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Olga Nesterova @onestpress.onestnetwork.com ⋅ 16h
Kathryn Salamander @transsalamander.bsky.social ⋅ 17h
Jesse Hawken @jessehawken.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
bort @crushbort.bsky.social ⋅ 3m
TFW2005 @tfw2005.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
luke steuber @lukesteuber.com ⋅ 2d
Victor Shammas @victorshammas.com ⋅ 20d
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In Sarah’s defense, it’s the world that’s ugly.
love this quote. loved since the very beginning.
It does make me wonder – since this is an alternate universe/remake of It’s Walky, does that mean Willis will reuse some of his own material? I mean, sure, it’s GOOD material and I wouldn’t mind a rehash, but I am curious.
Possibly, after all these are the same characters and it’s likely they’ll have the same situations and growths.
Well the idea is that there’s nothing sci-fi about the characters anymore so it’s a big “What If?” scenario. You can’t change certain things that are key to the characters but this time we get to see them before we met them in Roomies! or It’s Walky!
Linkara! You’re a Walky Verse fan? I don’t think he will. Especially given the chance to let characters who have never met in-universe interact with each other.
Sarah’s got it right, her being broken by the world will be sad, but Joyce is right to at least try new things.
Maybe she’ll try punching less people when the world breaks her.
what Joyce said made me laugh out loud and then I finished and my thoughts matched Sarah’s it made me sad. Congrats Willis you got me on both ends of the emotional spectrum
the world might break her, but that doesn’t mean she cant be rebuily, we have the technology
“rebuilt” is what i meant dammit
We can rebuild her: faster, stronger, Joyce-er.
Is that good thing?
THE HORROR!
such a perfect gravatar
We have the technology to do that?
It’s offical. You two are only allowed to post one after the other.
lol the two gravatars really made what you 2 just said all the funnier.
Need a Joyce Drago character, “I will break you”.
Seriously though, a rare empathetic moment from Sarah?
She will knock you all down. With her faaaaaaaaaaaaaace.
For a nickel.
With her penis
May Joyce bend, but not break.
Agreed and I agree totally with Joyce, but also agreed with Sarah, that is if you let it. I have bent many times, but haven’t broken.
Yes bend. And take other positions that are good on a bed… or a table… depends on preferences really.
I immediately got to thinking of Sarah’s reaction to Joyce when she didn’t break in It’s Walky!. They’re not the same continuities, but to me that makes this hopeful in its own way.
That’s very Zen but can Joyce follow such an Eastern Philosophy?
That which does not bend with adversity can only be broken by it.
Breaking isn’t so scary. It just means you get to put yourself together again and in the process change.
Yep, Sarah continues to be a stuck-up know-it-all.
Except that she’s right.
that’s the worst kind – the ones who are completely right.
No she isn’t. We feel the way we choose to feel. The world can only break you if you let it.
There’s a difference between a know-it-all and a cynic. Using my mad empathy skills, I can tell that something’s hurt Sarah pretty deeply in her past that affects the way she views the world.
Last panel can be substituted with ‘like it did me’ and it’d have the same content.
Joyce is gonna break the world.
In a good way?
With her penis
Wow. Sarah has a heart. A jaded one, but a heart nonetheless.
jade is a pretty stone, its a better heart making material than this frigid black onyx that mine is made of
I don’t have a heart. I traded it for some airline peanuts.
i lost mine in a lab accident while trying to give myself super powers
At least the peanuts tasted good.
Did the experiment work?
*sigh* i don’t wanna talk about it
How do you think he became ‘lord of dance’?
Is it really an accident if you were trying to do it?
I had my heart removed and locked up in a chest. Now I’m immortal, unless someone tries to open it. Thankfully, even I have forgotten where that thing is.
Every caterpillar breaks, if it lives long enough.
They’re both right…
…And that’s why this comic is sad.
God if I can’t relate to Sarah right now.
Good, I can’t relate to Sarah right now.
i sense a really heavy mood of foreboding around here somewhere..
Apparently it is depressing comic week at DoA.
There’s a part of me that can’t help but read this as “I like you Joyce. That’s why I’ll kill you last…”
That’s because it’s quite clearly the implied subtext.
“I lied.”
+1
Commando= greatest movie ever
World only breaks you if you let it. Some people are strong enough, most are just weak enough to fail.
A sculpture is made by ‘breaking’ off the pieces that don’t contribute to the desired form.
Apt, but it wasn’t intentional that Milo’s Venus stopped having arms.
Isn’t it supposed to be raining in this strip? Somebody could have waved a match near the smoke detector or something…
v.v I know how they both feel….
>: Y If Billie so much as looks wrong at Joyce again I’ll–!
I’ll–!
I’ll do something really mean and nasty to her!
What does it say if I’m currently in a horrible state of loneliness and depression, and I agree with Joyce 100 times more than Sarah?
That you still have a desire for hope in the future to light up your life despite being down in the dumps now.
You’re down, but not out. So to speak.
I would say that you are better person than most of the world simply for holding that hope. Keep that light shining Katana, people need that.
And I love how my avatar is Sarah
Nothing, really. Sarah, even though she’s a written character, potentially has a completely different reason for her outlook than one you may have. Your personal experiences, despite your current feelings, lead you to feel one way as opposed to the other.
Joyce = OptiMISS Prime
Sarah = A Depressacon
Sorry, couldn’t resist such a bad set of puns.
Well, someone’s gotta provide some sort of funny. Strip’s got a real downer of a punchline.
I am simultaneously charmed and disturbed that Joyce has said something that could easily be lifted as dialogue for The Doctor. Seriously, all that’s missing is “I wear a yellow sundress now, yellow sundresses are cool”.
Just as long as she doesn’t offering jellybabies or wearing celery as a corsage.
Agreed, celery is for Summers and Joyce is so totally a Spring.
Wow. Both are right, but it’s a rare person who can keep that optimism in the midst of life’s travails.
It’s pretty easy when you’ve been as sheltered as Joyce! I imagine in the future we’ll see how much she has to struggle to keep it based off what happens to her.
You should check out Willis’ previous strips because –*spoilers*
It’s possible to keep it without much struggle! I was sheltered growing up, but even though I was introduced to the real world at my boarding high school, I am still positive and cheery!
I get the drift; I’ve read Roomies and It’s Walky already.
On a side note, that’s why I hated Billie from her first appearance in DoA, and was happy to see Ruth. (Not liking Ruth in this current incarnation though.)
Yeah, it’s odd. I actually started reading DoA before going through the Roomies/It’s Walky archives. I’ve read Shortpacked! for years but never double dipped. I’m glad I finally read through them though and then I had to go back through the Shortpacked! archives too. Incrediblely weaved plots.
Sara makes a good point. I feel bad for wanting Joyce to be broken now.
Wink wink nudge nudge saynomore saynomore.
And you’re a pain in the ass, Sarah. I’ll be happy when you tear down the wall you’ve thrown up and give people a chance again.
I see nothing to indicate she doesn’t give people a chance. She doesn’t give all people a chance, but there’s a difference. One is a completely sensible thing one can expect from anyone with the capacity to learn from negative reinforcement. The other is a blanket statement regarding her views on people in general.
If anything Joyce is the unusual one here. Really, give a chance to every single person? Let’s see how long she can keep that up now that she’s outside of her protective bubble. Joe clearly upset her. Billie’s gonna hurt her whether Joyce succumbs to influence or not. How many Joes and Billies does she have to meet before she stops feeling quite so charitable when an obvious womanizer comes along. How many before it occurs to her that she only does herself a disservice by trying to convert all the joes of the world, and she just genuinely has no real reason to want to hang out with the Billies? She’s got a good sixty or seventy years ahead of her. That’s a whole lot of Billies and Joes if she’s taking the time to reach her hand out to each of them.
I can see and understand your point, but from her view, from her beliefs, even if out of all those people, she can save one person, than she succeeded. To her, the world is what you make it, and if she tries to help every single person, she makes it a slightly better place, if only in her eyes. So while yes, I’ll acknowledge, it is hard to give a chance to every single person, the important part is, as Joyce stated, to try.
True. True. Joyce is perfectly cool. Nothing wrong with what she does, and some people really do pull it off. I just object to the notion that Sarah is in the wrong simply for having learned to recognize those who are not worth her time. I see no real reason she should feel obligated to follow the Joyce school of thought here and start chumming with the whores and the lepers.
Though admittedly Joyce is a better christian than most I’ve known for trying. Certainly better than I ever was at my best. It’s a very noble endeavor.
Jesus was known for hanging out with the whores, lepers and other undesirables of the world…
However, it’s not the Joes and the Billies of the world Joyce needs to fear; it’s that one person who, at least initially, seems nice, but then uses her kindness to hurt and/or take advantage of her. That’s when the true test will happen.
So does that mean that Joyce will try to become a Hero of Justice like Shirou from Fate/stay night?
So, I guess this is a dramatic strip.
…Willis has not really gotten better at writing non-narmy dramatic dialogue, at all.
…Oh well.
And now the banner makes total sense. This comic is secretly about Joyce, Sarah, and Billie. All those other characters? Fuck ’em, they’re subplot.
In the next episode of DoA: Joyce will discover that ETHAN MAY OR MAY NOT BE HOMOSEXUAL, Sarah will become slightly less of a bongo, and Billie will have developed some horrible disease where her body has slowly been adapting to an absurd Blood Alcohol Content, and can no longer survive without critical amounts of liquor.
Walky will continue to make himself look like an idiot to Dorothy, and Sal will retain her badassery no matter what.
RE: “Billie will have developed some horrible disease where her body has slowly been adapting to an absurd Blood Alcohol Content, and can no longer survive without critical amounts of liquor.”
This is DoA, not Funky Winterbean.
I have never met a single person in the whole world that actually talks like this.
No, wait, there was one guy. We’re pretty sure he thought his life was an action movie.
my life is a romantic comedy, but it doesn’t star me….
Just be thankful it’s not a murder mystery.
I’m the guy with the fruit cart in the way of the climactic car chase.
On multiple occasions, I’ve said stuff almost exactly like Joyce’s little speech in this strip. Which is scary, because I have nothing else in common with her.
I meant Sarah. In real life, being melodramatic and ominous just makes you sound like a dick. A pretentious dick, at that.
My life is a roller coaster. But it is an old and ricketty one. However since there really aren’t any dangerous curves or anything they still keep it open.
Hi, just found this.
Oh, this is great. After all the trouble I’ve gone through to overcome the unhealthy Sal addiction I developed during It’s Walky!, I stumble upon David Willis’ latest webcomic, like an ex-junkie fresh out of rehab who finds a stash of heroin. Plus, now Sal rides a freaking motorcycle.
Damn you, Willis, DAMN YOU. I’ll never forgive you this.
*injects himself some Sal*
Guuuuuh… you’re forgiven.
Amigo, there ain’t enough Sal in this town for two of us.
It seems like in this universe Sarah might end up becoming like a protective older sister character for this Joyce.
I love how everyone was so critical of Joyce up until this point, and now that she’s said something that makes sense for her character and shows she’s not a total religious nutcase, they aren’t really talking about it that much.
I was B’awing by the second panel and tearing up by the third. These lines show that Joyce is more mature than I was when I started college, that’s for sure.
I’d agree that what Joyce is saying here makes sense for her character, but not for the reasons you’ve described. To me, it’s a gracious sentiment (and Joyce is certainly gracious, when she’s not hiring a chaperone to punch her date if he so much as glances at other girls). Moreover, it reinforces to me that Joyce sees the world through a melodramatic lens, where the smallest thing can be invested with huge moral and emotional significance. I don’t think that’s necessarily a mark of maturity, but then neither is world-weary jadedness. And this sort of earnest worldview is commensurate with the Joyce we know and love.
What I didn’t expect was for Sarah to get in on the gravitas in the last panel. Isn’t she supposed to be the down-to-earth one?
It’s obvious enough that I’ll do this. You guys do realize this is a comic right? Most of the plot, characters, etc. have been planned a certain way from the beginning. So really we would still have to wait and see how this turns out.
She is still a total religious nutcase. She’s just as relatively nice total religious nutcase – at least until you offend her religious sensibilities and she starts punching you in the everloving FAAAACE.
I remain firmly of the opinion that breaking will improve her – all comedic violence and mishaps aside, that divine high horse she’s on is the cause of *all* her problems to date. Getting knocked off it may be rough, but it’ll make her better in the long run.
Dammit Willis. We were all having fun here, laughing at the jokes and bongoing about how adorably psychotic some of the characters were. Now your starting to inject SERIOUS BUSINESS into these comics moment by moment. And we’ve all been down that road….pretty soon we’ll have nerds exploding and the drinkers being hit by trucks. You’ve been a countdown to our inevitable DOOM.
Snarking aside, good strip. All of this makes me wonder if this world ‘broke’ Sarah at some point.
Cerberus Syndrome. The comic is now so dark.
Is it just me, or is Sarah speaking from personal experience here?
*looks at comment above* Ah. Clearly not.
What a great comic. Sad, but true. I really feel for both Sarah and Joyce. You can sense how they both struggling to survive at college.
Every reason that people have been finding Joyce irritating or stupid? Completely countered by this. This is why I’ve always loved every version of Joyce.
No, not countered in the slightest. Joyce is still the same uptight, naive, potentially-violent idiot she was before. This adds another dimension to her character, but it doesn’t cancel out the old ones.
It’s not even a new dimension – she’s been friendly and upbeat from the start. And note that another way to read that “good” and “bad” in people she’s talking about is as “in my religion” and “not my religion” – and she’s been happy to consider everyone a possible convert from the start. You know, so that she can convert one to a husband and thus not be all alone.
I don’t entirely agree. It’s true that this doesn’t change her personality at all, but it does show that particular quirk in a new light. It’s not all about converting people. For example, it explains why, at the end of the “date” with Joe, she gave him a compliment because she wanted to end it on a positive note. She was trying to find the good even in a silly little jerk like him.
That said, my reply to Rachel still stands. This adds another dimension to Joyce’s personality, but it doesn’t cancel out the other dimensions that she has been (rightly, I think) criticized for.
Yeah, she gave him a compliment. But frankly, to me it came off as her not being nice, but trying make herself feel better. She spent the entire date trying to convert him, and being inconsiderate regarding his family life and then assaulted him because he behaved like a teenage boy with natural hormones that unlike her, he’s never been told were evil.
When the date ended because she attacked Joe with Mike, she felt guilty. She had given up on trying to convert him, because she felt he wasn’t worth it, since obviously he wasn’t going to be her husband. Had the date gone well, you KNOW she’d have tried to bible thump him into conversion so that way it would be a “proper” Christian marriage.
Actually, no it’s not. If anything one could argue this makes it worse. Before one could argue that Joyce grew up in such an isolated “bubble” that she didn’t know any better regarding her bible thumping and unfair judgments about people. Now she’s flat out told us that she knows better, but still does it.
But I do find the idea of everyone calling her bad and evil unfrair. Joyce is none of those things. She doesn’t do this stuff to be malicious. She acts like an annoying religious bible thumper because she thinks that’s a good way to behave. It’s how she was raised and all she knows.
But even though she’s not bad or evil, that doesn’t make her necessarily likable.
I don’t understand Joyce one bit. On one hand, she’s a religious conservative type, which makes her evil. On the other hand, she wants to be nice to everyone.
The girl is definitely confused.
Eh, she’s just Walt Whitman. It’s a human thing.
She never said she was a conservative.
And I believe it is possible to be both religious and conservative without actually being evil. If you feel the need to tell everybody about how religious and moral you are because they couldn’t possibly have figured it out otherwise, not a good sign.
Joyce sometimes seems to fall into the latter camp, but she says it here: She knows she’s not actually very good at it but she’ll keep trying to improve.
She didn’t have to say she was conservative. When you speak out in favor of conservative ideologies people tend to fill in the blanks.
People are often wrong about such things. After all, there are plenty of people who have conservative ideas on some things and liberal ideas on others, and just speak about whetever topic comes up.
True. Obviously political ideologies are complex and reducing them to a simple boolean value is a gross oversimplification for the most part.
Still. If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
i dont know who to reply to here so ill go hyper nested comment.. conservative and liberal. dont always have to do with politics btw. conservative can and more accurately refers to “the norm,the way it is, the way things have always been.” among other things its why the political spectrum liberal-conservative tends to match young-old people tend to get set in their ways.
Sarah you hypocrite, not being broken yet is the whole reason joyce irritates you!
And?
FINALLY! Joyce is showing herself to be SOMEWHAT likable again. I still don’t much care for her, mind you. Pretty much in every strip she’s appeared aside from the early ones and the motorcycle one, she’s been rather painful to read. Bible thumping, judgmental, and even violent. But at least here she acknowledges she does that. She’s not a bad person, but she is a person who conflicted on whether its better to follow her own feelings or to solely follow the guidelines set by her faith and family.
I just hope this side of her comes out more, and she stops being so heavy handed with the judgmental religious stuff.
And I feel bad for Sarah, because she’s become jaded by the world already. But I still have no issue with what she said to Billie, considered we all know that Billie is going to fall hard and take anyone near her down with her.
Actually, to follow up on what I posted yesterday (hey, I gotta sleep sometime), they’re both right, in their own ways.
Personally, though, I don’t think you’re finished being built unless you’ve been broken at least once.
Some broken things can be rebuilt. Sometimes better than before.
I think that’s a good point. It’s all well and good to say that only weak people break if you’ve never faced something that world-changing yourself (you in the general sense, not directed at *you*).
if you want that just read it’s joyce and walky; also theres 3 things that will alwys be true no matter what …verse your in. 1.sal looks cool. 2. Mike is an ass. 3. joyce always starts out sheltered and regligious to the extreme then begins to tone it down and be more “normal”
Well, yes. But we’re talking about this universe that’s barely just getting off the ground.
Also, Joyce was broken a couple times in It’s Walky, oddly.
I understand where she’s coming from, but I find Sarah’s world-weariness a little off-putting when I remember she’s only a sophomore. I don’t feel she’s earned the right to use “when” rather than “if”.
I love that your name is Jason and your avatar is Tony, first of all.
Also, age doesn’t indicate experience. It’s a good basis for a guess, but honestly everyone Joyce’s age is far more experienced than she is.
Re name and avatar…I chose neither.
“Sophomore” is Greek for “wise fool”. Most sophomores fit that quite well. Experienced to think they know it all, but not experienced enough to see the gaps in their knowledge.
Honestly, I don’t think it takes that much more experience to be that much wiser than Joyce. I think most people’s spirits broke back in high school, if not sooner. With Joyce so sheltered, Sarah’s statement is accurate enough.
-sigh- Sarah is a real pessimist in this one.
So is Joe wearing the S.E.M.M.E. shirt a joke for the nutcases like me who read the series in four days?
Message from earlier meant for another place
well since joyce was never exposed to the trama that her walkyverse self had to go through its possible that this joyce could either be broken or be solid like a cliff made of onyx.
Both Joyce and Sarah are extreme examples.
Joyce is so uber-optimistic to the point of being naive, and Sarah’s so cynical with life that she can’t enjoy life as it is and that both makes me sad.
I like to think that to live well, one has to achieve a balance in having a realistic outlook in life and having a more positive attitude.
Let’s face it, you can’t change how the world works, but you can change how you look at the world and therefore how you live in it.
break you with its ..
That would have to be FAAAAAAAAAAACE, because it’s not Joe, and Joe would break her with his penis.
I read that as “break you with tits ..” initially.
I…I really can’t reconcile this Joyce with the one that belted Joe. I won’t say it’s out of character yet-we haven’t seen enough of her to pass that judgement, but this doesn’t quite jive with the Hiring of Mike For Face Punches and Freaking out over discovering the male libido.
I guess I’m looking forward to seeing this all make more sense?
I don’t see why not? People are inherently hypocritical. Also, because she was expecting the good in people, she trusted 1) that Joe wouldn’t do anything deserving of getting punched in the face for and 2) that Mike wouldn’t actually do it. At least initially, her thought process was “speak quietly and carry a big stick”. Intimidation more than anything.
As far as her actually freaking out about the male libido, anyone who’s sheltered will do that. The punching, not so much but at that point it was kind of intended as a cross between plot and humor. Violence is going to be exaggerated in comic strips because it can.
And I will (cue hate mail) be happy when she is broken. What she is doing IS walling herself, only of a different sort. She is delluding herself into thinking that the world is much, MUCH nicer than it really is.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I think that the majority of people, while they do tend to look out for number 1, are decent people. But I also recognize that the world is a dark and cruel place as well.
She seems to be of the opinion (or so it seems) that the world is a cute and happy place, and that everyone has an angel inside them.
Bad news for you missy. We’re human. Which means we’re flawed. It also means that given the correct (not the right or wrong, but correct) circumstances, any of us can become something dark and twisted. Some people require a tiny push, while others take many.
Trust me missy. Your going to wake up one day, and realize that the world is a lot grayer than it was the previous day.
Cant we just pretend it wont?
I look forward to the world breaking her. Like a juicy orange.
But I never was much for sheltered upbringing as an excuse for bigotry, no matter how innocent it may seem
It’s kinda amazing just how much Willis was laying out and foreshadowing _in full view_.
Wait till you get to where I’m coming from. Ho boy.