyone is going to need a long time to get over this.
Long-term? My fanon is that there will be a phase where Joyce tries to confront her own anger at everything that’s happened by hunting bad-guys herself. Amber & Mazie will probably surprise themselves by trying to stop her. I also wonder if Amazi-Girl will officially retire, at least for a while, on the grounds that too much bad has happened. Then Ryan emerges as a threat and the four-girl team of Amazi-Girl, Spyder (Sal), Raguel (Joyce) and Delphi (Dorothy) and with Carla providing tech support set out to bring down the Entitled Guys Club and expose the corrupt cops in Bloomington. Sal’s mostly in it to keep the other three safe but will be there in the fights because… well, sometimes there’s a fight to be fought.
Fortunately, Leslie works out what the girls are doing and manages to talk them down before anyone gets hurt (maybe delivering an impassioned speech about how she’d love to beat her parents and their equally-smug friends to paste some days but it wouldn’t fix anything). At least none of the girls get hurt; several of Ryan’s clique manage to get new joints added to their long bones and free facial restructuring work and the aftershocks of Dorothy’s expose in the College news blog of corruption in the local PD promise to rumble on for years.
Thinking about it, Willis could do an entire blue panel chapter of the adventures of Bloomington’s own superhero team before going back to ‘normal’ and having Leslie persuading the five of them to stand down.
I just want to see Joyce and Joe have some more interactions, maybe a quiet date (as friends maybe) at a coffee shop and have a much needed talk
You neglected to mention Night Guy (Stalks the night! Destroys evil dreams!) and SideKick Man (When you need a sidekick, he’s there!).
This is starting to sound suspiciously like an obituary.
Which, I hope not.
My guess is that, one way or another, Amazi-Girl will never be seen again.
I’m worried that the dark circles and other references to Amber’s fatigue are foreshadowing a fatal mistake.
Joyce is really too good for this world. I hope this will totally change Faz’s life.
I’m Twitterpated by how this will be resolved.
That is, nervously excited and not infatuated or obsessed.
“At the end of the day, sometimes you have to recognize that you need help, whether it be to rally support for your cause, to realize that a seeming accomplice might be just as damaged as you are, or to get off a moving van to escape being kidnapped by the father of a vigilante. The most important thing you can do is just ask.”
Priorities slowly reestablish themselves.
Okay, how is Blaine not hearing the conversation in the back, and he most definitely would have heard Amazi-Girl climbing onto the roof. And now that I think about it, how is she managing to get up there, it is all smooth, slippery metal, and there is nothing to grab onto.
I just realized that I should be calling her Amber, not Amazi-Girl.
So it wasn’t a bluff. Interesting.
Oh come on AmaziGirl…there’s no handhold up there. You could have at least gotten in the back, not on top of it. Goober.
What if there’s an eject button on Sal’s motorcycle that released a cartoon spring that thrust her into the air, and now she’s climbing down?
1: This is technically Amber, not Amazi-Girl, and 2: Getting on top of a moving van is much, much more Amazi-Girl than getting in the van.
Funny enough, in between the “Becky’s bluffing” debate and now, Twitter rolled out the ability to schedule tweets at least to mobile web users!
You can do it on desktop, too.
Well there you go!
(I don’t use desktop generally so I couldn’t speak to that.)