That happens to me too; I’m all like oop, better finish chewing quickly so I can answer, and then I take another bite and I’m like argh. I keep forgetting.
The phrase “my tiny lesbian heart” makes me imagine a tiny (like, one inch tall) anthropomorphic human heart with female secondary sexual characteristics that is sexually and romantically attracted to other female-presenting hearts.
Loads of places will downgrade to manslaughter with enough provocation… However Walky’s family can probably afford better lawyers than Lesley can, especially if she gets fired for killing a student…
He was holding a slice in each hand in yesterday’s strip, but I don’t know where he put the second slice between the 2nd panel and the last panel of this strip.
Can’t relate cause lez but I guess I’m a crusty punk so any girl who still wants to fuck me after watching me shotgun a beer and eat a pizza I dropped on the ground deserves a medal
He’s not actively malicious, so he’ll place behind Blaine, Ross, and Mary, but he’s certainly a runner-up for the Character I’d Least Want to Spend Time With Award.
For some reason, when I was 19 I had a crush on a boy who looked kind of like Walky and was also a man-child. Nothing ever came of it though—he transferred to a different university, and I never saw him again.
Re women and bad choices about men: Just listening to how to stop feeling like sh*t and the Princess diarist audiobooks alternatively and it’s a lot like Carrie Fisher illustrates the points the other one makes.
Don’t know if i‘ll keep on listening to Fischer, I love the original Start Wars movies and don’t need them to be disenchanted.
Sometimes it looks like Walky knows he can easily be successful with annoying people but trying to be decent sets him up to fail.
This is the guy that made a costume instead of studying, pretended to be different people to get more pizza, wanted to dress as a woman to get free donuts, and in an alternate didn’t originally wanted to help fight aliens. No wonder he is an easy target of Mike.
Fair, I guess I wouldn’t hang out with him in the first place. Like I’m a trash person but Walky seems like a trash person in the inconsiderate way which I cant deal with
I think the real moral off this story is, if your best strategy to know if someone you care about is all right is “I’ll depend on Walky to tell me”, things have already messed up. Why not just text Becky? Maybe she did?
There IS pizza in Hell. It’s got a gluten-free oatmeal flatbread crust, soy cheese, hollandaise sauce, and its toppings are florets, artichoke petals, and whatever variety of cherry cough syrup tastes like.
Good pizza is nice cold. That monstrosity you’ve concocted for him..?
Arguably as heat increases the activity of the compounds that one smells and interprets as complex flavours, it would be better served about 5° cooler than perfect – cold enough for the cheese to be set (although soy cheese so probably a moot point) but warm enough to taste it in its full… Ummm… Glory?
Oh come on, everyone. Yes he’s being annoying. No you don’t have to decide who is the worst-behaved character in each strip, and then analyze why they are terrible at a deep moral level.
We just acknowledge he is being a jerk. That doesnt take away from our fun reading our story. Accusing who is being a prick, who is being evil and who is being a dumb is quite a normal thing in human behavior, and we will still continue watching as long as we are entertained. Is Moriarty evil? Is Alastor evil? Is Lovecraft a racist? is Vriska Serket problematic? Is Catra capable of redemption? Yes, yes, yes, that is debatable, and her chances are low every season.
That sounds fake. How could your life gain more balance from (for example) playing card games, roleplaying as a gay half-genie, painting figurines, engaging in online communities, or creating custom character models based on webcomic protagonists for online NSFW games? It seems like new-age quackery, is all.
Goddamnit, Walky, I know being immature is your schtick but now you’re being and insensitive prick on top of your immaturity…I hope she hits you so hard, every pizza you’ve ever eaten somehow flies out of your body.
One way I often describe Dumbing of Age as: “What if you put a bunch of quirky comedy characters into a more realistic setting”.
Turns out that while being a manchild can be kinda amusing in a more comedic setting, it gets obnoxious really fast when you put the manchild into one closer to reality.
I kinda forgot Leslie is probably super worried about her roomate making big life decisions and becoming dependent on someone who may well betray her once the election is over.
The more people take the tone with me that they are owed an explanation or even an answer, the more time I’m going to take and the more nuanced an answer they’re going to get. And don’t even try that “YES or NO!” bit with me unless you’re an officer of the court and then I’ll remind you of the oath I just took.
It’s always really annoying when someone asks a complex question, and doesn’t seem to realise that words take time to say out loud. Finishing your food and thinking through your response used to be considered polite. Now it’s grounds for the electric chair.
Where is the booth you were just at? Is a person you know present at that booth or not? If present, did she appear ok?
Those are all pretty simple questions. The most complicated would be describing the location of the booth. The other twords could be answered in one to three words.
It doesn’t matter how simple the questions are, anyway. Sometimes, an “easy” response takes a few extra seconds, regardless of how badly the other person wants it.
The tone can make a difference, too. The questions come out of your piehole in an indignant tumble when I don’t have the context to understand why your verbalizations are tumbling indignantly into my face, I’m eating pizza. Granted, we the readers have the context to understand Walky is being unnecessarily immature and dickish, but we can’t assume omniscience on the part of the characters.
There may be context as well even for questions that are superficially simple.
Why does the teacher want to know so badly? Wasn’t Becky staying with her? Shouldn’t she know already? Would I be betraying something Becky wants kept secret? Eat pizza and stall.
I’m sure he’s just trying to figure out how to answer, using the pizza as an excuse to stay quiet a little longer. Physical violence isn’t really called for, here.
I doubt he is worried he will say something that will make Leslie angry. He only cares about pizza and having intimacy with Amber. Being a prick in relation to food is a REALLY Walky thing. In the It’s A Pregnancy comics Walky shows he would accept his child if they turned out to be gay or trans, but he would disown his own child if they were vegan.
It is still weird how we read entirely different comics.
So many characters in this comic are defined by their facades. Walky plays the fool, but it’s mostly an act. We know damn well he cares about far more than “pizza and having intimacy with Amber.” We’ve seen his concern for Billie, again and again. We saw him put his relationship with his sister over intimacy with Amber. He was far more mature about breaking up with Dorothy than most 18 year olds I remember – especially in the lead up to it. I doubt I’d have been ready to break up with someone so they’d have more time to study.
Walky has a tendency to sail close to the point where violence against him becomes something like the only option to get through his shield of narcissism and arrogance. The problem is that I think it wouldn’t really do any good.
Walking around with fistfuls of pizza was maybe a bad choice. And maybe few people would agree with his priorities here, although if we’re reasonable Becky can surely wait a minute while the pizza might not. But I think this could have gone much better if Walky had just put up two fingers to start with.
Becky just completely ditched Leslie, left her stuff in her living room, and ghosted her. Unless she’s checked the news, as far as Leslie knows, Becky is a homeless girl who went MIA.
And my theory is that she blocked all news from her feeds that had the DeSanto tag on them after a traumatic house-guest experience.
And maybe she also knows that Toedad made bail. She knows that he’s tried to kidnap her once and telling the cops “yeah I’d like to be informed if this guy gets out” is the sort of detail she might cover….
…. holy crap she must be panicking bad, and now she’s about to go nuclear.
Walky, you fool! Your pizza-nomming tomfoolery has doomed us all!
Being an annoying man child to a gender studies professor, whose field largely deals with the cultural fallout of annoying man children on a societal scale…
To be fair, Mike and Robin also helped save the world (Mike literally saved Joyce’s life at the cost of his own) and that bought them a greta deal of slack for their behaviour.
Leslie already has two strikes against her as a teacher, she doesn’t need your implied third that she would grade people for things not related to the class.
She still wouldn’t come out worse than the average for University staff depicted in this comic. Ruth. Jason. Puddin’-Head. Dean McHenry. Half of them have literally fucked students under their authority.
In Panel 2 you can see both of Walky’s hands. He’s got pizza in only one hand. In panel 6 there’s more pizza. Where was he hiding that piece, between his knees?
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argh, I should’ve gotten pizza
I’VE BEEN CRAVING PIZZA ALL WEEK
instead I got duck
Duck? That’s the other strip, a couple weeks ago IIRC.
There’s duck ON the pizza though, I think!
Ooh, yummy.
Tomorrow’s strip: Walky motions for her to wait while he turns around and goes back for more pizza.
He opens a pizza box which he clearly couldn’t have been holding in the previous wide shots.
Zoom out to reveal they are somehow now at Galasso’s, with a line of waiters bringing more pizzas.
(and subs)
And then, on the wing . . . a lone Gremlin.
The subs are also bringing pizzas. I imagine most of the waiters are subs to begin with though…
Well, Walky wants to chews his words carefully. 😀
Terrible pun! Have you nosh shame?
Talk about eating a dead horse.
Dammit Walky, we want these answers too!
*Shakes Walky*
[Phone pop-up: Undo typing?]
I feel called out…
That happens to me too; I’m all like oop, better finish chewing quickly so I can answer, and then I take another bite and I’m like argh. I keep forgetting.
Becky should text her mom
Becky didn’t want Leslie to know since she knew it wouldn’t go over well.
Becky doesn’t realize the degree to which Leslie wants to be her lesbian mama duck and it hurts me deeply.
Ooooooor she could skip her responsibilities, pretend they don’t exist and don’t return calls.
Becky doesn’t have the best role model right now.
And the next strip is “Swallow”, then “Be~e~e~e~e~e~e~e~elch”.
Oh god Leslie’s worried Becky’s being exploited while Becky was worried she would get tired of hosting Becky my tiny lesbian heart.
The phrase “my tiny lesbian heart” makes me imagine a tiny (like, one inch tall) anthropomorphic human heart with female secondary sexual characteristics that is sexually and romantically attracted to other female-presenting hearts.
I’d watch that cartoon.
We need something to fill the Gay Objects Cartoon space in our thoughts that Steven Universe will be leaving.
what makes this better is they both know that walky could answer with a mouth full of food
Considering he did it the whole way as they were walking, yeah, he could totally answer right now.
I’m not proud that it took me three minutes to figure out your post.
I can’t figure it out if that helps… Is it a comment on Walky’s level of informativity?
You just need to chew on it for a bit.
There’s a murder in the offing here.
Loads of places will downgrade to manslaughter with enough provocation… However Walky’s family can probably afford better lawyers than Lesley can, especially if she gets fired for killing a student…
OK but where exactly was he hiding that other pizza slice? I don’t remember him holding any other slices previously.
He was holding a slice in each hand in yesterday’s strip, but I don’t know where he put the second slice between the 2nd panel and the last panel of this strip.
Very carefully.
hahahahaha I’ve literally done this
It’s sad that a boy developing into a toddler like this somehow got laid by two different women who obviously need to reevaluate their standards.
The secret is: some women like men who know how to have fun!
Yeah. It’s a comic strip.
Can’t relate cause lez but I guess I’m a crusty punk so any girl who still wants to fuck me after watching me shotgun a beer and eat a pizza I dropped on the ground deserves a medal
Walky and Amber have not had sex (yet?).
He’s not actively malicious, so he’ll place behind Blaine, Ross, and Mary, but he’s certainly a runner-up for the Character I’d Least Want to Spend Time With Award.
god dammit where’s the like button
For some reason, when I was 19 I had a crush on a boy who looked kind of like Walky and was also a man-child. Nothing ever came of it though—he transferred to a different university, and I never saw him again.
I first read that as “transferred to a different universe” and thought “wow, are you sure it *wasn’t* Walky then?!”
Then my eyes focused a bit better.
Re women and bad choices about men: Just listening to how to stop feeling like sh*t and the Princess diarist audiobooks alternatively and it’s a lot like Carrie Fisher illustrates the points the other one makes.
Don’t know if i‘ll keep on listening to Fischer, I love the original Start Wars movies and don’t need them to be disenchanted.
Sometimes it looks like Walky knows he can easily be successful with annoying people but trying to be decent sets him up to fail.
“I know he is essentially a human equivalent of an Ugg boot, but his non-spectacular skinny-fat physique turns my nethers into a dairy farm”
Ehehehehe. I can’t stop giggling. :3
Some people answer questions with style.
Walky answers them with pizzazz.
*flees for dear punning life*
Leslie wanted an answer, but for Walky, it was Chewsday.
(Sorry, I could not resist.)
I sense an ass whooping coming
Honestly I’d be pissed, Walky can be such a dickwad, I’d only do that to a close friend where annoying each other is consented
This is the guy that made a costume instead of studying, pretended to be different people to get more pizza, wanted to dress as a woman to get free donuts, and in an alternate didn’t originally wanted to help fight aliens. No wonder he is an easy target of Mike.
alternate universe*
Fair, I guess I wouldn’t hang out with him in the first place. Like I’m a trash person but Walky seems like a trash person in the inconsiderate way which I cant deal with
I think the real moral off this story is, if your best strategy to know if someone you care about is all right is “I’ll depend on Walky to tell me”, things have already messed up. Why not just text Becky? Maybe she did?
Or to shorten a bit:
If your best strategy is to depend on Walky, things are already messed up.
Unrelated, but Becky doesn’t have a phone of her own does she? Last I remember she was still borrowing Dina/Joyce’s.
She got either her own or repeated use of Robin’s after Robin got kicked out of the house, and hacked the Twitter account.
Becky has her own phone. We see her using a white phone in this strip, and Robin has her orange phone in the very next one, which continues the same scene.
Walky is about to get MAULED
Walky, you’d better hope there’s pizza in that grave you’re digging for yourself.
Theres no pizza in hell for him. Only vegetables as a karmic punishment.
There IS pizza in Hell. It’s got a gluten-free oatmeal flatbread crust, soy cheese, hollandaise sauce, and its toppings are florets, artichoke petals, and whatever variety of cherry cough syrup tastes like.
And it’s cold.
Good pizza is nice cold. That monstrosity you’ve concocted for him..?
Arguably as heat increases the activity of the compounds that one smells and interprets as complex flavours, it would be better served about 5° cooler than perfect – cold enough for the cheese to be set (although soy cheese so probably a moot point) but warm enough to taste it in its full… Ummm… Glory?
Whatever. It’s pizza.
“But it’s from Papa John’s.”
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Some people take the fifth. Walky takes the pizza.
He took 5 pizzas?!
Three, but the day’s still young.
The Duke of Thingley took the other two.
I would punch Walky if he did that to me. Some things aren’t worth his family guy slowness. It’s no wonder Jason and Joyce are annoyed by him.
Walky, you’re in college. You’re gonna have to try eating cold pizza eventually.
Not if he gets kicked out, or if he gets beaten down by Leslie. Never make a woman angry, especially a lesbian woman.
I graduated over a decade ago, and still eat cold pizza sometimes. (Leftover evening shift pizza, the breakfast of champions.)
Questionable Content on the question of day-old pizza.
Walky Archer?
Sterling Walkerton?
that’s where I went too XD ~<3
Oh come on, everyone. Yes he’s being annoying. No you don’t have to decide who is the worst-behaved character in each strip, and then analyze why they are terrible at a deep moral level.
We don’t have to, but
We just acknowledge he is being a jerk. That doesnt take away from our fun reading our story. Accusing who is being a prick, who is being evil and who is being a dumb is quite a normal thing in human behavior, and we will still continue watching as long as we are entertained. Is Moriarty evil? Is Alastor evil? Is Lovecraft a racist? is Vriska Serket problematic? Is Catra capable of redemption? Yes, yes, yes, that is debatable, and her chances are low every season.
Hobbies help people to be well-rounded, balanced individuals?
That sounds fake. How could your life gain more balance from (for example) playing card games, roleplaying as a gay half-genie, painting figurines, engaging in online communities, or creating custom character models based on webcomic protagonists for online NSFW games? It seems like new-age quackery, is all.
I’m almost sure that’s sarcasm.
Hey, Willis writes this so we‘ll have emotions about it. If we didn’t react what would be the fun in writing?
Goddamnit, Walky, I know being immature is your schtick but now you’re being and insensitive prick on top of your immaturity…I hope she hits you so hard, every pizza you’ve ever eaten somehow flies out of your body.
As whole discs of pizza. Semi-chewed half-digested pizza is not pretty.
How will Leslie getting fired improve the situation?
One way I often describe Dumbing of Age as: “What if you put a bunch of quirky comedy characters into a more realistic setting”.
Turns out that while being a manchild can be kinda amusing in a more comedic setting, it gets obnoxious really fast when you put the manchild into one closer to reality.
see also: Robin.
and Mike, and…
Joe.
Like when Sonic gets hit and loses all his rings, Walky will run around picking all his dropped pizzas back up again.
Walky, come on, answer her.
He has to run out of pizza, first.
Foool! The Duke of Thingley never runs out of pizza. Fooooool!
He runs out ON a bunch of stuff, though.
I kinda forgot Leslie is probably super worried about her roomate making big life decisions and becoming dependent on someone who may well betray her once the election is over.
especially since Becky just didn’t show up one day and didn’t return her calls.
It kinda looked like he pulled out that piece of pizza from his mouth in the last panel- just so he could eat it again
Who among us
Wally is such a dick.
Yeah, like you’ve never taken a little extra time to formulate a response to someone’s very charged question, despite how annoyed they were.
I do take time but answer nervously. No need for annoying theatrics.
The more people take the tone with me that they are owed an explanation or even an answer, the more time I’m going to take and the more nuanced an answer they’re going to get. And don’t even try that “YES or NO!” bit with me unless you’re an officer of the court and then I’ll remind you of the oath I just took.
It’s always really annoying when someone asks a complex question, and doesn’t seem to realise that words take time to say out loud. Finishing your food and thinking through your response used to be considered polite. Now it’s grounds for the electric chair.
Where is the booth you were just at? Is a person you know present at that booth or not? If present, did she appear ok?
Those are all pretty simple questions. The most complicated would be describing the location of the booth. The other twords could be answered in one to three words.
*other two
It doesn’t matter how simple the questions are, anyway. Sometimes, an “easy” response takes a few extra seconds, regardless of how badly the other person wants it.
The tone can make a difference, too. The questions come out of your piehole in an indignant tumble when I don’t have the context to understand why your verbalizations are tumbling indignantly into my face, I’m eating pizza. Granted, we the readers have the context to understand Walky is being unnecessarily immature and dickish, but we can’t assume omniscience on the part of the characters.
There may be context as well even for questions that are superficially simple.
Why does the teacher want to know so badly? Wasn’t Becky staying with her? Shouldn’t she know already? Would I be betraying something Becky wants kept secret? Eat pizza and stall.
Or of course, he’s just eating.
Oh, FFS. He’s not formulating. He’s eating.
I would argue that eating is a type of formulating.
I pitty the poor bastard that asks you any serious question
Is it wrong I think she’s justified slapping him?
I’m sure he’s just trying to figure out how to answer, using the pizza as an excuse to stay quiet a little longer. Physical violence isn’t really called for, here.
I doubt he is worried he will say something that will make Leslie angry. He only cares about pizza and having intimacy with Amber. Being a prick in relation to food is a REALLY Walky thing. In the It’s A Pregnancy comics Walky shows he would accept his child if they turned out to be gay or trans, but he would disown his own child if they were vegan.
I don’t know what one thing has to do with the other, but your first sentence is very reasonable.
Though it’s not like visibly stuffing your face when somebody asks you a serious question is actually less likely to make her angry.
Turns out quirks that make you endearing or amusing in a purely comedic setting become less so when being transplanted into a more grounded one. 😛
It is still weird how we read entirely different comics.
So many characters in this comic are defined by their facades. Walky plays the fool, but it’s mostly an act. We know damn well he cares about far more than “pizza and having intimacy with Amber.” We’ve seen his concern for Billie, again and again. We saw him put his relationship with his sister over intimacy with Amber. He was far more mature about breaking up with Dorothy than most 18 year olds I remember – especially in the lead up to it. I doubt I’d have been ready to break up with someone so they’d have more time to study.
Walky has depths, even if he tries to hide them.
Walky has a tendency to sail close to the point where violence against him becomes something like the only option to get through his shield of narcissism and arrogance. The problem is that I think it wouldn’t really do any good.
I mean, if it did any good, wouldn’t Sal have perfected him during the part of their childhood they spent together?
Walky gets that a lot.
…but no, she isn’t. That’s one non-negotional part of being a teacher.
That.
Though a lot of people can emphasize with the wish to do so, she’s the adult here and it’s her job to curb this kind of wish.
and no, before anyone says it, making terrible romantic decisions doesn’t make her not an adult. if anything, the opposite.
Walking around with fistfuls of pizza was maybe a bad choice. And maybe few people would agree with his priorities here, although if we’re reasonable Becky can surely wait a minute while the pizza might not. But I think this could have gone much better if Walky had just put up two fingers to start with.
Just in case Leslie had any questions about where Walky’s priorities lie…
Dramatic paus…
…or at least Walky paus.
More of a faux paus.
Heh. Good one.
*checks archives*
…. oh, WAIT.
Becky just completely ditched Leslie, left her stuff in her living room, and ghosted her. Unless she’s checked the news, as far as Leslie knows, Becky is a homeless girl who went MIA.
And my theory is that she blocked all news from her feeds that had the DeSanto tag on them after a traumatic house-guest experience.
And maybe she also knows that Toedad made bail. She knows that he’s tried to kidnap her once and telling the cops “yeah I’d like to be informed if this guy gets out” is the sort of detail she might cover….
…. holy crap she must be panicking bad, and now she’s about to go nuclear.
Walky, you fool! Your pizza-nomming tomfoolery has doomed us all!
Leslie has seen the news, that’s why she asks whether Becky was at Robin’s booth.
Wait for it…….waaaaaait for it……..
Being an annoying man child to a gender studies professor, whose field largely deals with the cultural fallout of annoying man children on a societal scale…
Fig. 1
He is eating figs too? Doesn’t he know God Hates Figs?
I still maintain, Walky is kinda horrible.
WALKY! ENOUGH!
Kind of weird, never felt Walky being such a big as*ole before.
It must be me…
Walky being a dick Is like most of his appearances.
It might also be more pronounced in Dumbing of Age compared to the other universe, as this one’s much more grounded in reality.
So behaviour that might seem like an amusing quirk otherwise becomes obnoxious real quick.
You can actually see the same effect with Mike – his comedic sociopathy becomes just plain disturing when put into a more realistic setting.
Yup. Robin, too.
To be fair, Mike and Robin also helped save the world (Mike literally saved Joyce’s life at the cost of his own) and that bought them a greta deal of slack for their behaviour.
Walky was an irritating jerk in the Walkyverse too, if anything this version is better because his immaturity hasn’t got anyone killed.
And Leslie will be giving him a grade in the class he’s taking. Not a good idea to annoy her.
Leslie already has two strikes against her as a teacher, she doesn’t need your implied third that she would grade people for things not related to the class.
She still wouldn’t come out worse than the average for University staff depicted in this comic. Ruth. Jason. Puddin’-Head. Dean McHenry. Half of them have literally fucked students under their authority.
You forgot…er… whatshername, Jason’s colleague, redhead.
The bar HAS been set incredibly low, which just makes it more jarring that even folks making it are still tripping on it.
In Panel 2 you can see both of Walky’s hands. He’s got pizza in only one hand. In panel 6 there’s more pizza. Where was he hiding that piece, between his knees?
Obviously he’s pulling the pizza out of his mouth so he can answer Leslie.
Cheek pockets?
Walky’s a hamster? Linda DOES look the type to eat her own young.
Jesus I hate Walky more and more
Dramatic Pause…
I did not say “eat”! I said “chew”!
if the next strip doesnt have walky in traction i am going to be so disappointed.
hear that, damnyouwillis? DO NOT DISAPPOINT THE INTERNET.
…
…
…
Are you perchance also a fan of Cleveland Browns?
Walky calmly, non-chalantly closing his eyes in the last panel is the exclamation point of this strip.
Seriously though this is one of Willis’ best comics. Perfectly composed, perfectly laid out. Comedy definitely working on an Olivia Jaimes frequency.