Joyce just abandoned rleigious fundamentalism and became a social darwinist. She will then appear dressed as Tanya Degurechaff and shoot people that don’t follow her capitalist ideals.
Nah, because if you kill people when they’re at their best then that’s their best chance to get into heaven. Sure you’ll be sinning by committing murder but it’s a martyrdom. In the eternal view, you’d be doing them a favour by keeping them out of hell.
A lot of religions – those that last and grow enough to be called that, rather than “cults” – have very specific prohibitions to keep people from taking their other beliefs to the logical conclusion(s). Otherwise, like the aforementioned cults or critters with lethal mutations, they’d die out within a generation.
keeping it short: When the phenotype(observable characteristics) of a creature’s species changes over many, many years? that’s Evolution.
When a SPECIFC creature’s phenotype changes in the course of that individual’s lifetime that’s metamorphosis.
No, that’s why people who understand science think Pokemon’s ‘evolution’ is wrong.
Evangelicals think it’s wrong because it’s one type of creature changing into another. Like actual evolution, just on the wrong time scale, but either one is bad to the science deniers.
What if every time a Pokemon evolves, it actually dies and is replaced by its offspring? They only think it’s the old Pokemon, but actually it’s a child, and the old Pokemon died. So trainers are shortening their Pokemon’s lives in a desperate attempt to gain martial power, and their Pokemon comply out of love for their trainers, even though they know they’re racing towards their own death.
That was essentially canon in the cartoon, at least briefly. Jessie and James were trying to evolve their Ekans and Koffing so they could keep up with the protagonists, but Meowth did some research on evolution and read that bit out loud to them while they all looked increasingly horrified.
In tears, they promised Ekans and Koffing they’d never try to get them to evolve again. Then they were happy, so they evolved. And nobody ever mentioned it again, as far as I know.
Following the “individual Pokemon go through metamorphosis” model, and having never played the games, I will just assume they liquefy themselves inside of the Pokeballs, like caterpillars inside a chrysalis.
Maybe I’ve been playing Pokemon for too long, but some evolutions are…not improvements. Of course that’s probably not what Joyce actually meant, but it’s what registered in my mind first, because that’s my context.
Most fundies almost by necessity acknowledge some evolution exists – it’s just typically phrased as “microevolution,” evolution that doesn’t “cross the boundaries between species” (whatever that means). This is contrasted with “macroevolution,” which is generally described as something like “atheists think turn fish into monkeys.”
It’s a very simplistic view of how the world works. They’d probably tell you cross-breeding different strains of apples to produce new kinds of apples, or breeding only the wooliest sheep in a herd to make generations of even woolier sheep “makes sense” because “they’re still apples and sheep”. One thing drastically evolving into something completely different by gradual change over an immense amount of time time isn’t something they can personally observe, therefore it can’t happen.
I started to say that Joyce clearly has issues, what with her sudden desire to murder people. But then it occurred to me that flinging stones inside my glass abode would be unwise.
Also Hank you should just be happy the conversation was adult for any length of time, I know people who seemingly can’t have an adult conversation without dying.
There’s a problem: you can only punish people after they commit a crime, or when they are going to commit a crime. Killing them before they become evil would make you evil.
You could kill literally everyone and everything in the universe (including yourself) and leave it as an empty husk. Neither good nor evil. But that’s kinda a wash.
Downside: the plan succeeds, you can pinpoint the exact moment people are at their best selves and start the process of murder, then find your own zenith was the moment before you thought of the plan
I thought it was going to be a song about murdering people who’ve hit their peak, and was really looking forward to hearing how a song from Pokemon could be interpreted that way.
…I mean my comment was a facetious statement, but go off I guess.
She’s not seriously suggesting murdering people, she’s clearly having a bit of breakdown from the dozen or so traumatic events of the past couple days.
Cut them some slack, Hank. They’re 18 and just had two, probably three deaths dropped on them. It’s probably a coping mechanism, and they are making very good observations either way.
Joyce, that is a fallacy like the one in Logan’s Run. You can’t rob people’s lives just because they could grow into old incompetent people. People become good or evil over time depending on their choices, mental growth and circumstances. Killing people when they reach an hypotethical zenith is social darwinism, and that is as dangerous as religious fundamentalism because like religious fundamentalism is based on extreme moral absolutes that not everyone can follow.
Time-travelling murderers who kill people at their moral zenith to stop them from becoming worse would make really interesting villains. NGL I’d read that story.
In Dr. Who there’s an organization that time travels to punish karma houdinis before their eventual death. The Doctor accidentally stopped them from torturing Hitler.
That one has two answers:
1- Kill ‘im. We already know how he turns out, so fuck ‘im.
2- Kidnap and raise him as your own, just to be sure.
If 2 fails, you just go back in time and kill both Baby Hitler and the you who’s about to kidnap him. No muss, no fuss.
Or, even more simply, figure out around when Hitler must have been conceived, travel back to those few weeks, and spend them in wacky hijinks making sure his parents don’t have sex. No murder, still gets rid of him.
Listen I’ve seen his paintings (one of my Humanities classes was just ‘Berlin’, great time), money will not help there.
That and the rise of fascism in Germany was the result of multiple factors including the massive inflation and economic burden they got saddled with in the wake of World War I, further fuelling dissatisfaction both with the choice to surrender and the Weimar Republic as a whole, and therefore Hitler was only the most visible symptom of a fundamentally unstable society as well as a backlash against the growing progressivism and intellectualism of Berlin in particular. (The LGBT community in particular lost SO MUCH from the destruction of the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft archives, and that’s far from the only cultural hit.) But *vague handwave* details! (I say this mainly as my weird form of joke based on ‘I know way too much about odd sections of history offhand and it’s always complicated,’ killing Hitler wouldn’t fix everything but it sure would’ve been an improvement.)
So you go back in time to Versailles at the close of The Great War and slap the French and Brits around until they decide that the best revenge is living well instead of demanding tribute.
The bloke who most needed slapping at the Versailles peace conference was Billy Hughes, prime minister of Australia. The other belligerents were resigned to not getting reparations (because of the American position) until Hughes gingered them up. Woodrow Wilson described Hughes as a “pestiferous varmint”, and for once I agree with him.
Oh, that is ABSOLUTELY my time travel plan to prevent World War II and has been for years! Thank you, Agemegos, for giving me exactly the one who most needs slapping, too!
The perfect time machine would be a device that allows one to go back into time to WITNESS an event — such as Pearl Harbor, or Custer’s Last Stand, or one’s own birth — as a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ observer, but not be able to actually interact with the events as they play out. So it could someday become possible to know with certainty, for example, whether there WAS a second shooter on the grassy knoll in Dallas or whether Oswald was acting alone in killing JFK, but one would not be able to do anything about it, thus avoiding the “Time Paradox” that Doc Brown was so concerned about in the “Back to the Future” trilogy.
The problem with that is how far back do you have to go to observe an event? A hundred years? A year? A day? A nanosecond? What’s the difference in going back a day or less and spying in real time?
And why go to the effort of getting evidence and deducing a criminal when you can just stake out the crime scene and watch?
Other possibilities include just getting him that damned art scholarship he wanted, or killing him during World War One when all kinds of folks were dying all over the place anyway and he’s no longer a cute little baby
Consider the difference in cost between setting up and administrating a scholarship and the that of a bullet. After the expense of constructing a working time machine we can’t count on having much a budget left.
Also during World War I there’s too great a probability of him firing back. As an infant, the probability is much much lower.
Also a bullet in the head of a baby is a much more of a dramatic statement and example. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Genecide does not pay. Mike’s shadow knows.
It took One Piece about ten years to reveal two possible candidates for main antagonist and another ten to reveal someone who was even more main antagonisty.
This might be the hardest I’ve laughed at this comic in a LONG while. Just the crazed look combined with the COMPLETELY out-of-nowhere “Let’s MURDER them!” idea is freaking hilarious.
You know, Joyce has a point, but also, it could be argued that Blaine had MORE room for positive growth potential because he started at such a deficit. It’s like how the bigger you are, the more weight you can lose. Or the lower your math grade, the more it can improve!
Mm-hmm. There’s a lot of room for adding more water in the Mojave, but there’s almost zero potential for it becoming a large lake. (And the only reason it’s only ‘almost’ is that humans might be dumb enough to force it. >_>)
Eveen Venus might actually be easier. Start with a series of nukes to kick enough dust in the air to start a nuclear winter and allow it to get cool enough the water vapor can precipitate and actually hit the surface before evaporating again and you can see how big a sea you have to work with. Even with a series of lakes, you can ease up on the nukes enough to let enough light through that the blue-green algae can get a start on converting the carbon dioxide into oxygen and hydrocarbons. And Bob’s your uncle.
Dang, the start of the conversation is exactly whats been haunting me about the death of my best friend. She was 23, and when i look back at the kind of person she was, the opinions she had, and all the ways i have changed… I often wonder if we would have drifted apart or if she would have changed along with me.
It was 11 years ago now. But that's sort of the thing, the more you age and change and grow, the more the contrast between who you were when they were alive and who you are now gets stronger and obvious.
re: panel two, I was just thinking about this the other day. In three years I’ll be older than my brother was, and he was an entire decade older than me. It’s hard to know that I’m nearly at the same place he was. Hell, if I make it long enough, someday I’ll be more evolved than my mom was. It’s just… weird. And uncomfortable. I’m glad to see it being tackled here.
Interesting. I feel that essentially I’m the same person I was at 11. I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two and I’ve definitely changed my mind on a few things along the way. A bit more confidence, but basically, my personality and approach to things is the same. I’d think that looking back and having evolved into a different person would be, well, weird.
But then recognizing I was significantly older than my father was when he died was pretty weird too.
“They call me Zenith. It is my personal mission to travel time and space to ensure that everyone bows out in the most spectacular way at the peak of their fame and power. So long as I live, no-one will ever suffer living through the far end of the bell curve!”
I don’t have anything funny to say except I really like the first three panels and always appreciate it when Becky’s facade breaks because it really helps contextualize her constant stream of jokes.
Becky is really a fascinating character from a writing point of view. And from a commentariat point of view.
So much of what we see of her is that facade. The difficulty of sympathetically portraying a character who’s mostly hidden behind a facade with only occasional glimpses behind in a way that lets those paying attention figure out how she’s really feeling even when it isn’t slipping.
‘Camera”s closer to Hank, too, but he’s certainly taller than the girls. Teens are Short (TV Tropes alert), combined with Willis’s tendency to draw women on the short side to begin with, most like.
The Trope and camera angle already mentioned are almost certainly the main reasons for it, but Joyce- along with Dina and Walky- have always been presented on the short end, being noticably shorter than the rest of the main, and most of the secondary cast.
Then all the rest of the females [other than the taller-than-average Ruth and Carlica, and perhaps Nash] have mostly just been shorter because Willis seems to trend the teenage girls in the cast to the shorter end (as was also already mentioned), and that amplifies the contrast (as there’s already a noticable difference between average adult male and teenage girl, within the comic, so a shorter-than-average teen girl will seem dwarfed by an average adult male).
We’ve seen Hank alongside other parents before, and I recall that he’s been “average”, in the sense of matching fairly comparably to them (unlike, say, Toedad, who was shorter than the other adults).
Joe and Ethan, by comparison, are comparable to Joe’s father Richard, who I believe was a bit above the other adults in height. So those (and any others I may be forgetting atm) should be the unusually tall ones in the series, similar to Joyce, Dina, and Walky for the shorter ones.
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WOW that went some places
At least it’s not an ADULT conversation ifyouknowhutimean I guess???
“What’s your favorite thing to shout as your partner approaches their zenith? What I like to do is–“
oh god xD
Great Caesar’s Ghost!
you mean like the one about the bear with the great tits?
Is that similar to the beer with the bear tits?
And remember how fast Sarah wanted to change the subject!
It was almost an adult discussion. Then it became a college discussion.
I don’t know. Joyce’s logic sounds impeccable to me.
Certainly there were Crusaders who employed similar logic from time to time
Crusaders? Do you mean the Inquisition?
Nobody expects the Inquisition!
….shadows fall…and hope has fled…
What were their weapons again?
No, Joyce, no! Don’t go there!
Joyce just abandoned rleigious fundamentalism and became a social darwinist. She will then appear dressed as Tanya Degurechaff and shoot people that don’t follow her capitalist ideals.
Nah, because if you kill people when they’re at their best then that’s their best chance to get into heaven. Sure you’ll be sinning by committing murder but it’s a martyrdom. In the eternal view, you’d be doing them a favour by keeping them out of hell.
Baptise babies to cleanse them of sin and then murder them to prevent them from sinning themselves. It’s the perfect system.
Makes for a short lived religion though.
A lot of religions – those that last and grow enough to be called that, rather than “cults” – have very specific prohibitions to keep people from taking their other beliefs to the logical conclusion(s). Otherwise, like the aforementioned cults or critters with lethal mutations, they’d die out within a generation.
Becky and Joyce drop out of college to create the city in Logan’s Run.
Yea, but they only did it so they could shout “renew” and zap people with lasers.
Countdown to Joyce having a mental shock moment over her father using the word “evolving”
Probably not NOW but when she’s reflecting on this later
…i’m pretty sure fundies know that the word has other meanings?
I think the Pokemon comment means she doesn’t have a problem with the word “evolving” when it just means change in general.
Except Pokemon is apparently bad evolution. I.. have no idea what that means.
keeping it short: When the phenotype(observable characteristics) of a creature’s species changes over many, many years? that’s Evolution.
When a SPECIFC creature’s phenotype changes in the course of that individual’s lifetime that’s metamorphosis.
No, that’s why people who understand science think Pokemon’s ‘evolution’ is wrong.
Evangelicals think it’s wrong because it’s one type of creature changing into another. Like actual evolution, just on the wrong time scale, but either one is bad to the science deniers.
What if every time a Pokemon evolves, it actually dies and is replaced by its offspring? They only think it’s the old Pokemon, but actually it’s a child, and the old Pokemon died. So trainers are shortening their Pokemon’s lives in a desperate attempt to gain martial power, and their Pokemon comply out of love for their trainers, even though they know they’re racing towards their own death.
Then it’d be evolution!
That was essentially canon in the cartoon, at least briefly. Jessie and James were trying to evolve their Ekans and Koffing so they could keep up with the protagonists, but Meowth did some research on evolution and read that bit out loud to them while they all looked increasingly horrified.
In tears, they promised Ekans and Koffing they’d never try to get them to evolve again. Then they were happy, so they evolved. And nobody ever mentioned it again, as far as I know.
I always thought the Nurse Joy clones were creepy.
Following the “individual Pokemon go through metamorphosis” model, and having never played the games, I will just assume they liquefy themselves inside of the Pokeballs, like caterpillars inside a chrysalis.
Maybe I’ve been playing Pokemon for too long, but some evolutions are…not improvements. Of course that’s probably not what Joyce actually meant, but it’s what registered in my mind first, because that’s my context.
Don’t all evolutions cause stat boosts?
Most fundies almost by necessity acknowledge some evolution exists – it’s just typically phrased as “microevolution,” evolution that doesn’t “cross the boundaries between species” (whatever that means). This is contrasted with “macroevolution,” which is generally described as something like “atheists think turn fish into monkeys.”
It’s a very simplistic view of how the world works. They’d probably tell you cross-breeding different strains of apples to produce new kinds of apples, or breeding only the wooliest sheep in a herd to make generations of even woolier sheep “makes sense” because “they’re still apples and sheep”. One thing drastically evolving into something completely different by gradual change over an immense amount of time time isn’t something they can personally observe, therefore it can’t happen.
Okay, but why does that make pokemon evolution–which has nothing to do with either–bad?
(Also, that came up in the comic before, when Dina was confused that Joyce acknowledged evolution by getting an annual flu shot.)
Maybe it’s the drastic change the Pokemon go through when they evolve?
Maybe it’s because someone they trust said it’s bad, therefore it must be bad? (Trotting out good old doublethink in the process.)
It’s still a pretty adult conversation to me.
Nah, this is a college-age discussion. Equal parts philosophy and irreverent bullshitting.
Yes — as the participants age away from the college years, the philosophy diminishes.
I cannot argue with this.
Too true to be funny.
When people reach their conversational nadir the irrelevant bullshitting is all about their grandchildren. Bozhe moi!
Upvote!
Last-panel Joyce is SO CREEPY!
Great job, Willis! Keep up the good work!
Someone totally needs to make that face their profile pic.
Not me, though. I like my angry deer pic.
I’d trade in my Jason icon for that Joyce, honestly.
Hey, I just enjoy the way Hank is looking back at us as he makes his comment in the last panel.
I started to say that Joyce clearly has issues, what with her sudden desire to murder people. But then it occurred to me that flinging stones inside my glass abode would be unwise.
Also Hank you should just be happy the conversation was adult for any length of time, I know people who seemingly can’t have an adult conversation without dying.
Like Mike, possibly.
Remember the Anti-Joyce.
I can see no possible downside with this plan, and I unreservedly endorse it.
What is the worst that could happen, right?
There’s a problem: you can only punish people after they commit a crime, or when they are going to commit a crime. Killing them before they become evil would make you evil.
You could kill literally everyone and everything in the universe (including yourself) and leave it as an empty husk. Neither good nor evil. But that’s kinda a wash.
You are going to have to explain to me why killing everyone is a wash. There seem to be some assumptions there that I’m not following.
That sounds less like “could” and “neither good nor evil” and more like “theoretical most evil possible.”
Killing people after they commit a crime is murder. Killing people before they commit a crime is often self-defense.
So, uh, no.
Nice logic!
Killing people after they commit a crime can also be “execution,” but that has many other requirements as well.
I mean, sure, if you wanna be all realistic and logical about it.
Party pooper. 😛
Downside: the plan succeeds, you can pinpoint the exact moment people are at their best selves and start the process of murder, then find your own zenith was the moment before you thought of the plan
That’s only a downside if you’re insufficiently committed. 😛
Having adult conversations uses up too much battery for you to maintain for long.
They actually did have a pokemon song about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3ykA1ZUC1Y
Huh. I was honestly expecting to be rick rolled.
I thought it was going to be a song about murdering people who’ve hit their peak, and was really looking forward to hearing how a song from Pokemon could be interpreted that way.
It’s funny because Blaine was just murdered
It’s fair to say he had reached his zenith.
He was incapacitated in a hospital bed, unable to harm anyone but himself.
That was the best he could do.
Well, as long as it wasn’t the least he could do, because that would make it a completely different comic.
And Toedad! Double trouble takedown achieved, after all.
Oh god Joyce why.
Because Willis wants Joyce to have jerkass attributes in every iteration of his stories.
…I mean my comment was a facetious statement, but go off I guess.
She’s not seriously suggesting murdering people, she’s clearly having a bit of breakdown from the dozen or so traumatic events of the past couple days.
But see, if you murder them at their zenith, they’ll go out as their best selves.
Cut them some slack, Hank. They’re 18 and just had two, probably three deaths dropped on them. It’s probably a coping mechanism, and they are making very good observations either way.
Hank’s fine. Read the comments section.
So Joyce and Becky came up with precogs from the short story, “The Minority Report”.
I was thinking they came up with Carousel from Logan’s Run, but your idea works, too.
That escalated.
Book the next: A safe an’ cozy plateau of jackassery
Joyce, that is a fallacy like the one in Logan’s Run. You can’t rob people’s lives just because they could grow into old incompetent people. People become good or evil over time depending on their choices, mental growth and circumstances. Killing people when they reach an hypotethical zenith is social darwinism, and that is as dangerous as religious fundamentalism because like religious fundamentalism is based on extreme moral absolutes that not everyone can follow.
Time-travelling murderers who kill people at their moral zenith to stop them from becoming worse would make really interesting villains. NGL I’d read that story.
In Dr. Who there’s an organization that time travels to punish karma houdinis before their eventual death. The Doctor accidentally stopped them from torturing Hitler.
You will experience a tingling sensation and then death.
Becky: ‘Course, y’ can always evolve, like, the bad way.
Hank: Are we not men?
We are D.E.V.O.
I have that CD. I also saw the music video on The Mike Douglas Show back in 1973.
Panels 2 and 3: Becky’s mother…
Really, it going silly was the only way it was gojng to go. Because Becky and coping mechanisms.
Yep. Awww, Becky.
It’s actually about Rich Mullins. https://www.dumbingofage.com/tag/rich-mullins/
(except it isn’t, but also it is, but then also it isn’t again)
Oh boy, it’s time for the “Kill Baby Hitler” debate!
I want to go on record that “Kill Baby Hitler” is a horrible name for a kid.
But it is a good band name.
That one has two answers:
1- Kill ‘im. We already know how he turns out, so fuck ‘im.
2- Kidnap and raise him as your own, just to be sure.
If 2 fails, you just go back in time and kill both Baby Hitler and the you who’s about to kidnap him. No muss, no fuss.
Well, but then you have to kill the Time Patrol to keep them from killing you before you can kill Hitler and alter History.
What’s with all the killing? Incapacitate, disarm, critically mislead… Lots of alternatives!
Or, even more simply, figure out around when Hitler must have been conceived, travel back to those few weeks, and spend them in wacky hijinks making sure his parents don’t have sex. No murder, still gets rid of him.
If sitcoms and 80s movies are any indicator, hijinks never work.
Maybe if they just made them wackier…
Buy him an art school scholarship.
Listen I’ve seen his paintings (one of my Humanities classes was just ‘Berlin’, great time), money will not help there.
That and the rise of fascism in Germany was the result of multiple factors including the massive inflation and economic burden they got saddled with in the wake of World War I, further fuelling dissatisfaction both with the choice to surrender and the Weimar Republic as a whole, and therefore Hitler was only the most visible symptom of a fundamentally unstable society as well as a backlash against the growing progressivism and intellectualism of Berlin in particular. (The LGBT community in particular lost SO MUCH from the destruction of the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft archives, and that’s far from the only cultural hit.) But *vague handwave* details! (I say this mainly as my weird form of joke based on ‘I know way too much about odd sections of history offhand and it’s always complicated,’ killing Hitler wouldn’t fix everything but it sure would’ve been an improvement.)
So you go back in time to Versailles at the close of The Great War and slap the French and Brits around until they decide that the best revenge is living well instead of demanding tribute.
The bloke who most needed slapping at the Versailles peace conference was Billy Hughes, prime minister of Australia. The other belligerents were resigned to not getting reparations (because of the American position) until Hughes gingered them up. Woodrow Wilson described Hughes as a “pestiferous varmint”, and for once I agree with him.
Oh, that is ABSOLUTELY my time travel plan to prevent World War II and has been for years! Thank you, Agemegos, for giving me exactly the one who most needs slapping, too!
The perfect time machine would be a device that allows one to go back into time to WITNESS an event — such as Pearl Harbor, or Custer’s Last Stand, or one’s own birth — as a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ observer, but not be able to actually interact with the events as they play out. So it could someday become possible to know with certainty, for example, whether there WAS a second shooter on the grassy knoll in Dallas or whether Oswald was acting alone in killing JFK, but one would not be able to do anything about it, thus avoiding the “Time Paradox” that Doc Brown was so concerned about in the “Back to the Future” trilogy.
And yes, I’m working on it. [grin]
Have you read Larry Niven’s The Theory and Practice of Time Travel?
Bill,
Are you using Kurt Godel’s general relativity solution as your approach or something completely different???
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=kd9BX6ssitKwBfzwn-gJ&q=Kurt+Godel%E2%80%99s+general+relativity+solution&oq=Kurt+Godel%E2%80%99s+general+relativity+solution&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzIFCCEQoAEyBQghEKsCMgUIIRCrAlCbHVibHWCMK2gBcAB4AIABR4gBR5IBATGYAQCgAQKgAQGqAQdnd3Mtd2l6sAEA&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjruOmsrrDrAhUKKawKHXz4B50Q4dUDCAk&uact=5
The problem with that is how far back do you have to go to observe an event? A hundred years? A year? A day? A nanosecond? What’s the difference in going back a day or less and spying in real time?
And why go to the effort of getting evidence and deducing a criminal when you can just stake out the crime scene and watch?
There couldn’t have been a second shooter. There was never a grassy knoll to begin with.
Only because time travelers buried it in concrete in a failed attempt to save Kennedy.
Other possibilities include just getting him that damned art scholarship he wanted, or killing him during World War One when all kinds of folks were dying all over the place anyway and he’s no longer a cute little baby
Consider the difference in cost between setting up and administrating a scholarship and the that of a bullet. After the expense of constructing a working time machine we can’t count on having much a budget left.
Also during World War I there’s too great a probability of him firing back. As an infant, the probability is much much lower.
Also a bullet in the head of a baby is a much more of a dramatic statement and example. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Genecide does not pay. Mike’s shadow knows.
‘Murder-Joyce’ is too scary!
I wish I’d never seen those eyes!
I won’t be sleeping tonight.
Joyce may no longer be a fundie, but she hasn’t learn to ditch her sociopathic tendencies.
What if this is foreshadowing and one of the seemingly benign characters is going to end up being the comic’s main antagonist?
Sa already was a villain in Walkyverse.
Sal*
I think Walkyverse!Sal was more of an antihero. She mostly caused collateral damage in her pursuit of selfish revenge.
Ten years is some time to find a main antagonist.
It took One Piece about ten years to reveal two possible candidates for main antagonist and another ten to reveal someone who was even more main antagonisty.
“Course, you can always evolve the bad way…”
Meanwhile across campus, Mary sneezes for some reason.
Dumbing of Age Book 10: And Then Murder Them
Too on-the-nose?
DoA Book 10: This Was An Adult Discussion For Almost Twenty Seconds There
Or, following Laidlaw’s Rule:
Dumbing of Age Book 10: And Then the Murders Began
This might be the hardest I’ve laughed at this comic in a LONG while. Just the crazed look combined with the COMPLETELY out-of-nowhere “Let’s MURDER them!” idea is freaking hilarious.
I think being kidnapped might have had an effect on Joyce
Dammit Joyce, you were doing so well.
Becky and Joyce have come up with the Brewster Sisters’ plot from Arsenic and Old Lace!
Mike wakes up from his coma convinced he’s Teddy Roosevelt
It’s only after Eleanor takes him home that bits and pieces of strange memories surface.
((Yes, I know. Don’t explain the joke))
I was just thinking she’d accidentally come up with the climax from Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You.
You know, Joyce has a point, but also, it could be argued that Blaine had MORE room for positive growth potential because he started at such a deficit. It’s like how the bigger you are, the more weight you can lose. Or the lower your math grade, the more it can improve!
She is not wrong though.
“Room for growth” and “growth potential” are really quite different things.
Mm-hmm. There’s a lot of room for adding more water in the Mojave, but there’s almost zero potential for it becoming a large lake. (And the only reason it’s only ‘almost’ is that humans might be dumb enough to force it. >_>)
No challenge in the Mojave. I want us to take on terraforming Mars.
Eveen Venus might actually be easier. Start with a series of nukes to kick enough dust in the air to start a nuclear winter and allow it to get cool enough the water vapor can precipitate and actually hit the surface before evaporating again and you can see how big a sea you have to work with. Even with a series of lakes, you can ease up on the nukes enough to let enough light through that the blue-green algae can get a start on converting the carbon dioxide into oxygen and hydrocarbons. And Bob’s your uncle.
Nice to see someone else use jackassery as an adjective for stupid and obnoxious actions.
I’m kinda happy that the alt text refers to “children” plural. I hope it’s a deliberate reference to Becky.
Joyce’s face in the last panel is incredible 😂
dang xD
I need a cut-out of that Joyce from the last panel as a wallpaper and T-shirt. Like, I NEED it.
Joyce makes the best silly faces in DoA.
I mean, if you kill all the assholes then you don’t have to worry about them doing horrible things!
It’s logical!
Dumbing of age goes boondock saints
What a good idea. Let’s put Mike in charge of deciding who the assholes are. You can’t argue he doesn’t have expert knowledge.
Joyce, no!
Despite of how this night has unfolded, murder rarely is a good solution.
Ah, murder, an instafix for most things.
Not legally, but still
Pokemon are a BAD evolution?!
Consider their upbringing, I wouldn’t be surprised if Carol was one of those “Pokemon is the devil” types back at the height of it’s popularity
They also, more often than not, tend to get less cute as they evolve. I think that would probably rub Joyce the wrong way as well.
Except for Torchic, which just plain doesn’t evolve.
Let me keep this delusion, I beg you.
Dang, the start of the conversation is exactly whats been haunting me about the death of my best friend. She was 23, and when i look back at the kind of person she was, the opinions she had, and all the ways i have changed… I often wonder if we would have drifted apart or if she would have changed along with me.
Shit, I was about to write “I’m sorry for your loss,” and then I remembered the Amber/Becky conversation.
So:
🙁
<3
It was 11 years ago now. But that's sort of the thing, the more you age and change and grow, the more the contrast between who you were when they were alive and who you are now gets stronger and obvious.
Pffftt Joycd’s face in the last panel
Joyce’s Murder face is more gleeful than I imagined.
It is concerning. . .
“If you’ve got to go, go with a smile!”
Ruth would be proud.
She’s going full Dexter, isn’t she?
Whoops. I think Joyce just zenithed.
Becky thinking of her mom, I get that.
Bonnie probably crossed Joyce’s mind, too.
And Hank’s.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/deserves/
Do people study The Bridge of San Luis Rey in American colleges?
Bah! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_of_San_Luis_Rey
Not in required courses. What the Literature majors get up to, who knows?
Interesting. I’ve never heard of it, but I was a math/science geek.
Hank in the final panel is my mum for the past twenty years.
Joyce cheerfully contemplating murder is a scary thing.
Occasionally, Willis needs to remind us that Walkyverse!Joyce was a homicidal stalker.
Misleading. While she was both homicidal and a stalker, she was never both at the same time.
re: panel two, I was just thinking about this the other day. In three years I’ll be older than my brother was, and he was an entire decade older than me. It’s hard to know that I’m nearly at the same place he was. Hell, if I make it long enough, someday I’ll be more evolved than my mom was. It’s just… weird. And uncomfortable. I’m glad to see it being tackled here.
Interesting. I feel that essentially I’m the same person I was at 11. I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two and I’ve definitely changed my mind on a few things along the way. A bit more confidence, but basically, my personality and approach to things is the same. I’d think that looking back and having evolved into a different person would be, well, weird.
But then recognizing I was significantly older than my father was when he died was pretty weird too.
Whatever you do, make sure joyce doesn’t the punisher on Netflix immediately followed by quantum leap
“They call me Zenith. It is my personal mission to travel time and space to ensure that everyone bows out in the most spectacular way at the peak of their fame and power. So long as I live, no-one will ever suffer living through the far end of the bell curve!”
I’ve been expecting you Zenith. What a pity your life will be so short.
Bwa, ha ha, etc.
I suspect that Joyce will have her opportunity to answer that question in panel 2 one day. I’ve even written a fan-fiction about it!
So, Panel 1 was an unexpected gut-punch.
It’s pretty much exactly that line of thought broke me when my wife died, and has been my defining stance regarding death since then.
Didn’t expect to see that just laid bare like that.
10/10 Willis.
This isn’t an adult discussion?
Which bit? The Pokemon bit? Because adults can totally enjoy pokemon.
All the other parts seem perfectly adult to me.
That’s…Joyce, that’s actually chilling. You’ve gone COLD girl.
Who is Joyce thinking of in panel 2?
Is Joyce ok there? Not only did she say something I’d have expected her to have a breakdown over, but her face when suggestion murder is uh…
It’s something
I think it’s because she’s with Becky. Lord knows I say the most fucked up shit with my friends.
I don’t have anything funny to say except I really like the first three panels and always appreciate it when Becky’s facade breaks because it really helps contextualize her constant stream of jokes.
Agreed and agreed.
Becky is really a fascinating character from a writing point of view. And from a commentariat point of view.
So much of what we see of her is that facade. The difficulty of sympathetically portraying a character who’s mostly hidden behind a facade with only occasional glimpses behind in a way that lets those paying attention figure out how she’s really feeling even when it isn’t slipping.
And then how many readers don’t see beyond it.
Commentariat. What a scary yet apt way to describe some comment sections.
I like to read the alt text as Hank canonically thinking of Becky as his daughter
That is one hell of a creepy last panel there, Joyce. >.>
is hank just tall or are becky and joyce just short?
‘Camera”s closer to Hank, too, but he’s certainly taller than the girls. Teens are Short (TV Tropes alert), combined with Willis’s tendency to draw women on the short side to begin with, most like.
The Trope and camera angle already mentioned are almost certainly the main reasons for it, but Joyce- along with Dina and Walky- have always been presented on the short end, being noticably shorter than the rest of the main, and most of the secondary cast.
Then all the rest of the females [other than the taller-than-average Ruth and Carlica, and perhaps Nash] have mostly just been shorter because Willis seems to trend the teenage girls in the cast to the shorter end (as was also already mentioned), and that amplifies the contrast (as there’s already a noticable difference between average adult male and teenage girl, within the comic, so a shorter-than-average teen girl will seem dwarfed by an average adult male).
We’ve seen Hank alongside other parents before, and I recall that he’s been “average”, in the sense of matching fairly comparably to them (unlike, say, Toedad, who was shorter than the other adults).
Joe and Ethan, by comparison, are comparable to Joe’s father Richard, who I believe was a bit above the other adults in height. So those (and any others I may be forgetting atm) should be the unusually tall ones in the series, similar to Joyce, Dina, and Walky for the shorter ones.