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I think it was a month ago that I said the dad with a shotgun thing could end VERY badly. I remember somebody saying that characters don’t die in this comic.
I think I remember replying with “tell that to Roomies.” They misunderstood me and thought that I was referring to all that alien stuff that happened later on. I wasn’t. I was thinking of this. Because up until this point, Roomies was just a wacky series about college hijinks, and after… it couldn’t really be that anymore.
This is the biggest spoiler in Roomies! so if you’re interested in reading it but haven’t, I recommend not clicking that link. Also not reading this comment section, probably.
Dumbing of Age brought a huge influx of new readers that aren’t familiar with Willis’ older works, and Roomies! finished its rerun on itswalky.com relatively recently. I don’t think it’s completely accurate to cite 16 years here.
Walkyverse!Ruth was able to face her end with her head held high, knowing that she had done one last good thing. In the end… in the very end, that is probably the only thing that matter.
…You know, I’d argue that none of this is Amazi-Girl’s fault, but…well, if she hadn’t done anything, none of this would be happening. BUT, if she hadn’t done anything, Becky’d be gone. So…yeah, I don’t know how to feel.
Becky would be very, very slightly farther down the road, headed to a known location with a known abductor, wearing her seatbelt and obeying traffic laws, holding a GPS-equipped cell phone with 911 on the way and a confession recorded on the call. And hey, perhaps Toedad would never have seen the phone if things hadn’t been so hectic.
Basically, AmaziGirl made everything 85 times worse.
This. Before Amazi-girl showed up, Becky was basically resigned to her fate and without hope. Amazi-girl reinvigorated that hope, but that also meant putting herself back in extreme danger as well as continuing to escalate things with Toedad (which was an inevitability, he’s abusive).
That being said, she might have stood to think twice about throwing tire popping spikes on a freeway and the danger Toedad’s out of control car would pose to itself and others. I mean, I get that she needed to move fast, but honestly just literally throwing her weight around would have destabilized the car enough for his shot to miss.
Ok, so Becky would have been slightly dumber, but still in a car that is following road rules, with a known abductor going to a known location, slowly, with 911 aware that SOME thing is going on (cops are headed to the fountain) and Sal/Joyce en route to either locate them (a skateboard caught up, pretty sure a motorcycle would) or giving a statement to the cops (if they got stopped). Sal/Joyce could catch up, tail them, and call the cops and/or inspire Becky to be rebellious like Amazigirl did. Pretty much anything would be better than Amazigirl’s involvement.
Hell, even if Becky were fully kidnapped by her dad she’d be better off than this.
Actually, the car WASN’T following road rules. Before Amazi-Girl had even managed to successfully hook the car, Becky was already calling out toedad for going past stop signs.
While Amazi-Girl has certainly made the car go MORE out of control, the rules of the road were already being ignored. Ross was refusing to slow down for anything for fear she might get out, which means he’d probably run red lights and such too, which is also highly dangerous.
Actually, we don’t really know if Amazi-girl made everything worse.
The police had no guarantee that toedad would be going home, so they would be forced to intercept them at some point. (Remember, the police don’t have complete knowledge of toedad’s state of mind, and have to prepare for any eventuality, such as him planning on taking her to some unknown location, or taking her with the plan to harm her.) Any such interception was likely going to lead to violence.
Amazi-girl just caused the violence to happen sooner rather than later.
Plus if it was the Police, because Toedad has not only been seen brandishing a rifle but also fired it, the Cops would definitely have their guns drawn. Now throw in Toedad’s “I’m doing this to save my daughter’s soul & I’m willing to die to do so” kinda attitude, and you have a large possibility of Becky becoming an Orphan & maybe taking a few rounds herself in the crossfire…
By Intercepting them first, Amazigirl may have prevented all that, with Becky only becoming a Prison-Orphan, & not a Full-Blown-Orphan…
Actually, Amazi-Girl has significantly increased her chances of becoming an orphan and raised her chances of becoming a corpse from ‘0’ to ‘very good’.
It’s absolutely idiotic to think that sending the car out of control is a good way of saving somebody in it.
How do you know that Becky’s chance of being a corpse before Amazi-girl showed up was ‘0’? Various posters have given various scenarios where she may have been inured/killed… hit by stray bullets if/when toedad had his confrontation with police, abused/executed in order to “save her soul”. Heck, at one point Ross was running through stop signs until Becky asked him to be careful; he could have started doing so again (which would be an invitation to a significant traffic accident).
You cannot say that the risk to Becky was ‘0’ without having some sort of god-like knowledge of alternate timelines.
I’m not saying Amazi-girl’s appearance made things safer for anyone; just that we don’t have enough knowledge to condemn her either.
Becky is 5 seconds or a shitload of luck away from being t-boned by a tractor trailer. A situation she would not be in if the crazy woman in the mask had let the proper authorities – or at the very least a concerned citizen who doesn’t think the best way to save people in a car is to take away its ability to steer (caltrops under the drive wheels are never going to improve that) – deal with the situation.
* We do have enough knowledge to condemn Amber. Becky is 5 seconds or a shitload of luck away from being t-boned by a tractor trailer.
And would she have been better off if she had been hit in the head by a stray bullet when the cops and toedad have their inevitable confrontation? Or how about being better off when her dad decides “She is a sinner and must be put down” and shoots her?
Again, you are looking at only one timeline, and have no idea what might have happened had the events in the comic unfolded in an alternative fashion.
I’m fine with Becky becoming an orphan. And “he may kill/hurt her” is poor justification for “let’s put her in certain danger with overwhelming odds of death/serious injury”
Wow, seems I helped fire up another line of debate…
Please note I did say MAY have prevented that. The cops could still catch up, mind you the gun is now further back down the road & has fired it’s chambered round so far less likely for a shootout.
Ultimately, there are hundreds of ways it could have gone, Toedad could have fired over his shoulder & killed Amazigirl, The Cops could have realized she was being towed by the car in question & pulled them over/hit them with a P.I.T. Maneuver, plus hundreds more. Daniel the Human says that in hundreds of parallel universes they DID happen, each created by a slight variation, but that hurts my processors…
She’d also likely being regularly beaten or it’s possible that Ross may have already ‘executed’ her as ‘an incorrigible sinner’. Don’t presume to be smart enough to know every possible outcome just because you fear vigilantes.
I can provide a whole bunch of reasons why on earth she would STILL be in the passenger seat: everything that’s just happened has probably spanned 10 seconds, maybe 15 at the most, the car is swerving out of control which would probably make it very difficult to take the seatbelt off and adjust her position, and it’s a high-pressure situation in which she has about five seconds to act.
Yesterday, I got lambasted for suggesting that Becky would have moved to the drivers’-side seat. Apparently grabbing the steering wheel from the passenger’s side is all you need. Also: brakes? Who needs ’em.
Well guys, guess you win. I’ll admit I didn’t see Becky being unaware of how to remove a seatbelt.
Haha, sorry…didn’t mean to lambast. But seriously, that is a tiny car, there is no way she can’t reach the steering wheel from her seat, seatbelt or no. And again: emergency brake is right there in the middle (though that’s probably something to avoid using while the car is actively spinning out and you’re trying to avoid killing people on the roof/sides).
I feel like it’s less “unaware of how to” and more “afraid to while the car is spinning out”. She talked Toedad down(ish) back at the fountain, but she can’t talk down centrifugal force.
That too. The seatbelts in my family’s car lock up if you so much as lean forward with insufficient nonchalance. Becky’s probably pinned. Even if her hand can physically reach the wheel, she’s got a really bad angle for steering.
One thing we also have to remember, even if she DID manage to get the wheel, Amber blew the tires on the front passenger side. That car is going to be handling like a speeding brick at this point. With Becky’s size and (likely) lack of muscles, she might not even be able to get the wheel to turn. Hell, Amber is even having a hard time turning the wheel on on today’s strip.
And I have a feeling that Amber & co are going to be relatively ok; however, the girl that’s following them will probably have to swerve to not him them… and make a mistake, and end up in front of the semi instead.
That poor truck driver is having the worst PTSD moment ever, right now. Hopefully he is also able to react more quickly the second time through. And when this is over he is going to become an accountant.
I’ve had all sorts happen in my short career driving trucks. Still think about the guy that ran out in front of me. (And the stupid girl that pulled out on me and made me damage to load due to braking. Damn her eyes)
My father in law was a lifelong trucker, a true gentleman. One night he was driving a semi and a car full of teens on a winter road slide into his lane. He, without hesitation, drove his truck into the ditch, knowing it could kill him.
The car with the teens then slid into the ditch right in front of him. Three dead kids. Yes, truckers can have PTSD.
Great, Jokerdad commenting on events involving Toedad…
Mr Willis has said there’ll be no deaths in here before, as many have pointed out before. That said, to quote Disney’s Aladdin movies, “You’ll be surprised by what you can live through…”
NICE. I loved Duel. Watched it on the sofa next to my dad decades ago. I can still remember him pointing out to me how the truck, not the driver, was the character.
The rope’s wrapped around her arm and her hands in a position that will cause the air bag to break it. She’ll be lucky if her arm doesn’t get torn off. It’s definitely not going to stay intact.
In one of the direct-to-video sequels to Aladin, Jafar returns to do bad things. One of the rules that are binding him, however, is that genies (which he is now) can’t use their powers to kill people. When reminded of this, he makes an evil grin and replies “You’d be amazed what you can live through”
Toedad will become fused with his gun. He’ll have to manually beat his own heart by firing bullets, the recoil driving the butt of the rifle deep into his chest. The process will be quite painful. Unable to hold a steady job because of his condition, he won’t be able to pay for the ammo. Like an addict he’ll perpetually scramble for his next hook up, doing things he’s deeply ashamed of, even going so far as to forfeit eternal salvation in his attempt to stave off immediate death.
Knowing there’s no deaths kinda murders all the gravitas really. Like… Oh No.. A truck.. Whatever will happen? Will the fucking Eagles swoop down and save them? One of them looks like a hobbit.. maybe it’ll be enough to summon them.
I totally went with the band too…and all I could think of was the Dude appearing in the back seat and saying “Come on man. I’ve had a shitty day and I f**kin hate the Eagles!”
Putting on your seat belt kills you. BUTTERFLY EFFECT
Sorry, yesterday I watched the last episode of GameTheory’s Until Dawn LP.
All the Until Dawn is still burned into my brain
I LOL’ed at this comment. That song always cracks me up. It’s a TERRIBLE idea to let Jesus take the wheel – he has unhealed wrist wounds and a long flowy mane that always gets in his eyes.
*ahem* Now that I got my FIRST! moment out of the way…
So at this point Amber’s two grip points are the steering wheel (inside car with nothing but her hand) and the rope attached to Toedick (dangling outside car) with most of her own body weight outside the car as well?
Oh, sweetheart. Sweetheart, no. I think the best* outcome we can hope for right now is that the truck dodges them and the driver is hurt, so everyone just suffers from extreme guilt instead of actual devastating injury.
*yes, I realize that is not best for the truck driver, but some lives really are worth more than others when they don’t really exist
No, toedad has one end of the rope, then it’s wrapped around her wrist, but the other end is attached to a grappling hook that looped over the roof and wedged under Becky’s door.
She’s just taken a head wound that’s bleeding, plus all the joint hyperflexibility in the world isn’t gonna stop her from breaking something here. Shock onset sounds very, very likely.
I think that the shock, pain from the impact, and the effects of the possible concussion are all catching up to her and she is starting to grey out on us. She will come to surrounded by cops and paramedics to find Becky OK, ToeDad under restraint by members of the Bloomington PD, and absolutely no memory of anything after hitting the windshield of the trailing car.
Is Amber literally bending over backwards? Seriously I cannot picture how the hell she’s twisting her body to do this.
Can someone show me a diagram or something?
That’s a good point, at first I thought she just turned her body around real quick but then the rope would be on the wrong arm in the last panel….this requires additional study :/
Yeah I dunno, apparently I too require a diagram. Perhaps Tuesday’s strip will be more illuminating? (Giving Willis the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t accidentally swap arms here…)
(ok evidently he did accidentally swap arms in the last panel, since when i later went to check, he’d fixed it. mystery solved! not that anyone is going to read this.)
(and not that i’m going to come back to this comments thread weeks from now and check to see whether anyone replied to this.)
If nothing else, I think the hands are wrong. At first she’s got the suction cup in her left hand and rope in her right, then she lets go of the suction cup and grabs the wheel, but she’s grabbing the wheel with her right hand.
Maybe she quickly switched the rope to her other arm in between panels? That’s all I got….cuz that’s definitely her right arm on the wheel there, going by the thumbs.
That’s the rope still around her right arm, AG is now on her belly across the top of the car with Ross hanging off her right arm as it grips the wheel and Willis only knows what she’s hanging on to with her left hand against the inside of the roof.
All of this may be moot, of course, because if the car is already SKIDDING SIDEWAYS, there is very little that even a driver buckled into the car could do to correct its course, much less … whatever the hell is going on here.
Red-car-lady-who-might-be-Maggie is actually wrapped around a tree a quarter-mile back, after the remaining caltrops took out both her near-side tyres.
I *think* the one thing that might help is if she could turn the car in the same direction as the truck is going . . . But then Becks would need to hit the gas like there’s no tomorrow.
It’d actually be good even without the gas, as it would leave more room for the car to crumple. (Trunk to front seats, vs door to passenger.) If that’s enough to avoid serious injury for Becky, I’m not sure. It’s unlikely to prevent serious injury to those not attached. (Though less chance of the car rolling on top of them.)
I can’t be sure, but I think the way AG is turning the wheel should make the front end spin further around so the car ends up facing the wrong way on the road, but not half across the median… I think. I’m allowing for her spending a lot of James Bond style points to make it happen.
Or is the Dumbiverse counterpart (I think we on Bring Back Roomies! decided the truck driver was Duncan from Shortpacked! as fanon, so possibly that’s him.)
But I like the thought of that trucker just going from universe to universe, forever plagued to cause accidents passing along the highway towards IU. Poor guy.
“Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the truck driver as he crashed was ‘Oh no, not again.’ Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the truck driver had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.”
It’s not like it’s the first time Amazi-Girl has jumped on top of a moving vehicle. She’s a seasoned professional.
And there’s “jumping on top of a moving vehicle” reckless, and then there’s “abandoning the controls of a moving vehicle so you can climb out the window with a gun” reckless.
This is good point. We’ve been focused a lot on Amazi-girl since, let’s be honest, she’s been taking the most action here.
Easy to forget that Toedad’s recklessness given the situation easily, EASILY outstrips any idiocy on Amazi-girl’s part. I don’t think she was expecting him to stop driving the effing car! Just because Amazi-girl is more flashy doesn’t mean she’s most responsible here.
Well, yeah, you’re Megatron. On the one hand you finally got to kill Optimus Prime. On the other hand, Starscream dumped you into space (Not even Soundwave objected. Ouch.) and Orson Welles made you regenerate.
Okay…
Just whipped out the ’86 movie and started watching, having not paid attention to it since the 80’s.
Now, I find the opening scene to the movie really, REALLY disturbing!!
Side note: Why-in-the-hell was everything back then so influenced by Heavy Metal…?
No, no. The movie: “Heavy Metal.”
The color and animation in the Transformers Movie looks just like it.
I didn’t notice back then but, it’s really obvious. Probably the same companies doing the in-betweens.
If the car has come ot a complete stop, then how does turning the steering wheel help?
Also, Becky, Becky, Becky….you should have unbuckled and slid over into the driver’s seat ASAP. If school kids can take the wheel of a runaway school bus, Becky should have been able to take over driving the car.
If the wheel is blown out and the car is spinning, I’m not sure how grabbing the steering wheel at this point will allow them to easily regain control. Becky unbuckling at this point would just make her a projectile in the inevitable crash.
BTW, for those keeping track and wondering about when Joyce & Sal will arrive and what they’ll find when they do, we’re coming up on the next tumblr preview panel.
welp, guess someone’s going to die horribly tomorrow.
in somewhat related news, does anyone else read Tarol Hunt’s: Goblins (goblinscomic.org)? it has a goblin named dies horribly in it. you can probably guess what happens.
I am so anxious about everything. Holy shit there is a truck. Amber is doing superhuman things that will surely break her bones and/or back. Ross is basically roadkill at this point. Everything is CRAZY.
….. remember when this was a nice little comic about college life? lmao
Yeah, the Amazi-Girl secret’s about to blow sky high because Amber’s about to spend the rest of the comic in a wheelchair. Might not be paralyzed for life, but certainly for the next decade real-time.
At this point I don’t see how Toedad does not get seriously FUBARed here. Even if AG manages to avoid hitting the semi he will either get chucked from the car (there is too much slack in that line if she can reach her arm into the car while he still holds onto it) or he will get struck by the semi. Even if neither of those happen, it will be because AG overcorrected and they go off the road to the right (which is a deep ditch).
Additionally, Toedad’s momentum is going to rip AG’s arm out of its socket something fierce.
It just occurred to me that nothing is actually anchoring AG to keep her on the roof of the car anymore. If she can reach into the driver’s side window that means her entire body can fall off of the roof.
Snap, it’s even worse than that. The arm she is connected to Toedad with is the same one that she is steering with. His momentum will either cause her to swing the car back to the left or will yank it fully to the right (depending on where her arm is at the exact moment his momentum yanks on it).
It just occurred to me that Danny probably still gets to be traumatized by an accident involving this truck driver in this universe as well. That sucks. I actually like Danny, even if many others don’t.
One actually has to wonder what impact this will have on their relationship as a whole.
I mean he has to realize this is a self destructive path she’s on right?
Would…would something like this be a noble role to give a loved one? She’d be a hero, but would it be a bit grizzly? Maybe I’m over thinking things and everyone will be fine
What I see:
-The Mazda was gaining on AG while on the skateboard, IN THE SAME LANE.
-Ross tried to shake AG.
-There’s copper colored SUV, went by on the other side.
-Ross’ car spun left, Mazda still matching pace.
-Now, Ross’ car is sliding into opposing traffic (the forward direction.)
My question is: Why was the Mazda so close to AG?
-It’s clear that she reacted to Ross trying to shake AG off but, continued rather than stopping, altogether.
Just a guess:
-The Mazda was attracted there.
-Our attention is on Ross and his Chevy but, her attention was on AG and the skateboard until AG mentioned Becky.
IIRC, the REASON Willis said nobody is dying is because the passage of time is so dilated that the grieving process would take forever. I think the “dealing with people we know being permanently vegetative/paralyzed” phase would be similar.
Where are people getting this from ? I keep hearing it over and over, are you sure this isn’t just some collective hallucination made up to protect you from the emotional trauma that eventually follows Willis’ comics ?
The situation was going to be escalated anyways. The cops would have eventually tracked down toedad, and given his state of mind, there would probably have been some conflict/shootout/etc. The advantage in having Amazi-girl intervene now (rather than wait for the cops) is that it prevents toedad from enacting any sort of end-game plan (e.g. holing up in some fortified location, harming/killing Becky for her “sinful” ways, etc.)
do you actually think sal would be able to get becky anyway? becky is the only one who called the police (which both joyce and sal shouldve done) but it doesnt exactly seem like theyre about to come for becky anyway. if amazi girl can get the car out of the way of the truck, everythings pretty much settled for her succeding
The police were on their way to the fountain, when they passed by Amazi-Girl car-skiing. Becky called after noticing AG, so dispatch would have to notify police to turn around. (plus, various bystanders at fountain prolly called, too). All this is happening in very short time.
And this is assuming police were actually going to the fountain… Remember, toedad was first seen with the gun going into the woods. That might be where the police go to first.
By the way, I did a google search… Did you know that apparently a large number of 911 operators DON’T have access to cell phone locations? Some cities haven’t updated their cell phone networks to track cell phone data, some cellphones don’t transmit the data, etc. Your chance of a 911 operator knowing your cell location can vary from 10% to 95%, depending on your location.
So, even if police know they’re hearing the kidnapper and victim from inside the car, they may not know where they are, even with the cell phone.
True enough, but consider where this is happening — Bloomington, Indiana, home to a major university with over 45 thousand students, most if not all of whom have cellular phones. Based solely on that metric alone, if there was anyplace in Indiana that would make sure their 9-1-1 system was updated enough to be able to determine a cellphone’s location, Bloomington would be it.
re: police…woods/fountain… on campus, at least. Dispatch is re-routing them as they are listening to Becky’s drama play out. (gun wielding guy is now in car; bystanders point: they went that-a-way!… points north-ish) At least one cop must’ve noticed car with AG, on their way past them, and figure it is a possible lead. *shrugs*
Oh, I’m sure the police would have enough sources to piece together what happened eventually. I just think that, given the circumstances (lots of calls, many from people with incomplete and possibly contradictory information; limitations on ability of 911 system, etc.), its not surprising that they did not automatically locate and respond to toedad immediately.
I wonder if Amazi-Girls more the Batman save everyone type of superhero or the Wolverine save most people but has no problem letting that serial child killer fall to his death type of superhero?
I’m surprised that no one has realized that Sal said that if Amazi-girl is in involved that everything will go sideways and the care is ACTUALLY going sideways…
OK now I have placed the chase as it were, from the fountain west on 7th to Walnut then north on Walnut until the bridge. That’s a hell of a long way to skitch on a borrowed skateboard and then jump on the roof with most of it on a rural 2-lane…
And (based on the centerline markings) they were at least up to the golf course when Becky saw Amazi-Girl, which means she was on the skateboard for that long, including a significant section of, as you said, rural 2-lane, with a speed limit of 55.
Er, there’s apparently two golf courses. They were past Bayles Road, for a better landmark. The main action sequence likely took place alongside “Taylors’ Par 3 Golf Course”.
Good find. I spent some time trying to locate it myself last night but gave up after about ten minutes. I didn’t let myself go far enough north.
Although now, knowing where they are and how far that is/was from campus, you’d think someone along Walnut Street/Business 37 would have noticed Amazi-Girl hanging on for dear life and not just dismissed it as “damned college kids!” Police response is most likely much closer than still poking around and asking questions back at Showalter Fountain.
Noooooo Willis what is it with you and trucks that make me all emotionallllllll, how dare you be a good writer and make me like the characters you do bad things to
If the Truck get’s a tag, then so should the woman in the red car.
Which would have been better? What Amazi-Girl did that set up this current situation? or if she had let’s Ross go with Becky and let the Police handle it, eventually?
I think that completely depends on when the police intervened. If they tried to intercept him on his way back to Indiana it would have likely resulted in a car chase, possibly a shootout, and most certainly death for at least Becky’s dad. Maybe he would have tried to kill her rather than let her go into their custody too, or just driven so recklessly trying to get away that a fatal crash occurred for them and possibly others.
On the other hand, if they were just waiting at his residence I think it would have been far less risky. Joyce could have just waited for the cops and given them the address, while Amazi-Girl gathered up witnesses and their contact information. Make sure everybody who saw and heard him threaten Becky and Joyce talked to the cops and might be able to testify in court if need be. Of course the police might still have tried to catch them on the highway, but maybe not.
Of course, the assumption would be that he WAS going back to Indiana. While there may be some logic that he would just “return home” there is no guarantee of that. I suspect the cops would have to plan for other eventualities. (e.g. kidnapped her to take her to some unknown location for “healing”, taking her to execute her, etc.)
Based on the other possibilities, I doubt the cops would just go to his residence and wait, and would probably be proactive in stopping him as soon as possible.
The woman in the Red Car is the ghost of Roomieverse Ruth. She is destined to cross every universe, stopping every instance of that truck from killing innocents. GhostRuth is the true hero of this tale.
The real reason Dina is dating Becky: she’s apparently got tiny trex arms. Who in the heck can’t reach the steering wheel from the passenger’s side, even if the seatbelt is locked up? Like…. come on, it’s clearly a compact car, any adult can reach.
I’m sorry I’m being mean now so I guess I should stop commenting, but every day my suspension of disbelief falls further into loss.jpg territory.
I didn’t question it when I was reading, but this comment actually made me curious enough to go out test this in my own car. Mine’s a compact, looks roughly the same size as the one Becky is in (maybe a little smaller? not sure what model that is). With the seatbelt locked up, my left arm could still easily wrap around the steering wheel, but my right (the one next to the door) could only just brush it. With only one hand at that angle, I simply didn’t have the leverage or grip to turn the wheel any significant amount. And this was in a non-moving, non-wildly-swerving vehicle.
Also now my chest hurts from straining against a locked seatbelt. Don’t let anyone tell you that webcomics aren’t dangerous.
This also depends on armspan, as generally-speaking one’s arm-span from fingertip to fingertip is the same as one’s height, so a tall person would be able to reach better than a short one.
What about the driver of the truck? Dude probably just got through therapy after that horrible accident left him scarred and anxious, just felt comfortable enough to renew his license and get back on the road, and now this shit again.
If the seat belt latch is under pressure (like from Becky’s weight being thrown against the belt; the car is swerving all over the place, remember?) it can become very difficult to unlock.
That hot tag is sooooooo bad. Not just the quote but the same damn truck.
Most surely a Damn you Willis moment!
Passengers belts hook on the drivers side. Toedad is standing and probably pushing against or blocking the seatbelt latch, keeping Becky from getting to it.
As for Amazi-Girl, she is putting up one Hellva fight. I’m not sure how she’s bending that way,o
Amazi-Girl yanks the wheel, sending the car into a hilariously out-of-control skid past a hospital before harmlessly coming to a stop in a corn field. Everyone staggers away from the car unharmed, temporarily forgetting why they’re in this situation in the first place.
Except why take the time to create a preview panel of a hospital unless one of the cast was going to end up there. Unless Willis is evil enough to draw a random panel just to mess with everyone – which I concede is possible – it’s a pretty reasonable conclusion.
I’m reading every instance of “no regrets” as “no regERts” because of that silly Milky Way commercial. Which makes me smile in spite of all the stupid repetition.
I choose to believe the original truck was an AI. Just like here.
And that it is annoyed by having to constantly hose off bad drivers out of its grill.
Why do these Lemmings keep popping in front of Truck.
The woman driving the red car is, as several readers have recognized from her appearances in Shortpacked!, Willis’s wife Maggie. She is not going to die.
Ross, I want you to think long and hard about the fact that you ALMOST GOT BECKY KILLED. What did you think would happen when you climbed out from the car window WITH A GUN? WHILE THE CAR WAS RUNNING?
And no whining about the vigilante on the roof. There are tons of ways you could have handled it that didn’t involve leaving the car running…. if you weren’t more worried about Becky escaping than Becky dying, that is.
Sooooo, is it this universe’s version of the driver or THE SAME driver? Because I’m a bit freaked out by the prospect of a pandimensional spedition company
Can someone show me where it was said that there would be no deaths? Cause otherwise, that sounds exactly like something that a feels writer would do….
I don’t often say this, because when I do, I want it to have meaning. If or when I type these words out, any who read them will know I’m actually upset. (Or joking.)
There is a great difference between doing the right thing and doing the easy thing. When you choose to become a hero, you spend the rest of your life fearing that you will somehow die a villain or even a monster.
For different reasons, both Ross MacIntyre and Amber O’Malley are considering these truths at this very moment.
I mean, I can understand her not reaching the wheel in say, a bigger vehicle. But it was literally shown a few strips ago in “mirror” that she’s well within arms reach even if her seat belt was hugging her as tight as possible. but.. ok.. drama gon drama.
Is it weird that… I’m kind of bored of this storyline? I’m already kind of having to take time to wrap my head around the physics of how everything is supposed to work. Plus the last ten strips or so have more or less just felt like an Amazi-Girl action comic strip. Maybe it’s just action/drama fatigue, but I’m not actually horribly invested in whatever is going to happen in the immediate future.
In Book 1, under a strip in the roofie sequence, Mr. Willis wrote, “This storyline had a very important self-imposed rule. At no point would I allow myself to end a strip on a cliffhanger where Joyce was in immediate physical danger.”
Perhaps it makes a difference that it’s Amber and Becky, not Joyce. More likely, he’s decided we’re tough enough to handle this.
BECKY TAKE THE WHEEL!/ Take it in your hands/ Cause I can’t do this on my own/ I’m holding Ross/ Let’s give him one more chance/ (Fuckin’ Fucked if I know why)/ BECKY TAKE THE WHEEL!
So remember when Willis previewed Joyce’s current outfit and said that, five years in, he felt safe to call back to the previous comic? And we all stupidly believed he was talking about the outfit, and not a certain scenario with a truck, an old brown car and a red car?
In fact, oh jeez, I just had to go back to the BBR site and check the date on that redrawn strip. Two years ago, longer than I thought, so probably not connected. Still possibly during the planning for this arc, I guess.
I may not have been around from the very beginning, but I’ve had plenty of time to appreciate Willis’ occasional bouts of magnificent bastardy.
The wonderful thing about webcomics:
If this were Batman, I’d yawn and say,”Of COURSE he’s going to survive!”
With Amazi-Girl you wonder if SHE’s going to survive, if Toedad is going to survive,if the daughter is going to survive, will the police jail Amazi-Girl for endangering them all, when Joyce and Sal are going to show up, will Amazi-Girl finally realize who Sal is, will Sal beat up Amazi-Girl for taking stupid chances, will Amazi-Girl be hospitalized for cracked ribs…
SUSPENSE! You don’t get that in regular comics anymore. Batman can’t die, he’s a franchise.
No; she knows Sal by name, but she DOESN’T know that Sal is the one who held up the convenience store and caused the pivotal moment that crystalized her becoming Amazi-Girl.
You’ve got that backwards: She physically recognizes Sal as the girl who took Ethan hostage, but doesn’t know her name or relationship to the rest of the cast.
Goddamnit Amber, don’t you get yourself killed because of that freakin’ idiot!
I’m with Al Shroeder on this; I’ve got about 25 different webcomics I read daily and this is the only one that’s managed to get me all riled up with the suspense!
You know who I feel sorry for the most right now? The truck driver. He lives in a Willis-verse. God only knows how many people engaged in some life and death struggle or inner crisis have found themselves in his headlights. Poor bastard is probably a broken shell of a man, every day praying that he can make it through that next haul without endangering someone else’s life. And every day his prayers fall on death years, cause the God of DOA is Willis, and Willis don’t give a fuck.
It sounds like part of his problem is praying to death years instead of deaf ears. I mean, the deaf ears aren’t going to hear him either, but having any interaction with a death year is probably a bad idea. Frankly a death year sounds like some kind of ancient curse, the sort of one that might force you to inadvertently kill bystanders over and over, watching in horror as their life is crushed and you are unable to change the outcome.
I’ve now devised an epic headcanon where, shaken from grief after accidentally killing Ruth, Truck Guy uses Joe’s dimensional gate to leap to a new dimension free from his sins. He even finds another job driving trucks in this unfamiliar Bloomington and moves on with his life.
Ross’s actions are so divorced from reality that I begin to wonder if he is used to engaging with it. Like, maybe he spends a lot of time at home alone with only his idea of God for company, working him into a horrible fervor.
I’m not saying that should excuse his actions, but it would go a ways to explaining them. His community failed him.
His community, which consists of his fellow fundamentalists, created him. In their eyes, he’s a shining beacon of The One True Faith and one of their greatest success stories.
That’s unclear. We’re going to find out, I suspect.
Joyce’s parents are apparently part of that community and Hank, at least, will be showing up in the near future.
It’s possible his entire community, including Joyce’s parents, will be behind him – leading to a really serious break between Joyce and her folks.
It’s possible his community, while still disapproving of LGTBQ people and even women’s liberation will disavow him now that he’s gone publicly violent. Conveniently ignoring their support at all the stages up to now.
It’s possible the community will support him, but Joyce’s parents won’t, leading to some awareness and growth for them.
There’s an old joke that asks: “What’s the last thing that goes through a bug’s brain when it hits your windshield?” The answer is: “His butt.” (Oh come on, Walky would have laughed.) I wonder if the same will be true when Fundie hits the grill of the truck.
So much for this being the ‘realistic’ version of the Willisverse… the version with the aliens in it is more believable.
I once read an review online of the remake of the movie ‘The Four Feathers.’ The reviewer got it right, explaining, “A movie about honor and duty made by people who understand neither.” Willis is clearly a skilled dramatist, but I don’t believe he truly understands the things he is talking about.
I am open to suggestions to where I can go to “truly understand” superhero physics! Is there a lab somewhere that they demonstrate superhero physics and I can take notes? Are hired models suspended in windtunnels wearing capes? Do they get real working grappling guns? How many of them are bitten by radioactive animals? This kind of place sounds awesome.
If superhero physics and cartoon physics are the same, couldn’t you just review all of the Roadrunner cartoons? I believe Wiley Coyote defined most of the cartoon physics laws. He was, after all, listed as a Super Genius in later years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_physics
Sadly, I don’t know of such a lab. Does sound awesome.
Though if we’re just setting limits for Amazi-girl, you probably wouldn’t need the radioactive animals, unfortunately. Just the wind tunnel and grappling guns.
I don’t have any real problems with it, but some people have commented on their suspension of disbelief being broken by this action sequence. I was just trying to distinguish between that and the character side.
As for actual superhero physics, I think the question is more people’s expectations. Amazi-girl is staying well within even non-powered superhero limits. And even within non-superhero action movie hero limits. OTOH, if the reader is thinking of her as just this semi-crazy girl who dresses up like a superhero, then this will all have been way over the top.
Wait, there really IS a place you can go, Willis! A physics professor at the University of Minnesota actually wrote a book on the physics of superheroes, and it was pretty awesome: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physics_of_Superheroes.
Character motivation was my point. He’s clearly working out issues from his childhood, which is fine. I am not arguing about the truth of his experience, or how he saw it _from his perspective_. But there are many characters involved in this who are NOT former fundamentalists, and I don’t believe he quite gets their motivations. Joyce is certainly characterized well. But I don’t believe he gets the rest of the cast down very well, essentially the further along the strip moves the less ‘true’ it feels. It is difficult to create believable characters, otherwise we would all be famous novelists. His work is impressive, and addictive, he’s attracted an impressive and loyal fanbase but that can create an echo chamber of love for an artist. Characters like Becky’s dad or Sal do not feel real, and ‘Amazi-girl”s two personalities both feel as if they wandered in from other stories or even genres. Cartoon evil like Head Alien is easy, I don’t think Becky’s dad is supposed to be a cartoon evil, but he is comes across that way.
That must be why we’ve had people writing thousands of words about Ross’ motivations and state of mind over the post couple of weeks, because he’s so flat and cartoonishly evil
Multiple readers have actually had to walk away from this storyline because it echoes experiences they personally went through, because Ross reminds them utterly of their own father. He’s realistic, he’s just not a type of person most of us have ever encountered. And for that I am very thankful. (But, I have my own survivor story that makes Ross look like a good guy, so YMMV)
“He’s working things out from his childhood” isn’t constructive criticism. It’s creepy and invasive to say that about someone else.
Fr the record, dozens of readers have come forth to talk about how Toedad here is practically a recreation of the shit they went through in their childhoods. He’s not an evil strawman christian villain.
I was just thinking this same thing. 100% accurate. Good intentions notwithstanding, everyone has a far greater risk of being killed now than if they had just waited for the police.
Arguable. Becky’s chances if Ross had gotten away with her might have been pretty bad.
And if the police did catch up with them, the resulting chase/stand off/shoot out wasn’t likely to end happily either. I could easily see Ross dying in a hail of bullets. I could also see him taking Becky with him in a murder/suicide kind of deal.
On the gripping hand, you’re right that things aren’t looking so rosy right now.
Amazi-girl did escalate it, but there’s no way it wasn’t escalating, short of just letting him get away.
The sane thing would have been to let Ross drive away and call the police. Amber’s just made things worse, but even Joyce and Sal couldn’t accomplish anything by driving after them.
As has been pointed out before in the comments… we don’t really know if Amazi-girl made things worse, because we do not have any knowledge of alternate timelines.
We do not know what toedad would have done if he was allowed to proceed… a murder/suicide, a dangerous confrontation involving gunfire and plenty of stray bullets, etc. It is doubtful whether toedad, when confronted by the police, would have threw his hands up and said “I surrender”, and its doubtful whether the police would be gentle in their treatment of him.
Spinning out in a car with the risk of being hit by a truck is not a situation anyone would want to be in, but it might have been the best of a bad group of outcomes.
I dunno, in the scenario where Amazi-girl doesn’t interrupt them, only two people are really at risk (Ross and Becky). Now there are at least four (Becky, Ross, Amber, the truck driver), and maybe even red car bystander.
When you consider risk, you also have to consider probabilities.
It is true that Amazi-girls actions put some people at risk that would have otherwise been safe… but at a possible escalation of the danger to others. For example, toedad was destined to die by the cops…. by Amazigirl getting involved, he may actually have a lower chance of dying. The same may (or may not) have been true for Becky… without amazigirl, we know something bad was going to happen with 100% certainty (although admittedly we weren’t sure how bad). The actions of Amazigirl actually decrease that risk.
One other thing should be noted… you are right in that there are now 4 or 5 people at risk of injury/death. But had the cops gotten involved, there would have been risk to the police themselves. (Granted, police officers are expected to handle such risks, but that shouldn’t be ignored.)
Before, there was a possibility that one person was likely to get severe emotional abuse at the hands of her bigot dad. He wasn’t planning to take her home and shoot her, he wanted to go pray her gay away. Ross is unstable, so maybe he does something more drastic, maybe not. The police, if they do their jobs correctly, have many ways of approaching this situation in a way that minmizes the risk to Becky, and even her father.
Amazigirl has put them in a situation where they will be excessively lucky to escape without some fatality. The only way anybody can view this as not being an escalation is if they are literally deluding themselves into thinking this situation is less deadly than it is. Panel three? In real life, that is a “three people are definitely about to die” moment. Unquestionably. No chance of avoiding it. It won’t turn out that way, because comics, but it -would- in reality. Basically nobody in a car survives being hit by a semi, and there’s no way anybody is getting that vehicle back under control enough to avoid the collision at that point. Unless that actually backing away from them, that is a picture of dead people.
For some reason I can’t reply to Heavensrun, but it should be noted that “pray away the gay” isn’t just a few people in a circle, hands folded, begging the Lord to change the heart of the poor sinner. It’s an all out emotional, and all too often physical, assault. The best outcome is Stockholm Syndrome, the worst is and eventual murder/suicide. Every bit of humanity is stripped away and the abductee is forced to conform. It is easily a fate far worse than death. Many of the stricter churches use a “Good old fashioned foot washing ceremony” to enforce compliance. It’s a demeaning practice where the elderly are lined up on the front row and the young are required to wash their feet. Failure to joyfully comply will result in the public humiliation of the parents, and continued ridicule of the youngster. The techniques used to pray away the gay are not so limited and include sleep deprivation, starvation, limiting water intake and toilet privileges, and in Becky’s case, repeated rape. The danger she faces from AG’s action are trivial compared to what she faces from a “Conversion Counselor.”
The replies only go to a certain number of levels, and we’ve capped it. And I understand all of that, but that is still less urgently dangerous than a car spinning out of control into a t-bone collision with a semi while two people wrestle on top of the roof. And since he kidnapped Becky at gunpoint, and the police have been called, there was very little chance he would get a chance to do any of that. Best case scenario would have been they get home, he puts the gun back in its case, locks her in her room, and a few minutes later the police surround the place, bust down the door, and taze the crap out of him before throwing him in jail and letting Becky go back to Joyce. Worst case scenario was that the police confront him directly and he gets into a shootout, which would -still- be less dangerous for Becky than -this- is.
Conversion therapy techniques vary. Some won’t be so harsh, particularly those that adults undergo willingly. Even those that work on minors with their parent’s consent often try to remain mostly within the law, though many stretch it. Any group that Ross would take Becky to though, would be willing to hold a legal adult against her will and thus are likely to have very few scruples. And yes, corrective rape is a thing.
Beyond that, even in the more general case, if a kidnapper gets away with his victim the chances of her being found again drop drastically. Amazi-girl doesn’t even know the full story, but kidnapping itself justifies drastic measures.
This is spiraling out of control, but that’s still Ross’s fault, not hers.
I’m not sure AG going after the crazed, murderous lunatic can be classified as escalation. By now, the police have arrived at the campus and been shown photos, and probably videos, of the incident. They have a description of the car, Fundie, and Becky. If they had caught up with them on the open road, spike strips, a road block, or a tap maneuver, would be a possibility. In any event, Fundie would still be armed and a standoff would be inevitable. Now, if they find a wrecked car and three injured passengers, they can go straight to rescue mode. The remains of the rifle will be collected from the road for evidence and charges can be filed later. The District Attorney has his work cut out for him, but the coroner won’t have to be involved.
I’m thinking of it like the third man in rule in hockey – two guys fighting get penalised, but the third guy to join in gets it worse because hes turning it into a brawl. Amazigirl is taking what could have been a delicate hostage situation and turning it into a potentetial multi vehicle pileup with fatalities. (Speaking of which, what happens to the other cars that hit her caltrops?)
Agreed, and I’m expecting consequences. Not necessarily legal or physical (owing to timeframes), but Amazi-Girl’s intervention – as awesome as it is to watch – has absolutely made the situation more immediately dangerous for everyone involved, and I think Amber will have to face that in the aftermath.
Back after she red-misted on Blaine, and picked an unprovoked revenge fight with Sal, I think she was starting to accept that Amazi-Girl isn’t a particularly healthy coping mechanism for her issues, but she seems to have put that aside after Dorothy chose not to out her. She’s regained confidence (Whiteboard Ding-Dong Bandit on), and sure, AG is pretty harmless when taking on petty campus criminality – but this situation is something else entirely. It’s not overconfidence; we had the “can’t fail anyone” mantra to point out how far she’s driven by her demons. As much as I love AG as a comic book hero, she’s not good for Amber in long run.
Something that just occurred to me… Becky called 911, but she did so using Dina’s phone. So, if the 911 operator is listening in on the call and looks up the owner of the phone, they may get the identities of the kidnapper and victims wrong.
Not likely. They just heard her say “It’s my girlfriend’s [phone], jackass!” So they’ll likely understand that even if the phone comes up under another name, that’s just her phone. Police aren’t usually brainless feebs, despite what the media might try and narrate.
True, I had forgotten about that. But the phone conversation had gone on for almost a minute before that particular fact was revealed. So even if the 911 operators/police figured it out, it would have been at least another minute or 2 before they’d get things figured out.
Does it really matter? It gets the cops to the scene, knowing there’s a crazy guy with a gun and a kidnapped girl. The rest they can sort out once they’re there.
As they’re picking through the wreckage, judging by more recent events.
Assuming the phone is still on, probably on the floor of the car, imagine what the 911 operator must be thinking now.
Operators can sometimes track cellphones that have called 911, but not cities have that technology installed, and some that do are only accurate to within a mile or 2.
Not that it was a bad idea… More information is good. I was just concerned that inaccurate information might muddy the waters, delaying action (even if things correct themselves eventually.)
Seriously, are you trolling? I get that you are mad at Amber escalating, so you want to answer that by killing her, Becky, and DoA Maggie, and leaving the hapless trucker and the homophobic abusive douchebag dad? That’s the side you’re rooting for here?
I hope YOU know that truck drivers frequently suffer severe, sometimes career-ending, PTSD from accidents like this, especially if there are fatalities. Some can never drive ANY vehicle again, let alone the one with which they make their sole income and is often the only trade skill they know. If the driver were to then find out that the only ones killed were a kidnapped girl, an innocent bystander, and a girl trying to save the kidnapped girl?
Go fuck yourself. I am a trucker. I always wish for the best for another driver, as I know all too well the anguish of a person dying on one’s truck. It never gets fucking easier, but I have people to support that rely on that income. They are what keep me driving.
Not sure what Amazi-Girl can do at this point to help matters. “Point the wheels in the direction of the skid” doesn’t seem useful.
FWIW:
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has given the Focus a “Good” overall rating in the frontal offset crash test and an “Acceptable” rating in the side impact test. Front and rear side curtain airbags and front seat-mounted torso airbags are standard. (Wikipedia)
Cartoon physics are the ONLY thing that will save them, with two of them hanging outside the vehicle. If that truck was at highway speed when he saw them, he can’t stop, and the IIHS rating means “HA HA NO” to a semi. This sort of accident is (rarely) survivable, but they’re never pretty. (Link to a similar accident to this setup that the car driver survived; warning for uncensored accident footage from a semi dashcam: https://youtu.be/CKNQG6pSYig ). More often, the result is that the semi driver survives it and the occupant(s) of the car do not. (Link to article and photos of semi vs Ford Focus that resulted in three fatalities: http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/rescue-underway-after-semitruck-rolls-onto-car-in-detroit/24732388 )
In a few weeks, after the tragic death of all the major characters in a multi-vehicle collision, Jason and Penny (woohoo, my avatar!) will be opening the Institute of Superhero Physics, and offering a full scholarship to Mr. Willis and other worthy candidates. Apply now!
Because Danny’s reaction to Amber dying would be to jump right to the next available person right? There wouldn’t be any drama whatsoever with him dealing with the fact that his girlfriend died in a terrible crash? In the midst of attempting to do heroics?
Yeah, this is pretty much what I meant. It wouldn’t avoid ALL drama, cause both Danny and Ethan would be dealing with loss and grief, and both would have lost Amber to her heroics, which in was a secret they both shared and would, in hindsight, feel guilty for not intervening in. I doubt they would just suddenly move on to each other’s arms, even if they did have shared-grief-sex in the midst of grieving. (Is that a thing? Maybe.)
But it would certainly be a twist, as their relationship has been foreshadowed rather clearly, so the issue of “What about Amber?” has been on everyone’s minds. Will Danny cheat? Will he and Amber break up? There’s a lot of possibilities, and outright killing Amber would be a surprising way to clear up the issue. Not necessarily the best way, and certainly not a drama-less way. But the drama would be less relationship drama and more grieving-over-shared-loss-and-crushing-guilt-I-am-not-ready-for-this-yet drama.
Still fun to read, though. Even if it reminds me of a lot of fanfiction back in the day.
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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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despite acting with integrity, having a few regrets
(just a little surprised the cab isn’t red)
No Regrets!
There’ll be regrets by the end of the week.
YOU
YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Regrets, I’ve had a few;
But then again, too few to mention.
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption….
For those who need the reference:
http://www.itswalky.com/comic/act-with-integrity/
No why would you do this that is not the reference we need right now
Willis even made the cars the same colours… AUGH WHY
Because he’s evil.
Even the car chasing the muddy-brown car is the same colour, given some leniency for lighting levels.
Wait a minute… *Reads remaining chain of events in “It’s Walky* This could potentially go very bad indeed…
Why yes. Yes it could.
Colors? When I first read this it was black and white. Man I’ve been reading Willis’s stories a long time.
They’re referring to the 100% new art in that link on the bringbackroomies website.
I think it was a month ago that I said the dad with a shotgun thing could end VERY badly. I remember somebody saying that characters don’t die in this comic.
I think I remember replying with “tell that to Roomies.” They misunderstood me and thought that I was referring to all that alien stuff that happened later on. I wasn’t. I was thinking of this. Because up until this point, Roomies was just a wacky series about college hijinks, and after… it couldn’t really be that anymore.
Like three strips later Joe is already making jokes, Aliens show up, and Joyce gets traumatized by watching porn.
It is the reference we deserve.
No, it’s the reference we need.
This is the biggest spoiler in Roomies! so if you’re interested in reading it but haven’t, I recommend not clicking that link. Also not reading this comment section, probably.
God dammit you tell me that 3 seconds AFTER I click on it
I mean, I would call “Jesus Dies in the Bible” level spoilers on this thing, considering it’s 16 years old… but yeah, heads up.
Dumbing of Age brought a huge influx of new readers that aren’t familiar with Willis’ older works, and Roomies! finished its rerun on itswalky.com relatively recently. I don’t think it’s completely accurate to cite 16 years here.
yeah, but people have been mentioning Ruth vs trucks in the comments here since Ruth and/or Danny (and/or trucks?) first showed up in DoA
Jesus…dies? NOOOOOOO
(“It’s okay, Alice. He comes back three days later.” –LALALA can’t hear you…)
WHY WOULD YOU TELL
NOW BIBLE IS RUINED
NEVER READ AGAIN
It’s okay. There’s still Revelations and the surprise twist.
NO THE CAR BEHIND IS RED WITH A GINGER INSIDE WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME
DAMN IT DAMN IT DAMN IT
Walkyverse!Ruth was able to face her end with her head held high, knowing that she had done one last good thing. In the end… in the very end, that is probably the only thing that matter.
“No Regerts?!”
“Sorry, I was eating a Milky Way!”
“No ragrets.” “You have no regrets? No? Like, not even a single letter?”
“No Rugrats?” “Yeah, that show sucked.”
Maybe instead of being Optimus Prime, it’s Ultra Magnus.
He doesn’t have time for this now.
That’s “He can’t deal with that now.”
Prepare for emergency separation!
No, wait, that could also be very bad, considering the positions a few of them are in now…
Oh yeah, forgot the line.
CORNER!
No, but he’s tagged as ” definitely that same truck driver dude as in roomies!”
Poor bugger just can’t get a break, all these cars throwing themselves in front of him all the time. At least this time he’s not out of control…
Yet.
oh nooooooooooo
WELP, looks like Sal was right after all ಠ_ಠ
…You know, I’d argue that none of this is Amazi-Girl’s fault, but…well, if she hadn’t done anything, none of this would be happening. BUT, if she hadn’t done anything, Becky’d be gone. So…yeah, I don’t know how to feel.
Becky would be very, very slightly farther down the road, headed to a known location with a known abductor, wearing her seatbelt and obeying traffic laws, holding a GPS-equipped cell phone with 911 on the way and a confession recorded on the call. And hey, perhaps Toedad would never have seen the phone if things hadn’t been so hectic.
Basically, AmaziGirl made everything 85 times worse.
Becky put on her seatbelt and called 911 after seeing Amazi-girl.
This. Before Amazi-girl showed up, Becky was basically resigned to her fate and without hope. Amazi-girl reinvigorated that hope, but that also meant putting herself back in extreme danger as well as continuing to escalate things with Toedad (which was an inevitability, he’s abusive).
That being said, she might have stood to think twice about throwing tire popping spikes on a freeway and the danger Toedad’s out of control car would pose to itself and others. I mean, I get that she needed to move fast, but honestly just literally throwing her weight around would have destabilized the car enough for his shot to miss.
Ok, so Becky would have been slightly dumber, but still in a car that is following road rules, with a known abductor going to a known location, slowly, with 911 aware that SOME thing is going on (cops are headed to the fountain) and Sal/Joyce en route to either locate them (a skateboard caught up, pretty sure a motorcycle would) or giving a statement to the cops (if they got stopped). Sal/Joyce could catch up, tail them, and call the cops and/or inspire Becky to be rebellious like Amazigirl did. Pretty much anything would be better than Amazigirl’s involvement.
Hell, even if Becky were fully kidnapped by her dad she’d be better off than this.
Actually, the car WASN’T following road rules. Before Amazi-Girl had even managed to successfully hook the car, Becky was already calling out toedad for going past stop signs.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/stop/
While Amazi-Girl has certainly made the car go MORE out of control, the rules of the road were already being ignored. Ross was refusing to slow down for anything for fear she might get out, which means he’d probably run red lights and such too, which is also highly dangerous.
Actually, we don’t really know if Amazi-girl made everything worse.
The police had no guarantee that toedad would be going home, so they would be forced to intercept them at some point. (Remember, the police don’t have complete knowledge of toedad’s state of mind, and have to prepare for any eventuality, such as him planning on taking her to some unknown location, or taking her with the plan to harm her.) Any such interception was likely going to lead to violence.
Amazi-girl just caused the violence to happen sooner rather than later.
Plus if it was the Police, because Toedad has not only been seen brandishing a rifle but also fired it, the Cops would definitely have their guns drawn. Now throw in Toedad’s “I’m doing this to save my daughter’s soul & I’m willing to die to do so” kinda attitude, and you have a large possibility of Becky becoming an Orphan & maybe taking a few rounds herself in the crossfire…
By Intercepting them first, Amazigirl may have prevented all that, with Becky only becoming a Prison-Orphan, & not a Full-Blown-Orphan…
Actually, Amazi-Girl has significantly increased her chances of becoming an orphan and raised her chances of becoming a corpse from ‘0’ to ‘very good’.
It’s absolutely idiotic to think that sending the car out of control is a good way of saving somebody in it.
How do you know that Becky’s chance of being a corpse before Amazi-girl showed up was ‘0’? Various posters have given various scenarios where she may have been inured/killed… hit by stray bullets if/when toedad had his confrontation with police, abused/executed in order to “save her soul”. Heck, at one point Ross was running through stop signs until Becky asked him to be careful; he could have started doing so again (which would be an invitation to a significant traffic accident).
You cannot say that the risk to Becky was ‘0’ without having some sort of god-like knowledge of alternate timelines.
I’m not saying Amazi-girl’s appearance made things safer for anyone; just that we don’t have enough knowledge to condemn her either.
We do have enough knowledge to condemn Amber.
Becky is 5 seconds or a shitload of luck away from being t-boned by a tractor trailer. A situation she would not be in if the crazy woman in the mask had let the proper authorities – or at the very least a concerned citizen who doesn’t think the best way to save people in a car is to take away its ability to steer (caltrops under the drive wheels are never going to improve that) – deal with the situation.
This is not a ‘what if’. This is ‘what happened’.
* We do have enough knowledge to condemn Amber. Becky is 5 seconds or a shitload of luck away from being t-boned by a tractor trailer.
And would she have been better off if she had been hit in the head by a stray bullet when the cops and toedad have their inevitable confrontation? Or how about being better off when her dad decides “She is a sinner and must be put down” and shoots her?
Again, you are looking at only one timeline, and have no idea what might have happened had the events in the comic unfolded in an alternative fashion.
I’m fine with Becky becoming an orphan. And “he may kill/hurt her” is poor justification for “let’s put her in certain danger with overwhelming odds of death/serious injury”
How do you think Becky would feel about becoming an orphan? I doubt her character would be “fine” with it.
Wow, seems I helped fire up another line of debate…
Please note I did say MAY have prevented that. The cops could still catch up, mind you the gun is now further back down the road & has fired it’s chambered round so far less likely for a shootout.
Ultimately, there are hundreds of ways it could have gone, Toedad could have fired over his shoulder & killed Amazigirl, The Cops could have realized she was being towed by the car in question & pulled them over/hit them with a P.I.T. Maneuver, plus hundreds more. Daniel the Human says that in hundreds of parallel universes they DID happen, each created by a slight variation, but that hurts my processors…
She’d also likely being regularly beaten or it’s possible that Ross may have already ‘executed’ her as ‘an incorrigible sinner’. Don’t presume to be smart enough to know every possible outcome just because you fear vigilantes.
Well, there’s the truck, but is it filled with manure?
it is filled with OUR TEARS
our tears
the characters’ blood
and the laughter of small children
and now it is going to be filled with another car! that’s right, they may all die horribly!
Wow, those children must have a twisted sense of humour.
A load of Monkey Master toys.
2nd woo
Jesus take the wheel
TAKE THE SEATBELT OFFF!!! DAMN YOU SEATBELTS!!
Like seriously people this shit is not rocket science.
Exactly. Why on earth would she still be in the passenger seat at this point? Tight or not, the belt can be released at the push of a button.
I can provide a whole bunch of reasons why on earth she would STILL be in the passenger seat: everything that’s just happened has probably spanned 10 seconds, maybe 15 at the most, the car is swerving out of control which would probably make it very difficult to take the seatbelt off and adjust her position, and it’s a high-pressure situation in which she has about five seconds to act.
Yesterday, I got lambasted for suggesting that Becky would have moved to the drivers’-side seat. Apparently grabbing the steering wheel from the passenger’s side is all you need. Also: brakes? Who needs ’em.
Well guys, guess you win. I’ll admit I didn’t see Becky being unaware of how to remove a seatbelt.
Haha, sorry…didn’t mean to lambast. But seriously, that is a tiny car, there is no way she can’t reach the steering wheel from her seat, seatbelt or no. And again: emergency brake is right there in the middle (though that’s probably something to avoid using while the car is actively spinning out and you’re trying to avoid killing people on the roof/sides).
It’s called ‘The Rule of Drama’. Basically, reality has to take the back seat to the needs of the story.
I feel like it’s less “unaware of how to” and more “afraid to while the car is spinning out”. She talked Toedad down(ish) back at the fountain, but she can’t talk down centrifugal force.
Also, if the force was applied suddenly, the seatbelt is probably currently very tight. Because, you know, that’s what seatbelts do.
That too. The seatbelts in my family’s car lock up if you so much as lean forward with insufficient nonchalance. Becky’s probably pinned. Even if her hand can physically reach the wheel, she’s got a really bad angle for steering.
“with insufficient nonchalance” is a great expression.
One thing we also have to remember, even if she DID manage to get the wheel, Amber blew the tires on the front passenger side. That car is going to be handling like a speeding brick at this point. With Becky’s size and (likely) lack of muscles, she might not even be able to get the wheel to turn. Hell, Amber is even having a hard time turning the wheel on on today’s strip.
And I have a feeling that Amber & co are going to be relatively ok; however, the girl that’s following them will probably have to swerve to not him them… and make a mistake, and end up in front of the semi instead.
That poor truck driver is having the worst PTSD moment ever, right now. Hopefully he is also able to react more quickly the second time through. And when this is over he is going to become an accountant.
I’ve had all sorts happen in my short career driving trucks. Still think about the guy that ran out in front of me. (And the stupid girl that pulled out on me and made me damage to load due to braking. Damn her eyes)
My father in law was a lifelong trucker, a true gentleman. One night he was driving a semi and a car full of teens on a winter road slide into his lane. He, without hesitation, drove his truck into the ditch, knowing it could kill him.
The car with the teens then slid into the ditch right in front of him. Three dead kids. Yes, truckers can have PTSD.
Well, the girl following them IS in a red car, so the colors would match up for a certain Roomies spoiler…
Great, Jokerdad commenting on events involving Toedad…
Mr Willis has said there’ll be no deaths in here before, as many have pointed out before. That said, to quote Disney’s Aladdin movies, “You’ll be surprised by what you can live through…”
Love the tagging today.
The driver must be an interdimensional traveler.
After hitting Ruth, he detoured through Maine to kickstart the plot of Pet Sematary. Next he’s off to start in the movie Duel.
NICE. I loved Duel. Watched it on the sofa next to my dad decades ago. I can still remember him pointing out to me how the truck, not the driver, was the character.
Also, a canister of radioactive waste is about to fall out of the trailer.
While leakproof, those canisters are pretty heavy.
If only the seatbelt had a gun. curse you, willis!
The only thing that can stop a car accident with a gun is a seatbelt with a gun?
That can’t be good for her shoulder muscles…
or her arms in general
Getting hit by that truck won’t be good for her anything.
Ow, my. . . . Everything.
Amber used to be a vigilante, until she took a crazy religious Toedad & truck to the everything?
Talk about putting her through the wringer.
The rope’s wrapped around her arm and her hands in a position that will cause the air bag to break it. She’ll be lucky if her arm doesn’t get torn off. It’s definitely not going to stay intact.
I can’t believe she’s steering the car with the same arm she’s holding Toedad up with.
No regrets.
Make up your mind to have…
GOD DAMN IT WILLIS YOU SAID NO TRUCKS
THIS. SO MUCH THIS. >_<
Willis said no DYING. You’d be amazed what you can live through.
Wasn’t expecting to see a Return of Jafar reference tonight. Or ever, really.
Well people have been making that reference since the gun came out. Not sure why though.
What reference?
In one of the direct-to-video sequels to Aladin, Jafar returns to do bad things. One of the rules that are binding him, however, is that genies (which he is now) can’t use their powers to kill people. When reminded of this, he makes an evil grin and replies “You’d be amazed what you can live through”
It becomes a recurring line
What Someguy said.
Tried finding 1 of the scenes on Youtube, no luck sorry. Maybe later…
Yound a page of Aladdin 2 Return of Jafar quotes. And guess what’s listed as the very 1st quote…
Blue Genie: [about Jafar] Don’t worry, Abu. He’s a genie, and genies can’t kill anyone.
[Jafar’s hands turn into dragons and spray fire all over Genie and Abu]
Blue Genie: [wheezing] But you’d be surprised what you can live through.
This, so much this.
Amber will break her spine and end up permanently paraplegic.
Becky will burn in a fiery inferno and be horribly disfigured.
Toedad will be okay, though.
Toedad will become fused with his gun. He’ll have to manually beat his own heart by firing bullets, the recoil driving the butt of the rifle deep into his chest. The process will be quite painful. Unable to hold a steady job because of his condition, he won’t be able to pay for the ammo. Like an addict he’ll perpetually scramble for his next hook up, doing things he’s deeply ashamed of, even going so far as to forfeit eternal salvation in his attempt to stave off immediate death.
Dude, not cool! The writers of Crank 3 worked really hard on that script, and here you are just giving it away.
GAH.
Stop reminding me that Crank is a thing. Actually, stop reminding me Crank is a thing that got a sequel!
While they were in no way well written or genius plot twisty…the Crank movies were nice popcorn fun.
Knowing there’s no deaths kinda murders all the gravitas really. Like… Oh No.. A truck.. Whatever will happen? Will the fucking Eagles swoop down and save them? One of them looks like a hobbit.. maybe it’ll be enough to summon them.
I know you meant LOTR Eagles, but I envisioned the band swooping in, David Hasselhoff “Hooked on a Feeling”-style.
I pictured a migratory flock of lunar modules.
You know, I’d be cool with either of these options.
I totally went with the band too…and all I could think of was the Dude appearing in the back seat and saying “Come on man. I’ve had a shitty day and I f**kin hate the Eagles!”
Nothing Willis does will be able to top this for me.
Bravo Comment Gang.
yessssssss
Oops, beat me to it. I’ll definitely read comments before I post next time. ^^”
WHY IS THE TRUCK BLUE
Red shift in reverse.
GodDAMN, if everyone makes it outta this, Amazi-Girl’s gonna be an ACTUAL superhero!
If what she’s trying to pull off now ends up working, she’s freaking James Bond.
Well… fuck.
See? Seatbelts kill more people than they save!
(Not really)
Putting on your seat belt kills you. BUTTERFLY EFFECT
Sorry, yesterday I watched the last episode of GameTheory’s Until Dawn LP.
All the Until Dawn is still burned into my brain
No, no, no, bad alt-text.
Ruthless.
And this is why wearing your seatbelt gets everyone killed…
If only Jesus was here.
He is within all of us.
Tell the fucker to use some lube next time. Ouch.
I LOL’ed at this comment. That song always cracks me up. It’s a TERRIBLE idea to let Jesus take the wheel – he has unhealed wrist wounds and a long flowy mane that always gets in his eyes.
Also, he only has a donkey-riding licence.
Also he’s been dead for like 2,000 years, but… DETAILS
Oh, you haven’t read the whole thing yet, I take it? I won’t spoil you.
Truck!! (Why is it always trucks?)
We tried switching to monkeys but SOMEBODY took issue with that.
But thank you for making the comment so the restof us don’t have to.
Ohhh, not again.
DAMN IT WILLIS YOU PROMISED NO TRUCKS.
Rule 0: Willis lies for the damns.
Willis promised no deaths. Doesn’t that make you feel better?
Rule 0: Willis lies for the damns.
Trucks sure do have it out for redheads at this school…
Meanwhile, truckers are thinking: “Why is it always redheads who end up in reckless driving situations?”
I can’t wait for Ruth to come in for the save!
Looks like toe dad is about to get stubbed!!
ahaha this situation isn’t funny at all
JESUS TAKE THE WHEEL
*ahem* Now that I got my FIRST! moment out of the way…
So at this point Amber’s two grip points are the steering wheel (inside car with nothing but her hand) and the rope attached to Toedick (dangling outside car) with most of her own body weight outside the car as well?
Oh, sweetheart. Sweetheart, no. I think the best* outcome we can hope for right now is that the truck dodges them and the driver is hurt, so everyone just suffers from extreme guilt instead of actual devastating injury.
*yes, I realize that is not best for the truck driver, but some lives really are worth more than others when they don’t really exist
No, toedad has one end of the rope, then it’s wrapped around her wrist, but the other end is attached to a grappling hook that looped over the roof and wedged under Becky’s door.
Holy cow, Amber!
MULTIPLE REGRETS
God damn it, what is it with Semis ruining lives? First it was Cheap thrills, now this.
Well, Amber, I mean, uh… You weren’t using that spine, anyways, right?
*reads comic*
*reads alt text*
How dare you
This just keeps getting better and better. I hope that Ross has some regrets, but, honestly, if he does, they won’t be about the right things.
(Man, am I glad that Willis has confirmed no one dies in DoA.)
What’s up with the white circles above Amazi-girl’s eyes? Is she about to pass out or something?
That’s what I thought. Maybe shock onset imminent?
That’s panic sweat.
She’s just taken a head wound that’s bleeding, plus all the joint hyperflexibility in the world isn’t gonna stop her from breaking something here. Shock onset sounds very, very likely.
Also that rope on her arm(s) probably isn’t doing her blood circulation any favors.
Sweat, I’m guessing. She’s certainly been active recently, and is hanging more or less upside-down right now.
She’s just had some serious Deja vu. Like, really serious.
Either that or a loss of blood circulation.
I was thinking drunk bubbles, except for dizziness (from upside downness)
I think that the shock, pain from the impact, and the effects of the possible concussion are all catching up to her and she is starting to grey out on us. She will come to surrounded by cops and paramedics to find Becky OK, ToeDad under restraint by members of the Bloomington PD, and absolutely no memory of anything after hitting the windshield of the trailing car.
Is Amber literally bending over backwards? Seriously I cannot picture how the hell she’s twisting her body to do this.
Can someone show me a diagram or something?
That’s a good point, at first I thought she just turned her body around real quick but then the rope would be on the wrong arm in the last panel….this requires additional study :/
Yeah I dunno, apparently I too require a diagram. Perhaps Tuesday’s strip will be more illuminating? (Giving Willis the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t accidentally swap arms here…)
(ok evidently he did accidentally swap arms in the last panel, since when i later went to check, he’d fixed it. mystery solved! not that anyone is going to read this.)
(and not that i’m going to come back to this comments thread weeks from now and check to see whether anyone replied to this.)
If nothing else, I think the hands are wrong. At first she’s got the suction cup in her left hand and rope in her right, then she lets go of the suction cup and grabs the wheel, but she’s grabbing the wheel with her right hand.
Maybe she quickly switched the rope to her other arm in between panels? That’s all I got….cuz that’s definitely her right arm on the wheel there, going by the thumbs.
That’s the rope still around her right arm, AG is now on her belly across the top of the car with Ross hanging off her right arm as it grips the wheel and Willis only knows what she’s hanging on to with her left hand against the inside of the roof.
All of this may be moot, of course, because if the car is already SKIDDING SIDEWAYS, there is very little that even a driver buckled into the car could do to correct its course, much less … whatever the hell is going on here.
Skidding sideways with one of the drive wheels blown out (which certainly did not help with the skidding).
At least one, there were a lot of caltrops.
Red-car-lady-who-might-be-Maggie is actually wrapped around a tree a quarter-mile back, after the remaining caltrops took out both her near-side tyres.
I *think* the one thing that might help is if she could turn the car in the same direction as the truck is going . . . But then Becks would need to hit the gas like there’s no tomorrow.
It’d actually be good even without the gas, as it would leave more room for the car to crumple. (Trunk to front seats, vs door to passenger.) If that’s enough to avoid serious injury for Becky, I’m not sure. It’s unlikely to prevent serious injury to those not attached. (Though less chance of the car rolling on top of them.)
I can’t be sure, but I think the way AG is turning the wheel should make the front end spin further around so the car ends up facing the wrong way on the road, but not half across the median… I think. I’m allowing for her spending a lot of James Bond style points to make it happen.
Very possibly.
That car is a friggin Escher print…
Ooooooooooooomigosh
And now for something completely different.
Have a very nice day.
So the Truck Driver is a multiversal singularity?
Another theory: there are multiple truck drivers in the multiverse.
oh wait, missed the tags
Or is the Dumbiverse counterpart (I think we on Bring Back Roomies! decided the truck driver was Duncan from Shortpacked! as fanon, so possibly that’s him.)
But I like the thought of that trucker just going from universe to universe, forever plagued to cause accidents passing along the highway towards IU. Poor guy.
Yeah, I was gonna say every morning this guy wakes up inside of another speeding truck in yet another dimension, and heaves a weary sigh
“Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the truck driver as he crashed was ‘Oh no, not again.’ Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the truck driver had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.”
“I wonder if it will be friends with me.”
I don’t have any internets, however, I give you twelve.
I don’t know how, but I did.
This is the part where the two universes meet, and everyone flees from the Walkyverse to the Dumbiverse.
The truck driver is the bridge between worlds!
He used to be, but there aren’t multiversal singularities anymore.
Damn, that truck driver just can’t catch a break no matter what universe he’s in.
And Ross nearly falls into the road, just as many of us predicted.
Doom is now sitting upon the edge of his seat, a feat not easily accomplished. Let it be known, Doom will keep the “Willis be Damned” on standby.
Hey what do you know toedads reckless driving might get everyone killed, who would have thought !?
As if it wasn’t reckless for AG to jump on the car in the first place.
It’s not like it’s the first time Amazi-Girl has jumped on top of a moving vehicle. She’s a seasoned professional.
And there’s “jumping on top of a moving vehicle” reckless, and then there’s “abandoning the controls of a moving vehicle so you can climb out the window with a gun” reckless.
This is good point. We’ve been focused a lot on Amazi-girl since, let’s be honest, she’s been taking the most action here.
Easy to forget that Toedad’s recklessness given the situation easily, EASILY outstrips any idiocy on Amazi-girl’s part. I don’t think she was expecting him to stop driving the effing car! Just because Amazi-girl is more flashy doesn’t mean she’s most responsible here.
Noooo! Amazi Girl is now at Ross’ mercy! Unless he suffers a sudden case of conscience, Amazi-Girl may soon be tasting asphalt.
Then they’ll still spin out and die, then terrifying part is he might be stupid enough to do it.
Goddammit, that hovertext frightens me…
Also, it appears Ross wasn’t quite as ready to die as he initially claimed.
This writing is almost as good as Flint Dille’s writing on The Transformer: The Movie.
that’s not nice
I think you should just change the title of this page to ” The seatbelt .”
* pictures Amazi-Girl grimace slide into foreground, flip, push into Joyce BSOD…
I dunno, the 1986 movie is awesome in my opinion.
I have a…mixed reaction to it.
Well, yeah, you’re Megatron. On the one hand you finally got to kill Optimus Prime. On the other hand, Starscream dumped you into space (Not even Soundwave objected. Ouch.) and Orson Welles made you regenerate.
Okay…
Just whipped out the ’86 movie and started watching, having not paid attention to it since the 80’s.
Now, I find the opening scene to the movie really, REALLY disturbing!!
Side note: Why-in-the-hell was everything back then so influenced by Heavy Metal…?
It was a reaction to Disco. One day they’re going to ask why our music is so influenced by one guy.
No, no. The movie: “Heavy Metal.”
The color and animation in the Transformers Movie looks just like it.
I didn’t notice back then but, it’s really obvious. Probably the same companies doing the in-betweens.
It’s completely covered in HM sauce.
Oh. Sorry, I didn’t realize anyone else had seen that movie.
Megatron is not ‘nice’.
If the car has come ot a complete stop, then how does turning the steering wheel help?
Also, Becky, Becky, Becky….you should have unbuckled and slid over into the driver’s seat ASAP. If school kids can take the wheel of a runaway school bus, Becky should have been able to take over driving the car.
Either way, the Cliff is Hanging.
The car hasn’t stopped, it’s still skidding from the blown tire. See the white action lines indicating its motion toward the oncoming truck?
All the more reason fro Becky to have slid over and grabbed the wheel sooner.
But she was probably panicking and/or not wanting to be loose in an out of control car? Becoming a human ragdoll isn’t appealing.
If the wheel is blown out and the car is spinning, I’m not sure how grabbing the steering wheel at this point will allow them to easily regain control. Becky unbuckling at this point would just make her a projectile in the inevitable crash.
Now’s a good time for Sal and Joyce to turn up and save the day.
BTW, for those keeping track and wondering about when Joyce & Sal will arrive and what they’ll find when they do, we’re coming up on the next tumblr preview panel.
Oh. Well everythings going to be allright then.
welp, guess someone’s going to die horribly tomorrow.
in somewhat related news, does anyone else read Tarol Hunt’s: Goblins (goblinscomic.org)? it has a goblin named dies horribly in it. you can probably guess what happens.
I am so anxious about everything. Holy shit there is a truck. Amber is doing superhuman things that will surely break her bones and/or back. Ross is basically roadkill at this point. Everything is CRAZY.
….. remember when this was a nice little comic about college life? lmao
Yeah, the Amazi-Girl secret’s about to blow sky high because Amber’s about to spend the rest of the comic in a wheelchair. Might not be paralyzed for life, but certainly for the next decade real-time.
Aaah, three weeks ago, what good times they were.
But soon she will translate her mad hacker skills into becoming the most powerful information broker in Bloomington, Indiana.
I don’t think she’s going Oracle, but I’m sticking with my theory that Amazi-Girl (not Amber!) is getting the Roomies! death this time around.
Kidnappings and traffic incidents and cops getting called happen during college life. We don’t like to talk about it so much, but there it is.
This week’s comic was brought to you by the Road Safety Commission.
Which is also brought to you by Geico
red splattered redheads in 3….2….1….
Would he really kill his Dumbiverse wife? It seems like he wouldn’t have used her if he was going to kill off the driver of the other car.
nah. a well timed ruth, though…
NO. No. No no no no no. This is NOT cool Willis.
Damn you, Willis.
Someday there will be an complete comments section filled entirely with people going “Damn you Willis!”. It will be glorious.
Except when that happens, he will have achieved absolute victory and no longer have any reason to continue the comic.
At this point I don’t see how Toedad does not get seriously FUBARed here. Even if AG manages to avoid hitting the semi he will either get chucked from the car (there is too much slack in that line if she can reach her arm into the car while he still holds onto it) or he will get struck by the semi. Even if neither of those happen, it will be because AG overcorrected and they go off the road to the right (which is a deep ditch).
Additionally, Toedad’s momentum is going to rip AG’s arm out of its socket something fierce.
It just occurred to me that nothing is actually anchoring AG to keep her on the roof of the car anymore. If she can reach into the driver’s side window that means her entire body can fall off of the roof.
Snap, it’s even worse than that. The arm she is connected to Toedad with is the same one that she is steering with. His momentum will either cause her to swing the car back to the left or will yank it fully to the right (depending on where her arm is at the exact moment his momentum yanks on it).
Somewhere, Ruth just flinched and isn’t quite sure why.
It just occurred to me that Danny probably still gets to be traumatized by an accident involving this truck driver in this universe as well. That sucks. I actually like Danny, even if many others don’t.
One actually has to wonder what impact this will have on their relationship as a whole.
I mean he has to realize this is a self destructive path she’s on right?
I’m guessing the fallout of this is what makes Danny realize that Amazi-Girl isn’t a cool hobby.
And here I almost made the ‘act with integrity’ comment when not-Maggie made that determined face as she sped forward.
“Totally not even tryin’ to kill any skaters…”
Would…would something like this be a noble role to give a loved one? She’d be a hero, but would it be a bit grizzly? Maybe I’m over thinking things and everyone will be fine
If Maggie is the person driving the Mazda 3, go back and to where the car first appears in this sequence and pay attention only to the red car.
Why is the car where it is, each time it appears?
When Amber lept to Ross’ car, it looked like Maggie (red car) sped passed them. But the ‘oncoming’ car was red too (herring, much?).
What I see:
-The Mazda was gaining on AG while on the skateboard, IN THE SAME LANE.
-Ross tried to shake AG.
-There’s copper colored SUV, went by on the other side.
-Ross’ car spun left, Mazda still matching pace.
-Now, Ross’ car is sliding into opposing traffic (the forward direction.)
My question is: Why was the Mazda so close to AG?
-It’s clear that she reacted to Ross trying to shake AG off but, continued rather than stopping, altogether.
Just a guess:
-The Mazda was attracted there.
-Our attention is on Ross and his Chevy but, her attention was on AG and the skateboard until AG mentioned Becky.
…It suddenly comes to mind that one can be in a vegetative state but still count as alive
Dammit Willis
Because, of course, nobody goes into mourning when their loved ones go into vegetative states.
And if they did it totally wouldn’t last longer than if they were dead and gave closure.
IIRC, the REASON Willis said nobody is dying is because the passage of time is so dilated that the grieving process would take forever. I think the “dealing with people we know being permanently vegetative/paralyzed” phase would be similar.
Where are people getting this from ? I keep hearing it over and over, are you sure this isn’t just some collective hallucination made up to protect you from the emotional trauma that eventually follows Willis’ comics ?
Pretty sure he’s said it multiple times in various places.
https://mobile.twitter.com/damnyouwillis/status/655233252253274112
*cracks up at the tags*
I haven’t typed these words in over a decade, and I’m returning after a long absence just to do so one more time, because you’ve really earned it:
DAMN YOU WILLIS
I REMEMBER YOU
THE CHOSEN HAS RETURNED!
VINDICATION
Anyway, still reading, keep up the good work.
Well, Sal was right about Amazi-girl escalating the situation. D:
The situation was going to be escalated anyways. The cops would have eventually tracked down toedad, and given his state of mind, there would probably have been some conflict/shootout/etc. The advantage in having Amazi-girl intervene now (rather than wait for the cops) is that it prevents toedad from enacting any sort of end-game plan (e.g. holing up in some fortified location, harming/killing Becky for her “sinful” ways, etc.)
do you actually think sal would be able to get becky anyway? becky is the only one who called the police (which both joyce and sal shouldve done) but it doesnt exactly seem like theyre about to come for becky anyway. if amazi girl can get the car out of the way of the truck, everythings pretty much settled for her succeding
The police were on their way to the fountain, when they passed by Amazi-Girl car-skiing. Becky called after noticing AG, so dispatch would have to notify police to turn around. (plus, various bystanders at fountain prolly called, too). All this is happening in very short time.
And this is assuming police were actually going to the fountain… Remember, toedad was first seen with the gun going into the woods. That might be where the police go to first.
By the way, I did a google search… Did you know that apparently a large number of 911 operators DON’T have access to cell phone locations? Some cities haven’t updated their cell phone networks to track cell phone data, some cellphones don’t transmit the data, etc. Your chance of a 911 operator knowing your cell location can vary from 10% to 95%, depending on your location.
So, even if police know they’re hearing the kidnapper and victim from inside the car, they may not know where they are, even with the cell phone.
True enough, but consider where this is happening — Bloomington, Indiana, home to a major university with over 45 thousand students, most if not all of whom have cellular phones. Based solely on that metric alone, if there was anyplace in Indiana that would make sure their 9-1-1 system was updated enough to be able to determine a cellphone’s location, Bloomington would be it.
re: police…woods/fountain… on campus, at least. Dispatch is re-routing them as they are listening to Becky’s drama play out. (gun wielding guy is now in car; bystanders point: they went that-a-way!… points north-ish) At least one cop must’ve noticed car with AG, on their way past them, and figure it is a possible lead. *shrugs*
Oh, I’m sure the police would have enough sources to piece together what happened eventually. I just think that, given the circumstances (lots of calls, many from people with incomplete and possibly contradictory information; limitations on ability of 911 system, etc.), its not surprising that they did not automatically locate and respond to toedad immediately.
Amazi-girl be like “Guy’s a total douche-nozzle but I should PROBABLY let him live.”
Also, I wonder if Amazi-girl essentially saving Ross’s life here might eventually lead to a Valjean-Javert relationship.
I wonder if Amazi-Girls more the Batman save everyone type of superhero or the Wolverine save most people but has no problem letting that serial child killer fall to his death type of superhero?
Wait a second… does Amber/Amazi-girl have a driver’s license? If not, she shouldn’t be trying to steer the car.
Forget kidnapping and attempted murder… driving a vehicle without a license can get you into REAL trouble.
Harharhar…
Plot twist, Ross doesn’t have a license, why would he need to worry about car accidents and legal trouble, he has GOD on his side.
The seatbelt’s too tight!? Amazi-Girl is ROPED TO YOUR DAD and she grabbed the wheel. Get it together, Becky.
Because of the swerve, the seatbelt probably locked up just now.
If the truck driver is tagged, will he jump his truck of the bridge to avoid hitting another car?
Also I see that we are now into blame Becky for not being a superhero territory.
They are now on a bridge. You know this is going to be significant.
It’s a bridge over a creek.
Its not a ‘bridge over troubled water’?
Damn you Simon and Garfunkel!
Sail on Silver Girl…
I’m surprised that no one has realized that Sal said that if Amazi-girl is in involved that everything will go sideways and the care is ACTUALLY going sideways…
Ahaha! Nice catch there!
The location, if anyone is curious.
OK now I have placed the chase as it were, from the fountain west on 7th to Walnut then north on Walnut until the bridge. That’s a hell of a long way to skitch on a borrowed skateboard and then jump on the roof with most of it on a rural 2-lane…
A link to google maps with the route highlighted if anyone is interested.
https://www.google.co.nz/maps/dir/39.1684849,-86.5192692/39.231722,-86.5407667/@39.2001524,-86.5656112,13z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!4m1!3e0
Nice.
So, based on that, where’s Sal? What shortcuts might she be taking?
She said “Highway 37 it is”, so she’s headed for the same place.
And (based on the centerline markings) they were at least up to the golf course when Becky saw Amazi-Girl, which means she was on the skateboard for that long, including a significant section of, as you said, rural 2-lane, with a speed limit of 55.
Er, there’s apparently two golf courses. They were past Bayles Road, for a better landmark. The main action sequence likely took place alongside “Taylors’ Par 3 Golf Course”.
Good find. I spent some time trying to locate it myself last night but gave up after about ten minutes. I didn’t let myself go far enough north.
Although now, knowing where they are and how far that is/was from campus, you’d think someone along Walnut Street/Business 37 would have noticed Amazi-Girl hanging on for dear life and not just dismissed it as “damned college kids!” Police response is most likely much closer than still poking around and asking questions back at Showalter Fountain.
Noooooo Willis what is it with you and trucks that make me all emotionallllllll, how dare you be a good writer and make me like the characters you do bad things to
:C nopenopenopenope
C:> nope.txt
C:/> nope.txt
(corrected the C prompt)
If the Truck get’s a tag, then so should the woman in the red car.
Which would have been better? What Amazi-Girl did that set up this current situation? or if she had let’s Ross go with Becky and let the Police handle it, eventually?
I think that completely depends on when the police intervened. If they tried to intercept him on his way back to Indiana it would have likely resulted in a car chase, possibly a shootout, and most certainly death for at least Becky’s dad. Maybe he would have tried to kill her rather than let her go into their custody too, or just driven so recklessly trying to get away that a fatal crash occurred for them and possibly others.
On the other hand, if they were just waiting at his residence I think it would have been far less risky. Joyce could have just waited for the cops and given them the address, while Amazi-Girl gathered up witnesses and their contact information. Make sure everybody who saw and heard him threaten Becky and Joyce talked to the cops and might be able to testify in court if need be. Of course the police might still have tried to catch them on the highway, but maybe not.
Of course, the assumption would be that he WAS going back to Indiana. While there may be some logic that he would just “return home” there is no guarantee of that. I suspect the cops would have to plan for other eventualities. (e.g. kidnapped her to take her to some unknown location for “healing”, taking her to execute her, etc.)
Based on the other possibilities, I doubt the cops would just go to his residence and wait, and would probably be proactive in stopping him as soon as possible.
Michael Jackson was going back to Indiana, but he wasn’t taking anyone there against their will.
The woman in the Red Car is the ghost of Roomieverse Ruth. She is destined to cross every universe, stopping every instance of that truck from killing innocents. GhostRuth is the true hero of this tale.
The real reason Dina is dating Becky: she’s apparently got tiny trex arms. Who in the heck can’t reach the steering wheel from the passenger’s side, even if the seatbelt is locked up? Like…. come on, it’s clearly a compact car, any adult can reach.
I’m sorry I’m being mean now so I guess I should stop commenting, but every day my suspension of disbelief falls further into loss.jpg territory.
Her dad’s standing up, though, which is going to limit her maneuvering something fierce, especially after he slapped her.
I didn’t question it when I was reading, but this comment actually made me curious enough to go out test this in my own car. Mine’s a compact, looks roughly the same size as the one Becky is in (maybe a little smaller? not sure what model that is). With the seatbelt locked up, my left arm could still easily wrap around the steering wheel, but my right (the one next to the door) could only just brush it. With only one hand at that angle, I simply didn’t have the leverage or grip to turn the wheel any significant amount. And this was in a non-moving, non-wildly-swerving vehicle.
Also now my chest hurts from straining against a locked seatbelt. Don’t let anyone tell you that webcomics aren’t dangerous.
Myth busted?
Don’t confuse us with facts.
This also depends on armspan, as generally-speaking one’s arm-span from fingertip to fingertip is the same as one’s height, so a tall person would be able to reach better than a short one.
What about the driver of the truck? Dude probably just got through therapy after that horrible accident left him scarred and anxious, just felt comfortable enough to renew his license and get back on the road, and now this shit again.
Damn you Willis, if you kill Becky or amazigirl in a car wreck, I swear I will be very upset
BEEP BEEP
Next comic: scene shifts to what Walky’s up to right now.
McDonalds is having a sale on McNuggets! This is the most exciting thing to happen all week!
I would be so unsurprised.
No regrets.
Alternatively, JESUS TAKE THE WHEEL!
Is there a reason Becky can’t… like… undo the seatbelt? Is there something I’m missing here about this particular seatbelt?
I’m guessing it’s just a combination of no time and her panicking and not thinking clearly.
Yes, in comics it takes less time to shout five words than it does to unbuckle a seat-belt.
Talking is a free action. Unbuckling a seat belt is a standard action.
*Like*
If the seat belt latch is under pressure (like from Becky’s weight being thrown against the belt; the car is swerving all over the place, remember?) it can become very difficult to unlock.
Patreon readers, can you tell me if the title to tomorrow’s strip is “No Regrets”? I feeling some bad juju from the title today.
The title of tomorrow’s strip is not informative, but please don’t ask for Patreon spoilers, even in jest.
Fair enough.
SPOILER:
THERE IS A COMIC TOMORROW
*gets banned*
We will remember you.
I called it!
I think both toedad and amazi-girl are having a “I did not think this all the way through and I immediately regret my decision” moment here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAE_HA0749I
>,<
Its like watching a train wreck in slow motion… or a Car accident for that matter.
Again with the trucks? Why is it always the trucks?
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but…
It’s worse than it looks! They’re on a bridge/overpass, so there’s no where the truck can swerve into.
some regrets
Shit shit shit.
That hot tag is sooooooo bad. Not just the quote but the same damn truck.
Most surely a Damn you Willis moment!
Passengers belts hook on the drivers side. Toedad is standing and probably pushing against or blocking the seatbelt latch, keeping Becky from getting to it.
As for Amazi-Girl, she is putting up one Hellva fight. I’m not sure how she’s bending that way,o
That is probably the point. Willis has said someone is going to end up in the hospital.
It is probably going to be Amazi-Girl: head concussion, bruised/broken ribs, dislocated arm/back. The list of injuries goes on.
And the scene is far from finished…
Did he actually say so? Or did he just show a preview panel with a hospital and a bunch of people jumped to conclusions?
Amazi-Girl yanks the wheel, sending the car into a hilariously out-of-control skid past a hospital before harmlessly coming to a stop in a corn field. Everyone staggers away from the car unharmed, temporarily forgetting why they’re in this situation in the first place.
Looks like I was typing my comment while you posted yours. I like yours better.
Except why take the time to create a preview panel of a hospital unless one of the cast was going to end up there. Unless Willis is evil enough to draw a random panel just to mess with everyone – which I concede is possible – it’s a pretty reasonable conclusion.
The hospital scene turns out to be Blaine getting discharged.
Joe leaving after getting treatment for an STD.
I’m guessing it’s Becky. If Amber went to the hospital it’d be the end of her as Amazi-Girl, while this is a Becky-centric storyline.
24 more hours of this?!? WHY???!!!!
I’m reading every instance of “no regrets” as “no regERts” because of that silly Milky Way commercial. Which makes me smile in spite of all the stupid repetition.
Ahahaha, look at Toedad, almost falling to his death. Fuck you, man.
Well, Sal did say something about “escalation”.
Whelp. Becky’s in the hospital. At least she won’t be completely homeless?
THAT IS A HORRIBLE TAG
UNGH! My blood pressure! @x@
Maybe that’s who’s in the hospital, it’s all of us from the heart problems Willis is trying to give us.
Red Car Maggie drove herself on to the hospital! All the excitement induced labor! Twinnnnnns!
Ross is saved by an agent of the dark lord! Pledge your allegiance to Satan, dad of the toe. What a jam you’re in! Hahaha!
Is wesa gonna die?
…the lady in the red car is totally going to die, huh?
Fuckign….
I wonder, where is she going to steer that car anyway? The way it’s positioned right now seems to make evading the truck impossible.
Save them, Amazi-girl!
Still. Impressed at Amber keeping the Amazi-Girl voice going in panel 3.
No
No…no….no
nonononononono
You said there would be no more trucks…. :((((
I choose to believe the original truck was an AI. Just like here.
And that it is annoyed by having to constantly hose off bad drivers out of its grill.
Why do these Lemmings keep popping in front of Truck.
The real question: Where is Dina?
That rope looks like a good way to have an arm ripped off, Amazi-girl.
You know, it occurs to me that whatever happens next, there’s a good chance Amazi-girl’s secret identity will be over.
You know, Willis said that no main characters will die, but he didn’t say anything about secondary characters who very fittingly drive a red car…
All things considered, DAMMIT WILLIS.
The woman driving the red car is, as several readers have recognized from her appearances in Shortpacked!, Willis’s wife Maggie. She is not going to die.
Ross, I want you to think long and hard about the fact that you ALMOST GOT BECKY KILLED. What did you think would happen when you climbed out from the car window WITH A GUN? WHILE THE CAR WAS RUNNING?
And no whining about the vigilante on the roof. There are tons of ways you could have handled it that didn’t involve leaving the car running…. if you weren’t more worried about Becky escaping than Becky dying, that is.
Sooooo, is it this universe’s version of the driver or THE SAME driver? Because I’m a bit freaked out by the prospect of a pandimensional spedition company
Can someone show me where it was said that there would be no deaths? Cause otherwise, that sounds exactly like something that a feels writer would do….
https://mobile.twitter.com/damnyouwillis/status/655233252253274112
I don’t often say this, because when I do, I want it to have meaning. If or when I type these words out, any who read them will know I’m actually upset. (Or joking.)
DAMN YOU WILLIS.
So, supposing that they manage to come out of this without getting ker-trucked, any takers on Toedad attacking Amazi-girl at the first opportunity?
Me.
God Damn You Willis !
“Act with integrity” My ass ! You horrible horrible heartless man.
Hmm… their car is the DoA equivalent of Danny’s car, so maybe someone is going to broadside Ross’ car?
FUCK YE FOR THAT HOVERTEXT, DAVID ;=;
There is a great difference between doing the right thing and doing the easy thing. When you choose to become a hero, you spend the rest of your life fearing that you will somehow die a villain or even a monster.
For different reasons, both Ross MacIntyre and Amber O’Malley are considering these truths at this very moment.
I mean, I can understand her not reaching the wheel in say, a bigger vehicle. But it was literally shown a few strips ago in “mirror” that she’s well within arms reach even if her seat belt was hugging her as tight as possible. but.. ok.. drama gon drama.
*covers his eyes* I can’t watch. Somebody’s gonna be dead by the end of this. I just KNOW it.
Is it weird that… I’m kind of bored of this storyline? I’m already kind of having to take time to wrap my head around the physics of how everything is supposed to work. Plus the last ten strips or so have more or less just felt like an Amazi-Girl action comic strip. Maybe it’s just action/drama fatigue, but I’m not actually horribly invested in whatever is going to happen in the immediate future.
Heck yeah, it’s weird. You should see a mental health profesional about your lack of empathy.
Please don’t take that as a serious reply.
Is it weird that I get annoyed by comments disparaging things I’m enjoying immensely?
Yes.
I mean, as long as nobody’s acting like a dickbag about it, it’s fine not to like the current storyline.
Nah, I have similar feels. I’m still scared for them, but I’m otherwise pretty bored.
In Book 1, under a strip in the roofie sequence, Mr. Willis wrote, “This storyline had a very important self-imposed rule. At no point would I allow myself to end a strip on a cliffhanger where Joyce was in immediate physical danger.”
Perhaps it makes a difference that it’s Amber and Becky, not Joyce. More likely, he’s decided we’re tough enough to handle this.
Wait, what?
In real life this would have killed Joyce!
Have we seen Joyce since?
Well, fuck me upstream with a spring-loaded boxing glove and a water-balloon, shit’s about to get heavy…
This one was a lot to process.
Damn you Willis.
BECKY TAKE THE WHEEL!/ Take it in your hands/ Cause I can’t do this on my own/ I’m holding Ross/ Let’s give him one more chance/ (Fuckin’ Fucked if I know why)/ BECKY TAKE THE WHEEL!
You sure this doesn’t take place in Russia?
I don’t understand the hovertext. Is this a reference to something in a past strip?
Something in an alternate reality.
no bones about amaz girl going to be feeling crushed reaching for the ring
So remember when Willis previewed Joyce’s current outfit and said that, five years in, he felt safe to call back to the previous comic? And we all stupidly believed he was talking about the outfit, and not a certain scenario with a truck, an old brown car and a red car?
In fact, oh jeez, I just had to go back to the BBR site and check the date on that redrawn strip. Two years ago, longer than I thought, so probably not connected. Still possibly during the planning for this arc, I guess.
I may not have been around from the very beginning, but I’ve had plenty of time to appreciate Willis’ occasional bouts of magnificent bastardy.
Ahhhhhhh I take it all back, I want to see Joyce learn that Teletubbies aren’t actually Satanic or something
Guys, I don’t see Amber or Amazi-girl on the list…
… or Joyce, or Billie, or Dorothy, or Walky…
in which direction to you even turn the wheel in that setting ? ^^;
Toedad: “What are you doing?”
Amazi-Girl: “Parking.”
Becky: “It’s not possible!”
Amazigirl: “No. It’s necessary.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaJHFxCYUjI
The wonderful thing about webcomics:
If this were Batman, I’d yawn and say,”Of COURSE he’s going to survive!”
With Amazi-Girl you wonder if SHE’s going to survive, if Toedad is going to survive,if the daughter is going to survive, will the police jail Amazi-Girl for endangering them all, when Joyce and Sal are going to show up, will Amazi-Girl finally realize who Sal is, will Sal beat up Amazi-Girl for taking stupid chances, will Amazi-Girl be hospitalized for cracked ribs…
SUSPENSE! You don’t get that in regular comics anymore. Batman can’t die, he’s a franchise.
Amazi-Girl knows who Sal is, the question is will Sal ever realize who Amazi-girl is.
No; she knows Sal by name, but she DOESN’T know that Sal is the one who held up the convenience store and caused the pivotal moment that crystalized her becoming Amazi-Girl.
You’ve got that backwards: She physically recognizes Sal as the girl who took Ethan hostage, but doesn’t know her name or relationship to the rest of the cast.
Goddamnit Amber, don’t you get yourself killed because of that freakin’ idiot!
I’m with Al Shroeder on this; I’ve got about 25 different webcomics I read daily and this is the only one that’s managed to get me all riled up with the suspense!
“Act with integrity”
OH SHIT
C’mon skin of the teeth.
Everyone dies, don’t they?
You know who I feel sorry for the most right now? The truck driver. He lives in a Willis-verse. God only knows how many people engaged in some life and death struggle or inner crisis have found themselves in his headlights. Poor bastard is probably a broken shell of a man, every day praying that he can make it through that next haul without endangering someone else’s life. And every day his prayers fall on death years, cause the God of DOA is Willis, and Willis don’t give a fuck.
It sounds like part of his problem is praying to death years instead of deaf ears. I mean, the deaf ears aren’t going to hear him either, but having any interaction with a death year is probably a bad idea. Frankly a death year sounds like some kind of ancient curse, the sort of one that might force you to inadvertently kill bystanders over and over, watching in horror as their life is crushed and you are unable to change the outcome.
Whatever happened to the Roomies! truck driver anyway?
You’re about to find out.
I’ve now devised an epic headcanon where, shaken from grief after accidentally killing Ruth, Truck Guy uses Joe’s dimensional gate to leap to a new dimension free from his sins. He even finds another job driving trucks in this unfamiliar Bloomington and moves on with his life.
If only he knew that fate had plans for him.
Ross’s actions are so divorced from reality that I begin to wonder if he is used to engaging with it. Like, maybe he spends a lot of time at home alone with only his idea of God for company, working him into a horrible fervor.
I’m not saying that should excuse his actions, but it would go a ways to explaining them. His community failed him.
His community, which consists of his fellow fundamentalists, created him. In their eyes, he’s a shining beacon of The One True Faith and one of their greatest success stories.
That’s unclear. We’re going to find out, I suspect.
Joyce’s parents are apparently part of that community and Hank, at least, will be showing up in the near future.
It’s possible his entire community, including Joyce’s parents, will be behind him – leading to a really serious break between Joyce and her folks.
It’s possible his community, while still disapproving of LGTBQ people and even women’s liberation will disavow him now that he’s gone publicly violent. Conveniently ignoring their support at all the stages up to now.
It’s possible the community will support him, but Joyce’s parents won’t, leading to some awareness and growth for them.
Quite true, it’s all necessarily unclear. To paraphrase an old saying: “Only our bard knows, and he ain’t talkin’.”
And there’s Jocelyn. And whatever causes that commotion in the preview strips on tumblr.
The drama is only starting.
What a day!
WHAT A LOVELY DAY!
is there a significance to the words “act with integrity” that I’m not getting?
It’s a line from the climactic battle between Walky and Sal in It’s Walky, and was later echoed by Danny’s time traveling son, DJ.
There was also this other thing but it wasn’t that important.
…ah shit I just found that other thing.
AH SHIT.
the alt text just made me scream
What if Fundie’s the one that acts with integrity? He’s constantly said he wants to save his daughter, now’s his chance.
Many will scream if that happens.
There’s an old joke that asks: “What’s the last thing that goes through a bug’s brain when it hits your windshield?” The answer is: “His butt.” (Oh come on, Walky would have laughed.) I wonder if the same will be true when Fundie hits the grill of the truck.
So much for this being the ‘realistic’ version of the Willisverse… the version with the aliens in it is more believable.
I once read an review online of the remake of the movie ‘The Four Feathers.’ The reviewer got it right, explaining, “A movie about honor and duty made by people who understand neither.” Willis is clearly a skilled dramatist, but I don’t believe he truly understands the things he is talking about.
Which part? The superhero physics? That’s arguable, but certainly no less believable than the Walkyverse.
Or the fundies? Cause, as he keeps saying, plenty of people keep posting “This is my life”.
I am open to suggestions to where I can go to “truly understand” superhero physics! Is there a lab somewhere that they demonstrate superhero physics and I can take notes? Are hired models suspended in windtunnels wearing capes? Do they get real working grappling guns? How many of them are bitten by radioactive animals? This kind of place sounds awesome.
If superhero physics and cartoon physics are the same, couldn’t you just review all of the Roadrunner cartoons? I believe Wiley Coyote defined most of the cartoon physics laws. He was, after all, listed as a Super Genius in later years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_physics
Sadly, I don’t know of such a lab. Does sound awesome.
Though if we’re just setting limits for Amazi-girl, you probably wouldn’t need the radioactive animals, unfortunately. Just the wind tunnel and grappling guns.
I don’t have any real problems with it, but some people have commented on their suspension of disbelief being broken by this action sequence. I was just trying to distinguish between that and the character side.
As for actual superhero physics, I think the question is more people’s expectations. Amazi-girl is staying well within even non-powered superhero limits. And even within non-superhero action movie hero limits. OTOH, if the reader is thinking of her as just this semi-crazy girl who dresses up like a superhero, then this will all have been way over the top.
Wait, there really IS a place you can go, Willis! A physics professor at the University of Minnesota actually wrote a book on the physics of superheroes, and it was pretty awesome: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physics_of_Superheroes.
no
Character motivation was my point. He’s clearly working out issues from his childhood, which is fine. I am not arguing about the truth of his experience, or how he saw it _from his perspective_. But there are many characters involved in this who are NOT former fundamentalists, and I don’t believe he quite gets their motivations. Joyce is certainly characterized well. But I don’t believe he gets the rest of the cast down very well, essentially the further along the strip moves the less ‘true’ it feels. It is difficult to create believable characters, otherwise we would all be famous novelists. His work is impressive, and addictive, he’s attracted an impressive and loyal fanbase but that can create an echo chamber of love for an artist. Characters like Becky’s dad or Sal do not feel real, and ‘Amazi-girl”s two personalities both feel as if they wandered in from other stories or even genres. Cartoon evil like Head Alien is easy, I don’t think Becky’s dad is supposed to be a cartoon evil, but he is comes across that way.
That must be why we’ve had people writing thousands of words about Ross’ motivations and state of mind over the post couple of weeks, because he’s so flat and cartoonishly evil
Well that was as vague as I expected it to be. What exactly is wrong with Sal though?
Multiple readers have actually had to walk away from this storyline because it echoes experiences they personally went through, because Ross reminds them utterly of their own father. He’s realistic, he’s just not a type of person most of us have ever encountered. And for that I am very thankful. (But, I have my own survivor story that makes Ross look like a good guy, so YMMV)
This is supposed to be coming across as constructive criticism, not bashing, BTW. I am sorry if I am missing the mark there.
“He’s working things out from his childhood” isn’t constructive criticism. It’s creepy and invasive to say that about someone else.
Fr the record, dozens of readers have come forth to talk about how Toedad here is practically a recreation of the shit they went through in their childhoods. He’s not an evil strawman christian villain.
Any statement beginning with “So much for this being…” is not constructive. You might as well write, “Quit sucking so much. You’re welcome.”
I AM SO EXCITED SQUEEE
Amazi-girl -did- totally escalate this situation, BTW. Sal was absolutely right.
I was just thinking this same thing. 100% accurate. Good intentions notwithstanding, everyone has a far greater risk of being killed now than if they had just waited for the police.
Arguable. Becky’s chances if Ross had gotten away with her might have been pretty bad.
And if the police did catch up with them, the resulting chase/stand off/shoot out wasn’t likely to end happily either. I could easily see Ross dying in a hail of bullets. I could also see him taking Becky with him in a murder/suicide kind of deal.
On the gripping hand, you’re right that things aren’t looking so rosy right now.
Amazi-girl did escalate it, but there’s no way it wasn’t escalating, short of just letting him get away.
The sane thing would have been to let Ross drive away and call the police. Amber’s just made things worse, but even Joyce and Sal couldn’t accomplish anything by driving after them.
As has been pointed out before in the comments… we don’t really know if Amazi-girl made things worse, because we do not have any knowledge of alternate timelines.
We do not know what toedad would have done if he was allowed to proceed… a murder/suicide, a dangerous confrontation involving gunfire and plenty of stray bullets, etc. It is doubtful whether toedad, when confronted by the police, would have threw his hands up and said “I surrender”, and its doubtful whether the police would be gentle in their treatment of him.
Spinning out in a car with the risk of being hit by a truck is not a situation anyone would want to be in, but it might have been the best of a bad group of outcomes.
I dunno, in the scenario where Amazi-girl doesn’t interrupt them, only two people are really at risk (Ross and Becky). Now there are at least four (Becky, Ross, Amber, the truck driver), and maybe even red car bystander.
When you consider risk, you also have to consider probabilities.
It is true that Amazi-girls actions put some people at risk that would have otherwise been safe… but at a possible escalation of the danger to others. For example, toedad was destined to die by the cops…. by Amazigirl getting involved, he may actually have a lower chance of dying. The same may (or may not) have been true for Becky… without amazigirl, we know something bad was going to happen with 100% certainty (although admittedly we weren’t sure how bad). The actions of Amazigirl actually decrease that risk.
One other thing should be noted… you are right in that there are now 4 or 5 people at risk of injury/death. But had the cops gotten involved, there would have been risk to the police themselves. (Granted, police officers are expected to handle such risks, but that shouldn’t be ignored.)
Before, there was a possibility that one person was likely to get severe emotional abuse at the hands of her bigot dad. He wasn’t planning to take her home and shoot her, he wanted to go pray her gay away. Ross is unstable, so maybe he does something more drastic, maybe not. The police, if they do their jobs correctly, have many ways of approaching this situation in a way that minmizes the risk to Becky, and even her father.
Amazigirl has put them in a situation where they will be excessively lucky to escape without some fatality. The only way anybody can view this as not being an escalation is if they are literally deluding themselves into thinking this situation is less deadly than it is. Panel three? In real life, that is a “three people are definitely about to die” moment. Unquestionably. No chance of avoiding it. It won’t turn out that way, because comics, but it -would- in reality. Basically nobody in a car survives being hit by a semi, and there’s no way anybody is getting that vehicle back under control enough to avoid the collision at that point. Unless that actually backing away from them, that is a picture of dead people.
For some reason I can’t reply to Heavensrun, but it should be noted that “pray away the gay” isn’t just a few people in a circle, hands folded, begging the Lord to change the heart of the poor sinner. It’s an all out emotional, and all too often physical, assault. The best outcome is Stockholm Syndrome, the worst is and eventual murder/suicide. Every bit of humanity is stripped away and the abductee is forced to conform. It is easily a fate far worse than death. Many of the stricter churches use a “Good old fashioned foot washing ceremony” to enforce compliance. It’s a demeaning practice where the elderly are lined up on the front row and the young are required to wash their feet. Failure to joyfully comply will result in the public humiliation of the parents, and continued ridicule of the youngster. The techniques used to pray away the gay are not so limited and include sleep deprivation, starvation, limiting water intake and toilet privileges, and in Becky’s case, repeated rape. The danger she faces from AG’s action are trivial compared to what she faces from a “Conversion Counselor.”
The replies only go to a certain number of levels, and we’ve capped it. And I understand all of that, but that is still less urgently dangerous than a car spinning out of control into a t-bone collision with a semi while two people wrestle on top of the roof. And since he kidnapped Becky at gunpoint, and the police have been called, there was very little chance he would get a chance to do any of that. Best case scenario would have been they get home, he puts the gun back in its case, locks her in her room, and a few minutes later the police surround the place, bust down the door, and taze the crap out of him before throwing him in jail and letting Becky go back to Joyce. Worst case scenario was that the police confront him directly and he gets into a shootout, which would -still- be less dangerous for Becky than -this- is.
Conversion therapy techniques vary. Some won’t be so harsh, particularly those that adults undergo willingly. Even those that work on minors with their parent’s consent often try to remain mostly within the law, though many stretch it. Any group that Ross would take Becky to though, would be willing to hold a legal adult against her will and thus are likely to have very few scruples. And yes, corrective rape is a thing.
Beyond that, even in the more general case, if a kidnapper gets away with his victim the chances of her being found again drop drastically. Amazi-girl doesn’t even know the full story, but kidnapping itself justifies drastic measures.
This is spiraling out of control, but that’s still Ross’s fault, not hers.
This whole conversation makes me want to see Willis make “What if…” comics based on DoA.
I’m not sure AG going after the crazed, murderous lunatic can be classified as escalation. By now, the police have arrived at the campus and been shown photos, and probably videos, of the incident. They have a description of the car, Fundie, and Becky. If they had caught up with them on the open road, spike strips, a road block, or a tap maneuver, would be a possibility. In any event, Fundie would still be armed and a standoff would be inevitable. Now, if they find a wrecked car and three injured passengers, they can go straight to rescue mode. The remains of the rifle will be collected from the road for evidence and charges can be filed later. The District Attorney has his work cut out for him, but the coroner won’t have to be involved.
Actually, that’s a good point. Amber at least got rid of his gun, because there’s no way that he wouldn’t try to use it on the cops.
But in the process, she’s put at least five people in immediate and deadly danger.
I was trying to come up with at least one positive to Amber getting involved, apart from some rad action beats.
I’m thinking of it like the third man in rule in hockey – two guys fighting get penalised, but the third guy to join in gets it worse because hes turning it into a brawl. Amazigirl is taking what could have been a delicate hostage situation and turning it into a potentetial multi vehicle pileup with fatalities. (Speaking of which, what happens to the other cars that hit her caltrops?)
Agreed, and I’m expecting consequences. Not necessarily legal or physical (owing to timeframes), but Amazi-Girl’s intervention – as awesome as it is to watch – has absolutely made the situation more immediately dangerous for everyone involved, and I think Amber will have to face that in the aftermath.
Back after she red-misted on Blaine, and picked an unprovoked revenge fight with Sal, I think she was starting to accept that Amazi-Girl isn’t a particularly healthy coping mechanism for her issues, but she seems to have put that aside after Dorothy chose not to out her. She’s regained confidence (Whiteboard Ding-Dong Bandit on), and sure, AG is pretty harmless when taking on petty campus criminality – but this situation is something else entirely. It’s not overconfidence; we had the “can’t fail anyone” mantra to point out how far she’s driven by her demons. As much as I love AG as a comic book hero, she’s not good for Amber in long run.
TEH TRUCK!
AGAIIIN! D:
Amber’s going to jail, isn’t she?
I hope so.
Remember kids; never wear your seatbelts.
WHAT IF REDCARGIRL PULLS A RUTH AND SAVES THEM ALL IS THAT WHY AMBULANCES IM SCARED
Let’s hope the worst that comes from this is Amber breaking her arm.
*crosses fingers*
*collects heads-up pennies*
*sacrifices to the luck gods*
The danger is escalating, and under these circumstances, that’s saying something.
Something that just occurred to me… Becky called 911, but she did so using Dina’s phone. So, if the 911 operator is listening in on the call and looks up the owner of the phone, they may get the identities of the kidnapper and victims wrong.
Not likely. They just heard her say “It’s my girlfriend’s [phone], jackass!” So they’ll likely understand that even if the phone comes up under another name, that’s just her phone. Police aren’t usually brainless feebs, despite what the media might try and narrate.
True, I had forgotten about that. But the phone conversation had gone on for almost a minute before that particular fact was revealed. So even if the 911 operators/police figured it out, it would have been at least another minute or 2 before they’d get things figured out.
Does it really matter? It gets the cops to the scene, knowing there’s a crazy guy with a gun and a kidnapped girl. The rest they can sort out once they’re there.
As they’re picking through the wreckage, judging by more recent events.
Assuming the phone is still on, probably on the floor of the car, imagine what the 911 operator must be thinking now.
Gets them to what scene?
Operators can sometimes track cellphones that have called 911, but not cities have that technology installed, and some that do are only accurate to within a mile or 2.
Not that it was a bad idea… More information is good. I was just concerned that inaccurate information might muddy the waters, delaying action (even if things correct themselves eventually.)
Maybe the woman in the red car can call the police. She knows this man is armed and she’s seen him pull a rifle. So she can pull over and dial 911.
I hope Ross and the truck driver are the only survivors.
And then they make out.
I’m okay with that.
Seriously, are you trolling? I get that you are mad at Amber escalating, so you want to answer that by killing her, Becky, and DoA Maggie, and leaving the hapless trucker and the homophobic abusive douchebag dad? That’s the side you’re rooting for here?
I’m pretty sure they’re trolling.
Or at the least we found the only Toedad fan in existence.
Why would I be mad at Amber?
I just think it’d be funny if Ross, in his misguided attempts at doing what he honestly feels to be the right path loses everything.
I want the trucker to survive because I know damn well that car ain’t doing shit to the truck, and truckers get enough shit to deal with as is.
I hope YOU know that truck drivers frequently suffer severe, sometimes career-ending, PTSD from accidents like this, especially if there are fatalities. Some can never drive ANY vehicle again, let alone the one with which they make their sole income and is often the only trade skill they know. If the driver were to then find out that the only ones killed were a kidnapped girl, an innocent bystander, and a girl trying to save the kidnapped girl?
Yeah, fuck you too.
Go fuck yourself. I am a trucker. I always wish for the best for another driver, as I know all too well the anguish of a person dying on one’s truck. It never gets fucking easier, but I have people to support that rely on that income. They are what keep me driving.
It’s a fucking comic on the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xcRE_XoPT0
Scott Walker, No regrets
Not sure what Amazi-Girl can do at this point to help matters. “Point the wheels in the direction of the skid” doesn’t seem useful.
FWIW:
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has given the Focus a “Good” overall rating in the frontal offset crash test and an “Acceptable” rating in the side impact test. Front and rear side curtain airbags and front seat-mounted torso airbags are standard. (Wikipedia)
This actually makes me feel better. Thank you.
I have reason to believe cartoon physics will save them.
Cartoon physics are the ONLY thing that will save them, with two of them hanging outside the vehicle. If that truck was at highway speed when he saw them, he can’t stop, and the IIHS rating means “HA HA NO” to a semi. This sort of accident is (rarely) survivable, but they’re never pretty. (Link to a similar accident to this setup that the car driver survived; warning for uncensored accident footage from a semi dashcam: https://youtu.be/CKNQG6pSYig ). More often, the result is that the semi driver survives it and the occupant(s) of the car do not. (Link to article and photos of semi vs Ford Focus that resulted in three fatalities: http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/rescue-underway-after-semitruck-rolls-onto-car-in-detroit/24732388 )
In a few weeks, after the tragic death of all the major characters in a multi-vehicle collision, Jason and Penny (woohoo, my avatar!) will be opening the Institute of Superhero Physics, and offering a full scholarship to Mr. Willis and other worthy candidates. Apply now!
I would say “Willis, you magnificent bastard!”, but I thought “act with integrity” before I even read the alt text.
I just realized Willis has left no guarantees nobody will be in a wheelchair for the rest of the comic.
Is it possible that the truck isn’t going that fast and has EXCELLENT breaks?
Even a wee bit possible?
If that truck has a load, there’s no braking system strong enough to stop quickly.
Oh hey, maybe THIS is how Danny becomes available for a relationship with Ethan!
…well that’s one way to avoid relationship drama, I suppose.
Darnit if I don’t keep posting the wrong email address after cleaning up my browser.
I sincerely doubt his girlfriend dying would motivate him to move on to a guy.
Because Danny’s reaction to Amber dying would be to jump right to the next available person right? There wouldn’t be any drama whatsoever with him dealing with the fact that his girlfriend died in a terrible crash? In the midst of attempting to do heroics?
to be fair, Usayasha said “available”
“ready for” is a different animal entirely
Yeah, this is pretty much what I meant. It wouldn’t avoid ALL drama, cause both Danny and Ethan would be dealing with loss and grief, and both would have lost Amber to her heroics, which in was a secret they both shared and would, in hindsight, feel guilty for not intervening in. I doubt they would just suddenly move on to each other’s arms, even if they did have shared-grief-sex in the midst of grieving. (Is that a thing? Maybe.)
But it would certainly be a twist, as their relationship has been foreshadowed rather clearly, so the issue of “What about Amber?” has been on everyone’s minds. Will Danny cheat? Will he and Amber break up? There’s a lot of possibilities, and outright killing Amber would be a surprising way to clear up the issue. Not necessarily the best way, and certainly not a drama-less way. But the drama would be less relationship drama and more grieving-over-shared-loss-and-crushing-guilt-I-am-not-ready-for-this-yet drama.
Still fun to read, though. Even if it reminds me of a lot of fanfiction back in the day.
Well this is when becky’s dad and Amazigirl fall out..
and becky dies.
bah. I’m hoping for no deaths.
no one: why don’t we pull over to the side of the road and fight like SENSIBLE people?
man, kids these days.
die without wrongdoing.
Seatbelts, man. That stuff can KILL you!
NOT AGAAAAIIIINNNN!!!
Wrong.
Belts anchor (for front passenger seats) at bottom left and top right. She could easily slip/lean left and reach the wheel.