You have to realize that this is supposed to be ten or more years in the past. This also could be a day care center than a school. Restrictions and requirements, especially for “private” day-care faclities, weren’t as strict back then
In 200x? Yes, they were, at least to the point of not having strip mines on the property.
But you’re close. It’s the memory and perceptions of someone nine or ten years old. What’s remembered as a gaping chasm may have only been a break in the side walk.
Willis was telling us on patreon yesterday how someone got a hole punched through their jaw on his playground in elementary school because of unsafe stuff in the playground. I think this is meant to be accurate.
comic time though. they were in elementry school in the 2000’s AND in the 1700’s if someone from that time happens to currently be reading thanks to fifth dimensional bs
if this is at school they needed better fences or at least some fences. if it is their normal life stuff than it is kind playing out in the open. i went lots of random places when i was growing up
When I was in seventh and eighth grade in Florida, half of the school I was attending was still under construction, and the athletic fields had to be cleared of rattlesnakes and scorpions before we were allowed to use them. It sucked so bad it could have drained the Gulf of Mexico…and it probably is now.
Do we even know that this is at a school or daycare?
When I was a kid, if you hopped our backyard fence and cut through the woods a little ways there was a very wide creek that was usually totally dry in the summer.
I grew up in central Texas. Just in the woods alone we risked all kinds of snakes, spiders, scorpions, raccoons, opossums, feral cats and dogs with who-knows-what diseases. Then, the draw of the creek bed was:
1) going under the bridge where a fairly major road crossed it. The spring rains would wash all kinds of debris down the creek and a lot of it would get caught under the bridge for us to find in the summer.
2) There is a massive underground system of caverns and underground lakes just below the surface of much of central Texas. When the creek was dry, there were cave openings just big enough to maybe poke in our heads and shoulders. We’d stick our heads in and a hand or arm and swing a flashlight around to see around the little cave openings.
There was usually only a very small opening with trash or a thick layer of silt, but we always hoped we’d find buried treasure, an opening in to a massive cave, or a colony of bats.
Only as an adult did I look back and realize that waking a colony of bats while your head is plugging the only exit point likely wouldn’t have been as cool as we imagined. Also that as small as most of these spaces were, we could have unwittingly come across a rattlesnake den, or uncovered brown recluse spiders or tarantulas, or any of a number of other dangerous critters.
We also could have easily broken a bone on the limestone rocks or the concrete under the bridge.
Anyway, sometimes someone’s parent (why they knowingly let us play there, I’ve no idea.) or older sibling would come down there to tell their kid/sibling it was time to come home.
So, I guess all that was to say what if this isn’t a teacher, but an older sibling or babysitter? And maybe the kids are just playing wherever it is in their neighborhood that kids have room to congregate?
At a guess, it’s a Don’t Go Beyond The Fence situation, and Leland edged the conflict outside the fence. My elementary school didn’t have a fully fenced in playground until I was in…second grade, maybe? And there was no problem with the kids running off to play in the street that I’m aware of. Considering how old the school was by the time I hit grade 2, there’d definitely have been a fuss if the kids were wandering off.
I’m less concerned about the drop and more concerned about what looks like random pieces of sharp jagged metal sticking out of random bits of broken concrete. Marcie’s lucky she wasn’t just impaled.
When i was in school there was a really cool ravine nearby we played tag in at lunch. However, did it have hunks of concrete with rebar poking out of it? No.
Anyone else notice there was a good chance of her dying???
1. I totes think this park sounds fuckin’ awesome, though
2. the cast seems a bit young for it, besides that
3. “altercations” like this aren’t part of the appeal of the park
unrelatedly, if I don’t seem to comment on much other than first (or sometimes last) post, I seem to be having this issue where DoA *specifically* chokes when trying to post comments due to some plug-in failing and I can’t figure out for the life of me why
so far but there was one guy that seemed nice but was a rapist. plus this is a flashback while he might have stayed the same he also might have changed. assuming of course he will show up in the current time frames. also i wonder if he has any family connections to anyone perhaps a cousin.
What makes you think Marcie’s mutism is ‘selective’? As an adult, I have never heard her speak at all. She does occasionally growl or sigh, but no actual words.
Now, AS A KID, she speaks, and many have expounded upon the reason for the change. If this is it, it hasn’t taken effect YET.
Is he new? When I first saw it, I thought that This was implying that Leland andthe person who drugged Joyce were the same person. Do we have a name for the rapist yet? And if we do, could he have just lied about it? Is this a moment for Sal and Amazigirl to put aside there differences and take down the real monster? NEXT TIME ON DUMBING OF AGE!
Yeah, Ryan the Rapist’s name has been known for a while.
That said, this comic tells us quite a bit. Marcie’s been bullied as a child – if this was a constant, pervasive thing, it may explain her interest in roller derby and security. She wants to be tough and un-bulliable.
It also further explains Sal’s history – she may have started getting into fights by attacking Marcie’s tormentors. Bullies are definitely a trigger for her.
And she most certainly got in trouble for attacking said bullies, because That’s How Things Work, which also further explains Sal’s fatalism and cynicism.
I’m going to put this here to make it easier to spot:
Getting mad at Walky when he’s also a victim here was really crappy of me, and want I apologize to everyone here for it.
Mr. Willis has created a wonderful safe space for people here and the thought that I might have tarnished that even a little is completely abhorrent to me.
That is very kind of you.
I can see your frustration, though. My older brother had a talk with my parents when the kids at school tried to turn us against each other. He was 5 or 6, I was 3 and just starting school. My brother was very concerned because he was loyal to his friends but also loyal to me. My parents told him siblings first, and he was relieved to know what to do. I doubt it would occur to the Walkertons that mini-David and mini-Sally ought to be a team, and that’s sad.
Leland is an asshole and a very confident bully. And Walky is obviously more afraid of being at the receiving end of his bullying than concerned with keeping his sister out of trouble.
No wonder Sal’s got so much hate inside her.
No, he’s a colossal asshat. I know most kids actually had some sense of self-preservation, unlike I did at that age, but I’m still a little disappointed in Walky
I do not blame Walky in the slightest. I had my own personal Leland from late elementary on through high school and he pretty much made it his mission to subtlely isolate me from all my peers throughout my middle school years. When I was in high school, I had the bright idea of telling him I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. He then grabbed a broom and proceeded to beat the fear back into me. And that’s when I learned that the whole “Bullies are cowards” narrative I had been fed was bullshit.
Its just that the teacher is right there. Sure, I know she won’t be forever, but bullies like that are just something that just makes me viscerally angry. And I also remember just how much it would have meant if to me if to have someone do that for me when I was getting bullied.
Which is also the only reason I stood up to them when I was a kid. I wasn’t brave, just too mad not to. And yeah, even when I didn’t lose the fight it didn’t do much to discourage them.
So while I don’t blame him, I would have really liked it if he’d stood up for Sal here. Though I’m going to be seriously pissed if this teacher actually believes this with the kid visibly threatening Walky right in front of her.
Self-sacrifice and helping others are things that are a lot easier to say than do, sadly.
The thing about bullies that infuriates me more than anything is that real bullies, or at least the kind I’m used to, aren’t something you can “win” against; not in a way that they will accept as a loss, at any rate. And they will keep going, for as long as they can sustain themselves. React emotionally? That’s just what they wanted! Go to an authority figure? They’ll just bully you when the grownups aren’t watching. Don’t react at all? Well, that must mean you don’t mind if they continue! Fight back? You get in trouble too, which was definitely their plan all along! (it wasn’t, but they’ll pretend it was just so they can maintain a victorious image) They will twist reality itself to maintain a sense of superiority, even rewriting their own memories if they have to.
And your second paragraph is probably why I ended up opting to fight most of the time. If no strategy actually seemed to work, I might as well go with the one that’s at least satisfying, even in failure.
Then again, as a white kid in a suburban school in a nice area, I probably had a lot less reason to fear getting seriously hurt than Walky does.
I switched which wrist I wore my watch on, so that when he punched me he tore his hand open. That seemed to do the job. (we sat adjacent to each other in class and he’d lean over and slug me in the shoulder as hard as he could whenever no one was looking…among other things).
I am fully aware however that I was incredibly lucky that that was the farthest physical bullying ever went against me and that that was all it took to stop that particular incident. Plenty of kids end up with bullies who are far more physically capable than they are and who won’t back down from retaliation. In other words, some kids end up with bullies against whom they can not push harder than the bully can push them. Verbal stuff is another matter, but that didn’t bother me nearly as much.
I was bullied by this one super annoying girl who thought she was tough sh**, and let it slide for a while, but at one point she tried to slap me for supposedly calling her sister fat, so I shoved her onto the floor of the bus and started yanking her hair with my foot on her throat as she was flailing to try and scratch my face. When the bus driver separated us she tried to say that she planned the whole thing, but everyone was laughing at her for getting her butt handed to her. She never bothered me, or anyone else that I know of, again. She was suspended for a week and I got 2 paddlings from the principal. Totally worth it.
My point here is, if you fight them and shrug off the fact that you got in trouble, bullies do tend to leave you alone. To the girl who was hit with a broom: I would have found something to beat that bully back with! Self-defense!
If you fight them and win, sometimes that works. Assuming they don’t just come back with friends. It depends entirely on the type of bully.
I almost always fought back, and I sometimes even won, but I still had a set of regular bullies who would pick fights with me, because they just liked fighting and hated nerds.
And there were the times were a kid I never met before would just punch me in the gut while passing by in the hallway. I was well known as an uncool spaz, so mistreating me earned you popularity points!
There was also an incident I remember from 7th grade where I some much larger 8th grader decided I was in his way while everyone was crowding through the main entrance to the school. Having no sense of self-preservation, I shoved him right back. So he punched me. Then I kicked him in the balls, and attempted to make my escape, only to run into two of his also very large friends.
I ended up blacking out briefly and coming to moments later in a heap on the floor.
I’ve no regrets about it, but fighting back is definitely NOT always effective.
That’s exactly the situation, as I can attest to from my own personal experience from about second grade through the end of high school (a couple of incidents in middle school and high school should have led to criminal charges, but of course nobody saw anything). There are people I grew up with who I could watch drown, plunge to their deaths or get hit by a bus and not shed a single tear for. And this is 35-45 years later.
“Ignore them and they’ll go away” is something useless adults say to comfort themselves when a child is suffering and they don’t know how to stop it.
Different bullies, different methods, but I have a fond memory of when – in 8th grade – I stopped persistent bully cold. She said she’d beat me up after school. I told her loudly, in front of everyone, that “Yeah, you can absolutely kick my ass and I can’t stop you.” Then, to her, I said “that’s why I’m going to go for your eyes as hard as I can on the way down.”
She told everyone I gave up and I never heard a peep from her again.
The teacher who’s currently restraining him and Sal, barely concerning herself with the actual attacker, and apparently entirely unconcerned by the severely injured child right in front of her?
Walky should be braver because he’s being backed up by that teacher?
Sounds like most of the teachers I had in elementary school. They gave no shits unless something happened right in front of them. “Don’t believe any stories you didn’t directly observe, because they’re ‘just kids’ and they’re probably making everything up. Their little problems are unimportant anyway (which may be true, but it’s their entire world so it’s important to them). A little roughousing is fine, boys will be boys.”
And what did they tell us to do about bullies? “Just ignore them, they’ll get bored and go away.”
The single biggest lie told by teachers is “Just ignore them, they’ll get bored and go away.” The worst possible advice to give to a kid who is being tormented constantly by kids who have as much as ten months’ growth on him.
Well, that strategy can work sometimes. Learning and applying “the cut direct” is probably the reason I am not dead or in prison now.
But my problem was more people goading me into attacking them than being attacked. (The bigger problem was honesty and believing society’s lies about justice and fairness.)
That’s a pretty rude response to someone who wasn’t insulting anyone but a fictional eight year old, and halfheartedly at that. I get people standing up for kids intimidated into silence, but calling someone a fucking idiot and telling them to shut up for being disappointed in a character for not standing up for their sister, (even when it’s dangerous for them to do so), is pretty extreme.
It’s a little ruder than necessary, but he’s not entirely unjustified. In retrospect it does look a bit shitty to get mad at Walky first in this situation.
I just know from experience how much it hurts to get bullied as a kid and find out that a friend doesn’t actually have your back. My best friend at the time didn’t want anyone to know we were friends in middle school, because he didn’t want the kids bullying me to target him as well. I understood why, but it still hurt. Its not helped by how I can’t think of a single instance until high school when one of my friends (or any other kids, for that matter) actually tried to intervene in any way when some asshole decided it was time to play “beat up / harass the nerdy spaz”.
So that’s the part of this that is the most frustrating for me. Its still definitely the bully who actually is the asshole here.
Yeah, imho the cursing and insults were beyond ruder than necessary. I’m a victim myself and I got where you were coming from. I was always the person putting myself in harm’s way to do the right thing, and it stung so much when no one would do the same for me. I resented friends and family for not standing up for me when I did so for them and that’s a valid feeling. It’s okay to feel disappointed with people, even if their behavior is understandable. Obviously the bully is the main aggressor here, but I think it’s okay to remember those feelings of being let down and betrayed when people you trusted didn’t help you when you needed it.
True, but it’s clear that not everyone’s experience was sufficiently similar for my reasons to be obvious, and pausing for a moment to provide some explanation up front would have gone a long way.
Even a limited subject like schoolyard bullying seems to varies in more than just intensity and duration, but is a horrifying kaleidoscopic rainbow of shitty experiences.
Sal and even possibly Marcie are not regularly bullied by Leland. Look at her face in the second panel, she’s shocked. This does not appear to be a regular scenario for her.
Walky’s reaction on the other hand clearly shows that he has met Leland before.
Basically, while Walky may not be the direct victim here, I deduce that he is more constantly the victim than Sal or Marcie.
Also, I am sorry for being rude, I would by the a cookie but I have no idea who you are.
It’s completely forgiven. I didn’t realize at all how victim-blamey it sounded / was absent any explanation.
You’re probably right about Walky being quite familiar with Leland already. I definitely remember the bullies at my school seemed to have a short list of their favorite targets, and I strongly doubt anyone messed with Sal on a regular basis.
@some1 walky’s made repeated reference to getting shoved into lockers etc, so it wouldn’t shock me to learn that Leland here was one of the shovers at some point.
Long-time reader, sporradic commenter (and I had insomnia last night so I just binge-read all the strips I’d missed over the past few months). While I agree that Some1’s response was rude, I was also someone who was bullied as a child. Even if the teacher was standing RIGHT THERE, I knew that if I “told” on the bully I would land up facing some pretty terrible consequences from them later. If I kept my mouth mostly shut, I could avoid some of their abuse. I know that’s not a terribly noble thing to admit, but when you’re a kid who has been consistently bullied, you get really scared and fall into a “survival” type of mentality.
And – I am NOT making this up – on some occasions when I did try to talk to the teachers about how other people or I were being bullied, I was flat-out told, “Nobody likes a tattletale.” (Quick note: my adult memory realizes that maybe ONE bad teacher out of an elementary school full of DOZENS of good teachers said that to me, but at the time it made me feel like I dare not say anything but just try to stay quiet and out of the way.)
That is just an IMPRESSIVELY shitty teacher, all the more so because of how that would completely taint how you would expect other teachers to react. But you did nothing shameful.
This is making me see that I was more fortunate than I realized when it came to how safe it was for me to fight back. Most of my teachers were (or at least not terrible), and most of them actually liked me a lot in spite of how often I was in trouble.
I think I know now how Joyce felt when she realized not all dads are good people.
Ugh! I hated that attitude from teachers. I remember when I was being taunted regularly in elementary school and being told that I needed to “get a thicker skin”. As though my peers chanting hurtful things about me was a sign of my own weakness. I’m sorry you dealt with that.
Translation: “I can’t be bothered to solve your little problem for you. Go away.”
The worst thing I remember about childhood is adults not taking you seriously. Sure the pending threat of nuclear armageddon looms large in your mind, but to a kid the threat of being beaten up in a remote corner during recess is just as important.
I was actually put in counseling for a while for “anger management”. Because apparently I had a temper problem, and not other kids trying to beat me up on a regular basis. The counselor was actually an okay guy though, and I think was the reason they stopped forcing me to go before very long. But still, a really great message to send.
“Not only are we going to do almost nothing to address the actual bullying, but there must be something wrong with you to make you so upset about it”
Throughout my life, I’ve had my friends’ backs, friends have had mine, and my friends have had each others. I get pushed around by some scumbag? I’m the one holding back my buddy from slamming him into the wall. Moron calls my friend an idiot? I have his failing math grade taped to the wall within the hour. One of my friends sees my other one crying? He asks if someone needs to, and I quote, “be shanked because I’m Puerto Rican and I can do that”. (Nobody was shanked on that day, because it was a family thing.)
Because of this, my first reaction to someone not standing up and saying something is to think of them as either a coward or a collaborator.
Of course, in the long run, I’ll still forgive them within seconds and acknowledge the fact that not everyone is as BRAVE and COURAGEOUS (read: arrogant and filled to the brim with invincibility complex) as me.
I just wanted to let you know that you’re not alone in having that immediate reaction.
Long ago, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, there was a child actor named Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer. Young Carl was quite the prankster, bringing chaos and mayhem to the set every chance he got.
George Sidney directed most of Carl’s films at the time. He hated children, and he hated Carl most of all. One day, Mr. Sidney called Carl over.
“When you turn twenty-one,” said Mr. Sidney, “I’m gonna find you and beat the shit out of you.”
That said, I hope that’s what happens to Leland when he finally reaches that age.
Yeah, but that’s Billie right there, the girl with the super rich parents, and aren’t the Walkertons well off too? There have gotta be some parents at this school with suing money.
My middle school was literally crumbling, there were chunks of concrete on the front stairs that used to be part of the facade. I remember I thought it was lucky that nobody got brained. (Rural mountain town, 1995, unlikely to have been fixed since then.)
You know, people complain that kids today are too safe, but a playground with a lack of concrete blocks and exposed reinforcing steel would probably have been a better choice.
Supposedly, he’s great at killing non-superheroes. The problem is, he’s a supervillain in a superhero universe and is therefore designed to be defeated.
Ah well, at least he always seems to have a good time even when he loses.
Gwen’s entire shtick is that even though she has no powers and is inept in a fight, she’s from our universe and is aware she’s the main character, so she thinks she’s invincible, because only “extras” get killed permanently. She also knows who everyone else is, so she’d consider Arcade a total joke.
Yeah. That whole series is kinda amazing, and written by the guy who created Dr. Mcninja.
She’s not Gwen Stacy, and she’s not Deadpool. She’s a regular comic book fan from “our” universe, who somehow ended up in the Marvel ‘verse. She can’t fight and has no powers, but she’s a comic book fan so she knows everybody’s secrets.
And she’s convinced that the whole universe she’s in is fictional (that it’s real to the people there doesn’t really register), so it doesn’t matter if she kills people or causes destruction, because it’ll all just get retconned or ignored anyway. And the reason she’s trying to be a superhero is so she gets her own book (it worked!), because then A) people in our world will read about her, thus making us aware of what happened to her, and B) if she’s a main character she’s invincible, because popular heroes never die or stay dead for long.
Just got into Squirrel Girl, and am loving that one, but I have always been a fan of Ryan North, so no surprise there. Gwenpool sounds to be in a similar style, and if it is by the same guy who did Dr. McNinja, it is a double win. So I will give it a go, thanks for the info.
I hear you. I miss it, too. I just keep telling myself that when we’re done reading through the early Walkyverse strips, I can re-binge-read Shortpacked…
Well, THAT’S one inattentive teacher. Looking right at the kid with the leer and fist, the phrasing of his version of events, Walky’s phrasing of his “confirmation”, and she’s probably gonna end up letting Leland off the hook to add to Sal’s trauma.
She’d be on my list of Educators I Want To Go Back In Time And Shake Some Sense Into for sure.
Worse than inattentive. Anyone think it’s pure chance that the only version of events she’s interested in is the one from the white male? No?
The band-aid Marcie is already wearing suggests this isn’t the first of these events, and what we know of later Sal tells us it’s not the last. By a long shot. Grrrrr.
(and is this the first time we’ve seen Marcie without glasses? though we did once see her eyes deathglare clean through the goggletint)
Yeah, Walky’s phrasing is pretty much “How obvious can I be that I’m only saying this to save my skin, while not actually getting beaten up for it later.”
Teacher knows exactly what happened. Teacher doesn’t care. Teacher just wants to avoid paperwork: if everyone says everything’s fine, then everything’s fine.
If anyone (like Sal) does have a problem, they’re the ones causing a disruption (for the Teacher) and need to be punished.
Also, Teacher is almost certainly making certain assumptions here (thank you, institutionalized racism) when she grabs hold of two of the black kids and stands between the other kids of color and the white kid while trying to “sort out” what’s going on.
Sal more than obviously gets it, Walky doesn’t get it at all, and Billie looks like she has no idea what’s going on or why but is afraid to say anything, along with the other dude in the background.
That suggests Teacher probably has a habit of doing this during disputes. :/
I think this may be a dream more than a flashback (“overwhelming charisma” does not seem like a phrase that would be uttered by grade-schoolers)(but it may be a dream that reflects reality).
It does remind me, though, that I was thinking that whatever enraged Sal enough to hold up a convenience store (and take a hostage?) may well have had something to do with Marcie being harmed.
Some families really are that highly verbal. My brothers and I could’ve said that in grade school. Heck, in junior kindergarten, at age four, my brother answered that his favorite shape was an hexagon.
Not quite a flashback, but Sal’s memory. She remembers her brother not having her back and being extra wordy about it. Sal will remember getting in trouble for this old episode, just like she is getting in trouble in the present for something she isn’t to blame for.
Dollars to donuts that Sal kicked Leland’s butt into the next state and it got her in HUGE trouble. I predict we’re seeing the beginning of Marcie’s and Sal’s friendship as well as Sal’s “descent into hooliganism” as her mother would probably say.
what kind of name is Leland anyway
The first person I think of when I hear the name Leland is Leland Yee, a California state senator who got arrested on corruption and drug trafficking charges. I believe there is a bill on the CA November ballot to the effect of making it easier to “fire” state legislators when something like that happens because the state was having a hard time figuring out how they could legally stop sending him his paycheck.
I still think it might be ‘well if that’s what everyone says I am, I should be actually doing it and getting (paid?)’ thing, but that is a sad option. Or Marcie wanted (a thing) while she was in the hospital and Sal’s mom wouldn’t buy it (maybe bc she ‘always knew that girl (Marcie) was a troublemaker’) or just because she wouldn’t listen to her.
You know what… I am just going to walk away from this one for a few hours. It’s a good strip, but it just sets off a whole lot of rage sensors right now.
Can’t say as I blame Walky for backing down: but I was like Sal. I would of creamed the asshole right then and there.
If I couldn’t have done it then, I would come up behind him with a brick when he wasn’t looking – and neither was that type of teacher.
Teacher sure is concerned about Marcie….
Yeah, I wasn’t someone who started fights in school ever, but especially in elementary school, I was more than willing to end whoever started it, especially with my friends (and, tbh, I was really small. like, second smallest in my grade. it worked to my advantage as far as getting into trouble). Though honestly if I was walky (therefor maybe not really Marcie’s friend) I’d just tell the truth and hope they weren’t dumb enough to try to beat me up right after getting in trouble for hurting someone else. But I don’t know the dynamic at their school so I don’t blame him either (though he could tell later, then anyone at the scene could have done it)
(by the time I was in high school I just got venomous with my tongue. unfortunately not literally.)
Teacher should be worried, Marcie just banged her head on rocks, even if there aren’t other reasons (eg Marcie being frequently bullied)
bullied), but it’s telling that she hasn’t even done a head/neck check of any kind (considering Marcie still isn’t up). She might have just wanted to stop the fight first, but it doesn’t give me confidence.
Wasn’t sure if it had been explained in some other corner of the Walkyverse. But it sure sounds like a plausible backstory for Marcie’s muteness to me.
In the Walkyverse, Marcie can actually talk but chooses not to.
In the Dumbiverse, Marcie could talk when she was a kid, but went mute due to some unspecified illness or injury, and Sal learned sign language with her so they could still talk.
The fact that the cause of Marcie’s muteness was left undisclosed means folks have been speculating for awhile.
Wonder if this may be one of the reasons for Sal’s rebellious streak or Sal may start to see Amazi-Girl as Leland in the same way Amazi-Girl sees young Sal.
I’d guess it was incidents like this that firmly entrenched her beliefs that authority figures are not allies and that the “system” will not support those like her and Marcie.
Mine had a real blindspot when it came to boys. ’cause the boys in our school would get violent all the time, sometines as a game, sometimes not, and mostly it would be ignored as long as no girls were involved. Of course I enjoyed that blindspot when I was playing fighting, but that lead to some bad days in the long run
my real first name (this is middle) is weird (well known bc of a celebrity, but not common enough to be on historical name data). so I never get it in these situations, but always if I see any celebrity things.
I have a name that is very rare as a first name, but only fairly uncommnon as a last name. I’m always delighted when I see a fictional character with that name. I only know of two or three, one of whom is a Critical Role NPC.
(that’s all the characters from the cast page, and I can’t think of any groups from the more minor characters… -Possibly- Raidah and her posse, but I know of no evidence on way or the other whether they met each other before college or at college)
Going to the same in-state university as 2 or 3 of your friends (well, 2 of your friends and a sibling, or 2 of your friends and a split personality) really isn’t so uncommon that this is at all disproportionate from reality.
If your concern is the addition of Leland, please note that there is no current evidence whatsoever that Leland goes to Indiana University. This is his first comic appearance, and there is nothing to suggest he will appear again outside of further flashbacks.
Did Dorothy, Danny, and Joe all know each other since kindergarten? I thought it was maybe more Dorothy knew them from middle/high school, and Danny and Joe knew each other longer. Same with Amber, Ethan, and Mike- they’ve known each other for a while, but I don’t know if it’s all the way since kindergarten, at least for all three of them.
(I get the impression that Amazi-Girl is a fairly recent addition- at least in the past few years. She wasn’t around until after the convenience store incident at least.)
Considering that Amazi-Girl defines the robbery as something that Sal did to her as well as Amber, yeah, Amber starting to dissociate is a fairly recent occurrence. Amber used to define Amazi-Girl as a mask that Danny could never love, and then she became insistent that it was AG who was dating him.
The first concrete sign we got was when Amber said that Amazi-Girl should approach every instance of underaged drinking the same way, but Amber can be inconsistent.
I don’t have a specific strip to link, but my impression’s always been that Ethan and Amber go way back. Maybe not as far as kindergarten, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did. But, again, Mike could easily be a more recent addition.
My list was intended to be any group of people in the main cast who came in already knowing each other prior to college, even if it was just high school. Hence my phrasing for the rest, ‘No known pre-college friends’. About the only thing I’m not counting is that one girl Billie ran into that one time that she knew from high school whose name I forget, because that friendship clearly ended even before college, and Sal’s chance encounter with Amber and Ethan that one could technically use to join those two groups, but it really wasn’t any kind of meaningful interaction.
…I mean, it was MEANINGFUL, but not…. You know what I mean.
If I stare at Panel 1 long enough, it eventually becomes clear that the way Marcie’s drawn *is* actually anatomically possible and not weird at all. But upon first glance, she looks like a human pretzel. It’s weird, and I don’t know why my mind is processing it that way. Possibly it’s all the blue, making it look like a Picasso painting?
It didn’t look weird to me until I gave it more than a glance due to your comment. I think the lines of the jacket are conspiring to make it appear more pretzel-y than it actually is.
Stating this as a man myself. Boys will be boys is such a horrible saying. Like every time I’ve heard it, it’s just been an excuse to justify violence or other abhorrent behavior and for some reason associates it to being male….Bad saying! Bad! No! Go sit in a corner till you’ve learned your lesson!
i feel like this is the same as saying “man up” when a boy cries. I sometimes think the two are related. i mean if you can’t get your emotions out through tears they might bubble up in other ways.
I believe it’s referred to as ‘Toxic Masculinity’. It’s that seeming weird form of, what, male sexism? Not as bad as the opposite, obviously, but still not good.
There was one random asshole who tried to state that Joyce’s glassing of his face was a sign of Joyce’s abuse of others and tried to downplay what Ryan did to make him out like the victim of an assault…
I don’t understand why the positioning is the way it is in the last panel. Wouldn’t Sal be the one close to the bully? Why did Walky interject and run past Sal only to instantly back down? Why are the grounds so unsafe? Looks like a nightmare scenario in general.
How much time passed? From the left to the right it seems as if the teach had to see everything and be in close proximity given her response time as well as stop the altercation before blows were traded. However if she was farther away she would have arrived during a fight. This might explain why Walky’s position changed so drastically because he was preventing it.
I’m more surprised Leland didn’t have a friend or two to help him.
That’s what happened to me. There were three primary bullies. Two of them would ambush me and beat me to a pulp. The third would *just happen* to be nearby to tell the school administrators that I started the fight.
Of course, since one of them was the vice principal’s son, there wasn’t much I could do. After sixth grade, my mom took me out of school and homeschooled me. (Oh, the school begged her not to. Besides being a ‘gifted student’, I had several other issues that led to me counting for several times what a normal student would when it comes to funding.)
I’m firmly convinced that, had I remained in public school, I would have ended up dead before I could graduate. I don’t mean that as an exaggeration or to be facetious: even if the bullies never beat me to death, I would have taken my own life long before the end of high school.
They’re the life experiences of Sal and Marcie, showing the strong connections they made and the fierce protectiveness Sal has for her friends. It shows Walky’s response to bullying which is understandable but part of why she has trouble fully opening up to him.
It shows the build-up of Sal’s rage at injustice at a young age, which has been a key theme in the Amazi-girl/Sal conflict because Sal recognized a lot of her old self in AG’s behavior. It also hints that Sal’s robbing of the bank may have been related to Marcie in some way, especially as it’s implied something happened between this flashback and now to render her mute.
Additionally, it starts to build up a piece of why Sal is so hostile regarding authorities. If this was the level of support she got from teachers and schools, where she was given the majority of the intervention and holding back by teachers than her white bullies? Then, yeah…
But short answer, characterization, context, all that good jazz.
Thx.
She robbed a bank too? I didnt remember that.
They are good characterizations esp for Marcie , as Willis gives her a lot more language.
In the present Willis , doesnt give her a lot of words. ( yes I know shes mute ) . Its great to have representation of Signing but her overall presented lack of word count , has reduced Marcie to a sidekick. I think Joe has had more non-spoken language in comic now , than Marcie.
( Willis If you are reading this I nominate Marcie to get her own Chapter ( Like Dina, ) where we get her own internal monologue. I dont want her to be a sidekick any more. She’s Sals best friend but most of her thoughts, and external life is off the page. )
I was just expecting the previous Flashback to be more relevant plotwise to that chapter. I ended up looking extra hard for connections, and why Willis posted it there , and i didnt find any. Maybe it was too subtle for me. I was expecting some sort of rhyme or foreshadowing. It would have been amazing if it was posted before we learned of Amazigirls creation/ red panels.
If this comment seems tortuously awkward its because I wanted to write about “voice” and its lack in the metaphorical written sense of ‘writers voice’ and personal agency and self-narrative ; in that I want Marcie to have more of one in the present. But I dont know the ASL equivalent of the Voice-metaphor , so I used “words” and “language” and half think It might be sound offensive.
OK I just realized Leland and the teacher are the only white Anglos.
and Teach instantly Blames the Walkertons and the White fuckface *
set the narrative.
More racism.
it can be read as Why Sal struck Amazigirl first. Letting Amazigirl attack her or Marcie first makes no sense, especially when she will get Blamed even when innocent
I don’t think Sal robbing those stores was about Marcie. I’m pretty sure it was, entirely, about doing stupid violent shit to make her parents pay attention to her.
If she was stealing money for Marcie, I think we would have gotten some kind of indication. Like she was carrying a bag with her or something.
I can’t imagine you’d really NEED a bag to carry the amount of money that was in that till… Just a couple decent pockets. Or just take a bag from the store.
As for her motives, they’ve really only been discussed speculatively even in-comic, and I can’t think of anyone other than Walky who has brought it up. His source of information would be his parents, and I think we can all agree that they really weren’t paying enough attention to know what happened (if they had been, would we really have interpreted this as a cry for help in the first place?).
Don’t get me wrong, getting her parents’ attention may very well have been a huge factor in her decision, or even the only factor. We don’t know what happened in the (I’m guessing) five years between this strip and the robbery. But it’s not like Willis hasn’t kept details like this hidden before (e.g., Amazi-Girl’s origins, whatever happened between Jordan and Carol). It’s why a lot of us keep coming back; good storytelling.
Yeah, I think this flashback series is going to be good for me. Wall of text follows.
Becky, Carla and Jocelyne have resonated strongly with me; Jocelyne especially so. I was assigned male at birth in a fairly conservative Christian community. I internalized a lot of really toxic ideas about sexuality growing up. “Homosexuality is an abomination.” “Trans people are corrupting God’s perfect will.” Popular culture even got into the act. Crocodile Dundee had that dreadful scene where Dundee sexually assaults a trans woman a bar and everyone cheers. We were supposed to cheer along.
As I aged, I began to discover that masculinity felt like a borrowed suit; it fit well enough that I could wear it and it got me in at the club, but I was increasingly aware that it wasn’t mine and it was starting to chafe. In the midst all the torment of feeling like I was somehow corrupted and sinful, I was suddenly aware that I was in an environment that felt VERY unsafe.
That’s why those stories hit me so hard. Every sideways glance, every snide remark, every stutter followed by a weak excuse to be somewhere else, they all felt like a punch to the gut. Watching Jocelyne as she watched her family, keeping track of who she might be able to trust and who she definitely can’t, felt far too familiar. Seeing the pain on her face of hearing Joyce say she’s always wanted a sister. That’s why it meant so much to see Hank make the decision to love and support Becky in spite of his religious upbringing. I’m hopeful we’ll see Hank do the same For Jocelyne some day.
Those stories resonated with me in a way Sal’s has not. While I am cognizant of racism, I don’t always recognize it. Racism manifests in different ways than transphobia and I don’t have those experiences. I see some of it, sure, but I have massive blind spots. When the issue of racism among the Walkertons themselves came up, I was incredulous, but I knew well enough to take it seriously and open myself up to seeing it. There was a time I would have been among those insisting the crowd at the rally probably wasn’t racist. I am getting better. This comic is helping.
I’ve had a few moments of sudden realization of the background radiation of racism in Sal’s life. A few days ago, Emperor Norton II mentioned (in a staggeringly beautiful post) people touching the hair of people of color without permission. My reaction at first was “Oh, yeah. That’s a thing. I have heard that before.” Then I remembered Joyce’s obsession with Sal’s hair. Specifically, Joyce is obsessed with Sal’s chemically straightened hair which is yet another sensitive issue. I had initially dismissed it as Joyce’s sweet, naive earnestness; annoying but harmless. Suddenly, it seemed like yet another very valid reason for Sal’s initial distaste for Joyce. When Sal mentioned that Joyce “felt real” for the first time, I thought “Well, she’s kind of gotten over that weird idol worship thing she had for Sal… OH GOD! She’s been practically fetishizing Sal this whole time and interacting with her like she ISN’T A REAL PERSON!” It wasn’t just annoying, it was genuinely dehumanizing. I didn’t see it because, to me, Joyce was putting Sal on a pedestal. It wasn’t malicious so I didn’t see it as harmful.
That’s why, while I LOVED the focus on Becky, Ruth, Carla and Jocelyne in the last book, I am very excited to see Sal get some significant screen time. The last book was important to me because resonated with me so well. Sal is important to me precisely because she doesn’t, but she should.
Wow. This comment was so good I actually feel like commenting myself. Text wall incoming? Is that how this works?
Racism isn’t a one way street, it’s a muti directional intersection. Sal’s and by extension the Walkerton’s depiction of racism as a whole has been pretty spot on. (especially the hair thing for black women. I have sooo many memories of sitting for hours in a salon waiting on my mom’s hair whatever with tin foil that just seeing Sal’s hair triggers me.) But as much as Sal is a victim of it she is a proponent of it. Calling Danny “wonderbread” while in context not necessarily a bad thing, as Danny is a bland, straight-laced, spongy slice of dough, it’s an example non the less. The same could be argued with her initial reception of Joyce. On strictly the most superficial terms Joyce probably represented everything Sal hates. That crowd a few strips back? Maybe they were racist, maybe they weren’t. The context of the strip and my own personal experience would lead me to believe one thing. But you know what stings most? They’re right! As much as that comment was bullshit Sal is (was) a troublemaker. A criminal. And that makes the situation ultimately ambiguous. As it should be. Life isn’t black and white, Willis knows this, and he’s too capable a writer to have someone outright shout “I distrust her because she’s black!” (Although now that I think about it I would legitimately laugh at that because I am a monster) Casual racism is very much the “background radiation” of all our lives. You’re not immune to it because you’re white or brown or green or purple. So when you say you can’t resonate with Sal’s circumstances I say you can! Because it happen to all of us…..Anyway this was just my long winded way of saying don’t stress Dandi_Andi! :D. You might have more in common with Sal than you think. That’s good!….Or maybe it’s actually bad? What is good is that this comic can spark these conversations.
Well that’s that. Hopefully you liked it or hated it and that I didn’t make a huge ass of myself. Either way I probably won’t do a post like this again. Putting yourself out there is scary. I honestly don’t know how Cerberus does this shit everyday.
When I first encountered Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” it was an eye-opening read. We are effectively “trained” or desensitized to not even see some of the ways these things are perpetuated and that’s a horrible, horrible thought.
….Look. There isn’t racism against white people. ‘wonderbread’ is not a continuation of the racism Sal receives. White people don’t deal with racism (In Modern America. Ask me again in like, 1500 or 2500). Seriously, go fuck yourself.
Sal’s a criminal. SO IS AMAZIGIRL. Both for her vigilante bullshit, and for committing fucking battery, a more serious crime than what Sal committed.
Yes, yes, yes! The point where Joyce becomes “real” to Sal is *exactly* the point at which Joyce stops fetishizing Sal!
Like Joyce, I was brought up in a 99.5% white community. I never saw anyone of a different skin colour until I was 18. There was no way I could not be unintentionally racist like Joyce at some point in my life. And so it proved, and so I watched over myself trying to be better. Not going out of my way to treat people differently.
Still, it was rather shocking when I saw blatant racism take place against one of my friends in a nice, white middle class squash club.
I tend to give my white confreres, even the nice, well mannered ones, less of the benefit of the doubt these days.
My reading of the lynch mob is that the crowd in the picture could only see a black woman faced by a white vigilante. Those are the only facts known to any of them. They assumed that the black woman was in the wrong.
Bizarre random aside, the woman in Crocodile Dundee isn’t trans. It was a bar prank on the character and he “checked” her like someone would an animal. Not that such remotely makes it less transphobic. It’s an out the same way that “Oh, Buffalo Bill isn’t REALLY trans.” Despite the horrible amount of phobia said depiction created.
“Then I remembered Joyce’s obsession with Sal’s hair. Specifically, Joyce is obsessed with Sal’s chemically straightened hair which is yet another sensitive issue.”
The pieces just keep clicking together, don’t they? I think the last time I read that particular strip, I had something vaguely trying to get my attention regarding Joyce’s obsession, but you made it all too clear what exactly was wrong there. Thank you for that.
And remember, Joyce is a person that by and large tries to do good (which I think is more important than someone who tries to be good). And she still falls into these traps. A good reminder to all of us what we can all easily be doing if we’re not being aware. And how intent can only go so far (which in fact isn’t very far at all) in mitigating the actions.
Thank you for the compliments, by the way. And I must say, I think you certainly know your way around a keyboard. A powerful and well-written post if ever I saw one (and I’ve seen plenty in the DoA comment field)!
There is something about how the school system that seems to encourage the development of children with behavioural issues into full-blown psychotics. I suppose it’s necessary; whole sections of industry and commerce wouldn’t have suitable recruits otherwise but, having been on the receiving end, I can tell you it isn’t fun.
So, I’m guessing that we’re about to find out just what happened to Marcie, why Sal feels so responsible for her and, possibly, the starting point of Sal’s estrangement from her parents. After all, if Leland is a good boy from a socially prominent family (the worst bullies usually are) then her accusing him of maiming her friend might be quite the sin in her parents eyes.
She’s got a union and decades of working precedent about ignoring bullying (until it turns to serious assault, homicide or suicide) to protect her from that.
What a weird time to blame hard-to-earn-and-vanishing tenure and teachers’ unions. Charter and private schools, with no unions and no accountability and a tendency to hire unqualified people because it saves money, are juuuuuust as likely to have horribly unqualified teachers, if not more so. Especially because this teacher is young and a woman working at an elementary school, so her likelihood of even having tenure is like ???????? no.
Also, teachers who might be otherwise good at teaching are often horrible at handling bullies, which is a completely unrelated issue.
she doesnt look that young to me amd also like… marcies latina sals black the bullys white… yeah i think the teachers going to ignore this one probably punish sal for trying to fight the kid who kicked her best friend and give marcie a band aid so her parents dont complain
This attitude was all too common among teachers well through the late 90s. They just didn’t want to deal with ‘kid problems’ because of the hassle. Besides there are a hundred other kids they need to keep an eye on.
If this changed in recent years, my guess is it’s only because of lawsuit-happy parents.
Flames. Flames. On the side of my face. Breathing hot breaths…
And it’s not fully for Leland. Like, yes, on one level, I despise bullies and Leland is a downright dangerous version of one given that ditch he just kicked Marcie into seems to be made of jagged stones and exposed rebar.
But to me, the fire of hatred for him pales in comparison to the raging bonfire of utter contempt I have for unnamed last panel teacher.
Like, No. Just no. She’s doing literally everything wrong she could be doing right now. And she’s doing it wrong in subtly bigoted ways.
Like, first up, let’s talk about the fact that she rushes over to investigate a scene and her natural instinct is to grab and hold back the two black siblings and to position her body to favor most of her strength and attention towards Sal.
Or the fact that her first instinct isn’t to immediately call for medical aid for the little girl bleeding from the fucking head in a pile of exposed rebar. Like, fuck, I’ve done recess duty when someone has gotten hurt and I would fucking sprint over to provide first aid or even just to check in before dealing with a single bit of disciplinary anything. Because that’s the bigger issue.
Or the way, she lets Leland set the first story (like, NO, if you are investigating something like this, the instigator will try and come and explain why it went down and what their victim did to deserve it, and you fucking shut that shit down and say you’ll talk to them next and ask the kid who got targeted first what happened). That’s like Recess Monitor 101.
Or the fact that Leland is straight up giving every bully signal possible that he did this, but she’s still acting like this is a “what’s all this then” situation. Like, holy fuckberries and cream, recess monitor lady, you’ve got this student grinning like an asshole while every other kid is in some amount of distress and he’s openly threatening another student with a closed fist while he demands said student back up his “I overheard a family member use this as an excuse for his domestic violence” bullshittery.
Like, motherfucker, this isn’t an investigating situation, this is a “Leland, go to the principal. No. I’m not arguing. Go or you will be suspended. Assistant, escort Leland to the principal. I’m gonna check on this girl” type situation or at least a “I don’t want to hear it Leland. We’re going to have a long talk about this the second I’m finished up here and don’t think about slinking off. I will find you. Now, you down there, are you okay” type situation.
Hell, you’d want to follow up with Leland anyways, not only because what he did was fucked and dangerous and he’ll pose a danger to further students if not thoroughly spoken to, but because that “tripped” excuse is way too reminiscent of a physical abuse excuse to be coincidence and that’s a sign of some badness at home Leland is emulating that CPS kinda need to be made aware of.
Like, on every fucking level, this is handled so utterly abominably in that last panel. Fuck, no wonder Sal doesn’t trust authorities farther than she can throw them. If she dealt with this and then racist cops harassing her growing up…? Fuck. And no wonder Billie is skeptical about the school’s resources aiding anyone, having seen terrible handling of nasty situations like this from a young age.
Ugh. Just fudge you random teacher, fudge you to Hades.
*Small note since terrible teachers are my kryptonite and will cause me to rage with the power of a thousand suns, but I wanted to also note how much I love Sal’s responses. That horror in her face in Panel 2 as she rushes over to check on Marcie is palpable. And the murderous rage in Panel 4 is righteous. Her friend could have been killed by this chuckling fuckwaffle. And I love the little touch of her impotently flailing arms as shitty teacher lady focuses her attention on holding her back. It’s amazing characterization for a character who only gets a single word in this strip.
FWIW, as I’ve said above, Leyland is probably going to turn out to be from a socially prominent family and that gives him effective immunity and impunity. Everyone knows it (except the kids, of course).
you can be from a family of basically no importance and still have immunity and impunity too (though, I actually bet it would be more the walkertons than the school cowing to the elite tbh. not because schools aren’t corrupt, but because the school can’t do much to punish him anyway). Especially if your parents just don’t care, so teachers calling home doesn’t actually mean any discipline and a suspension is just a 1-7 day break.
I didn’t even get into that, but yeah, fuck, as a teacher, you’re trained to never hold a student period if there’s a way to defuse the situation any other way.
To not only put her hands all over Sal, but to hold on to her face, like Sal isn’t even important, thus encouraging her continued resistance, especially as she asks the person who hurt her friend what is going on, it’s just… yeah, so much hatred for how horrible everything she’s doing is.
I gonna be the guy to say maybe Incompetent teacher isn’t that incompetent. Pushing the reality bendingly inappropriate face grab aside for a moment. Sal was actually going to murder Leland and shit. Completely justified child murder is still bad people! Even if no court would convict her.
Holy fuck! That is actually rebar! That has potential murder all over it. Congratulations for like actually making me want to punch a child. This comic. *head shake*
Cerberus is right; there is probably a history behind this. Aside from any abuse, I’ve got the feeling that Leyland’s parents have made it abundantly plain to him (if only by example) that victimising the weak is normal and praiseworthy behaviour.
To some extent the teacher’s behavior can be understood depending on what she say. If she only turned when Sal yelled and got there as Sal was lunging for Leland, the first priority would have to be stopping that. And seeing that, it might be reasonable to ask the apparent target, rather than the apparent aggressor.
OTOH, if she swallows the transparent excuse and ignores the implied threat to Walky and accepts his obvious bullshit response, which I fully expect her to, her thin vestige of excuse goes away.
And yes, checking on Marcie should come right after stopping the impending fight and well before any questioning about who did what.
Agreed with everything. The one thing I would add would be to charge Sal with getting Marcie to the nurse’s office (assuming the school even has one).
This would give Sal something productive to focus on other than her (justifiable but unhelpful) rage while leaving the teacher to escort Leland into custody.
Ooh, yes, definitely! De-escalates, gets injured child care (cause Sal will be heavily motivated to get Marcie care), and ensures the communication that prompt and swift action is being taken against the offending situation.
Well. This seems bad. Flashback!Marcie just had her skull smack against concrete pretty hard. And we just learned that she hasn’t always been mute.
Gee, wonder if those things are connected?
See, stuff like this always makes me think.
What is the best way for me to become a force for stopping bullying?
Well, there’s all those groups that go around and talk to people about it…
But wait, those don’t work.
Well, I could become a teacher! Of course, I’d be lucky to actually catch anyone in the act and I’d probably just end up getting fired for losing my temper with some little piece of shit who’s beating up nerds or whatever.
So after thinking, long and hard, I realized the only way to prevent bullying is to BUILD A TIME MACHINE
TRAVEL BACK THROUGH SCHOOL AS AN AGE-APPROPRIATE CHILD BUT WITH MY VOCABULARY AND PHYSICAL ABILITY (err… physical ability of someone much stronger than me, actually. I’m weak as hell)
FIND KIDS WHO ARE BEING BULLIED
STAHP IT
RINSE, AND REPEAT
So… shit. Bullying will probably always exist, to be honest. It’s an extremely painful part of reality.
Like a disease without a cure, all we can do is try our best to mitigate it’s effects.
It sucks.
If you’re seeing this, and you’re someone who knows that someone is being bullied, or you see someone being bullied in the future? Don’t let it continue. Use your strengths to the advantage of that victim- if you’re smart, outsmart the bully. If you’re strong, beat them u- er, ok, maybe not the best idea in the grand majority of situations.
The best thing to do is, as cheesy as it sounds, find an adult you can trust.
If after everything you try to do fails (and hell, even before it)- comfort that victim however you can. Be their friend. Make them realize that they aren’t just the trash that can be crumpled up and thrown out. Make them realize that bullies are just pathetic sacks of crap.
I’m pretty sure saying that I don’t advocate violence would be a bit of a lie. If I see someone being emotionally abused, I try my best to abuse the abuser. If I see someone being physically abused, I do the same thing. It’s not the best strategy, but bullies piss me off and I don’t respond well to things when I’m pissed.
If you’re like me, remember one thing- males are weak between the legs. I’ve never had to fight a female, so I don’t know what to tell ya then.
Also, like, get some therapy or some shit. Goodness knows I hate myself after coming out of my moods, shit’s unhealthy.
So now I can’t help but wonder: Is this a flashback for Sal, because of no one else aiming to help her in the current Amazi-showdown? Or a flashback for Walky in some way?
We don’t know how or when that happened. We’d already seen one younger flashback where Sal & Marcie met and she spoke then as well. We also know that Sal learned ASL to talk to her. Probably learned it with her, in fact. Which suggests it was before Sal’s attempted robbery and exile to Catholic school.
This could be the source of her muteness or that could still be later. Not enough data yet.
Possible prediction:
We’re going to have a sequence of alternate flashbacks: blue (Sal) and red (Amber) that are going to merge in the last one (which will be purple) that will retell the convenience store job. These will quickly remind us of both women’s history and the traumas, injustices and wounds that make them the people they are today.
The last panel of the flashback sequence will be a snap-cut back to here-and-now with the outcome of the confrontation at the DeSanto rally.
yes, this history is why Sal is so “non-compliant” and headed for Bongo Planet. Doesn’t matter that there are security guards and a whole mob of people around, she isn’t taking this crap at all. And AG and her racist friends just remind her of all the incidents in her life where she was ignored and treated badly because of who she is, while others got away with bad behavior. No justice, no peace.
First time commenting… I’ve read through but I could not see anyone talking about it… but sorry if I missed it… but is the guy with the scar in the strip two days ago grown-up Leland? Maybe Sal gave him that scar?
To wit also, in cased it was missed, no one in-universe know’s Ryan’s name. Known to us due to tags. Scar came from getting a broken bottle across the face from Joyce, if I recall correctly.
Leland is a repurposed character from Shortpacked. Not a pleasant guy there either.
And then that little boy sorted out his issues and grew up to be a police Captain. Because surely there can’t be two fictional characters named Leland.
*Does research*
Seriously, there are three fictional Lelands other than this one?
Which is again a fictional character that I don’t know anything about and one not on Wikipedia’s list of fictional Lelands. It’s almost as though I was wrong to think that there exists a standard, not-intentionally-unique name that isn’t well represented in fiction.
What year is this flashback taking place?
The comic started in 2010, and yet there’s apparently a sliding timeframe due to references made to Jurassic World and the 2DS.
If this flashback is taking place 10 years ago, is it in 2000, or2006?
The comic takes place today. In current time
If the flashback is 10 years ago, it takes place 10 years ago.
Which would currently be in 2006.
If we revisit these events in a strip 3 years from now, they will be taking place in 2009.
Truth. I never got told it in such words, but once, at ages about 9-10 (me) and 11 (him), my older brother and I got in a (non physical, very vocal) fight on the bus with another kid in his grade (he had been picking on me, so I started hissing vitriol at him, then he called me a bongo and my brother started yelling too).
Anyway, kid’s mom came to our house to tell my mom, explaining that she knows it’s just a kids fight, but that her son knew that my brother was in karate and stuff, and was worried he was going to get beat up.
I got grounded for two weeks, my brother didn’t get punished at all. And yeah, he was the one ‘defending,’ but he was also the only reason any actual violence was expected to occur.
My brother did bring me home skittles because his school (he was in middle and I was in elementary) had a vending machine.* I don’t know if he knew how grounded I was, but he probably heard the screaming-at I got.
No clue on the logic behind my mom’s punishing, it’s just what happened. He’s the Walky to my Sal though, things are just easier for him, starting right with parenting.
*we lived in a rural area and both our schools were closed campus, so this was actually a decent/surprising gesture, seeing’s we couldn’t just walk to the corner store for candy whenever we wanted
also internalized misogyny is huge in my family. it makes my husband uncomfortable, as an outsider, because he’ll walk in and just the women, even my grandma, will be cooking for a dinner, and be calling on me and my female cousin to help while the boys are off somewhere. this applied to other chores and stuff, but that’s when it’s super visible. It was less bad at my mom’s house than my aunt’s, but still pretty prevalent. I didn’t really connect it to gender until later though; while growing up my cousin and I just thought they didn’t like us as much.
(and now I’ll stop updating comments form yesterday because today everyone will be in today’s comments)
Just to be absolutely sure ‘glower’ means ‘an angry or sullen look’.
‘Vacuum’, of course, means ‘a void or absence’.
So far, I’m seeing one definite glower (on Sal, panel 3), and one possible glower (on the teacher). Nope, no absence of glowers here.
So, it must be meant ironically?
Either that, or it’s a play on the phrase ‘power vacuum’. Which there definitely is, now, with Ruth in the hospital. How will this power vacuum be filled? With glowers?? I’m expecting enough of them.
As a former victim of bullying, I feel like the media narrative too often prefers to portray them as irredeemable monsters who are evil or mean by nature. As I’ve matured, though I haven’t forgiven my bullies I have recognised that their behaviour sprang from mental illness and that they needed help.
Recognising that and acknowledging it in portrayals of bullies doesn’t excuse acts of bullying, in the same way that just handwaving it as “they’re naturally bigots” or “they’re naturally evil” doesn’t explain them.
So, I’ll tell you now, the reason I got so infuriated when I first read this is because it shows an important part: A physical violence type of bully that gets away with it because they -are allowed- to get away with it*. Someone that clearly never has to truly face the consequences of their actions.
I mean, look at the teacher here. The teacher asks Leland what is going on first. Not Sal or Walky, or certainly not Marcie (Sheesh, where is your concern for the kids lying down being hurt, teacher?). She asks Leland. Bad fricking move. It allows Leland to take charge of the story. His version is going to be believed.
And Marcie… Just look at Marcie not even being able to tell Sal that she’s really not OK. Marcie is trying to de-escalate things before the teacher even gets there, because she already knows (even if she can’t articulate it) that she won’t get anywhere with telling the truth. What chance is there that she will try to tell the teacher the whole story? Absolutely none whatsoever.
And I bet that (and I’m currently not a Patreon guy, so I honestly don’t actually know) the next couple flashback strips will have something to the effect of Sal trying to speak up, but the teacher not believing Sal, because, you know, she’s “a troublemaker”.
And thus, Leland is not getting the help he needs. Neither is Marcie. In fact, -nobody- gets the help they need from the people that are supposed to be in charge of making sure of just that. And that is the most infuriating thing of them all.
*The other types of bullies are either getting away with it because they are able to hide it better, or because it’s not taken seriously if it’s not physical bullying. OK, so not really that different, I guess… Where is my imperial “Nuke the world” button?
I will readily admit to having no compassion for that man. None whatsoever. I wrote this back then:
“The media attention to this matter has exceeded coverage given to many and almost all capital murders,”
And with good reason. Because as bad as capital murders are —and they are very bad indeed— most of the time, a person will do one murder (or at worst several murders in one go) and get captured.
And what’s more, while they are never condonable or acceptable, they can sometimes at least be understandable (such as a repeated victim of abuse that one day “clicks” and keeps on stabbing the abuser into oblivion). And they most certainly are very seldom meticulously planned and acted upon over a period of years.
This wasn’t a one-time incident like most murders. This was something that went on for many years, and it destroyed lives… And from that report, it’s obvious that it keeps destroying the lives of those affected. And for what reason did this judge destroy all these lives? For pieces of papers. For self-indulgence and greed way beyond having one’s basic needs met.
The original sin, the -real- original sin, the sin from which all other sins spring out from, is to treat other humans like things. It is from this original sin that most crimes spring from, but even then, most crimes are also born out of desperation and a (usually misplaced) feeling of “do or die”.
Unlike those crimes, this “judge” systematically embraced that original sin from a seat of comfort and power. He looked upon and treated all these kids as they were things; things that could help him acquire his own personal goals. That they went through really bad things in those centers; that the punishments were disproportionate to the crimes; it did not matter to this judge, because he only saw them as things.
It also did not matter to him that he single-handedly broke down the system he was sworn to uphold, piece by piece. It did not matter to him that his role is in fact that of a servant, not a master. It did not matter to him that the public’s trust in the local legal system would shatter if he was ever found out. None of this mattered to him, because to him, the public were obviously also just things.
His actions were the complete embodiment of the original sin; beyond what even some (but not all) murders are. His punishment and reputation should be set accordingly.
——-
So yeah, that is my blind spot. The spot where I find no compassion, only judgement.
If I may… Do you think I should have compassion for that judge? If so, why? Because while it is a blind spot, I also think that being enraged by that behaviour is not only the right reaction, I think it is the only worthy reaction. I react to it like that precisely because I do wish to -end- the suffering that that judge created.
I’d say no, if for no other reason than to avoid your ire.
Seriously, we all have, what, red panel things? While Dina, to my knowledge, has not been stated as having Autism, I believe many consider her to be on the spectrum. Seeing her years ago having been called [[trigger]] filled me with a sufficient rage as to I actively repressed reading it. I think Cerberus linked to it a few days ago, for some kind of reference.
That word, or anyone with some kind of a mental handicap, especially Autism, tends to get me seeing red. I also tend to get saddened by it as well, because growing up I was on the fringe of what Joyce had for a life, so things like ‘toxic masculinity’, and using the r-word as an insult were normal, both around and towards myself, and I sometimes find that word as an insult in my head when those old ways seep in. It’s tiring.
My ire is not dangerous. You know how my dungeons keep getting delayed anyway.
And I can totally understand your red flag. I mean, while not as egregious as the example I talked about, I think that it’s about the same principle: Someone, in a position of relative power* who thinks of Dina not as a real human, but as a thing.
And if I am reading you right, then I think that any other red flags you might have will also basically boil down to rage over seeing humans** being treated as things. And while there are ways to express that rage that is most certainly not OK, I am still sort of glad it’s there.
*In this case, the power of local social status and privilege.
**or comic characters made so realistic in character, they might as well be humans.
So is this going to be like Lost, where we spend nearly the whole show going “oh my god THIS IS WHEN LOCKE BECAME PARALYZED FROM THE WAIST DOWN no it wasn’t” except instead of “Locke” and “paralyzed” it’s “Marcie” and “mute”?
Yes, mute from the waist down. It’s a useful superpower.
It would be! Queef any time without issue, fart without evidence, even in intentional crop dusting of someone situations? Talk about best super-power! :O
Sal’s explained it- well, not really. Sal’s mentioned it- before, when she told Malaya to just learn sign. She says that she and Marcie learned it together, and something along the lines of ‘things happen.’
S: “Malaya, just learn the language. Marcie an’ me learned it together when we were kids. It ain’t that hard.”
M: “Together? Why?”
S: “Kinda had to. Stuff happens.”
Not the first time Marcie talked in flashbacks. Though I definitely understand why someone would miss it even if they’d been binging the archives. It’s never been a major point*.
At least, not a major point compared to all the other things that have happened in this comic.
*Which, in a way, is good, in the sense that most people do seem to treat Marcie as Marcie. Sal definitely does. That’s a hell of a lot better than treating Marcie as “that mute woman”.
Remember Sal’s ‘innate’ distrust of authorities and rules? Well, that moment right there is where she learned that from. That ‘teacher’ showed her plain as day that people who stay within the rules get their ass kicked by people who don’t. That whatever their fancy speeches about making everything fair and nice (which I’m sure they’ve had); at the end of the day, her best friend got abused and nobody who was in charge did anything about it.
So when Sal grabbed Ruth in this strip? I tink she is still thinking about that teacher. She is still hating that teacher with all her guts. Considering that Sal still has certain weak points, it is almost a miracle that she doesn’t follow up with some seriously heavy violence in the next strip; but instead “only” a dismissive throwing away, the gesture (and the words) basically stating “you’re not important enough to get in trouble for.”
And maybe also “You may be one of them, but you’re not the one I truly hate.”, though that might be stretching it somewhat.
If it had been her former teacher that she’d been holding, though…
Well spotted! OK, technically it might be by the hair, but it still a variant of “I’m not just restraining you, I am belittling you” type of grab going on there.
Hmmm… so it’s looking like that Sal’s protectiveness of Marcie is what gave her the reputation of tough wild child, and it was probably drilled into her so much that she pretty much had to become that.
Only speculating… and I am in no way a professional on this. So ignore me. Besides that, it’s only the first exposition comic on this.
But I am hoping this will eventually explain why Marcie doesn’t speak… I’m assuming she actually is mute at, and not just being a jerk. (Though, maybe it’s a lifelong promise or protest to not speak…)
nooooooooooooooooo
I was not prepared for this
the fuck are they playing next to an open ravine anyway
Indiana schools must not keep their playgrounds clear of hazards or else recess has gone in some werid direction I hadn’t heard of
All that said, OW
You have to realize that this is supposed to be ten or more years in the past. This also could be a day care center than a school. Restrictions and requirements, especially for “private” day-care faclities, weren’t as strict back then
In 200x? Yes, they were, at least to the point of not having strip mines on the property.
But you’re close. It’s the memory and perceptions of someone nine or ten years old. What’s remembered as a gaping chasm may have only been a break in the side walk.
Willis was telling us on patreon yesterday how someone got a hole punched through their jaw on his playground in elementary school because of unsafe stuff in the playground. I think this is meant to be accurate.
Of course, he was in elementary school in the 80s, not the 2000s.
These days I don’t even think they’re allowed to use pea gravel anymore.
comic time though. they were in elementry school in the 2000’s AND in the 1700’s if someone from that time happens to currently be reading thanks to fifth dimensional bs
if this is at school they needed better fences or at least some fences. if it is their normal life stuff than it is kind playing out in the open. i went lots of random places when i was growing up
When I was in seventh and eighth grade in Florida, half of the school I was attending was still under construction, and the athletic fields had to be cleared of rattlesnakes and scorpions before we were allowed to use them. It sucked so bad it could have drained the Gulf of Mexico…and it probably is now.
Do we even know that this is at a school or daycare?
When I was a kid, if you hopped our backyard fence and cut through the woods a little ways there was a very wide creek that was usually totally dry in the summer.
I grew up in central Texas. Just in the woods alone we risked all kinds of snakes, spiders, scorpions, raccoons, opossums, feral cats and dogs with who-knows-what diseases. Then, the draw of the creek bed was:
1) going under the bridge where a fairly major road crossed it. The spring rains would wash all kinds of debris down the creek and a lot of it would get caught under the bridge for us to find in the summer.
2) There is a massive underground system of caverns and underground lakes just below the surface of much of central Texas. When the creek was dry, there were cave openings just big enough to maybe poke in our heads and shoulders. We’d stick our heads in and a hand or arm and swing a flashlight around to see around the little cave openings.
There was usually only a very small opening with trash or a thick layer of silt, but we always hoped we’d find buried treasure, an opening in to a massive cave, or a colony of bats.
Only as an adult did I look back and realize that waking a colony of bats while your head is plugging the only exit point likely wouldn’t have been as cool as we imagined. Also that as small as most of these spaces were, we could have unwittingly come across a rattlesnake den, or uncovered brown recluse spiders or tarantulas, or any of a number of other dangerous critters.
We also could have easily broken a bone on the limestone rocks or the concrete under the bridge.
Anyway, sometimes someone’s parent (why they knowingly let us play there, I’ve no idea.) or older sibling would come down there to tell their kid/sibling it was time to come home.
So, I guess all that was to say what if this isn’t a teacher, but an older sibling or babysitter? And maybe the kids are just playing wherever it is in their neighborhood that kids have room to congregate?
At a guess, it’s a Don’t Go Beyond The Fence situation, and Leland edged the conflict outside the fence. My elementary school didn’t have a fully fenced in playground until I was in…second grade, maybe? And there was no problem with the kids running off to play in the street that I’m aware of. Considering how old the school was by the time I hit grade 2, there’d definitely have been a fuss if the kids were wandering off.
I’m less concerned about the drop and more concerned about what looks like random pieces of sharp jagged metal sticking out of random bits of broken concrete. Marcie’s lucky she wasn’t just impaled.
My elementary school in Indiana had ditches like that bounding both playgrounds.
I’m thinking a head injury from Marcie’s head hitting that rock just above her head might be the cause of her muteness.
Have to wait and see.
This is Indiana. They consider big open pits like that “a park” – haven’t you ever been to Pawnee?
I also went Noooooooooooooooo but was the for teaching fail! That’s not what you do teacher!! I send you back to school!!! With the monkeys!!!!
When i was in school there was a really cool ravine nearby we played tag in at lunch. However, did it have hunks of concrete with rebar poking out of it? No.
Anyone else notice there was a good chance of her dying???
I should be clear that
1. I totes think this park sounds fuckin’ awesome, though
2. the cast seems a bit young for it, besides that
3. “altercations” like this aren’t part of the appeal of the park
unrelatedly, if I don’t seem to comment on much other than first (or sometimes last) post, I seem to be having this issue where DoA *specifically* chokes when trying to post comments due to some plug-in failing and I can’t figure out for the life of me why
I’d been having that problem in firefox here and some other sites, until I switched the flash plugin to “Ask to Activate”.
Weirdly, even though I then clicked “Always Activate” for the site, it stopped crashing
oh a flashback. and a new character leland. i wonder whats his story.
His story is that he’s a tool.
so far but there was one guy that seemed nice but was a rapist. plus this is a flashback while he might have stayed the same he also might have changed. assuming of course he will show up in the current time frames. also i wonder if he has any family connections to anyone perhaps a cousin.
Playing nice but being evil is easy.
The other way around is a touch harder.
OTOH, being a bully in elementary school doesn’t mean you’re a monster for life either.
Some people grow up. Even by college.
I have known bullies from elementary and junior high who turned out fairly decent.
That said, DB Leland is on the Top Ten Worst Dumbing of Age characters. Haven’t decided his exact position, yet. Maybe if we see more of him…
Someone pointed out his previous existence as a customer in Shortpacked!
I withdraw my objection.
Eh. Some bullies stop doing what they did, precious few ever make it right.
The violence of this particular bully seems rather extreme.
I got some beef for calling the kid at the church a fuckboy, but this Leland guy is a massive fuckboy
How can you his sexual preferences towards one night stands from his 10 year old self?
However I do wonder if we are getting a flashback to show why Sal is soo protective of Marcie. Also why Marcie has selective mutism.
That’s not what fuckboy means. Fuckboy is AAVE and despite white people trying to redefine it as “the boy version of slut”, that is not correct.
I’m hardly an expert, but I think the ‘boy version of slut’ is spelled fuckboi. So, totally different word.
What makes you think Marcie’s mutism is ‘selective’? As an adult, I have never heard her speak at all. She does occasionally growl or sigh, but no actual words.
Now, AS A KID, she speaks, and many have expounded upon the reason for the change. If this is it, it hasn’t taken effect YET.
^ would upvote
He’s such a tool his middle name is Stanley and last name is Craftsman
okay.. I love that one.
Is he new? When I first saw it, I thought that This was implying that Leland andthe person who drugged Joyce were the same person. Do we have a name for the rapist yet? And if we do, could he have just lied about it? Is this a moment for Sal and Amazigirl to put aside there differences and take down the real monster? NEXT TIME ON DUMBING OF AGE!
Ryan. So, sorry to disappoint.
Yeah, Ryan the Rapist’s name has been known for a while.
That said, this comic tells us quite a bit. Marcie’s been bullied as a child – if this was a constant, pervasive thing, it may explain her interest in roller derby and security. She wants to be tough and un-bulliable.
It also further explains Sal’s history – she may have started getting into fights by attacking Marcie’s tormentors. Bullies are definitely a trigger for her.
And she most certainly got in trouble for attacking said bullies, because That’s How Things Work, which also further explains Sal’s fatalism and cynicism.
But, do we know his name is really Ryan? He is a rapist after all, he might have been smart enough to use an assumed name.
Ryan never gave his name in-story. He was only identified as such in the tags.
Ryan and Leland are two different dudes.
Well that’s a fact I didn’t know.
I thought the same!
A new challenger for worst character approaches.
He’s got a way to go before he truly challenges.
that is very true. the trust of that statement can easily be stated. for it is not a lie. it is a trustworthy statement of events.
Oh, Walky, you little turd.
He can’t help it, Leland is bigger than he is.
I’m going to put this here to make it easier to spot:
Getting mad at Walky when he’s also a victim here was really crappy of me, and want I apologize to everyone here for it.
Mr. Willis has created a wonderful safe space for people here and the thought that I might have tarnished that even a little is completely abhorrent to me.
I am truly sorry.
That is very kind of you.
I can see your frustration, though. My older brother had a talk with my parents when the kids at school tried to turn us against each other. He was 5 or 6, I was 3 and just starting school. My brother was very concerned because he was loyal to his friends but also loyal to me. My parents told him siblings first, and he was relieved to know what to do. I doubt it would occur to the Walkertons that mini-David and mini-Sally ought to be a team, and that’s sad.
I love you. <3
Yes. Walky is the turd, and not the kid who is threatening to bodily harm him if he does not support him.
Leland is an asshole and a very confident bully. And Walky is obviously more afraid of being at the receiving end of his bullying than concerned with keeping his sister out of trouble.
No wonder Sal’s got so much hate inside her.
Sure you don’t mean Leland, the kid making a very unsubtle threat of violence towards Walky?
No, he’s a colossal asshat. I know most kids actually had some sense of self-preservation, unlike I did at that age, but I’m still a little disappointed in Walky
I do not blame Walky in the slightest. I had my own personal Leland from late elementary on through high school and he pretty much made it his mission to subtlely isolate me from all my peers throughout my middle school years. When I was in high school, I had the bright idea of telling him I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. He then grabbed a broom and proceeded to beat the fear back into me. And that’s when I learned that the whole “Bullies are cowards” narrative I had been fed was bullshit.
Bullies are like prisoners. All they got is their rep and they will cling to it.
Its just that the teacher is right there. Sure, I know she won’t be forever, but bullies like that are just something that just makes me viscerally angry. And I also remember just how much it would have meant if to me if to have someone do that for me when I was getting bullied.
Which is also the only reason I stood up to them when I was a kid. I wasn’t brave, just too mad not to. And yeah, even when I didn’t lose the fight it didn’t do much to discourage them.
So while I don’t blame him, I would have really liked it if he’d stood up for Sal here. Though I’m going to be seriously pissed if this teacher actually believes this with the kid visibly threatening Walky right in front of her.
Self-sacrifice and helping others are things that are a lot easier to say than do, sadly.
The thing about bullies that infuriates me more than anything is that real bullies, or at least the kind I’m used to, aren’t something you can “win” against; not in a way that they will accept as a loss, at any rate. And they will keep going, for as long as they can sustain themselves. React emotionally? That’s just what they wanted! Go to an authority figure? They’ll just bully you when the grownups aren’t watching. Don’t react at all? Well, that must mean you don’t mind if they continue! Fight back? You get in trouble too, which was definitely their plan all along! (it wasn’t, but they’ll pretend it was just so they can maintain a victorious image) They will twist reality itself to maintain a sense of superiority, even rewriting their own memories if they have to.
Yeah, that’s true.
And your second paragraph is probably why I ended up opting to fight most of the time. If no strategy actually seemed to work, I might as well go with the one that’s at least satisfying, even in failure.
Then again, as a white kid in a suburban school in a nice area, I probably had a lot less reason to fear getting seriously hurt than Walky does.
I threw a desk at a tormentor in 8th grade. That guy never bothered me again. However, I do not recommend this course.
Still, i applaud you, given those circumstances.
I switched which wrist I wore my watch on, so that when he punched me he tore his hand open. That seemed to do the job. (we sat adjacent to each other in class and he’d lean over and slug me in the shoulder as hard as he could whenever no one was looking…among other things).
I am fully aware however that I was incredibly lucky that that was the farthest physical bullying ever went against me and that that was all it took to stop that particular incident. Plenty of kids end up with bullies who are far more physically capable than they are and who won’t back down from retaliation. In other words, some kids end up with bullies against whom they can not push harder than the bully can push them. Verbal stuff is another matter, but that didn’t bother me nearly as much.
I was bullied by this one super annoying girl who thought she was tough sh**, and let it slide for a while, but at one point she tried to slap me for supposedly calling her sister fat, so I shoved her onto the floor of the bus and started yanking her hair with my foot on her throat as she was flailing to try and scratch my face. When the bus driver separated us she tried to say that she planned the whole thing, but everyone was laughing at her for getting her butt handed to her. She never bothered me, or anyone else that I know of, again. She was suspended for a week and I got 2 paddlings from the principal. Totally worth it.
My point here is, if you fight them and shrug off the fact that you got in trouble, bullies do tend to leave you alone. To the girl who was hit with a broom: I would have found something to beat that bully back with! Self-defense!
If you fight them and win, sometimes that works. Assuming they don’t just come back with friends. It depends entirely on the type of bully.
I almost always fought back, and I sometimes even won, but I still had a set of regular bullies who would pick fights with me, because they just liked fighting and hated nerds.
And there were the times were a kid I never met before would just punch me in the gut while passing by in the hallway. I was well known as an uncool spaz, so mistreating me earned you popularity points!
There was also an incident I remember from 7th grade where I some much larger 8th grader decided I was in his way while everyone was crowding through the main entrance to the school. Having no sense of self-preservation, I shoved him right back. So he punched me. Then I kicked him in the balls, and attempted to make my escape, only to run into two of his also very large friends.
I ended up blacking out briefly and coming to moments later in a heap on the floor.
I’ve no regrets about it, but fighting back is definitely NOT always effective.
That’s exactly the situation, as I can attest to from my own personal experience from about second grade through the end of high school (a couple of incidents in middle school and high school should have led to criminal charges, but of course nobody saw anything). There are people I grew up with who I could watch drown, plunge to their deaths or get hit by a bus and not shed a single tear for. And this is 35-45 years later.
“Ignore them and they’ll go away” is something useless adults say to comfort themselves when a child is suffering and they don’t know how to stop it.
Different bullies, different methods, but I have a fond memory of when – in 8th grade – I stopped persistent bully cold. She said she’d beat me up after school. I told her loudly, in front of everyone, that “Yeah, you can absolutely kick my ass and I can’t stop you.” Then, to her, I said “that’s why I’m going to go for your eyes as hard as I can on the way down.”
She told everyone I gave up and I never heard a peep from her again.
The teacher who’s currently restraining him and Sal, barely concerning herself with the actual attacker, and apparently entirely unconcerned by the severely injured child right in front of her?
Walky should be braver because he’s being backed up by that teacher?
Sounds like most of the teachers I had in elementary school. They gave no shits unless something happened right in front of them. “Don’t believe any stories you didn’t directly observe, because they’re ‘just kids’ and they’re probably making everything up. Their little problems are unimportant anyway (which may be true, but it’s their entire world so it’s important to them). A little roughousing is fine, boys will be boys.”
And what did they tell us to do about bullies? “Just ignore them, they’ll get bored and go away.”
The single biggest lie told by teachers is “Just ignore them, they’ll get bored and go away.” The worst possible advice to give to a kid who is being tormented constantly by kids who have as much as ten months’ growth on him.
Well, that strategy can work sometimes. Learning and applying “the cut direct” is probably the reason I am not dead or in prison now.
But my problem was more people goading me into attacking them than being attacked. (The bigger problem was honesty and believing society’s lies about justice and fairness.)
in middle school this kid tried to pull me off some climbing thing so i kicked him in the face.
I admitted that i did it.
he said i did it.
his friends said i did it
my friends said i did it
I got not punishment my friend got a week of detention. teachers do play favorites and politics even if they dont admit it.
for all we know that kids parent is a big wig in the school or something.
okay… wait, how? What connection did your friend who got punished have to this?
he was sitting next to me on the thing. thats it
The raised fist seems to imply “Back me up or I beat it out of you the next time we’re alone” even if the teacher will prevent immediate beating.
Fart Captor forgive me but you’re being a fucking idiot. I was bullied often when I was around that age, so I say this with experience.
Shut up.
That’s a pretty rude response to someone who wasn’t insulting anyone but a fictional eight year old, and halfheartedly at that. I get people standing up for kids intimidated into silence, but calling someone a fucking idiot and telling them to shut up for being disappointed in a character for not standing up for their sister, (even when it’s dangerous for them to do so), is pretty extreme.
It’s a little ruder than necessary, but he’s not entirely unjustified. In retrospect it does look a bit shitty to get mad at Walky first in this situation.
I just know from experience how much it hurts to get bullied as a kid and find out that a friend doesn’t actually have your back. My best friend at the time didn’t want anyone to know we were friends in middle school, because he didn’t want the kids bullying me to target him as well. I understood why, but it still hurt. Its not helped by how I can’t think of a single instance until high school when one of my friends (or any other kids, for that matter) actually tried to intervene in any way when some asshole decided it was time to play “beat up / harass the nerdy spaz”.
So that’s the part of this that is the most frustrating for me. Its still definitely the bully who actually is the asshole here.
Yeah, imho the cursing and insults were beyond ruder than necessary. I’m a victim myself and I got where you were coming from. I was always the person putting myself in harm’s way to do the right thing, and it stung so much when no one would do the same for me. I resented friends and family for not standing up for me when I did so for them and that’s a valid feeling. It’s okay to feel disappointed with people, even if their behavior is understandable. Obviously the bully is the main aggressor here, but I think it’s okay to remember those feelings of being let down and betrayed when people you trusted didn’t help you when you needed it.
True, but it’s clear that not everyone’s experience was sufficiently similar for my reasons to be obvious, and pausing for a moment to provide some explanation up front would have gone a long way.
Even a limited subject like schoolyard bullying seems to varies in more than just intensity and duration, but is a horrifying kaleidoscopic rainbow of shitty experiences.
i was bullied too. it looks to me you are becoming the bully with that statement or deflecting your feelings from the past.
Yeah I’m sorry, I just get annoyed when people attack the victim like that.
To me, I was seeing Marcie as the victim, and while Sal stood up for her, Walky caved immediately. But you are right, he’s a victim here too.
here’s my theory on what’s happening
Sal and even possibly Marcie are not regularly bullied by Leland. Look at her face in the second panel, she’s shocked. This does not appear to be a regular scenario for her.
Walky’s reaction on the other hand clearly shows that he has met Leland before.
Basically, while Walky may not be the direct victim here, I deduce that he is more constantly the victim than Sal or Marcie.
Also, I am sorry for being rude, I would by the a cookie but I have no idea who you are.
It’s completely forgiven. I didn’t realize at all how victim-blamey it sounded / was absent any explanation.
You’re probably right about Walky being quite familiar with Leland already. I definitely remember the bullies at my school seemed to have a short list of their favorite targets, and I strongly doubt anyone messed with Sal on a regular basis.
@some1 walky’s made repeated reference to getting shoved into lockers etc, so it wouldn’t shock me to learn that Leland here was one of the shovers at some point.
Long-time reader, sporradic commenter (and I had insomnia last night so I just binge-read all the strips I’d missed over the past few months). While I agree that Some1’s response was rude, I was also someone who was bullied as a child. Even if the teacher was standing RIGHT THERE, I knew that if I “told” on the bully I would land up facing some pretty terrible consequences from them later. If I kept my mouth mostly shut, I could avoid some of their abuse. I know that’s not a terribly noble thing to admit, but when you’re a kid who has been consistently bullied, you get really scared and fall into a “survival” type of mentality.
And – I am NOT making this up – on some occasions when I did try to talk to the teachers about how other people or I were being bullied, I was flat-out told, “Nobody likes a tattletale.” (Quick note: my adult memory realizes that maybe ONE bad teacher out of an elementary school full of DOZENS of good teachers said that to me, but at the time it made me feel like I dare not say anything but just try to stay quiet and out of the way.)
That is just an IMPRESSIVELY shitty teacher, all the more so because of how that would completely taint how you would expect other teachers to react. But you did nothing shameful.
This is making me see that I was more fortunate than I realized when it came to how safe it was for me to fight back. Most of my teachers were (or at least not terrible), and most of them actually liked me a lot in spite of how often I was in trouble.
I think I know now how Joyce felt when she realized not all dads are good people.
Ugh! I hated that attitude from teachers. I remember when I was being taunted regularly in elementary school and being told that I needed to “get a thicker skin”. As though my peers chanting hurtful things about me was a sign of my own weakness. I’m sorry you dealt with that.
Translation: “I can’t be bothered to solve your little problem for you. Go away.”
The worst thing I remember about childhood is adults not taking you seriously. Sure the pending threat of nuclear armageddon looms large in your mind, but to a kid the threat of being beaten up in a remote corner during recess is just as important.
I was actually put in counseling for a while for “anger management”. Because apparently I had a temper problem, and not other kids trying to beat me up on a regular basis. The counselor was actually an okay guy though, and I think was the reason they stopped forcing me to go before very long. But still, a really great message to send.
“Not only are we going to do almost nothing to address the actual bullying, but there must be something wrong with you to make you so upset about it”
Throughout my life, I’ve had my friends’ backs, friends have had mine, and my friends have had each others. I get pushed around by some scumbag? I’m the one holding back my buddy from slamming him into the wall. Moron calls my friend an idiot? I have his failing math grade taped to the wall within the hour. One of my friends sees my other one crying? He asks if someone needs to, and I quote, “be shanked because I’m Puerto Rican and I can do that”. (Nobody was shanked on that day, because it was a family thing.)
Because of this, my first reaction to someone not standing up and saying something is to think of them as either a coward or a collaborator.
Of course, in the long run, I’ll still forgive them within seconds and acknowledge the fact that not everyone is as BRAVE and COURAGEOUS (read: arrogant and filled to the brim with invincibility complex) as me.
I just wanted to let you know that you’re not alone in having that immediate reaction.
Is little Malfoy a Walkyverse character? He doesn’t ring a bell.
He didn’t appear in the rerun so far.
Leland shows up in a couple Shortpacked! comics. Namely: he says toys are made by white supremacists, he pees green light, he clenches his sphincter.
Oh right, I remember that guy.
Fuck that kid up, Sal.
(Not really. But kinda.
I mean, there’s a chance he’s already fucked up by other factors in his life.
But still.)
But only when the authorities are not watching.
I really want to see sal beat up leland just for that euphoric moment when the antagonist realizes they pushed the protagonist too far.
givin the time zones this constitute as my birthday strip, and it’s one where Marcie gets beat up, thanks willis (said sarcastically)
Well I see this Leland is a dick.
Long ago, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, there was a child actor named Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer. Young Carl was quite the prankster, bringing chaos and mayhem to the set every chance he got.
George Sidney directed most of Carl’s films at the time. He hated children, and he hated Carl most of all. One day, Mr. Sidney called Carl over.
“When you turn twenty-one,” said Mr. Sidney, “I’m gonna find you and beat the shit out of you.”
That said, I hope that’s what happens to Leland when he finally reaches that age.
Is that random exposed rebar?
it’s a school so… probably?
I’m not sure I want to know what kinda crappy-ass school has chunks of random concrete lying around and exposed rebar.
Ones in poor areas, that don’t have the funding to fix it, and where the parents are far less able to afford the lawyers to sue if their kid gets hurt
And old ones, where dirt has eroded away and refilling it doesn’t seem to do anything.
Yeah, but that’s Billie right there, the girl with the super rich parents, and aren’t the Walkertons well off too? There have gotta be some parents at this school with suing money.
Sunnydale.
Bit of a difference between a ditch and a hellmouth.
My middle school was literally crumbling, there were chunks of concrete on the front stairs that used to be part of the facade. I remember I thought it was lucky that nobody got brained. (Rural mountain town, 1995, unlikely to have been fixed since then.)
My school was like that too, the didn’t fix it up until the late 90’s.
You know, people complain that kids today are too safe, but a playground with a lack of concrete blocks and exposed reinforcing steel would probably have been a better choice.
Hell, Arcade’s Murderworld would have been a better choice. At least their inevitable maiming/murder would be brightly colored and amusing to watch.
Arcade’s Murderworld is the safest place in the Marvel Universe. Has that guy EVER successfully killed someone?
Spider-Man should consider it a possible retirement home for Aunt May, she’d live forever.
Supposedly, he’s great at killing non-superheroes. The problem is, he’s a supervillain in a superhero universe and is therefore designed to be defeated.
Ah well, at least he always seems to have a good time even when he loses.
I now desperately want to see Arcade vs Gwenpool.
Gwen’s entire shtick is that even though she has no powers and is inept in a fight, she’s from our universe and is aware she’s the main character, so she thinks she’s invincible, because only “extras” get killed permanently. She also knows who everyone else is, so she’d consider Arcade a total joke.
Wait, is Gwenpool a thing?
Gwenpool is a thing. huh. I was still getting used to Spider-Gwen.
Wait, what does this do to SpideyPool? *head explodes*
Yeah. That whole series is kinda amazing, and written by the guy who created Dr. Mcninja.
She’s not Gwen Stacy, and she’s not Deadpool. She’s a regular comic book fan from “our” universe, who somehow ended up in the Marvel ‘verse. She can’t fight and has no powers, but she’s a comic book fan so she knows everybody’s secrets.
And she’s convinced that the whole universe she’s in is fictional (that it’s real to the people there doesn’t really register), so it doesn’t matter if she kills people or causes destruction, because it’ll all just get retconned or ignored anyway. And the reason she’s trying to be a superhero is so she gets her own book (it worked!), because then A) people in our world will read about her, thus making us aware of what happened to her, and B) if she’s a main character she’s invincible, because popular heroes never die or stay dead for long.
Gwenpool is one of my favorite comics right now. It’s not all what I would have expected, and is often thoughtful and heartfelt.
I had no idea that was Hastings writing that! Gonna have to check that out
Just got into Squirrel Girl, and am loving that one, but I have always been a fan of Ryan North, so no surprise there. Gwenpool sounds to be in a similar style, and if it is by the same guy who did Dr. McNinja, it is a double win. So I will give it a go, thanks for the info.
OMG Thank all of you kind folks for talking about a comic that I need to be reading LIEKNAOYESTERDAY. :O Seriously, this sounds rad. :O
Aunt May will live forever no matter what.
Well, especially since she is de-aging… yeah! (movies, anyway)
Plus the dude wears a bowtie, which totally makes him cool.
Nooooooo.
Marcie 🙁
Walky fuck’em up fuck’em up!
I still sometimes type in Shortpacked! when I’m coming to check for an update.
I hear you. I miss it, too. I just keep telling myself that when we’re done reading through the early Walkyverse strips, I can re-binge-read Shortpacked…
Well, THAT’S one inattentive teacher. Looking right at the kid with the leer and fist, the phrasing of his version of events, Walky’s phrasing of his “confirmation”, and she’s probably gonna end up letting Leland off the hook to add to Sal’s trauma.
She’d be on my list of Educators I Want To Go Back In Time And Shake Some Sense Into for sure.
I’m hoping that since its a flashback then maybe its a memory and not what really happened…I hope anyway
That’s not inattentive, that’s downright complicit.
Worse than inattentive. Anyone think it’s pure chance that the only version of events she’s interested in is the one from the white male? No?
The band-aid Marcie is already wearing suggests this isn’t the first of these events, and what we know of later Sal tells us it’s not the last. By a long shot. Grrrrr.
(and is this the first time we’ve seen Marcie without glasses? though we did once see her eyes deathglare clean through the goggletint)
Yeah, Walky’s phrasing is pretty much “How obvious can I be that I’m only saying this to save my skin, while not actually getting beaten up for it later.”
And if the teacher can’t see that …
Teacher knows exactly what happened. Teacher doesn’t care. Teacher just wants to avoid paperwork: if everyone says everything’s fine, then everything’s fine.
If anyone (like Sal) does have a problem, they’re the ones causing a disruption (for the Teacher) and need to be punished.
Also, Teacher is almost certainly making certain assumptions here (thank you, institutionalized racism) when she grabs hold of two of the black kids and stands between the other kids of color and the white kid while trying to “sort out” what’s going on.
Sal more than obviously gets it, Walky doesn’t get it at all, and Billie looks like she has no idea what’s going on or why but is afraid to say anything, along with the other dude in the background.
That suggests Teacher probably has a habit of doing this during disputes. :/
Leland has the squarest jaw of any kid I’ve ever seen, it’s mesmerizing
Wow, Walky sure had a big vocabulary back then
Leland’s a little shit.
I saw his nose and thought he was Ryan for a second there.
what if Leland is Ryan’s real name. I mean, why would Ryan give his real name to the girl he planned on raping?
well considering most rapes are from people who the person knows already. also we can consider that if he has done it before he is cocky.
That’s… not really what that means.
ryan never gave his name to anybody
we only know his name ‘cuzza the tags
well that makes sense. while i enjoy the comic i can’t remember every little detail.
He didn’t, but I mean, it wouldn’t matter much if he did (except that AG might have been more able to put the fear into him sooner).
It took Walky, like, five years to find step up to the plate in Walkyverse. How long does that translate to in Dumbing Time?
I think this may be a dream more than a flashback (“overwhelming charisma” does not seem like a phrase that would be uttered by grade-schoolers)(but it may be a dream that reflects reality).
It does remind me, though, that I was thinking that whatever enraged Sal enough to hold up a convenience store (and take a hostage?) may well have had something to do with Marcie being harmed.
They could be a fair variety of ages, though. Distinguishing between child ages is one place where comics tend to fall short.
Some families really are that highly verbal. My brothers and I could’ve said that in grade school. Heck, in junior kindergarten, at age four, my brother answered that his favorite shape was an hexagon.
So if Walky heard the phrase on tv, he could parrot it, no problem.
As someone who really had a strong vocabulary as a kid…nah.
I mean so did I but I’d never have directed it at someone I was trying to get NOT to beat me up :\
I learned “charisma” at the age of 10, thanks to D&D.
(And lots of other big words by being a voracious reader.)
Not quite a flashback, but Sal’s memory. She remembers her brother not having her back and being extra wordy about it. Sal will remember getting in trouble for this old episode, just like she is getting in trouble in the present for something she isn’t to blame for.
Dollars to donuts that Sal kicked Leland’s butt into the next state and it got her in HUGE trouble. I predict we’re seeing the beginning of Marcie’s and Sal’s friendship as well as Sal’s “descent into hooliganism” as her mother would probably say.
what kind of name is Leland anyway
mine
No, you’re miados.
It’s a rich white kid/future politician name.
I have never been either of those things but have the name.
Then you must not be Leland Stanford! (I hope not; he’s long dead)
It’s the name of a friend of mine, may he RIP, who foreswore the family business of lawyerin’ to be a cartoonist.
All I can think of is Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks…probably not a good sign.
Yup, there is NO WAY Sal is not kicking his but first opportunity. There is no way that doesn’t land her in trouble.
Seems to me like a pretty good snapshot of Sal’ls childhood.
I’m also willing to bet that “girls don’t respond with violence” will be a part of it.
“What kind of name is Leland anyway”
English, from a surname, from a place name meaning “fallow land.”
The first person I think of when I hear the name Leland is Leland Yee, a California state senator who got arrested on corruption and drug trafficking charges. I believe there is a bill on the CA November ballot to the effect of making it easier to “fire” state legislators when something like that happens because the state was having a hard time figuring out how they could legally stop sending him his paycheck.
Boy-oh-boy, Willis. You are trying my patience, and not in a good way.
So Marcie likely got her throat crushed at some point 😐
And my theory’s been that Sal tried to rob places to pay for an operation or something.
I still think it might be ‘well if that’s what everyone says I am, I should be actually doing it and getting (paid?)’ thing, but that is a sad option. Or Marcie wanted (a thing) while she was in the hospital and Sal’s mom wouldn’t buy it (maybe bc she ‘always knew that girl (Marcie) was a troublemaker’) or just because she wouldn’t listen to her.
It might have been throat cancer, or something like that.
Noooo. 🙁
I’ve always assumed it was a brain thing (I have a lot of brain things), but this or cancer or etc also seem likely.
Is it me, or is “charisma” a pretty advanced word for an eight year old?
I knew it at four, but I taught myself to read so I could play D&D.
Far worse reasons.
I’ve been familiar with the word “optimistic” since I was a first grader.
Of course, the existence of a certain Autobot had a lot to do with that…
It took me 30 years to actually experience that
You know what… I am just going to walk away from this one for a few hours. It’s a good strip, but it just sets off a whole lot of rage sensors right now.
Oof.
How old are they here? Marcie and Billie both look about ten of eleven, but walks looks younger.
Sal’s like
https://youtu.be/6b6Sn0RBmRo
And that little snot grew up to become a Trump supporter.
Or a DeSanto supporter?
Can’t say as I blame Walky for backing down: but I was like Sal. I would of creamed the asshole right then and there.
If I couldn’t have done it then, I would come up behind him with a brick when he wasn’t looking – and neither was that type of teacher.
Teacher sure is concerned about Marcie….
Yeah, I wasn’t someone who started fights in school ever, but especially in elementary school, I was more than willing to end whoever started it, especially with my friends (and, tbh, I was really small. like, second smallest in my grade. it worked to my advantage as far as getting into trouble). Though honestly if I was walky (therefor maybe not really Marcie’s friend) I’d just tell the truth and hope they weren’t dumb enough to try to beat me up right after getting in trouble for hurting someone else. But I don’t know the dynamic at their school so I don’t blame him either (though he could tell later, then anyone at the scene could have done it)
(by the time I was in high school I just got venomous with my tongue. unfortunately not literally.)
Teacher should be worried, Marcie just banged her head on rocks, even if there aren’t other reasons (eg Marcie being frequently bullied)
apparently I deleted the end.
bullied), but it’s telling that she hasn’t even done a head/neck check of any kind (considering Marcie still isn’t up). She might have just wanted to stop the fight first, but it doesn’t give me confidence.
Hey, that’s the guy with the green piss isn’t it?
He’s just self-conscious is all.
That’s a pretty bad spill.
I wonder if this is going to be the injury that caused Marcie to go mute.
Wasn’t sure if it had been explained in some other corner of the Walkyverse. But it sure sounds like a plausible backstory for Marcie’s muteness to me.
In the Walkyverse, Marcie can actually talk but chooses not to.
In the Dumbiverse, Marcie could talk when she was a kid, but went mute due to some unspecified illness or injury, and Sal learned sign language with her so they could still talk.
The fact that the cause of Marcie’s muteness was left undisclosed means folks have been speculating for awhile.
Well clearly the drama-tag got pulled much earlier in this continuity’s timeline
I think that there never WAS a drama tag.
I believe it came pre-pulled.
Don’t you just love when adults are such ignorant shits that they’re oblivious to what is obviously going on?
Stupid adults, what they ever do for us?
Also, how adorable is mini-Sal in her overall shorts.
She is impossibly both scary and cute as heck
Wonder if this may be one of the reasons for Sal’s rebellious streak or Sal may start to see Amazi-Girl as Leland in the same way Amazi-Girl sees young Sal.
I’d guess it was incidents like this that firmly entrenched her beliefs that authority figures are not allies and that the “system” will not support those like her and Marcie.
Teacher ignores the kid who just got attacked and rushes to defend the attacker. Looks like elementry school in the dumbiverse was just like mine.
I think she looks exasperated with Leland, but that doesn’t mean she won’t take his side (or that the principle or whoever this might go to won’t)
Nor does it change the fact Marcie is still lying in the rumble bleeding from her head being completely ignored.
Yeah, I’m bothered there’s not even a ‘Marcie don’t move,’ or anything.
That should be rubble.
Mine had a real blindspot when it came to boys. ’cause the boys in our school would get violent all the time, sometines as a game, sometimes not, and mostly it would be ignored as long as no girls were involved. Of course I enjoyed that blindspot when I was playing fighting, but that lead to some bad days in the long run
sigh i know its targeted at the character but its hard reading all these comments of hatred using my name.
well it is what it is.
my real first name (this is middle) is weird (well known bc of a celebrity, but not common enough to be on historical name data). so I never get it in these situations, but always if I see any celebrity things.
I have a name that is very rare as a first name, but only fairly uncommnon as a last name. I’m always delighted when I see a fictional character with that name. I only know of two or three, one of whom is a Critical Role NPC.
Both my real first and last names (and middle for that matter) are incredibly common… I don’t actually run into this as much as I’d expect.
Same.
Aw, I am sure you are the good name-twin, and this is the wicked one.
John had the same problem back in the confrontation between Joyce and… John.
There was a Ryan, too, who may have shared your pain. Heaven help anyone named Ross or Blaine.
Yup. I shoulda just picked a screen name.
FUDGE Y….
Sorry, sorry, reflex.
I almost dodged that bullet since book 1 was long finished when I started reading this comic …but then then he came back out of nowhere
I’m nicknaming the unnamed kid in panel 3 Franklin.
The teacher does not get a tag?
The little kid from Joyce’s Church back home didn’t get one, if I recall correctly. I think a few commenters wanted one for him as well.
isnt that marcie in panel 3? or do you mean the kid in the fifth panel?
I think they just counted the outlined panels
Right 5th panel.
Makes sense to me.
Okay, I’m really starting to have a hard time with just how many characters knew each other since kindergarten. It strains credulity.
Sal and Walky are brother and sister. Billie is their neighbor, and Marcie is Sal’s best friend.
That’s four people. How does that strain credulity?
Four people whose characterization rather depends on them having known each other forever.
Wait till they all get abducted in the spaceship!
I see what you’re doing there.
Walky + Sal + Billie + Marcie
Amber + Amazi-Girl + Ethan + Mike
Dorothy + Danny + Joe
Joyce + Becky
Sarah: No known pre-college friends.
Dina: No known pre-college friends.
Ruth: No known pre-college friends.
Roz: No known pre-college friends.
Carla: No known pre-college friends.
Jacob: No known pre-college friends.
(that’s all the characters from the cast page, and I can’t think of any groups from the more minor characters… -Possibly- Raidah and her posse, but I know of no evidence on way or the other whether they met each other before college or at college)
Going to the same in-state university as 2 or 3 of your friends (well, 2 of your friends and a sibling, or 2 of your friends and a split personality) really isn’t so uncommon that this is at all disproportionate from reality.
If your concern is the addition of Leland, please note that there is no current evidence whatsoever that Leland goes to Indiana University. This is his first comic appearance, and there is nothing to suggest he will appear again outside of further flashbacks.
Did Dorothy, Danny, and Joe all know each other since kindergarten? I thought it was maybe more Dorothy knew them from middle/high school, and Danny and Joe knew each other longer. Same with Amber, Ethan, and Mike- they’ve known each other for a while, but I don’t know if it’s all the way since kindergarten, at least for all three of them.
(I get the impression that Amazi-Girl is a fairly recent addition- at least in the past few years. She wasn’t around until after the convenience store incident at least.)
Considering that Amazi-Girl defines the robbery as something that Sal did to her as well as Amber, yeah, Amber starting to dissociate is a fairly recent occurrence. Amber used to define Amazi-Girl as a mask that Danny could never love, and then she became insistent that it was AG who was dating him.
The first concrete sign we got was when Amber said that Amazi-Girl should approach every instance of underaged drinking the same way, but Amber can be inconsistent.
Danny and Joe go back to at least as far as third grade according to http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-4/01-the-only-dope-for-me-is-you/newmainman/ It isn’t specified whether Dorothy knew them then or met more recently.
I don’t have a specific strip to link, but my impression’s always been that Ethan and Amber go way back. Maybe not as far as kindergarten, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did. But, again, Mike could easily be a more recent addition.
My list was intended to be any group of people in the main cast who came in already knowing each other prior to college, even if it was just high school. Hence my phrasing for the rest, ‘No known pre-college friends’. About the only thing I’m not counting is that one girl Billie ran into that one time that she knew from high school whose name I forget, because that friendship clearly ended even before college, and Sal’s chance encounter with Amber and Ethan that one could technically use to join those two groups, but it really wasn’t any kind of meaningful interaction.
…I mean, it was MEANINGFUL, but not…. You know what I mean.
I lied; I have a specific link as regards Ethan and Amber:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/looped/
“You were my best friend most of my life”
If I stare at Panel 1 long enough, it eventually becomes clear that the way Marcie’s drawn *is* actually anatomically possible and not weird at all. But upon first glance, she looks like a human pretzel. It’s weird, and I don’t know why my mind is processing it that way. Possibly it’s all the blue, making it look like a Picasso painting?
It didn’t look weird to me until I gave it more than a glance due to your comment. I think the lines of the jacket are conspiring to make it appear more pretzel-y than it actually is.
Is it bad at first I thought that kid was Ryan
Similar looks, similar characters, flashback right after Ryan appears – I thought so too.
So much charisma this Leland has! I would follow him to hell and back I would!
Boy’s will be boys, ‘mIright?
…No, OK, I think I might be wrong.
Stating this as a man myself. Boys will be boys is such a horrible saying. Like every time I’ve heard it, it’s just been an excuse to justify violence or other abhorrent behavior and for some reason associates it to being male….Bad saying! Bad! No! Go sit in a corner till you’ve learned your lesson!
i feel like this is the same as saying “man up” when a boy cries. I sometimes think the two are related. i mean if you can’t get your emotions out through tears they might bubble up in other ways.
ugh, It makes my skin crawl.
I believe it’s referred to as ‘Toxic Masculinity’. It’s that seeming weird form of, what, male sexism? Not as bad as the opposite, obviously, but still not good.
Oh, that alt text is a thing of beauty
Just checked… and yeah, that’s frickin’ glorious!
I wonder, do we finally have a villain who no one will defend?
Nevermind, that has to be Ryan. There’s no way anyone took his side. (Right?)
There was one random asshole who tried to state that Joyce’s glassing of his face was a sign of Joyce’s abuse of others and tried to downplay what Ryan did to make him out like the victim of an assault…
my brain is refusing to even parse that into ideas.
I recognize all the words but the way they’re arranged just doesn’t make any sense…
I applaud the alt text.
I was wondering if someone would comment on it. It made me smile.
I don’t understand why the positioning is the way it is in the last panel. Wouldn’t Sal be the one close to the bully? Why did Walky interject and run past Sal only to instantly back down? Why are the grounds so unsafe? Looks like a nightmare scenario in general.
That could be explained by Sal first rushing over to Marcie, then turning back when she saw she wasn’t badly hurt.
Who uses rollerskates on grass?
From the last panel it looks like they’re next to a sidewalk. Marcie was probably skating on that when Leland sweep her leg out from under her
Well I guess this establishes Marcie wasn’t born mute.
That was established a while ago, actually!
How much time passed? From the left to the right it seems as if the teach had to see everything and be in close proximity given her response time as well as stop the altercation before blows were traded. However if she was farther away she would have arrived during a fight. This might explain why Walky’s position changed so drastically because he was preventing it.
It seems most likely that the teacher was nearby but simply not looking in that direction until Sal yelled.
I’m more surprised Leland didn’t have a friend or two to help him.
That’s what happened to me. There were three primary bullies. Two of them would ambush me and beat me to a pulp. The third would *just happen* to be nearby to tell the school administrators that I started the fight.
Of course, since one of them was the vice principal’s son, there wasn’t much I could do. After sixth grade, my mom took me out of school and homeschooled me. (Oh, the school begged her not to. Besides being a ‘gifted student’, I had several other issues that led to me counting for several times what a normal student would when it comes to funding.)
I’m firmly convinced that, had I remained in public school, I would have ended up dead before I could graduate. I don’t mean that as an exaggeration or to be facetious: even if the bullies never beat me to death, I would have taken my own life long before the end of high school.
Glad you made it and the bastards didn’t win.
Also, is Marcie deaf, or just mute? I know Sal talks to her vocally, but some people are good at reading lips, etc…
Marcie is not deaf, just non-vocal.
Mute
Can someone explain to me how these flashbacks are related to the main plot?
They’re the life experiences of Sal and Marcie, showing the strong connections they made and the fierce protectiveness Sal has for her friends. It shows Walky’s response to bullying which is understandable but part of why she has trouble fully opening up to him.
It shows the build-up of Sal’s rage at injustice at a young age, which has been a key theme in the Amazi-girl/Sal conflict because Sal recognized a lot of her old self in AG’s behavior. It also hints that Sal’s robbing of the bank may have been related to Marcie in some way, especially as it’s implied something happened between this flashback and now to render her mute.
Additionally, it starts to build up a piece of why Sal is so hostile regarding authorities. If this was the level of support she got from teachers and schools, where she was given the majority of the intervention and holding back by teachers than her white bullies? Then, yeah…
But short answer, characterization, context, all that good jazz.
Thx.
She robbed a bank too? I didnt remember that.
They are good characterizations esp for Marcie , as Willis gives her a lot more language.
In the present Willis , doesnt give her a lot of words. ( yes I know shes mute ) . Its great to have representation of Signing but her overall presented lack of word count , has reduced Marcie to a sidekick. I think Joe has had more non-spoken language in comic now , than Marcie.
( Willis If you are reading this I nominate Marcie to get her own Chapter ( Like Dina, ) where we get her own internal monologue. I dont want her to be a sidekick any more. She’s Sals best friend but most of her thoughts, and external life is off the page. )
I was just expecting the previous Flashback to be more relevant plotwise to that chapter. I ended up looking extra hard for connections, and why Willis posted it there , and i didnt find any. Maybe it was too subtle for me. I was expecting some sort of rhyme or foreshadowing. It would have been amazing if it was posted before we learned of Amazigirls creation/ red panels.
If this comment seems tortuously awkward its because I wanted to write about “voice” and its lack in the metaphorical written sense of ‘writers voice’ and personal agency and self-narrative ; in that I want Marcie to have more of one in the present. But I dont know the ASL equivalent of the Voice-metaphor , so I used “words” and “language” and half think It might be sound offensive.
OK I just realized Leland and the teacher are the only white Anglos.
and Teach instantly Blames the Walkertons and the White fuckface *
set the narrative.
More racism.
it can be read as Why Sal struck Amazigirl first. Letting Amazigirl attack her or Marcie first makes no sense, especially when she will get Blamed even when innocent
I don’t think Sal robbing those stores was about Marcie. I’m pretty sure it was, entirely, about doing stupid violent shit to make her parents pay attention to her.
If she was stealing money for Marcie, I think we would have gotten some kind of indication. Like she was carrying a bag with her or something.
I can’t imagine you’d really NEED a bag to carry the amount of money that was in that till… Just a couple decent pockets. Or just take a bag from the store.
As for her motives, they’ve really only been discussed speculatively even in-comic, and I can’t think of anyone other than Walky who has brought it up. His source of information would be his parents, and I think we can all agree that they really weren’t paying enough attention to know what happened (if they had been, would we really have interpreted this as a cry for help in the first place?).
Don’t get me wrong, getting her parents’ attention may very well have been a huge factor in her decision, or even the only factor. We don’t know what happened in the (I’m guessing) five years between this strip and the robbery. But it’s not like Willis hasn’t kept details like this hidden before (e.g., Amazi-Girl’s origins, whatever happened between Jordan and Carol). It’s why a lot of us keep coming back; good storytelling.
Sal (unsuccessfully) robbed a convenience store, not a bank. If it had been a bank I think she’d still be in Juvie :/
Three convenience stores! With a shotgun! (It’s on the Cast page.) The bank came later…
It’s so rare for Cerberus to make a slip like this, so I had to push it hard.
Holy shit, I did say bank. What the hell, past me?
Yeah, I think this flashback series is going to be good for me. Wall of text follows.
Becky, Carla and Jocelyne have resonated strongly with me; Jocelyne especially so. I was assigned male at birth in a fairly conservative Christian community. I internalized a lot of really toxic ideas about sexuality growing up. “Homosexuality is an abomination.” “Trans people are corrupting God’s perfect will.” Popular culture even got into the act. Crocodile Dundee had that dreadful scene where Dundee sexually assaults a trans woman a bar and everyone cheers. We were supposed to cheer along.
As I aged, I began to discover that masculinity felt like a borrowed suit; it fit well enough that I could wear it and it got me in at the club, but I was increasingly aware that it wasn’t mine and it was starting to chafe. In the midst all the torment of feeling like I was somehow corrupted and sinful, I was suddenly aware that I was in an environment that felt VERY unsafe.
That’s why those stories hit me so hard. Every sideways glance, every snide remark, every stutter followed by a weak excuse to be somewhere else, they all felt like a punch to the gut. Watching Jocelyne as she watched her family, keeping track of who she might be able to trust and who she definitely can’t, felt far too familiar. Seeing the pain on her face of hearing Joyce say she’s always wanted a sister. That’s why it meant so much to see Hank make the decision to love and support Becky in spite of his religious upbringing. I’m hopeful we’ll see Hank do the same For Jocelyne some day.
Those stories resonated with me in a way Sal’s has not. While I am cognizant of racism, I don’t always recognize it. Racism manifests in different ways than transphobia and I don’t have those experiences. I see some of it, sure, but I have massive blind spots. When the issue of racism among the Walkertons themselves came up, I was incredulous, but I knew well enough to take it seriously and open myself up to seeing it. There was a time I would have been among those insisting the crowd at the rally probably wasn’t racist. I am getting better. This comic is helping.
I’ve had a few moments of sudden realization of the background radiation of racism in Sal’s life. A few days ago, Emperor Norton II mentioned (in a staggeringly beautiful post) people touching the hair of people of color without permission. My reaction at first was “Oh, yeah. That’s a thing. I have heard that before.” Then I remembered Joyce’s obsession with Sal’s hair. Specifically, Joyce is obsessed with Sal’s chemically straightened hair which is yet another sensitive issue. I had initially dismissed it as Joyce’s sweet, naive earnestness; annoying but harmless. Suddenly, it seemed like yet another very valid reason for Sal’s initial distaste for Joyce. When Sal mentioned that Joyce “felt real” for the first time, I thought “Well, she’s kind of gotten over that weird idol worship thing she had for Sal… OH GOD! She’s been practically fetishizing Sal this whole time and interacting with her like she ISN’T A REAL PERSON!” It wasn’t just annoying, it was genuinely dehumanizing. I didn’t see it because, to me, Joyce was putting Sal on a pedestal. It wasn’t malicious so I didn’t see it as harmful.
That’s why, while I LOVED the focus on Becky, Ruth, Carla and Jocelyne in the last book, I am very excited to see Sal get some significant screen time. The last book was important to me because resonated with me so well. Sal is important to me precisely because she doesn’t, but she should.
All of this. This is amazing.
Absolutely.
“This is amazing.”
… Would it be really weird to admit how much that made me smile?
Wow. This comment was so good I actually feel like commenting myself. Text wall incoming? Is that how this works?
Racism isn’t a one way street, it’s a muti directional intersection. Sal’s and by extension the Walkerton’s depiction of racism as a whole has been pretty spot on. (especially the hair thing for black women. I have sooo many memories of sitting for hours in a salon waiting on my mom’s hair whatever with tin foil that just seeing Sal’s hair triggers me.) But as much as Sal is a victim of it she is a proponent of it. Calling Danny “wonderbread” while in context not necessarily a bad thing, as Danny is a bland, straight-laced, spongy slice of dough, it’s an example non the less. The same could be argued with her initial reception of Joyce. On strictly the most superficial terms Joyce probably represented everything Sal hates. That crowd a few strips back? Maybe they were racist, maybe they weren’t. The context of the strip and my own personal experience would lead me to believe one thing. But you know what stings most? They’re right! As much as that comment was bullshit Sal is (was) a troublemaker. A criminal. And that makes the situation ultimately ambiguous. As it should be. Life isn’t black and white, Willis knows this, and he’s too capable a writer to have someone outright shout “I distrust her because she’s black!” (Although now that I think about it I would legitimately laugh at that because I am a monster) Casual racism is very much the “background radiation” of all our lives. You’re not immune to it because you’re white or brown or green or purple. So when you say you can’t resonate with Sal’s circumstances I say you can! Because it happen to all of us…..Anyway this was just my long winded way of saying don’t stress Dandi_Andi! :D. You might have more in common with Sal than you think. That’s good!….Or maybe it’s actually bad? What is good is that this comic can spark these conversations.
Well that’s that. Hopefully you liked it or hated it and that I didn’t make a huge ass of myself. Either way I probably won’t do a post like this again. Putting yourself out there is scary. I honestly don’t know how Cerberus does this shit everyday.
When I first encountered Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” it was an eye-opening read. We are effectively “trained” or desensitized to not even see some of the ways these things are perpetuated and that’s a horrible, horrible thought.
A wall of text makes people go ‘tl, dr’. But you have good stuff there — enough for several paragraphs.
I actually skipped past it, then went back up.
….Look. There isn’t racism against white people. ‘wonderbread’ is not a continuation of the racism Sal receives. White people don’t deal with racism (In Modern America. Ask me again in like, 1500 or 2500). Seriously, go fuck yourself.
Sal’s a criminal. SO IS AMAZIGIRL. Both for her vigilante bullshit, and for committing fucking battery, a more serious crime than what Sal committed.
For some reason, I thought the Walkertons were Latin, not black. Sal’s hair was probably part of it.
Yes, yes, yes! The point where Joyce becomes “real” to Sal is *exactly* the point at which Joyce stops fetishizing Sal!
Like Joyce, I was brought up in a 99.5% white community. I never saw anyone of a different skin colour until I was 18. There was no way I could not be unintentionally racist like Joyce at some point in my life. And so it proved, and so I watched over myself trying to be better. Not going out of my way to treat people differently.
Still, it was rather shocking when I saw blatant racism take place against one of my friends in a nice, white middle class squash club.
I tend to give my white confreres, even the nice, well mannered ones, less of the benefit of the doubt these days.
My reading of the lynch mob is that the crowd in the picture could only see a black woman faced by a white vigilante. Those are the only facts known to any of them. They assumed that the black woman was in the wrong.
Bizarre random aside, the woman in Crocodile Dundee isn’t trans. It was a bar prank on the character and he “checked” her like someone would an animal. Not that such remotely makes it less transphobic. It’s an out the same way that “Oh, Buffalo Bill isn’t REALLY trans.” Despite the horrible amount of phobia said depiction created.
And believe me, having been one of the assholes in a community like that, I apologize.
I don’t recall that scene at all.
This scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6fgPX3NjyA
“Then I remembered Joyce’s obsession with Sal’s hair. Specifically, Joyce is obsessed with Sal’s chemically straightened hair which is yet another sensitive issue.”
The pieces just keep clicking together, don’t they? I think the last time I read that particular strip, I had something vaguely trying to get my attention regarding Joyce’s obsession, but you made it all too clear what exactly was wrong there. Thank you for that.
And remember, Joyce is a person that by and large tries to do good (which I think is more important than someone who tries to be good). And she still falls into these traps. A good reminder to all of us what we can all easily be doing if we’re not being aware. And how intent can only go so far (which in fact isn’t very far at all) in mitigating the actions.
Thank you for the compliments, by the way. And I must say, I think you certainly know your way around a keyboard. A powerful and well-written post if ever I saw one (and I’ve seen plenty in the DoA comment field)!
There is something about how the school system that seems to encourage the development of children with behavioural issues into full-blown psychotics. I suppose it’s necessary; whole sections of industry and commerce wouldn’t have suitable recruits otherwise but, having been on the receiving end, I can tell you it isn’t fun.
So, I’m guessing that we’re about to find out just what happened to Marcie, why Sal feels so responsible for her and, possibly, the starting point of Sal’s estrangement from her parents. After all, if Leland is a good boy from a socially prominent family (the worst bullies usually are) then her accusing him of maiming her friend might be quite the sin in her parents eyes.
if a teacher didnt see the completely (and far too common) obvious bullying goin on then that teacher needs to be fired. stat.
She’s got a union and decades of working precedent about ignoring bullying (until it turns to serious assault, homicide or suicide) to protect her from that.
What a weird time to blame hard-to-earn-and-vanishing tenure and teachers’ unions. Charter and private schools, with no unions and no accountability and a tendency to hire unqualified people because it saves money, are juuuuuust as likely to have horribly unqualified teachers, if not more so. Especially because this teacher is young and a woman working at an elementary school, so her likelihood of even having tenure is like ???????? no.
Also, teachers who might be otherwise good at teaching are often horrible at handling bullies, which is a completely unrelated issue.
she doesnt look that young to me amd also like… marcies latina sals black the bullys white… yeah i think the teachers going to ignore this one probably punish sal for trying to fight the kid who kicked her best friend and give marcie a band aid so her parents dont complain
This attitude was all too common among teachers well through the late 90s. They just didn’t want to deal with ‘kid problems’ because of the hassle. Besides there are a hundred other kids they need to keep an eye on.
If this changed in recent years, my guess is it’s only because of lawsuit-happy parents.
it was still a thing in the mid 00’s and probably still is now teachers just dont care most of the time it seems
Heck, I’m amazed that teacher isn’t being surrounded by lawyers and clobbered just for laying a hand on a student.
Comic Reactions:
Flames. Flames. On the side of my face. Breathing hot breaths…
And it’s not fully for Leland. Like, yes, on one level, I despise bullies and Leland is a downright dangerous version of one given that ditch he just kicked Marcie into seems to be made of jagged stones and exposed rebar.
But to me, the fire of hatred for him pales in comparison to the raging bonfire of utter contempt I have for unnamed last panel teacher.
Like, No. Just no. She’s doing literally everything wrong she could be doing right now. And she’s doing it wrong in subtly bigoted ways.
Like, first up, let’s talk about the fact that she rushes over to investigate a scene and her natural instinct is to grab and hold back the two black siblings and to position her body to favor most of her strength and attention towards Sal.
Or the fact that her first instinct isn’t to immediately call for medical aid for the little girl bleeding from the fucking head in a pile of exposed rebar. Like, fuck, I’ve done recess duty when someone has gotten hurt and I would fucking sprint over to provide first aid or even just to check in before dealing with a single bit of disciplinary anything. Because that’s the bigger issue.
Or the way, she lets Leland set the first story (like, NO, if you are investigating something like this, the instigator will try and come and explain why it went down and what their victim did to deserve it, and you fucking shut that shit down and say you’ll talk to them next and ask the kid who got targeted first what happened). That’s like Recess Monitor 101.
Or the fact that Leland is straight up giving every bully signal possible that he did this, but she’s still acting like this is a “what’s all this then” situation. Like, holy fuckberries and cream, recess monitor lady, you’ve got this student grinning like an asshole while every other kid is in some amount of distress and he’s openly threatening another student with a closed fist while he demands said student back up his “I overheard a family member use this as an excuse for his domestic violence” bullshittery.
Like, motherfucker, this isn’t an investigating situation, this is a “Leland, go to the principal. No. I’m not arguing. Go or you will be suspended. Assistant, escort Leland to the principal. I’m gonna check on this girl” type situation or at least a “I don’t want to hear it Leland. We’re going to have a long talk about this the second I’m finished up here and don’t think about slinking off. I will find you. Now, you down there, are you okay” type situation.
Hell, you’d want to follow up with Leland anyways, not only because what he did was fucked and dangerous and he’ll pose a danger to further students if not thoroughly spoken to, but because that “tripped” excuse is way too reminiscent of a physical abuse excuse to be coincidence and that’s a sign of some badness at home Leland is emulating that CPS kinda need to be made aware of.
Like, on every fucking level, this is handled so utterly abominably in that last panel. Fuck, no wonder Sal doesn’t trust authorities farther than she can throw them. If she dealt with this and then racist cops harassing her growing up…? Fuck. And no wonder Billie is skeptical about the school’s resources aiding anyone, having seen terrible handling of nasty situations like this from a young age.
Ugh. Just fudge you random teacher, fudge you to Hades.
*Small note since terrible teachers are my kryptonite and will cause me to rage with the power of a thousand suns, but I wanted to also note how much I love Sal’s responses. That horror in her face in Panel 2 as she rushes over to check on Marcie is palpable. And the murderous rage in Panel 4 is righteous. Her friend could have been killed by this chuckling fuckwaffle. And I love the little touch of her impotently flailing arms as shitty teacher lady focuses her attention on holding her back. It’s amazing characterization for a character who only gets a single word in this strip.
FWIW, as I’ve said above, Leyland is probably going to turn out to be from a socially prominent family and that gives him effective immunity and impunity. Everyone knows it (except the kids, of course).
you can be from a family of basically no importance and still have immunity and impunity too (though, I actually bet it would be more the walkertons than the school cowing to the elite tbh. not because schools aren’t corrupt, but because the school can’t do much to punish him anyway). Especially if your parents just don’t care, so teachers calling home doesn’t actually mean any discipline and a suspension is just a 1-7 day break.
(yay, a clue reference)
I didn’t realize she was holding Walky until now, but I did notice she’s holding Sal by the fucking face. Which is a thing on its own.
I didn’t even get into that, but yeah, fuck, as a teacher, you’re trained to never hold a student period if there’s a way to defuse the situation any other way.
To not only put her hands all over Sal, but to hold on to her face, like Sal isn’t even important, thus encouraging her continued resistance, especially as she asks the person who hurt her friend what is going on, it’s just… yeah, so much hatred for how horrible everything she’s doing is.
I gonna be the guy to say maybe Incompetent teacher isn’t that incompetent. Pushing the reality bendingly inappropriate face grab aside for a moment. Sal was actually going to murder Leland and shit. Completely justified child murder is still bad people! Even if no court would convict her.
The devil needs no more advocates, he’s good. Promise.
Holy fuck! That is actually rebar! That has potential murder all over it. Congratulations for like actually making me want to punch a child. This comic. *head shake*
Cerberus is right; there is probably a history behind this. Aside from any abuse, I’ve got the feeling that Leyland’s parents have made it abundantly plain to him (if only by example) that victimising the weak is normal and praiseworthy behaviour.
YES! Abuse of official power is one of my largest pet peeves, and boy, does this teacher fuck up BAD.
To some extent the teacher’s behavior can be understood depending on what she say. If she only turned when Sal yelled and got there as Sal was lunging for Leland, the first priority would have to be stopping that. And seeing that, it might be reasonable to ask the apparent target, rather than the apparent aggressor.
OTOH, if she swallows the transparent excuse and ignores the implied threat to Walky and accepts his obvious bullshit response, which I fully expect her to, her thin vestige of excuse goes away.
And yes, checking on Marcie should come right after stopping the impending fight and well before any questioning about who did what.
Agreed with everything. The one thing I would add would be to charge Sal with getting Marcie to the nurse’s office (assuming the school even has one).
This would give Sal something productive to focus on other than her (justifiable but unhelpful) rage while leaving the teacher to escort Leland into custody.
Ooh, yes, definitely! De-escalates, gets injured child care (cause Sal will be heavily motivated to get Marcie care), and ensures the communication that prompt and swift action is being taken against the offending situation.
That’s definitely a great way to handle it.
I was expecting a reaction. Not that strong a one though.
Also, I wonder if Leland’s last name is Prescott.
Can I extra hate the new char Leland?
Cause i already do…
Leland is such a tool.
Sal’s panel 2 face is definitely everyone (reading)’s panel 1-2 face.
Well. This seems bad. Flashback!Marcie just had her skull smack against concrete pretty hard. And we just learned that she hasn’t always been mute.
Gee, wonder if those things are connected?
See, stuff like this always makes me think.
What is the best way for me to become a force for stopping bullying?
Well, there’s all those groups that go around and talk to people about it…
But wait, those don’t work.
Well, I could become a teacher! Of course, I’d be lucky to actually catch anyone in the act and I’d probably just end up getting fired for losing my temper with some little piece of shit who’s beating up nerds or whatever.
So after thinking, long and hard, I realized the only way to prevent bullying is to BUILD A TIME MACHINE
TRAVEL BACK THROUGH SCHOOL AS AN AGE-APPROPRIATE CHILD BUT WITH MY VOCABULARY AND PHYSICAL ABILITY (err… physical ability of someone much stronger than me, actually. I’m weak as hell)
FIND KIDS WHO ARE BEING BULLIED
STAHP IT
RINSE, AND REPEAT
So… shit. Bullying will probably always exist, to be honest. It’s an extremely painful part of reality.
Like a disease without a cure, all we can do is try our best to mitigate it’s effects.
It sucks.
If you’re seeing this, and you’re someone who knows that someone is being bullied, or you see someone being bullied in the future? Don’t let it continue. Use your strengths to the advantage of that victim- if you’re smart, outsmart the bully. If you’re strong, beat them u- er, ok, maybe not the best idea in the grand majority of situations.
The best thing to do is, as cheesy as it sounds, find an adult you can trust.
If after everything you try to do fails (and hell, even before it)- comfort that victim however you can. Be their friend. Make them realize that they aren’t just the trash that can be crumpled up and thrown out. Make them realize that bullies are just pathetic sacks of crap.
I’m pretty sure saying that I don’t advocate violence would be a bit of a lie. If I see someone being emotionally abused, I try my best to abuse the abuser. If I see someone being physically abused, I do the same thing. It’s not the best strategy, but bullies piss me off and I don’t respond well to things when I’m pissed.
If you’re like me, remember one thing- males are weak between the legs. I’ve never had to fight a female, so I don’t know what to tell ya then.
Also, like, get some therapy or some shit. Goodness knows I hate myself after coming out of my moods, shit’s unhealthy.
So now I can’t help but wonder: Is this a flashback for Sal, because of no one else aiming to help her in the current Amazi-showdown? Or a flashback for Walky in some way?
May just be a flashback in general, to give us insight on the Sal/Marcie dynamic.
Oh look, a new character! I hate him already.
I think indifference to a new character is rare.
I wonder if leiland is older than them. His height and the fact the teach asked him what was happening says at least something.
He seems to be slouching a bit in the last panel, so he could be a full head taller than Walky there.
Wait.
Isn’t Marcie deaf?
She doesn’t appear to be deaf in this flashback.
What happens?
Not deaf but 100% speech impaired.
Blood dripping down her fore-head doesn’t bode well. She may have hit her head on the nearby rock.
A head injury – if not looked at promptly – can cause all kinds of problems.
She doesn’t need a band-aid, she needs a MRI scanner and a neurologist pronto, neither of which she’s going to get given the results.
As BenRG said, not deaf, but mute.
We don’t know how or when that happened. We’d already seen one younger flashback where Sal & Marcie met and she spoke then as well. We also know that Sal learned ASL to talk to her. Probably learned it with her, in fact. Which suggests it was before Sal’s attempted robbery and exile to Catholic school.
This could be the source of her muteness or that could still be later. Not enough data yet.
Possible prediction:
We’re going to have a sequence of alternate flashbacks: blue (Sal) and red (Amber) that are going to merge in the last one (which will be purple) that will retell the convenience store job. These will quickly remind us of both women’s history and the traumas, injustices and wounds that make them the people they are today.
The last panel of the flashback sequence will be a snap-cut back to here-and-now with the outcome of the confrontation at the DeSanto rally.
yes, this history is why Sal is so “non-compliant” and headed for Bongo Planet. Doesn’t matter that there are security guards and a whole mob of people around, she isn’t taking this crap at all. And AG and her racist friends just remind her of all the incidents in her life where she was ignored and treated badly because of who she is, while others got away with bad behavior. No justice, no peace.
https://youtu.be/v4_COOh4VXw remains astonishingly relevant after 25 years. More accordion!
But they’re not her friends.
First time commenting… I’ve read through but I could not see anyone talking about it… but sorry if I missed it… but is the guy with the scar in the strip two days ago grown-up Leland? Maybe Sal gave him that scar?
Nope. Scarred guy is Ryan, a boy who roofied and attempted to rape Joyce.
oooh ok, thank you!
To wit also, in cased it was missed, no one in-universe know’s Ryan’s name. Known to us due to tags. Scar came from getting a broken bottle across the face from Joyce, if I recall correctly.
Leland is a repurposed character from Shortpacked. Not a pleasant guy there either.
And then that little boy sorted out his issues and grew up to be a police Captain. Because surely there can’t be two fictional characters named Leland.
*Does research*
Seriously, there are three fictional Lelands other than this one?
I assumed he was Leland Gaunt, the villain of Needful Things.
Which is again a fictional character that I don’t know anything about and one not on Wikipedia’s list of fictional Lelands. It’s almost as though I was wrong to think that there exists a standard, not-intentionally-unique name that isn’t well represented in fiction.
What year is this flashback taking place?
The comic started in 2010, and yet there’s apparently a sliding timeframe due to references made to Jurassic World and the 2DS.
If this flashback is taking place 10 years ago, is it in 2000, or2006?
The comic takes place today. In current time
If the flashback is 10 years ago, it takes place 10 years ago.
Which would currently be in 2006.
If we revisit these events in a strip 3 years from now, they will be taking place in 2009.
As thejeff said, the comic is always taking place “right now” so anything that takes place “this long ago” is “this long ago” from “right now”.
That’s very confusing.
If a boy beats someone up on a girl’s behalf, he’s a “defender.” If a girl beats someone up, “violence isn’t the answer.”
So Sal is probably going to do the right thing and get in trouble for it, right?
Darn.
Truth. I never got told it in such words, but once, at ages about 9-10 (me) and 11 (him), my older brother and I got in a (non physical, very vocal) fight on the bus with another kid in his grade (he had been picking on me, so I started hissing vitriol at him, then he called me a bongo and my brother started yelling too).
Anyway, kid’s mom came to our house to tell my mom, explaining that she knows it’s just a kids fight, but that her son knew that my brother was in karate and stuff, and was worried he was going to get beat up.
I got grounded for two weeks, my brother didn’t get punished at all. And yeah, he was the one ‘defending,’ but he was also the only reason any actual violence was expected to occur.
The hell?
My brother did bring me home skittles because his school (he was in middle and I was in elementary) had a vending machine.* I don’t know if he knew how grounded I was, but he probably heard the screaming-at I got.
No clue on the logic behind my mom’s punishing, it’s just what happened. He’s the Walky to my Sal though, things are just easier for him, starting right with parenting.
*we lived in a rural area and both our schools were closed campus, so this was actually a decent/surprising gesture, seeing’s we couldn’t just walk to the corner store for candy whenever we wanted
brought me skittles the day after, I mean.
also internalized misogyny is huge in my family. it makes my husband uncomfortable, as an outsider, because he’ll walk in and just the women, even my grandma, will be cooking for a dinner, and be calling on me and my female cousin to help while the boys are off somewhere. this applied to other chores and stuff, but that’s when it’s super visible. It was less bad at my mom’s house than my aunt’s, but still pretty prevalent. I didn’t really connect it to gender until later though; while growing up my cousin and I just thought they didn’t like us as much.
(and now I’ll stop updating comments form yesterday because today everyone will be in today’s comments)
I don’t want to be in those comments.
“Mr. Overwhelmin’ Charisma”
He’s too small for these words.
But not too small to have heard them used in that context and is just repeating them.
Wait, this is a new chapter… “Glower Vacuum”?
Just to be absolutely sure ‘glower’ means ‘an angry or sullen look’.
‘Vacuum’, of course, means ‘a void or absence’.
So far, I’m seeing one definite glower (on Sal, panel 3), and one possible glower (on the teacher). Nope, no absence of glowers here.
So, it must be meant ironically?
Either that, or it’s a play on the phrase ‘power vacuum’. Which there definitely is, now, with Ruth in the hospital. How will this power vacuum be filled? With glowers?? I’m expecting enough of them.
I think it’s just a vacuum of rage looks.
Mary will try to fill the vacuum, I imagine, inserting herself wherever people are too busy to fight her.
The vacuum of love and responsibility into which Sal the Authority-Hating Rebel and Amazi-Girl both sprang into life, glowering at all around them.
As a former victim of bullying, I feel like the media narrative too often prefers to portray them as irredeemable monsters who are evil or mean by nature. As I’ve matured, though I haven’t forgiven my bullies I have recognised that their behaviour sprang from mental illness and that they needed help.
Recognising that and acknowledging it in portrayals of bullies doesn’t excuse acts of bullying, in the same way that just handwaving it as “they’re naturally bigots” or “they’re naturally evil” doesn’t explain them.
This is all very true.
So, I’ll tell you now, the reason I got so infuriated when I first read this is because it shows an important part: A physical violence type of bully that gets away with it because they -are allowed- to get away with it*. Someone that clearly never has to truly face the consequences of their actions.
I mean, look at the teacher here. The teacher asks Leland what is going on first. Not Sal or Walky, or certainly not Marcie (Sheesh, where is your concern for the kids lying down being hurt, teacher?). She asks Leland. Bad fricking move. It allows Leland to take charge of the story. His version is going to be believed.
And Marcie… Just look at Marcie not even being able to tell Sal that she’s really not OK. Marcie is trying to de-escalate things before the teacher even gets there, because she already knows (even if she can’t articulate it) that she won’t get anywhere with telling the truth. What chance is there that she will try to tell the teacher the whole story? Absolutely none whatsoever.
And I bet that (and I’m currently not a Patreon guy, so I honestly don’t actually know) the next couple flashback strips will have something to the effect of Sal trying to speak up, but the teacher not believing Sal, because, you know, she’s “a troublemaker”.
And thus, Leland is not getting the help he needs. Neither is Marcie. In fact, -nobody- gets the help they need from the people that are supposed to be in charge of making sure of just that. And that is the most infuriating thing of them all.
*The other types of bullies are either getting away with it because they are able to hide it better, or because it’s not taken seriously if it’s not physical bullying. OK, so not really that different, I guess… Where is my imperial “Nuke the world” button?
Someone really dropped the ball for you, huh?
Ending-the-World jokes aside, what ever happened to compassion? Doing right by your fellow man? It’s just so easy to judge, to hate, to suffer.
Good question.
Short answer: People in position of authority who abuse their position is one of -my- blind spots. It brings out the most angry in me, it really does.
Here is a real-life example from five years back: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/08/11/139536686/pa-judge-sentenced-to-28-years-in-massive-juvenile-justice-bribery-scandal
I will readily admit to having no compassion for that man. None whatsoever. I wrote this back then:
“The media attention to this matter has exceeded coverage given to many and almost all capital murders,”
And with good reason. Because as bad as capital murders are —and they are very bad indeed— most of the time, a person will do one murder (or at worst several murders in one go) and get captured.
And what’s more, while they are never condonable or acceptable, they can sometimes at least be understandable (such as a repeated victim of abuse that one day “clicks” and keeps on stabbing the abuser into oblivion). And they most certainly are very seldom meticulously planned and acted upon over a period of years.
This wasn’t a one-time incident like most murders. This was something that went on for many years, and it destroyed lives… And from that report, it’s obvious that it keeps destroying the lives of those affected. And for what reason did this judge destroy all these lives? For pieces of papers. For self-indulgence and greed way beyond having one’s basic needs met.
The original sin, the -real- original sin, the sin from which all other sins spring out from, is to treat other humans like things. It is from this original sin that most crimes spring from, but even then, most crimes are also born out of desperation and a (usually misplaced) feeling of “do or die”.
Unlike those crimes, this “judge” systematically embraced that original sin from a seat of comfort and power. He looked upon and treated all these kids as they were things; things that could help him acquire his own personal goals. That they went through really bad things in those centers; that the punishments were disproportionate to the crimes; it did not matter to this judge, because he only saw them as things.
It also did not matter to him that he single-handedly broke down the system he was sworn to uphold, piece by piece. It did not matter to him that his role is in fact that of a servant, not a master. It did not matter to him that the public’s trust in the local legal system would shatter if he was ever found out. None of this mattered to him, because to him, the public were obviously also just things.
His actions were the complete embodiment of the original sin; beyond what even some (but not all) murders are. His punishment and reputation should be set accordingly.
——-
So yeah, that is my blind spot. The spot where I find no compassion, only judgement.
If I may… Do you think I should have compassion for that judge? If so, why? Because while it is a blind spot, I also think that being enraged by that behaviour is not only the right reaction, I think it is the only worthy reaction. I react to it like that precisely because I do wish to -end- the suffering that that judge created.
I’d say no, if for no other reason than to avoid your ire.
Seriously, we all have, what, red panel things? While Dina, to my knowledge, has not been stated as having Autism, I believe many consider her to be on the spectrum. Seeing her years ago having been called [[trigger]] filled me with a sufficient rage as to I actively repressed reading it. I think Cerberus linked to it a few days ago, for some kind of reference.
That word, or anyone with some kind of a mental handicap, especially Autism, tends to get me seeing red. I also tend to get saddened by it as well, because growing up I was on the fringe of what Joyce had for a life, so things like ‘toxic masculinity’, and using the r-word as an insult were normal, both around and towards myself, and I sometimes find that word as an insult in my head when those old ways seep in. It’s tiring.
My ire is not dangerous. You know how my dungeons keep getting delayed anyway.
And I can totally understand your red flag. I mean, while not as egregious as the example I talked about, I think that it’s about the same principle: Someone, in a position of relative power* who thinks of Dina not as a real human, but as a thing.
And if I am reading you right, then I think that any other red flags you might have will also basically boil down to rage over seeing humans** being treated as things. And while there are ways to express that rage that is most certainly not OK, I am still sort of glad it’s there.
*In this case, the power of local social status and privilege.
**or comic characters made so realistic in character, they might as well be humans.
I would be afraid this kid would end up a killer… but his name is Leland, not Bob.
Let’s make things better byet making the next story a depressing flahsback
“The way things were sucked.” Bad things STAYING in the past would be an improvement.
By showing how much the past truly sucked, it hammers in the point that we need to make the future better.
Yes, ‘next story’.
In some schools they read Lord of the Flies. In others, they live it.
So is this going to be like Lost, where we spend nearly the whole show going “oh my god THIS IS WHEN LOCKE BECAME PARALYZED FROM THE WAIST DOWN no it wasn’t” except instead of “Locke” and “paralyzed” it’s “Marcie” and “mute”?
Yes, mute from the waist down. It’s a useful superpower.
It would be! Queef any time without issue, fart without evidence, even in intentional crop dusting of someone situations? Talk about best super-power! :O
Tapping your foot when you’re impatient wouldn’t irritate people near you, so no glares!
Everybody’s speculating about the bully, and I’m like “MARCIE can…could…talk?? What happened?”
Sal’s explained it- well, not really. Sal’s mentioned it- before, when she told Malaya to just learn sign. She says that she and Marcie learned it together, and something along the lines of ‘things happen.’
Emperor Norton’s reference is right before what I was trying to reference
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/fun-2/
S: “Malaya, just learn the language. Marcie an’ me learned it together when we were kids. It ain’t that hard.”
M: “Together? Why?”
S: “Kinda had to. Stuff happens.”
And in the current run of “It’s Walky!”, we also learn that DoA Marcie is mute because of [REDACTED].
(Really, that is exactly what Willis said in his comment under the comic where Walkyverse Marcie was introduced.)
Not the first time Marcie talked in flashbacks. Though I definitely understand why someone would miss it even if they’d been binging the archives. It’s never been a major point*.
At least, not a major point compared to all the other things that have happened in this comic.
*Which, in a way, is good, in the sense that most people do seem to treat Marcie as Marcie. Sal definitely does. That’s a hell of a lot better than treating Marcie as “that mute woman”.
Though I wouldn’t be surprised if Mary does. But that’s a more in-universe thing, I guess.
Leland you little shit.
Oh, and one more thing about shitty teacher?
Remember Sal’s ‘innate’ distrust of authorities and rules? Well, that moment right there is where she learned that from. That ‘teacher’ showed her plain as day that people who stay within the rules get their ass kicked by people who don’t. That whatever their fancy speeches about making everything fair and nice (which I’m sure they’ve had); at the end of the day, her best friend got abused and nobody who was in charge did anything about it.
So when Sal grabbed Ruth in this strip? I tink she is still thinking about that teacher. She is still hating that teacher with all her guts. Considering that Sal still has certain weak points, it is almost a miracle that she doesn’t follow up with some seriously heavy violence in the next strip; but instead “only” a dismissive throwing away, the gesture (and the words) basically stating “you’re not important enough to get in trouble for.”
And maybe also “You may be one of them, but you’re not the one I truly hate.”, though that might be stretching it somewhat.
If it had been her former teacher that she’d been holding, though…
She is even grabbing Ruth by the face.
Well spotted! OK, technically it might be by the hair, but it still a variant of “I’m not just restraining you, I am belittling you” type of grab going on there.
He intent did seem to talk down to her.
FINISHED. After a week of marathon reading….I’m finally caught up…
And YOU, Mr Willis, have a damn fine comic going on here. Easily my new (non-porn) favorite.
Hmmm… so it’s looking like that Sal’s protectiveness of Marcie is what gave her the reputation of tough wild child, and it was probably drilled into her so much that she pretty much had to become that.
Only speculating… and I am in no way a professional on this. So ignore me. Besides that, it’s only the first exposition comic on this.
But I am hoping this will eventually explain why Marcie doesn’t speak… I’m assuming she actually is mute at, and not just being a jerk. (Though, maybe it’s a lifelong promise or protest to not speak…)
That is a VERY LONG TIME to *pretend* to not be able to talk. I mean, they both learned ASL–why do that without an incentive??
(to be clear, it’s Word of God that she’s nonverbal)
Finally getting a chance to catch up!
Digging that alt text. 🙂