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NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! 🤯
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
Patrick Willems @patrickhwillems.bsky.social ⋅ 1m
The Verge @theverge.com ⋅ 2d
Transformers Wiki @tfwiki.net ⋅ 2d
Josiah Hawthorne @josiahhawthorne.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
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️𝓝𝓪𝓷𝓲 
was waiting for one of them to draw in “start of Roomies!” style
What’s Walky’s art going to look like? We’ve got dueling author avatars here.
Obviously it’ll look like the author’s current style… that is, Walky’s art will be so photorealistic that nobody can tell it’s art. The rest of this storyline will probably be about how he’s tempted to use it for evil.
There was one strip in IW where his art style kept making up non-existent anatomy like “nostrils”
So Joyce draws Roomies and Walky draws ‘Walky Does a Sex’?
I’m not certain, but Joyce’s pic today convinced me to vote for her in the poll.
Once again the poll is deeply flawed. No option for both. No option for Malaya.
No option for. Yotomoe.
I wonder if there were 2 versions of the comic, and whoever was losing got their art previewed.
My money’s on begining of shortpacked!
Joyce’s drawing looks like Willis’s turn-of-the-millennium college cartoon style to me.
http://www.itswalky.com/comic/joe-joyce-journey-through-art-history-page-1/
I bet Walky’s style more abstract, like the elementary school versions of the cast.
(Throwaway gag: he goes to Mary for drawing advice, she demonstrates her prowess by redrawing all his characters as the same anime guy but with different hair.)
Oh, we know what Walky’s art style looks like.
http://www.itswalky.com/comic/whats-that/
I would love to see one good group portrait of the DoA cast in a more realistic style like that.
Heck, I’d pay to commission a group of headshots myself if I could afford all of them! xD
Julia, no! That was the nega-president!
Darth Keener!
….Wait, that gun is aiming at the reader of the math notes.
The math notes are Walky’s
Is walky the love interest werewolf?
(Is Joyce writing Anita Blake novels?)
He only borrowed the notes.
I’m pretty sure the president is the love interest/werewolf, so it’d be Dorothy.
The president ordered the hit so she’s not the love interest. Dorothy’s the jealous rival of the love interest that ordered Julia Grey to kill her lover leaving an open space for her to slide in on the rebound!
Hm, I think I parsed it wrong. I interpreted “It’s okay. It’s her love interest” as “It’s okay because she’s murdering for love instead of it being for the president (who’s a werewolf, it’s totally rad)”, rather than “It’s okay, she’s murdering her love interest (who then comes back as a werewolf, so he’s not really dead)”.
It seems weird to me that he’d lead with “She’s murdering her love interest” rather than “He gets better”, though, which is what threw me initially.
Nah, I think Walky’s saying, “It’s okay because he’s her love interest [and therefore a major character unlikely to die in this scene], and he comes back later.”
…These doodles have a surprisingly degree of narrative and continuity for not-even-a-single-panel drawings.
He’s read her fic as well.
It could be argued that Walky *would* call the Dorothy-insert the Joyce-insert’s love interest. Seems like a thing he would do.
Huh, I took it as a comment on the recent behaviors of the ex president’s fanclub but I see how Dorothy as president spy-fic also fits.
Also; if Joyce is Anita Blake, does that mean we’re going to end up with a few months of comics featuring her and the other characters in bed because reasons before one of the main characters ends up radically changing his character for reasons that make little sense in-universe but perfect sense if you realize that he was based on a real person and real-world drama bled over into the work?
You’d need to pay money for Slipshine, and an industrial quantity of brain bleach, if Willis tried to portray Joyce as Anita Blake.
I meant to write Julia instead of Joyce there, but… I think that just make the idea funnier, actually.
considering Joyce is autobiographical and Willis is now a pornlord… well…
I can’t tell if this is subtext in the early Blake novels that I missed or spillover from the later Blake novels I had stopped reading by that point.
It’s Julia Grey, Werewolf Hunter. Completely different genre.
I mean, if anyone can talk Joyce into extrajudicially killing her man, it’ll be Dorothy
“Who do you need me to kill?” is just what Captain Julia Grey asks the President every time she’s called to the office.
When you’re in the military, you have to kill whoever the president tells you to. It’s in Article I of the constitution.
In Australia we say the the job of the military is to kill people and break things that the prime minister wants dead and broken, and that if you aren’t okay with that you are going to have a problem.
Joyce publishes the strip, it immediately develops a cult following within the queer community on campus. Joyce is like, wwwwwhat?? Ô_ò
Lucy: “So, why do you think I can help.”
Walky: “Well, every time I’ve heard you mentioned around here, someone says “Lucy can do better”, so I was hoping that meant you were a better artist than Joyce.”
Cue my spit take! :O
I contribute my own spit take!
Take your pretend upvote.
Amazing comment.
In a cartoon universe, is this a realistic drawing? Cause it looks a lot like joyce
At least she’s not drawing body parts that don’t really exist
Like nostrils
she’s too busy drawing dongs….
That’s… surprisingly timely for something drawn months ago.
y i k e s
Yyyyeah. It…really reads differently after January 6, 2021…
It reads more or less the same to me, I don’t think the parallels are that strong
Do you mean IRL or in comic universe? Either way I’m not I beg to differ because if this came out at beast 5 months ago I’d still say it reflects real life way to much.
It’s definitely a buffer reference, but that does place it after all the crap went down in Michigan (and the rhetoric was already building up steam at that point).
Surprisingly competent art and storytelling depth Walky couldn’t hope to sniff the jockstrap of! He SHOULD be worried!
Nah, he can do Mike kicking various people. How can Joyce compete with that.
Joyce can draw competent, but can she draw a T-rex like Walky?
president shoelaces has an evil agenda? nooooooooooooooooooooooo
also lucy takes notes comics way too seriously xD
In light of recent events, though…
What do you mean “recent”? It’s been nearly 20 years of extrajudicial killings already.
Observation A: Joyce’s sunglasses look like angry anime eyes.
Observation B: that werewolf is totally joe right im not crazy
Well, Jacob was the space vampire, so it stands to reason someone else would be the space werewolf. Still, it’s last-semester Joyce we’re talking about here, so I think the werewolf was also Jacob. Maybe he was a space-vampire-werewolf, destined to bring the two peoples together.
It’s definitely space-werewolf Not-Joe and space Vampire Not-Jacob as the rival love interests…though there’s a lot of subtext there with president Not-Dorothy…
where the hell did space vampire jacob come from?
Bonus strip. Turns out the Julia Grey stories are exactly as ridiculously cheesy as you would expect.
Sorry, Thag, I forgot that one was also a bonus strip. There have been two Julia Gray strips that I recall, and for some reason I thought the vampire one was regular and the other Patreon.
Wasn’t this the plot of one of the Underworld movies??
A woman being told by an authority figure to kill her werewolf love interest?
Partial plot near the end of the first movie.
Looks like it’s an… Anti-sident.
Either Julia’s target is the math teacher or we need more lore about the Julia-verse
So…
She’s built up a full mythology, hasn’t she?
Wait, I thought Julia Gray was a fighter pilot? I didn’t know that meant she was a killer!
Oh man, I just realized this is another thing Joyce will eventually get disillusioned about
She probably grew up in an environment where everyone thinks fighter pilots are awesome, and no one asks awkward questions about who exactly they’re fighting and why.
She probably thinks about it in cartoon terms. Like the old GI Joe cartoons, where the Joes could shoot down waves of Cobra aircraft, but the pilots always parachuted to safety.
Would Top Gun be forbidden in the fundie Brown household?
Its okay, she spares the werewolf because she loves him.
I always enjoy seeing drawings by characters in comics and cartoons. It’s fun to see what looks “cartoony” to people who already live in a cartoony world.
It’s like the old joke: “If Sailor Moon were to draw a manga picture with the usual big eyes, would she regard it as photorealism?” (And what would a photorealistic drawing of a person look like to her?)
I was confused for a moment about who Julia Gray was and wondered if it was a reference to some big-budget legacy media that I wasn’t familiar with.
“Black Bart says ‘DRAW!'”–Jason Fox on FOXTROT
I wonder what made Joyce decide Werewolf instead of Vampire?
Like yeah Werewolves do a *lot* for the imagination, but it’s damned difficult to rationalize them versus a Vampire.
Whether it be Dracula, Strahd, Vlad von Carstein, or others. . .Vampires have always been the Kings and Queens of Attraction.
. . . Wasn’t there some kind of idea in some parts of Vampire mythos that Vampires are the servents of Satan’s blood or some such?
Meanwhile Werewolves are just simply those who were cursed?
When they’re not just natively shapeshifters I mean.
Properly speaking, Vampires in their earliest myths are more like ghosts or modern-day zombies – the restless dead who arise to kill each night, and then return to death during the day. They’re more or less mindless, and are generally attributed to unresolved grudges, tremendously sinful lives, or improper burial, depending on who conveys the folklore.
Once you get to more modern interpretations, it’s usually more “Generically Cursed by God” than directly serving Satan – either Caine’s curse, or Tepes being cursed, depending on the franchise and how closely they want to tie it to Dracula.
There are plenty of settings in which they are Satan’s servants, though – but, well, it’s vampires. There’s so many interpretations of them that almost any random fact can be attributed to vampires and end up true somewhere by pure luck.
As for Werewolves vs Vampire as romance pick…
…
…
…
Well, okay, I favor vampires personally, but I’m still going to recuse myself from this lest I end up re-enacting some of the more shameful flame wars of my past. Let’s just say it used to be a thing, and not just in Twilight, cursed be the franchise name.
You don’t need to masquerade. There won’t be an apocalypse if people figure it out. Unless… were you a die-hard Monster Squad fan?
Ooh, just realized you might be trying to Buff your mystique.
she was team Jacob?
Maybe I’m weird, but I don’t think a remorseless murderer that drinks the blood of the living to extend it’s ghoulish state of unlife is a particularly attractive romantic partner
Much rather get the normal person who gets big, angry and hairy once a month. Much more manageable
To quote Willow Rosenberg “Okay werewolf, but that’s not all the time. I mean three days out of the month I’m not much fun to be around either”.
Extending their ghoulish state of unlife by forcibly compelling people to be enchanted by them is why they are/were horrific. They weren’t intrinsically appealling, but magically, forcibly charming. Essentially they magically roofued their prey. The modern take that people may have the choice is due to the washout of the entire concept of romatic. Modern romance is about just the love or lust of the participants, but the classical romatics were more like Romeo and Juliet, star crossed and fated to die tragically. By removing the compulsion and self destruction caused by vampires, they’ve washed away the horror of the vampire and also functionally destroyed what truly made them what they were. Vampires were meant to make us question what it means to be human. Edward and his ilk do as much to make us question our humanity as a department store make-up counter.
I think the Greek tragedies would have been a much better example. I’m pretty sure R&J was not supposed to be some perfect love match, but an example of how dumb and melodramatic teenagers are. Romeo is chasing a different woman at the start, and says very similar things about how amazing she is. $20 says if he’d survived he’d be after a different woman middle of next week. (Also, “woman” might not be the right word since Juliet was 13-14.)
Making them not horrifying does really remove the vampire from vampires, though. Once they’re not feeding on the innocent they’re just regular people with weird teeth and a fondness for blood pudding.
I just now realized that what I really want to see is Joyce/Lucy.
How cruel of you! Yes, they’d be sweet together, but do you really want to give the rest of the campus diabetes? Plus, just imagine how grumpy poor Sara would be, having to deal with such a lovey-dovey couple on a regular basis…
Louche juicy?
…as one does
With current events being the way they are, Joyce would pose an even bigger threat to Walky’s position as the newspaper’s cartoonist because not only is her drawing at least “competent”, this one in particular is quite… Topical!
Julia Gray is finally illustrated in DoA!
I don’t have Patreon so I wonder if she’s been in a bonus strip?
She has!
Twice, even.
I’ve got the strips on a bookmark! Three of the same bookmark, even!
Where do you think the Gravatars came from?
When a mommy gravatar and a daddy gravatar love each other very, very much…?
I mean she’s more competent (assuming this is a good representation and not, for example, the only position she can draw) than a lot of people with monetized comics
this isn’t me knocking anyone, let alone an individual, with “bad” art and a successful comic (lotsa kinds of art, and without good storytelling “good” art doesn’t make a comic), only saying that it means Joyce could be successful with what she has, especially as a starting point
To play Walky’s advocate, I would be pretty miffed if I told a friend about an opportunity I was gonna pursue and they decided to apply as well and took the job out from under me. I mean yeah they have every right to do that but that’d definitely bug the crap outta me.
Everyone keeps saying this is topical and I’m really worried. There’s just WEREWOLVES walkin’ around and nobody had the good nature to tell me?
Actual footage of a real live werewolf (SFW I promise but loud noises)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nqSkHEB-aE
Our hands were tied until now; we didn’t want to break the Masquerade! But, well, they voted to abolish it yesterday, so that doesn’t really matter anymore.
Man they was like 12 different apocalypse level disaster events to deal with from The Fallout of 2020 we didn’t have time to focus just on that.
Apparently, they’re all in London and they love beef chow mein.
Their hair is *perfect*
I’m more curious as to why he even has that still.
He’s a Julia Grey fan.
The alternative would have been returning what he borrowed.
(Actually, when did he borrow that? He may have been disrupted by a kidnapping plot.)
I love this strip very much. It implies that Walky has either read Joyce’s self fanfiction or that they have talked about it and he found the plot details interesting enough to remember. 11/10
If asked about it he would probably say he remembered to make fun of her more accurately, but I like your interpretation better.
I think Walky and Joyce would be on the same wavelength of what constitutes a cool action scene, and Walky pretends to hate the romance parts of the story but secretly loves them.
Agreed. He has very strong opinions about the viability of Julia’s longterm love interest, and they disagree about when the lesbian super-scientists should succeed in resurrecting a dinosaur (Joyce agrees that they SHOULD, but is building it in the background of the plot over several arcs so that it’ll be The Most Dramatic. Walky says it’ll be dramatic no matter what because come on, DINOSAUR.)
+1
Joyce is rippin’ off yer drawing style, Willis!
If a character in drawn media draws something and it looks a lot like the world around them, isn’t it basically photo-realistic? That basically looks like Joyce traced an in-universe photograph, and Lucy says it’s “not good”???
Her standards are very high.
That’s OK
Considering Trump’s actions, this strip-within-the-strip is weirdly… prescient.
So, wait, if this is comic-book time, that means it’s early 2021 in-continuity (for now), and last term was 2020. So is the president ordering this killing Trump, or is it the generic-American-President-no-relation-to-real-life-President of so many action movies?
I mean, obviously it’s just a comic strip that Joyce wrote, but if she’s someone from a fundie-evangelical background fantasizing about her espy killing people on Trump’s orders, that could be troubling.
This is why the President is probably someone else in the Dumbingverse. My assumption is the President is Thad Guy.
Trump has at least been alluded to in DoA.
Willis has confirmed that the Dumbingverse US President is always the current-in-real-life one. Yes, including Trump.
The thing is, that’s really hard to do because Trump is… different.
It’s weird to have characters in a universe where Trump is currently president never mention anything about it. Even if they never say his name, never bringing up anything that wouldn’t make sense with another US president is weird.
Thing is, Willis specifically mentioned Trump by name when they stated that (and in a strip where Joe explicitly deflected in an argument by comparing his own behavior to Trump’s, that is); I don’t know how to link to a specific comment, but you can control+F “David M Willis” in this strip: Dumbing of Age: “Presidential”
Especially-relevant parts of Willis’s post quoted here in case someone doesn’t want to click the strip link:
“When I drew this strip months ago, I put a preview image of the panel with angry Dorothy on Twitter/Tumblr. It was captioned something to the affect of “Dorothy is angrier now that she exists in a post-Trump world”…
[…]
Hell, I’d say this strip only really exists as a begrudging acknowledgment of this webcomic now existing in a Trump Presidency, and how that’s starting to evolve how the characters think and react to things around them. How it specifically makes Dorothy less idealistic and a little more bitter.
[…]
The current President of the United States is always President in Dumbing of Age. I won’t ever name them while they’re currently President, because Sliding Timescale, but that’s how I’ve decided it works. It means I can now mention Obama having once been President, and maybe hopefully before too much longer I can start naming Trump, cross your fingers.”
“I won’t ever name them while they’re currently President, because Sliding Timescale…”
Yes, I know. And that’s exactly why I think that concept fell apart with Trump. Trump is different, and especially when there’s a character with presidential aspirations “timeless” conversations where Trump may or may not be president don’t always make sense.
Seriously, I work in education. My subjects are math and reading, but the reading sometimes involves information about other subjects. Teaching third graders about the president’s job while I know full well that the president doesn’t know this was just weird.
Generic AnyPresident might be Obama or Biden, but it’s hard for that person to also be Trump.
For the record, the above-linked strip was posted some four months into the Trump presidency; judging by the general size of Willis’s buffer, that probably means that it was written at some point after his inauguration, by which point it was already manifestly clear how…unusually terrible it was going to be. As of now, Dumbing of Age‘s “present year” is not set in the Trump presidency anymore, though the “previous” year still is – next year, the comic will never have been set in the Trump era. That’s how the sliding timescale works. Since Trump is thankfully no longer president, that means he and his administration can now be more concretely referred to in-comic, as a Thing Of The Past (whereas before it was only through references like Joe’s) if such an occasion arises; indeed, I believe Willis posted on Twitter a little while ago about how a future strip initially had a line referring to “former Vice President Mike Pence”, but the line was removed because it didn’t flow so well with the rest of the dialogue in that scene.
It’s President Doris (i.e., fanfic Dorothy)
The rule is that they never mention current presidents. So while President Biden can’t be mentioned, Trump can be mentioned as having been president at one time.
The president in the Julia Grey strips is a thinly veiled Dorothy expy, so she’s killing people on Dorothy’s orders. I dunno if that makes it better or worse for you.
Dorothy would have good reasons. I’m okay with it.
Doris wants Julia’s attentions and affections for herself. Slightly less okay with that.
(I mean, probably not really, if Joyce is afraid of recognizing she’s changed by needing glasses no way she’ll accept the possibility she’s biromantic, buuuut…)
Interesting that Walky knows this much about Julia Gray.
You know, I was half-joking, half-want it to be true when I agreed Walky’s a fan of the Julia Gray stories, but since he also realized the whole ‘fighter pilot fantasy’ thing to get a dig in at her earlier I think that might actually have textual backup.
I figured it was a call-back to when Leslie paired them off to be pretend-married.
That’s the origin of it all, but Julia’s a clearer indication of this as recurrent fantasy.
I think after all thats happened in the first semester, it’s interesting that Joyce’s protagonist is someone who is willing to kill people they love because a higher authority told them to…
Well, the notes are from the previous semester so at that point Joyce might have had a few authority figures left. Anyway, a comic strip/book character having to kill a love interest because Reasons is the Trope of Tropes. Joyce was probably aware of that even before attending college and getting exposed to popular media more.
Joyce losing her faith in God means the much darker thing that she wasn’t attracted to Christianity because of tolerance and pacifism but the structure of an absolute totalitarian church.
She was in fact raised in an absolute totalitarian church with zero teachings of tolerance! (And given Ross/frequent leanings of such fundamentalists and their obsession with Revelations, I wouldn’t be so sure about the pacifism either.) She does not have any true context for a church that isn’t totalitarian and hateful, and is realizing upon being able to step away from the hatefulness that she never actually BELIEVED in God so much as she feared eternal damnation if she didn’t follow the church’s teachings. She’s also realizing she really DOESN’T like the concept of original sin, or that Jesus alone is perfect and died for our sins because of it. (As that reminds her of Ross and his ‘I will die for you, Becky,’ and she may realize the one leads into the other.)
So on one level you’re not wrong, but on another level she didn’t really have a choice in believing in anything else and that’s why her faith’s shattering. (The rigid rules likely also appealed to her need for structure and order as someone who’s very clearly not neurotypical, but totalitarian religion is not the only outlet for that – just the only one she was exposed to and ‘allowed’ to like.)
The thing about Ross and her mother is, “They don’t MEAN IT.” I will die for you is utter nonsense if you won’t do anything for them if they don’t obey you like a slave.
I mean, Ross said it straight out with a rifle on a school campus: He would, in fact, die in a police shootout for Becky. Not Becky as she actually exists, of course – Satan has tempted her into thinking she’s gay, and that must be corrected immediately – but for the good of Becky’s immortal soul, which can still be pried from Satan’s dastardly grasp.
Much like Jesus died for all our sins, even those people who don’t believe in him, but can still be converted and saved. It’s for their own good. (And since her brother’s a missionary, she’s almost certainly familiar with that rhetoric, too.) Joyce realized she’s not comfortable with that, and evangelicalism and original sin (its own kettle of fish, but related in the ‘listen to us and we can save you’ department) are baked into even the non-totalitarian cult denominations of Christianity. She could probably find one that didn’t, if she dug deep enough and wanted that connection to the church back – Becky, after all, did. But Joyce realized she doesn’t just ‘not feel God’ at Jacob’s church, she’s not sure she ever heard God when she prayed, ever. Under the fear and anxiety and shame the church baked into her of eternal damnation, there is nothing.
Having had a similar realization sans cult (just a lot of internalizing bad societal ideas because of anxiety,) this is totally a thing that happens. It’s apparently even more common when one’s raised in an environment this controlling. Joyce never really knew a Christianity that wasn’t totalitarian. College is her first taste of adult figures in her life who are willing to let her have genuine thoughts and opinions of her own, not just what she’s ‘supposed to’ think. And the trauma from that means Christianity as a whole isn’t healthy for her, because its teachings were used against her and now triggering.
A lot of churches like that basically teach that obedience to God means absolute obedience to those above us in the hierarchy.
The irony given Jesus’ status as a man murdered by religious fanatics working with the original fascists (Rome).
Tony must be awfully confused about where this sneezing fit of his just came from.
Still waiting for them to realize they could make a good team on this whole comic thing. Two heads are better than one. Three heads are best though. That’s why Cerberus is such a good boy.
Two heads that will argue constantly and then stop working together aren’t so great
Depends. All the classic comedy groups are either pairs, or 4 or more. Maybe I’m just blank, but am not thinking of very many triple comedy teams. Programming also reveals that a pairing in extreme programming can be a great match up, but if you’re going to introduce the overhead of a multi-member team, you may as well go for a more traditional hierarchical layout and have the benefit of a much larger team than just three.
If your two heads are arguing constantly they aren’t a team and probably should be dispensed with.
The three stooges.
The Marx brothers.
Yakko, Wakko, and Dot.
Bugs, Daffy, and Elmer.
Sora, Donald, and Goofy.
Tom, Jerry, and Spike.
Babs & Buster Bunny (no relation).
It’s five dollars a strip, splitting it would barely cover a vending machine purchase.
Would love to see a strip where Joyce watches “Wolf Children” and bursts into tears for several days
Everyone talking about Joyce’s doodle but I’m just over here appreciating Lucy stanning the best Sequel Trilogy Star Wars movie.
I hear ya! I have that same poster on my wall.
Is it really extrajudicial when President Dorothy orders it?
Yes, by definition of extra-Judicial. If it’s not evaluated and issued by a judge following the laws of the land as set out by whatever structure creates the laws it is extra-judicial.
Now maybe Dotty becomes a Justice before Pres, but even then, becoming pres means she must relinquish her authority as a justice.
It’s just one sentence, though. Without any context, Lucy is making some assumptions.
If it’s President Dorothy, it’s probably not extrajudicial because she wouldn’t do that.
When the commander-in-chief orders a member of the armed services to kill an enemy combatant in a combat zone that is extra-judicial but legal and widely considered to be proper and even necessary. If Dorothy plans to become president she had better get comfortable with doing that.
Not really, since that’s usually still a bad thing.
And also isn’t what we were talking about, since as you literally just said it’s legal?
Legal doesn’t equal judicial. It can be bad and still necessary in a combat zone situation too. So, yes, barring any additional information, it’s extrajudicial killing.
so you still haven’t googled the phrase like i asked you to when you said the same thing in the patreon, huh
Draw like it’s 1997
Wally has not possibility to win.
*sees David Willis’ recent twitter feed on the Gurihiru art*
Ah, I see you are a comics reader of culture as well.
Aw, he noticed.
“surprisingly competent” belongs on an employee evaluation
Both!
They’re gonna be asked to make the comic together, aren’t they?
They like Joyce’s art and Walky’s writing, and they’re both sad about it.