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Desperate for companionship, Frankenstein's Monster pretends to be the Opera Ghost. A grave mistake.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
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Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
2 Slices
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Mac Hall
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The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
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.
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!
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Windy, Winter Jay Kiakas
Winona runs a werewolf shelter with partner in crime, Odile in the Gothic city of Merlot. One day they take in an injured vampire, and soon unravels many of the dark secrets of Merlot.
The Otherknown
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Beeserker
TJ Cordes
This comic is about a robot powered by bees, but it's also about the kind of people who think filling a robot with bees is a good idea, and why they're wrong.
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BUFFER WATCH
Comics are currently drawn and uploaded through:
Just to the left of this comment, below the Hiveworks logo, there is a “Buffer Watch” box (which has been there for years) which tells you how in advance comics are loaded. As of this moment, it says “July 3, 2023”. So, the most probably answer to your question is “Yes” and “Yes”.
The buffer watch then was in fact today, January 15, 2023, six months later.
The buffer watch on July 15 was January 1. I suspect that Willis did not do 14 complete strips, from raw sketch to fully colored and shaded, in one day and night, but had that many in progress that were finalized and uploaded.
not sure how far dina thinks ahead compared to becky but i don’t think she especially had a reason to not be/might be ok with just staying ‘girlfriends’ but is ok with it/knows that it’s important to becky
now to spend the next 10-15 years properly saving up for a wedding/home if not a small ceremony (or robin makes it big again and just gives them both a million dollars or so lol)
Nah, for the full Chickweed experience you need to make it look like your reference for human dental anatomy was an unflattering shot of Shane McGowan’s teeth
Mammal paleontologists often classify remains by their teeth (partly because they happen to be especially diagnostic in mammals, partly because they are some of the hardest parts there are and therefore tend to preserve best as fossils).
I highly doubt they would conclude that the 9CL characters are primates, let alone members of the genus Homo.
I think it actually is slightly more disturbing than solid white because that’s so normalized in comics. I mean, look at their teeth in the panel before. Look at Becky’s teeth in yesterday’s strip. They didn’t even warrant comment.
given that it’s a daily webcomic even including weekends, i’m surprised more don’t have a months ahead buffer. versus those webtoons where a full chapter is like 20-40 pages long and updating once a week to a month instead ll
Joyce in panel 1 definitely kinda feels like she’s talking to the readers rather than Becky. Has she started to develop Deadpool fourth-wall breaking abilities?
I kinda sorta know that feeling. Right on my third date with my now-hubby, I promised him a lifetime of unlimited squeezes. That was kind of my way of telling him I wanted to marry him. We didn’t make it legal until 10 years after that, but sometimes marriage accretes to one’s hull like barnacles. Or grows like coral. One crusty bit and piece and doodad at a time.
My grandparents only dated for two weeks before getting married. As a kid, I thought that was super romantic. Now when I think about about it, I’m kinda like, “Hey, what?” But it worked out for them and they had a long and happy marriage.
Coral-adjacent trivia:
There’s a greek myth that Perseus, on his way back home after killing Medusa (best character, fuck Perseus), stopped on some island with medusa’s chopped head in a bag. He dropped the bag on the beach, and it yawned open just enough that medusa’s petrifying stare caught some algae in the water. And that’s where coral comes from!! (*shakes head in biology nerd*)
Barnacle trivia:
Barnacles are crustaceans!
They are super old, with confirmed ancestry going back to the Carboniferous, and debated fossils from the motherfucking Cambrian (that’s pretty much as old as it gets), but have really only radiated to their present (huge) diversity in the last 20 million years. Which feels like a good thing to remember about so-called “living fossils”: you never know when your time to shine is gonna come. It may take 500 million years. You only got to hang on. (Barnacle joke.)
One family of barnacles, Rhizocephala, parasitizes crabs and other crustaceans. The free-swimming larva will attach to a crab and then extend tendrils into its body, wrap around its organs, feed from its hepatopancreas, and manipulate its hormones to chemically sterilize the host and develop its own sexual organs inside it, even altering the behaviour of the host to dacilirare their reproduction. It’s incredible.
Also, the talk page for the wikipedia article for one such barnacle, Sacculina, contains the best pun I’ve read this year =D
Hey, say what you want about Medusa, but Perseus is one of the few legitimately-decent-all-around classical Greek heroes, I will not stand for this slander! Now if you’d said “fuck Theseus” on the other hand… /tangent
Back to barnacles, as a kid I always had a liking for goose barnacles from the moment I first found out about them. Something about how silly they looked/what a silly name they had, and of course the mythology behind them—they were supposedly the juvenile form of the barnacle goose and (literally grew on trees. XD
what the hell, i didn’t know about that goose barnacle myth. that’s hilarious =D
anyway, heya King D! good to see you, whereabouts hast thou been?
(Perseus is fine, i just have a soft spot for Medusa. She was unfairly turned into a monster, but also, that made her way cooler. Snakes for hair??? Yes please.)
I like Medusa as well; I can still be okay with Perseus, though, because by that point, so many other figures had already screwed her over, and also someone was trying to screw over Perseus. Also, how much did he know about her history going in?
I’ve had a several friends tell me they knew really early on in the relationship/knowing their partner that they were with the person they were going to marry one day. I used to be skeptical but with my current partner I totally get it (it isn’t happening any time soon, but it definitely feels right)
While such stories always seem romantic, I wonder how much of a survivor bias there is in them.
We don’t tend to hear tales of couples who knew it was going to last forever a few weeks in, but then broke up a month or even a year later. No one wants to talk about that.
This is true. We do hear a decent amount of stories of couples who got married fairly quickly and then got divorced, but even then they tend to be together longer beforehand than when some people first get their “together forever” feelings.
There are also people who get married thinking it won’t last. We (the general population) don’t hear much about them either, but I do because my mom’s a divorce lawyer, and she’s told me about several clients over the years who say things like, “Even before the wedding, I knew it wasn’t going to work out.” Which might also be a bias (I imagine there’s a term for this, but I can’t think of it) and is really interesting to think about.
In these cases, I do feel an initial judgment of, “Well, why did you get married then?” But everyone is in their own unique and complex situation, and the jump to this judgment is probably part of why people don’t share these stories about themselves more.
That’s such a sweet love story
My guy and i have been talking about getting married since we first got together. Right now mostly about how we’re walking down the aisle to an acoustic version of Guts’s theme and how much Bleach music we’re gonna wedge in our reception (first dance is Nube Negra, yes we’ll be learning tango, and we’re totally gonna wedge Number One in there somewhere).
They’re going to show up in the hallway or something and Joyce is going to go, “Guess what! Becky and Dina are basically engaged!” And Lucy will say, “Oh my gosh, that’s so great! Walky and I aren’t there yet, but we are in love.” And then the Earth will grant Walky mercy and swallow him whole.
It’ll do its best, anyway. The ground will open up beneath him, but unfortunately they’re on like the second or third floor, so he won’t even notice, and it will close up sadly while he has to figure out whether or not to deal with his girlfriend.
hopefully she’s calmed down since. tho would be quite a moment for walky if they did kinda hook up in the heat of the moment and it ended up being a middling experience
i think it might be a combination of lack of dimples/smile lines + the gums visibly showing? definitely makes me think Joyce is gonna eat Becky’s face off.
I feel like elaborating a little. Crazy teeth aside, what’s adorable about this to me is how happy Joyce is for Becky and the idea of such a marriage taking place. Yes, she’s always been a huge romantic, and Becky is one of her dearest friends, even family now, but for a time, Dina was sort of a rival of hers, someone she failed to really understand or get along that well with.
Thankfully, that has changed, with her developing an honest-to-goodness friendship with Dina finally, and she probably is much more receptive to this than she once would have been.
Now most of the time, I’d say ‘famous last words’ for a first relationship talking about getting married but in this case I think it’s really possible they could.
sure, they are young and in love but given the irl struggle to even legalize gay marriage i imagine lgbt marriages would last longer than straight marriages
tho i’m down for a rom com of divorced wlw/mlm groups all being snippy at each other but supportive of their next romances and such
“I let him keep the dog in the divorce, so you’re welcome” or so lol.
It is not the case that, on average, same-gender marriages last longer than marriages between a man and a woman. (Thinking about how to phrase these things with regards to the fact that there are more than two genders and that queer people can and do enter into relationships that may be labeled as “straight” or “heterosexual”? Idk, it’s late, I’ll think more on this later.)
From most of what I’ve seen, the averages tend to be the same or shorter. Can see a few factors potentially contributing to this. Without looking into numbers right now, I feel pretty safe assuming that LGBTQ+ people may skew less religious than the overall population, and when they are religious, I’d think they’d be less likely to be among the “God doesn’t recognize divorce” type of religions. Our perceptions of divorce are going to affect how we approach divorce in our own lives. I also think it’s good to remember that a long marriage =/= a happy marriage. They can both be true, absolutely, but “we’ve been married 20 years” or whatever does not automatically translate to “great relationship.”
I also don’t know how the percentages of couples with kids compare, but if that’s significantly different, well, “stay together for the kids” is definitely another perception that can impact choices around divorce.
Now, in this specific case, I could see Becky and Dina lasting, and I hope they do. Just that that is often not the case for people. (And also, that not being the case is okay! I’m pro-divorce.)
I’m pro-divorce in general, and pro-divorce in specific cases! =P
i don’t get why Becky & Dina feel especially likely to last long, except, thus far, manifest authorial preference? They’re very good to each other, but they’re also 18-20 and on their first relationship.
I’m not sure I get what you mean by your first sentence.
I’m also not sure if you’re suggesting that I thinking Becky and Dina are especially likely to last long, but that’s not what I said. Obviously it’s statistically unlikely, but it does happen, and this is a work of fiction. There relationship isn’t, at least, one that I look at and go, “Oooh, that’s not going to last.” (Which is how I’m feeling with Walky and Lucy, and how I felt with some past relationships like Danny and Amber.)
Willis did say on his Tumblr something along the lines of “when will people realize these two are going to be fine?” So even if they do break up eventually it’s probably not going to happen in the comic
I also note that in the strip that someone helpfully linked, it was pretty transparently an impulse/attempt by Becky to semi-retroactively make what she just did Not a Sin (by the rules she grew up with). Dina correctly recognized that the proposal was not coming from a rational, well-considered position.
Yeah, even if it hadn’t been in that context and they had been, like, discussing a possible future together and were in agreement on things, I wouldn’t really put that as “kinda-sorta engaged,” and I don’t think most would either. But I have had friends who were excited to share about their partner also seeing a long term future with them. I wonder how much Becky and Joyce’s upbringing might impact how that’s expressed. (Like, the people I’ve known in the past who’ve gotten “pre-engaged” tended to be more religious. My reaction then was basically, “I don’t know what that means, but you seem happy, so good for you?”)
I think “friendship rings” are different in that they’re for, you know, friendships, but it’s possible there’s regional/temporal variations in how this used. My understanding is that both “friendship rings” and “pre-engagement rings” would fall under the category of “promise rings.” However, since “promise rings” have also come to be so widely associated with the idea that they’re about “saving oneself for marriage” (ugh*), I hear the term “pre-engagement ring” used more for this concept.
*The “ugh” is in reference to the idea that not having sex is “saving oneself.” I think it’s fine to wait to marriage if that’s what feels best to you, but that whole phrasing and promise ring tradition is obviously heavy on purity culture.
“might be kinda-sorta” is probably a better descriptor than “verbally confirmed definitely”, for “acceptable trajectory”. It’s a word choice that sounds like moving too fast. But I expect their storyline goes differently than Lucy and Walky’s will.
NGL, funny punchline aside, i think it’s sweet how happy Joyce is for Becky. As engaged as i was during the Joyce/Becky conflict from the last few storylines, the two of them being able to show that they’re always gonna love and care for each other really proves how important their friendship is to each other.
You know in one of those old video games where you max out the score and then it circles back to zero? That’s what happened here, Joyce and Becky were learning a lot and then, “Nope, experiences don’t change us, OMG yer engaged!!” Bless their little hearts.
Except experiences do actually change you. They literally rewire your brain. You still learn more about yourself, but you aren’t the same person, exactly.
To fall in love, have a wonderful relationship, and marry your first, skipping years of misdirection and mistakes… Dina and Becky must have done something really good in past lives…
lets not forget that Becky is still relatively inexperienced when it comes to hormones so this may be a tad premature. She just touched her first boobie.
I’ve actually never read the Slipshine, and I guess was really just projecting what I would do were I having sex with someone who had boobs and was okay with them being touched.
Just checked it out, and interestingly enough, no, Becky didn’t touch her breasts. At least not visibly. Willis should definitely have added more boob play, just saying.
This is something that is completely irrelevant to today’s strip, but I just thought of it and was surprised I hadn’t thought of it before, since this is about a historical figure I think about fairly often:
One of Joyce’s brothers is named John Brown.
…Motherfucker doesn’t deserve it.
(Also, if this is unclear, search up “John Brown Abolitionist.”)
Probably quite a few people by that name, deliberately or not. It’s not like either “John” or “Brown” is terribly rare. Also, not really sure that’s somebody I’d really want to be named after. No matter how noble his goals, he was a terrorist whose methods were often brutal and morally indefensible.
Here it’s short for Jonathan, which is often shortened to Jon, but not always. I wonder if we’re going to get back around to him and his possibly fictitious wife and mission trips, he leaves in January, the month the comic is currently in (Dumbing Day is this Thursday, I think)
Did you know historical John Brown has a US quarter? One of the 2016 designs is “John Brown’s Fort”. His methods were entirely justified and moral. He killed terrorists who were trying to spread systemic atrocities.
In Hebrew Yehonatan (which means “God has given” and gave rise to “Jonathan” in English) is a different name from Yehochanan (which means “God is gracious” and gave rise to “John” in English).
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it’s her quirk!
Wait. So, did Willis hit the buffer 6 months ago, and we’re seeing it now, or is it being posted _today_ when they now has a six month buffer?
Just to the left of this comment, below the Hiveworks logo, there is a “Buffer Watch” box (which has been there for years) which tells you how in advance comics are loaded. As of this moment, it says “July 3, 2023”. So, the most probably answer to your question is “Yes” and “Yes”.
July 3 is less than 6 months away
It’s 168 days away as of January 15th, divided by 30 that’s 5.6 months away. Personally, I’d count that as rounding up to 6.
169* mb I think I miscounted one of the 31 day months, point still stands, it’s a heck of an impressive buffed period.
A six-month buffer is super impressive. Can you imagine being able to take a six-month vacation, and nobody you work for even notices?
Oh, we’d notice..
ANARCHY IN THE COMMENTS SECTION yeah okay no one would notice.
And, as can be seen in the web archive of the page from July 16, 2022
https://web.archive.org/web/20220716073157/http://dumbingofage.com/
The buffer watch then was in fact today, January 15, 2023, six months later.
The buffer watch on July 15 was January 1. I suspect that Willis did not do 14 complete strips, from raw sketch to fully colored and shaded, in one day and night, but had that many in progress that were finalized and uploaded.
But what do I know? Maybe he is that fast.
it’s his quirk!
God, I love the HeroAca references.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/03-trial-and-sarah/fivesecond-2/
I guess that’s a confirmation of engagement?
Man, unrelated but Naked with hats is QUITE the look.
Got to be modest and cover up the most erogenous zone of the body.
not sure how far dina thinks ahead compared to becky but i don’t think she especially had a reason to not be/might be ok with just staying ‘girlfriends’ but is ok with it/knows that it’s important to becky
now to spend the next 10-15 years properly saving up for a wedding/home if not a small ceremony (or robin makes it big again and just gives them both a million dollars or so lol)
Not really confirmation of that so much as just referring back to that specific moment.
I thought that was just my tinnitus.
Tinitus is caused by little Joyces in your ears having a squee.
awwww
These may be my favorite faces in the comic of all time.
Panel 5 is a bit “I AM JOYCE, EATER OF WORLDS”
I’d held on to my first gravatar for 7 years. This finally dethroned it.
Not sure if I should go with “Praise the sun!” or “You heard about video games?”
Y-pose to establish dominance.
Nothing like a good celebratory Y-pose.
going for some 9 Chickweed Lane teeth there, yikes
Nah, for the full Chickweed experience you need to make it look like your reference for human dental anatomy was an unflattering shot of Shane McGowan’s teeth
Mammal paleontologists often classify remains by their teeth (partly because they happen to be especially diagnostic in mammals, partly because they are some of the hardest parts there are and therefore tend to preserve best as fossils).
I highly doubt they would conclude that the 9CL characters are primates, let alone members of the genus Homo.
Human, your pun appears to have been executed successfully. Kudos.
Pun what pun?
As Nietzsche said before:…
You say that like it isn’t less disturbing than the solid white mass would have been in this situation…
I think it actually is slightly more disturbing than solid white because that’s so normalized in comics. I mean, look at their teeth in the panel before. Look at Becky’s teeth in yesterday’s strip. They didn’t even warrant comment.
I don’t think very many newspaper comics have a buffer that long, and I can’t think of any other webcomic with even a comparable one. I’m impressed
given that it’s a daily webcomic even including weekends, i’m surprised more don’t have a months ahead buffer. versus those webtoons where a full chapter is like 20-40 pages long and updating once a week to a month instead ll
If Willis doesn’t write enough comics, they’ll explode!! Just like that bus in Speed.
bad_photoshop_of_keanu_reeves_with_willis_face.jpg
Panel 1 almost made me think Joyce and Becky were talking to someone rather than each other.
Maybe they were talking to… the reader???
DoA PSA
I had that impression, too. It seemed like they were in a classroom, rather than on the the top bunk
Joyce in panel 1 definitely kinda feels like she’s talking to the readers rather than Becky. Has she started to develop Deadpool fourth-wall breaking abilities?
I always wondered if Joyce would be able to awaken the dog whistle within her. Clearly the answer is a resounding: Yes!
Given the environment she grew up in, I bet she’s accidentally awakened it more than a few times.
…Why are my ears bleeding.
*plays Michael and Janet’s “Scream” on the hacked Muzak*
Yes!!
Imma start sending panels 4 and 5 to people without context. See how many people I can get to ask me if I’m okay.
Are you okay?
I’m helping!
I kinda sorta know that feeling. Right on my third date with my now-hubby, I promised him a lifetime of unlimited squeezes. That was kind of my way of telling him I wanted to marry him. We didn’t make it legal until 10 years after that, but sometimes marriage accretes to one’s hull like barnacles. Or grows like coral. One crusty bit and piece and doodad at a time.
My grandparents only dated for two weeks before getting married. As a kid, I thought that was super romantic. Now when I think about about it, I’m kinda like, “Hey, what?” But it worked out for them and they had a long and happy marriage.
Coral-adjacent trivia:
There’s a greek myth that Perseus, on his way back home after killing Medusa (best character, fuck Perseus), stopped on some island with medusa’s chopped head in a bag. He dropped the bag on the beach, and it yawned open just enough that medusa’s petrifying stare caught some algae in the water. And that’s where coral comes from!! (*shakes head in biology nerd*)
Barnacle trivia:
Barnacles are crustaceans!
They are super old, with confirmed ancestry going back to the Carboniferous, and debated fossils from the motherfucking Cambrian (that’s pretty much as old as it gets), but have really only radiated to their present (huge) diversity in the last 20 million years. Which feels like a good thing to remember about so-called “living fossils”: you never know when your time to shine is gonna come. It may take 500 million years. You only got to hang on. (Barnacle joke.)
One family of barnacles, Rhizocephala, parasitizes crabs and other crustaceans. The free-swimming larva will attach to a crab and then extend tendrils into its body, wrap around its organs, feed from its hepatopancreas, and manipulate its hormones to chemically sterilize the host and develop its own sexual organs inside it, even altering the behaviour of the host to dacilirare their reproduction. It’s incredible.
Also, the talk page for the wikipedia article for one such barnacle, Sacculina, contains the best pun I’ve read this year =D
Hey, say what you want about Medusa, but Perseus is one of the few legitimately-decent-all-around classical Greek heroes, I will not stand for this slander!
Now if you’d said “fuck Theseus” on the other hand… /tangent
Back to barnacles, as a kid I always had a liking for goose barnacles from the moment I first found out about them. Something about how silly they looked/what a silly name they had, and of course the mythology behind them—they were supposedly the juvenile form of the barnacle goose and (literally grew on trees. XD
what the hell, i didn’t know about that goose barnacle myth. that’s hilarious =D
anyway, heya King D! good to see you, whereabouts hast thou been?
(Perseus is fine, i just have a soft spot for Medusa. She was unfairly turned into a monster, but also, that made her way cooler. Snakes for hair??? Yes please.)
I like Medusa as well; I can still be okay with Perseus, though, because by that point, so many other figures had already screwed her over, and also someone was trying to screw over Perseus. Also, how much did he know about her history going in?
“Elysium isn’t for the good, it’s for the great. Great kings and killers, oft one and the same.”
I’ve had a several friends tell me they knew really early on in the relationship/knowing their partner that they were with the person they were going to marry one day. I used to be skeptical but with my current partner I totally get it (it isn’t happening any time soon, but it definitely feels right)
While such stories always seem romantic, I wonder how much of a survivor bias there is in them.
We don’t tend to hear tales of couples who knew it was going to last forever a few weeks in, but then broke up a month or even a year later. No one wants to talk about that.
This is true. We do hear a decent amount of stories of couples who got married fairly quickly and then got divorced, but even then they tend to be together longer beforehand than when some people first get their “together forever” feelings.
There are also people who get married thinking it won’t last. We (the general population) don’t hear much about them either, but I do because my mom’s a divorce lawyer, and she’s told me about several clients over the years who say things like, “Even before the wedding, I knew it wasn’t going to work out.” Which might also be a bias (I imagine there’s a term for this, but I can’t think of it) and is really interesting to think about.
In these cases, I do feel an initial judgment of, “Well, why did you get married then?” But everyone is in their own unique and complex situation, and the jump to this judgment is probably part of why people don’t share these stories about themselves more.
The term is “sampling bias”, where the people you’re examining aren’t a good representation of the population at large.
Oh, and I find you theory highly plausible, thejeff.
Um…no? To the “sampling bias” thing, because that’s not what I was talking about. It’s also not applicable to my comment in general.
Anyway, the what I was actually talking about was hindsight bias.
That’s such a sweet love story
My guy and i have been talking about getting married since we first got together. Right now mostly about how we’re walking down the aisle to an acoustic version of Guts’s theme and how much Bleach music we’re gonna wedge in our reception (first dance is Nube Negra, yes we’ll be learning tango, and we’re totally gonna wedge Number One in there somewhere).
Joyce is screaming at a pitch only dogs (and virgins) can hear.
What, you can’t hear that?…oh.
It’s two octaves above a SQUEE!
Middle SQUEE or high SQUEE?
Bats all around campus suddenly start flying into walls.
Nooooo
I hope they’re alright. I <3 bats
Shit, it almost get me deaf, as it was so loud.
Wait
oh thats scary
I wonder how Lucy and Walky are doing? Swimmingly I expect.
They’re going to show up in the hallway or something and Joyce is going to go, “Guess what! Becky and Dina are basically engaged!” And Lucy will say, “Oh my gosh, that’s so great! Walky and I aren’t there yet, but we are in love.” And then the Earth will grant Walky mercy and swallow him whole.
It’ll do its best, anyway. The ground will open up beneath him, but unfortunately they’re on like the second or third floor, so he won’t even notice, and it will close up sadly while he has to figure out whether or not to deal with his girlfriend.
Ironically if he had showed up a few strips earlier he’d have been able to dive right into Joyce’s Gluttony impression.
hopefully she’s calmed down since. tho would be quite a moment for walky if they did kinda hook up in the heat of the moment and it ended up being a middling experience
This one has big 9CL energy.
That’s terrifying. That’s a terrifying face Joyce is making.
Indeed, looks more like a vampire about to strike
A vampire…of happiness!
i think it might be a combination of lack of dimples/smile lines + the gums visibly showing? definitely makes me think Joyce is gonna eat Becky’s face off.
No, it is the snake jaw thing where she will swallow Becky whole.
Imagine the face joyce will make when she and joe finally hook up tho lol
IoI ALREADY?!!!? Well Joyce can’t do matchies by being engaged to Joe now, innit?
Congrats, Willis
That is fucking adorable.
I feel like elaborating a little. Crazy teeth aside, what’s adorable about this to me is how happy Joyce is for Becky and the idea of such a marriage taking place. Yes, she’s always been a huge romantic, and Becky is one of her dearest friends, even family now, but for a time, Dina was sort of a rival of hers, someone she failed to really understand or get along that well with.
Thankfully, that has changed, with her developing an honest-to-goodness friendship with Dina finally, and she probably is much more receptive to this than she once would have been.
To me, that’s adorable.
I’m gonna have to make a top
102025 greatest DoA faces ranking at some point, aren’t II feel like Joyce would get the majority of those spots
Now most of the time, I’d say ‘famous last words’ for a first relationship talking about getting married but in this case I think it’s really possible they could.
sure, they are young and in love but given the irl struggle to even legalize gay marriage i imagine lgbt marriages would last longer than straight marriages
tho i’m down for a rom com of divorced wlw/mlm groups all being snippy at each other but supportive of their next romances and such
“I let him keep the dog in the divorce, so you’re welcome” or so lol.
It is not the case that, on average, same-gender marriages last longer than marriages between a man and a woman. (Thinking about how to phrase these things with regards to the fact that there are more than two genders and that queer people can and do enter into relationships that may be labeled as “straight” or “heterosexual”? Idk, it’s late, I’ll think more on this later.)
From most of what I’ve seen, the averages tend to be the same or shorter. Can see a few factors potentially contributing to this. Without looking into numbers right now, I feel pretty safe assuming that LGBTQ+ people may skew less religious than the overall population, and when they are religious, I’d think they’d be less likely to be among the “God doesn’t recognize divorce” type of religions. Our perceptions of divorce are going to affect how we approach divorce in our own lives. I also think it’s good to remember that a long marriage =/= a happy marriage. They can both be true, absolutely, but “we’ve been married 20 years” or whatever does not automatically translate to “great relationship.”
I also don’t know how the percentages of couples with kids compare, but if that’s significantly different, well, “stay together for the kids” is definitely another perception that can impact choices around divorce.
Now, in this specific case, I could see Becky and Dina lasting, and I hope they do. Just that that is often not the case for people. (And also, that not being the case is okay! I’m pro-divorce.)
I’m pro-divorce in general, and pro-divorce in specific cases! =P
i don’t get why Becky & Dina feel especially likely to last long, except, thus far, manifest authorial preference? They’re very good to each other, but they’re also 18-20 and on their first relationship.
Yeah, statistically speaking, Becky and Dina are both likely to think they’re going to last forever and to not actually last forever.
OTOH, some do make it and they do have the Author on their side, which is more than most of us get.
I’m not sure I get what you mean by your first sentence.
I’m also not sure if you’re suggesting that I thinking Becky and Dina are especially likely to last long, but that’s not what I said. Obviously it’s statistically unlikely, but it does happen, and this is a work of fiction. There relationship isn’t, at least, one that I look at and go, “Oooh, that’s not going to last.” (Which is how I’m feeling with Walky and Lucy, and how I felt with some past relationships like Danny and Amber.)
Willis did say on his Tumblr something along the lines of “when will people realize these two are going to be fine?” So even if they do break up eventually it’s probably not going to happen in the comic
I also note that in the strip that someone helpfully linked, it was pretty transparently an impulse/attempt by Becky to semi-retroactively make what she just did Not a Sin (by the rules she grew up with). Dina correctly recognized that the proposal was not coming from a rational, well-considered position.
Yeah, I’m not at all sure that Dina would agree that they’re “kinda-sorta engaged”.
Yeah, even if it hadn’t been in that context and they had been, like, discussing a possible future together and were in agreement on things, I wouldn’t really put that as “kinda-sorta engaged,” and I don’t think most would either. But I have had friends who were excited to share about their partner also seeing a long term future with them. I wonder how much Becky and Joyce’s upbringing might impact how that’s expressed. (Like, the people I’ve known in the past who’ve gotten “pre-engaged” tended to be more religious. My reaction then was basically, “I don’t know what that means, but you seem happy, so good for you?”)
Isn’t this what “friendship rings” were for?
I think “friendship rings” are different in that they’re for, you know, friendships, but it’s possible there’s regional/temporal variations in how this used. My understanding is that both “friendship rings” and “pre-engagement rings” would fall under the category of “promise rings.” However, since “promise rings” have also come to be so widely associated with the idea that they’re about “saving oneself for marriage” (ugh*), I hear the term “pre-engagement ring” used more for this concept.
*The “ugh” is in reference to the idea that not having sex is “saving oneself.” I think it’s fine to wait to marriage if that’s what feels best to you, but that whole phrasing and promise ring tradition is obviously heavy on purity culture.
“might be kinda-sorta” is probably a better descriptor than “verbally confirmed definitely”, for “acceptable trajectory”. It’s a word choice that sounds like moving too fast. But I expect their storyline goes differently than Lucy and Walky’s will.
I like to imagine that the sound she is making is HOMPK
“I am Joycemandias, Queen of the Drunks! Harken unto my screams, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing besides remains,
save for a sustained screech at a pitch that only the late Rich Mullins can hear.
oh no it cute
The triangle smile opens up and reveals its full (terrifying) glory.
Where is she storing her teeth?
This is the DoA version of Hammerspace.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Hammerspace
Ah, of course. From (as a previous mention was) a skull that’s 90% teeth, to this, is a pretty neat trick.
Don’t go getting too comfy with that buffer, Willis!
NGL, funny punchline aside, i think it’s sweet how happy Joyce is for Becky. As engaged as i was during the Joyce/Becky conflict from the last few storylines, the two of them being able to show that they’re always gonna love and care for each other really proves how important their friendship is to each other.
Jaws of excitement!
https://youtu.be/zfI6vSflA5Y She is untethered and her
rageeuphoria knows no bounds!joyce is gonna be the best maid of honor/flower girl/wedding planner rolled up into one lol
and lol sal. tho i wonder, how close would a dog/local neighborhood be compared to a live in campus
Don’t have to wonder, we can look it up on Google Maps!
Read Hall is right near the edge of the campus.
I just assumed stray dogs, knowing my campus
And even if the area doesn’t really have stray dogs, people can take dogs outside of their homes and yards. That’s a definitely a thing that happens.
Somewhere Sarah hurts her face from a sudden frown.
I think Joyce might be a little happy!
we need an expression compilation ‘joyce happiness to grumpiness’ scale lol
5th panel Joyce is the last thing you see before you hit game over on Silent Hill.
What was that?
It’s Joyce-1.
She’s gone to plaid!
Did they confirm that it would be to each other, tho?
Panel 5 Joyce will hunt me in my dreams and swallow my skull whole
Is she happy? I think she is happy.
(in another universe, this is when Joyce reveals herself as alien, opens her mouth wiiiiiide open and gulps down Becky)
Shipper’s squeal activated
Joyce… is too powerful
Joyce suddenly discovered her new, terrifyingly, superpower.
Do dogs bark each time the buffer reaches a round figure or is it just the 6-month thing?
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of eardrums cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced…
OH GAWD so much TEETH!
You know in one of those old video games where you max out the score and then it circles back to zero? That’s what happened here, Joyce and Becky were learning a lot and then, “Nope, experiences don’t change us, OMG yer engaged!!” Bless their little hearts.
Is nobody going to acknowledge that this page opened with a 4th wall breaking “special episode” moral addressed directly to the audience?
Except experiences do actually change you. They literally rewire your brain. You still learn more about yourself, but you aren’t the same person, exactly.
It’s nudging the wall at best
To fall in love, have a wonderful relationship, and marry your first, skipping years of misdirection and mistakes… Dina and Becky must have done something really good in past lives…
Good thing I hit the can before coming here, would have peed myself otherwise. ‘why are all those dogs barking’. heh.
Congratulations for the buffer size, Willis
Will Becky inherit Dina’s last name, straight up, no hiphens?
She might want to just abandon Toedad’s surname. (Do we know Bonnie’s maiden name?)
The void calls you.
Void where prohibited.
Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, starting in Patch 6.1????
Sorry, I’ve been clean of MMOs for almost 10 years now, but I know some weebs who play XIV.
Weebs???? How could you say- okay yeah that’s fair. A lot of people on my friends list are Anime People.
There’s also a fair amount of kinksters in FF XIV communities.
Let’s see how this works. Glad I’m not the only one who is hypnotized by the void.
I feel a sense of foreboding. Willis hath given, and so shall Willis taketh away, I fear
I do love this couple, but marriage before finish college is a strange thing to me…
Just cause they’re maybe kinda-sorta engaged doesn’t mean they’re getting married anytime soon.
Unless they have to because of a lesbian pregnancy.
( https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/urrgl/ )
I just realized that this strip is a contrast to the first opening strips of the entire comic. “Do ever change.” Yeah, right.
lets not forget that Becky is still relatively inexperienced when it comes to hormones so this may be a tad premature. She just touched her first boobie.
2nd boobie, for sure.
“Those things usually travel in pairs.”
Not sure how far she went with her roommate back at Anderson, but Dina’s breasts have to be at least the third and fourth she’s touched.
Have we actually seen her touch them? It’s been a few years since I read the Slipshine.
I’ve actually never read the Slipshine, and I guess was really just projecting what I would do were I having sex with someone who had boobs and was okay with them being touched.
I’ll double-check later. Y’know for science.
Just checked it out, and interestingly enough, no, Becky didn’t touch her breasts. At least not visibly. Willis should definitely have added more boob play, just saying.
Joyce, we both need to brush more, our gums are inflamed
Oh, beyond the big buffer Willis has reached, Sal’s panel is another preview he had lauched times ago.
It’s so good to be alive.
This is something that is completely irrelevant to today’s strip, but I just thought of it and was surprised I hadn’t thought of it before, since this is about a historical figure I think about fairly often:
One of Joyce’s brothers is named John Brown.
…Motherfucker doesn’t deserve it.
(Also, if this is unclear, search up “John Brown Abolitionist.”)
Probably quite a few people by that name, deliberately or not. It’s not like either “John” or “Brown” is terribly rare. Also, not really sure that’s somebody I’d really want to be named after. No matter how noble his goals, he was a terrorist whose methods were often brutal and morally indefensible.
As to it being a common name: Yes, obviously.
As to the rest, what a shitty take. There’s a lot to say about John Brown, but maybe just start with some of the basics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)#Contemporaries
I mean, he was a terrorist against slavers.
That’s like being a terrorist against Nazis.
Nice both sides garbage there.
Here it’s short for Jonathan, which is often shortened to Jon, but not always. I wonder if we’re going to get back around to him and his possibly fictitious wife and mission trips, he leaves in January, the month the comic is currently in (Dumbing Day is this Thursday, I think)
Did you know historical John Brown has a US quarter? One of the 2016 designs is “John Brown’s Fort”. His methods were entirely justified and moral. He killed terrorists who were trying to spread systemic atrocities.
In Hebrew Yehonatan (which means “God has given” and gave rise to “Jonathan” in English) is a different name from Yehochanan (which means “God is gracious” and gave rise to “John” in English).
I love Becky’s confused look as Joyce squeals at a pitch no mortal human is meant to hear
Becky NO
Dina expressed it’s not outside the options to get married…. there was no DEFINITELY about it…. wtf BECKY chill tf out
And now glass is shattering in a 6 block radius.