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David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 17h
David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 17h
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...
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I guess his strength peaked early, too
In the meantime we see Sal’s ability to scale heights.
Of course she can scale heights, she IS Amazi-Girl after all.
“Pleeeeaaaase let this be a normal fieldtrip!”
“With Walky?!?! NO WAY!!!!!”
Robin would make an…interesting Miss Frizzle.
…I kinda want that to be an actual thing, now.
Oooooo! Now I REALLY want it to happen! Think of the awesome misadventures!!!
F’rizzle.
^ This is the content I come to the internet for!
I knew I should’ve stayed home today.
Thus Billie Ball was born.
And then he threw her underneath the school bus and Nina’s daughter took the opportunity to take her place. The “Billie/Jennifer” we’ve seen this whole time is actually a different girl altogether. It’s all connected, people.
Nah, Jennifer was thrown under the bus and has only returned to take Billie’s place in the last semester.
I feel like a school bus should probably have steps accessible to small children. Or is this public transportation?
i mean, do you want photos of my children crawling up the bus steps like a jungle gym on the first day of kindergarten, or
I don’t know about the rest of you here, but I certainty wouldn’t turn them down!
While I concur that it would be adorable, I don’t think that was a serious offer
FOOLS
note the steps are taller than their legs are at the knee
That backpack is bigger than mine, holy moly.
Was gonna say that’s kind of crazy to see. Are they making backpacks bigger these days or are children just small? I mean children are small, so maybe it’s both.
If you have a big backpack as a kid, then you can grow into it rather than having to set it aside after a year or three *taps forehead*
A bigger back pack also allows him to hide in it for a game of Hide and Seek, who would ever think to look in a back pack for a kid?
I know I started getting back pain from having to cart textbooks back and forth (in part because I went to daycare and we couldn’t keep our books there IIRC, also probably in part because of a connective tissue disorder but kids are bendy anyway) sometime around, like, third or fourth grade. Which is still several years away for them, but having a big backpack can be useful in that respect.
Kids that age need folders. Folders do not come in kindergarten size. All folders are the same size, and they all need to fit in the backpack.
Huge heavy backpacks bigger than most kids have been a thing at least since the 90s (can’t speak of before) XD In Mexico somewhere after the 2000s complains where made that what kids where carrying where too much and actually taken seriously.
I think the backpack is bigger than the KID. Like, Willis could put one kid in a backpack and have the other kid carry him.
How else is he supposed to smuggle the cat, the dog, or his brother into his class?
makes sense to grow into it lol, i feel like i got a new backpack every other year or so while doing back to school shopping tho i suppose it’d be more practical for one to just use the same backpack for multiple years til it wears down but given how fickles kids can be i can imagine they’d want a new backpack everytime around their interests (in yotsuba she also went backpack shopping and randoseru are also supposed to last long, tho i assume the black book bags as a high schooler could also last a while too/looks a bit more pro)
i’m old enough to appreciate a longer lasting bag now but i’d def be tempted to want a new backpack for each grade growing up tho i wasn’t particularly spoiled haha (tho still don’t really understand some women buying multiple over priced bags other than just to have some luxury name brand bag)
AWE
Thank you Willis!!!
BTW your kid has great taste in backpacks!
I want a shark backpack that can double as my shelter too…
Well, that’s egg on my face.
Also, Awwwww.
Your first mistake was assuming that the USA would do something sensible
Now you see to us we find this hilarious and adorable but in their minds they properly like they just Scaled Mount Everest with a backpack full of rocks.
Kind of like an episode of Rugrats where an average everyday encounter becomes a grand adventure!
So sweet!
Maybe I’ll make a game about it one day!
>watch your step
Good lord, the size of that back pack!
A clear case of child cruelty.
But it IS an impressive feat. And performed with backpack and mask as well. Well done, Willis spawn!
ADORABLE!
also…
holy shit, the busses are a hazard zone.
Those steps are half as tall as your children!! Sal, Walky and Billie have indeed been drawn approximately the same height as your smoll ones at a comparable age/stage
Is the yellow card so the bus driver knows where to deposit them?
I see your kids ride the yellow bus. We’ve also use this color coded cards.
Either I didn’t take the bus to school much when I was that young, or I’ve forgotten how big those steps are for a little kid.
When your backpack is literally big enough to hide inside of.
Honestly, the same bus that has 5 year olds on it also has 10 year olds on it, as someone who rode the bus from kindergarden to senior year of high school, can confirm, the steps are pretty big.
School buses should have a lot of things. School buses continue not to have those things regardless, in bold defiance of the Mothercrystal’s will.
Sort of a side effect of the bus thing, but yeah the step can be rough for younger kids
Oh hey, look, Charles is recording his children instead of Social Climbing, it’s almost like he’s a human being or something!
/sarcasm
It’s a smokescreen. He’s actually texting Linda a picture of them with the caption “
guess who just befriended the rich family’s daughter 
”
Linda’s already gotten the Billingsworth’s contact information. A play date will be set before the end of the school day. All according to plan!
Linda isn’t there. With nobody around to passively enable, he defaults to following what all the other parents are doing.
/s
–Holding hands meant so much baby–John Cougar Mellenkamp
Thank you for that.
Oh my god they’re so adorable
also, just caught the number on that bus.
What’s so special about it, other than it being a power of two?
It’s how many years ago Willis started doing comics.
I didn’t know Willis attended IU in 1894! That’s impressive!
It’s the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different—oh wait, wrong vehicle, sorry
Close though. It’s the smallest seventh power of a number to be three more than the third power of a number.
The main cast of It’s Walky! were members of squad 128.
Well, most of the main cast. Joe was never part of Squad 128 from memory, except in one of the alternate universes. (Billie was also never part of any of the SEMME squads, as she didn’t have superpowers.)
Joe was part of Squad 128 then he switched squads.
Well, point still stands then about Walkyverse!Billie.
Also, Danny.
Danny, Billie, Leslie, Amber, Ethan, Sarah, Dorothy, Becky, Dina…
A lot of the main cast have not been on 128.
The original comment referred to the main cast of It’s Walky!, though. Ethan and Leslie are Shortpacked!-era characters, Dorothy and Becky are Joyce and Walky!-era characters, and while Sarah—like Billie and Danny—originates in Roomies!, unlike them she was absent for pretty much the entirety of the following plot of It’s Walky, only returning for essentially an extended cameo at the beginning of the finale and one each much shorter cameo in the next two comics.
Nah, Joe was on 128 from the time he joined SEMME until the organization was disbanded. Mike was the one who switched.
Oh hey, it’s Good Friday!
plays “This Jesus Must Die” on the hacked Muzak, because I’m gonna have it stuck in my head all day so I might as well inflict it on y’all
Right there with ya.
JCSuperstar – rock on.
But it must be from the B’way soundtrack, not that abomination of a film.
BEST FRIENDS FOREVER.
*the screen inverts and dramatically zooms in. a guy who got paid $5 says “UNTIL THEY WEREN’T”*
*plays “Together Forever” by J. P. Hartmann on Hacked Muzak*
I am surprised and very pleased that the song that popped into my head at reading your comment was actually the song you linked to.
She was a lonely rich kid and Walky didn’t care about her wealth.
Heck, even their dad was telling them to behave around her.
That’s one of the most precious, important things about kids — minds not yet tainted by dogma, by the Grand Illusion that manifests the social classes as we know it. 🥲
Eh, go to private school and you’ll quickly find out that’s not true. My friend was getting bullied for being “poor” at like, 6
Note that he didn’t tell Sal to behave. I think it was just because he knows what his son is like.
Linda would’ve specifically told Sal to behave.
He didn’t say “behave”, he said “be nice to her”. And he said it to Walky because she was going to be in his class.
…maybe I’m weird, but to me, those mean the same thing.
Those “I love you”‘s between Sal and her father are surprisingly painful with the foreknowledge of how badly the relationship ends up deteriorating
It’s funny how you think he’s saying “I love you too” to Sal when he’s clearly saying it to his phone. You think he’s taking a loving video of his kid’s first bus ride, but he’s actually checking the value of his bitcoin. Yeah that’s right, Charles is a cryptobro! Sliding timescale means cryptocurrency probably existed then right?
If not, just give it a few years and it will already have already existed.
Just really clicked for me that when this comic started the characters were old enough to have gotten their first smart phone as a Sweet 16 present and now their parents had them when they were in kindergarten lol
Yeah, I did a doubletake.
Schoolbus too big for schoolchildren? “Ils sont fous, ces Américains !”
Yeah they’re built to handle all ages and you tend to design for the largest potential occupants
To be fair they do have school bus designs that’re intended to specifically accommodate younger kids, but not many districts bother as it’s easier to keep in a tight budget if you can just treat every bus as interchangeable.
You’re aware that buses don’t need to have steps at all, aren’t you?
They do when you build them on the same loading dock height ladder chassis as a cargo truck or dump truck!
Not if you built bus tops with a platform at bus floor height, a ramp at one end and stairs at the other. As they do in some cities in Brazil.
“bus stops”, that is.
Not practical in parts of the US, where it seems like the school bus stops at every other telephone pole!
Yeah, in rural and suburban areas school buses stop at houses with kids or at gathering points for a bunch of houses with kids, not at specially build bus stops.
Still possible to have a wheelchair ramp which smaller kids could use.
Ofc that would mean a bit more time per busstop.
The lesson here is that yes you can but no you won’t if you don’t really take it into account.
There’s no room for a ramp on a school bus. Look at the side of an American school bus, and you’ll see three strips that run the whole length, front to back. The bottom strip is the height of the floor, and the middle one is the height of the seats. There’s literally no room to make them accessible by a ramp; the stairs are that steep so you get up to the floor height before you hit the frame rail.
School buses here have to be specially equipped with hydraulic wheelchair lifts and tie-downs in order to accommodate wheelchair users, and the driver or an aide has to be trained on how to safely operate and secure them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX6vnB_OGY
School buses are built like box trucks, not low-floor passenger buses. The floor is over a meter off the ground.
That’s precisely the type of equipment I meant, I apologize for using the wrong terms (ramp seems to have been inadequate).
.
I’m beginning to see how Walky and Billie hit it off in their own little way.
Also funny is that this is probably years before the acting sting, but I am thinking of Joyce’s crush on the mouse in Hymnal that turned out to be Walky, how Walky’s been a presence in the romantic development of a surprisingly large portion of the cast.
Okay, that first panel with Charles and Sal is VERY cute. I love it <3
It’s also kinda heartbreaking because we know what their future holds.
Kind of makes you wonder what he’s actually like when he’s left to his own devices, rather than passively enabling Linda while she strong-arms the narrative. We’ve seen subtle hints that internally he’s at least more sympathetic to Sal than she is (not that it makes up for his actions, not by a long shot).
I think we just saw it. This is what Charles is like when Linda’s not around. Just a guy. Not really good or bad, but since he’s married to and associated with Linda and her actions it kind of makes everything he does a little less tolerable because you know he enables someone with undesirable motivations.
Man, Walky and Sal being young enough that leaving for their first day of school was filmed on a phone is the first thing that really made the sliding timeline hit weird for me (in a “Oh god, how am I this much older than them now?” type of way)
Those little moments when Walky manages to Walky just right
Which is always, because there is never a time when Walky doesn’t Walky.
Man, he got a smartphone before I did.
I was just admiring his smartphone, circa 2004? Even accounting for the “Always Now” timeline, 18 years ago is still well before the advent of the iPhone
I think we call that future proofing
They’re kindergarten-age here per word of Willis, and 18 in the “present”; hence this is (currently) set in circa 2009. The original iPhone was released in 2007, two years before.
Most kids start going to kindergarten in the US at around age 5 or 6, so that’s more like 12 or 13 years ago. So this would be 2009 or 2010 phones I guess.
There were phones taking pictures before the Iphone. I don’t remember one with this design, but I think this has more to do with this phone being generic so anyone can understand it’s a phone, rather than a specific design a of then existing phone. Note than on many sign now, the old phone symbole (the one with a thing to talk, and one other to speak) has been replace with a generic smartphone-like phone, so younger people are able to understand what it is (not saying they wouldn’t get it, I’m not the one replacing symbols because I’d think people aren’t able to bind a concept and a symbolic image – an ideogramm)
True. When i was little my mom had this phone that looked like an actual camera from the back, with like a rounded keyboard thing at the front. She gave it to me when I was 8 or something and it’s still the coolest phone I’ve ever owned and I’m still trying to track it down
Sal looks so happy here. She’s being sincere with that ‘love you’ bit.
=(
Yeah. Eventually though, “all that is solid melts into air…”
My reply ended up at the bottom and not here.
(The tragic thing is not that Sal means it, but that Charles does too.)
Yeah, it stings, thinking about it all.
I do think Sal definitely loves her parents, on account of it’d be so much easier for her sometimes if she didn’t, but it’s rough.
Simpler times.
These kids are too cute!
The tragic thing is not that Sal means it, but that Charles does too.
Scholarly-inclined readers will note that this time, Walky extended his right hand, while the booger was reportedly on the left. Turns out he was doing a bit the whole time!
Have we ever actually met Billy’s parents?
We saw her mom.
… Once.
… In the old Walkyverse continuity.
… In silhouette.
… In a flashback.
… Boinking Ruth’s father.
https://www.itswalky.com/comic/one-day-part-2-page-9/
And we saw her father walk her down the aisle. His head is out of frame, though. (Later crowd shots have both of them obscured by other people in the foreground.)
https://www.itswalky.com/comic/so-smug/
Willis remarked there that they might eventually appear in the Dumbiverse (which they still haven’t, to date), but that it eventually became something of a running gag to never get a clear view of her parents in the Walkyverse.
Which works out just as well, I suppose, since Willis has also stated that while Dumbiverse-Jennifer is mixed-race (her mother’s stated in-comic to be Chinese), Walkyverse-Billie was not (but her being often mistaken for such by the readership is what inspired Dumbiverse-Jennifer to be so, if I recall).
Huh, did not know that. Billie being biracial is one of those things that works so well for her in DoA that it’s hard to picture a situation where it wouldn’t be the case, though obviously, Walkyverse Billie isn’t quite the same character to begin with, naturally.
It works since they’re mostly defined in Jennifer’s life by their absence. Maybe we’ll get to meet Nina.
Pretty sure Nina’s a family servant, not Mrs. Billingsworth. Remember this strip? https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/nina/
That’s what I meant.
We’re more likely to meet Nina, since she’s been more of a presence in Jennifer’s life.
Protect this boy.
that “I love you daddy” is a true tragic irony.
We from the future are sad at this comic.
is the booger still in his other hand ?
C’mon, do you even need to ask?
I love how Sal just go up while Walky think about it. Their differences wires already here.
Though Walky’s also slowed to look after Jennifer.
Aw okay, I’ll admit it.. that was cute.
DYW started drawing using his classmates as models. Now he is using his children. Muzak plays Older by TMBG.
https://youtu.be/TdIRrmNN_CQ Headed out the door but had time to find it. BTW, my photos would be of grandchildren
I’ve got to say, I really like Walky in these flashback strips. You can see his entire character in miniature.
The little boy grossness that he’s retained of course, but also turning back to help Jennifer when she’s hesitating.
That was so cute! He’s a good egg.
And it was then everyone had a moment. A moment where they wondered, “Do I want a ‘Walky Babies’ thing? It’s Muppet Babies but with the kidDoA! versions of the characters?”
Thankfully, it was only a moment, and everyone recovered.
Thank goodness, everyone is safe. You scared me with the “Walkybabies” thing. I panicked. And after more coffee everything is fine.
Oooof, that second panel Billie going “the hell is this thing, a parent saying ‘I love you’ to their kids?”
“Where’s the $20 bill?”
You know what is honestly making me sad about this flashback isn’t anything to do with Jennifer (Billie, in flashback land) and Walky, but how sweet & caring little Sal is…. le sigh.
Little Sal is so adorable…