Superpowered middle schoolers fight evil spirits in their rural hometown. Come for the jokes, stay for the cast, the creatures, and the mystery that ties them all together!
Wilde Life
Pascalle Lepas
Oscar decided to rent an old haunted house, and that's when things got weird...
The End
August Brown, Cory Brown
Two aliens crash a sci-fi convention and accidentally take seven nerds on an adventure that spans the galaxy!
Wychwood
Varethane
When Tiara's pyrokinesis is finally noticed, she is captured by a magical research organization for study. If she cooperates, she could be helping to save humanity from a dire threat - but can she trust them?
Monster Pulse
Magnolia Porter Siddell
Four kids run afoul of a creepy secret organization's experiments, which turn their body parts into fighting monsters. Part sentimental coming-of-age story, part monster-training shonen manga, with just a bit of sci-fi body horror.
Atomic Robo
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener
The robot punches monsters and bad robots and one time he was a cowboy.
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!
Widdershins
Kate Ashwin
A series of light-hearted Victorian-era adventure stories featuring grumpy bounty hunters, accidental thiefkings, and more, in England's magical capital city Widdershins!
Devil's Candy
Rem, Bikkuri
A lush fantasy about boy genius Kazu Decker, the girl he constructed for his 9th grade science project, and the world of devils and monsters they live in.
Caramel Corn
Potchimew
Sarah is the only human left in a world full of mythical creatures and monsters. All she wants to do is live a quiet life, but everything changes when she meets her guardian angel, Jacob.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Knights Errant
J.R. Doyle
Wilfrid's humble quest for revenge becomes bigger and bloodier by the day.
The Lonely Vincent Bellingham
Diana Huh
Vincent is an unkind man looking to disappear, and finds himself in the care of a vampire and her two wicked children.
Girl Genius
Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio
In a time when the Industrial Revolution has become an all-out war, Mad Science rules the World...with mixed success.
Starhammer
J.N. Monk, Harry Bogosian
A teen girl inherits a powerful alien artifact and proceeds to make a series of increasingly poor decisions
Jailbird
Charlie Davis
An all-ages comic about a recently escaped prisoner's struggle to understand the outside world, and vice-versa. Also, a magic cape!
Real Science Adventures
Brian Clevinger
Spin off stories and other adventures from the world of Atomic Robo!
Kochab
Sarah Webb
A YA F/F fantasy comic about Sonya, a lost skier trying to survive a snowy wilderness and find her way back to her village; and Kyra - a fire spirit trying to fix the home that she let fall apart around her.
Never Satisfied
Taylor Robin
Lucy Marlowe, a magician's apprentice, competes against other apprentices for an important, magical, Goverment Job.
Demon's Mirror
Harry Bogosian
Based loosely off of "The Snow Queen", a story by Hans Christian Andersen, we see things take a different turn as the demons become central characters, and the side characters stick around. Yup, that's the only differences. Enjoy!
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.
Love Not Found
Gina Biggs
Abeille is on a quest to find someone who wants to do it the old-fashioned way in a time when touching has become outdated.
Goodbye to Halos
Valerie Halla
Cuddles, gay flirting, weird feelings, and magic-fueled knife fights - it's an adventure across the queer multiverse!
The Sanity Circus
Windy
Magic, monsters and mysteries await in the odd city of Sanity. It's up to Attley and a colorful group of characters to find out just what is going on.
Star Trip
Gisele Weaver
Jas is a human taken from her home planet on a trip across the galaxy she will never forget.
Astral Aves
Moon Cabal
A fantasy coming-of-age following the adventures of Astra The Black and friends, as they navigate the mysterious world around them. It's politics, adventure, and the supernatural; oh, and crazy hair.
Anarchy Dreamers
Emily Ree
Sparkly undead kids fight society's worst Nightmares in this pastel-punk urban fantasy coming-of-age!
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Alice and the Nightmare
Misha Krivanek
Alice finally attends University to learn to collect the dreams of humans, meet new friends, and deal with a pesky reflection along the way.
Fireweeds Moors
Gato Iberico
A cat-headed man and a girl with a sandwich hankering accidentally end up in a myth-infused country where magic chalices are a really big thing.
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
Go Get a Roomie
Clover
Experience the queer journey of an upbeat hippie and the friendships she makes along the way! A tale of self-discovery and love of many forms.
Lighter Than Heir
Melissa Albino
A young Volant woman joins the military in an effort to upstage her war-hero father.
This is Not Fiction
Nicole Mannino
What do you do when the person you're in-love with is an anonymous romance novelist? Get your best friend to hire your worst enemy for help!
The Automan's Daughter
Mike Stamm
Aisha Osman and her uncle Siddig outwit bikers, spies and kidnappers while gearing up for a showdown with the formidable Widowmaker mecha.
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Monsterkind
Taylor C
Wallace Foster, a young, bright-eyed human social worker, has his entire world view rocked when he's suddenly relocated into a city primarily inhabited by monsters.
Lilith's Word
inkPangur
If you had the power to make any wish come true using just one word, what would you say?
Sufficiently Remarkable
Maki Naro
Two young women living in Brooklyn discover that you're always coming of age.
Awaken
Koti Saavedra/Flipfloppery
Superpowers, monsters and conspiracies. Piras, the spoiled Dameschi heir, fights to recover his identity after becoming a terrorist!
Cut Time
Juby
Rel and her trusty avian friend Fugue are on a quest to save a world that's lost track of time. Follow them and their new recruits, in a story written with help from the stars.
Star Impact
Jack McGee
A young, energetic woman fights her way up in the world of super-powered boxing after discovering the mighty gloves of her missing idol!
Kiwi Blitz
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
Steffi thinks she can use her kiwi mech to become a superhero. This idea turns out to be very stupid.
Hazy London
Scotty
A story about messy relationships. From friendly foes to crazy families. Nothing is black and white, just full of color. But, all colors can get a little hazy...
[un]Divine
Ayme
A highschool senior thought giving up his soul for a demon was a good idea. It wasn't.
Tigress Queen
Allison Shaw
A barbarian warlord and a pampered prince try to avoid a marriage alliance that could end decades of violence.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
Ghost Junk Sickness
Studio CARTRIDGE, Laura Lee
Two hunters try to survive and end up being pushed to pursue a deadly bounty dubbed "The Ghost".
El Goonish Shive
Dan Shive
WARNING: This comic often ignores the Laws of Physics
Sam & Fuzzy
Sam Logan
Troubled by gangster rodents, lovesick vampire stalkers, or confused ninja assassins? Don't panic! Sam and Fuzzy are here to help. (For a reasonable fee.)
Cassiopeia Quinn
Gunwild, Psudonym
A cute, pantsless thief is pursued across the stars by a buttoned-up military officer in the spacey, laser-filled future.
Godslave
Meaghan Carter
Edith has been thrown into the dangerous world of modern-day Egyptian mythology. Fighting monsters and dealing with family drama of godly proportions.
Whomp!
Ronnie
A depressed, portly, hirsute anime fan stumbles through life in the ever-pursuit of chicken nuggets and other life-shortening indulgences.
The Witch Door
Anni K.
Katariina Lehto discovers her neighbor is a witch called Jousia Muotka. Jousia introduces Katariina to the strange people and places beyond the witch door...
Between Failures
Jackie Wohlenhaus
The low stakes adventures of an assorted group of 20 somethings trapped in the declining years of American retail. They are naughty and say lots of swears.
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My Wife: “I’m so jealous of your phone. It has more megapixels than mine!”
Me: “Do you want to use my phone to take some photos?”
My Wife: “No! I want a better phone with more megapixels than yours!”
This is seriously an accurate summary of conversation that we had back in October. She got her new phone – with more megapixels than mine – for Solstice.
We’ll finally all have access to that “enhancing” software that previously only spy agencies and some otherwise undistinguished police departments were equipped with, as seen in The Movies
Nah, they’ll just be on all the time, and the carriers will just get a pixel each from everyone around you to synthesize the image they think you should have been making.
And that’s why I don’t have a smartphone anymore. updating, upgrading without pause, to keep the pace with obsolescence of desires?
No, I’ll keep my old phony machine and let as much of rare-earth elements in the ground.
They didn’t break the 4th wall, they spoke in a weird way, largely due to the nature of the medium, and then acknowledged the way they spoke was weird. If anything that’s leaning on the 4th wall, as lampshade hanging often (but not always) is, but really that’s the sort of exchange I have with my friends IRL, so I’m not sure if this one is even sufficiently meta to qualify as even leaning on the 4th wall.
if “meta” referencing the medium from inside the story, then this is definitely meta. They didn’t literally say “we are in a comic” but the whole joke relies on the fact that they are.
How is lampshade hanging sometimes not “lean on the 4th wall”? i feel like lampshading is defined by implicitly breaking kayfabe? I’m probably working from an incomplete definition?
Lampshade hanging is when they point out a trope (usually) for comedic effect. Leaning on the 4th wall is when they make allusions to the medium but are sufficiently vague or indirect as to avoid fully breaking said 4th wall.
This could just be me, but I would say that if a line or conversation could plausibly happen in real life then it might not even count as leaning on the 4th wall. My friends and I regularly call out tropes when we see them in our daily lives, especially when they crop up in conversations, and we make use of them as a short hand form of communication sometimes where applicable. This means that I engage in lampshade hanging in my real life, and I am under no delusions about being a fictional character with an audience watching me/reading about me, ergo I’d say that any instance of lampshade hanging would have to be fairly contrived to qualify as leaning on the 4th wall using my standards. Obviously others are welcome to disagree.
There’s always a new superhero film and most of them are mid. It’s safer not to bother learning the names and to just assume there’s one playing at all times.
I was thinking he might not be paying attention to superheroes anymore, (especially in live action movies since they’re just pumped out faster than I can keep track of, and I don’t have any trauma related to friends who were into superhero media) and be offering a generic ‘yes’
It feels like everybody I know except me has gotten COVID. I’m certainly not jealous by any means– the long-term effects it has had and is still having on my brother are depressing as all hell to watch him struggle with– but it’s weird that they’ve all had this shared experience they compare notes about all the time and I’m just stuck saying “yeah, I can’t even imagine what it’s like.”
I can say you’re not alone, I got vaxxed and boosted as quick as I coul, but haven’t had the most recent booster, and I’m the only one in the family who hasn’t tested positive yet. It’s annoying to the rest of the family that I never get sick and the only time I went to the hospital was when I got hit by the truck and subsequent repairs as they found stuff later they missed the first time.
I finally caught the plague for the first time a few weeks ago. 104 degree fevers aren’t fun; I can think of better excuses to sleep for almost two days straight.
Yeah, I guess I got a mild strain. It was about 2 days of a high fever and another couple days of flu-like symptoms. After that it was about a week before my sense of smell was back to normal.
I feel like I’m complaining to a drowning person because my drink is too warm… Sorry you’re still dealing with it!
I have it now. Main problem at the moment is running out of everything, including the cough medicine that stops my lungs filling up with crap. Also, the rules for going back to work or to the shops are too vague. How DARE they throw it back on my “common sense”? I don’t have any.
Even worse than that in some places. As soon as those rules were rolled back in China, things immediately got worse again, people collapsing and other ugly sights. It got so out of hand that their government even stopped collecting statistics.
Here is a directory of local health departments in the USA to get local COVID-19 resources and guidelines for Isolation duration and masking: https://www.naccho.org/membership/lhd-directory
tbf. it probably wouldn’t stop college students from doing what they want. tho a six foot distance, “every 3rd-4th seat” being empty in a movie theatre would be enjoyable esp for a comedy where it’d be hard to hear over ppl laughing (surprised there’s not more subtitles by default on movies, besides just the foreign translated ones)
Do theaters still require sitting x seats apart in the US? Over here (france) the covid restrictions have pretty much entirely been lifted. I still try to wear an FFP2 mask in public places, buy i’m often the only one (aside from some old people). I wonder if the scary cost of healthcare in the US does encourage more people to still take it seriously??
The given reason is that test concerts didn’t bring much more contaminations “because people were looking in the same direction” and not speaking to each others. Where I work, it’s a bout one person in thirty that wears a mask, and most customers are well over sixty.
Movie theaters in Bloomington are open and have been for a long, long while. Granted, neither of them are all that close to the campus, and given how late it appears to be I doubt it would be easy for them to reach either of them in time for the final showings for the night. The closer one is the east side theater, which is the shitty one, but they’d probably need to take a bus there to get there in any reasonable amount of time, and I’m not sure how close a bus would get them since I’m not all that familiar with the bus stop locations on that side of town, there might be a stop right there or they might need to walk a couple blocks, and that’s assuming there’s a bus going there with a route that goes through campus, IIRC only a couple of city bus routes do and while both of them go to the east side that doesn’t mean they go to the theater, so they might need to transfer at the bus station. All in all, I worry about Booster’s assessment for how easily they can make it there in time to catch the start of the movie.
Sunset in early-mid January in Bloomington is around 20 ’till 6 at the earliest, and the sky doesn’t get quite that dark until a half hour to an hour after sunset (due to residual light from over the horizon), this changes when the sky is cloudy, but that sky looks pretty cloudless to me. I’d estimate that it’s about 6:10-ish at the absolute earliest. The local theaters have their last show for the night between 6 and 7:30 for most of their movies due to not yet being on their full schedules after covid yet. They wouldn’t say “there’s a showing soon, if we hop to it” if it was only a little after 6 and the showing was 7 or later, I’d guess, based on my checking of the local theaters that we’re looking at a 6:40 showing at the latest, that means they have at most a half hour to get to the theater before the previews start, it looks like they’re outside of Read right now, if they walk to the east side theater they’re looking at a 38 minute hike, at least, according to google maps a bus could get them there in about 16 minutes, but you have to add any time spent waiting for the bus to that and sadly the busses here aren’t super reliable.
I’ll also add that Spidey’s live action outings consistently entertain me more than Batman’s. A lot of that might be the music in those older Batmovies. It was a lot to deal with, most of the time. And then I just kinda liked the Nolan ones okay, nothing special in any of them and the audio pisses me off in a very serious way. Characters whispering followed by deafening rackets will always guarantee I hate your movie, and that’s all there is to that.
I wanted to disagree with this, but actually thinking about it Spidey’s had like four decent films and four bad ones, whereas Batman has a genuine masterpiece, two decent films, two bad but deeply entertaining films, three fever dreams and one throughly middling film.
And for bonus points, in a few months it’ll be referring to the new spider verse. On the tricky side how they react after is key. I mean, no one in their right mind would react to spider verse and another MCU Spidey movie the same
I’ve cooled off a lot from Marvel since Endgame. Watched Black Widow, Thor and Wakanda Forever. They were all… ok? They do their job, but don’t really compare to Ragnarok or Black Panther. No real interest in Ant-Man 3.
The entire appeal of the Ant-man movies was they were self contained breather episodes between the major ones, just fun adventures with relatively low stakes
Why on earth would you make one that’s the centerpiece of the entire current plot line for the universe
Unfortunately Marvel but themselves in the ass – Ant-Man’s the only property with access to time/dimensional hoopla without the persistent asshole vibe that is Dr, Strange, since they have not yet introduced the Marvel Universe’s ACTUAL time/dimension crazy weirdos, the Fantastic Four. (That’s the one I’m sad about. It’s gonna be terrible, because no one in show biz seems to understand what the Fantastic Four actually are and aren’t. I know this because all movies to date have insisted they’re superheroes.)
If Ant Man Three isn’t just an hour and half of an entire room of Time Displaced Micheal Douglas’s (Duglassi?) making Pym Particles like Walter Whites on acid, I’ll be sorely disinterested.
I loved Spiderman Homecoming, Black Panther, and Thor Ragnarok. But the whole Avengers III/IV thing pretty much ended my interest in the whole MCU franchise. If the directors can kill off main characters all over the place because they don’t like them, and kill off 3/4 of the world’s population and bring back *some* of them five years later and then just continue as if it was no big deal, why should I even care about these characters or this setting?
That was a scenario directly out of the original Infinity Gauntlet comic, although it was given much bigger stakes in the movie by placing the destruction of half the universe at the end of a movie and given five years to breathe rather than being deleted at the end of one issue and brought back an issue and a half later, with about an hour interim in-story.
Didn’t Thanos also put Captain America’s head in a block of acrylic like five seconds after the snap thing, too? It’s been a minute since I read that story.
I had been not liking most marvel movies very much for a while before Endgame came around. Thor Ragnarok was kind of the major exception, but like. There’s only so many movies I can watch that start off by pretending to have substance and then never address any of the substance in favor of bombastic fight scenes. I would say maybe I just shouldn’t be watching action movies except that while I have criticisms of it, the most recent Batman really did do it for me. So did Shazam. And Birds of Prey. Like there are clearly superhero movies that work for me, but they have to like care about their themes and their characters in really genuine ways and for the most part marvel movies don’t feel like they do that and haven’t for a long time.
I actually bought one of the Spiderman animated movies because I saw so many articles praising the artwork, which was honestly spectacular. Also that movie did a much better job of introducing Miles Morales than the comics did.
Infinity was pissed me off bc i only watched the preceding marvel movies so i could watch Thor Ragnarok and black panther. I’ve gone on a billion rants about how it ruined the MCU, blah blah blah. I refuse to interact with anything but Thor and the occasional Spidey movie if my boyfriend reeeeally wants to.
Thor Love and Thunder was awesome in my opinion. I mean, it wasnt like…high cinema or whatever but it was dumb fun which was all I ever needed it to be. a fun romp. Not enough superhero movies are fun romps these days
That’s the biggest problem with the MCU now. Marvel movies are supposed to be fun, but they’re not fun anymore. They’re homework. You have to study 8 movies and 15 new Disney+ series with nauseatingly awful CGI bc Disney works their SFX apartment like slaves, all just so you can watch a mediocre movie that’s more about “hey isn’t it cool all these characters are in this same room together?! Isn’t this crossover aMbItIoUs?!!!” than being entertaining.
Like MCU was always mediocre but at least it was less work to understand one movie before
Even more smart not to specify the franchise. That way, we can imagine them talking about a DCEU property and being too embarrassed to mention the title, the characters, or even the franchise altogether.
Oh, they are. This is just for the joke, willis is not usually so shy about referencing pop culture (see e.g. Taffy’s current avatar which is a reference to an in-comic reference to Spiderman 3)
The superhero craze started with Watchmen and the Nolan Batmen, and there have consistently been gritty deconstructions of varying quality throughout the reign of the MCU.
Endgame was their last hurrah, in a way. Most of the recognizable heroes are retired/killed off now. They might squeeze out another Thor, but I can’t really see a new Hulk movie and I’m not watching Guardians as long as Chris Pratt is in it.
So far as I can tell, it’s ‘cos years ago he attended an outspokenly homophobic church for a while, and this means he is Bad Forever. (That he presumably /left/ an outspokenly homophobic church gets ignored.)
Maybe. He seems to have been pretty cagey about the whole thing, so it’s hard to be sure why he left or even if he left. He also defended the church as not being homophobic.
A lot of it reads like he got in trouble and his PR told him to do damage control. Which is fine, I guess. At least he’s not trying to play “support me because I’ve been cancelled by the left” card.
Yeah I’m not sure where people got the impression he left just because he doesn’t talk about it openly. He’s an Evangelical Christian, as recently as the summer he still attends an Evangelical Fundamentalist Church- and no, it doesn’t say those words on there, you have to speak Christian to know it even has a position on anything- and the best anyone can say about him is that he’s real gosh darn nice so they’re sure he doesn’t believe anything bad. Sure, his response to accusations was “oh we’re all sinners, I’m divorced and that’s the same thing” but that can’t be a dogwhistle.
As we all know, someone from Minnesota being Nice has absolutely no chance of being anything other than face value.
And while we’ve got an Ethan strip and I’m thinking about it…
*Scenes of dinosaur-styled motorcars racing around a track*
ANNOUNCER: This is the best race we’ve had here in years! A full-on charge by the pack now through the chicane to the roundabout before the home stretch and everybody’s bringing 110%…
ANNOUNCER: The Ankylo BiTurbo and the Tri-Cam Triceratops are taking the fight to the PturboPterasaur and the Raptor Roller…
ANNOUNCER: The Stego Special and the Top Fuel T-Rex are trying to open a breakaway…
ANNOUNCER: And at the line—The Champion of the Shortpacked! Five Hundred for Twenty Twenty-Three!—
The cashiers and sales staff of Shortpacked!, holding their cars’ remote controllers. The kids and parents who’ve been watching the demo are cheering.
ANNOUNCER (FAZ): —Barbie in the pretty pink Dually Diplodocus.
DinoBro cars are, it seems, the toy car of the year. I don’t know if they really make RC or slot versions but this is comics!
I’ve always enjoyed in-theater movies more in a group, because you can lean over and mutter jokes during the loud parts. You also get to be part of a crowd that’s all here to see the show, so when you laugh or cheer there’s probably a couple of other people doing the same thing, and it feels more communal.
Come to think of it, a big crowd of people who are compelled to shut up for most of the event, sitting in comfy chairs, munching on snacks, in the dark… that’s kinda my ideal group setting.
But also, I saw the Sonic movie 8 days in a row when it came out, and only 2 of those viewings were with other people. The 6 times I saw it alone before work, it was a much more personal, meditative experience because I’d already seen it and knew what was happening, so I could tune in and out at my leisure and use the time in a way that was entirely my own without the possibility of other people I knew interrupting me with some random personal drama I couldn’t care less about but would have been obligated to engage with.
I was under a lot of completely unnecessary stress at the time and it was a pretty good movie, so I had an excuse to leave “for work” early and just Exist on my own terms for a couple hours before my shift. More about being unreachable than the movie itself, if I’m being entirely honest.
I go to the cinema alone most times. I like to sit all the way to the front of the room and most people hate that, so when i go with people usually we don’t even sit together lol.
What i do enjoy about going with a friend (or friends) is we get to discuss the movie afterwards =)
Not ONLY do I have no issue in going to the movies alone, I make sure to go to showings that have the biggest chance of having as few other people in the room as possible, so that I don’t have to fight off the urge to strangle whichever fucker has decided to play games on their phone with the sound turned up during it.
Don’t fight that urge. Employees at most places aren’t allowed to confront people anymore, so they’ll only ask the person nicely, which is never going to work. Take matters into your own hands and beat up the disruptive jackasses.
Employees at most places aren’t paid enough to confront people. If companies want security, hire security people, don’t task the minimum wage teenager with throwing people out.
I think the last time I actually went to a theater How to Train Your Dragon 2 was playing which was 2014 according to Google, which coincides with how the grandson was behaving after the movie when he was tired and hungry. He was little then.
He could just as easily have said “there’s a couple of superhero movies we could pick from” because there’s always like three in theaters at any one time. (I’m actually sick of the genre because of the oversaturation.)
I always make sure they’re from a certain amount of time before I make the thing. Nobody’s gonna bat an eye if I put a mute, blonde, green-clad swordsman in my game because nobody’s alive right now who was born before the first Zelda game came out. Long-running series are perfect for it, whereas a current meme is only gonna be interesting for a month or two.
? Zelda was published in the 80s, while I was introduced to the world in the 50s and my Dad, who lives still, was a teen in the 40s. I’m actually too old to be familiar with that character. In my day, computer-driven games were played on Teletypes. Honestly!
all my works tend to be in a set time, and if they’re not, I tend just to avoid specific references- I don’t usually find it necessary in my writing style to name things like that. (that’s not to disparage those who do, it can be incredibly important to setting or very poignant to know what exact song a character is listening to on repeat, but it’s rarely relevant in my works)
It funny when scifi set in the future wants to reference something current or recent, and they go “grandma once told me that in the before-times they had these things called “records”, she even had me to listen to one that i really liked,” etc ^^
Nearly as funny as scifi set in the far future that has secret messages being held in a gadget that reads your fingerprint and spits out a piece of paper.
It’s the old sci-fi with FTL spaceships, but they still whip out slide-rules to do the navigation that I love.
Makes you wonder what future advances our current ideas have completely overlooked.
It would depend on what he did with said epiphany. If he went about his day as normal and just winked at the fourth wall occasionally, no. If it sends him into the existential dread of knowing nothing and no one is real, it could be very dangerous.
The medical term is “CHIM”, and the worst that can happen is you could pop out of existence. On the other hand, you could gain console commands and savestates.
This isn’t even really close. It’s called a lampshade, where characters bring a plot contrivance to the audience’s attention. It’s the most basic form of “leaning” on the fourth wall
Alt-text: the cons of having a buffer of this size.
I imagine Willis, running fixing an entire timeline, because something crazy happened in pop culture or in the world and he doesn’t want to lost the timing of the thing
Google is eternal, nations will rise and crumbles, space colonies will flourish and dwindle, but Google will never stop searching. Don’t ask what they are searching for, that way leads to madness.
We never had any of those fancy online services like AOL or CompuServe. We had the number to the modem pool at my dad’s work and crawled the web at 9600 baud. (Apparently this call cost 10 cents a minute because it was long-distance.) Then in the late 90s we made do with the “10 hours free per month” NetZero before finally getting 1.5 meg DSL in 2003. That “was good enough” until I put together a business case that paying for analog basic cable, a POTS line, and DSL cost more than twice as many channels, phone service, and 50 meg Internet from the fiber company. This was 2011.
This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. If Booster is able to not fall asleep during the movie… Good for Ethan and let’s hope this will help Booster with Amber.
Since people are mentioning obsolete websites and computer programs (they used to be called programs, not apps), I’ll offer that in one of my grade schools, we had a computer lab and designated Computer class period. All we were allowed to do was go on Yahooligans or chat with Bonzi Buddy. It was a weird time.
Also avoids a passionate yet ultimately irrelevant 100-post argument between “True fans” of whichever superhero movie they like best, or MCU vs DCU, or movie-verse vs comic-verse, etc, etc. ^_^
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btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 1d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
confirming that the reason there's been no Galaxy Version female characters in Blokees until now is that they felt they needed to make Round Lady Thighs For Ladies
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 10h
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 1d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
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Is the lampshade for that streetlight? Because what they threw is HUGE
Now see, I thought saying Internet instead of the Metaverse was the lampshade.
Pretty sure it’s only called that by detached techbros with no remaining connection to reality.
Totally unlike people commenting on a webcomic page
Well we’re commenting on reality, not on how our bad Second Life twin towers of the WTC never fell in fantasyland. That’s gotta count for something.
Booster: “I have checked The Internet on my Phone.”
Ethan: “Oh, is that the latest Phone?”
Booster: “Yes, it has more Megapixels than the last one.”
My Wife: “I’m so jealous of your phone. It has more megapixels than mine!”
Me: “Do you want to use my phone to take some photos?”
My Wife: “No! I want a better phone with more megapixels than yours!”
This is seriously an accurate summary of conversation that we had back in October. She got her new phone – with more megapixels than mine – for Solstice.
I can just picture Booster going on about how there’s much more to better photos than just megapixels LOL
Speaking of which, re:autism, thanks for replying, it’s awesome that your wife got the diagnosis. also yeah, you probably were horny Dina in college.
Yes indeed, the optics are as important as the number of pixels, the more pixels, the more important the optics become to actually use the pixels.
A traditional digital camera with a larger image sensor but fewer megapixels will take better photos than a smartphone with more megapixels.
but a traditional digital camera is more equipment you have to bring with you.
But if you spend the money on the DSLR, you’re more likely to schlep it around to justify the cost!
Ha, the camera is the smallest and lightest piece of that equipment.
Have you shown her that XKCD comic?
This sounds like such a silly argument, but it does sound like it’s all in good fun and it was a great present
So outdated since the comic was written, we use Ultrapixels now
We use Metapixels here in the Metaverse.
In the future, cameras will only have one pixel each. They’ll use heavy processing and upscaling to make up the difference.
We’ll finally all have access to that “enhancing” software that previously only spy agencies and some otherwise undistinguished police departments were equipped with, as seen in The Movies
Nah, they’ll just be on all the time, and the carriers will just get a pixel each from everyone around you to synthesize the image they think you should have been making.
@Clif: As someone who dressed as Violet for Halloween, I appreciate that joke. ^^
Wouldn’t we go up to gigapixels?
And that’s why I don’t have a smartphone anymore. updating, upgrading without pause, to keep the pace with obsolescence of desires?
No, I’ll keep my old phony machine and let as much of rare-earth elements in the ground.
It is now Dynamaxels
“Bing it!” – Bad Machinery.
I love them busting each other’s chops.
And also the 4th wall, with the force of a million suns.
They didn’t break the 4th wall, they spoke in a weird way, largely due to the nature of the medium, and then acknowledged the way they spoke was weird. If anything that’s leaning on the 4th wall, as lampshade hanging often (but not always) is, but really that’s the sort of exchange I have with my friends IRL, so I’m not sure if this one is even sufficiently meta to qualify as even leaning on the 4th wall.
if “meta” referencing the medium from inside the story, then this is definitely meta. They didn’t literally say “we are in a comic” but the whole joke relies on the fact that they are.
How is lampshade hanging sometimes not “lean on the 4th wall”? i feel like lampshading is defined by implicitly breaking kayfabe? I’m probably working from an incomplete definition?
Lampshade hanging is when they point out a trope (usually) for comedic effect. Leaning on the 4th wall is when they make allusions to the medium but are sufficiently vague or indirect as to avoid fully breaking said 4th wall.
This could just be me, but I would say that if a line or conversation could plausibly happen in real life then it might not even count as leaning on the 4th wall. My friends and I regularly call out tropes when we see them in our daily lives, especially when they crop up in conversations, and we make use of them as a short hand form of communication sometimes where applicable. This means that I engage in lampshade hanging in my real life, and I am under no delusions about being a fictional character with an audience watching me/reading about me, ergo I’d say that any instance of lampshade hanging would have to be fairly contrived to qualify as leaning on the 4th wall using my standards. Obviously others are welcome to disagree.
There’s always a new superhero film and most of them are mid. It’s safer not to bother learning the names and to just assume there’s one playing at all times.
“Want to sit in a dark room and look at reasonably attractive men in spandex pants and eat overpriced sugar treats?”
“You had me at sit.”
I was thinking he might not be paying attention to superheroes anymore, (especially in live action movies since they’re just pumped out faster than I can keep track of, and I don’t have any trauma related to friends who were into superhero media) and be offering a generic ‘yes’
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/03-trial-and-sarah/traumaresponse/
I mean “that new superhero film” is basically the Marvel movie roadmap for the next 10 years verbatim.
An early preview showing for Ant Man 3 obv.
Wakanda Forever is still in theaters
It comes to disney+ tomorrow.
The joke could’ve easily used Robo-Vac, but then we wouldn’t have gotten the last panel.
Ah the ever burdening nature of different time scales. To which I say, “Balls.”
Then I would probably help two guys with the new problem of the week.
Booster is not a guy. If that’s what you meant?? Apologies if i just missed the joke
I was making a “Supernatural” reference, but it didn’t come across very well.
Finally, the confirmation I was looking for, that DoA takes place in a non-Covid AU. Wonder how long that can last?
Great username (and image) for this comment
Very much so. Don’t get COVID, it sucks!
It feels like everybody I know except me has gotten COVID. I’m certainly not jealous by any means– the long-term effects it has had and is still having on my brother are depressing as all hell to watch him struggle with– but it’s weird that they’ve all had this shared experience they compare notes about all the time and I’m just stuck saying “yeah, I can’t even imagine what it’s like.”
Just become a pandemic hipster. “Oh, I was going to get COVID, but then everyone started to.”
I can say you’re not alone, I got vaxxed and boosted as quick as I coul, but haven’t had the most recent booster, and I’m the only one in the family who hasn’t tested positive yet. It’s annoying to the rest of the family that I never get sick and the only time I went to the hospital was when I got hit by the truck and subsequent repairs as they found stuff later they missed the first time.
I miss it being last year when I could say this
I finally caught the plague for the first time a few weeks ago. 104 degree fevers aren’t fun; I can think of better excuses to sleep for almost two days straight.
That’s not even the worse of it. You can nearly suffocate, and right now long COVID has my back in AGONY
Yeah, I guess I got a mild strain. It was about 2 days of a high fever and another couple days of flu-like symptoms. After that it was about a week before my sense of smell was back to normal.
I feel like I’m complaining to a drowning person because my drink is too warm… Sorry you’re still dealing with it!
I have it now. Main problem at the moment is running out of everything, including the cough medicine that stops my lungs filling up with crap. Also, the rules for going back to work or to the shops are too vague. How DARE they throw it back on my “common sense”? I don’t have any.
Even worse than that in some places. As soon as those rules were rolled back in China, things immediately got worse again, people collapsing and other ugly sights. It got so out of hand that their government even stopped collecting statistics.
I’m not sure the chinese government not collecting (or not publishing) statistics is that dramatic a threshold
Paxlovid, my dear! Get it delivered or through a drive-thru window! Good luck to you!
Treatment dispensaries:
https://aspr.hhs.gov/TestToTreat/Pages/default.aspx
Here are the CDC guidelines on when to end Isolation and how to Isolate:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/isolation.html
Here is a directory of local health departments in the USA to get local COVID-19 resources and guidelines for Isolation duration and masking: https://www.naccho.org/membership/lhd-directory
Hope all goes well!
We are at the point where Covid measures are relaxed enough that you could put this comic post-covid.
But yes, perils of the sliding timescale.
tbf. it probably wouldn’t stop college students from doing what they want. tho a six foot distance, “every 3rd-4th seat” being empty in a movie theatre would be enjoyable esp for a comedy where it’d be hard to hear over ppl laughing (surprised there’s not more subtitles by default on movies, besides just the foreign translated ones)
The real reason Dotty was a dryer apart that whole time was Covid sanctions.
Wouldn’t hand holding defeat the purpose of said distance?
I’m sure they washed them afterwards.
Do theaters still require sitting x seats apart in the US? Over here (france) the covid restrictions have pretty much entirely been lifted. I still try to wear an FFP2 mask in public places, buy i’m often the only one (aside from some old people). I wonder if the scary cost of healthcare in the US does encourage more people to still take it seriously??
Haha. No.
Quite the opposite, really.
The given reason is that test concerts didn’t bring much more contaminations “because people were looking in the same direction” and not speaking to each others. Where I work, it’s a bout one person in thirty that wears a mask, and most customers are well over sixty.
Movie theaters in Bloomington are open and have been for a long, long while. Granted, neither of them are all that close to the campus, and given how late it appears to be I doubt it would be easy for them to reach either of them in time for the final showings for the night. The closer one is the east side theater, which is the shitty one, but they’d probably need to take a bus there to get there in any reasonable amount of time, and I’m not sure how close a bus would get them since I’m not all that familiar with the bus stop locations on that side of town, there might be a stop right there or they might need to walk a couple blocks, and that’s assuming there’s a bus going there with a route that goes through campus, IIRC only a couple of city bus routes do and while both of them go to the east side that doesn’t mean they go to the theater, so they might need to transfer at the bus station. All in all, I worry about Booster’s assessment for how easily they can make it there in time to catch the start of the movie.
How do you know that it’s late?
It’s January so the fact that it’s dark could mean it’s like 5pm
Closer to 3, lately.
Sunset in early-mid January in Bloomington is around 20 ’till 6 at the earliest, and the sky doesn’t get quite that dark until a half hour to an hour after sunset (due to residual light from over the horizon), this changes when the sky is cloudy, but that sky looks pretty cloudless to me. I’d estimate that it’s about 6:10-ish at the absolute earliest. The local theaters have their last show for the night between 6 and 7:30 for most of their movies due to not yet being on their full schedules after covid yet. They wouldn’t say “there’s a showing soon, if we hop to it” if it was only a little after 6 and the showing was 7 or later, I’d guess, based on my checking of the local theaters that we’re looking at a 6:40 showing at the latest, that means they have at most a half hour to get to the theater before the previews start, it looks like they’re outside of Read right now, if they walk to the east side theater they’re looking at a 38 minute hike, at least, according to google maps a bus could get them there in about 16 minutes, but you have to add any time spent waiting for the bus to that and sadly the busses here aren’t super reliable.
could’ve said “the new Spider-Man movie”, there’s always another one of them fuckin things
Sony needs to keep making them to retain the rights, so we’ll be getting Spider-Man movies until the end of time.
Or until Disney finally takes over every other media company, followed shortly by the world.
So next week then.
Are there more or less Spiderman movies than Batman movies?
Focusing solely on live action, not counting team-ups, there are 8 Spidey films and 9 Batman films.
Batman has Spidey vastly outnumbered in animated films, also.
I’ll also add that Spidey’s live action outings consistently entertain me more than Batman’s. A lot of that might be the music in those older Batmovies. It was a lot to deal with, most of the time. And then I just kinda liked the Nolan ones okay, nothing special in any of them and the audio pisses me off in a very serious way. Characters whispering followed by deafening rackets will always guarantee I hate your movie, and that’s all there is to that.
I wanted to disagree with this, but actually thinking about it Spidey’s had like four decent films and four bad ones, whereas Batman has a genuine masterpiece, two decent films, two bad but deeply entertaining films, three fever dreams and one throughly middling film.
For the record the Masterpiece is the 1966 Adam West movie, which is flawless
An Adam West movie, by definition, contains Adam West.
A minor flaw; in the final battle on board the submarine, the sky has wrinkles! Once you see them, they stare into your soul!
That’s just reality breaking from how cool that Batman is.
I can’t agree that there were only 50% decent Spidey films. I consider all of them really strong showings, each for different reasons.
I love the Mai Valentine icon <3
And for bonus points, in a few months it’ll be referring to the new spider verse. On the tricky side how they react after is key. I mean, no one in their right mind would react to spider verse and another MCU Spidey movie the same
I’ve cooled off a lot from Marvel since Endgame. Watched Black Widow, Thor and Wakanda Forever. They were all… ok? They do their job, but don’t really compare to Ragnarok or Black Panther. No real interest in Ant-Man 3.
Ant-man 3 makes me irrationally angry
The entire appeal of the Ant-man movies was they were self contained breather episodes between the major ones, just fun adventures with relatively low stakes
Why on earth would you make one that’s the centerpiece of the entire current plot line for the universe
Unfortunately Marvel but themselves in the ass – Ant-Man’s the only property with access to time/dimensional hoopla without the persistent asshole vibe that is Dr, Strange, since they have not yet introduced the Marvel Universe’s ACTUAL time/dimension crazy weirdos, the Fantastic Four. (That’s the one I’m sad about. It’s gonna be terrible, because no one in show biz seems to understand what the Fantastic Four actually are and aren’t. I know this because all movies to date have insisted they’re superheroes.)
True enough, but the Disfunctional Family slot has kind of been taken over by Guardians of the Galaxy.
They’ve been dicking around since Endgame. May as well put a plot somewhere.
What I heard was that the Director got tired of making the breather episodes and wanted to make an Endgame and they decided to let him
Not the choice I would have gone with.
Was Ant-Man ever claimed to be that? That seems like a really dumb way to market a movie.
The main villain of the last one was Walton Goggins and some goons he found on craigslist.
If Ant Man Three isn’t just an hour and half of an entire room of Time Displaced Micheal Douglas’s (Duglassi?) making Pym Particles like Walter Whites on acid, I’ll be sorely disinterested.
Love the concept of “sorely disinterested” =)
“Painfully unconvinced.”
“Devastatingly skeptical.”
“Crazed with ambivalence.
Don’t mind me, go on
I quite liked Crazed With Ambivalence. Stolen.
I loved Spiderman Homecoming, Black Panther, and Thor Ragnarok. But the whole Avengers III/IV thing pretty much ended my interest in the whole MCU franchise. If the directors can kill off main characters all over the place because they don’t like them, and kill off 3/4 of the world’s population and bring back *some* of them five years later and then just continue as if it was no big deal, why should I even care about these characters or this setting?
That was a scenario directly out of the original Infinity Gauntlet comic, although it was given much bigger stakes in the movie by placing the destruction of half the universe at the end of a movie and given five years to breathe rather than being deleted at the end of one issue and brought back an issue and a half later, with about an hour interim in-story.
Pesky actors age :/// /s
Didn’t Thanos also put Captain America’s head in a block of acrylic like five seconds after the snap thing, too? It’s been a minute since I read that story.
I had been not liking most marvel movies very much for a while before Endgame came around. Thor Ragnarok was kind of the major exception, but like. There’s only so many movies I can watch that start off by pretending to have substance and then never address any of the substance in favor of bombastic fight scenes. I would say maybe I just shouldn’t be watching action movies except that while I have criticisms of it, the most recent Batman really did do it for me. So did Shazam. And Birds of Prey. Like there are clearly superhero movies that work for me, but they have to like care about their themes and their characters in really genuine ways and for the most part marvel movies don’t feel like they do that and haven’t for a long time.
Me too, but I gave up watching any movie after Endgame.
Nothing catches my attention anymore. I don’t know why.
I actually bought one of the Spiderman animated movies because I saw so many articles praising the artwork, which was honestly spectacular. Also that movie did a much better job of introducing Miles Morales than the comics did.
Gonna try this tip. Thanks.
Infinity was pissed me off bc i only watched the preceding marvel movies so i could watch Thor Ragnarok and black panther. I’ve gone on a billion rants about how it ruined the MCU, blah blah blah. I refuse to interact with anything but Thor and the occasional Spidey movie if my boyfriend reeeeally wants to.
Thor Love and Thunder was awesome in my opinion. I mean, it wasnt like…high cinema or whatever but it was dumb fun which was all I ever needed it to be. a fun romp. Not enough superhero movies are fun romps these days
That’s the biggest problem with the MCU now. Marvel movies are supposed to be fun, but they’re not fun anymore. They’re homework. You have to study 8 movies and 15 new Disney+ series with nauseatingly awful CGI bc Disney works their SFX apartment like slaves, all just so you can watch a mediocre movie that’s more about “hey isn’t it cool all these characters are in this same room together?! Isn’t this crossover aMbItIoUs?!!!” than being entertaining.
Like MCU was always mediocre but at least it was less work to understand one movie before
This is smart writing by Willis because there’s always a new Superhero movie
Even more smart not to specify the franchise. That way, we can imagine them talking about a DCEU property and being too embarrassed to mention the title, the characters, or even the franchise altogether.
Relatable.
I mean, it’s Power Rangers 2, right?
Any day now. It’s only been six years.
Tommy’s still alive in DoA timeline.
Mystery Men 2. Please, just give me this.
We can even pretend that they’re in a universe where the DCEU wasn’t hot garbage that spawned the most annoying fanbase on the internet
I can’t watch Batman V Superman without falling asleep. I’ve tried five times.
Oh no, Becky’s awareness of the sliding timescale from that one Patreon strip is spreading
The Soggies will soon be upon us
Dear god, not the Soggies coming over into the Dumbyverse!!
(Willis, I came here to say please “date” your comic strips! Let them be full of nostalgia & reasons to suspend disbelief.
)
Oh, they are. This is just for the joke, willis is not usually so shy about referencing pop culture (see e.g. Taffy’s current avatar which is a reference to an in-comic reference to Spiderman 3)
My what?
Taffy has always had this avatar. You can go back in the archives and check.
After all, don’t want to mention the MCU and have this look silly in 2030 when the MCU is passe and the Rip-Off Comics Universe is ultra-hot.
It does sort of feel like the sun is starting to set on the MCU empire.
Now the whole craze is overly brutal deconstructions of the genre
The superhero craze started with Watchmen and the Nolan Batmen, and there have consistently been gritty deconstructions of varying quality throughout the reign of the MCU.
Endgame was their last hurrah, in a way. Most of the recognizable heroes are retired/killed off now. They might squeeze out another Thor, but I can’t really see a new Hulk movie and I’m not watching Guardians as long as Chris Pratt is in it.
Guardians 3 might do okay and Spider-man is consistently big, but yeah.
They do have Fantastic Four and X-Men back, so we’ll see what they do on that front. If they get a second wind, that’ll be how.
Oh Guardians 3 will probably do well, I just don’t want to watch it.
It’s a shame because I did enjoy the first two.
Oh, but they can do prequels and Super Babies and all the other exhausting stuff that studios do to squeeze one more drop of blood out of that turnip.
@Nono:
What? Why? Last I knew, Chris Pratt was dull and inoffensive. A quick Google of his name hasn’t turned up any horrific scandals.
People are mostly just sick of him being in everything. I think he might also be a fundie in some way, don’t quote this sentence.
So far as I can tell, it’s ‘cos years ago he attended an outspokenly homophobic church for a while, and this means he is Bad Forever. (That he presumably /left/ an outspokenly homophobic church gets ignored.)
Maybe. He seems to have been pretty cagey about the whole thing, so it’s hard to be sure why he left or even if he left. He also defended the church as not being homophobic.
A lot of it reads like he got in trouble and his PR told him to do damage control. Which is fine, I guess. At least he’s not trying to play “support me because I’ve been cancelled by the left” card.
Yeah I’m not sure where people got the impression he left just because he doesn’t talk about it openly. He’s an Evangelical Christian, as recently as the summer he still attends an Evangelical Fundamentalist Church- and no, it doesn’t say those words on there, you have to speak Christian to know it even has a position on anything- and the best anyone can say about him is that he’s real gosh darn nice so they’re sure he doesn’t believe anything bad. Sure, his response to accusations was “oh we’re all sinners, I’m divorced and that’s the same thing” but that can’t be a dogwhistle.
As we all know, someone from Minnesota being Nice has absolutely no chance of being anything other than face value.
… so he’s _might_ have some right-wing views, but keeps his mouth shut and _doesn’t_ use his platform to preach hate crimes?
**breathes a sigh of relief – can safely watch Guardians 3**
These days, I’m happy to accept a neutral ‘live and let live’ on the matter.
We were supposed to get a new cinematic universe if Bloodshot was a success.
…
*sigh*
“Oh, no, not another one!” — Marvin
Everyone knows that the King Features Syndicate universe is the next big thing.
When they finally crossover, the Defenders of the Earth movie will break 4 billion at the box office.
Are you implying that in our timeframe they won’t actually get to the theater until 2030? It’s slow, but it isn’t quite that slow.
Yeah, trying to have both pop culture references and a sliding timescale is like trying to push repelling magnets together.
In that you can do it if you’re really determined?
Also in that if your fingers or attention slip for even a second, things tend to go flying apart.
I mean
It isn’t much of a sliding timescale if there are no pop cultural references, now is it?
Fair point.
It’s true tho
And while we’ve got an Ethan strip and I’m thinking about it…
*Scenes of dinosaur-styled motorcars racing around a track*
ANNOUNCER: This is the best race we’ve had here in years! A full-on charge by the pack now through the chicane to the roundabout before the home stretch and everybody’s bringing 110%…
ANNOUNCER: The Ankylo BiTurbo and the Tri-Cam Triceratops are taking the fight to the PturboPterasaur and the Raptor Roller…
ANNOUNCER: The Stego Special and the Top Fuel T-Rex are trying to open a breakaway…
ANNOUNCER: And at the line—The Champion of the Shortpacked! Five Hundred for Twenty Twenty-Three!—
The cashiers and sales staff of Shortpacked!, holding their cars’ remote controllers. The kids and parents who’ve been watching the demo are cheering.
ANNOUNCER (FAZ): —Barbie in the pretty pink Dually Diplodocus.
DinoBro cars are, it seems, the toy car of the year. I don’t know if they really make RC or slot versions but this is comics!
While it looks like neither is ingratiating each other anytime soon…
I see you, Willis, I see you and that panel
45Uh-oh, the combination of Ethan and Booster is somehow shortpacking the universe. Is this merely a localized phenomenon?
More testing and observation is needed to confirm.
Quick! Apply for a grant.
SCENE: Booster and Ethan in a store-room, looking at a sign marked “Drama Tag.”
BOOSTER: I can’t even see what this is supposed to be attached to.
Wakanda Forever is still in wide release I can kind of see why Ethan would put off seeing a movie that’s all about processing grief.
Especially when that grief is processed … like that.
Ah, yes … trying to say “Nocturnal-Echo-Locating-Flying-Mammal-Man” without actually SAYING “Nocturnal-Echo-Locating-Flying-Mammal-Man.”
Night-time – acoustical radar – wing flapping while levitating – breast-fed – guy.
Non-diurnal – sound-oriented – vertically-mobile – hyoid-boned – dude
I do not believe Booster’s claim that they will not talk during the movie.
I question Booster’s physical ability to not talk for the duration of even the shortest of movies.
Do gifs qualify as very short silent movies
I mean, super hero movies are meant to be riffed on the whole time. Live action ones at least
The movie is weird. It’s “awkward” to go alone, but it’s impolite to comment on a movie with friends during the screening. Why go in a group?
I’ve always enjoyed in-theater movies more in a group, because you can lean over and mutter jokes during the loud parts. You also get to be part of a crowd that’s all here to see the show, so when you laugh or cheer there’s probably a couple of other people doing the same thing, and it feels more communal.
Come to think of it, a big crowd of people who are compelled to shut up for most of the event, sitting in comfy chairs, munching on snacks, in the dark… that’s kinda my ideal group setting.
But also, I saw the Sonic movie 8 days in a row when it came out, and only 2 of those viewings were with other people. The 6 times I saw it alone before work, it was a much more personal, meditative experience because I’d already seen it and knew what was happening, so I could tune in and out at my leisure and use the time in a way that was entirely my own without the possibility of other people I knew interrupting me with some random personal drama I couldn’t care less about but would have been obligated to engage with.
… sorry, I’m stuck on ‘saw the Sonic movie 8 days in a row’.
Why?
Even if you liked it… 8 days in a row? I don’t think I could watch my favorite movie 8 days in a row.
I was under a lot of completely unnecessary stress at the time and it was a pretty good movie, so I had an excuse to leave “for work” early and just Exist on my own terms for a couple hours before my shift. More about being unreachable than the movie itself, if I’m being entirely honest.
Because when you go alone you are existing for yourself, instead of existing for someone else’s benefit.
Because I don’t have friends who are that polite.
I go to the cinema alone most times. I like to sit all the way to the front of the room and most people hate that, so when i go with people usually we don’t even sit together lol.
What i do enjoy about going with a friend (or friends) is we get to discuss the movie afterwards =)
Not ONLY do I have no issue in going to the movies alone, I make sure to go to showings that have the biggest chance of having as few other people in the room as possible, so that I don’t have to fight off the urge to strangle whichever fucker has decided to play games on their phone with the sound turned up during it.
Don’t fight that urge. Employees at most places aren’t allowed to confront people anymore, so they’ll only ask the person nicely, which is never going to work. Take matters into your own hands and beat up the disruptive jackasses.
Employees at most places aren’t paid enough to confront people. If companies want security, hire security people, don’t task the minimum wage teenager with throwing people out.
That too. Or let the other patrons do it for free.
Egad, I think the last time I went to a theater, “playing games on your phone” was not yet a thing.
I think the last time I actually went to a theater How to Train Your Dragon 2 was playing which was 2014 according to Google, which coincides with how the grandson was behaving after the movie when he was tired and hungry. He was little then.
He could just as easily have said “there’s a couple of superhero movies we could pick from” because there’s always like three in theaters at any one time. (I’m actually sick of the genre because of the oversaturation.)
Ironically, I went to check and as of today, there were none at my local megaplex.
Here in the Metaverse we call that a defective megaplex.
Obviously I’m being hyperbolic. Just saying there’s been a lot and I don’t think it’s a good thing, as much as I adore the new Batman movie.
Right up until the Plague Year, I was avoiding the MCU stuff because it felt like too much of a time committment to watch a series od 20-odd films.
When you retire you can subscribe to Disney, binge-watch them all, and then cancel your subscription.
Hold on, Kraven’s getting a movie?
Ahhhh friendship.
So how do you guys handle pop culture references in your work?
I always make sure they’re from a certain amount of time before I make the thing. Nobody’s gonna bat an eye if I put a mute, blonde, green-clad swordsman in my game because nobody’s alive right now who was born before the first Zelda game came out. Long-running series are perfect for it, whereas a current meme is only gonna be interesting for a month or two.
It’s always easier to do commentary on things where the ink is dry
? Zelda was published in the 80s, while I was introduced to the world in the 50s and my Dad, who lives still, was a teen in the 40s. I’m actually too old to be familiar with that character. In my day, computer-driven games were played on Teletypes. Honestly!
The first game came out in 1886. You’re never too old to be familiar with something.
[Inserts cutting-edge references to Chinese Checkers and Ludo into comics to be down with the kids]
Chinese Checkers are neither checkers nor Chinese and Ludo is British Parcheesi.
all my works tend to be in a set time, and if they’re not, I tend just to avoid specific references- I don’t usually find it necessary in my writing style to name things like that. (that’s not to disparage those who do, it can be incredibly important to setting or very poignant to know what exact song a character is listening to on repeat, but it’s rarely relevant in my works)
Either by ignoring it or writing it in the indeterminate future and making shit up.
It funny when scifi set in the future wants to reference something current or recent, and they go “grandma once told me that in the before-times they had these things called “records”, she even had me to listen to one that i really liked,” etc ^^
Nearly as funny as scifi set in the far future that has secret messages being held in a gadget that reads your fingerprint and spits out a piece of paper.
If it doesn’t print out the secret message, how else can you swallow it after reading it?
It’s the old sci-fi with FTL spaceships, but they still whip out slide-rules to do the navigation that I love.
Makes you wonder what future advances our current ideas have completely overlooked.
Sun went down, i guess the chapter is almost over.
Are you talking about our civilization or the comic?
Hahaha! It’s funny cuz it’s true
The sun’s getting real low.
And now this comic will be dated as soon as Bing replaces google as the standard. Any year now…
Duck Duck Go.
Ask Jeaves, the AI.
DuckDuckGo leans on Bing results.
AltaVista….
Alta Vista never had the personality of Ask Jeves though.
I reached panel 2 and thought “oh hey, Willis is avoiding dating this comic by not saying WHICH superhero film.”
Then I reached the last panel and LOST IT at that being the Actual Punchline.
Booster dangerously close to having a deadpool epiphany….
Are those actually dangerous?
Asking for the audience.
It would depend on what he did with said epiphany. If he went about his day as normal and just winked at the fourth wall occasionally, no. If it sends him into the existential dread of knowing nothing and no one is real, it could be very dangerous.
I was thinking more along the lines of taking his epiphany and beating the audience over the head with it.
The medical term is “CHIM”, and the worst that can happen is you could pop out of existence. On the other hand, you could gain console commands and savestates.
Console commands would be cool and all, but most days I’d settle for extended play mode.
This isn’t quite breaking the fourth wall yet, but we’re getting kinda close to it with Booster and Ethan here.
This isn’t even really close. It’s called a lampshade, where characters bring a plot contrivance to the audience’s attention. It’s the most basic form of “leaning” on the fourth wall
Yes I feel pedantic tonight
In the future, everyone will have a copy of ChatGPT that can generate the lyrics to Yes, I Feel Pedantic Tonight.
Did someone lose their lampshade?
the lamp is above their head, I guess
Alt-text: the cons of having a buffer of this size.
I imagine Willis, running fixing an entire timeline, because something crazy happened in pop culture or in the world and he doesn’t want to lost the timing of the thing
Google is eternal, nations will rise and crumbles, space colonies will flourish and dwindle, but Google will never stop searching. Don’t ask what they are searching for, that way leads to madness.
There is a theory which says that, if they ever find it, it will be taken away and replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.
There is another theory which says this has already happened.
I thought that was what happened everytime the SEOs found what they were searching for.
The only thing I miss in this strip is a reference to Meta.
It was implicit. A Meta-phor if you like.
Booster’s genre-savvy.
Take that, 4th wall.
In my mind, they’re going to see James Gunn’s “Super”
Nobody in this strip searches on Prodigy anymore?
I participated in the interactive mysteries on Prodigy, but I don’t recall searching.
But it’s been awhile.
We never had any of those fancy online services like AOL or CompuServe. We had the number to the modem pool at my dad’s work and crawled the web at 9600 baud. (Apparently this call cost 10 cents a minute because it was long-distance.) Then in the late 90s we made do with the “10 hours free per month” NetZero before finally getting 1.5 meg DSL in 2003. That “was good enough” until I put together a business case that paying for analog basic cable, a POTS line, and DSL cost more than twice as many channels, phone service, and 50 meg Internet from the fiber company. This was 2011.
It was about being cheap the whole time.
The title attribute on this image has done more promotion for “Kraven The Hunter” than Sony.
This one was kind of painful.
at the time of posting Wakanda Forever is still in theaters, at least AMC, but you’d hardly call it the “new” superhero movie at this point
And they’re under a street lamp
Can’t tell if that was on purpose or if I’ve gone insane
it’s logically possible that both could be true.
I (friend) ship it.
XD
This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. If Booster is able to not fall asleep during the movie… Good for Ethan and let’s hope this will help Booster with Amber.
Since people are mentioning obsolete websites and computer programs (they used to be called programs, not apps), I’ll offer that in one of my grade schools, we had a computer lab and designated Computer class period. All we were allowed to do was go on Yahooligans or chat with Bonzi Buddy. It was a weird time.
This looks delicious! How did you know I was hungry?
I’m hungry for action too LOL XD
Oh my Cheese I love meta jokes like this!
Also avoids a passionate yet ultimately irrelevant 100-post argument between “True fans” of whichever superhero movie they like best, or MCU vs DCU, or movie-verse vs comic-verse, etc, etc. ^_^