A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
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!
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.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Angel's Orchard
Harry Bogosian
After the events in Demon's Mirror, Gerda has accepted her role as a Demon Hunter, and Cezar has traveled back to the Demon City. Demons have existed alongside humans for millennia, so things begin to return to normal. But an impossibly powerful Relic has been taken by one of the Demon Masters, and a silent war enters its final stages.
Peritale
Mari Costa
A fairy godmother with no magic tries her best to successfully fulfill a Fairytale and win the respect of her peers.
Lies Within
Lacey
Lysander's aimless and carefree life is turned upside down when he accidentally discovers that the cute boy next door, Simon, is a literal monster
Saint for Rent
Ru Xu
Saint Halliday runs an inn for Time Travelers. Unfortunately, he seems to attract other supernatural "guests," too.
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.
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
The Golden Boar
Magnolia Porter Siddell
A young woman joins a group of summoners who call forth Guardian Beasts to protect their isolated magical island. Unfortunately, her Guardian Beast is nothing like she'd imagined, and he's about to change her life, and everything she thought she knew about herself...
Sakana
Mad Rupert
Our heroes must navigate a hazardous dating scene, overcome personal anxieties, and wrangle unruly seafood in order to find love, peace of mind, and a paycheck.
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
Sleepless Domain
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
In a world where magical girls and their battles are commonplace, loss has become all too common as well.
Augustine
Winter Jay Kiakas, Windy
August and her ragtag group are just like everyone else, simply surviving in the treacherous Crater... When they stumble into what may be an artifact of the ancient past, their lives are thrown into a much bigger loop as they trifle with bounty hunters, monsters and gods.
Little Tiny Things
Clover
What are the little things that move us? The simple joys that warm our bodies and hearts? The micro life of insects that influence our world more than we think? The tiny steps we make everyday to have a happier tomorrow?
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.
Edison Rex
Chris Roberson
The adventures of the world’s greatest villain who, after defeating his superheroic nemesis, decides that he’s the only one left to defend the world.
ARISE, YE SKELETON KING
Brian Clevinger, Escher Cattle, Lee Black
A troupe of wandering "adventurers" down to their last silver "acquire" a map only to find the real treasure was the fiend they dug up along the way.
Freakshow
Scotty
A festival of broken people, blood flows in the center ring. Come one and come all, to the greatest show in all of Paris.
The Weave
Rennie Kingsley
A young woman pursued by bad luck is witness to the murder of the Fairy Queen of Summer. Can she get to the bottom of this mystery?
Monster's Garden
Ash G.
Champion pit fighter Kilo Monster was content to spend the rest of his days tending to his quiet garden alone... until he met a curious robot girl and her human family.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
Darkling Bright
Chris Hazelton
Kieran Bright is a college student home for the summer and roped into an online reunion with his old neighborhood friends in the most recent update of their favorite childhood MMORPG.
At least, he was, and that was the idea...
Join Kieran and his friends as they are pulled into another reality that may or may not be real and are forced to confront their own identities, the nature of simulated universes and reality itself.
Nigh Heaven & Hell
Scotty
Heather Vodihn is on a simple mission: find her father. However she becomes entangled with two strangers with mysterious powers being stalked by a group with bizarre demands. Heather must learn to trust her new traveling companions, even if she is untrustworthy herself.
Not Drunk Enough
Tess Stone
Logan Ibarra is possibly the unluckiest repairman in the world. A late night job should not have landed him in the middle of a mad scientist's squabble, but he soon finds himself surrounded by monsters and further madness with little tools to get out.
Three Panel Soul
Matt Boyd, Ian McConville
It's a pretty rigid format but we keep the content loose, you know?
Heroes of Thantopolis
Izzy Strontium Hall
A living boy fights to save the City of the Dead.
Barbarous
Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota
A crummy wizard and an anxious monster have to get over themselves and bring order to an apartment building full of misfits.
The Messenger
indui
In a ruin-abound town cursed with bad luck, Kai and Kalla--a young boy and a fledgling dragonbird spirit--take on a quest in hopes the reward will solve all of their problems.
Novae
KaiJu
A historical romance with a touch magic and a dash of astronomy. It chronicles the romantic adventures of Sulvain, a sweet tempered necromancer and Raziol, a passionate 17th century astronomer.
Ozzie the Vampire
Eric Lide
Ozzie and her best friend Kimmy are your average everyday normal art students – except one is an immortal vampire with superpowers and the other possesses a magic talking grimoire. Also they have to save their town from a demonic invasion.
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I bet he did something even crazier and is romantically linked to a minority that possibly practices a different religion. Or maybe he’s gay, has dyed hair, or got a tattoo. We can mix and match.
Well, Joyce is kinda doing the “romantically linked with a minority” thing already, and worse for a fungelical, he’s JEWISH! Space lasers! SPACE LASERS!
Is the Jewish bit really worse? i’m not even sure. The fundies i grew up with had a creepy fetish for judaism. It basically sums up as: “Wow, you’re God’s chosen people, yet we look down on you because WE understood that Jesus is the messiah and YOU didn’t. But you are so inspirational, Israel is so fascinating (This is where the bible stories happened!!!), let us steal some of your customs and pretend they were ours anyway!”
I didn’t realize how cringe that was until i left the church…
They do need an intact live brain to like spread themselves over. But they don’t need to be sapient since in one story they were infesting horses to sneak onto a base. They just seem to prefer it. So yeah, mostly.
There are a couple things we do know the host body needs to meet. A warm internal temperature, a central nervous system (there was an alien species they couldn’t use as a host because they had a distributed one) and to be of a certain size (Visser 3 registered disappointment that cats were too small) whether that’s body size or brain size is never clarified.
I honestly think that would be the coolest outcome, now that you’ve mentioned it. He didn’t cut them out because of anything about him that they specifically disapproved of; he just, like, realized independently that they were wack, without needing an inciting incident. It probably isn’t that, but given how those things usually happen in this strip, that would honestly be a different sort of gut punch out of nowhere.
Though seriously I do ponder over the idea he’s still religious just “the wrong kind” (be it even as mundane as a different flavour of Christianity or something else!)
Joyce’s dad said they moved a lot because they had political differences with each temple they went to, hinting at even more crazies than them. Maybe Jordan pulled a Percy Weasly and is like an ultra-mega-fundie.
Nah, Hank’s fears too. He was deep in the same culty branch of Christianity as Carol, and the rest of the family for that matter.
The real difference is that when faced with those fears, Hank realized he feared his kids being in danger, unloved and unhappy more than them practicing these “heathen” ways, and more than being wrong. Carol… didn’t.
It needs to be a series title. There are several different genres of parental fears. Some might be a bit more rational than others, like fear of getting caught up in gun violence in the USA or fear of your children having a hard time with life. Even those two examples can easily go to the extreme and have the parents’ reactions cause more issues than help, ie: overprotectiveness or pushing so hard for your young child to achieve things that they burn out.
Of course, you could also write it as not a self help book for parents and instead have it for the kids of those parents.
Hank may not have been the best father, but he always had a good heart, and he seems to be really trying. Plus, I don’t think we want all of their fears manifesting, as that presumably involves one of their children dying and like air-breathing sharks with cockroach legs or something.
I’ve not heard the word “disownership” before. It’s a good word. Like “disownment”, but with the added sense that she’s relinquishing “ownership” of them, because she totally thought she had that.
It’s always bothered me that Christians are mad at Eve for sharing.
Like, God says, you eat this fruit and you’ll die. (Technically true, since they’ll get banished from Eden for doing it, but not a direct immediate result.)
The snake says, “look, I’m eating the fruit, and I’m alive.”
And Eve tests it on herself! She tries the fruit, and she doesn’t die. It’s tasty times.
And then Eve is like, “woah, cool, I gotta share this” and shares some tasty non-death fruit with Adam.
And for this we’re supposed to be mad at her forever! She’s just a very responsible scientist.
heck like why did God not think to lock up anything which could potentially poison his newborn human children, just sayin that ain’t really responsible for a Heavenly Father XD
Why didn’t Pandora and Epimetheus seal and bury the pyx? Why didn’t the Jedi teach Anakin about Force healing? Why didn’t the Emperor explain his actions to his sons better while he still had twenty-one of them?
It’s a prequel. You can’t have a prequel not end where the real story began.
Going mythology nerd for a second, it’s like someone took a pretty decent* and rewrote it as fanfiction, jamming it into their incompatible worldview. Like the Jedi are Christians mostly concerned about converting all the sinners to space-Christianity.
*at least internally consistent. “Adapa and the South Wind” aka “Adapa and the Food of Life”
“Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting ‘Gotcha’. It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.”
—The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams
Or alternatively:
It was God who made the serpent,
And the woman and the man,
And there wouldn’t be an apple,
If it wasn’t in the plan.
–“It Was On a Friday Morning”, Andrew Pratt
Heck, double checking and Adam was apparently right there. So he knew the whole deal and where the fruit was from anyways. So what, he gets off scott free?
I’ve heard it said that this is a love story. That Adam recognized the fruit, believed what God had told them, and took it because he didn’t want to be parted from Eve no matter what.
On the list of things that don’t make sense about the tree of knowledge story, the “therefore all women are evil” moral is like, fourth from the top. But maybe putting it directly after the “therefore all humans are born evil” makes it extra clunky
They were already going to die in Eden, or there wouldn’t have been any point to the Tree of Life. Getting kicked out just made the intervening bit less pleasant.
Transitioning is big! I could easily see it changing the dynamic, shuffling the deck a bit and making Joyce struggle with seeing her as her sister because of how long the older “brother” relationship became normalized. I’d have loved to see that version of this comic but gosh Joycelyn is fun to watch tease.
I liked the bit where she leaned on Joyce to hold her up, just like she did last time she visited. Like I said in the comments then, it’s like her way of saying “yeah this part’s different but I’m still me”.
Voice training can be done before HRT and it would be a really neat way for her to express herself in the shitty situation she was in (even in secret.) No physical evidence like objects or changes in her appearance. Just waiting for moments when the rest of the family wasn’t around.
Yeah. Which would be most of the time, since she had an apartment of her own. She could do voice training and even start to build up a wardrobe and things relatively safely.
HRT would over time become too obvious to hide, once she started that step.
I see Walky’s making no further attempts to hide his civilian identity now that he’s been thoroughly tummy-punched. Is this the end of Nightguy? Or will he just stick to having Nightguy only come out at night?
had the thought “i feel like the way willis is drawing expressions has really been popping off lately”, remembered The Buffer, and followed that up with the thought “oh shit so what does his art look like NOW-“
Head on over to Tumblr and Bluesky to find out! The buffer may be almost a year ahead but he still posts preview panels and character models, all relatively spoiler-free.
Dorothy shouldn’t get to meet any more characters until she’s murdered one of the ones she already knows. It’s unrealistic for someone like her to know more than the exact amount of people she knew before this strip.
I know that the Incelerator is in another panel now, but I just wanted to point out that in Canada we have a historical precedent for attacks on women on a college campus by a self-styled incel vigilante, and that this arc might not be as funny and zany for some as it is for others.
It hasn’t really felt funny to me either, Willis probably knows what he’s doing but if toning down political comics with Robin when Trump won was the right thing to do, misogynistic villains can have a timing issue as well.
It was a double whammy for me when I realized this arc started less than 2 weeks after Dec. 6. I guess that’s probably not a well known date outside Canada? (And I know the comics are queued up months in advance.)
(For anyone genuinely not in the know, google Dec. 6 Ecole Polytechnique; CW femicide, misogyny, mass shooting.)
This is the first I’m hearing of it, possibly because it happened in another country, fully four years before I was born. Not the kind of thing they taught at my schools.
For us it’s an annual memorial day for the fourteen victims, as well as a day of awareness for violence against women. My university cancelled classes for it each year. It was one of the worst tragedies Canada has ever experienced.
Pretty fucked up how my first thought was “Only fourteen?”, as if that’s not a lot of people for one guy to murder. 9/11 happening when I was in 2nd grade (about 8 years old) seems to have skewed perception to some degree.
He draws web comics and porn on Patreon and Slipshine. The half-dozen comic lines are collectively called “The Caulkyverse” and feature a post-high school young general contractor handyman character nicknamed Caulky.
I think the Incelerator is an interesting character and would like to see more of them in the context that the guy trying to be a media influence and as wacky as the “heroes” is a good pitch for an antagonist. I find him a lot more interesting than Mary for example even if he’s less realistic and more dangerous as a kidnapper.
big emphasis on Yet (i wanna see it not just because I’m gay and require more undercut and nose-ring rep . . . okay actually yeah that’s the only reason)
My own name is Josh and I have a brother named Jordan, and that makes Joyce’s family’s names feel a wee bit weird to me. She’s like the little insane sister I never had. Also, I get why Jocelyne would wanna go with a more feminine name, but I’ve always thought “Josh” would be a cool name for a girl. It’s a little odd but it doesn’t reek of masculinity like “Steve” or “Dave” would. Also also, Joyce and Dorothy being accidentally gay for each other like some kinda Three’s Company mix-up bit is my favorite subplot.
I figured it out, Incelerator is Tony. They’re never seen together, he’s just significantly better at disguises than the main characters. Only Beef knows.
“it’s nice meeting you as Jocelyne” is a nice way to phrase it. It IS nice meeting people *again*, this time *for real*, after you’ve only met their carefully put-together facade! <3
“I’m just going to say it, shame on any of us who throws a trans child under the bus for thinking they’re going to get elected. That child deserves our support. Don’t worry about the pollsters calling it distractions, because we need to be the party of human dignity.”
Minnesota Star Tribune@startribune.com ⋅ 15h
Gov. Tim Walz is doubling down on trans rights — and criticizing members of his party who are retreating — at a time when the issue has become a political lightning rod nationally and back home in Minnesota.
they managed to get the arms and thighs to be different grays, which I wasn't sure they'd be able to do, the way the mold's set up
though maybe they're just producing a lot of extra thighs and/or arms in the wrong colors and throwing those away, i dunno
Cops are overgrown children cosplaying War, with all the rest of us forced into their stupid, childish game without our consent, consuming vast funds from the public treasury and ruining lives by the hundreds of thousands.
unknown@collie.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
I cannot get over these cops wearing night vision to arrest a dude on a Southwest Airlines flight in broad daylight.
Minnesota Star Tribune @startribune.com ⋅ 15h
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 16h
unknown @collie.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
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which ones are Jordan covering, I wonder
what if they’re made sausage-fest
I’m betting he draws porn
I bet he did something even crazier and is romantically linked to a minority that possibly practices a different religion. Or maybe he’s gay, has dyed hair, or got a tattoo. We can mix and match.
Gay might fit into “romantically linked to a minority”, just saying
Well, Joyce is kinda doing the “romantically linked with a minority” thing already, and worse for a fungelical, he’s JEWISH! Space lasers! SPACE LASERS!
Is the Jewish bit really worse? i’m not even sure. The fundies i grew up with had a creepy fetish for judaism. It basically sums up as: “Wow, you’re God’s chosen people, yet we look down on you because WE understood that Jesus is the messiah and YOU didn’t. But you are so inspirational, Israel is so fascinating (This is where the bible stories happened!!!), let us steal some of your customs and pretend they were ours anyway!”
I didn’t realize how cringe that was until i left the church…
Jordan’s probably an animorph.
Thanks for the actual lol.
oh, so Carol’s a Yeerk Controller?
Don’t Yeerks need functional brains to control?
I mean maybe she’s eaten instant Maple and Ginger oatmeal.
I thought they just needed a live body
They do need an intact live brain to like spread themselves over. But they don’t need to be sapient since in one story they were infesting horses to sneak onto a base. They just seem to prefer it. So yeah, mostly.
There are a couple things we do know the host body needs to meet. A warm internal temperature, a central nervous system (there was an alien species they couldn’t use as a host because they had a distributed one) and to be of a certain size (Visser 3 registered disappointment that cats were too small) whether that’s body size or brain size is never clarified.
I’m betting he’s gay.
That or his parents were overbearing and/or assholes and he cut them off.
I honestly think that would be the coolest outcome, now that you’ve mentioned it. He didn’t cut them out because of anything about him that they specifically disapproved of; he just, like, realized independently that they were wack, without needing an inciting incident. It probably isn’t that, but given how those things usually happen in this strip, that would honestly be a different sort of gut punch out of nowhere.
Sounds like “correct him by being overbearing” is exactly what they did, which led to him going low- or no-contact.
“All I’m saying is, we squeeze too hard, and we create another Jordan situation.”
-Hank
https://www.dumbingofage.com/squeezing-2/
could be porn, could be queerness, could be tattoos, could be support of Bulmeria, could be advocate for science-based sex-ed
for all we know he could be a pastor who made the “mistake” of encouraging church-goers to give to community instead of just church
there’s a reason why you see as much open contempt as you do towards the religious right
if there’s anything they’re consistently good at, it’s making enemies
Catholic Priest.
Though seriously I do ponder over the idea he’s still religious just “the wrong kind” (be it even as mundane as a different flavour of Christianity or something else!)
Joyce’s dad said they moved a lot because they had political differences with each temple they went to, hinting at even more crazies than them. Maybe Jordan pulled a Percy Weasly and is like an ultra-mega-fundie.
Married a Bolshevik and got sent to Siberia.
I’m ready with vodka, a thick Slavic accent and desire to crush US capitalism!
>:D
My bet’s on furry.
Also, accidentally reported the comment, mb.
Hank seemed okay with that
(not the reporting the comment, that’s negligible)
hahahahhahahahahahaha
Well, Carol’s fears, mostly.
Nah, Hank’s fears too. He was deep in the same culty branch of Christianity as Carol, and the rest of the family for that matter.
The real difference is that when faced with those fears, Hank realized he feared his kids being in danger, unloved and unhappy more than them practicing these “heathen” ways, and more than being wrong. Carol… didn’t.
Carol didn’t even think she was wrong.
“Didn’t even think she is wrong” is almost a full, one-sentence summary of every mom in this comic. There are, like, probably less than 5 good ones.
There are exactly 7. Amber, Dina, Dorothy, Mike, Sierra, The Casey, and Bold Marzespo all have good moms.
The fears of all reactionary fundamentalists, really.
Unholy unholy unholy is the Parasite of Hosts.
WE shall drain their White Gods of ALL their glory.
WE never give up on our struggle no matter what.
WE are the sum of all their fears.
WE are their ultimate, undying NIGHTMARE.
For WE need not be as gods, to turn the world inside out.
“All Our Parents’ Fears Are Being Made Manifest” is a peak book title.
1) sorry for reporting. Fat thumbs.
2) that NEEDS to be the book title.
This may in fact be the best book title comment I’ve ever seen.
BookTitle.upvote ++
^^ <3
Yes if this commenting system had upvotes, that would get all the thumbs.
100% down for a book title here! ~<3
Came here to make sure somebody said this, and was not disappointed.
It needs to be a series title. There are several different genres of parental fears. Some might be a bit more rational than others, like fear of getting caught up in gun violence in the USA or fear of your children having a hard time with life. Even those two examples can easily go to the extreme and have the parents’ reactions cause more issues than help, ie: overprotectiveness or pushing so hard for your young child to achieve things that they burn out.
Of course, you could also write it as not a self help book for parents and instead have it for the kids of those parents.
An excellent title for the eventual Omnibus.
Dumbing of Age: All Our Parents’ Fears Are Being Made Manifest
The Complete Collection
All 782 volumes
2 out of 3 fears down. Still waiting on the third.
Actually there’s probably way more than 3.
Clowns.
Maybe that’s what Jordan is doing
Jordan went to Pinfall City and Joined the Clown Corps. He fights crime.
He’s actually friends with Amazi-Girl on MaskBook, the superhero social network.
Oh, come on, Masktodon is RIGHT THERE
As Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf once said, two out of three ain’t bad.
It’s what they deserve.
Hank may not have been the best father, but he always had a good heart, and he seems to be really trying. Plus, I don’t think we want all of their fears manifesting, as that presumably involves one of their children dying and like air-breathing sharks with cockroach legs or something.
didn’t think i was gonna unlock a new fear today, but here we are
I think the last time I heard that statement, it was related to a human-centipede like mannequin.
Sounds like a thing for the Oglaf comic.
Gyo reference spotted. God I hated reading that book haha – the only Junji Ito story to ever give me nightmares
I actually had no idea Gyo even existed. I looked it up to write this reply just now, and I really really wish I had not done that.
Burber Derber is fine, but doesn’t their campus have an Applebapples or a Wendings?
Probably the taco place Johnny Cash sings about in Ring of Fire
I assume its named for 9 Chickweed Lane?
I thought you were just making that up, but then I looked again. Yeah, that is the 9CL family name.
They should at least have a Sbubby. How else would they Eef Freef?
I really love how you draw Jocelyne’s “dry wit” face.
Seconded. She’s a treasure
I love this strip so much. Aces.
They might have an ace or two, but I think most of them are definitely sexual.
Well, all their kids are still alive, so probably not.
… wait, do we know that they’re all still alive?
Pretty sure Jordan is alive.
burber derber has strong eef freef energies
what even is it
Agree, want to try their food, even though I strongly suspect Willis just pulled the name out of his ass.
Although, ‘Berber’ is the name of a group of North African tribes, so maybe it’s North African food?
These kids are going for 100% disownership by their mother and I am here for it!
+1!
It’ll be interesting if we ever see Carol again. I can maybe see us seeing her once more.
I’ve not heard the word “disownership” before. It’s a good word. Like “disownment”, but with the added sense that she’s relinquishing “ownership” of them, because she totally thought she had that.
This all their parents’ fears made womanifest. Which is even worse than manifest, because of woman’s sinful state of tempting Adam into sin.
It’s always bothered me that Christians are mad at Eve for sharing.
Like, God says, you eat this fruit and you’ll die. (Technically true, since they’ll get banished from Eden for doing it, but not a direct immediate result.)
The snake says, “look, I’m eating the fruit, and I’m alive.”
And Eve tests it on herself! She tries the fruit, and she doesn’t die. It’s tasty times.
And then Eve is like, “woah, cool, I gotta share this” and shares some tasty non-death fruit with Adam.
And for this we’re supposed to be mad at her forever! She’s just a very responsible scientist.
/cheeky reimagining
heck like why did God not think to lock up anything which could potentially poison his newborn human children, just sayin that ain’t really responsible for a Heavenly Father XD
Why didn’t Pandora and Epimetheus seal and bury the pyx? Why didn’t the Jedi teach Anakin about Force healing? Why didn’t the Emperor explain his actions to his sons better while he still had twenty-one of them?
It’s a prequel. You can’t have a prequel not end where the real story began.
A lot of the Bible honestly seems like embryonic stage Star Wars where early on George Lucas had some *terrible* ideas, so yeah that tracks XD
Going mythology nerd for a second, it’s like someone took a pretty decent* and rewrote it as fanfiction, jamming it into their incompatible worldview. Like the Jedi are Christians mostly concerned about converting all the sinners to space-Christianity.
*at least internally consistent. “Adapa and the South Wind” aka “Adapa and the Food of Life”
“Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting ‘Gotcha’. It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.”
—The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams
Or alternatively:
It was God who made the serpent,
And the woman and the man,
And there wouldn’t be an apple,
If it wasn’t in the plan.
–“It Was On a Friday Morning”, Andrew Pratt
“What does God need with a starship?”
– James T. Kirk
I like to think it was a test, and humankind passed. He wanted free moral agents, not robots or puppets, and He got them.
Heck, double checking and Adam was apparently right there. So he knew the whole deal and where the fruit was from anyways. So what, he gets off scott free?
I’ve heard it said that this is a love story. That Adam recognized the fruit, believed what God had told them, and took it because he didn’t want to be parted from Eve no matter what.
On the list of things that don’t make sense about the tree of knowledge story, the “therefore all women are evil” moral is like, fourth from the top. But maybe putting it directly after the “therefore all humans are born evil” makes it extra clunky
They were already going to die in Eden, or there wouldn’t have been any point to the Tree of Life. Getting kicked out just made the intervening bit less pleasant.
A bad scientist. She didn’t publish.
(unless we count genesis itself, which is not anywhere near a proper journal format.)
Good to see Jocelyn getting all the choice lines.
Jocelyn’s older sibling aura was the funniest part of her appearances and it’s held up when she returns.
She’s still the older sibling, so that tracks.
Transitioning is big! I could easily see it changing the dynamic, shuffling the deck a bit and making Joyce struggle with seeing her as her sister because of how long the older “brother” relationship became normalized. I’d have loved to see that version of this comic but gosh Joycelyn is fun to watch tease.
I liked the bit where she leaned on Joyce to hold her up, just like she did last time she visited. Like I said in the comments then, it’s like her way of saying “yeah this part’s different but I’m still me”.
The magic of soundless comics means Jocelyne has already mastered voice masking I guess.
I’m kind of assuming she hasn’t? If anything, her writing is most likely closer to her “true voice,” if I know writers at all.
She’s probably been practicing for at least as long as she’s been on HRT.
Probably quite a bit longer.
Which is, what, a few months? (If I’m remembering the extremely confusing Comics Time going on here)
And that assumes what she’s practising is….good
Voice training can be done before HRT and it would be a really neat way for her to express herself in the shitty situation she was in (even in secret.) No physical evidence like objects or changes in her appearance. Just waiting for moments when the rest of the family wasn’t around.
Yeah. Which would be most of the time, since she had an apartment of her own. She could do voice training and even start to build up a wardrobe and things relatively safely.
HRT would over time become too obvious to hide, once she started that step.
She could also do voice surgery as well.
Probably not on the budget she describes.
Been trying for 25 years its still a battle.
Why do I get the feeling Dorothy’s kinda digging Walky in the costume?
Because you possess pattern recognition, and thus recognize that she is a huge nerd XD
She’s even grabbing his titty in the first panel, I think.
I doubt it.
see Joyce, Dorothy has it right, do like her, learn from your future paramour. ~<3
She may be seeing Joyce touching Dorothy and thinking that covers one of mom’s darkest fears.
Is Dorothy back?
She’s right there.
Okay, yes, I think she’s found a new purpose, at least for now.
Good to see her looking happy again.
“Good to see her looking happy again.”
Same
i think we all could use a lil womanifestation in our world
I see Walky’s making no further attempts to hide his civilian identity now that he’s been thoroughly tummy-punched. Is this the end of Nightguy? Or will he just stick to having Nightguy only come out at night?
had the thought “i feel like the way willis is drawing expressions has really been popping off lately”, remembered The Buffer, and followed that up with the thought “oh shit so what does his art look like NOW-“
Head on over to Tumblr and Bluesky to find out! The buffer may be almost a year ahead but he still posts preview panels and character models, all relatively spoiler-free.
Dorothy shouldn’t get to meet any more characters until she’s murdered one of the ones she already knows. It’s unrealistic for someone like her to know more than the exact amount of people she knew before this strip.
I know that the Incelerator is in another panel now, but I just wanted to point out that in Canada we have a historical precedent for attacks on women on a college campus by a self-styled incel vigilante, and that this arc might not be as funny and zany for some as it is for others.
It hasn’t really felt funny to me either, Willis probably knows what he’s doing but if toning down political comics with Robin when Trump won was the right thing to do, misogynistic villains can have a timing issue as well.
It was a double whammy for me when I realized this arc started less than 2 weeks after Dec. 6. I guess that’s probably not a well known date outside Canada? (And I know the comics are queued up months in advance.)
(For anyone genuinely not in the know, google Dec. 6 Ecole Polytechnique; CW femicide, misogyny, mass shooting.)
This is the first I’m hearing of it, possibly because it happened in another country, fully four years before I was born. Not the kind of thing they taught at my schools.
For us it’s an annual memorial day for the fourteen victims, as well as a day of awareness for violence against women. My university cancelled classes for it each year. It was one of the worst tragedies Canada has ever experienced.
Pretty fucked up how my first thought was “Only fourteen?”, as if that’s not a lot of people for one guy to murder. 9/11 happening when I was in 2nd grade (about 8 years old) seems to have skewed perception to some degree.
He meant for it to be way more. But yeah, we’ve been through some pretty fucked up times this generation.
I hope sometime in a future we get to see Jordan, and find out what fears he’s made manifest for the Brown family parents.
He draws web comics and porn on Patreon and Slipshine. The half-dozen comic lines are collectively called “The Caulkyverse” and feature a post-high school young general contractor handyman character nicknamed Caulky.
I think the Incelerator is an interesting character and would like to see more of them in the context that the guy trying to be a media influence and as wacky as the “heroes” is a good pitch for an antagonist. I find him a lot more interesting than Mary for example even if he’s less realistic and more dangerous as a kidnapper.
Hell, it’s possible we might see a romantic pairing between Mary and incel-idiot.
Now now, mustn’t misname people, it’s offensive.
It’s pronounced “Incel-er-bater”.
His suit jacks him off.
I’d love to see Jocelyn redeem him with the power of her love.
Ick.
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Neither did I until about two hours ago!”
wait until they find out about Joyce’s not-quite-platonic relationship with the atheist who taught her how to masturbate.
Joyce: Not only that, but Dorothy showed me how to jill off. And I’ve done pre-marital hanky (but not panky) with my Jewish boyfriend.
Jocelyne: Yes, those are definitely on the parents-fears list.
Not true, Jocelyne. Joyce doesn’t yet have an undercut or a nose ring.
big emphasis on Yet (i wanna see it not just because I’m gay and require more undercut and nose-ring rep . . . okay actually yeah that’s the only reason)
Someone’s gotta introduce her to metal music, Joyce would be stoked to wear all black with chains and metal studs
What is a Burber Derbert?
Joke version of Erbert & Gerbert
Burber Derbert? It’s kinda like a Henway.
Is this the first time Joyce owns up to being an Atheist?
Yes. She’s definitely never mentioned it before.
To someone in her family, yes I believe so.
She told Carol during the argument over selling the house.
You’re right, she did!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/memorized-2/
It bounced right off though, because obviously Joyce was just lashing out. *eyeroll*
She tried to tell her mom when she visited, but I don’t think her mom was really interested in entertaining that idea.
My own name is Josh and I have a brother named Jordan, and that makes Joyce’s family’s names feel a wee bit weird to me. She’s like the little insane sister I never had. Also, I get why Jocelyne would wanna go with a more feminine name, but I’ve always thought “Josh” would be a cool name for a girl. It’s a little odd but it doesn’t reek of masculinity like “Steve” or “Dave” would. Also also, Joyce and Dorothy being accidentally gay for each other like some kinda Three’s Company mix-up bit is my favorite subplot.
Cool “guy” names for gals would definitely include Josh. I’ll add to the list Damon, Kyle, Howard, Buster, and Oliver
Remember, if your parent’s fears are becoming manifest, but everyone is happy, it’s because your parents are bad people
Maybe. Definitely here.
Parents aren’t always wrong though and teens can get themselves in a lot trouble while having a good time.
I figured it out, Incelerator is Tony. They’re never seen together, he’s just significantly better at disguises than the main characters. Only Beef knows.
AMEN, and AWOMAN
lel
All the Jordan talk, everyone’s forgotten John is possibly faking going on mission trips. Only four more days in January.
I’m not going back to through the whole chapter, but I’m pretty sure Jocelyn has the best sum up in it.
“it’s nice meeting you as Jocelyne” is a nice way to phrase it. It IS nice meeting people *again*, this time *for real*, after you’ve only met their carefully put-together facade! <3