I’m pretty sure that this comic serves the purpose of showing Walky realizing that Sal was right earlier. You know, when Sal was saying that their parents preferred him better because he’s whiter.
I am seriously waiting for that to come back and bite him in the ass. I have known so many kids in college that have gone through high school getting grades easily only to be stunned to find college is hard.
I know he’s not gonna flunk out because that would end all the plots he’s involved in but there’s gotta be a point where Walky’s gotta break down and study. Or mentally break down when his parents see his GPA.
The problem is that school went from being a place of education to being daycare/prison for parental neglected children, probably around the 1980’s when teachers were no longer allowed to treat children like their own (for good or bad.)
Look at all the stories about kids cyberbullying or driving other kids to suicide today. Would this be happening if kids had some parental oversight? There are “adult children” out there who have no desire to take on any responsibility for their own actions.
College or University isn’t free in most of the world, and even idiots realize that spending money on education that doesn’t benefit them is a waste of money. Unfortunately it’s not in the college’s best financial interests to tell students to drop out because there is no job market for the classes they are teaching.
Our school system was always a rigid thing poorly suited to teaching kids how to think and mostly about making them memorize things we wanted them to know. The world changed and that system was left behind.
It isn’t that teachers can’t beat kids. Even the system we had would work better, except that we don’t fund it. We don’t hire enough teachers, and don’t pay the ones we have anything like enough, and the system for funding schools leaves the schools most in need of more and better teachers with the least funding to hire them.
We used to fund education more. Going to state college used to be heavily state subsidied. Students could work for a summer and actually pay for the entire coming year of school. Not now – minimum wage has fallen considerably next to inflation, and our state and federal governmets have largely abandoned direct aid in favor of loans so that big bankers can have a chance to make a buck on the backs of struggling children.
That reduction in funding and reduced value placed on universal public education followed pretty quick on the courts deciding universal meant black kids, too. Funny, that.
“Teachers can’t beat kids anymore” is a cheap and petty and frankly wrong answer to a problem that’s a lot bigger and uglier than that.
Sorry but did I miss something…? When did she say anything about allowing school beatings? I read “teachers were no longer allowed to treat children like their own.” To me that didn’t mean beatings – it meant teachers that could use their own insight and knowledge to decide how they were going to teach their students. Now with more unified curriculum, teachers don’t really have personal input in their own classes anymore. They don’t organize curriculum, choose or provide the worksheets, decide what projects or selected readings their classes will be doing. Instead, it’s all pre-organized and handed to them, rendering many of them as nothing more than glorified babysitters. In my opinion at least, this tactic is harmful as it not only lowers the teacher’s personal inspiration and motivation to… well, teach, but kids don’t get a personal experience. I noticed going to school in the 1990s that the teachers who had more original classes and ideas to teach and who helped students on a more individual level were of the older generation, who learned their trade when that was more of a thing. It’s sad to see the relationship between teachers and students getting neutered from the education system for the sake of efficiency, all while grades are going down.
That was longer than I originally intended. Ah, whoops! XD
Don’t forget that nowadays there’s more colleges that only care to make money than actually educate. The actual, legitimate colleges you always know about or can find good information on easily, while the others you only really hear about if you live nearby or from advertisements on TV. A good college never needs an advertisement, it has a reputation, it has good teachers, good classes, etc.
I tried taking some classes at a community college some years back, they forced me to take basic level computer classes (the ones where you learn how to use freaking MS Word and Excel) despite having taken an Oracle programming class in High School. They also refused to let me talk to the counselors, only new students could, everyone else that wanted help with their schedules had to sit in a room with other students trying to figure it out themselves and hope someone was helpful. The final straw that broke the camel’s back was that 9 out of 10 of the teachers I had were very obviously not teachers. Professionals in their field, maybe, but not teachers. One was even questionable for that though in the fact that when someone asked him something, he just got confused and tried to refer to the book. I realize that it being a community college doesn’t mean I’ll get the best teachers, but I didn’t expect half of them to be the stereotypical computer phone support guy, thick Indian accent included.
(No offense to anyone Indian who are good teachers or support, of course. From me anyway, can’t say if the school was being racist with hiring cheaply though.)
I always figured that the school system existed to crush the souls of children, gradually preparing them for the tedious and ultimately futile struggle of adult life.
So, I thought it was doing pretty well.
Makes sense. Can also depend on what your goals are. If you just want to pass, get a diploma, that’s a very different game from say anything that would require you worry about your grade-point average.
Dorothy for example wants to transfer into another school, so even an “easy” course has to be taken seriously because any minor screw-up can have major repercussions. Takes ten minutes to learn to bake a cake, takes a lot longer to learn to consistently bake a flawless cake.
I would wager if he bombs or near-bombs out of his classes (or even just one), the admonishment he’d get from mom and dad would be a huge shock to his system if they did react that way. Suddenly life wouldn’t be easy-street and he’d have to spend a semester proving himself worthy of staying in college, all the while they berate, nag, and harp on him to make sure he’s actually doing his work.
Would be an even bigger shock if Sal ended up doing BETTER than him overall because she, through her own methods, went and got help to learn the material. So far we only know that she has a math class that she’s struggling in, but she could have other subjects too. If she’s not having any big problem with those though, it could very well happen that she ends up getting As or Bs in all of those and either eeking out a C in her math or (since it is still pretty early on and she has lots of time to catch up and improve) getting a B or an A in it.
Suddenly then… mom and dad would be extremely disappointed in their golden boy and scrambling to dote on and encourage their underdog child to make up for all those years of subtly or not-so-subtly putting her second or flat out ignoring she’s even there. The “good kid” fucks up? Tear him down… The “bad kid” succeeds? QUICKLY! Spoil and gush all over her accomplishments! You knew she had it in her all along and all that tough love finally fixed her! Now they can pretend they totally don’t suck as people and parents!
Not saying that will happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised… and I kind of hope it does. I hope the Walkerton parents do pull that crap and end up getting bongoed out and flat out rejected by BOTH of their kids so they have to perform some introspection and realize how shitty they were to Sal intentionally, while their attempts to coddle Walky set him up for failure when the system wasn’t catering to his habit of coasting along and putting forth no effort to win anything.
If Walky did get lower grades than Sal: Depending on the mindset of the parents, their opinion of Sal may not change one bit unless she does something to shock them out of their underachiever / mediocre view of her (3 As and 1 B may not quite be the “slap in the face” they need).
Judging from previous strips, I wouldn’t be surprised if the parents only focus on Walky and tell him he should be getting better grades than Sal, and never even consider commending Sal for her good grades (of AABB or whatever).
It could go either way… I also wouldn’t be surprised if that happened either where she DOES do better than him but then he just starts getting harped on for slacking off that “even SHE is ahead of you now! How far you have fallen! SHAME SHAME AND MISERY SHAAAAAME”. Kind of hoping that happens to so that they can get pointed out for how shitty of people they are for passive aggressively pitting sibling against sibling.
I don’t have a twin, but a similar thing did happen to me with one of my siblings… He was having trouble in school, I wasn’t, and right before I left for school I overhead my dad seething at my brother “You see HER? SHE works hard and gets good grades! YOU have no excuse!”, meanwhile my brother was already destroyed and just trying to keep from breaking completely. I marched back in and yelled at my father that I was not ok with being put on a pedestal for the sole purpose of tearing my brother down. Probably one of the only times back then that I stood up to my father and succeeded in knocking him down a peg and maybe making him think of how horrible he was being to his own kids.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Walky’s parents didn’t care how he does in college one way or the other. I’ve met families where the son(s) is incapable of failure so long as he spawns a child that winds up with the family name. Can’t support the whelp, no problem, so long as the name lives on!!
I honestly wonder sometimes why people have such an issue with college. 99% of my classes I never studied for and still got A’s. And don’t tell me it was all just easy classes. I heard people making the ‘hard classes’ excuse for classes like anatomy and biological chemistry but I never had to study for them either.
The only two classes I had issues with was my language courses (because just because my brain instantly connects one word to another that doesn’t make proper understandable sentences – use an auto web translator for proof) and then later on Cognitive Science (aka Cognitive Psychology aka “what chemicals are in the brain, and what parts of the brain do what, and how strongly do the impulses register”) which only was an issue because for that class I had to know what the levels and thresholds were – and it is ridiculously hard to correctly match seemingly random sequences of numbers to events.
Ended up with B- in both of those classes which prevented me from having a 4.0 without studying ah well. Still was given the honors ceremony for being the next best thing and graduated among the top 7 GPA’s of my graduating class.
So everyone who is gleefully waiting for Walky to crash and burn may just end up disappointed.
“So everyone who is gleefully waiting for Walky to crash and burn may just end up disappointed.”
Sooner or later, Walky will have to learn that he cannot go through life with only the barest minimum of effort. School may be easy for now, but then there’s work. So, for his sake, we SHOULD hope he gets a few bad grades that push him into getting his shit together. We are not “gleeful” about it, though.
Depending on what ‘work’ he ends up doing he still may not need to really try. And since his ‘work’ is going to be “eternally stuck in a temperal vortex where he’s in college forever, most likely freshmen year at that” I wouldn’t hold my breath about life catching up to him.
It already is. Notice that his last assignment he got back wasn’t a perfect score? And that he just realized he could skip classes and likely will in the future?
It’s gradual, but we’ll see a report card coming out soon with Cs and maybe even a D. Probably not so quick he’d get an F, but you never know.
I dunno about this school but both my high school and college, if you were late more than 5 minutes, you were marked absent and if you missed a certain amount of days, it was taken out of your grade. You could get As across the board but you missed those days your grade went down a letter. You missed more days, you lost another letter.
I’m doubting this is the moment. If there was a moment, I’m pretty sure it’d have more impact than “Walky got chosen to dress up like a blue Pikachu”, which is pretty cool, but not that important.
seems pretty important to me. Walky seems to be realizing (or at least thinking) that his mom was playing favorites here. She wanted him to be in the role because, on an unconscious level, he was whiter.
He’s also a boy. Weren’t all the Churchmouses boys? Actually, did she even check what this audition was about before draggin’ her kids there? Their mom just seems like one of those Beauty pageant ladies that will shove her kids into anything.
That she didn’t pay attention to what the audition was for, she just brought both of her kids in the hopes of both or either of them getting some TV spotlight. Ya’ know, a neglectful parent trying to live out her failed youth through her kids.
I’m not sure this is even an audition specifically for that role. This isn’t about the show preferring one or the other as a churchmouse, or there would be no point to the scene, never mind what Willis has actually said about it.
Taken by itself this doesn’t show Sal is right about race anything, but what happens with Walky’s reaction to it means he was being favored. Remember Billie talked to him about that, and he hadn’t acknowledged that much.
(As to whether race was a reason, by the way, this one comic doesn’t say; but the only ones who were there were the Walkertons, and David didn’t even notice there was favoritism, so I don’t know how you would get a better explanation that Sal’s first-hand opinion. Not to mention that the author decides whether it was true and has said it is).
The dude with the clipboard says, “It’s just the one line”, and Walky had only the one line in the Hymmel video.
Although it strikes me as odd that they’d be auditioning someone for a speaking role so far into the series (this was episode eight, right?). I would expect a production company to hire and work with the same group of adults and kids over the life of the show, sort of like how the original Mouseketeers stayed with the same 12 or 14 kids, rather than go through the efforts to train a fresh group of Churchmice for every episode.
I seriously doubt the show was ever animated. The sort of exhibitionist fundamentalist preacher who would dress up like a giant book to preach at kids is the sort who would wanna be seen.
(Plus, the show this is a close parody of was live-action.)
If it’s anything like the low budget kids shows I saw as a kid, they’d cycle through different groups of children every episode or few episodes, because the appeal of being able to get your kid on a TV show would be targeted towards parents who would compromise anything just so their kid could get a slot on a TV show. You wouldn’t have to worry about paying them much, if at all, because the ‘privilege’ of getting in front of the camera would usually be enough.
Hell, even productions like Sesame Street, which wasn’t low budget… I don’t recall the kids who were on those episodes ever being consistent. The only constant ‘humans’ on the show were the adults, while the muppets were meant to be the main cast. The kids were just kind of there to relay the “Hey kids, this show is for YOU, because there’s kids like you here!” message to keep the audience engaged.
She didn’t exactly say they were different genders, and unless the dude looked at the kids (whom are running around somewhere off panel), that wouldn’t be immediately obvious. A lot of twins are the same sex, and since Grace said all the church mice before were boys, she could indeed have just not payed attention to what the audition was for.
THAT BEING SAID, there was also a panel before that showed a little girl sitting on a pew, so she may have just been SOL. WE MAY NEVER KNOW!
(we’ll probably know by the end of the year maybe hopefully probably not)
Is there anything that indicates that all the churchmice were boys? Because I don’t think there was, and this scene wouldn’t make sense if they were, so I’d assume girls can be churchmice.
Ha, you know it honestly didn’t occur to me until I was reading the comments now that Linda would be picking? I thought Walky was looking back and realizing that the casting director came up with a lame-dog excuse to avoid even humoring the little girl with the trouble-making expression and natural hair, getting even flimsier when, on this occasion at least, Linda made an attempt to have her kids given the same treatment, and I assumed a second later he just grabbed Walky to audition without Linda having a say.
I thought it was Walky starting to grasp that sometimes people treated Sal differently while still not being at the point where he can acknowledge that their parents did it too.
But, duh, of course Linda would get a say in which kid they took back. Even if the casting director did choose Walky for himself she would still be making a choice not to insist that if its “Just one line” it would hardly keep them much longer to hear both of her kids say it than just one, or to just leave if they wouldn’t let both of her kids at least have a shot.
It’s not that this one incident is horrible or anything, Linda had to pick a kid. The problem is when it’s an example of a pattern, as Walky seems to realize here. He’s thinking back to all the other times in his life when Linda ‘had to pick a kid’ and she chose him.
That’ll be cool, we get to see how those past instances where for some god forsaken reason Walky was the better choice. How much crack do ya’ think people were smokin’ in the 90’s?
It doesn’t show the reason why, but it does show that she was Right. That, from an early age, there was preferential treatment. I suspect that overtime we’ll see Walky come to terms that the reason why, is exactly what Sal said.
I’m, thinking that this comic serves the purpose of LEADING INTO the comics that will show Sal was right, either by Mrs. Walkerton making the decision herself for those reasons, or the board making the choice, and mom accepting it, possibly with it coloring her future audition attempts (well, David’s more likely to get the role).
This comic in itself sets up a situation where we can see it coming, but does not itself show that Sal was right.
I wouldn’t say that Walky is better than Sal, or even more level-headed for that matter. Both of them have their good points.
Still, if there is any merit to what Sal thinks about this race crap (and I am still not sure it is) then the issue might be with their mother. Of course, if she were racially biased its unlikely she’d marry a person of color herself.
I know that our society treats mixed-ethnic children horribly in some ways, and such racial prejudice isn’t restricted to allegedly “privileged whites” either. Darker skinned people can look down on lighter-skinned children too and be every bit as ugly. There’s no monopoly there, believe me on this.
Perhaps there’s even some deeper psychological underpinnings here that our dear Willis is teasing us with….or it could all just be a total misunderstanding on Sal’s part much like how Amazi-Girl is completely spazing out over Sal?
One thing’s for certain, some serious shit is about to go down and tomorrow can’t get here fast enough.
Willis has stated, over and over, that Sal is correct in her belief that their parents favored Walky because his skin is lighter.
This has been confirmed by word of god. It’s a huge part of Sal’s character. It’s an over-arching plot point that has influenced the lives of several characters in the story, including both the twins, as well as Amber, in a significant way.
Seriously? Word of God is Sal is right and you’re still saying you don’t believe it? Seriously!? I’m as white as you can be *I* know enough to know there is merit in what Sal said. Also while this specific comic doesn’t scream “subtle racism” it does show blatant favouritism giving credence to the theory that SAL IS RIGHT.
I’m talking about not only picking Walky but of the implication behind the fact Sal’s name is in bold and not Walky’s. Plus the memory is about Walky realizing he was “picked” over Sal and that reenforces that Sal has a point
I didn’t notice the bolding, and even with it pointed out I would be more inclined to assume that it’s just the result of increasing volume as she tries to get her kid’s attention. I mean, she was telling them both to settle down; if she intended to lay all the blame on Sal she wouldn’t have called to Walky at all.
And I wholly agree that this is coming up because it reinforces the idea that Walky is the favored child, and doubtlessly this is just one of a cavalcade of incidents where Walky is given a hand up and Sal is left in the dust. But taken just as an isolated incident, this particular example isn’t as horrible an example of favoritism as it might have been. Linda did bring both kids with the intent to get them on the show together, and it’s only when she’s forced to make a split-second choice between them does she kick Sal to the curb. It ain’t like she left Sal behind scrubbing out the fireplace.
(I’ll just concede in advance that tomorrow’s comic might show Linda looking at her kids and saying, “You know, Sally’s poofy hair is dumb-looking and probably won’t fit under the mouse hoodie anyway. Take my good kid instead,” in which case yeah there you go.)
Presumably, this is Walky realizing that this is, maybe, an example of a trend, and not an isolated incident.
I think that’s the way it normally happens when we notice our privilege. It’s rarely something big and overwhelming. It’s just a lot of little things that start to add up.
Willis is actually doing this perfectly, by just starting with one little instance that makes Walky wonder if maybe Sal is right. And, frankly, he does a good job with story-telling and pacing. So it wouldn’t half surprise me if it comes out bit by bit and piece by piece.
You gotta be willing to accept that some types of discrimination exist beyond just the sum of what you see, and also that if you DON’T see discrimination or CAN’T imagine it being there, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It just means that you didn’t notice it or can’t imagine it. And there are a lot of things in your life that you don’t notice or can’t imagine. It’s hard to find anyone who can honestly imagine infinity. Does that mean it doesn’t exist? Hell no.
It is vitally, vitally important to realize the limits of your perception, that you are not an objective judge of what influences another person’s reality or even, necessarily, a better judge than them. Give Sal the benefit of the doubt here; she might be better at knowing where her life has been. If your only basis for assuming that she’s a poor judge of what lead to what is this one instance, then maybe you could stand to reassess your opinion.
“Darker skinned people can look down on lighter-skinned children too and be every bit as ugly. There’s no monopoly there”
Look, let’s not pretend that this is the same as white or lighter skinned people looking down on black or darker skinned people. Sure, you could flip the family situation maybe – it would be weird and you would need some explanation but the parents could treat their more ethnic-looking child better for some reason. But that wouldn’t change the fact that the world at large would treat Walky, who is ambiguous enough to pass for a tan European, better than Sal, who has the wild curly hair and darker skin, based on race.
We don’t have to pretend, because that is exactly how it is. Whites aren’t genetically or socially more racist than blacks, or hispanics, or asians, or mixeds. Ask any white guy living in the slums in any city in Latin America and you’ll know. Every race is racist. Human beings have a sadistic need to find excuses to put themselves above others. That’s exactly what you are doing when you argue over the internet that you are “less racist” than someone else.
Ignoring the whole racism-is-inherent thing for now- this really isn’t about any sort of dark sinister hidden desire of white people to discriminate against non-white people, or black people to discriminate against other black people, or any singular biases of any individual. I mean, it’s about Linda, yes, and how she sees her children, but she doesn’t look at them and say ‘You know, I’ve noticed that Walky is pretty white in comparison to Sal. I should bake him cupcakes. ‘ She hears both of their voices and thinks Sal is being so loud and obnoxious and Walky should quiet down, too. She helps them get ready for school and is so glad Walky got her hair because it’s so much easier to deal with for her and looks so cute. And when she needs to pick one of her kids to show up in a cameo role on a show, she does, and it doesn’t wind up being surprising who she chooses. And yes, I argue that you can read that in to what we’ve seen of their family dynamics. I could be wrong- I’ve interpreted Willis comics wrong before-but that’s what I see.
And that has nothing to do with slums in Latin America or racist black people who hate white people, and only a little bit to do with Linda herself and how she consciously sees race, because Linda’s preference for Walky is a symptom of an endemic cultural preference for white people and white things ingrained into the culture of the United States. And it’s not good enough to say ‘Well, white people aren’t the only racists! ‘ when we have and indirectly support an unbalanced system by not challenging it. I seriously doubt we’ll ever see Linda saying that Sal is just too black- but we’ll see her having less tolerance when Sal acts up because she expects her black daughter to act the way society has told her black girls act and she feels like she needs to be ready to quiet her down and make her behave. Any she expects Walky to work harder and achieve more. She expects Walky to become a doctor in the next few years, and I don’t know if she even expects Sal to get a passing GPA.
It’s a socially ingrained attitude, and it doesn’t boil down to the individual. I’m a white girl from an overwhelming black suburb, and while I never noticed it in my childhood, yeah, I got my privilege even though I was technically a minority. It wasn’t that the white people around me just wanted white people to do well, because my teachers weren’t mostly white- it was that they had a social expectation to see the white girl studying and applying herself, and the black girl acting up, and you see what you expect to see. So when I was seperated out with the other ‘good’ students in elementary school and then when I went to a science-specialty high school and then when I went to college, the proportions of black people to white people leveled out, stopped being representative of the population. And it wasn’t because white people are just better at science, and it wasn’t that the admittance board was stocked with mustachioed Jim Crow activists. It was just that, in small and everyday interactions, people expected the white kid to study and ask questions and learn and they expect to have to tell the black kid to quiet down and behave and because of those expectations, that is what they see.
And if you don’t see that sort of ingrained unbalance in American society as a problem because hey, it’s not like there aren’t Asian racists, then I don’t even know what to say. If you don’t wanna see it in comics, don’t wanna think that someone could have biases that they don’t acknowledge that could damage how the people they are supposed to raise see themselves- well, okay, but maybe it’s worth examining.
Also I apologize for the rant and know I’m probably repeating things that have been said, but come on x_x
I’m not even going to get into the rest of it, but this: “Of course, if she were racially biased its unlikely she’d marry a person of color herself.”
???Really??? How so? Are no sexists married to women either?
Nah, she owns and operates a rival pizza joint directly across from Galasso’s, and she’s an embittered ex-politician who gave up after Robin beat her for Senate.
“I’ve heard christian girls grow up to be either really cute or really sexy. Oh…but so do Christian BOYS. Now I’m REALLY conflicted. Why oh Why didn’t I marry a christian boy!”
Naw, with Joyce; the entire scheme of character interactions in DoA is COMPLETELY reliant on this single event, through an intricate network of seemingly random, yet connected, time shifts in paradox space.
That, or all those “alternate reality” episodes on TV have been lying to me over the years.
Honestly, I don’t see Sal as the type of person who’s mortified by embarassing childhood things. “Sure, ah was in that silly video when ah was eight. Whatever, ah’ve got a motorcycle now.”
Honestly, if she had been chosen, I think she’d have smiled at the fact she was chosen at least once, but it would have been a sad smile, because she hasn’t been chosen since.
Wanna say what’re the odds Hymmel the Hymnal was on DVD? Also, Joyce could totally have brought over her own (that she brought to college just for such an occasion) once Dorothy agreed.
But mostly I didn’t want to be technology-ist and assume. [Hanging onto hope its real-life counterpart hasn’t migrated to BD yet??]
[[I mean, it’s kind of mindboggling that shit like Bad Santa is on BD when there’s NO reason to have that in ultra high-def]]
Her having a VCR that her family used to use is more likely. I kept one, which paid off ten years later when I found awful movies worth watching [while anything but sober] on VHS for $1 at MovieStop.
I’d say DVD. The box is the width of a DVD case, and they seem to be watching it on an LCD screen (on a computer?). Plus those particular old shows DVDs released ~2007.
Really depends on whether her parents are Luddites or not. [Could be Beta!] All I know is I went back and looked and stared and I honestly somehow couldn’t tell =|
“I’m David Walkerton the First. My father is David Walkerton the Second. My grandfather is David Walkerton the Third….there was an incident with a time machine and a contraceptive.”
I’m glad Walky is smart enough to think about what that choice meant, but I don’t want him to feel guilty for it happening. Why do your characters have to be so sympathetic, Willis?
I know, right? Because that never happens here! People never argue about anything on the internet! Though it is funny as Hell to watch, let’s be honest…
*I hit the “post comment” button too fast with my previous comment.*
Ah Gods damn it I knew he looked familiar. Welp I feel like a fool now though maybe I’ll check out his new show. Although I never really watched it that much I enjoy The Daily Show but I just couldn’t get into The Colbert Report. I liked it in small chunks but found it a little hard to digest as a full show.
Wilmore is taking over for Colbert? That is a great move, I love his bits on the Daily Show. Since John Oliver is not available, Wilmore is the perfect choice.
I believe he’s talking to a guy who claims Martin Luther King would have been against stricter gun control laws. Possibly arguing that Dr King would have wanted to arm all black slaves in order to make “slavery a brief chapter in our nation’s history”.
Which Wilmore answers with “It would have been a preface. Followed by a chapter called ‘All the black people are dead, now who’s going to build our country for us?'” While also calling the guy out on using Dr King’s ghost as his imaginary black yes-man.
Basically, Willis was expecting most or all of his readers to automatically assume that racism was the reason that Sal was being treated any differently than Walky during their upbringing. Of course when this did not happen (months ago when Sal indicated that it was indeed because of this factor) Willis basically took to calling out anyone who did not share his own views (or at least indicated them to be) “ignorant” or just flat out “racist” themselves for not automatically jumping to that conclusion.
It also was not cool to be called a “Romney voter’ at the time, since I never actually voted for that guy (admittedly I voted twice for the guy that we currently have in office, and I have mixed feelings for how that turned out).
Its because of how Racism is thought of in our culture. In our culture, Racism isn’t a small thing. It’s a big nasty thing that cannot be fixed that makes you a horrible person always and forever. It’s a comfortably held belief that colors your every thought and action, and cannot be a subtle, it can’t be done unconsciously. Being racist means you are evil. Forever. Racists aren’t ‘fixed’ in our culture. At the end of stories, Racists are brought low: Humiliated, incarcerated, possibly even dead.
This viewpoint makes it kinda hard to completely stamp out racism, ironically, because if racists are villains then the fact that you are not evil means that you don’t have to adjust your viewpoints. And racists being irredeemable means that if you were racist you couldn’t do anything about it anyway. In the real world, most racists aren’t evil. They’re flawed, but they can change their minds and they can come around. In the real world, racism can be as subtle as subconsciously comparing your childrens’ actions to an imagined list of “blackness” and treating them accordingly.
I don’t think Linda Walkerton is necessarily a bad person, we haven’t seen enough of her to make that determination. I do think that she’s a little racist. The problem here is that we as a culture don’t know how to process “a little racist” because we’ve been told it doesn’t exist. You’re either KKK or Multicultural Rainbow, and there’s nothing in between.
Personally it was because she’s so similar to her Walkyverse counterpart that I assumed she’d continue her pattern of being horribly wrong about everything. Then you add in the multiple criminal acts and it just becomes ‘well of course they like Walky better, who wouldn’t’?
Privilege and race are not necessarily the same thing. It could be because Walky was a boy just as easily. Or simply favoritism based on other factors like being the baby or born first (as twins he might have been either by a couple minutes). Sal really needs to have that talk with her parents and not busting Walky’s balls about it.
Sal has, for the first time in her life, in literally ONE INTERACTION on the subject, pointed out that the fact that Walky’s whiter probably caused some subconscious sibling favoritism. Instead of acknowledging Sal’s explanation, you make up other reasons why Walky was picked (all of which have to do with privilege).
Sal isn’t busting Walky’s balls over this, she’s caused him to recognize a truth.
That hasn’t been firmly established yet woope.
Point is the problem isn’t Walky, its her parents and Sal needs to bust their balls (figuratively speaking) and get to the crux of the problem. If her parents are favoring him because of skin color then she needs to get them to confess, and if its not then she needs to get them to tell her WTF.
Walky’s only fault here is…well, being Walky, but that’s a curse he has to deal with daily. As do we all.
So you don’t think Sal, who was the only one there and paying attention, can be trusted that it was racism. And you don’t think David Willis, who is writing the history, can be trusted when he says she can be trusted. Ok.
I really give little value to word of god until it actually has some evidence in story. Unfortunately, with Willis continually pushing his word out every time the subject is raised, it makes it difficult to look at the story with an unbiased view.
So far as evidence for walky’s parents being racist:
walky made a joke about his skin color. Sal says they are racist. The parents don’t like curly hair(I HATE that people use this as evidence. Black people do not have a monopoly on curly hair), and are vocal to the point of rudeness about it. The mother, we assume, chooses walky over sal for the role of churchmouse.
In other words, the only real evidence for racism is that Sal says that her parents are racist. Sal, the girl who is willing to lie and cheat to get her way, Sal, the girl who is unstable enough to commit a robbery using threat of violence.
I would prefer a more reliable witness. Until more evidence pops up, her parents are just dicks.
So the only evidence we have is someone explicitly saying it (and we have no reason not to believe them except that you don’t want to) and, oh, 2 things that actually happen in real life due to racism (but those don’t count because you say they’re not racist).
Ignoring any prior comment threads that I was not a part of I would say that one does not HAVE to bring racism into this particular strip. Rather, to me, it is an indication that Walky has realized that he either did have or could have been perceived as having preferential treatment when growing up. Now this could be due to racism, it could be due to sexism, it could be due to any number of things, and I am not going to theorize on the possibilities right now, but considering Sal’s previous accusations it is not unreasonable for Walky to, at the very least, take this new recollection as evidence for her position.
Humm, you know you might have a point.
Mixed blooded families have different sorts of issues and I confess not having a point of reference beyond an academic standpoint on the subject. I just think Sal was out of line to dump on Walky for being clueless and throwing that in his face. I just hope they work it out. It seems like they were close once, and it sucks when siblings are at odds over their parent’s stupidity.
To be fair, Walky had been needling her for her past crime for a while at that point. And threw a big, hissy rage-quit when Sal brought up her side of the issue.
Walky: bringing up past mistakes/traumatic experiences to make himself sound better on parent visitation day.
No, when people pointed out all the evidence and events supporting Sal’s conclusion, and compared it to their own real life experiences, you were supposed to learn something. You were supposed to think “huh, I am learning about parts of life that were outside of my previous experiences.” There was even some great meta-commentary on how racism works in real life, where people do not notice it until it is explicitly thrown in their faces.
You weren’t supposed to throw a hissy fit in the comments.
This event alone really doesn’t explain anything to me either. That’s not to say it wont be corroborated with other flashbacks but alone all this shows is a 50/50 chance of him being chosen, no racism necessary. I don’t think she’s the type to just leave if they can’t both do it, she has way too much ambition.
To Willis’ credit, he did eventually flat out indicate that it was due to racism. He did not leave the audience hanging, which is cool. It just sucks that many of us were supposed to make an assumption and did not, and then we are considered “ignorant” for not reading his mind.
I had no idea that Sal’s issues (subconscious parental racism, “good hair”) were real issues. In the comments during the first days it was brought up, several people expressed recognition and thanked Willis for paying attention to it. Willis also confirmed that Sal was right. At no point was I called ignorant for not knowing any of this beforehand.
What has happened since then is that every time this issue is brought up, some random people keep insisting that Sal is full of shit, and no matter how many times Willis states that “I’M TELLING YOU SHE’S RIGHT I AM THE AUTHOR GODDAMMIT!” people are still going “We don’t really know that yet, durr hurr.” There’s even one guy a little way up in this comment thread saying they don’t care about Word of God, and I… there’s… I just don’t have enough hands to facepalm with.
Sure, some people simply haven’t read the comments, or the hovertexts, or the Twitter feed, or the Tumblr, or the blog posts directly under the comics, or noticed the one time when Willis turned off comments entirely because the idiocy had reached critical mass. At this point, though, there’s been enough indications in the comic strip itself that anyone’s natural reaction should at least be “Hmm, maybe Sal is right?” rather than “Where’s the evidence?”.
It reminds me (as an increasing number of fandom things do) of an Ace Attorney game, where no matter how solidly the point has been made, even when it’s been proven beyond a shadow of the doubt that it’s completely impossible for the defendant to have committed the murder and also that this other person with an obvious motive was standing in front of the victim holding the murder weapon at the exact moment of the murder, the prosecutor can still slam their desk and say “but you have no definitive proof!” and force you to go another round.
What really gets me is that the people arguing this are clearly in the comments section, reading the comments, and have collectively either a) somehow missed the multiple posts from people saying they experienced related or identical racism, or b) collectively decided these people are all lying.
I think I’ll go with #1, since it’s less awful and nicely fits with my existing theory of “people don’t read”.
Nah. Expect the worst of people, you won’t be disappointed.
Anyway, it wasn’t unreasonable to not take Sal’s word at first, but if the author confirms it, that does kind of settle it.
Well, unless you’re the kind of person that thinks authors have no better a view on their own work than anyone else, after all, they only wrote it, what would they know?
(I’m not holding that view, I’m just saying. Still, it does seem like it will perhaps come up more often, so just ignore the dissenters, there’ll eventually be enough in the comic for most of them to give up)
I feel like there’s some merit in death of the author when it comes to certain works. For instance, the ‘Save the Pearls’ book was blatantly racist, however much the author tried to deny it. However, I think Willis’ observations mainly highlight things that are already present in the text and that certain people absolutely refuse to see. So I don’t think it applies in this case.
I don’t think this strip on it’s own is supposed to say anything other than ‘Walky is starting to remember a specific instance of when his mom showed preferential treatment’. We don’t even have the full memory yet (I’d say it’s 50/50 that next strip continues the memory and explicitly shows Linda choosing Walky over Sal).
But, this strip isn’t in a vacuum and, taken with what happens in the other strips, it should mean more.
Hoo boy, epic reaction GIF, but I think you misunderstand me. What I thought you intended to show in this strip was Walky finally remembering a specific event in his life in which his mother favored him over Sal. I was just nitpicking OP’s use of the word “explain”. The strip doesn’t explain *why* Linda favored him over Sal on that day — though I 100% believe Sal is correct that it was due to Linda’s (unconscious) racism. I doubt it “explains” Sal’s resentment of her parents, either: this event was certainly not the last time she was disfavored, unlikely to be the first, and probably not the one time most prominent in her memory. tl;dr: this is not Sal’s “origin episode.”
Sal only wanted to be a good christian girl. She kept that dress, not for appearances, but to wear and pretend she’s Joyce when noone’s around. Ironically, Joyce is Sal’s hero.
Who knows maybe Sal might start going to services with Joyce…perhaps star wearing a cross chain around her neck? You know they’re cool with everything.
And perhaps Sal and her own worldly ways might be the thing Joyce needs to find a balance between living for God and living for herself. Yes I think if it works out these two might well be what the other needs?
Indeed. It is clearly Walky’s fault for not predicting the future! That, or we are to automatically assume that racism is what happened no matter what! Something like that right?
I’m willing to guess that Walky ALWAYS got the advantage. Always got picked. Always held up on a pedestal. Always got ice cream while Sal never did. And so on.
It’s not a matter of, “If you pick the lighter-skinned kid, you are a racist,” but “If you always pick the lighter-skinned kid, that might be a factor.”
No one ever said it was Walky’s fault for anything about this.
And it was not about you having to automatically assume it was about racism. The problem is automatically dismissing the possibility of racism when you haven’t see anything for or against it being the cause.
People were so quick to say Sal could only be wrong. We weren’t there, we didn’t see it happening or not yet at that point. She was, and she did.
Willis you can get mad at me again for this if you want, but Sal was out of line with the racist BS. And no I am not going to call her a racist for saying it, but its a poor excuse to throw at another person, especially your own twin sibling. She’s right to feel resentment for not being the favored child, but out of line for saying what she said.
Now that being said, I hope that Sal keeps a level head when she has to deal with the uh….Arkham Asylum version of Amazi-Girl. I’m hoping she has enough in make it a good fight, or have the mad skills to reason with her at any rate. Please don’t keep us in suspense.
Yes, shame the person for pointing out racism she’s experienced, because being the Racism Pointer-Outer is an offense worse than racism itself, and it by default makes her the REAL racist.
In my experience on the subject anyone who lives a life focused on racial identity politics, be they white supremacists or social “progressives” are holding back humanity.
Consider that my “A plague on both your houses” or to use a sci-fi reference: “From my point of view the Jedi are evil!”
Although I guess you could always go through life thinking the reason certain people are favored over you again and again is all just a huge coincidence, making sure not to notice any pattern.
And furthermore, I’ve yet to meet a person who actually does “ignore” racial identity politics. They just say they do(“I don’t see color.”) and pat themselves on the back for not being racist, without ever critically examining why they have no black friends(or just the proverbial one black friend). Or to immediately jump in with “not all white people” when someone is criticizing a thing they actually experience regularly.
Not ignore it, but not letting oneself be defined by it either.
Its a pretty shallow nowhere existence to look at yourself in a group-think mentality rather than as a kick ass individual who has the drive and the will to define yourself and tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves.
When one reduces people to skin color, sexual preferences, or their political or religious beliefs, or any other classification, they reduce them from a human being into an object. And that no matter how you slice it, is bigotry.
Sadly the human race tends to do that over and over again. Even the most allegedly “tolerant” and progressive people can sometimes be the most hateful.
None of that objectification has happened here. Sal hasn’t reduced her identity or anyone else’s to a skin color. She hasn’t abandoned drive and will. She’s just pointed out that her brother has been favored, and offered an explanation why.
In my experience most cases of “progressives” reducing people to skin color would be that sort of thing: not actually reducing them, but noticing that race can affect their experiences. Maybe you’ve seen different. I’m sure in the comic, though, everything you just described is imaginary.
I’m lucky enough to not need a culture to define myself on, so I know what you mean. But your mistake is not recognizing that not everyone has the same privilege. I don’t claim to understand why some people need to hold on to some cultural or ethnic template for their identity, but as I’ve come to understand some of the enormity of the oppression these people live with I have no choice but to respect it.
Okay, let me try to be a bit nicer about this then I did when replying to Willis earlier.
I’m white as a frigging ghost, lily white – I have partial albinism (I can’t tan in some places because no melanin). Someone calls me a white cracker I don’t get offended. Why? Because whites here in good old USA did not get lynched, murdered, tortured etc less then 50 years ago. You know, a time that someone’s grandparent/parent is still alive from. I’m not assumed a hooligan because of my clothes or the color of my skin. I’m not shot and killed on the street because my music is too loud and I won’t turn it down – I’m not tailed for blocks by someone with a gun because I may be suspicious.
I don’t get offended when someone calls me a nasty Christian (I’m agnostic theist actually), because my family was never killed for their beliefs in the last 100 years. (I’m talking about Nazi Germany here). And if their were, it wasn’t something big. 9/11 does not count, that was pure terrorism plain and simple.
I don’t get offended when someone tells me to go back to where I came from (usually those that assume because I’m from MS I’m from the backward part of it – but I’m not I’m from the coast area-which still has it’s issues, but that isn’t one of them). My family was never rounded up into camps because we looked like the enemy (Asian Americans during WWII) or looked at with fear because I wore a religious piece of clothing and had the wrong colored skin.
I do however get offended when people tell Native Americans to leave their plantations and not use Casinos to raise money for that land so they can keep it – because I have Native blood very close to my surface. The trail of tears was not that long ago, and Native’s are treated like crap still by a lot of people. Including the government believe it or not.
I get offended when someone tells me to go back into the kitchen, because when my late grandmother was young she couldn’t vote – my mother more then 20 years at her current job barely makes 2 dollars over a NEW male employee they bring in to do a similar job. I can’t wear certain clothes without people thinking I’m “asking for it”. I’m a slut because I’ve slept with 7 people in my life, but the teenage boy down the lane has slept with lots more and isn’t labeled at all.
These things are not “political”, this is real life.
It happens just around the corner from you; and you see it in the news from cities not so far, or not so near you.
It happens night and day, no matter then time.
Hell, it is something that has haunted many a colored/female politician from election to term.
BUT. It can be stopped, but it cannot be stopped by not saying anything.
Women did not get anything by sitting at home twiddling their thumbs.
We did not disallow segregation by staring at the race separated bathrooms and sighing loudly.
Until people stop using the words and minute things that indicate discrimination – staying quiet about it does NOTHING. It will keep happening, and it won’t stop.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, discrimination won’t stop in a day either.
It needs all of us to work together to make things a bit brighter.
“When one reduces people to skin color, sexual preferences, or their political or religious beliefs, or any other classification, they reduce them from a human being into an object. And that no matter how you slice it, is bigotry.”
It is when one uses further racism to justify a feeling of superiority when labeling the first person as a racist.
Yeah, its a vicious cycle…and its all too likely a flaw in our human nature.
No it is not. Calling someone racist to feel superior (which I can assure you is what happens in probably only about 1% of cases) is literally, unequivocally not worse than racism.
The only people who call other people racist to be superior are white folks. If you really believe that subtle racism isn’t real or being hurt by the racist behaviour of your family is wrong then you have your head so firmly up your ass you can see your breakfast digest.
Oh and Walky was at fault for not noticing/looking the other way. Just like I’m at fault for not defending a girl I went to school with who got picked on for daring to be Hispanic and join sports teams. I never joined in the bullying but I did nothing to stop it.
You point of view is…naive, and I struggled for a long time to find a nice word for that.
Racism isn’t just acts of cartoonish villainy. It isn’t about tying asian people to the railroad tracks or putting a stack of dynamite under a black person’s house. It can be more subtle.
– Favoritism for job selection (often unconsciously) done by the hiring party (like in this comic).
-Refusing housing applicants for racial reasons, as practiced by that NBA owner dude (he was under felony investigation for this before his recent dumb comments).
-Lack of positive representation in media
None of these things go away if people stop talking about racism. Hell, even the cartoonish acts of violence practiced by the KKK doesn’t go away without talking about it (the dynamite example was on the nose, almost distastefully so).
I would love to know why people think these things disappear if we stop talking about them. I really would.
“You pointed out the racism, so you’re the REAL racist.”
“You pointed out the sexism, so you’re the REAL sexist.”
“I pointed out a dog, so I’m the REAL dog.”
Like how Wile E. Coyote doesn’t fall off the cliff if he doesn’t look down? And it’s his own damn fault for looking down and mentally acknowledging that gravity exists?
Exactly! In fact, racism didn’t even exist until 1861, when a bunch of uncompensated laborers in the American South noticed that they felt all superior when they suggested that maybe their uncompensated status was somehow related to the fact that they all had dark brown skin and the job creators generous enough to employ them all had pale skin, thus becoming the first real racists.
Noted liberal progressive Abraham Lincoln (D-Illinois) invented treason in a similar fashion shortly thereafter.
(With Poe’s Law in mind, and seeing some of the apparently serious comments here (and gods only know what Willis has had to suppress), I should probably make explicit that my comments in this subthread contain approximately 9000% of your recommended daily allowance of sarcasm. Part of this complete breakfast.)
So she can feel resentment over not being a favored child, but isn’t allowed to articulate why? lol what?
In what world does that shit make sense? Her parents are racist and they treat Sal like shit compared to Walky. They treat Walky as the kid who can do wrong, their shining example of everything good.
But Sal? Meh, she has to prove herself worthy first. And while maybe their parents don’t explicitly say that, or anything overtly racist, it’s pretty obvious. I mean hell, when they found out Walky had a girlfriend they pretty much ignored Sal altogether.
Hell, the first thing after Mr. Walkerton said hello to Sal was an indirect criticism. “Oh, your hair’s curly again. It’s so beautiful when it’s straight”(I’m paraphrasing) Her mother basically ignored her existence altogether because Walky, the golden child, had a girlfriend.
I didn’t catch it at the time, but, having since read more on the politics of black people’s hair, it makes what is seemingly just a vaguely insensitive remark a whole lot worse.
Because they can both audition and if one of them gets the part good for them? After all it was a writing contest they both could have entered. It’s the same concept in my books, or, well, would have been if they both could have auditioned.
No, she seemed surprised that there weren’t parts/lines available for both of them, and had to make a snap decision. That appeared to be the entire point. Otherwise she would have just simply brough Walky and not Sal in the first place, seeing as she’s apparently this huge racist, and all.
An open audition might not say how many kids they need, just ‘need kids’. Also there may have been multiple parts open, but by the time they got around to the Walkertons, there was only one part left.
Oh wow… I wasn’t sure if it was bolded and just looks strange on my phone or if it was just me, but now I know it wasn’t the latter. Subtle, yet effective.
Who is that man? That guy that’s sitting next to Linda in panel 1. Who is he? I know I’ve seen him from the Walkyverse, or maybe even the Dumbiverse, before. Who is he?
It’s funny how I can feel bad for kid Sal that she didn’t get something that I know perfectly well adult Sal would be nothing but grateful to have missed out on. And yet.
I think a lot of people (myself included) have wrongly assumed bunked beds, rather than lofted. Which is fair, because in my experience lofted beds take up a huge portion of the room and block light, and in real life you’re never in a viewing angle where the other beds presence isn’t apparent.
I got really excited for a moment because I thought that Walky was playing with Lucy and she was going to fit into DOA as a childhood friend, but of course it’s Sal. More Sal/Walky backstory is good too!
No, I follow that much. What I mean is I havent seen any evidence of actual racism as yet. In all honesty after going back through the archive I’m more inclined to Sal using the accusation as a crutch. There’s a line about Walky being favourite because he’s whiter, but they have an identical skin tone. I’m not trying to be inflammatory here, promise, I just feel like this is a case of “The situation is this, because I say so” as opposed to observed character actions telling the story… Geh… I’d really like someone to tell me I’m an idiot and point out what I’ve missed, cos it makes me feel kinda like a jerk
I’m not trying to come down hard one you, but people have been pointing out and explaining the racism in this story literally every time this storyline comes up. In this very comment section, in fact, are a bunch of people explaining it. The skin tone thing has been gone over again and again and again and again. If you honestly don’t get it, there are a ton of explanations available for you. Just read the comment threads below the previous strips about this.
“The situation is this, because I say so.” Okay, but when the “I” in this case is Willis, then yes, the situation is in fact this. If he says Walky and Sal are 18 are you going to demand he produce their birth certificates? Sal said her parents were racist, and Willis said she is telling the truth. What exactly would it take to prove this to you?
That wouldn’t really make sense with what we’re given here. The casting person doesn’t ask for a specific Walkerton child. Just one of them.
Assuming this is the Hymmel audition, we know that Walky had to have been the one Linda chose, as he got the part and they said only one of them could audition.
That’s interesting. I didn’t even see it as Walky’s mom being given the choice. I just assumed the producers or whatever not even considering Sal for the part. As a black dude, that’s the way I’ve seen it happen. “We only have one space, I’m afraid. And this one just looks . . . like he might be more into the role.”
Also, the Walkertons might have a religious background, even if they’re not practicing. There’s this, and there’s also the fact that Sal was sent off to a catholic school.
Years ago, I worked as a computer cluster supervisor at my university. My job was to clean up the print queues, do minor tech support, and keep people from monopolizing particular machines during high-traffic times. This included the scanners in the clusters, since each cluster only had one or two computers with a scanner attached.
One day, a gentleman came in and insisted he be allowed to use a scanning computer, though the user had stepped away. I made the decision to give that user a little bit of extra time to come back. He disagreed. Somewhere in the discussion of why I wasn’t immediately booting off the user, and by discussion I meant it evolved into an argument, I tossed off the sarcastic comment alluding to my reasoning clearly being racial. (I’m white. He was unclear ancestry other than +melanin. I was 22 and at a very liberal university.) This apparently resounded clearly with him, since he stormed off to escalate to my boss. A minute or two later, the original scanner user came back. She was also +melanin, but Indian. She was apologetic for wandering off mid-scan and I got in trouble for the racism crack.
Here’s the question: was racism the actual reason I didn’t give that guy the computer or was it my executive decision to let someone keep working in spite of my being argued with? I thought it was the latter. He thought it was the former. Is it unconscious racism if I decide not to give in to the demands of someone who is +melanin in favor of another +melanin who faces fewer struggles…but whose identity I don’t know until after the fact? Does every ruling not in favor of +melanin mean unconscious racism? Was making a sarcastic comment actually giving voice to my deep racist urges or was it more a commentary on attending a school that was very social justice-oriented? (Brown)
This is why I question Sal. Sometimes, it is possible to see a decision made for reason (x) when it is made for reason (y). Even when racism is common, not every decision made against you is racist.
Your deep intentions are yours to know, but other people can only go by your behavior, and the general patterns of behavior of people in general (some of which are racist). The gentleman’s inference doesn’t seem unreasonable to me in that situation. Even if he was wrong, that doesn’t mean it was unreasonable. Unless we’re saying nobody should ever ascribe any behavior to racism ever, which is convenient for people who don’t have to deal with racism but also leads to people being wrong, because some behaviors are affected by racism.
If I understand the story properly it sounds like Karen flatout told the guy he was being denied access to the computer for racial reasons. The guy treated that statement seriously, and now Karen gets to go “Psych, I’m not really a racist”, proceeding to tell the story as an illustration of how people who perceive racism are just silly fools who don’t understand sarcasm.
Actually I could go even further; as snow-white as your intentions may have been and as hilarious as your comment surely was, it sounds like the typical kind of thing to invoke stereotype threat, which has provably damaging effects, which would make a comment such as the one you apparently made, in the contentious situation you apparently made it in, a microaggression regardless of the intent behind it.
Just going from your description of the situation of course.
Since it’s impossible to know what people are actually thinking, we look at their actions for patterns, and see what kind of behavior fits those patterns.
When it comes right down to it, our definitions of behaviors are based on those patterns. It doesn’t matter what the real intent is if it matches the behavioral pattern of racism, because it amounts to the same.
For the Walkerton parents, I can think of 4 relevant behavioral data points off the top of my head:
– Walky’s ‘generically beige’ comment
– This strip
– The straight hair comment/kerfuffle
– Ignoring Sal at freshman family weekend
-(and out of strip, Willis has stated it’s racism)
Now I imagine there were more relevant bits of data that flew over my head, but this behavior fits a racist pattern.
“I tossed off the sarcastic comment alluding to my reasoning clearly being racial.”
Why? Why would you do that? How is it surprising that someone was upset by that? What did you expect to happen? You said something that came off as pretty racist (even as a joke) and someone took it that way.
I feel like you’re deliberately asking a very leading question and ignoring the part where you acted like a asshole and gave the dude every reason to think you might a racist.
Was it impossible for you to have an argument with this gentleman without bringing up race?
I mean, why the hell did you think this would strengthen your argument or diffuse the situation? That’s just you being rude AND sarcastic with a customer when it was uncalled for. Even if race wasn’t mentioned, he was right to go to your supervisor.
True. Since these comments are all over the place, that tells me Willis either failed to convey his point, or there isn’t one, or we’ll learn more about this later.
Besides, this set-up doesn’t make sense. The mother isn’t the one who should decide who goes on camera; that’s the show’s decision, no her’s. And if young Sal is darker-skinned than Walky, shouldn’t that be reflected in the art? They’re the same shade. What am I missing?
Her hair. ‘Black hair’ is known to be curly and hard to control rather than straight, like Walky’s. You see this emphasized earlier on in the comic where Sal’s hair is talked about.
“The comments are all over the place” is the same kind of response people have to global warming. One side or another having a louder megaphone does not make their point more valid!
Also, this makes perfect sense if you remember that this is an open casting call and they don’t particularly care who says the line. They’re on a time limit to get through people, and then they have to turn everyone else away – open casting calls tend to be insanely packed, as you might imagine.
What you’re missing is the context a lot of people have previously offered in the comments- talk about how the hair straightening is a race issue they’ve experienced, or how acting ‘white’ (often in that exact language) is a race issue.
The Mother doesn’t decide who goes on camera per say, buy she is being forced to choose between two children because they only have time to audition. If she chooses Walky, and he gets the part, it would be understandable for child Sal to be jealous a little bit. If she chooses Walky because she thinks he has a better chance because he’s “generically beige,” that’s a little bit racist. If she then always chooses Walky (which seems likely based on her present treatment of Sal), that’s racism to the point of negligence.
This is all very sad and also hits close to home for me (in a different, yet similar way). As I was the far less favored child I sometimes think about if my brother has ever had this revelation that Walky is having right now. It’s quite the thing to think about.
On the one hand I’m glad that Walky is finally realizing this, but on the other hand… this is all so sad and I am sad now =/
*Walky saying he’s “Generically beige” vs. his sister being “black”
*The hair straightening thing
*This strip
*Parents completely ignoring Sal on freshman family weekend
All of which people in the comments have corroborated as real things that actually happen.
So we’re going to have this talk again. What do we need evidence for? Sal’s discrimination lawsuit? The problem is that Sal feels their parents treat her unfairly and her brother refuses to acknowledge the existence of her feelings or discuss the matter at all because the idea makes him uncomfortable. What we need is a honest conversation between the twins.
And no, I doubt we’re going to see anything obviously terrible from Mr or Mrs Walkerton that lets us hang signs around their necks that say “Cartoonishly evil racists”. They’re educated, well-meaning, forward-thinking people who just wish their daughter could have been born with straight hair because it would make her prettier; conforming just a little bit more to their ideal of what a refined, proper, civilized person should look like, not that any reasonable person would judge someone by how they look, it’s no big deal, just a tiny little sting every time you look at her next to her bright, well-behaved brother and his shiny smooth head of hair.
Because in the context of the storyline this seems realistic and/or likely? We have every reason to think she made a choice, and basically no reason to think she flipped a coin. Unless you’re really really determined to ignore racism as a factor.
Oh sh*t yeah. This made me notice that she holds that hand behind her back during the entire encounter with her parents. And when Amber is saying “it’ll have to be tonight,” Sal is pulling a glove onto that hand as well.
Side note: they also sent her away after she did a stupid teenager thing (robbing a bulletproof counter with a knife) and had it backfire on her horribly to the point of permanent scarring (we assume). And so kept these twins apart for five years. As if no teenager ever acted out by breaking the law, or recklessly endangered themselves or others. I could totally see her parents focusing on her mistake and their anger, and glossing over the fact that she got stabbed, could have been shot, and what could have made her do this.
Well, in defense of Sal’s parents, for one thing I’m sure tons of teenagers act out by breaking the law, and while not all of those teenagers get sent to Catholic school I’m betting those teenagers’ parents all do something about it. If they didn’t I’d call it neglect, honestly (or a sign that the parents don’t think the behaviour is a big deal, which can be reasonable for some laws but not the ones against holding up stores with a knife, I’d say).
For another, it’s possible the knifing was actually a reason to intensify their reaction, be it reasonably or as a rationalization. Like “She got a KNIFE THROUGH THE HAND, if she keeps this up what’s next, she’ll end up KILLED, we have to stop this pattern whatever it takes“.
Well, I can agree that drastic action was probably warranted. But since in the beginning Walky says they haven’t talked in five years, and her mom still doesn’t talk to her, it seems more like they didn’t want to deal with her at all. Also, most parents would look for a solution in the tri-state area, at least.
Yeah, the fact that they hadn’t talked in five years was really odd to me. Most people I know who went to boarding school (not that there are many) came home during summer vacation and holidays. So Sal’s family didn’t even have her come home for Christmas or Thanksgiving? Or Spring break? Her parents didn’t have the twins call each other on their birthday? And since they share the same birthday, the fact that Walky’s was celebrated and, presumably, his sister’s wasn’t gives more and more credence to Sal’s stance and makes Walky look more and more like an idiot for not picking up on just how much he was favored over his sister.
More and more evidence keeps mounting in Sal’s favor that she definitely was given short shrift as compared to Walky. Plus, she has said she believes it’s due to racism (why is her word automatically discounted by so many people?), AND the author has explicitly stated race is the reason. Why are people still arguing this?
BTW, Willis, kudos to you for writing a story that shows subtle racism. It’s easy to write racism in big, broad, generic strokes, but much harder to craft a story that shows micro-aggressions and the cumulative effects of them over time. It reminds me of the Everyday Sexism project http://usa.everydaysexism.com/
I will be so happy if there’s a later revisiting of this flashback that shows Linda flipping a coin. I mean, sure, maybe there’s subtle racism happening in this strip, but if so it’s hardly explicitly stated. (Unlike the hair thing.)
why would that make you happy? I mean, yes, it’s upsetting, but clearly we need to see depictions of racism in the media. Look at all the people who are so against the idea that it could possibly be a factor here.
I like the idea that Linda might be a human with more settings than “abuse Sal continuously argleblarglebargh”. Yes, she’s probably got some built-in preference for straight-haired Walky, the way her husband demonstrably does. Yes, she’s a horrible person who has basically given up on her criminal daughter in favor of her gonna-be-a-doctor-wether-he-knows-it-or-not son. But given what’s displayed in this comic she’s not so far being deliberately horrible, and it would be nice to see some indication that at some points in her life she is actually NOT a horrible, racist, needs-to-be-shot-in-the-face-right-now person. Just for a few moments now and then.
I have been wondering when the preferential treatment began. Now it’s possible for a person to love someone else of a different race and have children with them but still prefer for the child to have racial traits similar to their own as it’s more familiar and easier to relate to.
But another thing that I wonder if what if this moment was the major start of this favoritism. Now depending on the era and which show/programming it is they tend to use people with a racial ambiguity so anyone can sort of relate or their traits leans more towards a Caucasian persuasion so that they don’t feel “threatening”. If that is the case then they would chose the one that most represents that and that would be the child with the lighter color and straighter hair. If their mother saw this and noticed that one would be wanted more because he presents an image that people are more comfortable with she might have began to push the one that would be more likely to succeed.
I’ll give Linda a tiny amount of credit for at least bringing both of them to the audition. At the very least on some level she wanted both of them in (and corrected clipboard lady that she had twins), even if subconsciously she had higher hopes for Walky.
Little-kid Sal is adorable, and seeing those poofy pigtails kinda makes me wish she liked her natural hair enough to not perm and press it into ‘conformity’.
Yeah, I’m accepting the fact Sal was right about it being racially based regarding the favoritism to Walkerton. I was hoping it was something else but, honestly, if they favorited Walky because he’s a boy or smarter then it’s not exactly an IMPROVEMENT either.
It’s society’s general rule of boys vs girls… There are innumerable studies and essays detailing that boys are encouraged and driven to participate in activities outside of the home, promote or teach a workable skill, or otherwise be productive and thus the ‘breadwinner’ later in life. Girls in contrast are given dolls and taught skills pertaining to the care of the home or the care of offspring.
Whether intentionally or not, because of that, it’s assumed that when the adults are old and need to be taken care of, it will be the son and his family that take that responsibility, because he will be the breadwinner, the head of the household, and will have the financial means of providing the support to his parents. The daughter, in contrast, is assumed to be going and marrying off to another family where she will have a husband who will be the breadwinner, the decision maker, and the one who will have the financial stability and say… and any support HE provides will be to HIS parents, not hers. The boy is in the family forever, whereas the girl is given away. Couples who only have daughters and no sons are considered extremely unlucky, and only less fortunate than those who have no children.
That’s not to say it’s all like this… but many cultures center around the male being the center of the household, whereas females are delegated to subservience and having little to no say in anything. Things have changed, but that underlying and subconscious way of thinking is still very prevalent.
More seriously in my mind (as a mother of a five year old) there is a really harmful stereotype that girls mature faster so are expected to be quiet, well behaved and obedient at a really young age while little boys are allowed to be little animals with very little discipline because “boys will be boys” which I find outrageous and offensive. It makes girls into dolls and boys into animals. I made damn sure I taught my boy how to behave. Also I flat out had a woman I looked up to tell me “boys don’t like art” despite the fact my kid was constantly making things for her.
People have weird ideas about what kids should and shouldn’t do. I just let my kid be himself.
I don’t think that’s accurate that sons are expected to take care of their ailing parents, quite the opposite I thought this typically fell on daughters, as all caregiving tasks do, while sons would be assumed to have their own lives. Though your “daughters become part of a new family, sons remain in their own” is also a good point. It might depend on the culture. In modern Western societies I’m 90% sure most adult caregiving falls on adult daughters.
This doesn’t change the “sons preferred over daughters” thing – I can totally see why you’d have a certain preference for the child who’s actually gonna go out there and do stuff and be someone.
I know someone who was AFRAID when she knew she was having a girl, because she went through this whole negative, abusive thing with HER mother and grandmother and was afraid of the cycle continuing onto her daughter… then she made peace with that and found a way to break the cycle [yay!].
Also, she and Daughter are super into the same things, which alleviated another fear of hers.
[To be fair, I’d prefer boys only because I don’t think I’d be any good dealing with female puberty again, even vicariously.]
Willis, you are right about racism. Everyone is at least a little bit racist, and pointing that out for the sake of introspection is cool. I have no problem with that. I really, truly don’t. I’m not even trying to be a smartass either. I agree with you on the topic of racism.
You already understand that many of us have not had to deal with racism because we have privelage. Of course that is why we were not able to identify what was really happening. So I apologize for that. I was wrong in my interpretation. My only real complaint in situations like this is that racism cannot always be the root cause of someone’s misfortune, and so I try not to jump to that immediate conclusion (I know that I am not the only one with that viewpoint). I’m sorry for my mistake in misinterpreting that part of your comic.
“racism cannot always be the root cause of someone’s misfortune”. No one said it was. But it often is the cause of misfortune, and it’s interesting to me that you took issue with the idea that in this one particular circumstance it was.
I’m going to need more evidence that Walky and Sal once went to an audition with their mother. All we have is Walky thinking about it, and I can’t be expected to just take his experiences at face value.
I’m going to need more evidence that the entire comic isn’t just a hallucination in some autistic kid’s head. All we have is every strip in the comic, and I can’t be expected to take the evidence presented at face value.
“It’s okay sir; my children both expected to have a chance to audition and I wouldn’t want to disappoint either of them by only allowing one of them to. C’mon kids, let’s go get some pizza.”
If a lady is pimping her kids out to play mice for fundys, she’s not likely to want to turn away from whatever small financial compensation she gets for doing so. Besides, why deprive both of your kids from a chance at showbiz and fame just because they don’t have enough open slots for the whole family?
“I will have [at least] ONE child rise to fame and fortune and support me in my old age after I SHOULD have gotten fabulously wealthy of my own accord but clearly that didn’t work!”
So basically Sal [and Walky] need to look to the future and see the life of parental co-dependency that’s coming, Sal with relief at having dodged a bullet and Walky with moritification that he’ll be the one driving Linda to the urologist every other Thursday or whatever.
half-assed Google search:
“A urologist is a physician who has specialized knowledge and skill regarding problems of the male and female urinary tract and the male…” [didn’t bother clicking the full link]
Contrary to popular belief, the uterus has nothing to do with the urinary tract, so she probably wouldn’t see a gynecologist if she was having trouble with peeing
Okay, so I’m thinking that some people were arguing that Sal deserved to be the ‘unfavorite’ because of the whole ‘robbing a convenience store’ thing, and we’ve only ever seen the family interact post-robbery (hey, never mind that years of subtly being treated worse than a sibling could lead to lashing out). But here she’s FRIGGIN’ FOUR. How far back do we need to go?
A younger Linda Walkerton is getting an ultrasound done, and she is told she is having twins for the first time. She points to the blurry image of the male fetus and declares she likes that one better. People will continue to claim that even if she is biased, it’s totally Sal’s fault. She’s kicking too much or something.
They’ll just make stuff up. Someone up above (can’t comment on it, no reply option) justified their position by stating Sal “is willing to lie and cheat to get her way.” Do you remember Sal doing any of that? Because I sure as hell don’t.
There was the whole ‘tried to sex up her TA for better grades’ incident. That didn’t win her any sympathy points and would count as cheating. But yeah, people here make up reasons not to like certain character.
Weirdly Jason seems to have not gotten much flack even though what he did was wayyyy more wrong. You don’t give up on tutoring your students, and you don’t hook up with people you have power over.
“She DESERVED to be stabbed! She held up a convenience store!”
“And why did she hold up the convenience store?”
“For attention!”
“Which she didn’t get because…?”
“Because she DESERVED it!”
“Why?”
“Because she held up a convenience store!”
“But that’s the effect. She can’t deserve past punishment for something she does in the future.”
“SHE HELD UP A CONVENIENCE STORE.”
I [or anyone, really] need to make a comic about victim-shaming:
“You DESERVED to be raped. You shouldn’t have dressed like a slut.”
“You DESERVED to be carjacked. You shouldn’t have bought a fancy car.”
“You DESERVED to be mugged. You shouldn’t have worn a three-piece suit and carried around loads of $20 bills.”
“You DESERVED to be murdered. You shouldn’t have been standing in the way of that bullet.”
…..I kind of do think people who drive fancy cars are asking for it. There’s no point to fancy cars other than to go ;look how much money I can afford to waste!”
Timemonkey, we all spend money on things we don’t actually need for survival. Generally speaking (unless they’re neglecting their kids or something like that), it’s not for any of us to judge how others spend their spare cash.
kind of sad to see the storyline ended for if nothing else joyce winds up showing the tape to billy for her reaction and thus it is the reasons she and walky don’t get along
This isn’t a flashback, you know. If Joyce showed the video to Billie, it would be in the present. That wouldn’t explain why Billie has been antagonistic toward Walky in the past. That would mean the cause happened after the effect.
I like that this event, which probably stuck with Sal this whole time, was completely forgotten by Walky. He didn’t even care about what he was given. It’s just so Walky. He’s completely unaware and ungrateful, while Sal has to try so hard just to be ignored.
I dunno.. I don’t think we have enough evidence that this is Walky remembering this interaction. For all we know it could be Ethan remembering a conversation he overheard!! We need more evidence, Willis!!
Since nobody seems to be pointing it out, the bolded letters indicate that Linda raised her voice against Sal, but not Walky, now we could take this as her voice simply raised because Sal’s name was second and she was trying to grab their attention. However in light of the whole “Sal’s mom being racist” thing, this could be an indicator of how deep-seated the issue is, possibly she isn’t even conscious of it, she is just innately more unfriendly and aggressive towards Sal
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Once again, Walky is just plain old better than Sal.
I’m pretty sure that this comic serves the purpose of showing Walky realizing that Sal was right earlier. You know, when Sal was saying that their parents preferred him better because he’s whiter.
But at least he doesn’t have to STUDY!
I am seriously waiting for that to come back and bite him in the ass. I have known so many kids in college that have gone through high school getting grades easily only to be stunned to find college is hard.
I know he’s not gonna flunk out because that would end all the plots he’s involved in but there’s gotta be a point where Walky’s gotta break down and study. Or mentally break down when his parents see his GPA.
Nah,
The problem is that school went from being a place of education to being daycare/prison for parental neglected children, probably around the 1980’s when teachers were no longer allowed to treat children like their own (for good or bad.)
Look at all the stories about kids cyberbullying or driving other kids to suicide today. Would this be happening if kids had some parental oversight? There are “adult children” out there who have no desire to take on any responsibility for their own actions.
College or University isn’t free in most of the world, and even idiots realize that spending money on education that doesn’t benefit them is a waste of money. Unfortunately it’s not in the college’s best financial interests to tell students to drop out because there is no job market for the classes they are teaching.
Our school system was always a rigid thing poorly suited to teaching kids how to think and mostly about making them memorize things we wanted them to know. The world changed and that system was left behind.
It isn’t that teachers can’t beat kids. Even the system we had would work better, except that we don’t fund it. We don’t hire enough teachers, and don’t pay the ones we have anything like enough, and the system for funding schools leaves the schools most in need of more and better teachers with the least funding to hire them.
We used to fund education more. Going to state college used to be heavily state subsidied. Students could work for a summer and actually pay for the entire coming year of school. Not now – minimum wage has fallen considerably next to inflation, and our state and federal governmets have largely abandoned direct aid in favor of loans so that big bankers can have a chance to make a buck on the backs of struggling children.
That reduction in funding and reduced value placed on universal public education followed pretty quick on the courts deciding universal meant black kids, too. Funny, that.
“Teachers can’t beat kids anymore” is a cheap and petty and frankly wrong answer to a problem that’s a lot bigger and uglier than that.
Sorry but did I miss something…? When did she say anything about allowing school beatings? I read “teachers were no longer allowed to treat children like their own.” To me that didn’t mean beatings – it meant teachers that could use their own insight and knowledge to decide how they were going to teach their students. Now with more unified curriculum, teachers don’t really have personal input in their own classes anymore. They don’t organize curriculum, choose or provide the worksheets, decide what projects or selected readings their classes will be doing. Instead, it’s all pre-organized and handed to them, rendering many of them as nothing more than glorified babysitters. In my opinion at least, this tactic is harmful as it not only lowers the teacher’s personal inspiration and motivation to… well, teach, but kids don’t get a personal experience. I noticed going to school in the 1990s that the teachers who had more original classes and ideas to teach and who helped students on a more individual level were of the older generation, who learned their trade when that was more of a thing. It’s sad to see the relationship between teachers and students getting neutered from the education system for the sake of efficiency, all while grades are going down.
That was longer than I originally intended. Ah, whoops! XD
Don’t forget that nowadays there’s more colleges that only care to make money than actually educate. The actual, legitimate colleges you always know about or can find good information on easily, while the others you only really hear about if you live nearby or from advertisements on TV. A good college never needs an advertisement, it has a reputation, it has good teachers, good classes, etc.
I tried taking some classes at a community college some years back, they forced me to take basic level computer classes (the ones where you learn how to use freaking MS Word and Excel) despite having taken an Oracle programming class in High School. They also refused to let me talk to the counselors, only new students could, everyone else that wanted help with their schedules had to sit in a room with other students trying to figure it out themselves and hope someone was helpful. The final straw that broke the camel’s back was that 9 out of 10 of the teachers I had were very obviously not teachers. Professionals in their field, maybe, but not teachers. One was even questionable for that though in the fact that when someone asked him something, he just got confused and tried to refer to the book. I realize that it being a community college doesn’t mean I’ll get the best teachers, but I didn’t expect half of them to be the stereotypical computer phone support guy, thick Indian accent included.
(No offense to anyone Indian who are good teachers or support, of course. From me anyway, can’t say if the school was being racist with hiring cheaply though.)
I always figured that the school system existed to crush the souls of children, gradually preparing them for the tedious and ultimately futile struggle of adult life.
So, I thought it was doing pretty well.
The official term for why schools are like that now is “No Child Left Behind.”
Willis said on Tumblr that Walky’s taking easy classes.
If you’re taking easy classes or classes in a subject that comes naturally to you, it can be very easy to breeze through college, for better or worse.
Makes sense. Can also depend on what your goals are. If you just want to pass, get a diploma, that’s a very different game from say anything that would require you worry about your grade-point average.
Dorothy for example wants to transfer into another school, so even an “easy” course has to be taken seriously because any minor screw-up can have major repercussions. Takes ten minutes to learn to bake a cake, takes a lot longer to learn to consistently bake a flawless cake.
Remember, also, that Walky isn’t paying for his education. His parents are, and they have… PLANS for him.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/footforward/
Well, Walkzzzpinator have planzzzz right back!
I would wager if he bombs or near-bombs out of his classes (or even just one), the admonishment he’d get from mom and dad would be a huge shock to his system if they did react that way. Suddenly life wouldn’t be easy-street and he’d have to spend a semester proving himself worthy of staying in college, all the while they berate, nag, and harp on him to make sure he’s actually doing his work.
Would be an even bigger shock if Sal ended up doing BETTER than him overall because she, through her own methods, went and got help to learn the material. So far we only know that she has a math class that she’s struggling in, but she could have other subjects too. If she’s not having any big problem with those though, it could very well happen that she ends up getting As or Bs in all of those and either eeking out a C in her math or (since it is still pretty early on and she has lots of time to catch up and improve) getting a B or an A in it.
Suddenly then… mom and dad would be extremely disappointed in their golden boy and scrambling to dote on and encourage their underdog child to make up for all those years of subtly or not-so-subtly putting her second or flat out ignoring she’s even there. The “good kid” fucks up? Tear him down… The “bad kid” succeeds? QUICKLY! Spoil and gush all over her accomplishments! You knew she had it in her all along and all that tough love finally fixed her! Now they can pretend they totally don’t suck as people and parents!
Not saying that will happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised… and I kind of hope it does. I hope the Walkerton parents do pull that crap and end up getting bongoed out and flat out rejected by BOTH of their kids so they have to perform some introspection and realize how shitty they were to Sal intentionally, while their attempts to coddle Walky set him up for failure when the system wasn’t catering to his habit of coasting along and putting forth no effort to win anything.
If Walky did get lower grades than Sal: Depending on the mindset of the parents, their opinion of Sal may not change one bit unless she does something to shock them out of their underachiever / mediocre view of her (3 As and 1 B may not quite be the “slap in the face” they need).
Judging from previous strips, I wouldn’t be surprised if the parents only focus on Walky and tell him he should be getting better grades than Sal, and never even consider commending Sal for her good grades (of AABB or whatever).
It could go either way… I also wouldn’t be surprised if that happened either where she DOES do better than him but then he just starts getting harped on for slacking off that “even SHE is ahead of you now! How far you have fallen! SHAME SHAME AND MISERY SHAAAAAME”. Kind of hoping that happens to so that they can get pointed out for how shitty of people they are for passive aggressively pitting sibling against sibling.
I don’t have a twin, but a similar thing did happen to me with one of my siblings… He was having trouble in school, I wasn’t, and right before I left for school I overhead my dad seething at my brother “You see HER? SHE works hard and gets good grades! YOU have no excuse!”, meanwhile my brother was already destroyed and just trying to keep from breaking completely. I marched back in and yelled at my father that I was not ok with being put on a pedestal for the sole purpose of tearing my brother down. Probably one of the only times back then that I stood up to my father and succeeded in knocking him down a peg and maybe making him think of how horrible he was being to his own kids.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Walky’s parents didn’t care how he does in college one way or the other. I’ve met families where the son(s) is incapable of failure so long as he spawns a child that winds up with the family name. Can’t support the whelp, no problem, so long as the name lives on!!
I have a BA on my wall right now…
Didn’t study for shit.
College ain’t that hard.
I honestly wonder sometimes why people have such an issue with college. 99% of my classes I never studied for and still got A’s. And don’t tell me it was all just easy classes. I heard people making the ‘hard classes’ excuse for classes like anatomy and biological chemistry but I never had to study for them either.
The only two classes I had issues with was my language courses (because just because my brain instantly connects one word to another that doesn’t make proper understandable sentences – use an auto web translator for proof) and then later on Cognitive Science (aka Cognitive Psychology aka “what chemicals are in the brain, and what parts of the brain do what, and how strongly do the impulses register”) which only was an issue because for that class I had to know what the levels and thresholds were – and it is ridiculously hard to correctly match seemingly random sequences of numbers to events.
Ended up with B- in both of those classes which prevented me from having a 4.0 without studying ah well. Still was given the honors ceremony for being the next best thing and graduated among the top 7 GPA’s of my graduating class.
So everyone who is gleefully waiting for Walky to crash and burn may just end up disappointed.
“So everyone who is gleefully waiting for Walky to crash and burn may just end up disappointed.”
Sooner or later, Walky will have to learn that he cannot go through life with only the barest minimum of effort. School may be easy for now, but then there’s work. So, for his sake, we SHOULD hope he gets a few bad grades that push him into getting his shit together. We are not “gleeful” about it, though.
Depending on what ‘work’ he ends up doing he still may not need to really try. And since his ‘work’ is going to be “eternally stuck in a temperal vortex where he’s in college forever, most likely freshmen year at that” I wouldn’t hold my breath about life catching up to him.
When’s finals anyway? 2030?
Except Walky is a genius. That is unless Willis is trying to run us through a loop.
It already is. Notice that his last assignment he got back wasn’t a perfect score? And that he just realized he could skip classes and likely will in the future?
It’s gradual, but we’ll see a report card coming out soon with Cs and maybe even a D. Probably not so quick he’d get an F, but you never know.
I dunno about this school but both my high school and college, if you were late more than 5 minutes, you were marked absent and if you missed a certain amount of days, it was taken out of your grade. You could get As across the board but you missed those days your grade went down a letter. You missed more days, you lost another letter.
I’m doubting this is the moment. If there was a moment, I’m pretty sure it’d have more impact than “Walky got chosen to dress up like a blue Pikachu”, which is pretty cool, but not that important.
seems pretty important to me. Walky seems to be realizing (or at least thinking) that his mom was playing favorites here. She wanted him to be in the role because, on an unconscious level, he was whiter.
He’s also a boy. Weren’t all the Churchmouses boys? Actually, did she even check what this audition was about before draggin’ her kids there? Their mom just seems like one of those Beauty pageant ladies that will shove her kids into anything.
I don’t get what you’re saying
That she didn’t pay attention to what the audition was for, she just brought both of her kids in the hopes of both or either of them getting some TV spotlight. Ya’ know, a neglectful parent trying to live out her failed youth through her kids.
I think you’re reading too much into this. There’s nothing that tells us how much info was available at the auditions or why their mom took them
I just realized your avatar is lookin’ right down at mine.
that’s nothin, head to the cast section and you get a whole lot of eye interaction.
I’m not sure this is even an audition specifically for that role. This isn’t about the show preferring one or the other as a churchmouse, or there would be no point to the scene, never mind what Willis has actually said about it.
Taken by itself this doesn’t show Sal is right about race anything, but what happens with Walky’s reaction to it means he was being favored. Remember Billie talked to him about that, and he hadn’t acknowledged that much.
(As to whether race was a reason, by the way, this one comic doesn’t say; but the only ones who were there were the Walkertons, and David didn’t even notice there was favoritism, so I don’t know how you would get a better explanation that Sal’s first-hand opinion. Not to mention that the author decides whether it was true and has said it is).
The dude with the clipboard says, “It’s just the one line”, and Walky had only the one line in the Hymmel video.
Although it strikes me as odd that they’d be auditioning someone for a speaking role so far into the series (this was episode eight, right?). I would expect a production company to hire and work with the same group of adults and kids over the life of the show, sort of like how the original Mouseketeers stayed with the same 12 or 14 kids, rather than go through the efforts to train a fresh group of Churchmice for every episode.
But wasn’t it just the one episode? I thought this was the only live-action episode, and the others were animated.
I seriously doubt the show was ever animated. The sort of exhibitionist fundamentalist preacher who would dress up like a giant book to preach at kids is the sort who would wanna be seen.
(Plus, the show this is a close parody of was live-action.)
That’s a good point. I should try actually paying attention to these comics some time, they seem like they have some good detail. 😛
If it’s anything like the low budget kids shows I saw as a kid, they’d cycle through different groups of children every episode or few episodes, because the appeal of being able to get your kid on a TV show would be targeted towards parents who would compromise anything just so their kid could get a slot on a TV show. You wouldn’t have to worry about paying them much, if at all, because the ‘privilege’ of getting in front of the camera would usually be enough.
Hell, even productions like Sesame Street, which wasn’t low budget… I don’t recall the kids who were on those episodes ever being consistent. The only constant ‘humans’ on the show were the adults, while the muppets were meant to be the main cast. The kids were just kind of there to relay the “Hey kids, this show is for YOU, because there’s kids like you here!” message to keep the audience engaged.
Actually, I think it may be both.
http://www.psalty.com/
If gender was the issue, the guy would have said “We only have room for your son” instead of “We only have room for one.”
She didn’t exactly say they were different genders, and unless the dude looked at the kids (whom are running around somewhere off panel), that wouldn’t be immediately obvious. A lot of twins are the same sex, and since Grace said all the church mice before were boys, she could indeed have just not payed attention to what the audition was for.
THAT BEING SAID, there was also a panel before that showed a little girl sitting on a pew, so she may have just been SOL. WE MAY NEVER KNOW!
(we’ll probably know by the end of the year maybe hopefully probably not)
Is there anything that indicates that all the churchmice were boys? Because I don’t think there was, and this scene wouldn’t make sense if they were, so I’d assume girls can be churchmice.
Personally, if there IS a moment, I feel like it hasn’t dropped yet, lol. Let’s wait and see before being so definitve
Ha, you know it honestly didn’t occur to me until I was reading the comments now that Linda would be picking? I thought Walky was looking back and realizing that the casting director came up with a lame-dog excuse to avoid even humoring the little girl with the trouble-making expression and natural hair, getting even flimsier when, on this occasion at least, Linda made an attempt to have her kids given the same treatment, and I assumed a second later he just grabbed Walky to audition without Linda having a say.
I thought it was Walky starting to grasp that sometimes people treated Sal differently while still not being at the point where he can acknowledge that their parents did it too.
But, duh, of course Linda would get a say in which kid they took back. Even if the casting director did choose Walky for himself she would still be making a choice not to insist that if its “Just one line” it would hardly keep them much longer to hear both of her kids say it than just one, or to just leave if they wouldn’t let both of her kids at least have a shot.
It’s not that this one incident is horrible or anything, Linda had to pick a kid. The problem is when it’s an example of a pattern, as Walky seems to realize here. He’s thinking back to all the other times in his life when Linda ‘had to pick a kid’ and she chose him.
That’ll be cool, we get to see how those past instances where for some god forsaken reason Walky was the better choice. How much crack do ya’ think people were smokin’ in the 90’s?
Considering that crack came out around the late 80s and spread like wildfire in inner cities….I’d say a lot.
“Linda had to pick a kid.”
So did Sophie…
Bill Mulder, too.
Don’t be silly, that’s a rattata costume.
It doesn’t show the reason why, but it does show that she was Right. That, from an early age, there was preferential treatment. I suspect that overtime we’ll see Walky come to terms that the reason why, is exactly what Sal said.
I’m, thinking that this comic serves the purpose of LEADING INTO the comics that will show Sal was right, either by Mrs. Walkerton making the decision herself for those reasons, or the board making the choice, and mom accepting it, possibly with it coloring her future audition attempts (well, David’s more likely to get the role).
This comic in itself sets up a situation where we can see it coming, but does not itself show that Sal was right.
Wow that is harsh.
I wouldn’t say that Walky is better than Sal, or even more level-headed for that matter. Both of them have their good points.
Still, if there is any merit to what Sal thinks about this race crap (and I am still not sure it is) then the issue might be with their mother. Of course, if she were racially biased its unlikely she’d marry a person of color herself.
I know that our society treats mixed-ethnic children horribly in some ways, and such racial prejudice isn’t restricted to allegedly “privileged whites” either. Darker skinned people can look down on lighter-skinned children too and be every bit as ugly. There’s no monopoly there, believe me on this.
Perhaps there’s even some deeper psychological underpinnings here that our dear Willis is teasing us with….or it could all just be a total misunderstanding on Sal’s part much like how Amazi-Girl is completely spazing out over Sal?
One thing’s for certain, some serious shit is about to go down and tomorrow can’t get here fast enough.
Willis has stated, over and over, that Sal is correct in her belief that their parents favored Walky because his skin is lighter.
This has been confirmed by word of god. It’s a huge part of Sal’s character. It’s an over-arching plot point that has influenced the lives of several characters in the story, including both the twins, as well as Amber, in a significant way.
Seriously? Word of God is Sal is right and you’re still saying you don’t believe it? Seriously!? I’m as white as you can be *I* know enough to know there is merit in what Sal said. Also while this specific comic doesn’t scream “subtle racism” it does show blatant favouritism giving credence to the theory that SAL IS RIGHT.
I dunno if it’s “blatant” favoritism, given that she *had* to pick only one of them. For all we know she used eeny-meeny-miney-moe.
I’m talking about not only picking Walky but of the implication behind the fact Sal’s name is in bold and not Walky’s. Plus the memory is about Walky realizing he was “picked” over Sal and that reenforces that Sal has a point
I didn’t notice the bolding, and even with it pointed out I would be more inclined to assume that it’s just the result of increasing volume as she tries to get her kid’s attention. I mean, she was telling them both to settle down; if she intended to lay all the blame on Sal she wouldn’t have called to Walky at all.
And I wholly agree that this is coming up because it reinforces the idea that Walky is the favored child, and doubtlessly this is just one of a cavalcade of incidents where Walky is given a hand up and Sal is left in the dust. But taken just as an isolated incident, this particular example isn’t as horrible an example of favoritism as it might have been. Linda did bring both kids with the intent to get them on the show together, and it’s only when she’s forced to make a split-second choice between them does she kick Sal to the curb. It ain’t like she left Sal behind scrubbing out the fireplace.
(I’ll just concede in advance that tomorrow’s comic might show Linda looking at her kids and saying, “You know, Sally’s poofy hair is dumb-looking and probably won’t fit under the mouse hoodie anyway. Take my good kid instead,” in which case yeah there you go.)
Presumably, this is Walky realizing that this is, maybe, an example of a trend, and not an isolated incident.
I think that’s the way it normally happens when we notice our privilege. It’s rarely something big and overwhelming. It’s just a lot of little things that start to add up.
Willis is actually doing this perfectly, by just starting with one little instance that makes Walky wonder if maybe Sal is right. And, frankly, he does a good job with story-telling and pacing. So it wouldn’t half surprise me if it comes out bit by bit and piece by piece.
You gotta be willing to accept that some types of discrimination exist beyond just the sum of what you see, and also that if you DON’T see discrimination or CAN’T imagine it being there, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It just means that you didn’t notice it or can’t imagine it. And there are a lot of things in your life that you don’t notice or can’t imagine. It’s hard to find anyone who can honestly imagine infinity. Does that mean it doesn’t exist? Hell no.
It is vitally, vitally important to realize the limits of your perception, that you are not an objective judge of what influences another person’s reality or even, necessarily, a better judge than them. Give Sal the benefit of the doubt here; she might be better at knowing where her life has been. If your only basis for assuming that she’s a poor judge of what lead to what is this one instance, then maybe you could stand to reassess your opinion.
I don’t assume that Sal is wrong about being discriminated against. See above reply for more detail.
“Darker skinned people can look down on lighter-skinned children too and be every bit as ugly. There’s no monopoly there”
Look, let’s not pretend that this is the same as white or lighter skinned people looking down on black or darker skinned people. Sure, you could flip the family situation maybe – it would be weird and you would need some explanation but the parents could treat their more ethnic-looking child better for some reason. But that wouldn’t change the fact that the world at large would treat Walky, who is ambiguous enough to pass for a tan European, better than Sal, who has the wild curly hair and darker skin, based on race.
We don’t have to pretend, because that is exactly how it is. Whites aren’t genetically or socially more racist than blacks, or hispanics, or asians, or mixeds. Ask any white guy living in the slums in any city in Latin America and you’ll know. Every race is racist. Human beings have a sadistic need to find excuses to put themselves above others. That’s exactly what you are doing when you argue over the internet that you are “less racist” than someone else.
You need to stop.
Ugh, okay, I should ignore this but I can’t.
Ignoring the whole racism-is-inherent thing for now- this really isn’t about any sort of dark sinister hidden desire of white people to discriminate against non-white people, or black people to discriminate against other black people, or any singular biases of any individual. I mean, it’s about Linda, yes, and how she sees her children, but she doesn’t look at them and say ‘You know, I’ve noticed that Walky is pretty white in comparison to Sal. I should bake him cupcakes. ‘ She hears both of their voices and thinks Sal is being so loud and obnoxious and Walky should quiet down, too. She helps them get ready for school and is so glad Walky got her hair because it’s so much easier to deal with for her and looks so cute. And when she needs to pick one of her kids to show up in a cameo role on a show, she does, and it doesn’t wind up being surprising who she chooses. And yes, I argue that you can read that in to what we’ve seen of their family dynamics. I could be wrong- I’ve interpreted Willis comics wrong before-but that’s what I see.
And that has nothing to do with slums in Latin America or racist black people who hate white people, and only a little bit to do with Linda herself and how she consciously sees race, because Linda’s preference for Walky is a symptom of an endemic cultural preference for white people and white things ingrained into the culture of the United States. And it’s not good enough to say ‘Well, white people aren’t the only racists! ‘ when we have and indirectly support an unbalanced system by not challenging it. I seriously doubt we’ll ever see Linda saying that Sal is just too black- but we’ll see her having less tolerance when Sal acts up because she expects her black daughter to act the way society has told her black girls act and she feels like she needs to be ready to quiet her down and make her behave. Any she expects Walky to work harder and achieve more. She expects Walky to become a doctor in the next few years, and I don’t know if she even expects Sal to get a passing GPA.
It’s a socially ingrained attitude, and it doesn’t boil down to the individual. I’m a white girl from an overwhelming black suburb, and while I never noticed it in my childhood, yeah, I got my privilege even though I was technically a minority. It wasn’t that the white people around me just wanted white people to do well, because my teachers weren’t mostly white- it was that they had a social expectation to see the white girl studying and applying herself, and the black girl acting up, and you see what you expect to see. So when I was seperated out with the other ‘good’ students in elementary school and then when I went to a science-specialty high school and then when I went to college, the proportions of black people to white people leveled out, stopped being representative of the population. And it wasn’t because white people are just better at science, and it wasn’t that the admittance board was stocked with mustachioed Jim Crow activists. It was just that, in small and everyday interactions, people expected the white kid to study and ask questions and learn and they expect to have to tell the black kid to quiet down and behave and because of those expectations, that is what they see.
And if you don’t see that sort of ingrained unbalance in American society as a problem because hey, it’s not like there aren’t Asian racists, then I don’t even know what to say. If you don’t wanna see it in comics, don’t wanna think that someone could have biases that they don’t acknowledge that could damage how the people they are supposed to raise see themselves- well, okay, but maybe it’s worth examining.
Also I apologize for the rant and know I’m probably repeating things that have been said, but come on x_x
tl;dr: “It’s no use arguing racism against X, because racism exists EVERYWHERE against EVERYONE”
Classic racist argument against doing anything to stop racism [especially the specific racism the racists are benefitting from].
Please don’t start this again.
I’m not even going to get into the rest of it, but this: “Of course, if she were racially biased its unlikely she’d marry a person of color herself.”
???Really??? How so? Are no sexists married to women either?
“Once again, Walky is just plain old better than Sal.”
I…what? Having trouble squaring that comment with this comic.
He means because Linda chose Walky to be in it over Sal – Linda shows a preference for Walky as if he is ‘better’.
WAIT
Are we sure that isn’t Sydney Yus
In this universe it’s Sydney who was switched at birth, not Beef.
Sydney was the Walkerton’s redheaded stepchild? WHOA!
That what I thought at but the nose and eyes are what makes it look like Sal.
Syndney Yus is probably Walky’s crazy cousin who doesn’t like the Walkerton side of the family.
Nah, she owns and operates a rival pizza joint directly across from Galasso’s, and she’s an embittered ex-politician who gave up after Robin beat her for Senate.
Headcanon accepted.
Robin is a Representative, not a Senator.
Which makes it all the more confusing that Yus up and dropped out of the Senatorial race.
I was thinking she looked like Lucy.
He’s thinking about it. I am delighted.
This. ^
“Well, maybe if I put my son in this vid, he can use it to get laid later on in life.”
“I’ve heard christian girls grow up to be either really cute or really sexy. Oh…but so do Christian BOYS. Now I’m REALLY conflicted. Why oh Why didn’t I marry a christian boy!”
“The only boy who could ever please me was the son of a preacher man.”
D’aaaaw
What the Hell, Linda.
Well, in this particular case at least, Sal dodged a bullet.
Could you imagine the look on Sal’s face if things where in reverse.
OF COURSE, THIS TIME! SHE CHOOSES ME. THANKS MOMBAMA.
HahaHa… I’m cracking up, I can’t do it, I can’t beat that joke , Yotomoe your are the funnier man I bow to your superiority.
Clearly then it would be Walky turning to a life of petty crime.
And motorcycle riding.
And Sal would be…wow what a mind fuck.
And Sal would be…
…in a Slipshine comic with Dorothy?
Naw, with Joyce; the entire scheme of character interactions in DoA is COMPLETELY reliant on this single event, through an intricate network of seemingly random, yet connected, time shifts in paradox space.
That, or all those “alternate reality” episodes on TV have been lying to me over the years.
with MARCIE
SURELY
Come on, Jen, we know you’re biased.
And on that subject, where the heck did that gravatar come from?
Seems like every time I bother answering, no one sees my answer =p
He stole ALL the chicken nuggets.
Ain’t no bulletproof glass at McDonald’s to stop him, either!
Honestly, I don’t see Sal as the type of person who’s mortified by embarassing childhood things. “Sure, ah was in that silly video when ah was eight. Whatever, ah’ve got a motorcycle now.”
Honestly, if she had been chosen, I think she’d have smiled at the fact she was chosen at least once, but it would have been a sad smile, because she hasn’t been chosen since.
Sal wouldn’t be the first child to surround herself with cool toys to make up for perceived neglect as a child. Overcompensation?
“Which ah paid for myself, thankyouverymuch.”
Ohhhhhh. Oh Sal.
It would be much funnier if it were Sal giving Walky’s line.
The person with the clipboard reminds me of Leslie for some reason.
Me too- Maybe it’s the hair?… Or maybe it’s Maybelline?
His name is Isaac Richards.
(anyone who gets this joke knows I’m a horrible person).
And here we have the root of all their problems.
Damn you talent agent. Damn you to hell.
Yeah. He never thought…”Maybe the twins could say the line at the same time”. THAT’D BE THE MOST ADORABLE SHIT EVER AND YOU KNOW IT, TALENT AGENT.
You’re a genius, Yotomoe
But people would be all, ‘But they can’t be twins, one of them is black!”
Or “they can’t be twins, they have the exact same hue of skin color but one of them has slightly curlier hair than the other”?
Or “Those are DEFINITELY twins, they look exactly alike!”
[said of Sal and some unrelated black girl who happens to wander in]
I mean, I’m sure it’s not the root. But one instance among many, you know?
Look at all that gumption.
Think Sal would be happy to know she was spared this injustice.
I’ll take the unsolved mystery of who stabbed my hand over a childhood memory of costumed religious propaganda any day.
on DVD, no less!
…or VHS, doesn’t look like they ever specified =p
What are the odds that Dorothy would own a VHS player?
Wanna say what’re the odds Hymmel the Hymnal was on DVD? Also, Joyce could totally have brought over her own (that she brought to college just for such an occasion) once Dorothy agreed.
But mostly I didn’t want to be technology-ist and assume. [Hanging onto hope its real-life counterpart hasn’t migrated to BD yet??]
[[I mean, it’s kind of mindboggling that shit like Bad Santa is on BD when there’s NO reason to have that in ultra high-def]]
Her having a VCR that her family used to use is more likely. I kept one, which paid off ten years later when I found awful movies worth watching [while anything but sober] on VHS for $1 at MovieStop.
I’d say DVD. The box is the width of a DVD case, and they seem to be watching it on an LCD screen (on a computer?). Plus those particular old shows DVDs released ~2007.
Really depends on whether her parents are Luddites or not. [Could be Beta!] All I know is I went back and looked and stared and I honestly somehow couldn’t tell =|
“video”
Is blue going to be the new red? Is blue gonna be the new red!?
It’s blue cos it wasn’t traumatic(at the time).
Is that how color schemes work for flash backs?
I believe so in Willis’ case going by what evidences I have available.
Nah, it’s the Doppler effect. The past appears red, the future blue.
Walky is actually flashing forward to when he gets a job as a casting director and a bad nose job.
Walky Marries a woman who looks exactly like his mom and will make the same mistakes his mom did.
Apparently he also got cloned. Both clones made the mistake of getting nose jobs. What can you expect, they ARE the same person.
No no no. Walky gets and bad nose job and then in the future goes into the past and is his own casting director and oh no I’ve gone cross eyed.
No, no, no, if we’re dealing with blue things and time travel, that scenario isn’t NEARLY convoluted enough. 😉
“I’m David Walkerton the First. My father is David Walkerton the Second. My grandfather is David Walkerton the Third….there was an incident with a time machine and a contraceptive.”
Sounds to me like the presence of contraceptive was the exact opposite of the problem.
It was 42 contraceptives.
I’m glad Walky is smart enough to think about what that choice meant, but I don’t want him to feel guilty for it happening. Why do your characters have to be so sympathetic, Willis?
It’s all because there has to be a story arc where he’s forced to “check his priviledge,” or more accurately, #checkhispriviledge.
1st panel: “Ooohhh, little Walkertons are so cute!”
3rd panel: “Awww no…”
4th panel: Oof.
Pretty much.
Poor li’l cuties.
At first I was like, “Who’s that girl Walky’s playing with?” and then I was all like, “Oh.”
Which one would you say is less black? Well, Sally does like Kool-Aid more…
Walky it is!
“OK we got our candidate forour our next slave child actor, now lets force him into that mouse costume and make him TV bongo.”
Hollywood man just pure evil.
Oh shit. Queue the mass debate and arguments in the comment section!
…What? Like you can’t see it happening too?
I DON’T BELIEVE THERE’LL BE MASS DEBATES IN THE COMMENT SECTION. SO THERE. AND TO FURTHER MY ARGUMENT…
I know
I know, right? Because that never happens here! People never argue about anything on the internet! Though it is funny as Hell to watch, let’s be honest…
*I hit the “post comment” button too fast with my previous comment.*
While your point is valid and perfectly reasonable, I disagree on the claims that I want to be difficult and petty.
We should argue about nothing for the next several hours! It would be both funny (and ironic) at the same time!
…Though I will probably need to sleep sooner rather than later! Or something!
NO YOUR BOTH WRONG
YOU’RE!***
Invocation of Godwin’s law at Yotomoe!
You and your child? Was Linda in the video too?
I don’t think so but I’m guessing its normal for parents to enter the audition with their children.
Oooooh, didn’t realise that was an audition. Then again I suppose a parent would be there with filming too.
This explains a lot.
Does it? I’m failing to see how it explains anything, really.
i want that gif with flashing impact font that says “WHITE PEOPLE”
Whereas I just want to know the original context of that gif. He’s so exasperated that it will either be amusing, infuriating, or both.
i’m 80% sure it’s him talking about racism in politics, which is one reason why i wanted the text.
… Sorry who’s he? The only American news people I know are the ones who infuriate me. Well them and news satirists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wilmore
Larry Wilmore, Senior Black Correspondent on the Daily Show, about to star in his new show to replace the Colbert Report on Comedy Central called…
The Minority Report
kinda my hero/favorite person in general
Ah Gods damn it I knew he looked familiar. Welp I feel like a fool now though maybe I’ll check out his new show. Although I never really watched it that much I enjoy The Daily Show but I just couldn’t get into The Colbert Report. I liked it in small chunks but found it a little hard to digest as a full show.
Wilmore is taking over for Colbert? That is a great move, I love his bits on the Daily Show. Since John Oliver is not available, Wilmore is the perfect choice.
I believe he’s talking to a guy who claims Martin Luther King would have been against stricter gun control laws. Possibly arguing that Dr King would have wanted to arm all black slaves in order to make “slavery a brief chapter in our nation’s history”.
Which Wilmore answers with “It would have been a preface. Followed by a chapter called ‘All the black people are dead, now who’s going to build our country for us?'” While also calling the guy out on using Dr King’s ghost as his imaginary black yes-man.
Or I could be thinking about a different gif set.
Wait, we can use gifs here? That’s a thing we could’ve been doing!?
No. Willis can use GIFs here. Because it’s his site. The rest of us have to use our words.
*Sigh*
Basically, Willis was expecting most or all of his readers to automatically assume that racism was the reason that Sal was being treated any differently than Walky during their upbringing. Of course when this did not happen (months ago when Sal indicated that it was indeed because of this factor) Willis basically took to calling out anyone who did not share his own views (or at least indicated them to be) “ignorant” or just flat out “racist” themselves for not automatically jumping to that conclusion.
It also was not cool to be called a “Romney voter’ at the time, since I never actually voted for that guy (admittedly I voted twice for the guy that we currently have in office, and I have mixed feelings for how that turned out).
Willis is just tired of people denying that privilege could even possibly be a factor in how Sal and Walky were treated as kids.
Folks will find any excuse not to take Sal at her word.
hmmm I WONDER WHAT COULD BE A REASON FOR THAT
Its because of how Racism is thought of in our culture. In our culture, Racism isn’t a small thing. It’s a big nasty thing that cannot be fixed that makes you a horrible person always and forever. It’s a comfortably held belief that colors your every thought and action, and cannot be a subtle, it can’t be done unconsciously. Being racist means you are evil. Forever. Racists aren’t ‘fixed’ in our culture. At the end of stories, Racists are brought low: Humiliated, incarcerated, possibly even dead.
This viewpoint makes it kinda hard to completely stamp out racism, ironically, because if racists are villains then the fact that you are not evil means that you don’t have to adjust your viewpoints. And racists being irredeemable means that if you were racist you couldn’t do anything about it anyway. In the real world, most racists aren’t evil. They’re flawed, but they can change their minds and they can come around. In the real world, racism can be as subtle as subconsciously comparing your childrens’ actions to an imagined list of “blackness” and treating them accordingly.
I don’t think Linda Walkerton is necessarily a bad person, we haven’t seen enough of her to make that determination. I do think that she’s a little racist. The problem here is that we as a culture don’t know how to process “a little racist” because we’ve been told it doesn’t exist. You’re either KKK or Multicultural Rainbow, and there’s nothing in between.
Personally it was because she’s so similar to her Walkyverse counterpart that I assumed she’d continue her pattern of being horribly wrong about everything. Then you add in the multiple criminal acts and it just becomes ‘well of course they like Walky better, who wouldn’t’?
I haven’t been following DoA for very long (Just a year or so now) but has Sal always had readers on her case?
No one believes Sal is upset that she didn’t get the part?!
I took Sal at her word that it was what she thought happened to her, Willis. I just find it so terribly sad to find out she’s RIGHT.
Privilege and race are not necessarily the same thing. It could be because Walky was a boy just as easily. Or simply favoritism based on other factors like being the baby or born first (as twins he might have been either by a couple minutes). Sal really needs to have that talk with her parents and not busting Walky’s balls about it.
lol @ busting Walky’s balls over this
Sal has, for the first time in her life, in literally ONE INTERACTION on the subject, pointed out that the fact that Walky’s whiter probably caused some subconscious sibling favoritism. Instead of acknowledging Sal’s explanation, you make up other reasons why Walky was picked (all of which have to do with privilege).
Sal isn’t busting Walky’s balls over this, she’s caused him to recognize a truth.
That hasn’t been firmly established yet woope.
Point is the problem isn’t Walky, its her parents and Sal needs to bust their balls (figuratively speaking) and get to the crux of the problem. If her parents are favoring him because of skin color then she needs to get them to confess, and if its not then she needs to get them to tell her WTF.
Walky’s only fault here is…well, being Walky, but that’s a curse he has to deal with daily. As do we all.
So you don’t think Sal, who was the only one there and paying attention, can be trusted that it was racism. And you don’t think David Willis, who is writing the history, can be trusted when he says she can be trusted. Ok.
I really give little value to word of god until it actually has some evidence in story. Unfortunately, with Willis continually pushing his word out every time the subject is raised, it makes it difficult to look at the story with an unbiased view.
So far as evidence for walky’s parents being racist:
walky made a joke about his skin color. Sal says they are racist. The parents don’t like curly hair(I HATE that people use this as evidence. Black people do not have a monopoly on curly hair), and are vocal to the point of rudeness about it. The mother, we assume, chooses walky over sal for the role of churchmouse.
In other words, the only real evidence for racism is that Sal says that her parents are racist. Sal, the girl who is willing to lie and cheat to get her way, Sal, the girl who is unstable enough to commit a robbery using threat of violence.
I would prefer a more reliable witness. Until more evidence pops up, her parents are just dicks.
But–say–white people with curly hair aren’t stigmatized for it so readily for it being “nappy.” Or have other white people ask to touch it. And so on.
People actually ask to touch ANYONE’S hair? That is creepy as hell.
So the only evidence we have is someone explicitly saying it (and we have no reason not to believe them except that you don’t want to) and, oh, 2 things that actually happen in real life due to racism (but those don’t count because you say they’re not racist).
You’re right, it’s totally for another reason.
@begbert2–sadly people don’t always ASK first when invading people’s personal space.
Ignoring any prior comment threads that I was not a part of I would say that one does not HAVE to bring racism into this particular strip. Rather, to me, it is an indication that Walky has realized that he either did have or could have been perceived as having preferential treatment when growing up. Now this could be due to racism, it could be due to sexism, it could be due to any number of things, and I am not going to theorize on the possibilities right now, but considering Sal’s previous accusations it is not unreasonable for Walky to, at the very least, take this new recollection as evidence for her position.
And to further Sal’s argument. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/appointment/
i.e. the whole black hair thing in the States.
Humm, you know you might have a point.
Mixed blooded families have different sorts of issues and I confess not having a point of reference beyond an academic standpoint on the subject. I just think Sal was out of line to dump on Walky for being clueless and throwing that in his face. I just hope they work it out. It seems like they were close once, and it sucks when siblings are at odds over their parent’s stupidity.
To be fair, Walky had been needling her for her past crime for a while at that point. And threw a big, hissy rage-quit when Sal brought up her side of the issue.
Walky: bringing up past mistakes/traumatic experiences to make himself sound better on parent visitation day.
No, when people pointed out all the evidence and events supporting Sal’s conclusion, and compared it to their own real life experiences, you were supposed to learn something. You were supposed to think “huh, I am learning about parts of life that were outside of my previous experiences.” There was even some great meta-commentary on how racism works in real life, where people do not notice it until it is explicitly thrown in their faces.
You weren’t supposed to throw a hissy fit in the comments.
This event alone really doesn’t explain anything to me either. That’s not to say it wont be corroborated with other flashbacks but alone all this shows is a 50/50 chance of him being chosen, no racism necessary. I don’t think she’s the type to just leave if they can’t both do it, she has way too much ambition.
To Willis’ credit, he did eventually flat out indicate that it was due to racism. He did not leave the audience hanging, which is cool. It just sucks that many of us were supposed to make an assumption and did not, and then we are considered “ignorant” for not reading his mind.
That is not what happened.
I had no idea that Sal’s issues (subconscious parental racism, “good hair”) were real issues. In the comments during the first days it was brought up, several people expressed recognition and thanked Willis for paying attention to it. Willis also confirmed that Sal was right. At no point was I called ignorant for not knowing any of this beforehand.
What has happened since then is that every time this issue is brought up, some random people keep insisting that Sal is full of shit, and no matter how many times Willis states that “I’M TELLING YOU SHE’S RIGHT I AM THE AUTHOR GODDAMMIT!” people are still going “We don’t really know that yet, durr hurr.” There’s even one guy a little way up in this comment thread saying they don’t care about Word of God, and I… there’s… I just don’t have enough hands to facepalm with.
Sure, some people simply haven’t read the comments, or the hovertexts, or the Twitter feed, or the Tumblr, or the blog posts directly under the comics, or noticed the one time when Willis turned off comments entirely because the idiocy had reached critical mass. At this point, though, there’s been enough indications in the comic strip itself that anyone’s natural reaction should at least be “Hmm, maybe Sal is right?” rather than “Where’s the evidence?”.
It reminds me (as an increasing number of fandom things do) of an Ace Attorney game, where no matter how solidly the point has been made, even when it’s been proven beyond a shadow of the doubt that it’s completely impossible for the defendant to have committed the murder and also that this other person with an obvious motive was standing in front of the victim holding the murder weapon at the exact moment of the murder, the prosecutor can still slam their desk and say “but you have no definitive proof!” and force you to go another round.
What really gets me is that the people arguing this are clearly in the comments section, reading the comments, and have collectively either a) somehow missed the multiple posts from people saying they experienced related or identical racism, or b) collectively decided these people are all lying.
I think I’ll go with #1, since it’s less awful and nicely fits with my existing theory of “people don’t read”.
Nah. Expect the worst of people, you won’t be disappointed.
Anyway, it wasn’t unreasonable to not take Sal’s word at first, but if the author confirms it, that does kind of settle it.
Well, unless you’re the kind of person that thinks authors have no better a view on their own work than anyone else, after all, they only wrote it, what would they know?
(I’m not holding that view, I’m just saying. Still, it does seem like it will perhaps come up more often, so just ignore the dissenters, there’ll eventually be enough in the comic for most of them to give up)
I feel like there’s some merit in death of the author when it comes to certain works. For instance, the ‘Save the Pearls’ book was blatantly racist, however much the author tried to deny it. However, I think Willis’ observations mainly highlight things that are already present in the text and that certain people absolutely refuse to see. So I don’t think it applies in this case.
Text. Text? Too many english papers this semester . . .
Even though it might not explain everything,nit might be one thing that gets Walky thinking that maybe Sal might have a point.
I don’t think this strip on it’s own is supposed to say anything other than ‘Walky is starting to remember a specific instance of when his mom showed preferential treatment’. We don’t even have the full memory yet (I’d say it’s 50/50 that next strip continues the memory and explicitly shows Linda choosing Walky over Sal).
But, this strip isn’t in a vacuum and, taken with what happens in the other strips, it should mean more.
Hoo boy, epic reaction GIF, but I think you misunderstand me. What I thought you intended to show in this strip was Walky finally remembering a specific event in his life in which his mother favored him over Sal. I was just nitpicking OP’s use of the word “explain”. The strip doesn’t explain *why* Linda favored him over Sal on that day — though I 100% believe Sal is correct that it was due to Linda’s (unconscious) racism. I doubt it “explains” Sal’s resentment of her parents, either: this event was certainly not the last time she was disfavored, unlikely to be the first, and probably not the one time most prominent in her memory. tl;dr: this is not Sal’s “origin episode.”
Oh DUH I just realized it EXPLAINS why SAL WAS NOT IN THE VIDEO! DUH SORRY!
Ruth is rolling her eyes at me SO HARD NOW.
I bet that the irony is that Sal really wanted the role but they gave it to Walky instead.
Sal only wanted to be a good christian girl. She kept that dress, not for appearances, but to wear and pretend she’s Joyce when noone’s around. Ironically, Joyce is Sal’s hero.
Is it weird that I really want this to be canon?
Who knows maybe Sal might start going to services with Joyce…perhaps star wearing a cross chain around her neck? You know they’re cool with everything.
And perhaps Sal and her own worldly ways might be the thing Joyce needs to find a balance between living for God and living for herself. Yes I think if it works out these two might well be what the other needs?
Watch or sharp edges
because you’re knee-deep in slash territory, there.
[insert Sal-on-knees-with-hands-in-air-and-crying-while-facing-crucifix fan art]
Naw, c’mon Walky. That’s probably just because they knew she’d eventually try to rob a convenience store. That’s all it ever was.
Indeed. It is clearly Walky’s fault for not predicting the future! That, or we are to automatically assume that racism is what happened no matter what! Something like that right?
I’m willing to guess that Walky ALWAYS got the advantage. Always got picked. Always held up on a pedestal. Always got ice cream while Sal never did. And so on.
That certainly is the easy money for where Willis has decided to take the narratives for these characters.
It’s not a matter of, “If you pick the lighter-skinned kid, you are a racist,” but “If you always pick the lighter-skinned kid, that might be a factor.”
They have the exact same skin tone. Walky is ‘whiter’ in his behaviour.
I’m pretty sure the hair thing is a big factor.
Did he get vanilla?
No one ever said it was Walky’s fault for anything about this.
And it was not about you having to automatically assume it was about racism. The problem is automatically dismissing the possibility of racism when you haven’t see anything for or against it being the cause.
People were so quick to say Sal could only be wrong. We weren’t there, we didn’t see it happening or not yet at that point. She was, and she did.
Wait, is Walky remembering this, or is this an objective flashback?
Not sure I agree with your alt-text, Willis. I’m pretty sure someone’s eaten those two’s eyes, leaving only the optic nerves.
I don’t know about you but that audition lady was REALLY dumb. WHAT’S CUTER THAN YOUNG TWINS SAYING THE SAME CUTE THING AT THE SAME TIME? WHAT?
Yeah, but at the same time, what’s creepier than young twins saying the same cute thing at the same time? Hmm?
Come play with us, Wadey…
God’s working through us
God’s working through us
Ok, maybe casting lady had the right idea.
Things I will guess:
1. Walky always got the advantage, not just in this situation.
2. Whether Sal was right or wront about Racism, she was the unfavored child in everything.
Willis you can get mad at me again for this if you want, but Sal was out of line with the racist BS. And no I am not going to call her a racist for saying it, but its a poor excuse to throw at another person, especially your own twin sibling. She’s right to feel resentment for not being the favored child, but out of line for saying what she said.
Now that being said, I hope that Sal keeps a level head when she has to deal with the uh….Arkham Asylum version of Amazi-Girl. I’m hoping she has enough in make it a good fight, or have the mad skills to reason with her at any rate. Please don’t keep us in suspense.
Yes, shame the person for pointing out racism she’s experienced, because being the Racism Pointer-Outer is an offense worse than racism itself, and it by default makes her the REAL racist.
bullet dodged phew
I know! Damn her, so horrible.
I mean it isn’t as if she has a reason. Oh hell nah! Just a damn broad screaming racism. Racism doesn’t exist – it has been proven.
Just look at twitter and facebook!
(this post is brought to you by — SARCASM – can we say sarcasm kids?)
In my experience on the subject anyone who lives a life focused on racial identity politics, be they white supremacists or social “progressives” are holding back humanity.
Consider that my “A plague on both your houses” or to use a sci-fi reference: “From my point of view the Jedi are evil!”
Then your experience is pretty limited. Not everyone has the option to ignore racial identity politics.
Although I guess you could always go through life thinking the reason certain people are favored over you again and again is all just a huge coincidence, making sure not to notice any pattern.
And furthermore, I’ve yet to meet a person who actually does “ignore” racial identity politics. They just say they do(“I don’t see color.”) and pat themselves on the back for not being racist, without ever critically examining why they have no black friends(or just the proverbial one black friend). Or to immediately jump in with “not all white people” when someone is criticizing a thing they actually experience regularly.
Not ignore it, but not letting oneself be defined by it either.
Its a pretty shallow nowhere existence to look at yourself in a group-think mentality rather than as a kick ass individual who has the drive and the will to define yourself and tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves.
When one reduces people to skin color, sexual preferences, or their political or religious beliefs, or any other classification, they reduce them from a human being into an object. And that no matter how you slice it, is bigotry.
Sadly the human race tends to do that over and over again. Even the most allegedly “tolerant” and progressive people can sometimes be the most hateful.
None of that objectification has happened here. Sal hasn’t reduced her identity or anyone else’s to a skin color. She hasn’t abandoned drive and will. She’s just pointed out that her brother has been favored, and offered an explanation why.
In my experience most cases of “progressives” reducing people to skin color would be that sort of thing: not actually reducing them, but noticing that race can affect their experiences. Maybe you’ve seen different. I’m sure in the comic, though, everything you just described is imaginary.
I’m lucky enough to not need a culture to define myself on, so I know what you mean. But your mistake is not recognizing that not everyone has the same privilege. I don’t claim to understand why some people need to hold on to some cultural or ethnic template for their identity, but as I’ve come to understand some of the enormity of the oppression these people live with I have no choice but to respect it.
Okay, let me try to be a bit nicer about this then I did when replying to Willis earlier.
I’m white as a frigging ghost, lily white – I have partial albinism (I can’t tan in some places because no melanin). Someone calls me a white cracker I don’t get offended. Why? Because whites here in good old USA did not get lynched, murdered, tortured etc less then 50 years ago. You know, a time that someone’s grandparent/parent is still alive from. I’m not assumed a hooligan because of my clothes or the color of my skin. I’m not shot and killed on the street because my music is too loud and I won’t turn it down – I’m not tailed for blocks by someone with a gun because I may be suspicious.
I don’t get offended when someone calls me a nasty Christian (I’m agnostic theist actually), because my family was never killed for their beliefs in the last 100 years. (I’m talking about Nazi Germany here). And if their were, it wasn’t something big. 9/11 does not count, that was pure terrorism plain and simple.
I don’t get offended when someone tells me to go back to where I came from (usually those that assume because I’m from MS I’m from the backward part of it – but I’m not I’m from the coast area-which still has it’s issues, but that isn’t one of them). My family was never rounded up into camps because we looked like the enemy (Asian Americans during WWII) or looked at with fear because I wore a religious piece of clothing and had the wrong colored skin.
I do however get offended when people tell Native Americans to leave their plantations and not use Casinos to raise money for that land so they can keep it – because I have Native blood very close to my surface. The trail of tears was not that long ago, and Native’s are treated like crap still by a lot of people. Including the government believe it or not.
I get offended when someone tells me to go back into the kitchen, because when my late grandmother was young she couldn’t vote – my mother more then 20 years at her current job barely makes 2 dollars over a NEW male employee they bring in to do a similar job. I can’t wear certain clothes without people thinking I’m “asking for it”. I’m a slut because I’ve slept with 7 people in my life, but the teenage boy down the lane has slept with lots more and isn’t labeled at all.
These things are not “political”, this is real life.
It happens just around the corner from you; and you see it in the news from cities not so far, or not so near you.
It happens night and day, no matter then time.
Hell, it is something that has haunted many a colored/female politician from election to term.
BUT. It can be stopped, but it cannot be stopped by not saying anything.
Women did not get anything by sitting at home twiddling their thumbs.
We did not disallow segregation by staring at the race separated bathrooms and sighing loudly.
Until people stop using the words and minute things that indicate discrimination – staying quiet about it does NOTHING. It will keep happening, and it won’t stop.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, discrimination won’t stop in a day either.
It needs all of us to work together to make things a bit brighter.
“When one reduces people to skin color, sexual preferences, or their political or religious beliefs, or any other classification, they reduce them from a human being into an object. And that no matter how you slice it, is bigotry.”
So why are Sal’s parents doing this to her?
Yes, pointing out racism is FAR worse than actual racism.
It is when one uses further racism to justify a feeling of superiority when labeling the first person as a racist.
Yeah, its a vicious cycle…and its all too likely a flaw in our human nature.
No it is not. Calling someone racist to feel superior (which I can assure you is what happens in probably only about 1% of cases) is literally, unequivocally not worse than racism.
Stahp
So… calling someone a racist makes that person superior to the racist?
I think that’s a pretty low bar to clear.
The only people who call other people racist to be superior are white folks. If you really believe that subtle racism isn’t real or being hurt by the racist behaviour of your family is wrong then you have your head so firmly up your ass you can see your breakfast digest.
Oh and Walky was at fault for not noticing/looking the other way. Just like I’m at fault for not defending a girl I went to school with who got picked on for daring to be Hispanic and join sports teams. I never joined in the bullying but I did nothing to stop it.
Stop being a dick for the sake of it.
You point of view is…naive, and I struggled for a long time to find a nice word for that.
Racism isn’t just acts of cartoonish villainy. It isn’t about tying asian people to the railroad tracks or putting a stack of dynamite under a black person’s house. It can be more subtle.
– Favoritism for job selection (often unconsciously) done by the hiring party (like in this comic).
-Refusing housing applicants for racial reasons, as practiced by that NBA owner dude (he was under felony investigation for this before his recent dumb comments).
-Lack of positive representation in media
None of these things go away if people stop talking about racism. Hell, even the cartoonish acts of violence practiced by the KKK doesn’t go away without talking about it (the dynamite example was on the nose, almost distastefully so).
I would love to know why people think these things disappear if we stop talking about them. I really would.
Did you really just cite Anakin Skywalker’s sithy temper tantrum as representative of your position?
racism will be fixed as long as poc don’t ever ever talk about it or make any one feel bad :((((
(sarcasm)
See it isn’t racism until someone says it is so by pointing out racism Sal is actually causing the racism so she’s the real racist.
Schrödinger’s Racism?
“You pointed out the racism, so you’re the REAL racist.”
“You pointed out the sexism, so you’re the REAL sexist.”
“I pointed out a dog, so I’m the REAL dog.”
I once pointed out a shitty comment on the Internet. Now I live in Youtube.
Like how Wile E. Coyote doesn’t fall off the cliff if he doesn’t look down? And it’s his own damn fault for looking down and mentally acknowledging that gravity exists?
Yeah, racism is like that. Sheesh.
Exactly! In fact, racism didn’t even exist until 1861, when a bunch of uncompensated laborers in the American South noticed that they felt all superior when they suggested that maybe their uncompensated status was somehow related to the fact that they all had dark brown skin and the job creators generous enough to employ them all had pale skin, thus becoming the first real racists.
Noted liberal progressive Abraham Lincoln (D-Illinois) invented treason in a similar fashion shortly thereafter.
(With Poe’s Law in mind, and seeing some of the apparently serious comments here (and gods only know what Willis has had to suppress), I should probably make explicit that my comments in this subthread contain approximately 9000% of your recommended daily allowance of sarcasm. Part of this complete breakfast.)
He who smelt it*, dealt it*
*racism
So she can feel resentment over not being a favored child, but isn’t allowed to articulate why? lol what?
In what world does that shit make sense? Her parents are racist and they treat Sal like shit compared to Walky. They treat Walky as the kid who can do wrong, their shining example of everything good.
But Sal? Meh, she has to prove herself worthy first. And while maybe their parents don’t explicitly say that, or anything overtly racist, it’s pretty obvious. I mean hell, when they found out Walky had a girlfriend they pretty much ignored Sal altogether.
Hell, the first thing after Mr. Walkerton said hello to Sal was an indirect criticism. “Oh, your hair’s curly again. It’s so beautiful when it’s straight”(I’m paraphrasing) Her mother basically ignored her existence altogether because Walky, the golden child, had a girlfriend.
I didn’t catch it at the time, but, having since read more on the politics of black people’s hair, it makes what is seemingly just a vaguely insensitive remark a whole lot worse.
This will be the least of Sal’s concerns once AmaziGirl swings by. Or maybe they’ll be on par…
Why would Mrs. Walkerton bring both her kids to an audition for a single part?
Because they can both audition and if one of them gets the part good for them? After all it was a writing contest they both could have entered. It’s the same concept in my books, or, well, would have been if they both could have auditioned.
No, she seemed surprised that there weren’t parts/lines available for both of them, and had to make a snap decision. That appeared to be the entire point. Otherwise she would have just simply brough Walky and not Sal in the first place, seeing as she’s apparently this huge racist, and all.
I thought that she was surprised that they were not both able to audition and that that was the cause for the snap decision.
oh dear lord
An open audition might not say how many kids they need, just ‘need kids’. Also there may have been multiple parts open, but by the time they got around to the Walkertons, there was only one part left.
They said “we only have time for”, so it seems like the agent had an allotted time limit for the open auditions.
Which seems plausible enough to me. There are probably a lot of people that show up to something like that.
…is Sal’s name bolded? aw man…
Oh wow… I wasn’t sure if it was bolded and just looks strange on my phone or if it was just me, but now I know it wasn’t the latter. Subtle, yet effective.
I noticed that, too.
I think it’s going to become obvious that Sal was always the “bad child” even before she actually became the bad child.
self-fulfilling prophecy self-fulfilled
Damn, now that you pointed that out that is giving me chills.
Walky being pensive looks weird to me. Like seeing a smiling Mike.
Who is that man? That guy that’s sitting next to Linda in panel 1. Who is he? I know I’ve seen him from the Walkyverse, or maybe even the Dumbiverse, before. Who is he?
I think he’s the guy who sold Roz that a weird ass cat.
Pretty sure that is not Davan
http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=1278
He looks like Joyce’s older brother! The one Ethan thought was cute.
older *sister.
Jocelyne is transgender
Jocelyn would be too young. But she does have an older brother.
oh…. oh no….
Well, luckily Sal was able to enjoy dressing up like a mouse later in life. In her own unique way.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-4/01-the-only-dope-for-me-is-you/bunk/
LOL I just caught that reference!
Well speaking about Sal its time for the match of the centur: SAL VS AMAZI-GIRL! I’m still conflicted about but I’m also excited.
So am I.
I think Sal has a good chance of being Amaz-girl’s match in a fight.
Dressing up as a cute little mouse is not worth losing a sister over.
It’s funny how I can feel bad for kid Sal that she didn’t get something that I know perfectly well adult Sal would be nothing but grateful to have missed out on. And yet.
As much as I like this strip, that final pose with Walky and the sudden disappearance of Dorothy has me worried.
Like, did the bottom bunk monster eat her?
There is no bottom bunk. Her computer desk is down there.
Walky needs to stop buildin’ beds on top of peoples shit, that’s just rude.
I think a lot of people (myself included) have wrongly assumed bunked beds, rather than lofted. Which is fair, because in my experience lofted beds take up a huge portion of the room and block light, and in real life you’re never in a viewing angle where the other beds presence isn’t apparent.
Funny enough, the comics just a few days ago (when Walky shows up) do a really good job of showing that the desk is under the bed.
Such a tired stereotype that the human-devouring entity has to be a monster under the bed instead of the bed itself.
Well, at least it ended on an up note.
True. Anytime Walky is actually thinking is an up note.
Now dude, about this epic fight coming up….
I got really excited for a moment because I thought that Walky was playing with Lucy and she was going to fit into DOA as a childhood friend, but of course it’s Sal. More Sal/Walky backstory is good too!
Gonna be honest here – I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to take away from this. Walkys Mum is a jerk for making a snap decision?
look at it in context of the ongoing story line discussing Walky and Sal’s childhood and racism?
No, I follow that much. What I mean is I havent seen any evidence of actual racism as yet. In all honesty after going back through the archive I’m more inclined to Sal using the accusation as a crutch. There’s a line about Walky being favourite because he’s whiter, but they have an identical skin tone. I’m not trying to be inflammatory here, promise, I just feel like this is a case of “The situation is this, because I say so” as opposed to observed character actions telling the story… Geh… I’d really like someone to tell me I’m an idiot and point out what I’ve missed, cos it makes me feel kinda like a jerk
I’m not trying to come down hard one you, but people have been pointing out and explaining the racism in this story literally every time this storyline comes up. In this very comment section, in fact, are a bunch of people explaining it. The skin tone thing has been gone over again and again and again and again. If you honestly don’t get it, there are a ton of explanations available for you. Just read the comment threads below the previous strips about this.
“The situation is this, because I say so.” Okay, but when the “I” in this case is Willis, then yes, the situation is in fact this. If he says Walky and Sal are 18 are you going to demand he produce their birth certificates? Sal said her parents were racist, and Willis said she is telling the truth. What exactly would it take to prove this to you?
….. is that an untagged Jake Manley making the casting call, or are my eyes playing tricks on me?
And here I read the comic as the casting people being racist, and Walky looking back and being like “Oh crap, they discriminated against my sister!”
Of course, BOTH is always an option.
That wouldn’t really make sense with what we’re given here. The casting person doesn’t ask for a specific Walkerton child. Just one of them.
Assuming this is the Hymmel audition, we know that Walky had to have been the one Linda chose, as he got the part and they said only one of them could audition.
Oh no! It’s Sophie’s choice.
…in reverse(?). 😛
The shoe dropped on top of Walky, finally.
Wait, was it same shoe Dorothy found in Amber’s room? 😛
Ah, here wee see Walky realising the harsh truth that his sister was right.
My least favorite part of this story arc is the comments section.
I dunno, I certainly find it informative.
That’s interesting. I didn’t even see it as Walky’s mom being given the choice. I just assumed the producers or whatever not even considering Sal for the part. As a black dude, that’s the way I’ve seen it happen. “We only have one space, I’m afraid. And this one just looks . . . like he might be more into the role.”
Also, the Walkertons might have a religious background, even if they’re not practicing. There’s this, and there’s also the fact that Sal was sent off to a catholic school.
A story:
Years ago, I worked as a computer cluster supervisor at my university. My job was to clean up the print queues, do minor tech support, and keep people from monopolizing particular machines during high-traffic times. This included the scanners in the clusters, since each cluster only had one or two computers with a scanner attached.
One day, a gentleman came in and insisted he be allowed to use a scanning computer, though the user had stepped away. I made the decision to give that user a little bit of extra time to come back. He disagreed. Somewhere in the discussion of why I wasn’t immediately booting off the user, and by discussion I meant it evolved into an argument, I tossed off the sarcastic comment alluding to my reasoning clearly being racial. (I’m white. He was unclear ancestry other than +melanin. I was 22 and at a very liberal university.) This apparently resounded clearly with him, since he stormed off to escalate to my boss. A minute or two later, the original scanner user came back. She was also +melanin, but Indian. She was apologetic for wandering off mid-scan and I got in trouble for the racism crack.
Here’s the question: was racism the actual reason I didn’t give that guy the computer or was it my executive decision to let someone keep working in spite of my being argued with? I thought it was the latter. He thought it was the former. Is it unconscious racism if I decide not to give in to the demands of someone who is +melanin in favor of another +melanin who faces fewer struggles…but whose identity I don’t know until after the fact? Does every ruling not in favor of +melanin mean unconscious racism? Was making a sarcastic comment actually giving voice to my deep racist urges or was it more a commentary on attending a school that was very social justice-oriented? (Brown)
This is why I question Sal. Sometimes, it is possible to see a decision made for reason (x) when it is made for reason (y). Even when racism is common, not every decision made against you is racist.
Your deep intentions are yours to know, but other people can only go by your behavior, and the general patterns of behavior of people in general (some of which are racist). The gentleman’s inference doesn’t seem unreasonable to me in that situation. Even if he was wrong, that doesn’t mean it was unreasonable. Unless we’re saying nobody should ever ascribe any behavior to racism ever, which is convenient for people who don’t have to deal with racism but also leads to people being wrong, because some behaviors are affected by racism.
If I understand the story properly it sounds like Karen flatout told the guy he was being denied access to the computer for racial reasons. The guy treated that statement seriously, and now Karen gets to go “Psych, I’m not really a racist”, proceeding to tell the story as an illustration of how people who perceive racism are just silly fools who don’t understand sarcasm.
Pretty much.
Actually I could go even further; as snow-white as your intentions may have been and as hilarious as your comment surely was, it sounds like the typical kind of thing to invoke stereotype threat, which has provably damaging effects, which would make a comment such as the one you apparently made, in the contentious situation you apparently made it in, a microaggression regardless of the intent behind it.
Just going from your description of the situation of course.
Thank goodness for that semicolon or that sentence would have broken my comma key. I’m not usually like this.
Since it’s impossible to know what people are actually thinking, we look at their actions for patterns, and see what kind of behavior fits those patterns.
When it comes right down to it, our definitions of behaviors are based on those patterns. It doesn’t matter what the real intent is if it matches the behavioral pattern of racism, because it amounts to the same.
For the Walkerton parents, I can think of 4 relevant behavioral data points off the top of my head:
– Walky’s ‘generically beige’ comment
– This strip
– The straight hair comment/kerfuffle
– Ignoring Sal at freshman family weekend
-(and out of strip, Willis has stated it’s racism)
Now I imagine there were more relevant bits of data that flew over my head, but this behavior fits a racist pattern.
“I tossed off the sarcastic comment alluding to my reasoning clearly being racial.”
Why? Why would you do that? How is it surprising that someone was upset by that? What did you expect to happen? You said something that came off as pretty racist (even as a joke) and someone took it that way.
I feel like you’re deliberately asking a very leading question and ignoring the part where you acted like a asshole and gave the dude every reason to think you might a racist.
Was it impossible for you to have an argument with this gentleman without bringing up race?
I mean, why the hell did you think this would strengthen your argument or diffuse the situation? That’s just you being rude AND sarcastic with a customer when it was uncalled for. Even if race wasn’t mentioned, he was right to go to your supervisor.
Wow. Customer service FAIL.
Sorry, my reply was for Karen. I agree ENTIRELY with fit-to-freak’s comment.
oh haha, I was a little confused!
I still lack compelling evidence one way or the other to make a decision on the whole Walkerton racism thing.
True. Since these comments are all over the place, that tells me Willis either failed to convey his point, or there isn’t one, or we’ll learn more about this later.
Besides, this set-up doesn’t make sense. The mother isn’t the one who should decide who goes on camera; that’s the show’s decision, no her’s. And if young Sal is darker-skinned than Walky, shouldn’t that be reflected in the art? They’re the same shade. What am I missing?
Her hair. ‘Black hair’ is known to be curly and hard to control rather than straight, like Walky’s. You see this emphasized earlier on in the comic where Sal’s hair is talked about.
“The comments are all over the place” is the same kind of response people have to global warming. One side or another having a louder megaphone does not make their point more valid!
Also, this makes perfect sense if you remember that this is an open casting call and they don’t particularly care who says the line. They’re on a time limit to get through people, and then they have to turn everyone else away – open casting calls tend to be insanely packed, as you might imagine.
What you’re missing is the context a lot of people have previously offered in the comments- talk about how the hair straightening is a race issue they’ve experienced, or how acting ‘white’ (often in that exact language) is a race issue.
Sal and Walky’s skin tones are exactly the same.
The Mother doesn’t decide who goes on camera per say, buy she is being forced to choose between two children because they only have time to audition. If she chooses Walky, and he gets the part, it would be understandable for child Sal to be jealous a little bit. If she chooses Walky because she thinks he has a better chance because he’s “generically beige,” that’s a little bit racist. If she then always chooses Walky (which seems likely based on her present treatment of Sal), that’s racism to the point of negligence.
Also, racism is not defined by skin color, but rather many factors. Willis has made a point Sal’s hair being a defining factor, a historically charged issue. See here: http://www.naturallycurly.com/curlreading/kinky-hair-type-4a/a-look-back-at-the-black-hair-story/
This is all very sad and also hits close to home for me (in a different, yet similar way). As I was the far less favored child I sometimes think about if my brother has ever had this revelation that Walky is having right now. It’s quite the thing to think about.
On the one hand I’m glad that Walky is finally realizing this, but on the other hand… this is all so sad and I am sad now =/
She could have just flipped a coin. Need to see more evidence to suggest Walky’s parents were racist against Sal.
*Walky saying he’s “Generically beige” vs. his sister being “black”
*The hair straightening thing
*This strip
*Parents completely ignoring Sal on freshman family weekend
All of which people in the comments have corroborated as real things that actually happen.
So we’re going to have this talk again. What do we need evidence for? Sal’s discrimination lawsuit? The problem is that Sal feels their parents treat her unfairly and her brother refuses to acknowledge the existence of her feelings or discuss the matter at all because the idea makes him uncomfortable. What we need is a honest conversation between the twins.
And no, I doubt we’re going to see anything obviously terrible from Mr or Mrs Walkerton that lets us hang signs around their necks that say “Cartoonishly evil racists”. They’re educated, well-meaning, forward-thinking people who just wish their daughter could have been born with straight hair because it would make her prettier; conforming just a little bit more to their ideal of what a refined, proper, civilized person should look like, not that any reasonable person would judge someone by how they look, it’s no big deal, just a tiny little sting every time you look at her next to her bright, well-behaved brother and his shiny smooth head of hair.
They are called microaggressions. Straws on a camels back. They exist.
Because in the context of the storyline this seems realistic and/or likely? We have every reason to think she made a choice, and basically no reason to think she flipped a coin. Unless you’re really really determined to ignore racism as a factor.
I just realized while thinking about Sal, if I have my continuity right-
Her parents sent her away to boarding school shortly after she got stabbed in the hand.
That is fucked up.
Oh sh*t yeah. This made me notice that she holds that hand behind her back during the entire encounter with her parents. And when Amber is saying “it’ll have to be tonight,” Sal is pulling a glove onto that hand as well.
Side note: they also sent her away after she did a stupid teenager thing (robbing a bulletproof counter with a knife) and had it backfire on her horribly to the point of permanent scarring (we assume). And so kept these twins apart for five years. As if no teenager ever acted out by breaking the law, or recklessly endangered themselves or others. I could totally see her parents focusing on her mistake and their anger, and glossing over the fact that she got stabbed, could have been shot, and what could have made her do this.
Well, in defense of Sal’s parents, for one thing I’m sure tons of teenagers act out by breaking the law, and while not all of those teenagers get sent to Catholic school I’m betting those teenagers’ parents all do something about it. If they didn’t I’d call it neglect, honestly (or a sign that the parents don’t think the behaviour is a big deal, which can be reasonable for some laws but not the ones against holding up stores with a knife, I’d say).
For another, it’s possible the knifing was actually a reason to intensify their reaction, be it reasonably or as a rationalization. Like “She got a KNIFE THROUGH THE HAND, if she keeps this up what’s next, she’ll end up KILLED, we have to stop this pattern whatever it takes“.
Well, I can agree that drastic action was probably warranted. But since in the beginning Walky says they haven’t talked in five years, and her mom still doesn’t talk to her, it seems more like they didn’t want to deal with her at all. Also, most parents would look for a solution in the tri-state area, at least.
Yeah, the fact that they hadn’t talked in five years was really odd to me. Most people I know who went to boarding school (not that there are many) came home during summer vacation and holidays. So Sal’s family didn’t even have her come home for Christmas or Thanksgiving? Or Spring break? Her parents didn’t have the twins call each other on their birthday? And since they share the same birthday, the fact that Walky’s was celebrated and, presumably, his sister’s wasn’t gives more and more credence to Sal’s stance and makes Walky look more and more like an idiot for not picking up on just how much he was favored over his sister.
More and more evidence keeps mounting in Sal’s favor that she definitely was given short shrift as compared to Walky. Plus, she has said she believes it’s due to racism (why is her word automatically discounted by so many people?), AND the author has explicitly stated race is the reason. Why are people still arguing this?
BTW, Willis, kudos to you for writing a story that shows subtle racism. It’s easy to write racism in big, broad, generic strokes, but much harder to craft a story that shows micro-aggressions and the cumulative effects of them over time. It reminds me of the Everyday Sexism project http://usa.everydaysexism.com/
Ah, I hadn’t thought of the five years, mother doesn’t want to deal with her thing. Good point.
Remember, Sal attempted robbery twice. So it was a pattern of bad behaviour that got her sent away.
well it was in the same night
Did I miss that in the comic, or is this new information? Just curious.
I’m pretty sure this is the first time we’ve been told anything at all about the robbery that Amber and Ethan weren’t there for.
…*I* just remembered that, in The Other Universe, Linda sent Sal away… as a “distraction” from Walky, who was the “real” threat.
LINDA WALKERTON
SEXIST IN EVERY UNIVERSE
dangit, did all this research over dinner and this strip is all “END OF STORYLINE” so no one will come back and read it =/
FWIW
I don’t think God works through Linda.
Woooh, nice one! 😀 So this is not just about embarrassing moments from Joyce and Walky’s childhoods. Well played, Willis sir ^^
…I think some of my brain cells committed suicide after reading the whole comment thread.
Racism? Who can tell, really, HERP DERP?
I will be so happy if there’s a later revisiting of this flashback that shows Linda flipping a coin. I mean, sure, maybe there’s subtle racism happening in this strip, but if so it’s hardly explicitly stated. (Unlike the hair thing.)
why would that make you happy? I mean, yes, it’s upsetting, but clearly we need to see depictions of racism in the media. Look at all the people who are so against the idea that it could possibly be a factor here.
I like the idea that Linda might be a human with more settings than “abuse Sal continuously argleblarglebargh”. Yes, she’s probably got some built-in preference for straight-haired Walky, the way her husband demonstrably does. Yes, she’s a horrible person who has basically given up on her criminal daughter in favor of her gonna-be-a-doctor-wether-he-knows-it-or-not son. But given what’s displayed in this comic she’s not so far being deliberately horrible, and it would be nice to see some indication that at some points in her life she is actually NOT a horrible, racist, needs-to-be-shot-in-the-face-right-now person. Just for a few moments now and then.
I have been wondering when the preferential treatment began. Now it’s possible for a person to love someone else of a different race and have children with them but still prefer for the child to have racial traits similar to their own as it’s more familiar and easier to relate to.
But another thing that I wonder if what if this moment was the major start of this favoritism. Now depending on the era and which show/programming it is they tend to use people with a racial ambiguity so anyone can sort of relate or their traits leans more towards a Caucasian persuasion so that they don’t feel “threatening”. If that is the case then they would chose the one that most represents that and that would be the child with the lighter color and straighter hair. If their mother saw this and noticed that one would be wanted more because he presents an image that people are more comfortable with she might have began to push the one that would be more likely to succeed.
But that is just a theory.
They have the same skin color. The hair is pretty starkly different though.
Well, maybe it was a joke but Walky DID say he was less black than his sister.
Yeah I was going based on what Walky said when their ‘flavor’ was questioned.
I’ll give Linda a tiny amount of credit for at least bringing both of them to the audition. At the very least on some level she wanted both of them in (and corrected clipboard lady that she had twins), even if subconsciously she had higher hopes for Walky.
Uhh, I don’t think we need to be giving credit because people didin’t fuck up as badly as they could have.
Yeah, might’ve been too expensive hiring a sitter for just Sal, and/or she didn’t want to potentially go to jail for child abandonment.
Little-kid Sal is adorable, and seeing those poofy pigtails kinda makes me wish she liked her natural hair enough to not perm and press it into ‘conformity’.
Yeah, I’m accepting the fact Sal was right about it being racially based regarding the favoritism to Walkerton. I was hoping it was something else but, honestly, if they favorited Walky because he’s a boy or smarter then it’s not exactly an IMPROVEMENT either.
For some reason, many parents I know, especially MOTHERS, always seem to prefer their boys over their girls. It always makes me sad.
It’s society’s general rule of boys vs girls… There are innumerable studies and essays detailing that boys are encouraged and driven to participate in activities outside of the home, promote or teach a workable skill, or otherwise be productive and thus the ‘breadwinner’ later in life. Girls in contrast are given dolls and taught skills pertaining to the care of the home or the care of offspring.
Whether intentionally or not, because of that, it’s assumed that when the adults are old and need to be taken care of, it will be the son and his family that take that responsibility, because he will be the breadwinner, the head of the household, and will have the financial means of providing the support to his parents. The daughter, in contrast, is assumed to be going and marrying off to another family where she will have a husband who will be the breadwinner, the decision maker, and the one who will have the financial stability and say… and any support HE provides will be to HIS parents, not hers. The boy is in the family forever, whereas the girl is given away. Couples who only have daughters and no sons are considered extremely unlucky, and only less fortunate than those who have no children.
That’s not to say it’s all like this… but many cultures center around the male being the center of the household, whereas females are delegated to subservience and having little to no say in anything. Things have changed, but that underlying and subconscious way of thinking is still very prevalent.
More seriously in my mind (as a mother of a five year old) there is a really harmful stereotype that girls mature faster so are expected to be quiet, well behaved and obedient at a really young age while little boys are allowed to be little animals with very little discipline because “boys will be boys” which I find outrageous and offensive. It makes girls into dolls and boys into animals. I made damn sure I taught my boy how to behave. Also I flat out had a woman I looked up to tell me “boys don’t like art” despite the fact my kid was constantly making things for her.
People have weird ideas about what kids should and shouldn’t do. I just let my kid be himself.
I don’t think that’s accurate that sons are expected to take care of their ailing parents, quite the opposite I thought this typically fell on daughters, as all caregiving tasks do, while sons would be assumed to have their own lives. Though your “daughters become part of a new family, sons remain in their own” is also a good point. It might depend on the culture. In modern Western societies I’m 90% sure most adult caregiving falls on adult daughters.
This doesn’t change the “sons preferred over daughters” thing – I can totally see why you’d have a certain preference for the child who’s actually gonna go out there and do stuff and be someone.
I know someone who was AFRAID when she knew she was having a girl, because she went through this whole negative, abusive thing with HER mother and grandmother and was afraid of the cycle continuing onto her daughter… then she made peace with that and found a way to break the cycle [yay!].
Also, she and Daughter are super into the same things, which alleviated another fear of hers.
[To be fair, I’d prefer boys only because I don’t think I’d be any good dealing with female puberty again, even vicariously.]
Just got my Kickstarter download notification for the Slipshine reward. Thank you, Sir Willis, you are most certainly my Pornlord.
Willis, you are right about racism. Everyone is at least a little bit racist, and pointing that out for the sake of introspection is cool. I have no problem with that. I really, truly don’t. I’m not even trying to be a smartass either. I agree with you on the topic of racism.
You already understand that many of us have not had to deal with racism because we have privelage. Of course that is why we were not able to identify what was really happening. So I apologize for that. I was wrong in my interpretation. My only real complaint in situations like this is that racism cannot always be the root cause of someone’s misfortune, and so I try not to jump to that immediate conclusion (I know that I am not the only one with that viewpoint). I’m sorry for my mistake in misinterpreting that part of your comic.
“racism cannot always be the root cause of someone’s misfortune”. No one said it was. But it often is the cause of misfortune, and it’s interesting to me that you took issue with the idea that in this one particular circumstance it was.
Because she made decisions of her own accord which resulted in her getting into trouble. I’ve already apologized to Willis for the misinterpretation.
I’m going to need more evidence that Walky and Sal once went to an audition with their mother. All we have is Walky thinking about it, and I can’t be expected to just take his experiences at face value.
ilu
I’m going to need more evidence that the entire comic isn’t just a hallucination in some autistic kid’s head. All we have is every strip in the comic, and I can’t be expected to take the evidence presented at face value.
“It’s okay sir; my children both expected to have a chance to audition and I wouldn’t want to disappoint either of them by only allowing one of them to. C’mon kids, let’s go get some pizza.”
^ THIS WAS ALSO AN OPTION, LINDA.
If a lady is pimping her kids out to play mice for fundys, she’s not likely to want to turn away from whatever small financial compensation she gets for doing so. Besides, why deprive both of your kids from a chance at showbiz and fame just because they don’t have enough open slots for the whole family?
“I will have [at least] ONE child rise to fame and fortune and support me in my old age after I SHOULD have gotten fabulously wealthy of my own accord but clearly that didn’t work!”
So basically Sal [and Walky] need to look to the future and see the life of parental co-dependency that’s coming, Sal with relief at having dodged a bullet and Walky with moritification that he’ll be the one driving Linda to the urologist every other Thursday or whatever.
Linda needs and *uro*logist?
I mean, where I am from, I have only ever noticed “uro” for men any “gyneco” for women.
But apparently that’s a misconception?
half-assed Google search:
“A urologist is a physician who has specialized knowledge and skill regarding problems of the male and female urinary tract and the male…” [didn’t bother clicking the full link]
whoops, posted too fast =p
Contrary to popular belief, the uterus has nothing to do with the urinary tract, so she probably wouldn’t see a gynecologist if she was having trouble with peeing
Okay, so I’m thinking that some people were arguing that Sal deserved to be the ‘unfavorite’ because of the whole ‘robbing a convenience store’ thing, and we’ve only ever seen the family interact post-robbery (hey, never mind that years of subtly being treated worse than a sibling could lead to lashing out). But here she’s FRIGGIN’ FOUR. How far back do we need to go?
A younger Linda Walkerton is getting an ultrasound done, and she is told she is having twins for the first time. She points to the blurry image of the male fetus and declares she likes that one better. People will continue to claim that even if she is biased, it’s totally Sal’s fault. She’s kicking too much or something.
They’ll just make stuff up. Someone up above (can’t comment on it, no reply option) justified their position by stating Sal “is willing to lie and cheat to get her way.” Do you remember Sal doing any of that? Because I sure as hell don’t.
There was the whole ‘tried to sex up her TA for better grades’ incident. That didn’t win her any sympathy points and would count as cheating. But yeah, people here make up reasons not to like certain character.
Weirdly Jason seems to have not gotten much flack even though what he did was wayyyy more wrong. You don’t give up on tutoring your students, and you don’t hook up with people you have power over.
She forced him to tutor her using brute force.
But yeah, I think Jason gets less flack because nobody really cares about him so his actions don’t really matter.
You… don’t? Is patience infinite merely because one is a teacher’s assistant?
The banging’s easier to forgive on the grounds of comedy and also having to be hounded into it by Sal.
Don’t forget that after a very young Sal robbed a convenience store, she was shipped away to boarding school.
At 14.
After being stabbed.
The more I think about it, the more fucked up it gets.
“She DESERVED to be stabbed! She held up a convenience store!”
“And why did she hold up the convenience store?”
“For attention!”
“Which she didn’t get because…?”
“Because she DESERVED it!”
“Why?”
“Because she held up a convenience store!”
“But that’s the effect. She can’t deserve past punishment for something she does in the future.”
“SHE HELD UP A CONVENIENCE STORE.”
Something like that?
I [or anyone, really] need to make a comic about victim-shaming:
“You DESERVED to be raped. You shouldn’t have dressed like a slut.”
“You DESERVED to be carjacked. You shouldn’t have bought a fancy car.”
“You DESERVED to be mugged. You shouldn’t have worn a three-piece suit and carried around loads of $20 bills.”
“You DESERVED to be murdered. You shouldn’t have been standing in the way of that bullet.”
etc.
…..I kind of do think people who drive fancy cars are asking for it. There’s no point to fancy cars other than to go ;look how much money I can afford to waste!”
Comfy seats? An air conditioner that works? A car that won’t be a piece of trash after the guarantee expires?
Timemonkey, we all spend money on things we don’t actually need for survival. Generally speaking (unless they’re neglecting their kids or something like that), it’s not for any of us to judge how others spend their spare cash.
Nah, the part that bothers me is that she’s 14. It just seems totally disproportionate for someone who is essentially a kid.
It’s slightly worse, because she was 13.
I’s like putting on the ring an realize the eye of Sauron’s always been there.
kind of sad to see the storyline ended for if nothing else joyce winds up showing the tape to billy for her reaction and thus it is the reasons she and walky don’t get along
This isn’t a flashback, you know. If Joyce showed the video to Billie, it would be in the present. That wouldn’t explain why Billie has been antagonistic toward Walky in the past. That would mean the cause happened after the effect.
Billy and Walky stopped getting along because Billy became the popular girl and Walky remained a dork.
I like that this event, which probably stuck with Sal this whole time, was completely forgotten by Walky. He didn’t even care about what he was given. It’s just so Walky. He’s completely unaware and ungrateful, while Sal has to try so hard just to be ignored.
It’s like Walky is privilege personified.
Don’t forget the comment of “I don’t need to (study)”, further embodying how easy Walky has it.
Linda Walkerton being a terrible parent? NEVER.
I sense we’re about to see the saddest audition story this side of that time when Sideshow Bob upstaged Cecil for the Krusty show. 😉
Walky should get elected President by accident. Then Dorothy and Sal can hate him together.
I don’t think Dorothy would hate him. It’s not like he’d be president forever.
Just until the “IMPEACH WALKERTON” signs go up.
I dunno.. I don’t think we have enough evidence that this is Walky remembering this interaction. For all we know it could be Ethan remembering a conversation he overheard!! We need more evidence, Willis!!
Since nobody seems to be pointing it out, the bolded letters indicate that Linda raised her voice against Sal, but not Walky, now we could take this as her voice simply raised because Sal’s name was second and she was trying to grab their attention. However in light of the whole “Sal’s mom being racist” thing, this could be an indicator of how deep-seated the issue is, possibly she isn’t even conscious of it, she is just innately more unfriendly and aggressive towards Sal
cmd1095, oooh! Good catch.
Willis, you are a master of subtle.
I just discovered this comic this past weekend and I am now caught up and I just want to say, thank you for making this beautiful series.