A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
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.
Whomp!
Ronnie
A depressed, portly, hirsute anime fan stumbles through life in the ever-pursuit of chicken nuggets and other life-shortening indulgences.
Astral Aves
Moon Cabal
A fantasy coming-of-age following the adventures of Astra The Black and friends, as they navigate the mysterious world around them. It's politics, adventure, and the supernatural; oh, and crazy hair.
Real Science Adventures
Brian Clevinger
Spin off stories and other adventures from the world of Atomic Robo!
The End
August Brown, Cory Brown
Two aliens crash a sci-fi convention and accidentally take seven nerds on an adventure that spans the galaxy!
El Goonish Shive
Dan Shive
WARNING: This comic often ignores the Laws of Physics
[un]Divine
Ayme
A highschool senior thought giving up his soul for a demon was a good idea. It wasn't.
Kiwi Blitz
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
Steffi thinks she can use her kiwi mech to become a superhero. This idea turns out to be very stupid.
Fireweeds Moors
Gato Iberico
A cat-headed man and a girl with a sandwich hankering accidentally end up in a myth-infused country where magic chalices are a really big thing.
Star Trip
Gisele Weaver
Jas is a human taken from her home planet on a trip across the galaxy she will never forget.
Love Not Found
Gina Biggs
Abeille is on a quest to find someone who wants to do it the old-fashioned way in a time when touching has become outdated.
Cut Time
Juby
Rel and her trusty avian friend Fugue are on a quest to save a world that's lost track of time. Follow them and their new recruits, in a story written with help from the stars.
Star Impact
Jack McGee
A young, energetic woman fights her way up in the world of super-powered boxing after discovering the mighty gloves of her missing idol!
This is Not Fiction
Nicole Mannino
What do you do when the person you're in-love with is an anonymous romance novelist? Get your best friend to hire your worst enemy for help!
Lighter Than Heir
Melissa Albino
A young Volant woman joins the military in an effort to upstage her war-hero father.
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!
Paranatural
Zack Morrison
Superpowered middle schoolers fight evil spirits in their rural hometown. Come for the jokes, stay for the cast, the creatures, and the mystery that ties them all together!
Devil's Candy
Rem, Bikkuri
A lush fantasy about boy genius Kazu Decker, the girl he constructed for his 9th grade science project, and the world of devils and monsters they live in.
Wilde Life
Pascalle Lepas
Oscar decided to rent an old haunted house, and that's when things got weird...
Never Satisfied
Taylor Robin
Lucy Marlowe, a magician's apprentice, competes against other apprentices for an important, magical, Goverment Job.
Anarchy Dreamers
Emily Ree
Sparkly undead kids fight society's worst Nightmares in this pastel-punk urban fantasy coming-of-age!
Demon's Mirror
Harry Bogosian
Based loosely off of "The Snow Queen", a story by Hans Christian Andersen, we see things take a different turn as the demons become central characters, and the side characters stick around. Yup, that's the only differences. Enjoy!
Widdershins
Kate Ashwin
A series of light-hearted Victorian-era adventure stories featuring grumpy bounty hunters, accidental thiefkings, and more, in England's magical capital city Widdershins!
Tigress Queen
Allison Shaw
A barbarian warlord and a pampered prince try to avoid a marriage alliance that could end decades of violence.
Atomic Robo
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener
The robot punches monsters and bad robots and one time he was a cowboy.
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
Caramel Corn
Potchimew
Sarah is the only human left in a world full of mythical creatures and monsters. All she wants to do is live a quiet life, but everything changes when she meets her guardian angel, Jacob.
Ghost Junk Sickness
Studio CARTRIDGE, Laura Lee
Two hunters try to survive and end up being pushed to pursue a deadly bounty dubbed "The Ghost".
Awaken
Koti Saavedra/Flipfloppery
Superpowers, monsters and conspiracies. Piras, the spoiled Dameschi heir, fights to recover his identity after becoming a terrorist!
Goodbye to Halos
Valerie Halla
Cuddles, gay flirting, weird feelings, and magic-fueled knife fights - it's an adventure across the queer multiverse!
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.
Cassiopeia Quinn
Gunwild, Psudonym
A cute, pantsless thief is pursued across the stars by a buttoned-up military officer in the spacey, laser-filled future.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Between Failures
Jackie Wohlenhaus
The low stakes adventures of an assorted group of 20 somethings trapped in the declining years of American retail. They are naughty and say lots of swears.
Lilith's Word
inkPangur
If you had the power to make any wish come true using just one word, what would you say?
Hazy London
Scotty
A story about messy relationships. From friendly foes to crazy families. Nothing is black and white, just full of color. But, all colors can get a little hazy...
Wychwood
Varethane
When Tiara's pyrokinesis is finally noticed, she is captured by a magical research organization for study. If she cooperates, she could be helping to save humanity from a dire threat - but can she trust them?
Monster Pulse
Magnolia Porter Siddell
Four kids run afoul of a creepy secret organization's experiments, which turn their body parts into fighting monsters. Part sentimental coming-of-age story, part monster-training shonen manga, with just a bit of sci-fi body horror.
Godslave
Meaghan Carter
Edith has been thrown into the dangerous world of modern-day Egyptian mythology. Fighting monsters and dealing with family drama of godly proportions.
Monsterkind
Taylor C
Wallace Foster, a young, bright-eyed human social worker, has his entire world view rocked when he's suddenly relocated into a city primarily inhabited by monsters.
Alice and the Nightmare
Misha Krivanek
Alice finally attends University to learn to collect the dreams of humans, meet new friends, and deal with a pesky reflection along the way.
Knights Errant
J.R. Doyle
Wilfrid's humble quest for revenge becomes bigger and bloodier by the day.
The Witch Door
Anni K.
Katariina Lehto discovers her neighbor is a witch called Jousia Muotka. Jousia introduces Katariina to the strange people and places beyond the witch door...
Sam & Fuzzy
Sam Logan
Troubled by gangster rodents, lovesick vampire stalkers, or confused ninja assassins? Don't panic! Sam and Fuzzy are here to help. (For a reasonable fee.)
Kochab
Sarah Webb
A YA F/F fantasy comic about Sonya, a lost skier trying to survive a snowy wilderness and find her way back to her village; and Kyra - a fire spirit trying to fix the home that she let fall apart around her.
The Automan's Daughter
Mike Stamm
Aisha Osman and her uncle Siddig outwit bikers, spies and kidnappers while gearing up for a showdown with the formidable Widowmaker mecha.
Go Get a Roomie
Clover
Experience the queer journey of an upbeat hippie and the friendships she makes along the way! A tale of self-discovery and love of many forms.
Sufficiently Remarkable
Maki Naro
Two young women living in Brooklyn discover that you're always coming of age.
Starhammer
J.N. Monk, Harry Bogosian
A teen girl inherits a powerful alien artifact and proceeds to make a series of increasingly poor decisions
The Lonely Vincent Bellingham
Diana Huh
Vincent is an unkind man looking to disappear, and finds himself in the care of a vampire and her two wicked children.
Jailbird
Charlie Davis
An all-ages comic about a recently escaped prisoner's struggle to understand the outside world, and vice-versa. Also, a magic cape!
Girl Genius
Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio
In a time when the Industrial Revolution has become an all-out war, Mad Science rules the World...with mixed success.
The Sanity Circus
Windy
Magic, monsters and mysteries await in the odd city of Sanity. It's up to Attley and a colorful group of characters to find out just what is going on.
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
BOOKMARK Click "Tag Page" to bookmark a page. When you return to the site, click "Goto Tag" to continue where you left off.
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Also Joyce is way better at this than I thought. That’s silhouettes, use of negative space, shading, interesting shot composition, and panel layouts. She’s supposed to be a beginner!?!?
I would joke about her previously having written and drawn Spry Slurs for her high school newspaper, but unlike Willis she actually was just flat-out home-schooled so who the hell knows where she got the skillz.
This is basically the first strip of Roomies! (the first Walkyverse comic), but with Joyce Julia substituted for Danny and brunette Dorothy Doris for Joe. Even the artwork is similar.
But since Joyce is in college now, I guess we’re skipping that one.
(Unless it turns out she was drawing a Sly Sirs analogue in her high school years, just for her own amusement. That would explain her previously unseen, “not good but competent” cartooning skill.)
I imagine it’s not easy to intentionally add specific mistakes back into a drawing style that has evolved past them. I think this is better drawn than the strip it’s aping, though I did not go through the trouble of finding it to check.
Well there’s no barely-off-panel sexual harassment, for a start. And the subsequent strip doesn’t have Joe coming in through the window, just starts with him back in the room. So yeah, definitely technical evolution but this is still very much The First Roomies Strip. (That Julia does in fact look better than Original Roomies Joyce, checking. Less of the Big Poofy Forehead Hair Thing a lot of Roomies characters had.)
For reference there, especially since we’ve all linked the first one by now. Looking at the silhouette shot versus the side views in the Roomies strip is… striking.
Jeez, that just sent me back. I’ve seen the first strip many times since, so the effect has been blunted, but the first Joyce strip had me remembering the smell of my high school computer lab where I shouldn’t have been reading webcomics…
That sent me further back, to being in college before there were graphing calculators. (For those who took a course without them: You’re not missing much by doing it all with a TI-30.)
Well, I don’t know what kind of math courses you’re referring to, but I remember physics, and fields&waves. When it came to calculus or DiffEq a calculator wouldn’t have improved my results.
OK, fine!
I’ll go fetch my cosmic 4th wall metatext spackle for all these cracks.
(I keep expecting Rod Serling to lean into frame and start narrating.)
I remember back in the day when Garrison Keillor would talk about one of the residents of Lake Wobegon, Senator K. Torvaldson. According to the story, he wasn’t elected to anything or was even a politician; his parents had named him “Senator” because they liked the sound of it.
Excuse me his name is Jugemu Goko no Surikire Kaijarisuigyo no Suigyomatsu Unraimatsu Furaimatsu Ku Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yabura Koji no Bura Koji Paipo-paipo Paipo no Shuringan Shurigan no Gurindai Gurindai no Ponpokopi no Ponpokona no Chokyume no Chosuke Bradley and you will put some respect on his name
How amusing, my name is also Jugemu Goko no Surikire Kaijarisuigyo no Suigyomatsu Unraimatsu Furaimatsu Ku Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yabura Koji no Bura Koji Paipo-paipo Paipo no Shuringan Shurigan no Gurindai Gurindai no Ponpokopi no Ponpokona no Chokyume no Chosuke Bradley.
I think I know how this has to end, and it’s with Joyce and Walky both being beaten by Tom Chestnut and his comic about a robot catgirl who plays video games.
People keep suggesting that, ignoring that Walky points out Dinosaur Comics already exists earlier in this very storyline, and also Dina owning a Dinosaur Comics shirt.
On the one hand, we have no inclination Malaya has either the time (as a roller derby player) or the storytelling skills and inclination to draw a comic.
On the other hand, I would in fact read The Daily Adventures of Fuckface. (To save on time, every strip is the same three panels of Fuckface sitting in a tank, turning his head to face the audience, and turning back to previous position. Every day. There is no internal monologue, or background, or dialogue revealing offscreen shenanigans by Fuckface’s unseen owner. Just an iguana, sitting there.)
I suppose a bit like those ‘Garfield but without Garfield’s lines’ strips, but again: There is only one strip. Maybe if Daisy insists on variation, Malaya will prominently add a bowl of fruit slices to the side and sometimes there will be one fewer slice. Maybe one week it’s just the Fuckface staring directly at you panel for several days. (I’m assuming Malaya decided this was enough of a hobby to get a tablet and is drawing digitally rather than manually redrawing these panels. Alternately, they photocopied the one strip and keep making copies to submit.)
I wouldn’t be shocked if Walky gets the job, if only because Willis is using the meta jokes so quickly they risk running out, but.
Does dunking on Roomies ever truly get old? I love everything about this strip. Julia’s sunglasses being essential, and also the only way we could differentiate her from a Roomies-era Joyce drawing. Doris literally just being Dorothy with dark hair (drawn in what honestly looks more like a J&W!-era style to me but honestly I can’t totally gauge given the posing anyway and of course, we don’t have a reference for that design in Roomies.) The fact that the only thing Joyce can come up with for establishing Doris’s presidential ambitions is electoral college votes, specifically. The fact that ‘Betty’ has been slotted into the role of Sal, thus not actually implying she’s Julia’s love interest because intent is clear but at the same time I am 100% bringing it up in the continuing saga of Joyce’s Unintentional Biness.
It’s beautiful. I love it. Now I want to see Walky doing the exact same strip but with Gary the T Rex and a legally-distinct Monkey Master pastiche.
… You know I actually hadn’t thought about that but damn, that is in fact a parallel there.
Now I really want Joyce to get the job just so we can see a Betty and Julia version of the Power Booster Rod scene, both as a sucker for platonic love saving the universe and because there is a RICH well you could plumb out of that tying into the Dumbingverse characters.
WV!Sal pretty much got split into three: DOA!Dorothy (dumps Danny when college begins to work for the government), DOA!Becky (childhood friend who runs away from home, shows up at college unexpectedly, loses parents, and harbors ultimately-unrequited love for the protagonist), and DOA!Sal (general Sal-ness).
Agreed. Doesn’t mean I’m not curious as to how the Round Face-Framing hairdo would look with the Roomies Poofy Forehead Thing, though. (Probably awkward, but the curiosity remains.)
So Julia Grey now has to go on for long enough for Joyce to do the dumbing of age style reboot where Julia is in college again and draws a comic for her college paper until we reach infinite recursion.
My favorite of the changes between Joyce Roomies and the actual historical Roomies is the way “college” is underlined both times. You can FEEL the “Enh? Wokka wokka!” coming off this strip
I wonder how much easier this was to draw than current Dumbing of Age strips.
Then again, it’s one thing inking over an old strip you made almost a quarter-century ago. Creating brand-new material that emulates the style of your old work is a whole other thing, and probably harder.
Willis, I don’t know how much control you have over the ads that come with the website, but there is one for some sort of air purifier/filter that comes in from the riight-hand side and covers almost 25% of the screen. Please try to find some way of getting rid of it.
I could absolutely see Joyce being willing to acknowledge this totally-not-a-fictionalized-self liking ladies, without acknowledging it in herself.
Granted, I really hope we don’t dredge up the Joyce/Becky ship because a) Dina, b) they’ve both said they consider each other sisters at this point, and c) Joyce suddenly realizing she’s had feelings for Becky all along would undercut the hell out of… basically all of Books 5-6 IMO.
About 11 years from now, Julia and Doris will by lying on a rug together and wondering about how different their lives might have been in just one or two things had been different at the time they first met.
I find myself wondering if phones have reached an evolutionarily stable form, or if in another 20 years, people will look at that first panel in the same way that Danny and the handset looks to us now.
One of my favorite bits, in an episode full of them, is when Ben Sisko slaps his chest… and then remembers, oh right, they’re still using flip phones in this century. (Meanwhile, Dax is smiling and waiting for it.)
Great comic, not sure the format will be suited for a college newspaper? My money is that Joyce and Walky will both be given the job, forced to work together leading to hilarious circumstances.
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Oh, classic Roomies! strip, how does Willis redraw thee? Let me count the ways…
*gets “awaiting moderation” throttled trying to post more than one link*
eh, it’s like three anyway
Off the top of my head, there’s the Sep 10 2007 Joyce and Walky!, the Sep 10 2012 Dumbing of Age, and a partial homage in at least one Shortpacked!.
We also get Sal’s side of the conversation here, and a partial homage in the final Roomies! strip.
I’m losing my touch!
Just so there is a link. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/06-strange-beerfellows/fifteen-2/ .
y’all forgot http://www.itswalky.com/comic/ten-years/
We are going to overdose on meta in these next plotlines
probably
Hope so.
Yeah, hopefully it won’t get it the way too much for those of us who don’t know the references.
Get in the way? No no no, it’s showing you the way! To boldly read all of It’s Walky! where no one outside the DoAverse hath quoted before
I tried It’s Walky a few years ago. I couldn’t get into it at all. I felt like I was missing backstory, and it was all too dark for my tastes.
I got farther with Shortpacked but the talking car lost me.
Don’t worry, those who do will contextualize the references in the comments (whether it’s asked for or not).
I disagree with your characterization of meta as ever being too much.
You plant the seeds and a decade later when it pays off people think your a genius! Respect the process, Doris!
Also Joyce is way better at this than I thought. That’s silhouettes, use of negative space, shading, interesting shot composition, and panel layouts. She’s supposed to be a beginner!?!?
Also, simple character designs and bold lines easily reproducible on cheap newsprint
I would joke about her previously having written and drawn Spry Slurs for her high school newspaper, but unlike Willis she actually was just flat-out home-schooled so who the hell knows where she got the skillz.
This is her best attempt at copying the early work of the guy who created Dexter and Monkey Master.
Can you tell me what this is a reference to?
NO I AM NOT BEING JOE
ok, Lucy’s cool
Yeah she is!
She’s NightGirl!
Gravatars are but fleeting. Do not give a fuck about who they depict.
And yet Face with honesty thy given Fucks whence fortune and fate do impart upon thee a delightful conjunction of same.
I was stuck as Galasso for a long damned time.
This is basically the first strip of Roomies! (the first Walkyverse comic), but with
JoyceJulia substituted for Danny andbrunette DorothyDoris for Joe. Even the artwork is similar.http://www.itswalky.com/comic/and-now/
but what is “Spry Slurs”?
Willis drew a comic called “Sly Sirs” in high school.
But since Joyce is in college now, I guess we’re skipping that one.
(Unless it turns out she was drawing a Sly Sirs analogue in her high school years, just for her own amusement. That would explain her previously unseen, “not good but competent” cartooning skill.)
I imagine it’s not easy to intentionally add specific mistakes back into a drawing style that has evolved past them. I think this is better drawn than the strip it’s aping, though I did not go through the trouble of finding it to check.
http://www.itswalky.com/comic/and-now/
The OG strip.
Oh my god, thats amazing!
It totally is.
Joyce including teeth is the big tell.
http://www.itswalky.com/comic/and-now/
Well there’s no barely-off-panel sexual harassment, for a start. And the subsequent strip doesn’t have Joe coming in through the window, just starts with him back in the room. So yeah, definitely technical evolution but this is still very much The First Roomies Strip. (That Julia does in fact look better than Original Roomies Joyce, checking. Less of the Big Poofy Forehead Hair Thing a lot of Roomies characters had.)
http://www.itswalky.com/comic/i-hate-math/
For reference there, especially since we’ve all linked the first one by now. Looking at the silhouette shot versus the side views in the Roomies strip is… striking.
Jeez, that just sent me back. I’ve seen the first strip many times since, so the effect has been blunted, but the first Joyce strip had me remembering the smell of my high school computer lab where I shouldn’t have been reading webcomics…
That sent me further back, to being in college before there were graphing calculators. (For those who took a course without them: You’re not missing much by doing it all with a TI-30.)
I mean, some of my math professors didn’t let us use calculators at all for the tests, which was actually probably a good idea.
You had calculators?
We had to draw our graphs in the snow.
And it was uphill both ways.
Well, I don’t know what kind of math courses you’re referring to, but I remember physics, and fields&waves. When it came to calculus or DiffEq a calculator wouldn’t have improved my results.
[Dances gleefully]
We’re being pulled into the recursive singularity. THE ENGINES CANNO TAKE IT, CAPN!
If this is in a Scottish accent, that no-t-cannot has an official spelling – cannae. Wild, right?
The engines cannae take it, Capn!
Fwiw:
Do not = dinnae
Will not = winnae
I don’t mean this as a correction – just a neat fact.
It’s more specifically a reference to Scotty from TOS.
To be fair, James Doohan was from Vancouver and his parents were Irish…
My favourite is “disnae,” for “does not.” Confusing when you’re talkng about animation…
My favorite is dinnae soar in Icarus and the Time Machine.
Yes disnae! I forgot about that
I predict Dan will be the only member of the cast never adapted since Joyce does not remember he exists without his hat.
The polar opposite of their Walkyverse dynamic…
OK, fine!
I’ll go fetch my cosmic 4th wall metatext spackle for all these cracks.
(I keep expecting Rod Serling to lean into frame and start narrating.)
THE SELF-PARODY HAS BEGUN!
Initially thought I was on the wrong page.
Same
Not saying.
I kind of thought that maybe Willis had accidentally uploaded an old Roomies strip instead of today’s DoA. Then a laughed out loud.
Ssmes
(which is what my keyboard initally decided to spit out instead of “same”)
Parodiception!!
Just after midnight, I load up both DoA and the J&W rerun in separate tabs. I saw this first and got really confused.
Is “President Doris” actually her name? First name ‘President’, middle name ‘Doris’, last name unknown?
(Like Fuhrer President King Bradley where it turned out ‘King’ was actually his first name, though maybe not the first name he was born with.)
Her last name is Kenner.
I remember back in the day when Garrison Keillor would talk about one of the residents of Lake Wobegon, Senator K. Torvaldson. According to the story, he wasn’t elected to anything or was even a politician; his parents had named him “Senator” because they liked the sound of it.
Hah, yep. His parent were immigrants IIRC.
Excuse me his name is Jugemu Goko no Surikire Kaijarisuigyo no Suigyomatsu Unraimatsu Furaimatsu Ku Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yabura Koji no Bura Koji Paipo-paipo Paipo no Shuringan Shurigan no Gurindai Gurindai no Ponpokopi no Ponpokona no Chokyume no Chosuke Bradley and you will put some respect on his name
How amusing, my name is also Jugemu Goko no Surikire Kaijarisuigyo no Suigyomatsu Unraimatsu Furaimatsu Ku Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yabura Koji no Bura Koji Paipo-paipo Paipo no Shuringan Shurigan no Gurindai Gurindai no Ponpokopi no Ponpokona no Chokyume no Chosuke Bradley.
Weird, mine is Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern- schplenden- schlitter- crasscrenbon- fried- digger- dingle- dangle- dongle- dungle- burstein- von- knacker- thrasher- apple- banger- horowitz- ticolensic- grander- knotty- spelltinkle- grandlich- grumblemeyer- spelterwasser- kurstlich- himbleeisen- bahnwagen- gutenabend- bitte- ein- nürnburger- bratwustle- gerspurten- mitz- weimache- luber- hundsfut- gumberaber- shönedanker- kalbsfleisch- mittler- aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm.
And I’m Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
You killed my translatorbot. Prepare to die.
When you go out, do people always shout?
I was waiting for this. I am also very impressed you went to the effort to get the whole name correct.
After the Civil War, formerly enslaved people named their children Mister and Miss so white folks had to call them that.
I think I know how this has to end, and it’s with Joyce and Walky both being beaten by Tom Chestnut and his comic about a robot catgirl who plays video games.
She’s going to hire Mary instead as her anime fundamentalist cartoons are treated as satire.
I’m all in on Dina winning with Dinosaur Comics.
^options the poll should have had, but didn’t^
People keep suggesting that, ignoring that Walky points out Dinosaur Comics already exists earlier in this very storyline, and also Dina owning a Dinosaur Comics shirt.
I missed those references. I just keep saying it because I think it would make for maximum comedy
Great artists steal.
Or, just to make the commenters scream, Malaya, who seems to have some actual artistic skills, according to the art prof.
On the one hand, we have no inclination Malaya has either the time (as a roller derby player) or the storytelling skills and inclination to draw a comic.
On the other hand, I would in fact read The Daily Adventures of Fuckface. (To save on time, every strip is the same three panels of Fuckface sitting in a tank, turning his head to face the audience, and turning back to previous position. Every day. There is no internal monologue, or background, or dialogue revealing offscreen shenanigans by Fuckface’s unseen owner. Just an iguana, sitting there.)
Also only ever submitting a single strip and getting paid $5 per day would probably be the one way this gig pays anything resembling fairly.
So it’s Garfield but way better?
I suppose a bit like those ‘Garfield but without Garfield’s lines’ strips, but again: There is only one strip. Maybe if Daisy insists on variation, Malaya will prominently add a bowl of fruit slices to the side and sometimes there will be one fewer slice. Maybe one week it’s just the Fuckface staring directly at you panel for several days. (I’m assuming Malaya decided this was enough of a hobby to get a tablet and is drawing digitally rather than manually redrawing these panels. Alternately, they photocopied the one strip and keep making copies to submit.)
But in the last strip Mike runs in and kicks him out of the panel.
That’s the finale, kicking off successor comic Malaya Vs Mike.
Just the longest action sequence Malaya can draw before she gets bored with near-contextless violence. So it’ll last like, five years.
Maybe six, if there’s enough material from making Fuckface a Kaiju.
I feel like Willis wants to draw Joyce’s comic instead of Walky’s.
(Because it’s awesome)
Snrrk, I love it.
Hey, watch the 4th wall, Willis!
the 4th wall is dead and never coming back
Diegesis is overrated.
Yeah, Linkara’s already had to move once in the middle of a pandemic. Who knows what horrible punishments Viga will unleash if it happens again?
seriously though what does it say about me that I can no longer hear the phrase “fourth wall” without thinking of Linkara
You have taste in comic reviewers?
Lamp?
Their name is Assistant, or That One. This is actually where they and Doris meet for the first time, they will be instrumental in her rise to power.
is Joyce’s comic also gonna include bad star trek references?
No, it’ll only include good Star Trek references.
Has Joyce even seen Star Trek? Carol probably would’ve banned it because it depicts a hivemind collective as a bad thing.
Pretty sure the Federation is depicted as a good thing.
For the truth, just ask Elim.
I meant the Borg, but you’re not entirely wrong either.
DS9 probably got banned though; the premiere episode all but establishes Sisko as Bajoran Jesus.
Well, yes, but it was only so Bajor would eventually take its rightful place in the
ChurchFederation.oh my god
it’s so beautiful.
Sh! If we let Willis know that he’s bringing us joy, he’ll have to compensate.
*plays “Black Betty” on the hacked Muzak*
Bam-a-lam.
I’d read it
But would you subscribe to Joyce’s patreon?
I wouldn’t be shocked if Walky gets the job, if only because Willis is using the meta jokes so quickly they risk running out, but.
Does dunking on Roomies ever truly get old? I love everything about this strip. Julia’s sunglasses being essential, and also the only way we could differentiate her from a Roomies-era Joyce drawing. Doris literally just being Dorothy with dark hair (drawn in what honestly looks more like a J&W!-era style to me but honestly I can’t totally gauge given the posing anyway and of course, we don’t have a reference for that design in Roomies.) The fact that the only thing Joyce can come up with for establishing Doris’s presidential ambitions is electoral college votes, specifically. The fact that ‘Betty’ has been slotted into the role of Sal, thus not actually implying she’s Julia’s love interest because intent is clear but at the same time I am 100% bringing it up in the continuing saga of Joyce’s Unintentional Biness.
It’s beautiful. I love it. Now I want to see Walky doing the exact same strip but with Gary the T Rex and a legally-distinct Monkey Master pastiche.
I mean, there’s also the fact that both WV!Sal and DOA!Becky have run away from home and watched their parents die, in roughly that order.
… You know I actually hadn’t thought about that but damn, that is in fact a parallel there.
Now I really want Joyce to get the job just so we can see a Betty and Julia version of the Power Booster Rod scene, both as a sucker for platonic love saving the universe and because there is a RICH well you could plumb out of that tying into the Dumbingverse characters.
-Betty?
-Hi, Julia? (drops Rooster)
WV!Sal pretty much got split into three: DOA!Dorothy (dumps Danny when college begins to work for the government), DOA!Becky (childhood friend who runs away from home, shows up at college unexpectedly, loses parents, and harbors ultimately-unrequited love for the protagonist), and DOA!Sal (general Sal-ness).
Disagree. There is no end to the number of metajokes. There is an extremely rich backhistory to riff on.
Dorothy was a late J&W! character. Adapting
herDoris to the early Roomies! art style probably would’ve made her less recognizable.Agreed. Doesn’t mean I’m not curious as to how the Round Face-Framing hairdo would look with the Roomies Poofy Forehead Thing, though. (Probably awkward, but the curiosity remains.)
So Julia Grey now has to go on for long enough for Joyce to do the dumbing of age style reboot where Julia is in college again and draws a comic for her college paper until we reach infinite recursion.
Nah, this is Roomies!, where it all started. She’s not due for a DoA-style world reboot for over a decade.
A decade their time, which has to be at least a couple of centuries in ours.
sick silhouette shot tho
Whoa, this threw me for a loop. For a second I was like “wait, I just looked at Joyce and Walky?”
I predict it will be neither Joyce, nor Walky that gets the job, but dark horse candidate Mary with a strip about Hymmel the Humming Hymnal.
Also, if Maggie hand lettered that, I commend her penmanship.
Actually lettered in Maggie Comic Girly..
I would buy that font.
…
I want a Julia Gray spinoff.
My favorite of the changes between Joyce Roomies and the actual historical Roomies is the way “college” is underlined both times. You can FEEL the “Enh? Wokka wokka!” coming off this strip
I wonder how much easier this was to draw than current Dumbing of Age strips.
Then again, it’s one thing inking over an old strip you made almost a quarter-century ago. Creating brand-new material that emulates the style of your old work is a whole other thing, and probably harder.
No colours, so substantially easier I assume
I think the first panel border might be straight-up traced.
I was comparing this stirp to the original Roomies! strip and I noticed the line art on that lamp is really crisp. Good job, Joyce
genuinely thought I had clicked onto itswalky where the old roomies strips are archived for a sec lol
Here’s Joyce’s first appearance in Roomies (not counting the “College Ho” prequel) for anyone else who wants to compare early Joyce to Julia Gray.
http://www.itswalky.com/comic/i-hate-math/
Willis has disappeared up his ass so far that he’s become a Mobius strip.
I mean that in the most admiring way possible.
A mobius… comic strip?
Ah, the Mobius phase of butts’ disease!
Doris is already less annoying than Joe.
And I assume Betty is Julia Grey’s Becky…
Willis, there’s no need to be down on yourself. Your handwriting is plenty girly.
As a southpaw that reverse slant looks familiar. Any chance that Maggie is left-handed?
Uncredited Collaboration.. tsk
Willis, I don’t know how much control you have over the ads that come with the website, but there is one for some sort of air purifier/filter that comes in from the riight-hand side and covers almost 25% of the screen. Please try to find some way of getting rid of it.
You need to report the ad to Hiveworks. They’ll get rid of it.
Hah for a moment I thought there was a rerun strip or something. Fun homage!
“You all look so familiar somehow…”
Willis, how does it feel to roast past-you?
He’s had experience.
Spring is sprung
The grass is riz
I wonder where
The humor is!
Burma-Shave
Eat at Arbys.
Needs more Betty.
So I’m guessing Julia and Betty dated in high school and are still nominally dating?
I could absolutely see Joyce being willing to acknowledge this totally-not-a-fictionalized-self liking ladies, without acknowledging it in herself.
Granted, I really hope we don’t dredge up the Joyce/Becky ship because a) Dina, b) they’ve both said they consider each other sisters at this point, and c) Joyce suddenly realizing she’s had feelings for Becky all along would undercut the hell out of… basically all of Books 5-6 IMO.
I don’t know why after the meta of the previous strips with Joyce and Dorothy talking about Joyce’s comic, but I didn’t see this coming somehow.
Oh ye of little faith.
joyce, it would be optimal to make joyc–I mean julia and doris end up together in the comic
About 11 years from now, Julia and Doris will by lying on a rug together and wondering about how different their lives might have been in just one or two things had been different at the time they first met.
I find myself wondering if phones have reached an evolutionarily stable form, or if in another 20 years, people will look at that first panel in the same way that Danny and the handset looks to us now.
“Oh, yeah, I remember when combadges were those things you had to hold.”
In the really old days the combadges had wires attached, which made it really difficult to walk around.
One of my favorite bits, in an episode full of them, is when Ben Sisko slaps his chest… and then remembers, oh right, they’re still using flip phones in this century. (Meanwhile, Dax is smiling and waiting for it.)
For a second while the site was loading I was like
“Wait i clicked on Dumbin not It’s Walky”…. oh…. OOHhhhhhhhhh
I hope Joyce gets the job so we can get more of this.
Second.
Thirded.
Well that caught me off guard, and in all of the right ways
It’s DumbingIt’s JuliaJulia of SpaceLet’s have a look at more strips, shall we?
Dormmates!
With a guest appearance of You/Aide in the background!
It’s That One/Assistant in Joyce’s world.
Dorothy see herself in that character and she don’t like it.
Great comic, not sure the format will be suited for a college newspaper? My money is that Joyce and Walky will both be given the job, forced to work together leading to hilarious circumstances.
Dorothy suspects she’s being called out here…
Dorothy suspects no such thing.
She knows.
NO THIS IS TOO META BRAIN CAN’T DEAL
Oh my Cheese, this is perfect!
what the hell, it’s not even september 10 yet
March 21 is the new September 10.
You have to allow for the effect of covid affecting the procession of the equinoxes disrupting the time streams.
Joyce, you have a future in comics if you keep at for…8000 days
Lamp is here!
and Betty, when you call her, you can call her Al