Seriously. She was literally the last central character I was expecting to see on the other end of that bat. After her bi-universal distaste for Joyce, I honestly would have been less surprised to see Robin, or Mike, or even Jason delivering the pain than Sarah. I’m starting to get lost in this strange alternate universe.
i like the one where he tells abraham to sacrifice his son, but then before he kills the kid, ashton kutcher comes down and tells abraham that he got punk’d.
See that woman hanging out of the spaceship with the really large bat?
I’m not saying this party wasn’t easy to find, but it was a little out of her way, and she didn’t wanna come to begin with. Woman’s looking to kill some folk, so really, it’s her will y’all should worry about thwarting.
Wow I JUST figured out what your avatar is supposed to look like. You know, ‘mario holding a lightsaber.’ I’ve for the longest time thought it was a butt–like, Mario’s butt, with a lightsaber impaled in the butt-hole. *facepalm* I was so confused and grossed out.
Yay for mario holding a lightsaber with his HANDS and not his butt!!!
For those who don’t remember:
“Ruth saving Joyce doesn’t have much pull, from a writing perspective, since they don’t interact much. Neither do most of the other choices that have been offered. Someone who would, though, is Sarah. The two had a big fight, the last time we saw Sarah, wtih Joyce telling Sarah that she has no friends. Sarah claimed that she didn’t care if anything happened to Joyce, but we know that deep down that isn’t true. So, she follows along,bringing a baseball bat as a weapon, which she would totally use, to make sure nothing happens, and establish herself as a good friend for Joyce. All the while denying any mushy friendship feelings.
You see, its all about the writing opportunities that it creates afterwards, and making the writing flow from ongoing relationships.”
Called nuthin. Pretty sure that in the hundreds of comments, all characters ever were called at least once. That’s like asking 52 people to pick a card and then going “5 of clubs, is that somebody’s card?”
It’s more like looking at a card and asking 52 people, what card am I looking at? If you say the right card you still called it, even though a lot of other people thought you where looking at another card. I would have been different if lightsabermario would have made a lot of assumptions and then claimed he was right. Just because a lot of other people thought someone else was holding the bat, doesn’t invalidite the people ‘calling out’ the right name.
With replacement, chances that you randomly pick the right card of 52 randomly selected cards are (1 – (51/52)^52) = about 63.57%. Not a certainty by any means.
You didn’t mean with replacement, but whatever. I did the maths, so it would be wasteful to not mention it now.
i knew sarah would make a big impact on friday’s story back when willis announced rotating characters in the previous banner. she hadn’t really done anything yet, so it only made sense that sarah was the one with the bat.
And Ryan keeps pitching the puns and everyone else is still swinging at air.
Fortunately for us Sarah is not one to kick a guy when he is down when a good Tee off would be more appropriate. Once laid out appropriately, the stomping can commence.
Just waiting for the salt for the follow through.
Not to be mean, but ‘Sky’ is a female name, and ‘Skye’ sounds pretty dang female as well. Not to mention the girl-avatar. So really, no one would have objected if you did.
Nah, if God was a woman, She wouldn’t be some comical figure like Oprah. I figure someone like Helen Mirren – aged, wise, stable and yet still somehow strangely hot.
I picture the female version of god as more like Cathy Jones of “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” fame.
The guy version would be of either David Broadfoot or Vincent Price or possibly both at the same time.
Nice. Sarah wasn’t even in my top 5 guesses for who would be wielding the bat.
At least she beat Ronald Reagan. In my list of guesses, I mean. She didn’t beat him with the bat. Although I suppose that might have happened off screen.
I’m surprised and disappointed that Sarah reacted with such overwhelming violence in this situation. From this point forward, I simply cannot see her not lashing out physically and still being in character.
Joyce punched Joe for honestly seeking mutually consentual sex.
Sarah saved Joyce from a predator who conned her, drugged her, and then flew into a violent rage when his plans didn’t work out.
I’m thinking there’s just a wee bit of a difference.
Ah, I see. I recall a few folks being worried that she might be in trouble for glassing a guy, but I don’t remember a lot of vitriol, though I admittedly started skimming to check for responses to my own posts once the thread hit 500 or so…
True, but then again, rapist. Guys like Ryan in fiction are kind of like Nazis, in that pretty much anything can happen to them, and nobody’s going to feel bad about it. (Unless the reader is an awful, awful person.)
I also saw said vitriol. I believe the difference is that when Joyce hit him, he was threatening her verbally and physically (without touching her). He’s physically assaulting her by the time Sarah comes in.
Well, it’s never legal, I’ll give you that. “Okay” is a little more a matter of perspective. While I DO worry about potential repurcussions for Sarah, I’d be lying if I said I felt the slightest bit of sympathy for Ryan. At the risk of belaboring a point and being obnoxious, while I’ve always hated rapists, having two daughters has really cranked it up to eleven. Judging by what he was saying and the look on his face, I have no doubt he wasn’t going to stop at mere rape, and anything Sarah can dish out is, frankly, better than he deserves.
Sometimes you need to trust your instincts and take advantage of that first strike. I’d rather Joyce not wait to be assaulted to retaliate, even if it is with sharp glass. That being said, Sarah had him down and I think the attention of a crowd, so I thought the 2nd strike was unnecessary. Then again, she’s probably a bit emotional to stop and judge wither the threat is gone. I’m not letting it bother me.
Additionally we forget that joyce didn’t gave a lot of time to act: she was drugged. She looked at her glass as if she remembered something. And she WAS told that people might drug her. And she WAS aware that ryan had offered her a drink that night.
That said she may also have been in fear of life and limb, and so reacted.
Soooo…self-defense. Her actions are justified. even in the case of death. You would be hard pressed to find a jury that would convict her.
Plus technically she was acting under the influence of a controlled substance, so the one who administered the substance is at least %50 to blame for any mayhem that resulted.
Well, he better live, or at this point she’s going to be in trouble. I’m not aware of any states where it’s legal to beat someone unconscious to death, no matter what he did while awake. Tempting yes, legal now.
Sarah has violent wrath for rapists, and hasn’t resorted to violence for any other reason. Joyce has violent wrath for betrayers of her manly ideal, and has done it to non-rapists too. Obviously these situations are exactly the same!
Now, if Sarah takes a baseball bat to the next person who disses her in the cafeteria, then never fear, I’ll get a bit critical of her actions too.
Well, as I just said, I don’t think she was acting in self defense. She attacked because she was furious at him, not because she felt threatened. (Check her facial expressions.)
Obviously the situation changed when he got up after she cut him, actually threatened her, and then followed that up by actually attacking her. Of course by that point Joyce was woozy, and so Sarah stepped in to fill the ‘justified (self?-)defense’ void.
Hell no. Yeah, she was pissed, but she was acting in self-defense. She was angry because she realized that this guy was attempting to rape her and had drugged her. I’d react with more than a little anger in that situation as well.
The people who predicted this must be elated. The “old testament god” line is classic. I’m an atheist, but even I recognize the fact that that has to be the most badass thing someone could say while delivering a beatdown.
Is Sarah hated enough that her enemies will bear false witness, and claim Sarah attacked Ryan without justification? (I don’t think so. It’s one thing to do someone dirt when there are no consequences to oneself, another when you’ve skin in the game.)
Yeah, but the drunk people she was hanging out with, no matter how drunk, can probably put some pieces together. She was sober, she wasn’t drinking at all, and suddenly she goes to the bathroom and is all drugged and woozy? Not to mention the guy she was with looked pissy the whole time.
And anyone who knows Joyce can defend her, saying, “Hey, that girl doesn’t drink or do drugs, she’s a hardcore fundie through and through.”
…you seem to have somehow very badly misread this. You’re countering my point by… agreeing with it? There are drugs in her system. People do not take roofies for fun even if they ARE druggies, doesn’t matter what people think of Joyce. Who cares what people say or put together, that’s pretty irrefutable proof.
4 4 they has forsaken me an made dis place ov foreign godz; they has burnd incense in it 2 godz dat neithr they nor their ancestors nor teh kings ov judah evr knew, an they has filld dis place wif teh blood ov teh innosent.
5 they has built teh high placez ov baal 2 burn their children in da fire as offerings 2 baal – somethin i did not command or menshun, nor did it entr mah mind.
6 so beware, teh dais r comin, declarez teh lord, when peeps will no longr call dis place tofeth or teh valley ov ben hinnom, but teh valley ov slaughtr.
7 “in dis place im gonna ruin [a] teh planz ov judah an jerusalem. Im gonna mak them fall by teh sword before their enemiez, at teh hanz ov dose hoo seek their livez, an im gonna giv their carcasez as fud 2 teh birdz an teh wild animals.
8 im gonna devastate dis city an mak it an object ov horror an scorn; all hoo pas by will be appalld an will scoff cuz ov all itz woundz.
9 im gonna mak them eat teh flesh ov their sons an daughters, an they will eat wan anothers flesh cuz their enemiez will pres teh siege so hard against them 2 destroy them.
10 “den break teh jar while dose hoo go wif u r watchin,
In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.
“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.
“Certainly,” said man.
“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God.
And He went away.
Bokonon goes on to explain the human striving for knowledge in one of his immortal Calypsos:
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?”
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
It would be a shame for Sarah to barely avoid trouble with her former roommate and get in trouble over this.
It almost seems like she knows Ryan and his tricks — perhaps through said roommate?
Of course, once Joyce un-roofies it, Sarah is going to give her the biggest “I told you so” lecture of her LIFE.
Not like Joyce doesn’t need one of those, and Sarah DID say she wouldn’t save Joyce prior to the party, but it’s still well within Sarah’s rights to lash out at Joyce for being dumb and not listening to the voice of reason.
To be fair, Sarah just didn’t want Joyce to go to the party, which doesn’t so much teach her how to avoid asshole rapists but put off her opportunity to learn it. Wiser advice might have been to go but to stay close to a friend who’s already proven trustworthy and not drink anything your eyes have not been on since the moment of pouring. From a container unlikely to be spiked (i.e., NOT a punch bowl).
Yeah, it’s not really fair to say that Joyce was “being dumb” for going to a party, unless we’re going to start saying that women who are sexually assaulted were “being dumb” for being out in public without a male protector. Giving the advice that Random Webcomics Junkie mentioned would have been a much better way to go than just saying “Don’t go to parties, that’s dumb!”
I think anyone who drinks something they can’t personally verify to be sound to at the very least possesses a dangerous amount of faith in their fellow being.
That’s not even a party rule as far as I’m concerned. Only time I’d ever leave a drink unmonitored and still trust it is in a private setting among friends or family, and even that’s backfired on me once.
It was not however in any way negatively reflective on her that she went to the party, or that she didn’t realize Ryan possessed malign intent. Last I checked she possesses neither telepathy nor precognition, so there’s only so much we can expect of her.
while given that this is a comic so it is more an act of willis then anything. it should be noted that God has a tendency to act in ways we don’t expect. for example a person might ask for something and expect it to happen a certain way however God might make it so that it happens in a way that depending on the sitch might make the asker (or the person the prayer was for) a better person for the experience
Our car had a fan belt that was falling apart, so we ordered a new one from the auto part store, but had to wait a week for it to arrive. My mom kept praying that the car wouldn’t break down until we got the part in the car. When the part arrived my dad drove down to the auto part store and picked up the part tossed it on the passenger seat and started to drive home. Halfway home the belt finally broke and the car stopped running. my mom’s prayer was answered the car didn’t breakdown until the part was in the car, she just hadn’t mentioned that she wanted it installed.
Always be very, very specific to God when you pray to him, or he’ll totally prank you. He’s omniscient, so he knows what you mean, but he just likes finding loopholes in your pleas because he’s a jerk.
Praying to God is like wishing on the monkey’s paw.
Also, hilarious. “Hey Abraham, I order you to kill your son! HAH! Just kidding! Oh my me I can’t believe you were actually about to do that! LOLZ. Have fun with that awkward family moment now!”
To our modern sensitive selves, yes, a lot of the Old Testament is pretty harsh. But the thing is, the God of the OT was —for the most part— egalitarian in a world where that was unheard of. He was a god of justice. His punishments may have looked overblown, but they were at least usually dished out because you did something stupid.
In contrast, you look at the Greek pantheon, who were all living a soap opera and regularly dicked around with mortals (and each other) for shits and giggles. Or the various Mesopotamian gods who were just this side of Eldrich Horror that saw people as little more than mildly entertaining ants.
Alright, so the religions of their neighbors were pretty bad. But still, your argument is akin to this:
“Well, at least he had food poisoning instead of ebola!”
I’m a Christian and all, but the Old Testament allegories are often making God out to be a macabre, petty, self-righteous tyrant. I mean, come on. “Yay, I helped you Hebrews out of slavery. Now go enslave you some heathens! Slavery’s fine, as long as it’s not Hebrew slaves!” Political allegory using a divine voice as the narrative for 1,000 Alex.
But…again, I’m just providing the context of the day and age. I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to counter with.
Yes, he was a horrible character. I’m not debating that. But if you start throwing around terms like ‘worst ever’, then you have quite a list of contenders.
Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of when it was posited that Sarah might be the bat wielder (I was hoping for Ruth, or maybe one of the drunk gamers)
I’m really interested to see how Joyce handles this. If, as I expect, she grows much wiser from the experience, then I’m also interested to see how Sarah reacts to someone who experienced the dark side of college and didn’t shut down and become a miserable recluse.
second whack hell! I’m wondering if she stomping his head, ribs, gut, nuts or knees!
I’m going to assume in the context that she’s going after testicular vengeance, but there’s also the possibility that she’s crippling his hands too come to think of it. *sigh* the good old days.
By the looks of it I doubt she could do too much damage with those shoes. She doesn’t look like the combat boot wearing type in the first place. So only soft tissue damage at best unless she really tried to break something.
given a good stomp, half your body weight on a surface area the size of your foot… believe it or not, that’s an absolute crap load of pressure. I’d expect fractures in the very least, considering how eagerly she’s going about it. serious bruising an other nasty side effects (remember, skin and muscle don’t just bruise, they tear… you can really screw a person up just by tripping and landing wrong on them… now imagine the damage when it’s intentional).
All in all, if this lil prick survives (it’s a given that he will), he’s going to be hurting a lot afterwards.
There’s a very good chance Sarah just lost her scholarship AND earned herself an assault with a weapon charge.
Yes she is defending someone in duress. Bad thing here is you cannot continue to “defend” yourself and others when the threat is gone. By her own admission he is on the ground and not moving and she is continuing to use the bat to assault him. She just went from defender to assailant in front of witnesses in the eyes of the law. Depending on how good a lawyer he has they could even press for attempted murder.
Don’t get me wrong. He needs a good ass kicking. Doesn’t change the very BIG risk Sarah’s running from panel 2 on
To be fair, we don’t know that he’s on the ground and not moving yet. She made a joke about letting him go if he stays down, but she doesn’t give him enough chance to get up before hitting him again. It’s 50/50 whether or not he could have gotten up and fought more.
He’s on the ground. Once that occurs most state laws state you must remove yourself from the situation not continue it. Any lawyer would seize on her statement “Woops I lied” as a clear indicator that she saw the threat was gone and continued the assault anyway. That she has the time to make jokes and doesn’t use it to remove herself and the victim is what could bite her
Ryan’s a scumbag. The kind that seems to me would say “If I’m going down I’m sure as hell taking her with me”
Dude, this is a comic. If we can’t enjoy a little self-indulgent smiting on rapist pricks in a freakin’ comic without it devolving into a ream of legal consequences on the good guys, the world is doomed to eternal seriousness.
the pisser is, yes it’s a comic, but unfortunately for real world implications- ryan would become the victim and sarah the assailant. No matter how justified we see it, most the whiners, lawyers and other scum in this world would make it so that both sarah and joyce are the bad guys…
‘So it was going to be a little sex, it’s not like you didn’t want it. you were at the party after all… and no one forced you to be there…’
You’d think so, but considering all the absolutely absurd cases I’ve heard about in the last 20 years, I can’t honestly hold any hope that things would go any other way.
Burn yourself with a cup of coffee? the coffee brewers fault.
beg a rapist to wear a condom before raping you? now it’s consensual.
break a jerk’s arm when he’s in your house stealing your stuff? aggravated assault and battery with intent to do deadly harm.
yeah, I’ve not got much hope for the legal system.
To be fair, in the coffee thing the woman got third degree burns, needed skin grafts and had to be hospitalized for 8 days, all after her grandson pulled the car over so that she could add cream and sugar without hurting herself.
All of the cases you cite were wildly spun by media and pundits into examples of “absurd” legal decisions. If ones investigate even slightly one discovers that the situations were not really as described and in several cases the absurd arguments were defeated but were perceived as so outrageous that they were presented as though they succeeded. People hate lawyers, until they need one . . .
I’ve read the stuff on the McDonald’s coffee spill, David. Frivolous? No. Was McDonald at fault? Hell no! This just in: COFFEE IS HOT. Leading scientists have come to a groundbreaking conclusion that if you spill hot coffee on yourself, you may get burned.
Seriously, it was her own damn fault for trying to hold the cup of hot coffee between her legs when cars come with cup holders. And the cups already had signs on them alerting that the coffee is hot! What more do you want, people? Does McDonald’s coffee need to come with a person to carefully hold it for you?
If that is your take-home message from the details of the case, then I really think you only skimmed it. Yes, coffee is expected to be hot. That doesn’t mean restaurants are free-and-clear to sell beverages at any high temperature. Sometimes a temperature can be too high. Would it be okay to set a jacuzzi to boiling because they’re expected to be hot? Is it your fault if you step in one and have to get skin grafts?
We expect coffee to be hot. We don’t expect it to be insanely hot.
Actually I did do my homework. The case argued that if the coffee was lower than the 180 degrees it was at, say around 150, she wouldn’t have been burned. However, “a British court later rejected this argument as scientifically false finding that 149 °F (65 °C) liquid could cause deep tissue damage in only two seconds.” It can do damage at even lower temperatures if absorbed through synthetics like polyester. So it would have burned her even if it was at the lower temperature. But even disregarding that, she was clearly being teh stupidz by holding an easily squishable coffee cup BETWEEN HER LEGS. That is not using the jacuzzi properly, sir.
Mike punched a guy in the face a few times in this universe. Leaving no lasting damage. There;s a BIG difference between that and beating another person with a bat in front of a house full of people. The weapon and the fact it continues as he’s laying on the ground really DOES make all the difference
Depending on where Willis wants to go with this charges, loss of scholarship and/or expulsion are not unrealistic possibilities
Dude, this is a comic. If we can’t enjoy a little self-indulgent smiting on rapist pricks in a freakin’ comic without it devolving into a ream of legal consequences on the good guys, the world is doomed to eternal seriousness.
Not to be pulling in stuff from Willis’ other comics, but if you’ve read IW, you’d know that Joyce’s killing of Anti-Joyce there didn’t go away for a looooong time. And there was legal action.
We can enjoy it. But we’re not in the comic we observe it through the fourth wall. In comic Is Willis’ turf and may yet choose to smite her for it but that is unlikely.
That may be, but considering what is surely happening in that party (underage and possibly statutory rape) , it’s a matter of “If I go down, I’m taking you with me”.
Pursuing charges means looking into the party itself, which means a lot of other people would be on the hook for underage drinking and various other shenanigans. I don’t think anyone other than Ryan is going to be eager to go there, and I don’t know that he’s going to want to gamble on coming out of this looking like the good guy.
Once again, it’s a pretty safe bet that Ryan’s not going to the police with his story. Yes, as has been the case since Joyce first slashed him, he could make a decent case if he wanted to. I sincerely doubt he has any desire to place the events of this night under investigation.
The witnesses are probably too busy partying drunkenly to call the cops right now, and after the fact it’ll be done and seem less important since they weren’t really involved in it.
Ryan’s probably just gonna try and blend in with all the other partygoers who ended the night in a state of disrepair and unconscious. The fewer questions asked the better.
While I’m sure this will have consequences for Sarah (she’s not exactly standing on the top of the world right now. Doesn’t need any new stories about her unmellow behavior in the vicinity of fun), these consequences will be unlikely to include legal ramifications. Might get a warning from the Dean about her scholarship.
Ryan’s desires are not consequent given that he is probably dead. The first blow was low to the back of the head, if Sara was swinging hard on the bat that probably severed his brain stem. After that he just gets to twitch himself to death without immediate care, the further beating renders the point moot.
In before people say that Sarah’s violence is uncalled for: Ryan did appear to be able to violently assault Joyce. And, while it might not be legal or moral, I’d do the same thing to protect someone innocent from being hurt.
Although I do wish Billie or Dottie had gotten there first! Then again, they did leave Joyce alone when they definitely should not have. I suppose it’s fitting that Sarah saves her instead of them.
Yaknow, with all this drinkin’ and characterisin’ and relationship buildin’, sooner or later Cobgresswoman DeSanto is going to have to pick up the Drama Tab.
I mean, she’s in the government, she can afford it!
I’m pretty sure the drama tag was implicitly pulled when Ryan showed up, and he mentioned horses, so his parents are loaded. That said, it’s his responsibility to pick up the drama tag.
He didn’t mispell it. He meant to say tab. “Pick up the drama tab.” Just like when you “pick up the tab” for everyone when you eat out. In other words, pay for everyone. Monetarily. 😉
Aaaand debatably in the New Testament. It’s iffy, cause there’s one passage that seems to relate to homosexuality in general in some translations, and one that relates to women acting like dudes.
But eh. The New Testament wasn’t very full of new rules, so it maaay be nothing.
Yeah, I was really hoping that it would be Joe wielding the bat; he really didn’t get a fair chance with Joyce. Showing her that folks who are honest about their sexual desires aren’t all evil/rufie-fying/rapist types would have been a nice lesson for Joyce to grapple with.
Sarah is a decent second choice, though — but it may take the storyline down a grittier path. She already has a hates-addicts & drugs background that seems pretty dark; the inevitable ‘I told you so’ might transfer some of Sarah’s paranoia & intolerance into Joyce, … or etc.
We’ll see. The biggest problem with these comics is that they’re impossible to stop reading, especially when I have something important to do…. wait, it’s already 1:30 am? o_O
Good thing God isn’t Morgan Freeman in this universe (or at least if he is he’s not about repeating things) otherwise we’d have to sit through Ryan Almighty.
does sarah just show up to random parties she has no interest in with a baseball bat on the off chance that her “ignorant little naif” of a roomate is gonna get raped?
It’s not a random party. It is specifically the party she knew her roommate would be attending. She (must have) felt bad saying that she would not come out to help her, no matter what after a while and decided to give the scene a cursory check. And the rest is baseball history.
I don’t think Sarah is in much trouble. Who the hell is going to report? There’s underage drinking going on at this party, which party guest is going to run to the cops and tell them that some guy just got his FAAAAACE beat in with a baseball bat at a party like that?
If anything, Ryan will get to the hospital and just tell them he was in a fight and leave it at that.
Sometimes, you have to use common sense when declaring what kind of trouble you think a person will get into.
Yay for adding an attempted murder charge to the assault with a weapon and GBH charges! Yay!
Seriously, to all the people saying, ‘no one will call the cops’, there’s a very good chance he’s unconscious or dying with two baseball bat blows to the head already. No getting out of that.
People shouldn’t assault other people. The bottling was called for, as was (possibly) the first blow with the bat, if Sarah can make the case that he was about to kill Joyce, which is arguable. Pulling him away would be unassailable in that circumstance. But the second blow while he’s on the ground? Plus stomping on his [face, body, limbs, etc.]? It doesn’t matter what he did – there are reasons why people aren’t allowed to do that kind of thing, even if they think they’re doing the right thing.
Am I the only one looking at the red on Joyce and going ‘Wait, either that shouldn’t be there, or she has blood on her hand.’ She has a bit of a red swatch on her forehead and hair.
She did just smack Ryan with a roofie’d glass of Sierra Mist. It’s residual blood that is… Y’know… I’m not gonna continue that explanation… Joyce was a badass and you know it.
Some how I really don’t see Joyce remembering everything that happened during the party once the drugs wear off. Also have to wonder how much of the drugs she’s consumed already. I seem to remember her being ‘enamored’ with the ‘sprite’ Mr. Now Black n Blue gave her just prior to wigging out.
I’m a touch surprised though. If she’s getting Old Testament on his ass, why not go all the way and pull out some Ezekiel 25:17? Why not strike down upon him with great vengeance and furious anger?
I’m actually really not okay with Sarah beating on a prone rapist. Joyce smashing glass into his face? Justified self-defense. Sarah cracking the back of his head unawares, possibly causing brain damage? Still cool in my book; Ryan was a threat.
But when a dude’s down, he should be out. MAYBE we can chalk up “Whoops, I lied” to ‘just making sure’, but going on to kick his face in is way past the red line. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Sarah should face legal repercussions, ‘cuz unnecessary force against a rapist feels more like a misdemeanor than anything but courts necessarily can’t look at in like that… But I hope there’s some occasion where she can reflect on how she lets her emotions carry her a bit too far.
Meanwhile, in literary analysis land, it’s fine that Sarah’s secret compassionate side got the best of her and she followed Joyce to the party, if a tad cliche. I do wonder where the hell she got that bat, though. It’s a bit too creepy/convenient if she brought it from home.
Put your sister in joyce’s place, and let’s see if you stop. hell, put you mother, your girlfriend, your wife, daughter or just a friend in her place. I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t stop. If you can put the needs and safety of some creep above another person, well… I guess you’re just one of those better people.
I’m not putting the needs and safety of Ryan above anyone. He is the absolute bottom of the totem pole for people I’m concerned about. But, objectively, Ryan stopped being an immediate threat as soon as he hit the ground. Sarah’s continued violence isn’t making Joyce any safer right now, and realistically it’s not making any potential future victim of Ryan’s safer, either. Unless she’s planning on going far enough to actually kill or cripple him, which is a whole different can of worms, and I doubt that scenario anyway.
Now, none of us are souless robots, so yeah I can appreciate the emotional angle and cut Sarah some slack. I’d probably do something similar but more incompetent in Sarah’s shoes, so I can’t call myself a better person. None of that actually makes it okay to pointlessly beat up on a defenseless, lacerated rapist with a possible concussion, though.
There’s no proof he stopped being a threat once he hit the ground. If a rapist or murderer hit the ground after I hit them, I’d make darn sure they would stay down.
Note that Sarah didnt pause and give him time to get up before the punchline. She doesn’t know whether or not he’s still a threat. Note that we don’t know how strong Sarah is without the bat. She’s smaller than him, and she won’t get any backup from Joyce, her scared and drugged roommate. He just threatened Joyce with both rape and extended violence during/afterward. I’m pretty certain it’s the smart thing to make double-sure this guy won’t get up and hurt either of them.
No one else at the party has moved to help or not help yet, so presumably Sarah needs to make sure they’re both safe. Also, she’s probably really pissed. Dude tried to rape and violently assault (in addition to the rape part) her naive, sheltered roommate. And then he tried to justify it as the girl asking for all of it. I think it’s understandable to see red. It’s easy for us sitting safe in our homes to judge her, but think if this was real. If he got to his feet, he could overwhelm Sarah, grab the bat, and do harm. Just being devil’s advocate here.
Also, it’s probably easy to find a baseball bat in someone’s house like that. All it takes is a member of the household being into sports.
He doesn’t stop being a threat because he’s on the ground.
He stops being a threat when he is sufficiently incapacitated that he can be taken into custody. If it takes a few extra whacks to make sure he is that incapacitated I call that a safety margin.
I think this is a ‘real world’ vs ‘fictional world’ difference. In the real world you shouldn’t use violence, unless as a last resort. The glass is in, the first batting is in, the rest is out. She should call the police and let the courts punish the rapist.
This is a comic however and no one wants to see the doa-crowd involved in a court case with testimonies and stuff for hundreds of strips. So see bats him some more; he get’s his retribution and we had some fun.
Besides; I don’t know how the law works in the US, but where I live there exists a term that roughly translates ‘excessive self defense under duress’. In other words; if you use to much violence while defending yourself or friends for assault you are forgiven if you where emotianally overwhelmed at the time. (rapist guy could get a lower sentence though) That might aplie here.
I’m not aware of any similar laws where I live in TN. There was a case recently involving a man who shot someone who threatened to beat him; he was found guilty of murder. You’re not allowed to kill someone unless you have reason to believe there is a threat to someone’s life, although you are allowed to assume that someone breaking into your house is such a threat. Now, his threats to give Joyce back what she gave him plus interest might qualify as a threat to Joyce’s life. If he died, and this were a completely real universe, my guess is there would be a jury trial, most likely verdict manslaughter. But it would depend on a lot of factors, the most important being the attitude of the police and DA.
As far as right and wrong go (leaving out the legal system) I don’t have a problem with killing rabid dogs. It’s clear from his behavior that Ryan has done this many times. He doesn’t need to be alive anymore.
I don’t know if I would stop, I’ve never been in that situation. Because I might commit a crime means I should condone its commission? I hope that I would not let my rage lead me to such egregious action; and I further hope that if it did I would cowboy up and accept the consequences.
I sympathize much more with Sara than with Ryan, but that doesn’t mean Sara is in the right.
Ryan’s positioning in the second panel indicates he got hit from below. If he was completely prone, that wouldn’t have been possible. It’s quite possible he was starting to try and get up, or was on his hands and knees, in which case he wasn’t down for the count yet.
Also, methinks he’s just had some of his ribs smashed from that one.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Sarah won’t be getting into too much legal trouble. What’s Ryan going to do? Go to the cops and say “I had just drugged this chick and was so ready to violently rape her when some b**** with a baseball bat kicked my ass!”
I don’t think he’s going to die because…let’s face it, this is a comic. Vigilante justice usually results in a few broken bones, no matter how extreme it was.
Willis kills minor characters. How many unnamed SEME squads, or nameless Aliens from the planet Alien, died in Its Walky? Main characters always were revived when this happened, but hopefully Ryan isn’t meant to be a main character.
To be fair, Willis kills minor characters in a story about ALIENS in a story that was very much about life and death as it was about Nachitos and pooping. He’s not killed off anyone in Shortpacked (Though Ronnie did disappear), and I doubt he’ll kill Ryan off here.
I prefer the New Testament god more, but there are times when I think it’s appropriate to get Old Testament on someone’s ass, and Sarah picked a good time.
While I’m totally okay with Sarah beating the every lovin’ shit out of this monster, she should probably stop before she kills him. And unfortunately, there’s a high likelihood that she’s going to be facing assault charges, because I think I can easily see this guy trying to place the blame on Joyce and Sarah. After all, he has visible injuries, and they don’t. The drugs will be used against him, but no doubt his lawyer will try to find a way to get that over looked. The fact that Sarah may have brought that baseball bat to the party, can also be argued as a premeditated attack…
Not necessarily. Are you telling me that you’ve never gone to a party after midnight batting practice and didn’t have time to drop off your equipment at home?
Chances are, Ryan is too knocked out from bat trauma that he doesn’t even know who the hell Sarah is. At the end of the night, he’ll wake up and all he’ll remember is “Ok, I was about to rape that Christian tease when everything went black.” So he’d only be able to press charges on Joyce, which given she was drugged and said drugs were affecting her at that point there’s no way she could have done. After that, it comes down to basically everything BEFORE the bat whacking.
Yeah, but unfortunately their is a party full of people, who just saw Sarah beating the hell out of Ryan, and they can testify against her. They saw her hitting him, but I don’t think they saw him trying to drag Joyce into the bathroom. 🙁
You know, while I’m really delighted that Sarah showed up and Ryan is getting his just desserts (honestly the world would be better if he were out of it completely), I’m a little disappointed that Sarah’s prediction that Joyce couldn’t survive a party without Sarah’s help turned out to be true. That’s a sad commentary on college life, or at least life at their college.
Agreed. I just had an experience where I tried to help out a guy who’s car was broke down and turned out he was wanted for a crime. I felt pretty stupid and now wonder if I should ever try to help anyone out ever again.
I know what you mean, I tried to help someone out once because he had some car trouble and got pulled over later because the guy was in trouble with the law. Not only did I feel stupid, I don’t think I can help anyone out ever again.
one of my teachers told me that some judge once said that its better for 9 guilty men to go free than one innocent man to hang.
just because you helped someone wanted for a crime before shouldn’t keep you from helping people again, just carry pepper spray or something to protect your self next time.
that’s just my opinion and its not like i know the whole story, so don’t get to stressed out if you don’t like it.
Right or wrong, in trouble or not, her foot hasn’t come down yet, and there’s plenty of time between panel 4 today and panel 1 tomorrow for somebody with a cooler head to intervene.
Sarah seems so aloof at times, but she knows whats going on and knew Joyce was in trouble from the get-go. Now I wonder, did she follow Joyce to the party or maybe receive a tip from someone that Ryan was going to be there?
Maybe she decided to go a short time after the girls left, and Amber tipped her off? Amber was there was a ? mark in her bubble a couple back, that must be it.
Amber doesn’t seem like she’d tip Sarah off. She’d have no reason to believe Sarah could do any more than she could, and at any rate Amazi-Girl has a habit of trying to rescue people herself. If she did know what was going on and feel like she couldn’t handle Ryan alone, she’d probably swoop up Mike or someone and bring him to the rescue. 😛
I was thinking the same thing. It’s just possible Sarah beat Amazi-Girl to the scene if she had to slip into her disguise. Maybe she’ll still show up to stop Sarah from killing Ryan?
Or, maybe Joyce’s rant about Sarah being wrong for being solely about the study made her think “I can take one night off so I don’t go completely insane” She gets to the party, spots Joyce talking with Ryan, sees ryan go batcrap crazy at joyce, picks up one of the residents baseball bats and goes to help.
I think you’re right. Willis said something a few strips back about editing blood on Joyce’s palm and on things she touches, after someone pointed out that smashing a glass on Ryan’s face would probably cut her hand pretty badly. In the second panel, her palm is on her forehead, where the pink spot is in the next panel.
If you look at her hair, you can see blood there as well. I was thinking maybe it was blood from Ryan, since she was still holding the main part of the glass in the last comic, panel 1. But what Henry said made sense, since the cup would of cut her up a bit too (her hand)
who did not know, the E-C-DUB chant was used by ECW fans/Mutants back when the original ECW was still around and ECW was well known as the most extreme and hardcore wrestling promotion and I use it when someone got beaten up using foreign objects like bats or steel chairs.
AmaziGirl is Danny. And yes, AmaziGirl did save Danny, but one of them was Batman filling in on the sly to protect his identity. Fools Lois every time.
And the second-to-last panel bugs the Atheist -and human- in me.
Translation: “When you do something good for me, I give the credit to God. Because obviously you wouldn’t bother helping your fellow man if you weren’t pushed into doing it by my diety. Because you’re clearly a horrible, horrible person.”
Orrrrr… you know, from Joyce’s perspective, the timing was pretty damn perfect. You know, almost miraculously perfect. Taking “God sent you to save me” as an insult is a little ridiculous, at least when it’s Joyce who’s talking.
Honestly, Joyce would probably consider that a compliment. God’s best choice to save the day was Sarah.
Similarly, “You’re a credit to your race” is honestly meant as a complement, from the perspective of those saying it. Others, however, might interpret it differently.
I feel like I’m channelling the Tenth Doctor now, WHAT?
You’re taking this to mean something entirely different than not only what the SPEAKER meant, but what general connotations would take it to mean. “God sent you to save me” doesn’t even SOUND like “I think you’re a horrible person who would never do this on your own.”
You took a happy, JOYFUL statement on Joyce’s part, and made it something negative… because she said “God”?
2) For this not to be completely nonsensical, this means that God had to have a hand in inciting the person to action.
3) In fact, for this not to be completely nonsensical, the speaker has to believe that the person would not have taken the action if not for God’s prodding.
4) Thus, every time the speaker thanks God for somebody else’s good actions, they must believe that left to themselves, those people would not have been good. Unless they haven’t given any thought to what they’re saying and they’re just spouting nonsense.
5) Here’s where one presumes a trend – if they only shifts credit to god once, then that’s only a minor bit of rudeness. If they make a habit of crediting God for the benevolence of others, this necessitates a belief that other people are naturally bastards – who constantly have God intervening in their actions to bring them up to a base level of decency. That, or the person keeps babbling these things without giving a single thought to the nonsense they’re actually saying.
6) Another trend we’re presuming – if the person blames god for bad acts in equal proportion to good acts, that also changes the equation – rather than presuming people are bastards, they are presuming them to be puppets – playthings of a less-than-perfectly-benevolent God. (This is actually the relationship Willis, or any author of fiction, has with their characters.) Of course I’ve never met a person who consistently gives God credit for evil things, but I like to keep my cases covered.
7) It’s worth noting – there sects of Christianity who actively admit to believing that humans are bastards by natural. Original sin, “the natural man is an enemy to God”, that kind of business. So it’s not like all of Christendom is unaware of the implications of what they say.
8) On the other hand, lots of Christians spout this stuff without giving what they’re saying a second -or first- thought. Joyce is almost certainly an example of this type. Possibly so are you. Lots of people are. However, that doesn’t change the fact that their beliefs have implications – whether the believers intend them to or not.
1) God is cited in being involved in LEADING someone somewhere.
2) Leading is about giving directions, not mind-controlling someone, just like everything that anyone did in the Bible ever.
3) For this to be necessary, the speaker would need to believe that the person wouldn’t have KNOWN to show up on their own (oh hey that makes perfect sense cause she wouldn’t)
4) Which means, logically, that God said “If I put signposts here, this person will probably follow them, cause that’s the kind of person she is.” Oh yeah. That’s so much of an insult, and takes away from SO MUCH of her worth as a human being.
5) Really, you’re doing a lot of trend-presuming and trend-creating, but whatever. When you call someone else’s beliefs nonsense? You are being an egotistical, self-righteous jackass. You may very well believe that you’re right. Hey, you may even be right. But when you put yourself up on a pedestal where only YOU can see these implications, and only YOU can read people’s minds and tell what they really meant from a 5-word sentence, then YOU are being an asshole. No one else.
6) Except this whole mind-control thing is entirely in your head. So none of that makes any sense.
7) Most, if not all of Christianity is BASED upon the concept of original sin, and that humanity is sinful by nature. But then, if your whole mind control thing is a load of crap, then there’s no point in talking about it.
Of course, there won’t be any changing your mind, but it’s not like this is the first out-of-left-field thing that you’ve posted on here, with your constant rambling about Joyce not acting in self-defense. So I guess that’s just how you are.
Let’s take a step back for a second: What’s more likely, that you know so much more than anyone, especially anyone who believes in this nonsense, or – what if, like before, you read something into this that wasn’t really there?
It seems like whenever Joyce is involved, you invent or imagine some sort of hidden meaning behind everything. Whether you just despise all Christians, or whatever your reasoning is, this isn’t about all those millions of people being so insulting (which they aren’t) it’s about you thinking you’re above them.
She is free to believe what she wants. Similarly, I am free to be bugged by the direct and essentially unavoidable implications of transferring credit for a person’s good deeds to some theorized being. My beliefs are doing no more harm than hers are.
(Do you know how many times I’ve heard “Please bless this food to make it healthy and beneficial for our bodies”? ‘Hey cook, before eating your food I feel the need to ask for divine intervention to make it safe to eat!’ And that’s putting aside the fact that they just gave God the credit for putting it on the table – presumably aside from the poisonous aspects of it. Gaah!)
It drives me nuts when my brother prays “Please bless this food to our bodies,” but for different reasons. When does anyone ever ask God, or anyone else for that matter, to bless anything else to anything else? It’s a syntactic anomaly, and it’s pointless at best and meaningless at worst.
I will be the first to admit that I am irritated by trivial things.
“Unavoidable implications”? Gonna say it again, you are adding in these “implications” where it makes no sense. At all. I’m seriously reeling from how little sense you’re making.
A) “God sent you to save me” more understandably is saying that the person being saved thinks it is at least somewhat miraculous. It doesn’t sound at ALL like anyone’s being “pushed into it;” in fact, it sounds like the direct opposite. Something terrible was gonna happen, and Joyce would have been screwed if Sarah wasn’t there.
In fact, I was remembering that panel wrong, she doesn’t say that God sent Sarah to SAVE her, just that God sent Sarah AFTER her. Which means only that God put her in the right place at the right time, and any good she did was just because of who she was.
You know, the whole opposite of your whole “implication” that you were getting so butthurt about.
B) I don’t know where you hear people say that whole speech about how the food’s getting blessed, but how I’ve heard it said in pretty much every place I’ve been is “Bless this food to our bodies, and bless the hands that prepared it.”
And before you go “oh well that just means that the hands couldn’t have done it on their own because of these bizarre connections I came up with on my own” NO IT DOES NOT
Bless can mean “to request of God the bestowal of divine favor upon,” i.e. “Make this person’s life awesome because they made this kickass food for me.” Or it could mean “to make or pronounce holy,” like saying “this food and the person who made it are so awesome, they should be called holy.” Or “put this food to use in a holy manner in our lives as it provides us energy.”
Seriously. You’re coming up with these batshit crazy ideas of how positive things being said are really insults. It’s ridiculous.
Batshit crazy, until you actually listen to the words being said, friend. These positive things? They compliment God – and the human puppet’s suitability to being a tool of that God.
Looking at the comic – Joyce apparently doesn’t think Sarah would have come after her without divine intervention. Thus she robs Sarah of the credit for having, by herself, decided that going and trying to protect Joyce was something she wanted to do. She is presuming that Sarah, left to her own devices, would have blown her off.
If you want to think that, after mind-controlling Sarah into coming to the party and finding a baseball bat, that God then released Sarah from her tether to act on her own…yeah. In my experience those who thank God for other people’s actions don’t do it by halves. That’s just not how it’s usually done.
But whichevers. Joyce, like many Christians, probably hasn’t really thought out the implications of her belief that God is the source of good actions and events in the world. I hardly think she’s consciuosly meaning “nice that you’re here – no thanks to you.” But, like “you’re a credit to your race”, her statements reveal an unconscious bias in how she views the world and the people around her.
beg, if you really think about it, you’re just offended by religion though. Because this sort of conflict is gonna come up a lot. People who are considered to be “inspired by God” in your view are not getting enough credit for their actions. With this in mind, realize you didn’t believe in the first place, so you can’t convince religious people this is wrong to say. Because if you did believe, you probably wouldn’t mind.
Please note that I don’t believe and I actually had the same thought process “Hey, she’s not giving Sarah full credit.” But then I thought about it, and from Joyce’s perspective, she’s basically saying Sarah is an Agent of God’s Will, which is EXTREMELY high praise. She’s getting compared favorably with people like Moses and Paul by her saying that. Take the compliment as meant, get over the fact you have different views on religion.
(Assuming anyone’s still reading) Don’t get the chickens and eggs mixed up here – I’m offended by the religion because the religion in question is inherently offensive. There are other religions and religious beliefs that are not offensive -silly, but not offensive.
And people thank god too often and too casually and for far too simple of things for it to be credible as high praise as a “agent of God’s will”. Otherwise every time god is thanked for a meal, the chef is Moses.
Joyce is doubtlessly very thankful. To whom and in what proportion – meh, who can say?
Specifically, the religious principle of habitually propping up a deity (or anyone else) by robbing other people of the credit for their creditable actions. That philosophy and behavior is objectively and inherently offensive.
Propping up the deity by giving them credit for natural good fortune and luck, on the other hand, is not offensive. It’s rather obviously incorrect, statistically speaking, but it’s morally neutral. Unlike the stuff that offends me.
Admittedly, as a religion based around a human sacrifice (or something parallel to it) with a dash of ceremonial cannibalism to it for spice, Christianity as a whole has some serious moral issues in it. (Which it makes worse by loudly claiming moral superiority.) But regardless of that I wasn’t talking about Christainity as a whole – just this specific issue. As should be AMPLY clear by now, given how much and how specifically I’ve written here.
Now you – you’re not a troll. You honestly think you have the high ground. Just like mr. theoretical “credit to your race” guy. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that your limited perspectives don’t skew your ability to assess things from an external perspective.
Considering you were responding to the previous statement, which was (obviously rightly) accusing you with having a problem with religion in general… No, it wasn’t clear that you weren’t speaking of Christianity as a whole. Honestly, I’m not sure you aren’t just backing out of that gigantically massive dick move. You didn’t say that “religious principle” was offensive, you said the RELIGION was offensive.
And, as stated before, the whole idea you have about taking credit away is not necessarily what the statement means. In fact, it’s most likely NOT what it means. It’s only “inherently offensive” to you because you made that connection yourself, based on your own beliefs.
That’s the thing – while my whole purpose here is to defend a group of people, yours is to yell that all of them are really so ignorant that they have no idea just what they mean when they say something. You’re the only one in the world who knows the real meaning, and their intention means nothing in regard to that.
Honestly, the only one who’s perspective is “limited” here is you. Your “external” perspective you think you have is just your feelings about religion compounded onto anything any religious person says or does. You take things to the outermost extreme (like with your ridiculous “credit to your race” example) because you want to see the worst of what religion means.
Ok, I wanna put my two cents in here, but first I gotta reset this margin before we get one long line of letters going down.
Begbert2, I think you are perfectly justified in thinking that it’s wrong to give credit to God when it is the choice of the person to do good. I myself believe that God does play a role, but a small one, and He does not take credit for your good actions. More on that later. But yes, to attribute all credit to God and none to the person would be horrible, and would imply that the viewer thinks of the person as basically evil, with God as puppeteer.
However, I don’t think that Joyce is in any way trying to take credit away from Sarah by her comment, or claiming that God forced her to do something she wouldn’t have otherwise done. Joyce is just rationalizing the situation in her Christian mind. You are probably right when you say that Joyce probably never thought the concept through before, but that does not mean that she believes what you’re saying she does, consciously or unconsciously.
There actually is a strong line of belief in Christianity that takes into account and solves this discrepancy, one that I believe in as well. This belief is that God doesn’t actively do anything, but lives IN the goodness of mankind. God is the innate desire of a person to do good towards his fellow man, regardless of consequences. God is our compassion, He is our love. We can choose to act on it, or we can ignore it, the decision is ours. But that feeling of satisfaction from doing something altruistic? It’s not that that was put there artificially by God, that IS God which lives in all of us. [/sermon] In this light, God does not take credit away from people, he just shows them the higher path and lets them choose. Do I think that Joyce prescribes to this specific line of belief? Maybe, maybe not. But even if she doesn’t, this is most likely what reflects her subconscious, since most people who give any credit to God (some exceptions of course) do not in any way believe that the good-doing person is still an evil human being. They still thank the person, even as they also thank God.
Now do you have a right to be offended by what Joyce says? Of course you do! No one can command what you can or cannot think. You have a right to be as insightful as Buddha (or insert your own most insightful person here) or as obtuse as the most blockheaded troll on the internet. But should you be offended? No. Simply put, she doesn’t mean or imply anything by it, consciously or unconsciously.
Also, “Okay, jerk, stay down and I won’t hit you again. – WHAM- Whoops, I lied.”
Gonna try that next time i need to bat someone on the FAAAAAAAAAAAACE.
Yup, the old testament stomp a mudhole in your ass and walk in dry. Like the preacher’s son said, “You reap what you sow.” Well, he sowed an attempted rape, and now he’s reaping an ass whuppin’.
The tetragrammaton (YHWH) does not provide clear pronunciation, since (like most Semitic languages) Hebrew does not have written vowels. The difficulty is aggravated by the cultural taboo on using God’s name which may have resulted in the losing of the correct pronunciation. The term Jehova was created by interspersing the vowels from the word Adonai (gods) with the tetragrammaton.
I’ve got a bad feeling this incident could wind up consuming the entire series for an awfully long time. Even if that’s wrong, that might not be any better, possibly trivializing the incident in some eyes.
Yes. Willis specifically said he edited blood into later strips on Joyce’s hand and on things she touches, after it was pointed out that smashing a glass on someone’s face will often leave your hand fairly cut-up.
It’s time to consult the old timeworn adage, What Would Batman Do? Batman wouldn’t wait for him to get up after the first Batarang knocked him down. Batman wouldn’t stop laying the beatdown until Ryan feared the bat. He’d probably end this by leaving Ryan hanging by his collar to the front of a moving train, with a note saying “Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Batman”. Maybe hit him with some confiscated scarecrow gas while he’s at it spiked with some uppers to prevent loss of consciousness and surgically install a pacemaker in case all this gives him a heart attack.
Therefore Sarah’s still in the clear for a while, but should also be wearing a mask or something. Masks are like legal enhancers.
Well… depends on the incarnation of Batman. But yeah, anything less than fatal injury would probably be his style.
Still, I doubt he would beat an unconscious man. That’s generally where he stops, at least from what I’ve seen. So the question is, is Ryan still awake or not?
If Ryan’s not still awake then all Sarah’s one-liners and two-liners are just for the crowd. That would certainly be an aspect of her we haven’t seen before.
I’ve been wrong before, and I’m man enough to admit that. Though I guess Sarah was the most likely to save her. I guess I just wanted a reason to actually like Joe. >_>
I do have to say that in the last panel, where Sarah is saying that the “Old Testament God” sent her, I really do enjoy this. How God is mentioned in the New Testament, God is trying to bring peace without much pain and suffering, and it takes a while for things to get across. In the Old Testament, you piss God off and God comes at you full force to teach not only you, but everyone, a lesson. It was nicely separated from the Old and the New 🙂
No, I am not trying to start an argument or a major discussion, just saying 🙂
Hey, she’s like Hawk (Avery Brooks) in “Spenser: For Hire”. At the end of the day she pops up right in the nick of time to beat up the bad guy and save the hero/heroine.
I am… mildly creeped out by the amount of people who think that after a person 1) drugs someone 2) Demands sex from the person they drugged, that there is no immediate threat involved in those actions. That it’s not a threat until after said person grabs the drugged victim.
Maybe lots of the readers here are just dudes, and have never been in a terrifying situation with a guy who is sexually interested in them and unwilling to take no for an answer? The threat is there before it gets physical, and if you wait for it to get physical (why? In the interests of fairness towards rapists?), then it’s probably too late for you to do anything if you’re not in the line of sight of a trusted friend.
But regardless of any other hypothetical scenario, in THIS scenario, person A drugged person B. That, by itself, is an attack and calls for swift and immediate action, up to and including physical violence.
Completely agreed. I think that most of the people on here feel the same way as you do, it’s just a few who want to argue that Ryan didn’t threaten anyone. For whatever reason, I dunno. That’s their own personal thing, I’m not sure how they arrived at those conclusions.
Regardless, when anyone says it, I’m fairly certain responses popped up almost instantaneously saying that no, Ryan did clearly threaten Joyce. Most of the commenters here are bright people.
I am HIGHLY creeped out by the fact that you equate brutality with appropriate response. When you’ve knocked an assailant down and you keep attacking, YOU are now the attacker, and you need to be held accountable for that.
1. There is no evidence that Joyce was drugged until after she had already glassed him in the face (the legal defense here is two-fold: one she had been assaulted chemically, two said chemical assaulted could have affected her ability to act rationally).
2. Joyce was in a situation where a reasonable person would have had options other than glassing her assailant. His language had escalated to a level where it could be considered violent and a physical response (a slap, a groin kick or kneeing) would have been a reasonable response. While such a response would have been legally appropriate she also had non-violent options including walking away and calling for help given that she and Ryan were not physically isolated.
3. Ryan used abusive language prior to her responding with lethal force. If he had either included an or else in his speech (that is said “or else,” included a physical threat in the speech, or had made any {and that includes even extremely innocuous} physical contact with her) a lethal force response would have been justifiable. Without that we are left with only the abusive language and the alleged chemical assault as provocation.
4. Sara comes to bat justifiably (with some questions about the source of her weapon; if she brought it with her we enter some very iffy legal territory) striking Ryan when he indeed had laid hands on Joyce (given that she had just glassed him he was actually legally justified, but Sara first could not be expected to realize that and secondly could argue she was intervening to stop a physical confrontation that was a threat to both participants) making the use of a lethal weapon a reasonable response. Everything after that irst blow is aggravated assault and battery possibly including attempted murder (unless he is dead in which case it is simply murder, in which case hope she found the bat in order to avoid a premeditation aggravated circumstance situation, which I believe could lead to the death penalty in Indiana).
So while I empathize with Joyce and Sara and despise Ryan, from a legal viewpoint this is a very sticky situation.
garfield without garfield was done, so why not a see sarah stomp site? might be pretty funny to see her stomp… tycho, gabe, the fat guy from pvp, richard, etc…
Wait a tic, Willis! I thought that you said that you didn’t like incorporating punchlines into the title of your strip! What is this political flip-floppery!
In Roomies!, Danny was a moral compass, and Sarah was a kind of jerk.
Now, Danny is compeletely evil, and Sarah is saving the day.
‘Tis truly another universe, indeed.
I’m just now starting on this comic and I have to say, I hate when any guy uses what he knows of any religion to justify his lustful actions. I cheered in my head when I read this.
Okay, I detest rapists. And it is a comic. Part of me really wants to jump on the “go girl beat the villain!” bandwagon. There’s something deeply primal and satisfying seeing someone like this get beat down in a way we wish we could in society.
Seriously though? That’s a baseball bat. That’s assault with a deadly weapon. From behind. And I’m not just talking about the law and legal blah blah, there is a very real chance this man will die from blunt trauma to the head and body. And I haven’t read any of the strips past this yet, but I bet there’s absolutely no way Sarah’s going to trial over this one. Which would bother me less if the tandem story-line on double standards and women’s liberation vs. propriety, etc. wasn’t so serious and meant to be grounded in reality.
Yes, rapists should get punished, and even if he wasn’t “successful” he shouldn’t get a pass. Joyce defended herself, aggressively but okay. Sarah has probably killed someone this evening by slamming a bat into his head from behind.
And it troubles me that you don’t. But it’s your work, man.
I know I’m not gonna find any friends with my comment. And again, he’s a sleazebag (and the later strip suggests it’s habitual), but just because rape is more detestable than murder doesn’t mean murder, even murder of a isn’t, ya know, pretty bad. Morality isn’t graded on the curve.
“When he saw Jesus, he cried out, fell down before him, and shouted with a loud voice, “Leave me alone, Jesus, Son of the Most High God! I beg you, do not torment me!””
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Well Sarah just went up a few pegs in my book
Only a few?
she just went up ALL the pegs!
Aaaaaaaall of them!
She spent the evening in the dorm room with the irons…
IN THE FIRE!
IN
THE
FIIIIIIIIRE!!!!!!!! ::::)
Not ashamed to say I counted the a’s there.
They are of the correct number. I am pleased. ::::D
He forgot the face though……..
you can never for get the FAAAAAAAACE! ;;;;)
You got your Homestuck in my DoA.
The month long hiatus over there might have something to do with that. The interweb needs to let the repressed memes free every once in a while.
FINALLY YES 101 days has made me really depressed….
Your avatar. Right after the irons in the fire thing, too 😀
Even though pegs aren’t really an exhaustively quantifiable thing and we all %$#ing know that.
The second I read this I instantly pictured that “X *ALL* the Y” meme.
Beat ALL the Rapists!
Go up ALL the pegs!
My first thought when I saw the strip was ‘Booyah! Sarah for the win!’
Weird thing: I never say booyah…
Most definitely, black Jewish people are the best!
Seriously. She was literally the last central character I was expecting to see on the other end of that bat. After her bi-universal distaste for Joyce, I honestly would have been less surprised to see Robin, or Mike, or even Jason delivering the pain than Sarah. I’m starting to get lost in this strange alternate universe.
Nah, I feel like Sarah is a lot like I am. The pessimism creates a person who’s always prepared for the worst.
yeah, Sodomize and Gomorrah him…wait…no do that
That Old Testament God sure was a funny pal.
He rained the SHIT out of Noah.
That dude punk’d the Egyptians so bad too.
i like the one where he tells abraham to sacrifice his son, but then before he kills the kid, ashton kutcher comes down and tells abraham that he got punk’d.
As the wall of water closed in on Ramses and his army, he could almost hear a voice saying, “bongo, your ass got PUNK’D!”
It’s good to go old school once in a while.
Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek.” I say, “And when you run out of cheeks, go for the throat and the scroat.”
YES!
Looks like she made it just in the nick of time! What does that make her?
Are you setting us up for the big damn hero-meme? because that’s played out…
dues ex machina?
Big Damn hero, Fauxlosopher.
A Big Damn Hero, sir.
Aint She Just.
I am in hearts with this thread.
Gotta say, Sarah, your talent for alienating folk is near miraculous.
These comments should be put in the comment hall of came!
God’s will?
See that woman hanging out of the spaceship with the really large bat?
I’m not saying this party wasn’t easy to find, but it was a little out of her way, and she didn’t wanna come to begin with. Woman’s looking to kill some folk, so really, it’s her will y’all should worry about thwarting.
I love the Firefly reference. Also, I think that even Jayne would be a little intimidated by Sarah at this moment.
She may be a fundie…. but she’s OUR fundie.
God, I love the people of the internet. You guys are awesome for the references. Real shiny.
Speaking of which, I just realized that Sarah, at least in appearance, reminds me a lot of Zoe. Shiny!
Wow I JUST figured out what your avatar is supposed to look like. You know, ‘mario holding a lightsaber.’ I’ve for the longest time thought it was a butt–like, Mario’s butt, with a lightsaber impaled in the butt-hole. *facepalm* I was so confused and grossed out.
Yay for mario holding a lightsaber with his HANDS and not his butt!!!
Yes! You win for the reference!
Now to make sure that SOB stays down She needs to Curb stomp his face.
Joyce’s cynical and reluctant guardian angel.
yes sarah! Use your aggression! Fuel your descent to the DARK SIDE!!!
Yeah, He was a mean ol’ bastard then.
Ya’ down wit’ O-T-G? YEAH, YOU KNOW ME!
how many people called this?
I /hoped/ that it was the case.
BOOYAH! I called it! woohoo!
For those who don’t remember:
“Ruth saving Joyce doesn’t have much pull, from a writing perspective, since they don’t interact much. Neither do most of the other choices that have been offered. Someone who would, though, is Sarah. The two had a big fight, the last time we saw Sarah, wtih Joyce telling Sarah that she has no friends. Sarah claimed that she didn’t care if anything happened to Joyce, but we know that deep down that isn’t true. So, she follows along,bringing a baseball bat as a weapon, which she would totally use, to make sure nothing happens, and establish herself as a good friend for Joyce. All the while denying any mushy friendship feelings.
You see, its all about the writing opportunities that it creates afterwards, and making the writing flow from ongoing relationships.”
Called nuthin. Pretty sure that in the hundreds of comments, all characters ever were called at least once. That’s like asking 52 people to pick a card and then going “5 of clubs, is that somebody’s card?”
Hey, Suzie Sour-Snatch, how’s your evening treating you?
It’s more like looking at a card and asking 52 people, what card am I looking at? If you say the right card you still called it, even though a lot of other people thought you where looking at another card. I would have been different if lightsabermario would have made a lot of assumptions and then claimed he was right. Just because a lot of other people thought someone else was holding the bat, doesn’t invalidite the people ‘calling out’ the right name.
With replacement, chances that you randomly pick the right card of 52 randomly selected cards are (1 – (51/52)^52) = about 63.57%. Not a certainty by any means.
You didn’t mean with replacement, but whatever. I did the maths, so it would be wasteful to not mention it now.
i knew sarah would make a big impact on friday’s story back when willis announced rotating characters in the previous banner. she hadn’t really done anything yet, so it only made sense that sarah was the one with the bat.
And Ryan keeps pitching the puns and everyone else is still swinging at air.
Fortunately for us Sarah is not one to kick a guy when he is down when a good Tee off would be more appropriate. Once laid out appropriately, the stomping can commence.
Just waiting for the salt for the follow through.
Aww, she does care. How sweet.
I know right! That’s so nice!
I’m trying REALLY hard, but I can’t not read that sarcastically, with Ruth’s face right there.
Joyce, you don’t understand. Sarah wasn’t sent by the Old Testament God.
SARAH IS THE OLD TESTAMENT GOD.
Makes sense as Morgan Freeman acts more like the New Testament God.
Are you saying that Sarah becomes Morgan Freeman when she gets older?
That’s just wrong.
Do I want to know what the intermediary stage would look like?
If Sarah is female, and Morgan Freeman is god, then the intermediate stage is a female god.
So, Oprah.
… I wish I were a chick so I could say “have my babies,” though I’m confident your wife would not appreciate.
Not to be mean, but ‘Sky’ is a female name, and ‘Skye’ sounds pretty dang female as well. Not to mention the girl-avatar. So really, no one would have objected if you did.
Damn you Willis!!! I hurt form laughing.
“Why couldn’t Bender choose a normal religion, like Oprahism or Voodoo?”
Nah, if God was a woman, She wouldn’t be some comical figure like Oprah. I figure someone like Helen Mirren – aged, wise, stable and yet still somehow strangely hot.
I picture the female version of god as more like Cathy Jones of “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” fame.
The guy version would be of either David Broadfoot or Vincent Price or possibly both at the same time.
The male version could only be Sean Connery.
When I think of Sean Connery nowadays, I think Zardoz.
Sean Connery in a wedding dress
No, no. Female God is Alanis Morrisette
I was about to say that.
This proved far more fruitful than I was expecting. Bravo.
I don’t think that God would ever say this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7liYfhRgXGk
Works for me.
ok
God, Jiminy the Crickrt samething.
Nice. Sarah wasn’t even in my top 5 guesses for who would be wielding the bat.
At least she beat Ronald Reagan. In my list of guesses, I mean. She didn’t beat him with the bat. Although I suppose that might have happened off screen.
I betted on it being Dina, which I admit was a longshot in the first place.
I think I had the longer odds–my bet was on Snape.
I kind figured. This is the best solution in all possible worlds!
she would have had to set up a rope trap in advance
And the betting pool goes to Wandering Meme for who it was on the other end of the bat.
I’m hoping Willis has multiple versions drawn that he will show us someday, of multiple people holding the bat
:DDD
The best one will be Walky. With his Dorothy face on. And the bat still raised.
YES!!! Please show us this
I am pretty certain that this is NOT what Ryan was hoping for when he wanted to get ‘biblical’ with someone. 😀
CARLOS!
MY MANWICH!
The only way this could be better is if joyce drunkenly professed her love for sarah.
And NOT THAT WAY YOU FREAK!
Alright, I owe my metaphorical bookie a couple bucks. Shoulda seen this coming.
I’m sorry Ryan, I can’t hear you over the sound of Sarah beating your face in old testament style.
Beating your FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE.
That hulk-stomp Sarah’s about to do is going going to be EPIIIIIIIIIIIIC!
“The pwnage heard round the world.”
Whoever hasn’t sinned may cast the first stone, and sticks and stones may break his bones. We’re out of stones but we got sticks!
But names cause acute lead posioning!
Sarah layin down the Word of God up in here!
WOOOHOOO!! I was right!! Sarah to the rescue!
So it’s not a Scout, but an alternate universe Demoman doing the beating? Huh.
kaBOOOM!
I’m surprised and disappointed that Sarah reacted with such overwhelming violence in this situation. From this point forward, I simply cannot see her not lashing out physically and still being in character.
(Guys, am I doing it right?)
I do believe you’re doing it right.
Character nothing. We all wanted to do the exact same thing.
My point was to point out that everyone reacts with vitriol when Joyce gets violent, but when Sarah does it everyone just roots her on.
Not everyone! I was cheering up a storm!
And so where a couple other people. You should re read last page’s comments again.
Aye, aye, “Everyone” is rather hyperbolic, but my point stands.
Joyce punched Joe for honestly seeking mutually consentual sex.
Sarah saved Joyce from a predator who conned her, drugged her, and then flew into a violent rage when his plans didn’t work out.
I’m thinking there’s just a wee bit of a difference.
The incident with Joe can be explained by one thing:
It’s a comic.
That was *supposed* to be comic.
But no, I’m referring to the *last strip*.
Ah, I see. I recall a few folks being worried that she might be in trouble for glassing a guy, but I don’t remember a lot of vitriol, though I admittedly started skimming to check for responses to my own posts once the thread hit 500 or so…
Also, Joyce only committed assault. Not aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
True, but then again, rapist. Guys like Ryan in fiction are kind of like Nazis, in that pretty much anything can happen to them, and nobody’s going to feel bad about it. (Unless the reader is an awful, awful person.)
I also saw said vitriol. I believe the difference is that when Joyce hit him, he was threatening her verbally and physically (without touching her). He’s physically assaulting her by the time Sarah comes in.
I’m more talking about panels two and four. You know, the ones that could potentially cause murder. You know, that thing that is basically never okay.
Well, it’s never legal, I’ll give you that. “Okay” is a little more a matter of perspective. While I DO worry about potential repurcussions for Sarah, I’d be lying if I said I felt the slightest bit of sympathy for Ryan. At the risk of belaboring a point and being obnoxious, while I’ve always hated rapists, having two daughters has really cranked it up to eleven. Judging by what he was saying and the look on his face, I have no doubt he wasn’t going to stop at mere rape, and anything Sarah can dish out is, frankly, better than he deserves.
True, against Joe.
But not true when smashing a glass into someone’s face. A bit lower on the jaw, and that cut might’ve been something more fatal.
Sometimes you need to trust your instincts and take advantage of that first strike. I’d rather Joyce not wait to be assaulted to retaliate, even if it is with sharp glass. That being said, Sarah had him down and I think the attention of a crowd, so I thought the 2nd strike was unnecessary. Then again, she’s probably a bit emotional to stop and judge wither the threat is gone. I’m not letting it bother me.
Additionally we forget that joyce didn’t gave a lot of time to act: she was drugged. She looked at her glass as if she remembered something. And she WAS told that people might drug her. And she WAS aware that ryan had offered her a drink that night.
That said she may also have been in fear of life and limb, and so reacted.
Soooo…self-defense. Her actions are justified. even in the case of death. You would be hard pressed to find a jury that would convict her.
Plus technically she was acting under the influence of a controlled substance, so the one who administered the substance is at least %50 to blame for any mayhem that resulted.
And Joyce punched this guy before he laid a hand on her. Sarah hit him with the bat after he was forcibly holding Joyce down.
I want to be clear that I’m not against what Joyce did–anyone could feel threatened by what he said to her, but there is that slight difference.
Well, he better live, or at this point she’s going to be in trouble. I’m not aware of any states where it’s legal to beat someone unconscious to death, no matter what he did while awake. Tempting yes, legal now.
No one complained when Joyce took broken glass to Ryan’s face.
No, the double standard here seems pretty simple: one standard for rapists, another for bad dates. That’s a double standard I think I can get behind.
Actually at least one person did complain, and even got a few supporters, but he was still in the minority.
I complained! Yay!
Sarah has violent wrath for rapists, and hasn’t resorted to violence for any other reason. Joyce has violent wrath for betrayers of her manly ideal, and has done it to non-rapists too. Obviously these situations are exactly the same!
Now, if Sarah takes a baseball bat to the next person who disses her in the cafeteria, then never fear, I’ll get a bit critical of her actions too.
I meant complaining about her glassing Ryan; some people disapprove of self-defense.
Well, as I just said, I don’t think she was acting in self defense. She attacked because she was furious at him, not because she felt threatened. (Check her facial expressions.)
Obviously the situation changed when he got up after she cut him, actually threatened her, and then followed that up by actually attacking her. Of course by that point Joyce was woozy, and so Sarah stepped in to fill the ‘justified (self?-)defense’ void.
Hell no. Yeah, she was pissed, but she was acting in self-defense. She was angry because she realized that this guy was attempting to rape her and had drugged her. I’d react with more than a little anger in that situation as well.
Splunge.
Man, when Sarah goes to town on someone, Sarah goes to town.
And apparently she favors Cooperstown.
WIN
I thought she favored Louisville?
I hear Banff is lovely in the fall.
Oh God I love this. On a scale of 1 to Goliath, how Old Testament dead will Ryan be after this?
Korah.
Proper Fraked like before zee cylons get there
The Pharoah in Exodus: even Ryan’s children are going to be feeling this one!
I’m going to say “Sodom”.
It’s too bad that “sodomized” already has a meaning, because otherwise it would be appropriate here.
“Gomorrahized” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Gomorrinated.
And Sarah is the Gomorrinator?
Also, it’s pretty flipping fantastic that everyone knew the scale needed to be broken.
Lot’s Wife.
Baal Worshipers at the contest between who’s god could burn a bull.
no no wait, Cain- he will get a scar as his mark
The people who predicted this must be elated. The “old testament god” line is classic. I’m an atheist, but even I recognize the fact that that has to be the most badass thing someone could say while delivering a beatdown.
Wow. He is going to die.
But at least he’ll have died doing what he loves doing…
Okay, that’s pretty dark, I admit.
Not quite. He didn’t even make it past Joyce’s shirt, let alone her underoos.
Yes, but he’s being touched by a lady. Just one with a large woody.
it’s a trap?
if he dies, at least it will give sarah a valid excuse to stay in her room all day.
Outstanding. And Sara gets him right in the faceeee. She was my first guess but my last hope.
YEAH SARAH! Go Old Testament on his ass!
I really hope Sarah doesn’t get in trouble for this. You know, from students who already hate her and would rather side with a rapist.
That would suck monkeyballs. It would be totally babies!
Or maybe the opposite will happen and she’ll go from ‘social leper’ to ‘BADASS PROTECTOR’ status?
The only thing on her side is that she is a known narc/party-pooper. I suspect she will be believed when she claims Ryan was up to no good.
Is Sarah hated enough that her enemies will bear false witness, and claim Sarah attacked Ryan without justification? (I don’t think so. It’s one thing to do someone dirt when there are no consequences to oneself, another when you’ve skin in the game.)
I doubt that would happen, there WAS a line for the bathroom and I’m sure there were enough bystanders within the vicinity who could bear witness.
Not to mention enough people know and trust Joyce enough to take her word for it.
Not gonna be easy, what with the drugged girl and all. I doubt that Joyce is going to be pegged as having taken the roofies for fun.
Yeah, but the drunk people she was hanging out with, no matter how drunk, can probably put some pieces together. She was sober, she wasn’t drinking at all, and suddenly she goes to the bathroom and is all drugged and woozy? Not to mention the guy she was with looked pissy the whole time.
And anyone who knows Joyce can defend her, saying, “Hey, that girl doesn’t drink or do drugs, she’s a hardcore fundie through and through.”
…you seem to have somehow very badly misread this. You’re countering my point by… agreeing with it? There are drugs in her system. People do not take roofies for fun even if they ARE druggies, doesn’t matter what people think of Joyce. Who cares what people say or put together, that’s pretty irrefutable proof.
Oh, oops, my bad ^_^ I guess I did misread it.
Uh, yes they do. Ro-hypnol is used recreationally, just in smaller doses than usually used by date rapists.
Now Sarah has her own Crowning Moment of Awesome.
Read Jeremiah 19:4-10 if you want some epic biblical shit. Just terrifying stuff all around.
Jeremiah 19:4-10 (LCB)
4 4 they has forsaken me an made dis place ov foreign godz; they has burnd incense in it 2 godz dat neithr they nor their ancestors nor teh kings ov judah evr knew, an they has filld dis place wif teh blood ov teh innosent.
5 they has built teh high placez ov baal 2 burn their children in da fire as offerings 2 baal – somethin i did not command or menshun, nor did it entr mah mind.
6 so beware, teh dais r comin, declarez teh lord, when peeps will no longr call dis place tofeth or teh valley ov ben hinnom, but teh valley ov slaughtr.
7 “in dis place im gonna ruin [a] teh planz ov judah an jerusalem. Im gonna mak them fall by teh sword before their enemiez, at teh hanz ov dose hoo seek their livez, an im gonna giv their carcasez as fud 2 teh birdz an teh wild animals.
8 im gonna devastate dis city an mak it an object ov horror an scorn; all hoo pas by will be appalld an will scoff cuz ov all itz woundz.
9 im gonna mak them eat teh flesh ov their sons an daughters, an they will eat wan anothers flesh cuz their enemiez will pres teh siege so hard against them 2 destroy them.
10 “den break teh jar while dose hoo go wif u r watchin,
What the hell?
Which Bible version is that, the ICanHasCheezburger edition?
It’s popular among those who own cat-themed calendars and jewellery.
LolBible, yes. I prefer Lego Bible, but each to his own.
The (LCB) stands for LOLcat Bible, you can google it.
this is awesome.
I prefer the Books of Bokonon, myself.
Book 1, Verse 2 seems appropriate:
In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.
“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.
“Certainly,” said man.
“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God.
And He went away.
Bokonon goes on to explain the human striving for knowledge in one of his immortal Calypsos:
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?”
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
Fuck yes!
I just noticed that, officially, if the strip gets any wider I will have to start using the sidescroller. Meh.
at 1000 pixels? are you unable to increase the resolution of your monitor?
if nothing else, you could use ctrl – to make everything on here a little smaller.
And none of YOU said “And the jerk’s gonna get stomped in his New Testament”? *shrug*
It would be a shame for Sarah to barely avoid trouble with her former roommate and get in trouble over this.
It almost seems like she knows Ryan and his tricks — perhaps through said roommate?
And now a reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 5, verses 6 through 17, regarding the Sacred Club of Louisville…
and for our second reading a little Ezekiel 25:17 (Tarantino edition) “And you will know My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee.”
Can’t believe I had to go this far down in the comments to find it.
Seriously, I was gonna post it myself if no one else had.
So, Sarah has a B.M.F. purse, right?
Of course, once Joyce un-roofies it, Sarah is going to give her the biggest “I told you so” lecture of her LIFE.
Not like Joyce doesn’t need one of those, and Sarah DID say she wouldn’t save Joyce prior to the party, but it’s still well within Sarah’s rights to lash out at Joyce for being dumb and not listening to the voice of reason.
it’s a shame sarah missed the board games.
To be fair, Sarah just didn’t want Joyce to go to the party, which doesn’t so much teach her how to avoid asshole rapists but put off her opportunity to learn it. Wiser advice might have been to go but to stay close to a friend who’s already proven trustworthy and not drink anything your eyes have not been on since the moment of pouring. From a container unlikely to be spiked (i.e., NOT a punch bowl).
Yeah, it’s not really fair to say that Joyce was “being dumb” for going to a party, unless we’re going to start saying that women who are sexually assaulted were “being dumb” for being out in public without a male protector. Giving the advice that Random Webcomics Junkie mentioned would have been a much better way to go than just saying “Don’t go to parties, that’s dumb!”
I think anyone who drinks something they can’t personally verify to be sound to at the very least possesses a dangerous amount of faith in their fellow being.
That’s not even a party rule as far as I’m concerned. Only time I’d ever leave a drink unmonitored and still trust it is in a private setting among friends or family, and even that’s backfired on me once.
It was not however in any way negatively reflective on her that she went to the party, or that she didn’t realize Ryan possessed malign intent. Last I checked she possesses neither telepathy nor precognition, so there’s only so much we can expect of her.
God didn’t do jack.
while given that this is a comic so it is more an act of willis then anything. it should be noted that God has a tendency to act in ways we don’t expect. for example a person might ask for something and expect it to happen a certain way however God might make it so that it happens in a way that depending on the sitch might make the asker (or the person the prayer was for) a better person for the experience
God, in any of her incarnations, has a very wry and dark sense of humor in a Vincent Price / Alfred Hitchcock sort of way.
God also has a sense of humor.
Our car had a fan belt that was falling apart, so we ordered a new one from the auto part store, but had to wait a week for it to arrive. My mom kept praying that the car wouldn’t break down until we got the part in the car. When the part arrived my dad drove down to the auto part store and picked up the part tossed it on the passenger seat and started to drive home. Halfway home the belt finally broke and the car stopped running. my mom’s prayer was answered the car didn’t breakdown until the part was in the car, she just hadn’t mentioned that she wanted it installed.
Always be very, very specific to God when you pray to him, or he’ll totally prank you. He’s omniscient, so he knows what you mean, but he just likes finding loopholes in your pleas because he’s a jerk.
Praying to God is like wishing on the monkey’s paw.
So, you’re saying God is kind of like the cosmic version of… well, you.
In essence, God is an evil genie?
Haters gotta hate.
“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”
Exactly.
What are you talking about this is all written in the Book of Willis.
I was curious as to how people would respond.
So, in other words, you be trollin.
No trollin involve malice.
I always liked Sarah.
I was a fan of her’s ever since she utter the phrase, “Do you do anything in moderation?”
hipster Sarah fan?
“I was liking Sarah before she brought the baseball bat to the frat party”?
Sarah is amazing. She is totally [insert comment about being ironic and or transcendent], you wouldn’t understand. *goes back to playing with iphone*
The God of the old testament has to be the meanest character in all fiction.
Also, hilarious. “Hey Abraham, I order you to kill your son! HAH! Just kidding! Oh my me I can’t believe you were actually about to do that! LOLZ. Have fun with that awkward family moment now!”
It’s like if Mike was creator of the universe.
Win
god was the first troll.
And yes, I refuse to capitalize god’s name for my own reason.
God isn’t God’s name. His name is Yahweh.
I thought it was Howard.
“Our Father, who art in Heaven
Howard be thy name.”
This.
To our modern sensitive selves, yes, a lot of the Old Testament is pretty harsh. But the thing is, the God of the OT was —for the most part— egalitarian in a world where that was unheard of. He was a god of justice. His punishments may have looked overblown, but they were at least usually dished out because you did something stupid.
In contrast, you look at the Greek pantheon, who were all living a soap opera and regularly dicked around with mortals (and each other) for shits and giggles. Or the various Mesopotamian gods who were just this side of Eldrich Horror that saw people as little more than mildly entertaining ants.
It’s all about context.
Alright, so the religions of their neighbors were pretty bad. But still, your argument is akin to this:
“Well, at least he had food poisoning instead of ebola!”
I’m a Christian and all, but the Old Testament allegories are often making God out to be a macabre, petty, self-righteous tyrant. I mean, come on. “Yay, I helped you Hebrews out of slavery. Now go enslave you some heathens! Slavery’s fine, as long as it’s not Hebrew slaves!” Political allegory using a divine voice as the narrative for 1,000 Alex.
The comment was that he was the worst guy around ever. That’s all I’m debating here.
But I can see how people would SEE the God described in the Old Testament as the worst guy ever, if taken to be as literally described.
I don’t see Him that way (existing as literally described), so I can say this and I get to keep my Christian decoder ring. ^__^
But…again, I’m just providing the context of the day and age. I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to counter with.
Yes, he was a horrible character. I’m not debating that. But if you start throwing around terms like ‘worst ever’, then you have quite a list of contenders.
Oh man, now I have to spend the next two strips listening to Sarah throw out “I told-you-so’s”
Maybe, but I honestly see Joyce going all “I was having a great time until that happened, next time I’ll just not be so dumb”
Of course, if she starts it when Joyce is still hopped up on roofies it’ll go more “That’s niiiiice, oh he lost a tooth, head woozy going do-” THUMP
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. My guess is that Sarah followed Joyce only to prove something bad was going to happen.
joyce: “at least i didn’t kill a man!”
True, then again he may not qualify as one either.
Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of when it was posited that Sarah might be the bat wielder (I was hoping for Ruth, or maybe one of the drunk gamers)
I’m really interested to see how Joyce handles this. If, as I expect, she grows much wiser from the experience, then I’m also interested to see how Sarah reacts to someone who experienced the dark side of college and didn’t shut down and become a miserable recluse.
OH YEAH!!! Show ’em how it’s done, Sarah!
(I really hope that second whack doesn’t get you in trouble later)
second whack hell! I’m wondering if she stomping his head, ribs, gut, nuts or knees!
I’m going to assume in the context that she’s going after testicular vengeance, but there’s also the possibility that she’s crippling his hands too come to think of it. *sigh* the good old days.
By the looks of it I doubt she could do too much damage with those shoes. She doesn’t look like the combat boot wearing type in the first place. So only soft tissue damage at best unless she really tried to break something.
given a good stomp, half your body weight on a surface area the size of your foot… believe it or not, that’s an absolute crap load of pressure. I’d expect fractures in the very least, considering how eagerly she’s going about it. serious bruising an other nasty side effects (remember, skin and muscle don’t just bruise, they tear… you can really screw a person up just by tripping and landing wrong on them… now imagine the damage when it’s intentional).
All in all, if this lil prick survives (it’s a given that he will), he’s going to be hurting a lot afterwards.
Alright…time to be the devil’s advocate.
There’s a very good chance Sarah just lost her scholarship AND earned herself an assault with a weapon charge.
Yes she is defending someone in duress. Bad thing here is you cannot continue to “defend” yourself and others when the threat is gone. By her own admission he is on the ground and not moving and she is continuing to use the bat to assault him. She just went from defender to assailant in front of witnesses in the eyes of the law. Depending on how good a lawyer he has they could even press for attempted murder.
Don’t get me wrong. He needs a good ass kicking. Doesn’t change the very BIG risk Sarah’s running from panel 2 on
To be fair, we don’t know that he’s on the ground and not moving yet. She made a joke about letting him go if he stays down, but she doesn’t give him enough chance to get up before hitting him again. It’s 50/50 whether or not he could have gotten up and fought more.
He’s on the ground. Once that occurs most state laws state you must remove yourself from the situation not continue it. Any lawyer would seize on her statement “Woops I lied” as a clear indicator that she saw the threat was gone and continued the assault anyway. That she has the time to make jokes and doesn’t use it to remove herself and the victim is what could bite her
Ryan’s a scumbag. The kind that seems to me would say “If I’m going down I’m sure as hell taking her with me”
Dude, this is a comic. If we can’t enjoy a little self-indulgent smiting on rapist pricks in a freakin’ comic without it devolving into a ream of legal consequences on the good guys, the world is doomed to eternal seriousness.
Who said you can’t enjoy it?
the pisser is, yes it’s a comic, but unfortunately for real world implications- ryan would become the victim and sarah the assailant. No matter how justified we see it, most the whiners, lawyers and other scum in this world would make it so that both sarah and joyce are the bad guys…
‘So it was going to be a little sex, it’s not like you didn’t want it. you were at the party after all… and no one forced you to be there…’
yeah, burn em all.
Except of course for the drugs in Joyce’s system. Pretty sure attempted roofying has a tendency to turn a jury against you.
You’d think so, but considering all the absolutely absurd cases I’ve heard about in the last 20 years, I can’t honestly hold any hope that things would go any other way.
Burn yourself with a cup of coffee? the coffee brewers fault.
beg a rapist to wear a condom before raping you? now it’s consensual.
break a jerk’s arm when he’s in your house stealing your stuff? aggravated assault and battery with intent to do deadly harm.
yeah, I’ve not got much hope for the legal system.
To be fair, in the coffee thing the woman got third degree burns, needed skin grafts and had to be hospitalized for 8 days, all after her grandson pulled the car over so that she could add cream and sugar without hurting herself.
I am so tired of the McDonald’s coffee spill lawsuit being trotted out as frivolous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants People shouldn’t get their news from late night talk show monologues.
All of the cases you cite were wildly spun by media and pundits into examples of “absurd” legal decisions. If ones investigate even slightly one discovers that the situations were not really as described and in several cases the absurd arguments were defeated but were perceived as so outrageous that they were presented as though they succeeded. People hate lawyers, until they need one . . .
Ah, got it. These things never happen, have never happened, and will never happen. Good to know.
I’ve read the stuff on the McDonald’s coffee spill, David. Frivolous? No. Was McDonald at fault? Hell no! This just in: COFFEE IS HOT. Leading scientists have come to a groundbreaking conclusion that if you spill hot coffee on yourself, you may get burned.
Seriously, it was her own damn fault for trying to hold the cup of hot coffee between her legs when cars come with cup holders. And the cups already had signs on them alerting that the coffee is hot! What more do you want, people? Does McDonald’s coffee need to come with a person to carefully hold it for you?
If that is your take-home message from the details of the case, then I really think you only skimmed it. Yes, coffee is expected to be hot. That doesn’t mean restaurants are free-and-clear to sell beverages at any high temperature. Sometimes a temperature can be too high. Would it be okay to set a jacuzzi to boiling because they’re expected to be hot? Is it your fault if you step in one and have to get skin grafts?
We expect coffee to be hot. We don’t expect it to be insanely hot.
Actually I did do my homework. The case argued that if the coffee was lower than the 180 degrees it was at, say around 150, she wouldn’t have been burned. However, “a British court later rejected this argument as scientifically false finding that 149 °F (65 °C) liquid could cause deep tissue damage in only two seconds.” It can do damage at even lower temperatures if absorbed through synthetics like polyester. So it would have burned her even if it was at the lower temperature. But even disregarding that, she was clearly being teh stupidz by holding an easily squishable coffee cup BETWEEN HER LEGS. That is not using the jacuzzi properly, sir.
Except that Mike, with neither superpowers nor SEMME privileges, isn’t arrested yet. I’m pretty sure Sarah’s going to be fine.
Mike punched a guy in the face a few times in this universe. Leaving no lasting damage. There;s a BIG difference between that and beating another person with a bat in front of a house full of people. The weapon and the fact it continues as he’s laying on the ground really DOES make all the difference
Depending on where Willis wants to go with this charges, loss of scholarship and/or expulsion are not unrealistic possibilities
Dude, this is a comic. If we can’t enjoy a little self-indulgent smiting on rapist pricks in a freakin’ comic without it devolving into a ream of legal consequences on the good guys, the world is doomed to eternal seriousness.
I just hope Willis understands that piece of truth.
Not to be pulling in stuff from Willis’ other comics, but if you’ve read IW, you’d know that Joyce’s killing of Anti-Joyce there didn’t go away for a looooong time. And there was legal action.
We can enjoy it. But we’re not in the comic we observe it through the fourth wall. In comic Is Willis’ turf and may yet choose to smite her for it but that is unlikely.
if “my cousin vinny” taught me anything, it’s that “legal comedy” does exist.
That may be, but considering what is surely happening in that party (underage and possibly statutory rape) , it’s a matter of “If I go down, I’m taking you with me”.
Pursuing charges means looking into the party itself, which means a lot of other people would be on the hook for underage drinking and various other shenanigans. I don’t think anyone other than Ryan is going to be eager to go there, and I don’t know that he’s going to want to gamble on coming out of this looking like the good guy.
Once again, it’s a pretty safe bet that Ryan’s not going to the police with his story. Yes, as has been the case since Joyce first slashed him, he could make a decent case if he wanted to. I sincerely doubt he has any desire to place the events of this night under investigation.
The witnesses are probably too busy partying drunkenly to call the cops right now, and after the fact it’ll be done and seem less important since they weren’t really involved in it.
Ryan’s probably just gonna try and blend in with all the other partygoers who ended the night in a state of disrepair and unconscious. The fewer questions asked the better.
While I’m sure this will have consequences for Sarah (she’s not exactly standing on the top of the world right now. Doesn’t need any new stories about her unmellow behavior in the vicinity of fun), these consequences will be unlikely to include legal ramifications. Might get a warning from the Dean about her scholarship.
Ryan’s desires are not consequent given that he is probably dead. The first blow was low to the back of the head, if Sara was swinging hard on the bat that probably severed his brain stem. After that he just gets to twitch himself to death without immediate care, the further beating renders the point moot.
Willis, you are wandering out of common knowledge bible jokes. Oh noes!
Sarah used Smite!
Critical Hit!
It’s super effective!
Foe RYAN fainted!
SARAH just kept going…
But Smite does flat damage to minions! Does that mean that Ryan the Rapist is online a MINION?! D:
In before people say that Sarah’s violence is uncalled for: Ryan did appear to be able to violently assault Joyce. And, while it might not be legal or moral, I’d do the same thing to protect someone innocent from being hurt.
Although I do wish Billie or Dottie had gotten there first! Then again, they did leave Joyce alone when they definitely should not have. I suppose it’s fitting that Sarah saves her instead of them.
Yaknow, with all this drinkin’ and characterisin’ and relationship buildin’, sooner or later Cobgresswoman DeSanto is going to have to pick up the Drama Tab.
I mean, she’s in the government, she can afford it!
I’m pretty sure the drama tag was implicitly pulled when Ryan showed up, and he mentioned horses, so his parents are loaded. That said, it’s his responsibility to pick up the drama tag.
Drama tab. Don’t ruin that awesome joke with bad reading comprehension!
I thank you. 😀 I just thought, “If New-Universe Spock gets Winona Ryder for a Mum, ANY cross-continuity change can be acceptable!”.
Bad spelling=bad reading comprehension?
He didn’t mispell it. He meant to say tab. “Pick up the drama tab.” Just like when you “pick up the tab” for everyone when you eat out. In other words, pay for everyone. Monetarily. 😉
Ryan will surely now not forget this now. Go Sarah!
i’d be surprised if he remembers ANYTHING after this.
And you will KNOW my name is THE LORD, when I lay my Sarah upon thee.
“Fuck’im, Father, for who know’s DAMN well what he’s doing.”
And so Joyce realized that it was Sarah whom God wanted her to marry.
That would be amazing.
Yes!
Here, have an Internet.
Well, technically the Bible has nothing against FEMALE homosexuality… >.>
Just putting that out there.
At least not in the Old Testament.
Aaaand debatably in the New Testament. It’s iffy, cause there’s one passage that seems to relate to homosexuality in general in some translations, and one that relates to women acting like dudes.
But eh. The New Testament wasn’t very full of new rules, so it maaay be nothing.
Willis, I love the pose you have Sarah in in the last frame. Excellent delivery.
Darn it. Oh well, you can’t win’em all.
Now that I was not expecting. But it makes sense in retrospect.
Damn, Willis is good at misdirection.
Phew!
Yeah, I was really hoping that it would be Joe wielding the bat; he really didn’t get a fair chance with Joyce. Showing her that folks who are honest about their sexual desires aren’t all evil/rufie-fying/rapist types would have been a nice lesson for Joyce to grapple with.
Sarah is a decent second choice, though — but it may take the storyline down a grittier path. She already has a hates-addicts & drugs background that seems pretty dark; the inevitable ‘I told you so’ might transfer some of Sarah’s paranoia & intolerance into Joyce, … or etc.
We’ll see. The biggest problem with these comics is that they’re impossible to stop reading, especially when I have something important to do…. wait, it’s already 1:30 am? o_O
Darn it.
Ryan: Smite me, o mighty smiter!!!
Sarah: Challenge accepted. *WHAM*
Good thing God isn’t Morgan Freeman in this universe (or at least if he is he’s not about repeating things) otherwise we’d have to sit through Ryan Almighty.
No, no, even Morgan Freeman would be like “this dude’s getting a bat to the face for the next hour and a half.”
Who would watch that movie?
does sarah just show up to random parties she has no interest in with a baseball bat on the off chance that her “ignorant little naif” of a roomate is gonna get raped?
Yes. Sarah is just that much of a protective big sis after all.
only when her “slugger sense” is tingling
It’s not a random party. It is specifically the party she knew her roommate would be attending. She (must have) felt bad saying that she would not come out to help her, no matter what after a while and decided to give the scene a cursory check. And the rest is baseball history.
GO SARAH!
I don’t think Sarah is in much trouble. Who the hell is going to report? There’s underage drinking going on at this party, which party guest is going to run to the cops and tell them that some guy just got his FAAAAACE beat in with a baseball bat at a party like that?
If anything, Ryan will get to the hospital and just tell them he was in a fight and leave it at that.
Sometimes, you have to use common sense when declaring what kind of trouble you think a person will get into.
No, not even a fight. He’d say he tripped while washing dishes or “fell down the stairs.” Next up — mandatory rubber mats in the kitchen spaces.
Now I want Ryan to actually fall down the stairs, just to add insult to injury. Sarah should totally drag him up the stairs and then push him down.
Yay for adding an attempted murder charge to the assault with a weapon and GBH charges! Yay!
Seriously, to all the people saying, ‘no one will call the cops’, there’s a very good chance he’s unconscious or dying with two baseball bat blows to the head already. No getting out of that.
People shouldn’t assault other people. The bottling was called for, as was (possibly) the first blow with the bat, if Sarah can make the case that he was about to kill Joyce, which is arguable. Pulling him away would be unassailable in that circumstance. But the second blow while he’s on the ground? Plus stomping on his [face, body, limbs, etc.]? It doesn’t matter what he did – there are reasons why people aren’t allowed to do that kind of thing, even if they think they’re doing the right thing.
It’s a webcomic. Maybe in real life Sarah would be in a world of trouble, but this is FAKE and FICTION!
Whatever Willis says goes here, if he wants Sarah in trouble, Sarah will get in trouble. If he doesn’t, she’s fine.
Sarah rocks!
Let’s keep the party rolling with a Ryan pinata. Bwahahaha!
On a lighter note…
In panel 2, check out the follow-through!
Is Joyce going to develop drug induced Perverse Sexual Lust for GodSarah? Cuz that would be funny.
WHOO! go Sarah! :3
Shouldn’t you be upside-down?
“whoops, i lied” BEST. LINE. EVER.
Am I the only one looking at the red on Joyce and going ‘Wait, either that shouldn’t be there, or she has blood on her hand.’ She has a bit of a red swatch on her forehead and hair.
She did just smack Ryan with a roofie’d glass of Sierra Mist. It’s residual blood that is… Y’know… I’m not gonna continue that explanation… Joyce was a badass and you know it.
Indeed.
It’s kind of in a thumbprint shape. It’s not unlikely that it was on her hand and she rubbed her forehead.
I CALLED IT!
Roommate who truly cares to the rescue
Or Roommate who doesn’t want to deal with roommate who has new post-rape issues.
She can pretend it was she was just trying to avoid a negative roommate relationship all she wants but I know she truly cares.
That avatar makes that all the more appropriate.
Same thing.
Some how I really don’t see Joyce remembering everything that happened during the party once the drugs wear off. Also have to wonder how much of the drugs she’s consumed already. I seem to remember her being ‘enamored’ with the ‘sprite’ Mr. Now Black n Blue gave her just prior to wigging out.
I bet by the time Sarah’s done, she’ll have lost the bat entirely
(THINK ABOUT IT ITS GROSS)
You mean when she finishes making Ryan into a real woman?
SAAARAAAH!
I’m a touch surprised though. If she’s getting Old Testament on his ass, why not go all the way and pull out some Ezekiel 25:17? Why not strike down upon him with great vengeance and furious anger?
Kick ‘im while he’s down!
I’m actually really not okay with Sarah beating on a prone rapist. Joyce smashing glass into his face? Justified self-defense. Sarah cracking the back of his head unawares, possibly causing brain damage? Still cool in my book; Ryan was a threat.
But when a dude’s down, he should be out. MAYBE we can chalk up “Whoops, I lied” to ‘just making sure’, but going on to kick his face in is way past the red line. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Sarah should face legal repercussions, ‘cuz unnecessary force against a rapist feels more like a misdemeanor than anything but courts necessarily can’t look at in like that… But I hope there’s some occasion where she can reflect on how she lets her emotions carry her a bit too far.
Meanwhile, in literary analysis land, it’s fine that Sarah’s secret compassionate side got the best of her and she followed Joyce to the party, if a tad cliche. I do wonder where the hell she got that bat, though. It’s a bit too creepy/convenient if she brought it from home.
He’s a rapist. he fucking deserves worse.
Like vivisection.
You’re too kind.
Not a helpful attitude.
Put your sister in joyce’s place, and let’s see if you stop. hell, put you mother, your girlfriend, your wife, daughter or just a friend in her place. I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t stop. If you can put the needs and safety of some creep above another person, well… I guess you’re just one of those better people.
I’m proud to say I’m not.
I’m not putting the needs and safety of Ryan above anyone. He is the absolute bottom of the totem pole for people I’m concerned about. But, objectively, Ryan stopped being an immediate threat as soon as he hit the ground. Sarah’s continued violence isn’t making Joyce any safer right now, and realistically it’s not making any potential future victim of Ryan’s safer, either. Unless she’s planning on going far enough to actually kill or cripple him, which is a whole different can of worms, and I doubt that scenario anyway.
Now, none of us are souless robots, so yeah I can appreciate the emotional angle and cut Sarah some slack. I’d probably do something similar but more incompetent in Sarah’s shoes, so I can’t call myself a better person. None of that actually makes it okay to pointlessly beat up on a defenseless, lacerated rapist with a possible concussion, though.
There’s no proof he stopped being a threat once he hit the ground. If a rapist or murderer hit the ground after I hit them, I’d make darn sure they would stay down.
Note that Sarah didnt pause and give him time to get up before the punchline. She doesn’t know whether or not he’s still a threat. Note that we don’t know how strong Sarah is without the bat. She’s smaller than him, and she won’t get any backup from Joyce, her scared and drugged roommate. He just threatened Joyce with both rape and extended violence during/afterward. I’m pretty certain it’s the smart thing to make double-sure this guy won’t get up and hurt either of them.
No one else at the party has moved to help or not help yet, so presumably Sarah needs to make sure they’re both safe. Also, she’s probably really pissed. Dude tried to rape and violently assault (in addition to the rape part) her naive, sheltered roommate. And then he tried to justify it as the girl asking for all of it. I think it’s understandable to see red. It’s easy for us sitting safe in our homes to judge her, but think if this was real. If he got to his feet, he could overwhelm Sarah, grab the bat, and do harm. Just being devil’s advocate here.
Also, it’s probably easy to find a baseball bat in someone’s house like that. All it takes is a member of the household being into sports.
Or at least one girl in residence. Keep one in the front hall closet or mixed in with the umbrellas in the stand. Just in case ya know 😉
He doesn’t stop being a threat because he’s on the ground.
He stops being a threat when he is sufficiently incapacitated that he can be taken into custody. If it takes a few extra whacks to make sure he is that incapacitated I call that a safety margin.
I think this is a ‘real world’ vs ‘fictional world’ difference. In the real world you shouldn’t use violence, unless as a last resort. The glass is in, the first batting is in, the rest is out. She should call the police and let the courts punish the rapist.
This is a comic however and no one wants to see the doa-crowd involved in a court case with testimonies and stuff for hundreds of strips. So see bats him some more; he get’s his retribution and we had some fun.
Besides; I don’t know how the law works in the US, but where I live there exists a term that roughly translates ‘excessive self defense under duress’. In other words; if you use to much violence while defending yourself or friends for assault you are forgiven if you where emotianally overwhelmed at the time. (rapist guy could get a lower sentence though) That might aplie here.
If you’re kickboxing or something like that then violence is your first resort.
I’m not aware of any similar laws where I live in TN. There was a case recently involving a man who shot someone who threatened to beat him; he was found guilty of murder. You’re not allowed to kill someone unless you have reason to believe there is a threat to someone’s life, although you are allowed to assume that someone breaking into your house is such a threat. Now, his threats to give Joyce back what she gave him plus interest might qualify as a threat to Joyce’s life. If he died, and this were a completely real universe, my guess is there would be a jury trial, most likely verdict manslaughter. But it would depend on a lot of factors, the most important being the attitude of the police and DA.
As far as right and wrong go (leaving out the legal system) I don’t have a problem with killing rabid dogs. It’s clear from his behavior that Ryan has done this many times. He doesn’t need to be alive anymore.
Hey, as long as you’re willing to serve your sentence, more power to you.
I don’t know if I would stop, I’ve never been in that situation. Because I might commit a crime means I should condone its commission? I hope that I would not let my rage lead me to such egregious action; and I further hope that if it did I would cowboy up and accept the consequences.
I sympathize much more with Sara than with Ryan, but that doesn’t mean Sara is in the right.
Who says she’s gonna kick him in the face? Maybe she’s just gonna stomp him in the balls.
…YES.
Ryan’s positioning in the second panel indicates he got hit from below. If he was completely prone, that wouldn’t have been possible. It’s quite possible he was starting to try and get up, or was on his hands and knees, in which case he wasn’t down for the count yet.
Also, methinks he’s just had some of his ribs smashed from that one.
Sarah: I’m getting Old Testament on your ass!
(Halleulah!)
Okay, I so didn’t wait for her to be the savior.
And can I say, I love Sarah so much now (i just liked her before).
Epic scenes!
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Sarah won’t be getting into too much legal trouble. What’s Ryan going to do? Go to the cops and say “I had just drugged this chick and was so ready to violently rape her when some b**** with a baseball bat kicked my ass!”
I don’t think he’s going to die because…let’s face it, this is a comic. Vigilante justice usually results in a few broken bones, no matter how extreme it was.
Willis kills minor characters. How many unnamed SEME squads, or nameless Aliens from the planet Alien, died in Its Walky? Main characters always were revived when this happened, but hopefully Ryan isn’t meant to be a main character.
To be fair, Willis kills minor characters in a story about ALIENS in a story that was very much about life and death as it was about Nachitos and pooping. He’s not killed off anyone in Shortpacked (Though Ronnie did disappear), and I doubt he’ll kill Ryan off here.
Would Ronnie have counted anyway?
I prefer the New Testament god more, but there are times when I think it’s appropriate to get Old Testament on someone’s ass, and Sarah picked a good time.
MIKE X SARAH OTP!
Somewhere, Mike’s boner has ripped through his pants for no apparent reason.
And suddenly Sarah is made of total win.
So… What *is* Amazi-Girl doing around the party, then?
OH WAIT I GET IT SARAH IS AMAZI-GIRL GUYZ I FIGURED IT OUT!
No she’s Bat-girl *da-dum-tish*
While I’m totally okay with Sarah beating the every lovin’ shit out of this monster, she should probably stop before she kills him. And unfortunately, there’s a high likelihood that she’s going to be facing assault charges, because I think I can easily see this guy trying to place the blame on Joyce and Sarah. After all, he has visible injuries, and they don’t. The drugs will be used against him, but no doubt his lawyer will try to find a way to get that over looked. The fact that Sarah may have brought that baseball bat to the party, can also be argued as a premeditated attack…
…I watch a lot of Law and Order…
Not necessarily. Are you telling me that you’ve never gone to a party after midnight batting practice and didn’t have time to drop off your equipment at home?
I have that problem everywhere I go. My baseball bat just never leaves my van.
Your van? o.o
Is there candy in your van too?
Candy AND Elmo.
Chances are, Ryan is too knocked out from bat trauma that he doesn’t even know who the hell Sarah is. At the end of the night, he’ll wake up and all he’ll remember is “Ok, I was about to rape that Christian tease when everything went black.” So he’d only be able to press charges on Joyce, which given she was drugged and said drugs were affecting her at that point there’s no way she could have done. After that, it comes down to basically everything BEFORE the bat whacking.
Yeah, but unfortunately their is a party full of people, who just saw Sarah beating the hell out of Ryan, and they can testify against her. They saw her hitting him, but I don’t think they saw him trying to drag Joyce into the bathroom. 🙁
I’m glad you added that last line. I was about to say, “This is a webcomic, not ‘Law and Order.'” XD
You know, while I’m really delighted that Sarah showed up and Ryan is getting his just desserts (honestly the world would be better if he were out of it completely), I’m a little disappointed that Sarah’s prediction that Joyce couldn’t survive a party without Sarah’s help turned out to be true. That’s a sad commentary on college life, or at least life at their college.
Agreed. I just had an experience where I tried to help out a guy who’s car was broke down and turned out he was wanted for a crime. I felt pretty stupid and now wonder if I should ever try to help anyone out ever again.
I know what you mean, I tried to help someone out once because he had some car trouble and got pulled over later because the guy was in trouble with the law. Not only did I feel stupid, I don’t think I can help anyone out ever again.
Oops sorry for the double post I didn’t see it earlier when I was on, and I wonder why my picture’s different?
one of my teachers told me that some judge once said that its better for 9 guilty men to go free than one innocent man to hang.
just because you helped someone wanted for a crime before shouldn’t keep you from helping people again, just carry pepper spray or something to protect your self next time.
that’s just my opinion and its not like i know the whole story, so don’t get to stressed out if you don’t like it.
Yeah, I will do my best to be a good Samaritan, I just need to use better judgement.
I am now shipping Mike and Sarah, their misanthropy would be a delightful thing for them to build a relationship on.
It’s the scowley mike gravatar that really sells it.
Right or wrong, in trouble or not, her foot hasn’t come down yet, and there’s plenty of time between panel 4 today and panel 1 tomorrow for somebody with a cooler head to intervene.
Am I the only one that read Sarah sounding like Samuel L Jackson for this comic?
You were until now. Suddenly her lines are thirty times more awesome!
Oh my cheese. I’m seeing it now too!
Nah, she’s clearly channeling Donny Most there.
I hear his lines, but they’re in Pam Grier’s voice.
Ryan, do you read the Bible? There’s a certain passage that I have memorized for this sort of situation. Ezekiel 25:17…
Old testament god: wrath and punishment. New testament god: nicer, more easy going. Explanation: between the old and new testaments, god got laid.
Wow she’s lucky. What are the odds of a bat lying around?
Old Testament God slipped New Testament God a roofie to avoid another morality discussion.
Sarah seems so aloof at times, but she knows whats going on and knew Joyce was in trouble from the get-go. Now I wonder, did she follow Joyce to the party or maybe receive a tip from someone that Ryan was going to be there?
Maybe she decided to go a short time after the girls left, and Amber tipped her off? Amber was there was a ? mark in her bubble a couple back, that must be it.
Sarah is, like, SUPER FUCKING AMAZING NOW! 😀
Amber doesn’t seem like she’d tip Sarah off. She’d have no reason to believe Sarah could do any more than she could, and at any rate Amazi-Girl has a habit of trying to rescue people herself. If she did know what was going on and feel like she couldn’t handle Ryan alone, she’d probably swoop up Mike or someone and bring him to the rescue. 😛
I was thinking the same thing. It’s just possible Sarah beat Amazi-Girl to the scene if she had to slip into her disguise. Maybe she’ll still show up to stop Sarah from killing Ryan?
maybe she will stealthily replace sarah’s bat with one of those squeaky fair-grounds bats..
or just carry her off like billie
Probably followed since she knew that neither Dorothy nor Billie would be reliable to get her through the night unscathed.
Or, maybe Joyce’s rant about Sarah being wrong for being solely about the study made her think “I can take one night off so I don’t go completely insane” She gets to the party, spots Joyce talking with Ryan, sees ryan go batcrap crazy at joyce, picks up one of the residents baseball bats and goes to help.
I like the way you think.
Is no one going to comment on the bruise on Joyce’s head in the next to last panel?
I’m worried about her!
I was taking that as a bit of blood splatter coming from Ryan.
I think you’re right. Willis said something a few strips back about editing blood on Joyce’s palm and on things she touches, after someone pointed out that smashing a glass on Ryan’s face would probably cut her hand pretty badly. In the second panel, her palm is on her forehead, where the pink spot is in the next panel.
Thought it was just some facial flushing.
If you look at her hair, you can see blood there as well. I was thinking maybe it was blood from Ryan, since she was still holding the main part of the glass in the last comic, panel 1. But what Henry said made sense, since the cup would of cut her up a bit too (her hand)
I’ve said it on Friday and I’ll say it again, “E-C-DUB! E-C-DUB! E-C-DUB!”
For those of you
who did not know, the E-C-DUB chant was used by ECW fans/Mutants back when the original ECW was still around and ECW was well known as the most extreme and hardcore wrestling promotion and I use it when someone got beaten up using foreign objects like bats or steel chairs.
Holy crap I was right! 😀 YAY Sara!
<3Sarah<3
nice avatar for that comment =]
Looks like my predictions were off. This time a week ago, I really suspected people would be shipping Joyce with Amazi-girl.
That’s it, I’m switching the Beast Wars theme on. STRUM YOU GUITARS OF BADASSNESS!
I now officially harbor Perverse Sexual Lust for Sarah. My kinda gal. I love the whole warrior-goddess type.
We’ve seen Amazi-girl a short while ago, and now Sarah comes up. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Ever seen both of them together in this continuum?
AmaziGirl is Danny. And yes, AmaziGirl did save Danny, but one of them was Batman filling in on the sly to protect his identity. Fools Lois every time.
That last panel pleases the Christian in me.
And the second-to-last panel bugs the Atheist -and human- in me.
Translation: “When you do something good for me, I give the credit to God. Because obviously you wouldn’t bother helping your fellow man if you weren’t pushed into doing it by my diety. Because you’re clearly a horrible, horrible person.”
o.O
Orrrrr… you know, from Joyce’s perspective, the timing was pretty damn perfect. You know, almost miraculously perfect. Taking “God sent you to save me” as an insult is a little ridiculous, at least when it’s Joyce who’s talking.
Honestly, Joyce would probably consider that a compliment. God’s best choice to save the day was Sarah.
Similarly, “You’re a credit to your race” is honestly meant as a complement, from the perspective of those saying it. Others, however, might interpret it differently.
Wait, what.
Seriously, you just connected that?
What?
I feel like I’m channelling the Tenth Doctor now, WHAT?
You’re taking this to mean something entirely different than not only what the SPEAKER meant, but what general connotations would take it to mean. “God sent you to save me” doesn’t even SOUND like “I think you’re a horrible person who would never do this on your own.”
You took a happy, JOYFUL statement on Joyce’s part, and made it something negative… because she said “God”?
WHAT?!
This is not complicated.
1) Got gets credit for something someone does.
2) For this not to be completely nonsensical, this means that God had to have a hand in inciting the person to action.
3) In fact, for this not to be completely nonsensical, the speaker has to believe that the person would not have taken the action if not for God’s prodding.
4) Thus, every time the speaker thanks God for somebody else’s good actions, they must believe that left to themselves, those people would not have been good. Unless they haven’t given any thought to what they’re saying and they’re just spouting nonsense.
5) Here’s where one presumes a trend – if they only shifts credit to god once, then that’s only a minor bit of rudeness. If they make a habit of crediting God for the benevolence of others, this necessitates a belief that other people are naturally bastards – who constantly have God intervening in their actions to bring them up to a base level of decency. That, or the person keeps babbling these things without giving a single thought to the nonsense they’re actually saying.
6) Another trend we’re presuming – if the person blames god for bad acts in equal proportion to good acts, that also changes the equation – rather than presuming people are bastards, they are presuming them to be puppets – playthings of a less-than-perfectly-benevolent God. (This is actually the relationship Willis, or any author of fiction, has with their characters.) Of course I’ve never met a person who consistently gives God credit for evil things, but I like to keep my cases covered.
7) It’s worth noting – there sects of Christianity who actively admit to believing that humans are bastards by natural. Original sin, “the natural man is an enemy to God”, that kind of business. So it’s not like all of Christendom is unaware of the implications of what they say.
8) On the other hand, lots of Christians spout this stuff without giving what they’re saying a second -or first- thought. Joyce is almost certainly an example of this type. Possibly so are you. Lots of people are. However, that doesn’t change the fact that their beliefs have implications – whether the believers intend them to or not.
Simple.
Or:
1) God is cited in being involved in LEADING someone somewhere.
2) Leading is about giving directions, not mind-controlling someone, just like everything that anyone did in the Bible ever.
3) For this to be necessary, the speaker would need to believe that the person wouldn’t have KNOWN to show up on their own (oh hey that makes perfect sense cause she wouldn’t)
4) Which means, logically, that God said “If I put signposts here, this person will probably follow them, cause that’s the kind of person she is.” Oh yeah. That’s so much of an insult, and takes away from SO MUCH of her worth as a human being.
5) Really, you’re doing a lot of trend-presuming and trend-creating, but whatever. When you call someone else’s beliefs nonsense? You are being an egotistical, self-righteous jackass. You may very well believe that you’re right. Hey, you may even be right. But when you put yourself up on a pedestal where only YOU can see these implications, and only YOU can read people’s minds and tell what they really meant from a 5-word sentence, then YOU are being an asshole. No one else.
6) Except this whole mind-control thing is entirely in your head. So none of that makes any sense.
7) Most, if not all of Christianity is BASED upon the concept of original sin, and that humanity is sinful by nature. But then, if your whole mind control thing is a load of crap, then there’s no point in talking about it.
Of course, there won’t be any changing your mind, but it’s not like this is the first out-of-left-field thing that you’ve posted on here, with your constant rambling about Joyce not acting in self-defense. So I guess that’s just how you are.
Let’s take a step back for a second: What’s more likely, that you know so much more than anyone, especially anyone who believes in this nonsense, or – what if, like before, you read something into this that wasn’t really there?
It seems like whenever Joyce is involved, you invent or imagine some sort of hidden meaning behind everything. Whether you just despise all Christians, or whatever your reasoning is, this isn’t about all those millions of people being so insulting (which they aren’t) it’s about you thinking you’re above them.
Isn’t she allowed to believe she wants, as she’s not pushing it on anyone? She’s drugged and scared. I think freedom of belief should apply, lol.
She is free to believe what she wants. Similarly, I am free to be bugged by the direct and essentially unavoidable implications of transferring credit for a person’s good deeds to some theorized being. My beliefs are doing no more harm than hers are.
(Do you know how many times I’ve heard “Please bless this food to make it healthy and beneficial for our bodies”? ‘Hey cook, before eating your food I feel the need to ask for divine intervention to make it safe to eat!’ And that’s putting aside the fact that they just gave God the credit for putting it on the table – presumably aside from the poisonous aspects of it. Gaah!)
It drives me nuts when my brother prays “Please bless this food to our bodies,” but for different reasons. When does anyone ever ask God, or anyone else for that matter, to bless anything else to anything else? It’s a syntactic anomaly, and it’s pointless at best and meaningless at worst.
I will be the first to admit that I am irritated by trivial things.
“Unavoidable implications”? Gonna say it again, you are adding in these “implications” where it makes no sense. At all. I’m seriously reeling from how little sense you’re making.
A) “God sent you to save me” more understandably is saying that the person being saved thinks it is at least somewhat miraculous. It doesn’t sound at ALL like anyone’s being “pushed into it;” in fact, it sounds like the direct opposite. Something terrible was gonna happen, and Joyce would have been screwed if Sarah wasn’t there.
In fact, I was remembering that panel wrong, she doesn’t say that God sent Sarah to SAVE her, just that God sent Sarah AFTER her. Which means only that God put her in the right place at the right time, and any good she did was just because of who she was.
You know, the whole opposite of your whole “implication” that you were getting so butthurt about.
B) I don’t know where you hear people say that whole speech about how the food’s getting blessed, but how I’ve heard it said in pretty much every place I’ve been is “Bless this food to our bodies, and bless the hands that prepared it.”
And before you go “oh well that just means that the hands couldn’t have done it on their own because of these bizarre connections I came up with on my own” NO IT DOES NOT
Bless can mean “to request of God the bestowal of divine favor upon,” i.e. “Make this person’s life awesome because they made this kickass food for me.” Or it could mean “to make or pronounce holy,” like saying “this food and the person who made it are so awesome, they should be called holy.” Or “put this food to use in a holy manner in our lives as it provides us energy.”
Seriously. You’re coming up with these batshit crazy ideas of how positive things being said are really insults. It’s ridiculous.
Batshit crazy, until you actually listen to the words being said, friend. These positive things? They compliment God – and the human puppet’s suitability to being a tool of that God.
Looking at the comic – Joyce apparently doesn’t think Sarah would have come after her without divine intervention. Thus she robs Sarah of the credit for having, by herself, decided that going and trying to protect Joyce was something she wanted to do. She is presuming that Sarah, left to her own devices, would have blown her off.
If you want to think that, after mind-controlling Sarah into coming to the party and finding a baseball bat, that God then released Sarah from her tether to act on her own…yeah. In my experience those who thank God for other people’s actions don’t do it by halves. That’s just not how it’s usually done.
But whichevers. Joyce, like many Christians, probably hasn’t really thought out the implications of her belief that God is the source of good actions and events in the world. I hardly think she’s consciuosly meaning “nice that you’re here – no thanks to you.” But, like “you’re a credit to your race”, her statements reveal an unconscious bias in how she views the world and the people around her.
beg, if you really think about it, you’re just offended by religion though. Because this sort of conflict is gonna come up a lot. People who are considered to be “inspired by God” in your view are not getting enough credit for their actions. With this in mind, realize you didn’t believe in the first place, so you can’t convince religious people this is wrong to say. Because if you did believe, you probably wouldn’t mind.
Please note that I don’t believe and I actually had the same thought process “Hey, she’s not giving Sarah full credit.” But then I thought about it, and from Joyce’s perspective, she’s basically saying Sarah is an Agent of God’s Will, which is EXTREMELY high praise. She’s getting compared favorably with people like Moses and Paul by her saying that. Take the compliment as meant, get over the fact you have different views on religion.
(Assuming anyone’s still reading) Don’t get the chickens and eggs mixed up here – I’m offended by the religion because the religion in question is inherently offensive. There are other religions and religious beliefs that are not offensive -silly, but not offensive.
And people thank god too often and too casually and for far too simple of things for it to be credible as high praise as a “agent of God’s will”. Otherwise every time god is thanked for a meal, the chef is Moses.
Joyce is doubtlessly very thankful. To whom and in what proportion – meh, who can say?
“I’m offended by the religion because the religion in question is inherently offensive.”
Ohhhh you’re a troll. That explains everything. No one could say that and actually think they still had the moral high ground.
Specifically, the religious principle of habitually propping up a deity (or anyone else) by robbing other people of the credit for their creditable actions. That philosophy and behavior is objectively and inherently offensive.
Propping up the deity by giving them credit for natural good fortune and luck, on the other hand, is not offensive. It’s rather obviously incorrect, statistically speaking, but it’s morally neutral. Unlike the stuff that offends me.
Admittedly, as a religion based around a human sacrifice (or something parallel to it) with a dash of ceremonial cannibalism to it for spice, Christianity as a whole has some serious moral issues in it. (Which it makes worse by loudly claiming moral superiority.) But regardless of that I wasn’t talking about Christainity as a whole – just this specific issue. As should be AMPLY clear by now, given how much and how specifically I’ve written here.
Now you – you’re not a troll. You honestly think you have the high ground. Just like mr. theoretical “credit to your race” guy. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that your limited perspectives don’t skew your ability to assess things from an external perspective.
Considering you were responding to the previous statement, which was (obviously rightly) accusing you with having a problem with religion in general… No, it wasn’t clear that you weren’t speaking of Christianity as a whole. Honestly, I’m not sure you aren’t just backing out of that gigantically massive dick move. You didn’t say that “religious principle” was offensive, you said the RELIGION was offensive.
And, as stated before, the whole idea you have about taking credit away is not necessarily what the statement means. In fact, it’s most likely NOT what it means. It’s only “inherently offensive” to you because you made that connection yourself, based on your own beliefs.
That’s the thing – while my whole purpose here is to defend a group of people, yours is to yell that all of them are really so ignorant that they have no idea just what they mean when they say something. You’re the only one in the world who knows the real meaning, and their intention means nothing in regard to that.
Honestly, the only one who’s perspective is “limited” here is you. Your “external” perspective you think you have is just your feelings about religion compounded onto anything any religious person says or does. You take things to the outermost extreme (like with your ridiculous “credit to your race” example) because you want to see the worst of what religion means.
Ok, I wanna put my two cents in here, but first I gotta reset this margin before we get one long line of letters going down.
Begbert2, I think you are perfectly justified in thinking that it’s wrong to give credit to God when it is the choice of the person to do good. I myself believe that God does play a role, but a small one, and He does not take credit for your good actions. More on that later. But yes, to attribute all credit to God and none to the person would be horrible, and would imply that the viewer thinks of the person as basically evil, with God as puppeteer.
However, I don’t think that Joyce is in any way trying to take credit away from Sarah by her comment, or claiming that God forced her to do something she wouldn’t have otherwise done. Joyce is just rationalizing the situation in her Christian mind. You are probably right when you say that Joyce probably never thought the concept through before, but that does not mean that she believes what you’re saying she does, consciously or unconsciously.
There actually is a strong line of belief in Christianity that takes into account and solves this discrepancy, one that I believe in as well. This belief is that God doesn’t actively do anything, but lives IN the goodness of mankind. God is the innate desire of a person to do good towards his fellow man, regardless of consequences. God is our compassion, He is our love. We can choose to act on it, or we can ignore it, the decision is ours. But that feeling of satisfaction from doing something altruistic? It’s not that that was put there artificially by God, that IS God which lives in all of us. [/sermon] In this light, God does not take credit away from people, he just shows them the higher path and lets them choose. Do I think that Joyce prescribes to this specific line of belief? Maybe, maybe not. But even if she doesn’t, this is most likely what reflects her subconscious, since most people who give any credit to God (some exceptions of course) do not in any way believe that the good-doing person is still an evil human being. They still thank the person, even as they also thank God.
Now do you have a right to be offended by what Joyce says? Of course you do! No one can command what you can or cannot think. You have a right to be as insightful as Buddha (or insert your own most insightful person here) or as obtuse as the most blockheaded troll on the internet. But should you be offended? No. Simply put, she doesn’t mean or imply anything by it, consciously or unconsciously.
Also, “Okay, jerk, stay down and I won’t hit you again. – WHAM- Whoops, I lied.”
Gonna try that next time i need to bat someone on the FAAAAAAAAAAAACE.
Yup, the old testament stomp a mudhole in your ass and walk in dry. Like the preacher’s son said, “You reap what you sow.” Well, he sowed an attempted rape, and now he’s reaping an ass whuppin’.
And that’s the bottom line cause Stone Cold said so.
Old testament god, also known as yawe or allah
Actually the correct way of priting the Hebrew name of God in the English language is YHWH, usually pronouced as Yahweh(Ya-way).
The tetragrammaton (YHWH) does not provide clear pronunciation, since (like most Semitic languages) Hebrew does not have written vowels. The difficulty is aggravated by the cultural taboo on using God’s name which may have resulted in the losing of the correct pronunciation. The term Jehova was created by interspersing the vowels from the word Adonai (gods) with the tetragrammaton.
Your smar assery is not enough, acording to scholars the pronuntiation is /IEBE/ where I is the vowel i not the variant j.
Hooray! A beating. Best Christmas ever.
My first reaction to this: Awesome.
My second reaction to this: Uh, she’s totally going to put that guy in a coma, and while he’s a jerk, that is not awesome.
im all for making his face look like ground hamburger, but continuing once hes incapacitated is still unfortunately “excessive force”
someone get phoenix wright on the phone
I’ve got a bad feeling this incident could wind up consuming the entire series for an awfully long time. Even if that’s wrong, that might not be any better, possibly trivializing the incident in some eyes.
did joyce cut her hand from the glass? is that what the red thing on her head is? :O
Yes. Willis specifically said he edited blood into later strips on Joyce’s hand and on things she touches, after it was pointed out that smashing a glass on someone’s face will often leave your hand fairly cut-up.
ah, did not see that, thanks 🙂
Okay, Sarah needs to back off; the first blow could be argued as being warranted, but now this is starting to blur into assault.
It’s time to consult the old timeworn adage, What Would Batman Do? Batman wouldn’t wait for him to get up after the first Batarang knocked him down. Batman wouldn’t stop laying the beatdown until Ryan feared the bat. He’d probably end this by leaving Ryan hanging by his collar to the front of a moving train, with a note saying “Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Batman”. Maybe hit him with some confiscated scarecrow gas while he’s at it spiked with some uppers to prevent loss of consciousness and surgically install a pacemaker in case all this gives him a heart attack.
Therefore Sarah’s still in the clear for a while, but should also be wearing a mask or something. Masks are like legal enhancers.
Well… depends on the incarnation of Batman. But yeah, anything less than fatal injury would probably be his style.
Still, I doubt he would beat an unconscious man. That’s generally where he stops, at least from what I’ve seen. So the question is, is Ryan still awake or not?
If Ryan’s not still awake then all Sarah’s one-liners and two-liners are just for the crowd. That would certainly be an aspect of her we haven’t seen before.
Nah, it’s for Sarah’s benefit. I know for sure I’d be talking smack just being caught up in the moment.
Awww, Sarah!! <3
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Sarah.
I’ve been wrong before, and I’m man enough to admit that. Though I guess Sarah was the most likely to save her. I guess I just wanted a reason to actually like Joe. >_>
i wanted him to redeem himself to joyce after that date failure
ps, im not nrrd enough to know the difference between a mog and a moogle, but i like that demented-looking mo(o)g(le) avatar youve got there
I think Mogs and Moogles are the same thing. More specifically, Mog is a coomon name for a Moogle.
*common.
It’s Trollmog actually. XD
And yes, Mog is generally just a common Moogle name.
The LORD will take revenge and punish them; the time will come when they will fall; the day of their doom is near. Deuteronomy 32:35 (Good News Bible)
WHAM! The official soud effect of smiting!
Torn up face, broken jaw, possible broken ribs… and I think she’s going for the crotch.
It’s just not this guy’s night, is it
HA!!!!!
I do have to say that in the last panel, where Sarah is saying that the “Old Testament God” sent her, I really do enjoy this. How God is mentioned in the New Testament, God is trying to bring peace without much pain and suffering, and it takes a while for things to get across. In the Old Testament, you piss God off and God comes at you full force to teach not only you, but everyone, a lesson. It was nicely separated from the Old and the New 🙂
No, I am not trying to start an argument or a major discussion, just saying 🙂
This will really make Sarah’s popularity with the alcoholic druggie crowd skyrocket. =P
Not that she should care what they think. Just sayin’ 😉
Hey, she’s like Hawk (Avery Brooks) in “Spenser: For Hire”. At the end of the day she pops up right in the nick of time to beat up the bad guy and save the hero/heroine.
This pleases me.
Love the last line.
She’s about to go all biblical on his ass.
I am… mildly creeped out by the amount of people who think that after a person 1) drugs someone 2) Demands sex from the person they drugged, that there is no immediate threat involved in those actions. That it’s not a threat until after said person grabs the drugged victim.
Maybe lots of the readers here are just dudes, and have never been in a terrifying situation with a guy who is sexually interested in them and unwilling to take no for an answer? The threat is there before it gets physical, and if you wait for it to get physical (why? In the interests of fairness towards rapists?), then it’s probably too late for you to do anything if you’re not in the line of sight of a trusted friend.
But regardless of any other hypothetical scenario, in THIS scenario, person A drugged person B. That, by itself, is an attack and calls for swift and immediate action, up to and including physical violence.
Completely agreed. I think that most of the people on here feel the same way as you do, it’s just a few who want to argue that Ryan didn’t threaten anyone. For whatever reason, I dunno. That’s their own personal thing, I’m not sure how they arrived at those conclusions.
Regardless, when anyone says it, I’m fairly certain responses popped up almost instantaneously saying that no, Ryan did clearly threaten Joyce. Most of the commenters here are bright people.
I am HIGHLY creeped out by the fact that you equate brutality with appropriate response. When you’ve knocked an assailant down and you keep attacking, YOU are now the attacker, and you need to be held accountable for that.
1. There is no evidence that Joyce was drugged until after she had already glassed him in the face (the legal defense here is two-fold: one she had been assaulted chemically, two said chemical assaulted could have affected her ability to act rationally).
2. Joyce was in a situation where a reasonable person would have had options other than glassing her assailant. His language had escalated to a level where it could be considered violent and a physical response (a slap, a groin kick or kneeing) would have been a reasonable response. While such a response would have been legally appropriate she also had non-violent options including walking away and calling for help given that she and Ryan were not physically isolated.
3. Ryan used abusive language prior to her responding with lethal force. If he had either included an or else in his speech (that is said “or else,” included a physical threat in the speech, or had made any {and that includes even extremely innocuous} physical contact with her) a lethal force response would have been justifiable. Without that we are left with only the abusive language and the alleged chemical assault as provocation.
4. Sara comes to bat justifiably (with some questions about the source of her weapon; if she brought it with her we enter some very iffy legal territory) striking Ryan when he indeed had laid hands on Joyce (given that she had just glassed him he was actually legally justified, but Sara first could not be expected to realize that and secondly could argue she was intervening to stop a physical confrontation that was a threat to both participants) making the use of a lethal weapon a reasonable response. Everything after that irst blow is aggravated assault and battery possibly including attempted murder (unless he is dead in which case it is simply murder, in which case hope she found the bat in order to avoid a premeditation aggravated circumstance situation, which I believe could lead to the death penalty in Indiana).
So while I empathize with Joyce and Sara and despise Ryan, from a legal viewpoint this is a very sticky situation.
390 comments! And this comic doesn’t even involve gay robots or marriage proposals!
If that impresses you, you should’ve seen friday’s.
Ohhh sarah my love…marry me!
Cause you’re such a f’in lady!
Love how the last panel has a transparent background. I’m tempted to add Sarah to other comics, stomping on the characters.
garfield without garfield was done, so why not a see sarah stomp site? might be pretty funny to see her stomp… tycho, gabe, the fat guy from pvp, richard, etc…
She’s the chick who’s going to BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN… WITH LEMONS!
Wait a tic, Willis! I thought that you said that you didn’t like incorporating punchlines into the title of your strip! What is this political flip-floppery!
Sarah = DoA Samuel Jackson in coolness now.
Her action figuree will read, “Bat and the can of whoop ass included.”
Nice curb stomp Sarah
Somehow I missed this a month ago. HOW DID I MISS THIS A MONTH AGO!?
yup, nothing better than the ol’ testament style.
When I was a returning student I saw a nasty frat guy try to prey on a girl and hit him with a chair.
In Roomies!, Danny was a moral compass, and Sarah was a kind of jerk.
Now, Danny is compeletely evil, and Sarah is saving the day.
‘Tis truly another universe, indeed.
I’m just now starting on this comic and I have to say, I hate when any guy uses what he knows of any religion to justify his lustful actions. I cheered in my head when I read this.
Oh, sweet Etro, she’s being the Old Testament God? Wow…we are screwed.
I wish we could hear what Ryan McRapey is thinking.
“Man, I’m finally going to get me some rape on and- ooh, I immediately regret this.”
Okay, I detest rapists. And it is a comic. Part of me really wants to jump on the “go girl beat the villain!” bandwagon. There’s something deeply primal and satisfying seeing someone like this get beat down in a way we wish we could in society.
Seriously though? That’s a baseball bat. That’s assault with a deadly weapon. From behind. And I’m not just talking about the law and legal blah blah, there is a very real chance this man will die from blunt trauma to the head and body. And I haven’t read any of the strips past this yet, but I bet there’s absolutely no way Sarah’s going to trial over this one. Which would bother me less if the tandem story-line on double standards and women’s liberation vs. propriety, etc. wasn’t so serious and meant to be grounded in reality.
Yes, rapists should get punished, and even if he wasn’t “successful” he shouldn’t get a pass. Joyce defended herself, aggressively but okay. Sarah has probably killed someone this evening by slamming a bat into his head from behind.
If Sarah had killed him, I’d have no problem with that. It troubles me that you do.
And it troubles me that you don’t. But it’s your work, man.
I know I’m not gonna find any friends with my comment. And again, he’s a sleazebag (and the later strip suggests it’s habitual), but just because rape is more detestable than murder doesn’t mean murder, even murder of a isn’t, ya know, pretty bad. Morality isn’t graded on the curve.
*”murder of a rapist.” I clicked too soon. And I’ll admit, “murder of a rapist” as a sentence alone almost sounds like a totally fine idea.
;__; aw I’m about to get all emotional over here
I already loved Sarah. Now I love her even more.
That’s why I rarely pay attention to the Old Testament
this is still my favorite doa strip of all time
It was mine for a while, then Dina attacked Becky’s Dad.
Thee goddess is there to dish out the punishment.
Occasionally I don’t so much mind a little divine smiting for the people who have it coming. Gray Guard this bit Sarah.
Ok I like sarah a lot now, especially the last panel lol.
“When he saw Jesus, he cried out, fell down before him, and shouted with a loud voice, “Leave me alone, Jesus, Son of the Most High God! I beg you, do not torment me!””
Luke 8:28
This comic is why Sarah is my favorite.
“yeah the old testament god”
hahaha that wrathful warmonger fits pretty well
got a big chuckle out of that, isnt religion fun guys? can make so many references
like that rapist dude is like oedipus, a motherfucker