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David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 2h
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
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️𝓝𝓪𝓷𝓲 
I love Joyce saying it’s a good idea.
It can be interpreted sarcastically or seriously and it’s funny both ways
Most likely serious. Their similarly rather basic tastes and sense of humor is the common ground where a relationship between them flourished in another universe.
I mean, for a webcomic, the premise is sound.
Also, in DoA canon we now have a panel of Joyce looking at Walky’s crotch saying, “Oh, dang, that’s good.”
that sounds LAWsome and also one of the guys they should kick is the fourth wall
Bingo! This is how Mike returns to DoA.
And gets kicked in the last panel of every strip?
That could be popular.
I’d read it.
see i was expecting a joke about Roomies! but i appreciate Willis giving some love to their true masterpiece
It really does hit the right balance of comedic repetition and surrealness to be far, far funnier than it has any right to be.
Also, since Walky can reuse two-thirds of the art five bucks a strip sounds slightly less insulting.
“…and I can recycle like two-thirds of the art!”
Nothing new there. Garry Trudeau reused his background art so much it was like he was drew one panel, Xeroxed it four times, and just changed the dialog on each panel.
I was *just* reading that he, specifically, was a comic artist who always did each panel fresh rather than ever reusing art, so I’m curious where you read that.
In the StBeals comics author’s reddit comment (u/stbeals) about copied art, in response to a reader who finds copy/paste at to be distracting and lazy: “I will say that Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury), who famously has panel after panel of the same image, is right with you on this. Even though there’s a repetition, he draws each panel separately.”
We’re not going to mention Ryan North here?
The man is an artistic genius, don’t besmirch his reputation by comparing him to some lowly comickers.
I thought I already did yesterday. Or maybe it was the day before. Of course an appropriate tribute may have been to copy and paste the comment (since I cant change the comment art).
to Lurra — can’t remember where I read it because it was so long ago (during the Nixon administration/Watergate era). The fact of the matter is that, whether it is true or not that each individual panel was redrawn, his backgrounds were so very repetitious to the point that it DID look like he was Xeroxing a single frame, and many writers of the time made mention of it. example a example b
However, when that same style of cartooning wins you a Pulitzer Prize, I guess that will effectively silence most of the critics.
If you look closely at those strips, although they use similar framing – and the second uses exactly the same camera shot throughout, the actual lines are different every time. He’s using a technique a lot of comic artists would use to by lazy but he’s not actually taking advantage of it to be lazy.
Look at any of the bushes in the White House scene from panel to panel, for example.
“However, when that same style of cartooning wins you a Pulitzer Prize,”
If you think his style of drawing very similar panels is what won him the Pulitzer prize, I suggest you might one day start reading the actual content of his strips.
Oh goddammit, I predicted this, but I was just joking!
No jokes are safe in the expanded Walkyverse.
Would you kindly joke about the stock market, and or the lottery numbers in Canada? It’s for a, uh, study!
GameStop and AMC will go up again! Ha, ha?
Also Walky can always default to the two guys sitting on a couch talking about video games genre!
Then add a robot built out of a PlayStation.
| | | | |__
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Well that didn’t work. Uh, just pretend it looks like loss.
The real loss is that I was so primed to expect this that even without the formating, it’s somehow still legible.
Loss memes make me laugh like that weird little puppet guy Jabba has in Star Wars, but I gotta be honest, I feel bad sometimes.
Like, the whole strip was inspired by Buckley’s then-girlfriend going through a miscarriage right? putting that to paper seems like what artists *do* when they feel things.
I don’t know much about the surrounding context because I haven’t thought about CAD in at least 10 years, but I’m skeptical that Loss memes ballooned to the point where we just throw them without knowing that we’re laughing at that time some guy we don’t know went through a personal tragedy.
You ever see that “I have the power of God and Anime” kid? I laugh my ass off at the video but then I think whether he’s going to have to put up with that the rest of his life, because someone recorded being a kid on camera.
The strip was inspired by an ex-girlfriend who he had an unplanned pregnancy and miscarriage with in college. He also posted a parody of the strip on its ten year anniversary so if he does have sad memories about the event, he seems to at least be in good humour about the memes.
Ah.
He didn’t turn into a sad, depressed sack of tears for the rest of his life.
(That’s almost a direct quote from the news update under Loss when it went up.)
I don’t think he posted a new update per se, he replaced loss.jpg with a version that had Birdhair pulling some weird, smug face in the last panel. The original version went back up the next day.
That’s the parody he posted, yeah. It was a temporary replacement but it was a thing.
I don’t think these two are ready for the sophisticated storytelling required to produce a loss.jpg caliber strip. Let them cut their teeth with a few strips about how big the original xbox controller was, or a few “just randomly ninjas are in this comic now” strips first.
This is true. Loss.jpg is one of those things you have to build up to over years, laying groundwork and honing your craft.
Also, now I’m trying to rearrange the LAWsome panel structure into loss.jog’s so uh.
I blame you all.
Really liking the matching smug grins in panels 2 and 5. These absolute dorks
Hooray, LAWsome! Please somebody link it for maximum Mike & Jason ridiculousness.
Ah! Found it. It wasn’t Jason after all, but it’s still comedy times.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/blog/lawsome/
Thank you, I had missed this context and my life is now forever enriched by the knowing.
I think that’s still more clever than Garfield Minus Garfield.
I disagree.
Garfield minus Garfield takes what is a quite mediocre comic at its core and turns it into a surreal work of art about depression, loneliness, and mental breakdowns while at the same time making it funnier. It’s a masterpiece.
The voices in my head unanimously agree! G-G is a cathartic breakdown.
That premise is a sketch.
How many strips in until the kicker accidentally kicks itself?
Minimum six.
Oh jeez and it’s really about him processing Mike’s death, like how Lawsome needs to be handled in the gritty reboot.
Your Kicks just keep getting harder to find…
Ah, so “Ouch, My Balls: The Comic.”
This comic strip would be awesome, or, as they say in France, l’awesome.
This is the third consecutive comic with a beat panel consisting of Joyce and Walky looking at each other. Just saying.
Eventually the panel structure will all be the same, and then Mike will return, and things will be kicked. Willis is just easing us into it.
And every time all the little goblin in my brain does is scream “NOW KISS FOR FUCKS SAKE!”
“A beat panel consisting of Joyce and Walky looking at each other” has a high chance of being the most-frequent panel across Willis’s collective works.
Yaaaaay, LAWsome returns!
Joyce knows quality wen she sees it.
Important lore question: Does Wen exist in DoA?
I’ll believe it Wen I see it.
She hasn’t shown up yet, but thanks for reminding me that I’m curious how Faz is doing post-time skip.
I really hope not. One Faz-like character is more than enough.
all I know for certain is that if Wen exists in this universe, she is Quality Wen
“Oh, Like You’re Some Genius Cartoon-Drawing Person!” would be a good book title.
DOA 11: ‘An I Can Recycle Like Two-Thirds of the Art.
DoA Book 11: Oh, Dang, That’s Good
With a cover made entirely (other than the title) by using the freehand select tool in MS Paint to copy pieces of previous covers.
Ultimate LAWsome by Mark Millar
This is the guy who came up with living in a trampoline park, Joyce. He’s certainly got creative ingenuity down at least.
Honestly, Walky should just go into a creative writing degree.
Hey! I own that shirt, Walky!
So, when does it hit her that she and Walkie are alone, in her room, so close together, looking into each other’s eyes…
When the mailbox kicks her.
And he’s so deliciously caramel, in the words of Dorothy
Well, this a deep cut.
And Raen knows the deep.
I feel like i should get this, but i don’t, and it’s making me sad
Just check Leorale’s link above.
Holy shit a LAWsome callback out of left fukken field.
Wait, so does the mailvox get kicked… or does it sometimes kick the guy?
Huh. Has Walky’s palette changed? He seems more… obviously dark-complexioned than usual. Maybe it’s just me…
He also seems to have stolen Booster’s lipstick, but that’s a different matter altogether.
I love that these two are on the same page as often as they are. Like, they’re the same brand of goofball, just different flavors.
And this is why I ship them tbh. COME ON BOARD!
Aren’t they already a couple in It’s Walky? Not saying it won’t happen but what’s the point of a reboot if you just do things you’ve already done?
I think the purpose is to ask the question “What would change and what would be the same in different circumstances?”
If, after letting the characters develop for a while, the natural conclusion seems to be that they still go together, that’s what should happen, and it’s a story about how two people can match together even with very different lives.
Is it just me. . . or did Walky go full “The Faz” face in the last panel there?
Not 100%, but I really wish you hadn’t made me see it.
I hope yer takin’ notes, Willis.
the glorious return of LAWsome
I’ve been waiting for them to get to the, “we should bone” moment, but knowing Willis it will either take 3 months to happen or suffer from Booster interruptis or something like that
Is that real time 3mos, or comic time 3mos (a real decade)?
Whichever one will create more cries of “Damn you Willis!”
im sure this feud is going to escalate and eventually end with mary or malaya wining the coveted 5 dollar job
See I was just thinking the winner is gonna end up being Mary drawing Sonic crying before the Cross.
And on Sundays, he’s joined by Tails and Knuckles.
“the coveted 5 dollar job”
Phrasing!
… Is Joyce going to make a comic about Walky, but with the name changed?
Is she going to make a comic called “THAT’S AMBLER!”
Basically recycling everything, including character designs, process art and even the basic plot, worked for Hanna Barbera animation for something like 20 years. Walky figures that he can make it work for him too!
Yup. How many times did they try to recapture Scooby-Doo‘s lightning in a bottle with a group of misfit teenagers and character-that-talks-but-actually-shouldn’t? There was Jabberjaw and Speed Buggy anyway. I think they eventually gave up and just kept rebooting Scooby with the movies and celebrity episodes.
Their real winning move was throwing a tie, shirt collar, hat, and vocal impression of a golden-age radio star onto animals walking upright.
To be fair, they also did Jetsons and The Flintstones was _Huge_ in its time. They didn’t have the same longevity, but both were hits.
I think out of all the Hanna-Barbera properties, The Flintstones has had the most staying power in the pop culture background noise. It’s probably the multivitamins.
At least it wasn’t The Banana Splits Adventure Hour instead. That’s some weird stuff.
(Some of their one-season wonders sound like they should’ve been bigger than they turned out. What didn’t they animate back in the 60s and 70s?!)
(Besides Scooby-Doo, of course. They keep that franchise front and center with a new reboot every couple years. I meant of all the classic shirt-collar and necktie cartoons.)
For a while there, HB was pretty much the only studio producing TV cartoons in the west on a large scale. Being a monopoly led to stagnation and they were basically blown off the screens when dubbed animé started turning up.
The return of the glory that is LAWsome.
I’m curious who the second and third guys will be.
LAWSOME!!!
That could be the new “Life in hell”!!!
“Oh dang, that’s good” is the kind of misaimed praise on a par with “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC3W1BiUjp0”>How’s he keep up with the news like that?
Ugh.
This is the link.
okay y’know now i am beginning to see why there’s an entire strip that hinges on this pairing
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: They make way better antagonistic pseudo-siblings than they ever did a couple.
Can’t read it all…if it hasn’t been said “Walky, stop stealing from Family Circle!” I swear 2/3 is recycled scenes, once you get past the first decade.
Looks a bit like Joyce is wearing warpaint
Glancing at the comments for the first time in a while…
Do people honestly not remember the epic sequel LAWsome, or is it just that the majority of DoA readers are teens and tweens at this point?
The great thing about the Joyce and Walky dynamic in this universe is how much they want to deny that they’re on the same wavelength.
Willis makes a joke about recycling artwork, but draws each frame individually rather than going for the easy visual gag.