This confused me for a moment because I was imagining the Ironside theme by Quincy Jones, which actually overlaps with some Morricone music during Kill Bill.
In the last panel Linda has the face of a person who has suddenly understood that she’s talking with another maniac. If really Linda is going to sue the church, I’m with her. Sure, Linda is a horrible parent, but Carol is probably worse than her.
First, you crush some garlic cloves. 5-7, depending on size.
Then prep the popcorn popper. I use a 1:1 mix of duck fat and ghee, with salt and pepper. Add the garlic, and a single popcorn kernel. Cook on medium-low until the corn pops. This is to prevent the garlic from burning.
Add the rest of your popcorn and raise the temperature. Stir/shake vigorously as it pops.
As soon as the popping stops, quickly transfer your popcorn into a large bowl. Top with powdered parmesan cheese and nutritional yeast.
Ladies and Gentlemen I give you Carol missing the fucking point and Linda still somehow being a pain in the ass despite being in the right and going after the right people for once.
Because the alternative is acknowledging that her actions were directly responsible for a situation that endangered the lives of six teenagers (including her daughter) and resulted in a man’s death.
Far more often the cause of tragedies in human history, at their root source, than all the narcissism, deliberate wickedness, or any of the extremes of humanity at it’s most evil…
She has no where else to go if she’s gonna keep living in her fantasy land where bailing out the guy that kidnapped his daughter at gunpoint was somehow a remotely good idea.
Then aided in kidnapping *their* daughter along with several others, including The One Woman in this country who gets the One Vote to decide everything, and thanks to the guy they blindly trusted with paying his bail thumping him to death with a peen hammer, guess who’s accessible enough for Her to play “No One F#@%s with Linda Walkerton?”
Seriously, Blaine is both too busy with police charges and might not be an easy enough target. That leaves Hank and Carol….Possibly Joyce?
And I look at it as Carol calling out Linda’s exaggerated accusation by merely stating the facts in rebuttal. Ross did NOT shoot up the school — or anyone else — once he had been released on bail; and even in the first incident he fired ONE single shot, and that was into the air.
Linda never said he shot anyone. Carol is the only one saying that. And he DID “shoot up the school” by firing a shot on school grounds. None of Linda’s comments are exaggerated. Carol is the one who instantly jumped to “yes but nobody died”.
Also, a friendly reminder that bullets fired into the air can and sometimes do injure people when they come back down. Sometimes fatally. Toedad not shooting anyone that day ended up being a matter of chance.
Yes, any shots more than a few degrees off of absolute vertical can maintain ballistic trajectory and kill someone – it’s happened before when people celebrate by firing guns into the air.
I’m fairly certain that shots fired more vertically than that can also kill people. The difference is, if you fire it vertically enough, you get to find out who it kills. Unless, of course, you manage to compensate correctly for the Coriolis force and wind to do it fucking right.
Note that I’ve only once heard of someone managing to do it fucking right. But that someone was enough of a piece of work there was clapping involved in the reaction to it.
It shouldn’t happen. I won’t say it can’t because my physics is too weak to be sure.
A bullet fired straight up will come down at whatever terminal velocity is for the bullet, so it shouldn’t be any more dangerous than dropping that same bullet out of an airplane. Bullet, not the whole cartridge (which is probably less dense, and less aerodynamic, than the bullet alone and would therefore have a lower terminal velocity.) A bullet fired anywhere near horizontally is probably going to come down still going, horizontally, about as fast as it was going, horizontally, when it was fired. Although, if the range is great enough, it may lose enough velocity to wind resistance to be no more dangerous than the vertical shot. Also, it’ll probably plow into the ground, or something or someone else, before it bleeds off enough of its horizontal velocity to be anything like safe.
But, that said, know your backstop, and if you MUST shoot into the sky, or toward something that is likely to cause a ricochet, use a shotgun.
Generally firing straight up is pretty safe. The terminal velocity for a tumbling bullet isn’t that high. It’s mostly just dangerous if you fire at an angle, so that the bullet remains aerodynamically oriented during it’s path.
Hyperbole much? While firing ANY gun on a campus is a bad idea because bullets can and do come down again), you seem to equate firing one shot into the air with firing fully automatic weapons in both hands, Rambo-style, at everything and everyone.
Simply put, firing a gun into the sky, unless you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are the ONLY PERSON AROUND for about a mile and a half, is reckless. If you’re on a college campus, tucked into a small town, there are definitely people around within that 1.5 miles.
Frankly, it’s probably no more dangerous to others than you going into a crowd without a mask on, but you shouldn’t do that right now either.
People like Carol use otherwise common expressive phrasing as an angle to play Roger Dodger with a conversation topic. It’s a bit of a manipulation tactic, often ‘learned’ monkey-see, monkey-do style.
They had their chance to do something more for Ross than simply let him go nuts then make verbal excuses for him when he got in legal trouble.
They had their chance to get to know this seemingly sympathetic stranger and even join him to pick up Ross so they could help Ross beat this “misunderstanding.”
They simply waited for things to work out in their favor on their own while making verbal excuses for his actions, and now Ross is both dead and got into even more legal trouble before he was killed….Legal trouble that now has one of those “soccer moms” they might of heard about a decade or so ago glaring at their church family with crimson crosshairs.
Might as well double down on refusing to admit it!
Using that as a reference, I doubt it would come out that blatantly. More an awkward about how difficult it must be or something.
Something she could think as well meaning, but so obviously rooted in racism.
I’m suddenly reminded of this page I saw from a DC/Marvel crossover where Joker realizes that Red Skull is actually a Nazi and not just talking a big game for the sake of sounding more evil, and declares that he might be a psychopath but he’s an *American* psychopath.
Linda might not be a great parent, but even she’s got to draw the line somewhere.
If I remember correctly, that particular comic came from an era where Joker was more of a regular goofy criminal than a crazed mass murderer. While Red Skull has pretty much always been a monster.
In case anyone is wondering, that’s from the Batman/Captain America one-shot by John Byrne.
It’s an Elseworlds set during WW2, and is technically in continuity with his Superman/Batman Generations series.
The main reason I didn’t name the trope was to avoid this. Linking TV Tropes when now, more than ever, people are desperate to find something to distract themselves from the world? None of us will ever emerge from there again.
I’ve seen the aurora, it’s a real thing. I’ve also seen “cyclops” skulls with multiple eye sockets as in one huge and two small, made from mastadon skulls. Unicorns are African antelope with close-set horns that look like a single horn from the side.
In some ways, this is how I feel about the upcoming election, bizarrely enough. On one side, we have a deeply conflicted and flawed individual who does awful things even when they think they’re doing well, and lends all sorts of accidental support to horrible situations.
And on the other hand, we have a radioactive dumpster fire transformed into a passing semblance of a human being.
It’s the worst-case ‘lesser of two evils’ scenario.
It’s like that time Winston Churchill went from reactionary racist imperialist putz to the one guy who’d stand up to Adolph Hitler. Sometimes all it takes to turn a jerk into a hero is to put him next to a much bigger jerk.
Of course if you put a jerk next to just a marginally bigger jerk he turns into the Mussolini to the bigger jerk’s Hitler — see the late unlamented Toedad.
I think Charles is angry, I think he doesn’t like the way this woman defended toedad. I think that while under different circumstances he might commiserate with Hank, right now he’s a bit too focused on the bongo in front of him to be reflecting on the bongo standing next to him.
I have heard some people claim I am. Personally, I prefer to describe it as me not wanting to get into fights, considering that I’m scrawny. Also sometimes I fail with words the right way by accident. When one fails with words as much as I do, it can and does just happen sometimes.
Hank’s face towards Carol implies they’re going to hit a bit if a rough spot. I also think the little alarm bells he sometimes heard in the back of his head when his wife talks just got yanked to the prefrontal cortex.
I feel like if she went as far as to say that she should also turn around and start walking away. Just to really emphasize how rediculous it is. Before she turns around and says something along the lines of: “Seriously? What in your mind makes you think that is the hill you want to die on?”
The bright side here is that she STOPPED the call, and her anger and spite might have found a new target. Best case: She spends her time and effort to sue that church rather than trying to get Amber expelled.
Best case, she gets herself made persona non grata on campus, and the dean finds it VERY hard to give her even the barest hint of what she wants.
You know, we don’t know how Linda and the dean broke up. It might have been because he liked her fine as a friend, but couldn’t see himself living with that crazy for the rest of his life. Linda might be “that one friend” for the dean. You know the one. The one who insists the U.S. government is controlled by either lizard people or Zionists, thinks vaccinations are the mark of the beast, and will tell you why it’s obviously true, in detail, and demands that the mind-controlling G5 towers be torn down post-haste.
That’s silly. Vaccinations look nothing like 666, which since they used a numerical code using the 6th letter, would be FFF, referring to the satanic organization, Future Farmers of France. The lizard people are actually very nice and without the G5 towers we would have uncontrolled chaos by this point.
Even the Good Parents like Dorothy’s. I don’t think I want Parents in the comic for a while. Actually let me just extend that to… Authority Figures in general.
She was probably trying to wear him down to agree with her demands. Legal have already probably told him that taking action against any of Blaine’s targets would be suicide and llkely guarantee that the Board of Trustees can him as a scapegoat to buy off all the lawsuits. Because of that, Linda was trying to do the hardest thing in existence: Convince someone to do something personally harmful because you say so and think that what you say should always go.
Nice reference, and I wouldn’t say Linda is an idiot. She clearly has some intelligence, she just chooses to use it for the wrong reasons on tne wrong things.
Perhaps, but he didn’t shoot up the school. All the school buildings remained standing without unsightly holes in the windows. No school officials were wounded. Very few bullets were dug out of walls.
I wonder if where they got the bail money to start with is going to come up. That would probably make Linda even angrier. Whether it will make her more pissed at the Church or Amber I do not know,
I don’t know. I think it’s possible to take the stance that they should keep arguing with each other in the hopes that they’ll take each other out without actually siding with one of them.
The last storyline was all about terrible fathers and now this one is all about terrible mothers, I’m glad that we’re seeing both sides of the coin in this strip.
Linda might not be able to get a judgment in her favor, but she will keep the case bleeding billable hours only Linda can afford until the church is fucking exsanguinated. This is how the rich typically circumvent the legal system, but this is the abyss the church hurled itself into.
I guess the question is whether there were any indications that there COULD be problems with Ross…i.e. they knew Ross was unrepentant and would likely try to kidnap Becky again once released.
If the majority of the church maintained a strict anti-gay/pro-ross attitude they might claim the church was part of a conspiracy.
I think it would be more appropriate to say they’re in different holes throwing dirt at each other than to say either of them has any sort of “high ground”.
Plus Carol get sympathy points for being the more ‘simple’ less ‘Martha Stewart-y’ of the two. Carol’s age could also be used to make excuses for the things she says. “Christ, that was bad, but you should have heard my grandmother go on about cannibals in Africa!” or such and such.
Linda’s real advantage lies in that she knows more about litigation than simple hearsay at the local potluck or from Rush Limbaugh’s old radio show. The funds to cover how ever far she wants to take this, too.
Dunno…. The morality of Hank is a long and complicated story. He is doing a lot of good, but he has also enabled the people who released ToeDad for many years. He did nothing to blunt Toedad over the years except almost saying something. When he tried to kidnap Becky he did so with the conviction that God and church was with him, and Hank had never given any reason to think otherwise.
It could be argued that being chewed out by Linda is exactly what he deserves.
maybe most to the point – if Joyce had grown up to be the kind of person he had told her to be rather than the kind of person who does the right thing, she would have called ToeDad when Becky first showed up.
The fact that she didn’t is thanks to her, not thanks to him.
(and yes, I still try to supervise the transport of a “Daddy of the year” mug large as an oil tanker to him, thanks to how he has stepped up as a father to Becky. But my points above still stand)
Yeah, and don’t forget that it’s only a few weeks since Hank tried to use God-talk to intimidate Joyce into shunning Dorothy because Dorothy is an atheist. He’s not a homophobe, but he is a bigot.
Linda is NOT a Mama Bear. Mama Bears nurture and support their children in addition to defending them to the death. Linda is a Karen: an entitled parent who uses their personal frustrations with how their life has turned out so far to make defenseless service workers miserable. She views Carol as someone who she can blame and vent at; but unfortunately for her Carol is a fundangelical – someone who has long discarded concepts like personal responsibility and taking the blame for anything.
The fact that Linda is technically in the right here doesn’t actually matter to either of them. Which is why disgonnabegood.gif.
Actually Linda is technically in the wrong and Carol is technically in the right. He really didn’t shoot up the school as Linda claimed. Pointing it out kind of misses the point, but yeah.
I meant like instead of comparing her to the metaphorical Mama Bear, comparing her to a literal one that will eat its own cubs in a pinch, in addition to other departures from ideal motherly behavior.
Speak for yourself, I’m rooting for them to kill each other. 😛
And as far as I can tell, upper middle class. Enough they can afford a lawsuit or to send a kid to boarding school but nowhere near Billie or Carla’s level.
Do they live in the same neighbourhood? We’ve never actually seen or (to my recollection) heard of them hanging out before school age and they went to the same public school. All they need to do is be put in the same class.
Same public school, on the elementary level, tends to mean ‘same neighborhood or thereabouts’ in that kind of suburban area. (School districts are weird, but looking it up the Evansville district – which I’m pretty sure is theirs? – has eighteen different elementary schools.) We also saw Billie, Walky, and Sal playing together when they were clearly REALLY young – probably kindergarten or younger – when Sal first met Marcie.
On the other hand, I don’t think Billie and Marcie’s families would be anywhere close in terms of financial status. So I don’t think living in the same neighbourhood is a direct indicator of wealth level; for all we know the Billingsworths may just be notoriously thrifty about where they live.
I mean, the ones in my area generally serve a single development, but it’s also a HEAVILY urban-sprawled commuter county so I admit it may not be typical. (*Looks it up* Yeah okay my county has more than QUADRUPLE the number of elementary schools that Evansville does, deeeeefinitely not typical.)
(And thank god they decided today for all virtual schooling for the fall semester, because our population density is high enough that ALL THOSE SCHOOLS are pretty much packed. And a lot of them are old buildings with aging or ill-designed ventilation systems.)
Someday I hope to see a parent in Dumbing of Age whose a monster in all walks of life except for being a parent. Perhaps Carla’s parents have an island where they hunt people.
Yeah, he might technically not have “shot up the school”, but he showed up with a gun, prepared and ready to do harm. Arguing semantics is just pedantry at best, defending a monster at worst.
I got to wonder if I rolled up to the nearest college campus and shot at a bunch of people but missed would I still get pegged for attempted mass murder?….oh wait I’m black, I’d be lucky just to survive long enough to be convicted.
That line reminded me a bit of the Catholic Church’s reaction whenever people bring up increasing accountability in some form for sexual abuse of minors.
*Sits atop billions of dollars worth of gold-plated property* “But we already lost so much when we lost all those initial lawsuits! And now you want to allow more people to sue? Haven’t we suffered enough?!”
The Catholic Church notably sits on a huge amount of land that is actually unsellable since it exists to provide public services. The idea it’s some massive rich organization is based around anti-Catholic bigotry akin to anti-Semitism.
I say that also saying every single person involved in the sex scandal needs not just to pay up but be sent to prison. Money cannot make up for sexual abuse–says someone who has relatives who suffered it.
no. The Catholic Church is an actual organization that has actual wealth, including real estate that is actually sellable, and not some preternaturally “public service” dispensing fields. Noticing that the Catholic Church has billions in assets, that they hide from settlements, is not akin to someone claiming that Jews make matzoh out of the blood of Christian babies. so, just no. no no no.
Recently, the KKK shot a Catholic priest in my area so my feeling toward anti-Catholic bigotry is pretty low right now. There’s a lot of people who try to make Davinci code-esque conspiracy theories and ignore the actuality of situations. Basically, the Browns are all about their hate for Catholics and their organization.
The Catholic Church has about 30 billion dollars in assets, which sounds big until you remember they have a billion members.
They produce and defend rapists. They put men in positions of power over children and then, as a powerful organization, defend those men with the billions of dollars at their disposal.
You claim one (1) priest was shot by the KKK. more black men have been lynched this summer than Catholic priests targeted.
people are mad at Catholicism because it’s so large and powerful and uses its power to hurt people. comparing anger at Catholicism to real bigotry is a fucking insult to every person suffering from racism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, all of which are gleefully carried on through, you guessed it, the Catholic church. so please kindly fuck off.
I’m not sure I understand your argument. How is murdering black men not evil? The KKK doing it to priests is the same as the Nazis did to priests and other victims. It’s a sign of the complete moral bankruptcy of bigotry. I’m really confused.
The world doesn’t revolve around the USA! You’re aware the Roman Catholic Church is the dominant religion in a lot of countries, right? They’re not a poor persecuted minority there.
With more than 1 billion adherents, the Catholic Church is one of the largest, if not the largest, nongovernmental landowners in the world. One estimate puts the church’s holdings close to 177 million acres, or 277,000 square miles. If those properties were grouped together and placed on a list of the world’s countries by land area, it would fall within the top 50, higher than both France and Spain.
In Massachusetts, the state Supreme Court recently ruled that only a portion of a Catholic shrine’s nearly 200 acres were used for worship purposes and therefore were exempt from paying local property tax. The shrine was sent a tax bill for $92,000.
Would money make everything better for victims? No. Would it at least pay for therapy, anxiety meds, and so forth brought on by the trauma? Yes.
And is the gold on that property also unsalable because it too is part of the public service? Kinda hard for the Catholic Church to plead poverty when all you have to do is look at the interior of St Peter’s Basilica to know that plea is a lie.
Net worth of the Vatican ALONE, ignoring all the dioceses, is estimated in the 10-15 billion dollar range. That’s a positive figure, assets in excess of debts. The church is in the black. Even if that estimate is high by 400%, that still fits regina’s claim of “billions of dollars”. And we can’t pretend that it’s tied up performing public services, because the Vatican is its own nation, its only public is its priesthood and employees, and whatever laws it might have against selling the property it is more than free to change whenever it likes.
But in all fairness, the Vatican isn’t gold-plated. Electroplating is a recent technique and would not have been used in, say, decorating St Peter’s Basilica.
>The idea it’s some massive rich organization is based around anti-Catholic bigotry akin to anti-Semitism.
The diocese my family used to belong to had a private jet for the archbishop and other priests who were assigned there.
A. Private. Jet.
They were relatively landlocked – they were close to the coast (and well within plane rides to more tropical locals, like the Bahamas and the Keys), but 100% didn’t need to use the plane to minister to their parishioners.
In the interests of a civil comment section, I just deleted a really long flame I was about to post. Instead, I will limit myself to four points.
1) Prejudice against Catholics and the murder of a priest is, indeed, contemptible. That should go without saying, but I know the Internet, and if I don’t say it someone somewhere will assume that I’m arguing the opposite.
2) Calling out the bad actions of the Church (meaning the instituion/heirarchy/priesthood, rather than the general body of believers), including how it refuses to make adequate compensation when it has the means to do far more than it actually doing, is completely legitimate criticism. Perhaps open to factual debate, but not any sort of transgression. Point 1 does not change this.
3) Equating the two, and leveling the charge of bigotry justly earned by the people doing point 1 against the people doing point 2… well I’m trying to keep this civil, so I’ll err on the side of understatement and just say that it is unjustified.
4) Declaring this anti-Catholic bigotry as being akin to antisemitism, and particularly making that declaration in defense of the Catholic Church, is… I again err on the side of understatement here… problematic.
I acknowledge that certain recent events have left you raw, and so for civility’s sake I am forgoing a more pointed and expansive (not to mention hotter) exploration of these topics.
I left the Catholic Church notably as a result of the rape and coverups. I had spent much of my early adult years heavily involved in charity works that were orchestrated by them ranging from homeless shelters to elderly care for those who couldn’t afford it. However, my relatives have suffered childhood sexual abuse and it was unforgivable to me. The Church protecting individuals like that disgusts me. I also know that people involved in the clergy have been murdered and firebombed in my area for their activities against the local church. The casual bigotry against them and portrayal of the church as a massive business irritates me greatly because I also know the for-profit ministries and megachurches that do nothing but bilk their followers of wealth.
I have complicated feelings regarding the church as such and am sensitive to these issues. It was a…I don’t have words for it…moment to find out my relatives were sexually abused and that I couldn’t do anything to make it better or help (it had happened years in the past).
Oh the estimate for how much the Catholic Church has come from Time Magazine which is that it is not nearly as wealthy an organization as it appears. Previous articles stuck with me as several churches in my areas shut down and we lost the charitable services they provided.
And finally, my apologies. The emotionality of recent events had me state a lot of stupid things. None of which were well done and I wish I hadn’t said most of them.
Thank you for your patience and taking time to discuss things. I appreciate it.
Ah, yes, the great public services of *checks notes* promoting homophobia, transphobia, pedophilia, and anti-choice.
What’s this “unsellable” fuckery? The Catholic Church has never not been a private, parasitical organisation that is the biggest landowners in the world if you don’t count actual countries. Research has shown that most of the money dontated to the Catholic Church goes to maintain the beast and not to any actual social work. The only reason they’re finidng themselves in monetary woes right now is because its victims are fighting their fears and coming forward and suing the fuckers for everything they got – if you’re running out of money because you need to pay compensation to all the victims of the pedophilia you enabled you are entitled to exactly ZERO whining.
Also feeding the poor, free hospital care, caring for the mentally ill, and giving care to the dying. Mind you, I’d like to get rid of all homophobia, transphobia, and anti-choice in the church while keeping the rest.
Wouldn’t you?
Also, what “research” is lying to you? I mean it’s not that hard to disprove that. It’s the largest charitable organization in the world. Go downtown to any city and check it out. Its like denying gravity.
Imma pretty certain the mob, or at least Asher’s granddad, was unaware of and not likely to support Blaine’s dipshittery. At a minimum it is waaaay too visible for any serious mobster’s comfort level.
I don’t think John personally skimmed anything. The church board itself may have, but that’s a group responsibility, like corporations and CEO salaries.
Of course, he may have found ways of hinting to the board that he was the sort of person who deserved as much as he did because reasons. Grifters gonna grift.
That aside, I don’t think it’s the same church as Hank and Carol’s. I note that John was not present at services when Hank, Carol, Joyce, and Becky went.
IIRC, the Browns’ current church is based off the one Willis’s mom was part of? Didn’t that one end up going bankrupt (after she donated the family house to the church), if memory serves?
In most states the bail money would actually be refunded because the defendant in deceased. However in some jurisdictions the bail money belongs to the defendant even if posted by a third party.
Pretty sure that’s irrelevant he was murdered before the bail could be fortified. He’s dead so legally speaking he’s not guilty of anything and can’t be charged with anything.
Since Blaine’s name was apparently the one on the bail paperwork (or at least a name, but that’s how Becky got him in the Twitter Thread,) and Blaine is now in jail for the one crime Indiana doesn’t allow bail for, that might also affect things some.
Seriously, CANNOT overstate how much I want to see Gramps’s reaction to this bullshit. I am sure I would regret this the moment I got this wish, but seriously it is difficult to imagine a more ill-conceived or -executed plan than Blaine’s whole scheme and I have to assume an Actual (Presumably) Competent Mobster is gonna have the same ‘oh my god are you fucking kidding me’ reaction we have.
Yeah I’m not going to lie if I was blains Boss I’d be fed up this his crap to. He’s fucking up so badly and wasted much of his own time and money just to fail at bringing in his own daughter. On top of that his blunders are drawing attention to his own mob and getting his grandson involved. The appropriate thing to do would be “Forget the fool let him rot in there for all I care.”
He and Asher recognized each other on sight, too, which means he is DEFINITELY connected enough Gramps does not want to risk him turning state’s witness on the mob stuff to reduce his charges.
And given the incredibly visible displays of Serious Money To Burn putting this plan in action (posting an extremely high bail for a total stranger chief among them,) his nickel-and-diming Amber in the dorm – though I’m pretty sure she knows it’s not really about that – and how he hid his conflicting tax returns so badly a 13-year-old could find them, he’d damn well better hope no one who’d heard him gripe about tuition gets deemed relevant enough to be interviewed. The mob has a vested interest in that investigation being cut off before it starts.
Seriously I’d be shocked if Blaine makes it a week without a Mysterious and Unfortunate Accident courtesy of one of the many enemies he made with that stunt.
He will probably commit suicide by hanging…in a room with no movable furniture, while the cameras mysteriously glitch, the guards both take a smoke break, and using a coathanger he couldn’t have had access to.
But wouldn’t it then go to whoever Ross designated as an heir in his will? What if Ross’s will says something like “Women can’t inherit money, so all of my money goes to Becky’s husband, if she has one, or to the church, if she doesn’t have one.”
How many sets of parents would be on campus at all, never mind loitering in the Read lobby, while there isn’t an event? Basically just the kidnapping victims’.
They’re probably not Sarah’s parents (hey it’s possible she could be adopted, they don’t know).
They can’t be Becky’s (both are deceased, even if Linda didn’t know about Bonnie it would be odd for her to show up with another man already).
They’re certainly not Amber’s (Blaine’s in jail) or Walky’s (that’s them).
Walky dated Dorothy for a while, so they might know her parents (at least in passing). She also doesn’t look anything like Hank and Carol.
They know Dorothy’s parents. They met when the two of them were dating. I faintly remember Linda talking about how Walky was going to be a doctor, whether or not he realized that yet.
Ethan’s and Dina’s as well, though Dina can be eliminated for the same reasons as Sarah. Given how both the Browns’ hair is graying, it’s not inconceivable they could be mistaken for Ethan’s parents, but their skintones and facial shapes do differ just enough to make it less likely. (Provided Linda and Charles had a chance to see and pay any attention to what Ethan looked like. Fairly big ‘if’ there.)
She already talked to her kids, yah? They may have given her the gist “so this guy who tried to kidnap someone we know before got out on bail and kidnapped me to get to her”
It hit the handgun of someone who was about to commit suicide. This event caused them to rethink things, get professional help, resolve the issues in their life, reconcile with their family, find a partner, a fulfilling job, and live happily ever after.
There is at least one passage about arming yourself for the coming bad times. Going so far as to sell your coat to afford a weapon.
Luke 22:36
There’s another passage about dying by the very implement you lived by.
Matthew 26:52
I choose to interpret that as meaning don’t pick fights expecting your martial prowess bail you out, but be prepared to defend yourself and your own by any means necessary.
The Bible is widely open to interpretation, of course. But as I recall, those passages were about swords, not guns. 😉
In practice the Bible’s pretty much an inkblot test, where what people take away from it says more about them than it does about the Bible. You can do a lot worse than “don’t pick fights… but be prepared to defend yourself”, so you won’t get any debate from me about your interpretation.
Charles: So Hank, you want we should both get divorced and Gay married? I mean yeah, I don’t swing that way and you probably think it’s a mortal sin and an ABOMINATION, but it’s gotta be better than this right?
Hank: ….
Charles: Ok, just putting it out there, no offence meant.
Hank: No no, hang on. I’m thinking…
Let’s not overlook the worst part of Carol’s defending Ross: her daughter was kidnapped too and it was her daughter he was threatening when he fired his gun. The man she’s defending endangered her daughter’s life TWICE.
Says everything about her priorities that her first response wasn’t “My daughter was kidnapped too! My daughter was taken *hostage* as a human shield! Don’t you act like we had any way of knowing he was capable of something like this!”*
*although they did. Random guy shows up out of nowhere to pay bail for someone he doesn’t know, and no one thinks to ask why? Ross was as dumb as a box of rocks, an easy tool to manipulate.
Aaaaall of this. Go fuck yourself, Carol. I can’t even bring myself to be disappointed, because that would imply I had any expectation whatsoever it would EVER be anything but this, but you suck beyond words.
No. The Bible is all over the place in a lot of subjects as a result of being written by a bunch of people over a long period of time, but Jesus is very clear that divorces aren’t an actual thing, and neither is remarrying. It’s aaaatttttt… the Sermon at the Well, I think.
Jesus is clear about not divorcing except in cases of adultery.
But yeah, like SeanR says, unevenly yoked often gets cited as grounds for divorce.
I think the Hank/Carol type of evangelical prefer the idea of “maybe it’s a sin, but Jesus forgives. Once saved always saved.” That brand of Christians do divorce a lot, significantly above the national average.
Sure, but how much of that is faith in doctrine, and how much of that is being a kid who wants her parents to love each other? Having your parents break up is awful, regardless of age.
Surely he shares their Good Old Christian Values ™ (not to be mistaken for anything Jesus actually advocated for) so strongly fronting megabucks for a stranger made sense? The Lord was clearly acting through him, why would they have questioned it?
I note that Linda’s already on the phone with the dean trying to get Amber expelled. BOY does she work fast.
But yeah wow Linda’s not wrong re: her indignation in this instance. Feels like everyone here is turning on Carol though given she’s clearly completely missing the point.
Fair enough. I just don’t like Linda and am instantly bound to empathize with anyone she is in conflict with. Usually that is Sal, but this time it is another abysmal character.
At the very least, assault with a deadly weapon. Probably a law against discharging a firearm within city limits, discharging a firearm on school grounds, HAVING a firearm on school grounds, and whatever that amplifies the kidnapping charge to.
He didn’t shoot at anyone only because Becky caved at the warning shot, and he did not get the chance to shoot AG (and Sal and Joyce, who caught up to the chase after he started talking about sending Becky’s friends to hell for aiding her in defying him) before being stopped.
And he still brought a gun on campus with the intention of using it (and causing a police shootout, if necessary. Probably by ACTUALLY shooting some of these corrupt, secular students,) and did fire it as a warning shot and threaten people at gunpoint. That qualifies as, at minimum, an attempted shooting up, and the distinction for any students in hearing/threatened range is basically meaningless.
I hate Linda with the fire of a small magma flare, but in this ONE moment, she is entirely correct in putting blame on Carol and the church.
Still says nothing good about her that her first impulses have been ‘blame (and attempt to expel) a student for the actions of her father’ and ‘blame (and attempt to sue) the church that bailed the Dead Chump out’, though! So much blame. No onscreen attempt whatsoever to actually support or check in on or even remotely LISTEN TO her children (both of them, given Sal was involved in the rescue.)
Shooting up the school is a phrase with a different meaning than shooting upwards while at the school. I think maybe you have never seen a building that’s been shot up.
Was it even church money used for the bail, or was it church members’ money.
Hank better be angry if Carol used family money to bail out a man who threatened their daughter’s life.
Go ahead and sue, Linda. I very much doubt that putting up money for bail makes you liable for any crimes committed while out on bail.
A broken clock is right twice a millenium. Congrats, Linda.
Carol, you realize firing a gun repeatedly at a university campus is generally considered to be “shooting up the school”, even if no one got hit, right? It’s still a horrifying thing to do that terrified and traumatized quite a few people!
No, Karen–sorry, Linda–you can’t sue someone for posting bail. Every bail bond company in the country would have been sued out of existence if you could.
But dammit, Carol, just shut your frickin’ mouth for a change! Forget Linda, I want to see Hank, Joyce, and Becky tear into her! Heck, I want to see Hank invoke “the husband is the head” Scripture and just completely destroy Carol. Dammit, Hank, grow an effing pair!
I doubt that’s how it would play out, though. More likely going down that route would invite a lecture from Carol about her idea of how a ‘proper’ patriarch should be and how Hank wasn’t measuring up.
Yes, semantics is definitely the right way to defend a kidnapper and attempted murderer, Carol /s
And Charles, are you the dad or the butler? All you do is hang around, take orders and only actively participate in conversations that are trite and superficial. This strip really exemplifies that.
It’s all she’s got. It’s easier to keep digging than admit she’s wrong. Attempting to process the cognitive dissonance she’s built up will make her have a stroke.
“Hey, um, if we were to show that we were contrite and recognized the error of our ways… like, say, helping you get signatures for a petition to get that O’Malley kid out of the college… would that maybe get you to hold off on the suing our church thing?”
But I’m pretty sure you can’t sue anyone, church or not, for bailing somebody out of jail. (Except the bondsman can sue you for the balance of the bond money.) That’s not actionable. Maybe it should be, but it isn’t.
And you DEFINITELY can’t sue for all their money, just actual damages irrespective of how much money they have. And you can’t sue to wipe a church off the map in the equity sense of getting a court order to close the church down. (Maybe force them to move if they’re squatting on your property, but not shut down.)
That said, if Linda uses some mix of connections and money to sue that church out of existence despite not really being able to, I’m not going to complain all that loudly. Yeah, she’s vile, but so is the church in question.
Suing for damages is actually very easy. You just have to convince the jury to award them and that the person is liable. In this case, all they need to prove is that they knew Ross would try to kidnap his daughter again.
Juries make determinations of fact — that is, whether things happened in this or that way in any given case. Judges make determinations of law.
So if you took the case to court that their church bailed out Ross and therefore should be made to cover the damages Ross caused, you would have to convince the jury of the facts of the case like, yes, the church did bail out Ross and, yes, Ross did cause those damages, and maybe also yes, those things were foreseeable.
But you’d also have to convince the judge that the law says that all those facts together, if the jury found they were true, would entail legal liability. THAT’S where it would all fall apart. The whole case would be dismissed prima facie long before a jury was even empaneled.
Otherwise, as just one of a million potential examples, an extremist evangelical could sue me or you for the emotional distress caused to them by the thought that us not converting to his particular denomination would land us in hell, and it would be entirely up to a jury whether or not that was something that we were on the hook for regardless of what freedoms the law says we have.
You can also sue for punitive damages – probably wouldn’t apply in this case, but it is a thing.
You can go beyond the actual damages is the point.
And the actual damages would likely be high – particularly for Mike.
True, but what I’m saying is that there wouldn’t be any legal grounds to sue the church for this, any more than there would be legal grounds to sue, say, Asma for this. The damages caused by the guy who was out on bail exist, but the parties that posted bail are not legally liable for them.
I think Linda would just sue their church for whatever might stick, with the goal that the church would have to spend all their money on legal fees. Linda doesn’t need their money, she’s trying to close the church.
*she would be trying to close the church.
At this point she clearly hasn’t thought this through it at all (given that she’s only just learning that suing a church is even possible). She’s lashing out / establishing that she has weight she can throw around. But her wild threat is still reasonably plausible.
Aye. This feels like one of those situations where people are going “The church deserves to be severely punished for what they did!” and skipping over the whole, um, legality of it.
Not all bad things are illegal, and you can’t sue someone for doing something that isn’t in breach of a law or contract or something. It feels like the only way the church would be at all liable is if the people organizing the bail funding had knowledge that Ross would try to do what he did again, bail be damned… and I can’t bring myself to believe that they’re that callous.
Given Carol’s warning call to Joyce, I think at least some of them were aware another kidnapping attempt on Becky was at least a possibility.
That’s still a criminal charge, not a tort. The BEST Linda could come up with is some form of negligence suit, MAYBE, depending on Indiana negligence law,
and even that is an INCREDIBLY shaky premise. But since the church can’t defend itself, it might actually get Linda’s goal (ie, punish SOMEONE, personally, for her son getting kidnapped) accomplished.
I’ve had some of those situations before. You’re in a argument with a far-right basket-case and despite the fact you’re explaining to them in refined detail exactly why they’re so far in the wrong, they start using their mental gymnastics to condone why doing certain terrible actions are ok, and you’re just standing there astonished at how stupid their logic is.
If I remember correctly. Blaine “helped” but it was mainly their church pushing for it and using their ‘name’ for it.
so blaine helped with it. but it was mainly the church.
Shitastic-dad just nudged things along in the end, and then scooped ross up
Specifically, I don’t think it’s so much a name for Siri as it is a Siri-equivalent app/virtual assistant/whatever released by the Rutten parents, IIRC.
The name comes from a line of sentient cars Joe’s company released, somewhat modeled after Ultra Car, back in the Walkyverse. (It was a mid-late Shortpacked! arc.)
Well, if I’m reading this situation correctly I feel like we’re two to three days of strips from someone else interrupting/escalating this fiasco. Naomi would probably be an entertaining example for some here based on above comments.
No, I’m pretty sure that Joyce is going to come down with her friends to go to see Mike. Carol will say something selfish and psychotic-sounding about the previous events and Joyce will lose her temper with her, possibly for the first time ever. Hank will tell Joyce to calm down, then turn to Carol and say: “But you know she is right.”
Then, just as Linda is enjoying the show, Walky, Billie and Sal will turn up and demonstrate to her that she doesn’t have anywhere near the control over 2/3 of the youths in her life that she thought.
Friggin mike drop (pun not intended here) with that horrible statement.
Time for everyone to turn, walk aaway from her and hannk to make a clean break.
In which Linda finally encounters someone whose view of the universe is more nihalistically sopolistic than hers. It’s worse in Carol because she’s fighting a rearguard action to shore up her view of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in her personal universe.
Meanwhile, Hank is going to find out that it is hard to prevent problems from turning into disasters when everyone else seems to be sure that the disaster is somehow a moral victory. I also think that he’s beginning to see Jordan’s point.
Linda’s a weird parent to hate. She definitely does a lot of things wrong (her treatment of Sal in general, taking away Sal’s money, her ‘my word is final’ approach). At the same time it kind of feels like her heart is in the right place; she wants to make sure her kids have the best life.
At the same time though, she is insanely strict and absolutely refuses to compromise with her children. On top of this, it’s *her* definition of what a ‘good life’ is (Walky becoming a doctor, Sal not hanging out with Marcie because she’s apparently a bad influence) and any attempt by her kids to stray away from this will be met with consequences.
She assumes she knows best even before she has all the facts, and assumes everyone who isn’t her isn’t being the rational party of the group.
In short, she’s a dick, but less of a dick than Carol.
I’m not really sure either of those are easy to unlearn. Conversions away from religious bigotry do happen. Drastic changes in parenting styles are rare.
Though to be fair, Linda may wind up adapting after some years without the kids at home and needing to learn to treat them as adults if she wants any contact with them.
It’s possible, but I anticipate Linda learning that yes, there ARE in fact things you can do to a 13-year-old that break their trust in you permanently.
That’s not a thin excuse, Carol. That’s an excuse from a theoretical higher dimension of negative width.
Imagine if someone told you a man took a gun to your daughter’s school in order to, for political reasons, kill his child, anyone who might get in his way and probably himself. “Let’s spring him out of jail so he can get right back to it, perhaps with the aid of an emotionally disturbed career criminal” would probably not be plan A, nor making excuses for why he didn’t succeed. Unless it turns out he’s your friend in which case he can do no wrong.
I’m sort of looking forward to Hank and the Walkertons’ reaction to Carol’s upcoming “he was a good, god-fearing man” speech elegising Ross.
FWIW, I wouldn’t be surprised if this scene ends with Hank telling Carol that he’s going to seek and immediate divorce because he doesn’t know who she is but she doesn’t resemble the woman she married (which will be a triumph of rose-tinted memories).
Yep. She’ll probably also contrive to find some way to blame Becky for the church trustees having to wind up the organisation because of financial problems.
The “they shouldn’t have” (and Carol continuing to refer to the church in the third person) makes me think that Hank doesn’t yet know how much Carol contributed… And she knows he’ll be really unamused when he finds out…
I’d expect her to present it as a ‘test of faith and ideological purity’ to him. As several people have already said, the chances are that this is going to lead to a brutal divorce.
FWIW, I’m wondering what the likelihood is that Carol was having an affair with Ross.
I’m having trouble seeing what they could sue the church for. It’s the court that let Ross free on bail, and they had the facts of the case to judge him a danger to others no less than Carol’s church did.
What illegality, criminality or other wrongdoing can the church be actually sued for? It’d make better sense to sue the court for letting him go on bail.
‘Reckless endangerment’ is an obvious option. In civil cases, there is a long trail of precedents that being too stupid or optimistic to know just how badly something will likely go doesn’t relieve an entity of liability for said bad outcome.
If Linda was able to prove that they posted bail with the hope and intent that Ross would re-offend. I’m not sure but I think then she could sue.
But in a they should have know better situation the court has already decided how much someone can be charged for giving Ross freedom in the event that he re-offends.
The court had no choice under Indiana’s constitution – bail can only be denied for murder cases. Of course, they seem to have used the usual loophole to get around this by setting bail higher than he could possibly make in order to keep him in jail. Even with the help of his church and community, he couldn’t make bail until an actual mobster stepped in to help.
Of course, this highlights all sorts of things wrong with the bail system.
In the last panel Linda has the face of a person who has suddenly understood that she’s talking with another maniac. If really Linda is going to sue the church, I’m with her. Sure, Linda is a horrible parent, but Carol is probably worse than her.
Not ‘a maniac’, just someone with a divergent view of reality. Imagine Carol and Linda both looking up at a cloudless sky. One says ‘blue’ and the other says ‘green’ and both are right in their own minds because what they see is what they define that particular colour. You can’t reason with people like that because their foundational view of reality is different.
Sorry but not. I don’t think Linda, however she’s bad as a parent, would have done her best to bail a man who threatened teenagers on a campus. That’s totally another level of madness.
Hank: Yep, setting him free was a stupid idea.
Carol: He was doing the right thing because he was showing her how much he loved her and trying to help her find the right path. That’s just called good parenting!
Joyce: My parents are a united body that share a small hive mind.
Ooh, great defence! For a moment, I thought something bad had happened.
On the real, the fact that the guys who was freed on bail also happened to be the only one killed should mean something. I don’t know what it should mean exactly, but it should mean something.
It means that Carol and the rest of the ‘good’ people sent Ross right to his death. This happened because they basically trusted a serpent offering them an apple and because they refused to understand or accept the nature of the man they were trying to help.
Blaine only covered what Ross’s church family fell short of? Hrhm…
This is a pretty neat direction for this to go. *Let the crappy parents duke it out between eachother!* Linda’ll come off as a bully just trying to make herself feel better about not being in control all the time, and the Browns’ little church family will be outed at how inept and pathetic they are at the “right way.”
We may get back at Blaine trying to work with Ross before it got ugly again. Yay.
Yeah, she has just been temporarily side-tracked by discovering an even bigger entity that she’s decided deserves punishment. She has infinite wrath to deal out, because she is The Good People and bad things primarily exist to give her this self-righteous endorphin high.
Yes Henry Brown, you DID marry that. YOU lived YOUR LIFE and estranged ALL four of your kids as a part of THAT, you Jon Arbuckle-ly flavor-drained vanilla-standard of a man!
Does Carol even have an opinion on Mondays? That doesn’t make the conversation turn to the authenticity of Jesus Christ as the messiah, that is? Wellllllllllllllll, Henry Brown?!
I’m so used to Linda being wrong about everything that comes out of her mouth that for a moment I was like “oh come off it Linda you can’t sue everything you don’t like”
Then I realized
Oh, shit she’s right
I believe it was specifically depicted as a single-shot varmint rifle (which, considering Ross’s views on his daughter, was oddly…befitting of him) – more specifically, a Ruger No. 1 – rather than a shotgun, but aye.
I’ve said (and it’s being debated) that the church can’t be sued for this.
(… well, okay, it CAN be sued for this, but the suit would get tossed out as groundless in an early motion to dismiss.)
But assuming Linda tries to follow through (which I’m not sure of, she seems to be frantically retargetting her anger at whatever comes into her field of vision next), here’s a likely scenario.
She takes it to a lawyer.
The lawyer says that no, it won’t work if you try it THIS way… but give me a couple days to look into it and I’ll see if there are some things that WILL work.
If the actual goal is to hurt or disband the church, rather than recover damages, the lawyer doesn’t actually need to find something that will work… just something that will get to trial rather than get promptly dismissed. A competent lawyer WILL be able to do this, even if an ethical lawyer will think it’s skeevy and might not want to be part of it.
The church would then need to hire an attorney, which Carol has helpfully told Linda it can’t afford to. Getting someone to do it pro-bono is theoretically possible, but the bad press the church has already generated around this case makes it unlikely. (Though the fact that it’s generated press at all might make it more likely.)
Unable to afford to mount a defense, the church goes bankrupt regardless of the trial’s outcome. Linda wins.
This kind of nuisance suit, where you’re using the lawsuit itself as a weapon to hurt someone rather than to recover damages, is a bit on the unethical side. But it happens all the time.
It’s 100% on the unethical side. It’s attempting to pervert the legal system to damage and harass someone who’s done nothing that the legal system finds actionable.
Best case is that it’s a “it’s an awful, ugly thing to do, but it’s the best option out of a lot of bad options” thing.
So if I’m following your logic correctly, it would be unethical to sue a branch of the KKK that’s not yet done something actionable in order to damage and harass them ?
Yes. The KKK is a horrible institution and they deserve worse, but it would be extremely unethical to file such a suit. It would be tantamount to repressing their free speech and assembly rights.
Dude. If you have to bring up the KKK as a justification, you know it is unethical and not the right way to do something. The KKK shouldn’t be allowed to exist from the get go as a group.
Yes it would be wrong and unethical even if the person you are targeting is themselves unethical. Because you can’t allow double standards in ethics where it is fine if it is a bad guy but not if it is a good guy without cosigning that to screw over a bad person, it’s inevitable that good people will be screwed over by it too. Anything you suggest as fine as revenge against a bad guy is something that the wrong people will use as revenge against a good guy and if you find it unacceptable against the latter, as cathartic as it may be, it cannot be allowed against the former either.
There are things that should be illegal, basically on the grounds that you can’t draw lines to allow them without allowing other worse things, but nonetheless remain morally correct.
Punching Nazis is the canonical example: it is assault and is and should be illegal. It is still a moral good.
It’s unethical (possibly including under ABA guidelines – I only know them as they’d pertain to paralegals), but:
1) That does not stop lawyers from doing it, because unfortunately unsavory lawyers exist,
2) Linda Walkerton is not ethical, as demonstrated by the fact that she wants Amber expelled for getting herself kidnapped.
As to the KKK discussion… we could get into an incredibly heated debate here but I will suffice it to say: case studies indicate that hate speech on that level does not stay peaceful if left to fester. The First Amendment’s stance on hate speech has been inconsistent over the years, but ‘fighting words’ are explicitly not protected, and frankly I think by this point generalized hate speech should be understood as such. That’s a completely different argument that would require being brought to an appellate court, but seriously hate speech should not be a protected category in and of itself.
Tldr on that last bit: Don’t use a nuisance suit, you have an actual fucking case there on some level (though you’d need a MUCH different Supreme Court makeup for any success.) Now, if that branch can’t fight your suit… well, one less branch, aim higher.
At this point it’s gone beyond casual hate speech and into full blown propaganda and that can and has led to atrocities.
This is something we as a country really need to grapple with in our understanding of “Free Speech”.
Linda has a habit of like.. treating Charles like a secretary? Is it just that she’s technologically illiterate (unlikely, like another commentator said the parents are probably gen X), or does she see him as someone who should do these things for her? He’s quite complacent, and she seems to be using that, like that’s the role he’s supposed to play or something.
“Yes your honor, my client walked into a bank with a mask and gun and demanded money, but he was tackled to the ground before anything else happened so we feel the robbery charge isn’t appropriate here.”
May I direct you to Sierra’s dad, Reno? Obviously, an extremely minor character, but his brief appearance during the hallway chase has forever endeared him in my heart. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/blood/
Just look at that. Steps right in between Blaine and Amber, attempts to deescalate Blaine, and lets Amber get the fuck away. Beautiful.
Other decent dads include Jacob’s brother Harrison (though his son is a baby, so it’s a cheat to list him here,) along with Dorothy’s and Mike’s dads (both pleasant men, married to pleasant women.) The Saruyamas also appear to be evenly-matched temperament-wise, but that temperament is fairly mild so I wouldn’t exactly call Ryou a strong father figure. (Notably, they insisted on being polite and letting Blaine in the dorm room, but apologized when they realized their mistake.) He hasn’t had an onscreen line yet, but given Haruka only had the one and an offscreen phone conversation, and Dina and Becky have both referred to her parents, plural, being supportive of the relationship, we can assume he’s just quiet.
And of course, Hank seems to be building to the point where he can no longer tolerate Carol’s bullshit. He’s been helpful to Becky away from Carol, and starting to realize he needs to have Joyce’s back here, but what he’ll say to Carol’s face is going to be a real questiom. Still, a lot of us have hope he’ll do better in the end.
All that aside, the Crushingly Overbearing Mom figure’s recurrence in Willis’s work is… um, likely something to do with the artist’s life, shall we say. Wouldn’t be surprised if the meeker dads were as well.
Anyone else notice in Panel 5 when Carol, uhm, “speaks up” that the background completely vanishes and then comes right back with a collective look of “WTF” from all parties involved? It’s as if Carol’s “logic” broke all sense of reality for a split second & then snapped right back when she went quiet.
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As part of the Criterion Collection release of Dumbing of Age, we proudly present the extended cut of this strip.
(imagines Ennio Morricone music during the closeups)
This confused me for a moment because I was imagining the Ironside theme by Quincy Jones, which actually overlaps with some Morricone music during Kill Bill.
(recently saw a symphonic version of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, accompanied by film clips)
In the last panel Linda has the face of a person who has suddenly understood that she’s talking with another maniac. If really Linda is going to sue the church, I’m with her. Sure, Linda is a horrible parent, but Carol is probably worse than her.
They’re both bad for exactly the same reason. They just fuel their bitter narcissism with two distinct dogmas.
Bravo. Just bravo.
The single most important comment on this post.
*KaneApplause.gif*
The most epic of hatefucks indeed.
MichaelJacksonEatingPopcorn.gif
Today’s strip is sponsored by Orville Redenbacher’s Classic.
Is it bad I prefer Pour-Over cheddar? *munches cheesily*
Nono, this momfight requires the Good Stuff.
First, you crush some garlic cloves. 5-7, depending on size.
Then prep the popcorn popper. I use a 1:1 mix of duck fat and ghee, with salt and pepper. Add the garlic, and a single popcorn kernel. Cook on medium-low until the corn pops. This is to prevent the garlic from burning.
Add the rest of your popcorn and raise the temperature. Stir/shake vigorously as it pops.
As soon as the popping stops, quickly transfer your popcorn into a large bowl. Top with powdered parmesan cheese and nutritional yeast.
Eat with chopsticks.
Oh
You left out the exclamation point. Also the explicative.
Ladies and Gentlemen I give you Carol missing the fucking point and Linda still somehow being a pain in the ass despite being in the right and going after the right people for once.
Carol isn’t missing the point. She’s deliberately evading the point.
Because the alternative is acknowledging that her actions were directly responsible for a situation that endangered the lives of six teenagers (including her daughter) and resulted in a man’s death.
And of course we can’t have that.
Far more often the cause of tragedies in human history, at their root source, than all the narcissism, deliberate wickedness, or any of the extremes of humanity at it’s most evil…
…. holy shit, I was *not* expecting Carol to dissonance into outright face value defense so quickly.
She has no where else to go if she’s gonna keep living in her fantasy land where bailing out the guy that kidnapped his daughter at gunpoint was somehow a remotely good idea.
Then aided in kidnapping *their* daughter along with several others, including The One Woman in this country who gets the One Vote to decide everything, and thanks to the guy they blindly trusted with paying his bail thumping him to death with a peen hammer, guess who’s accessible enough for Her to play “No One F#@%s with Linda Walkerton?”
Seriously, Blaine is both too busy with police charges and might not be an easy enough target. That leaves Hank and Carol….Possibly Joyce?
Forgot to include ‘the favored son of’ before ‘The One Woman in this country-etc etc’
Forget this thing doesn’t come with an ‘Edit’ feature.
And I look at it as Carol calling out Linda’s exaggerated accusation by merely stating the facts in rebuttal. Ross did NOT shoot up the school — or anyone else — once he had been released on bail; and even in the first incident he fired ONE single shot, and that was into the air.
Linda never said he shot anyone. Carol is the only one saying that. And he DID “shoot up the school” by firing a shot on school grounds. None of Linda’s comments are exaggerated. Carol is the one who instantly jumped to “yes but nobody died”.
Also, a friendly reminder that bullets fired into the air can and sometimes do injure people when they come back down. Sometimes fatally. Toedad not shooting anyone that day ended up being a matter of chance.
He also did try to shoot at Amber/Amazi-girl when she gave chace- Well he “tried” but wasn’t successful.
Yes, any shots more than a few degrees off of absolute vertical can maintain ballistic trajectory and kill someone – it’s happened before when people celebrate by firing guns into the air.
I’m fairly certain that shots fired more vertically than that can also kill people. The difference is, if you fire it vertically enough, you get to find out who it kills. Unless, of course, you manage to compensate correctly for the Coriolis force and wind to do it fucking right.
Note that I’ve only once heard of someone managing to do it fucking right. But that someone was enough of a piece of work there was clapping involved in the reaction to it.
It shouldn’t happen. I won’t say it can’t because my physics is too weak to be sure.
A bullet fired straight up will come down at whatever terminal velocity is for the bullet, so it shouldn’t be any more dangerous than dropping that same bullet out of an airplane. Bullet, not the whole cartridge (which is probably less dense, and less aerodynamic, than the bullet alone and would therefore have a lower terminal velocity.) A bullet fired anywhere near horizontally is probably going to come down still going, horizontally, about as fast as it was going, horizontally, when it was fired. Although, if the range is great enough, it may lose enough velocity to wind resistance to be no more dangerous than the vertical shot. Also, it’ll probably plow into the ground, or something or someone else, before it bleeds off enough of its horizontal velocity to be anything like safe.
But, that said, know your backstop, and if you MUST shoot into the sky, or toward something that is likely to cause a ricochet, use a shotgun.
https://mythresults.com/episode50
Bullets fired precisely straight up with absolutely zero variance will not be lethal
Any variance from perfectly straight up will put enough spin on the bullet to cause lethal force
Bullets are almost NEVER shot perfectly straight up
It takes a .50 call to kill someone by falling. Anything less is not very dangerous.
I have a friend whose brother did die on New Years by being hit by a bullet fired into the sky.
Generally firing straight up is pretty safe. The terminal velocity for a tumbling bullet isn’t that high. It’s mostly just dangerous if you fire at an angle, so that the bullet remains aerodynamically oriented during it’s path.
Hyperbole much? While firing ANY gun on a campus is a bad idea because bullets can and do come down again), you seem to equate firing one shot into the air with firing fully automatic weapons in both hands, Rambo-style, at everything and everyone.
Simply put, firing a gun into the sky, unless you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are the ONLY PERSON AROUND for about a mile and a half, is reckless. If you’re on a college campus, tucked into a small town, there are definitely people around within that 1.5 miles.
Frankly, it’s probably no more dangerous to others than you going into a crowd without a mask on, but you shouldn’t do that right now either.
No offense, but when you bring a loaded weapon somewhere and threaten violence, then “well he shot in the air” is a really, really shitty defense.
Personally, I feel like it’s an exaggeration to say Ross “shot up the school”. Not that Carol’s in the right, but y’know.
Well, he did shoot up. While at the school. So if one chose to employ bad grammar, they could say he shot up the school.
People like Carol use otherwise common expressive phrasing as an angle to play Roger Dodger with a conversation topic. It’s a bit of a manipulation tactic, often ‘learned’ monkey-see, monkey-do style.
They had their chance to do something more for Ross than simply let him go nuts then make verbal excuses for him when he got in legal trouble.
They had their chance to get to know this seemingly sympathetic stranger and even join him to pick up Ross so they could help Ross beat this “misunderstanding.”
They simply waited for things to work out in their favor on their own while making verbal excuses for his actions, and now Ross is both dead and got into even more legal trouble before he was killed….Legal trouble that now has one of those “soccer moms” they might of heard about a decade or so ago glaring at their church family with crimson crosshairs.
Might as well double down on refusing to admit it!
She IS the point.
Carol: I stand by a murderous kidnapper who put a boy into a coma and not the lesbian daughter who is still a faithful Christian.
Hank: Uh…um…uh
Carol: I bet you have CRIMINAL children too with your…relationship.
Linda: Huh?
Yeah I’m honestly waiting for the “mixed couple” comments to come out.
Come out of Carol, to specify.
Was that a thing with her? I don’t remember anything specific. Not that I’d put it past her or anything.
Given her comments about Sarah, I would honestly not be surprised.
Yeah that’s what I’m referring to. The whole “wait til the neighbors hear that our daughter isn’t a racist!” thing
Using that as a reference, I doubt it would come out that blatantly. More an awkward about how difficult it must be or something.
Something she could think as well meaning, but so obviously rooted in racism.
The hell, did miss something that indicated her as a racial bigot to? What did she say about Sarah?
‘Oh! Joyce! Your roommate is black! Now I can tell everyone on the street that we’re not racist!’ or something to that effect.
The bonus strip where the Browns speculate Obama is the Anti-Christ is also notable.
… I am feeling very unusual right now.
I’m… entirely behind Linda in this scene. Linda is doing nothing wrong here. As a parent, I fully agree with her stance and actions taken/threatened.
That has never happened before. It may never happen again.
I must cherish this strange and unique moment in history.
MIRROR UNIVERSE.
I’m suddenly reminded of this page I saw from a DC/Marvel crossover where Joker realizes that Red Skull is actually a Nazi and not just talking a big game for the sake of sounding more evil, and declares that he might be a psychopath but he’s an *American* psychopath.
Linda might not be a great parent, but even she’s got to draw the line somewhere.
If I remember correctly, that particular comic came from an era where Joker was more of a regular goofy criminal than a crazed mass murderer. While Red Skull has pretty much always been a monster.
Nope, 1997. Well after stuff like Death in the Family, and about contemporary to when he was attempting to nuke New York in Birds of Prey.
(It was from a WWII-set Elseworld.)
In case anyone is wondering, that’s from the Batman/Captain America one-shot by John Byrne.
It’s an Elseworlds set during WW2, and is technically in continuity with his Superman/Batman Generations series.
Reference for those who need it: https://fuckyeahbatmanvillains.tumblr.com/post/22119773305#notes
That’s even the trope image for Even Evil Has Standards.
Down the rabbit hole I go. Tell my wife I love her.
The main reason I didn’t name the trope was to avoid this. Linking TV Tropes when now, more than ever, people are desperate to find something to distract themselves from the world? None of us will ever emerge from there again.
I read that one! That part is just hilarious! One of the few times Joker has standards.
She does reference Amazigirl as being half at fault, if you want to cling to a shred of normalcy.
Actually, I misread; there is no normalcy to cling to here 🥺
Let me fix that for you: Linda was on the phone with the dean in panel 1, probably trying to get Amber expelled.
You may now resume your usual hatred of Linda.
Thank you, sir. But I never stopped, so.
It’s like seeing the Northern Lights. Or a unicorn.
I’ve seen the aurora, it’s a real thing. I’ve also seen “cyclops” skulls with multiple eye sockets as in one huge and two small, made from mastadon skulls. Unicorns are African antelope with close-set horns that look like a single horn from the side.
I know the aurora is real, I was just strapped for what else to say is a rare unique sight other than a unicorn.
Cherish might be a bit strong.
Did you ever hear about the time the U.S. Army fought alongside the regular German army, and a bunch of French POW’s, in WWII, against the SS?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Castle_Itter
In some ways, this is how I feel about the upcoming election, bizarrely enough. On one side, we have a deeply conflicted and flawed individual who does awful things even when they think they’re doing well, and lends all sorts of accidental support to horrible situations.
And on the other hand, we have a radioactive dumpster fire transformed into a passing semblance of a human being.
It’s the worst-case ‘lesser of two evils’ scenario.
It’s like that time Winston Churchill went from reactionary racist imperialist putz to the one guy who’d stand up to Adolph Hitler. Sometimes all it takes to turn a jerk into a hero is to put him next to a much bigger jerk.
Of course if you put a jerk next to just a marginally bigger jerk he turns into the Mussolini to the bigger jerk’s Hitler — see the late unlamented Toedad.
#EverythingIsWorldWarIIifYouSquintHardEnough
Immovable object? Meet Unstoppable force.
Unstoppable force? Immovable object.
I’m sure they’ll be best of friends!
This is gonna be a lot, isn’t it.
thats an understatement!
Ooo! Ooo! Maybe Linda will punch Carol! That’d be awesome!
A full on brawl and they both get banned from Campus forever!
The college assigns them new parents.
I think Hank just realized something about his wife.
I can’t tell whether Charles’s expression in that last panel is awkwardness or commiseration.
I see where you’re coming from but I disagree.
I think Charles is angry, I think he doesn’t like the way this woman defended toedad. I think that while under different circumstances he might commiserate with Hank, right now he’s a bit too focused on the bongo in front of him to be reflecting on the bongo standing next to him.
Charles is a very affable guy. Too f—ing affable.
However his affableness…has limits.
Can a person be ineffably affable?
I don’t know about people, but that’s pretty much Aziraphale right there.
I have heard some people claim I am. Personally, I prefer to describe it as me not wanting to get into fights, considering that I’m scrawny. Also sometimes I fail with words the right way by accident. When one fails with words as much as I do, it can and does just happen sometimes.
I think Hank’s realised it for a while. I get the feeling he’s realised he can’t ignore it any more.
Yeah. Hank’s response *was* “they should not have done that”.
I was impressed he said that in front of Carol.
Hank’s face towards Carol implies they’re going to hit a bit if a rough spot. I also think the little alarm bells he sometimes heard in the back of his head when his wife talks just got yanked to the prefrontal cortex.
“Christ, Carol. This is *not* the hill to die on.”
I, on the other hand, I’m quite comfortable with Carol dieing on that hill. Or any hill. Or any other terrain feature, for that matter.
Welp, since Linda’s aimed at the right target I’m going to just sit back and watch the chaos.
Mind if I join you?
I brought popcorn.
Well she was aiming at Amber in the first panel, talking to the dean on the phone, so…no?
“Oh, my mistake. That was the only objection I had to this series of events, actually. Carry on!”
I feel like if she went as far as to say that she should also turn around and start walking away. Just to really emphasize how rediculous it is. Before she turns around and says something along the lines of: “Seriously? What in your mind makes you think that is the hill you want to die on?”
Ooohh the rare Karen vs Karen fight! popcorn.gif
Whoever wins, we win!
Optimism is so amazing. I must try it someday.
You won’t regret it. Promise. What could go wrong?
*points at first panel where Linda is talking to the dean, probably about getting Amber expelled*
Yeah, only wins here…
The bright side here is that she STOPPED the call, and her anger and spite might have found a new target. Best case: She spends her time and effort to sue that church rather than trying to get Amber expelled.
Best case, she gets herself made persona non grata on campus, and the dean finds it VERY hard to give her even the barest hint of what she wants.
You know, we don’t know how Linda and the dean broke up. It might have been because he liked her fine as a friend, but couldn’t see himself living with that crazy for the rest of his life. Linda might be “that one friend” for the dean. You know the one. The one who insists the U.S. government is controlled by either lizard people or Zionists, thinks vaccinations are the mark of the beast, and will tell you why it’s obviously true, in detail, and demands that the mind-controlling G5 towers be torn down post-haste.
That’s silly. Vaccinations look nothing like 666, which since they used a numerical code using the 6th letter, would be FFF, referring to the satanic organization, Future Farmers of France. The lizard people are actually very nice and without the G5 towers we would have uncontrolled chaos by this point.
They are fighting for the Bronze medal in the bad parent olympics.
Carol’s the mother of bad mothers, no matter what.
I didn’t realize Joyce was a mother at all, much less a bad one!
Carol’s got second worst parent on lock now that Ross is disqualified due to a case of dead.
Don’t underestimate toedad, I’m sure he can find a way to be a dick from beyond the grave.
I still say there’s time for Naomi to show up and clinch this thing.
I’m so tired of Bad Parents, I just want a break.
Even the Good Parents like Dorothy’s. I don’t think I want Parents in the comic for a while. Actually let me just extend that to… Authority Figures in general.
Does that include Leslie?
I have it on good authority that Leslie has never been a general.
I’ve become a convert to the Carol school of arguing. Did you notice?
Bold of you to assume she counts as an authority figure at this point
…yes she does. Her job is literally to be an authority figure on the topic of gender studies to a bunch of college kids. Don’t disempower her.
Yep, I am enjoying this so much.
QUICK JOYCE! While Linda is distracting the Brown’s you can run off with Dorothy’s parents!
And not just to get a bite to eat, text Asma and see if she can have adoption papers printed and waiting for you at the desk.
And that way if anyone tries to kidnap her again, they can be subject to an Asma Attack.
Infinite_facepalm.gif
Asma has been in under 20 strips in the nearly ten year this comic has run. Is this the first-ever Asma Attack pun in the comments?
You’ve not searched the comments on https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/02-but-the-sun-still-shines/chase/. Or you typoed, or didn’t wait for the page to finish or something.
Indeed, you caught me being lazy on that.
Now I have to be very careful to not giggle about Asma attack when my wife actually has one of her (very rare) asthma attacks.
As a general rule, you don’t want to be in a situation where Linda is the reasonable party.
At least she isn’t trying to push them to side with her to get leverage against Amber, since their daughter was also kidnapped.
I wonder what she was talking on the phone to the Dean about though. I hope that wasn’t about Amber.
It was definitely about Amber
She was probably trying to wear him down to agree with her demands. Legal have already probably told him that taking action against any of Blaine’s targets would be suicide and llkely guarantee that the Board of Trustees can him as a scapegoat to buy off all the lawsuits. Because of that, Linda was trying to do the hardest thing in existence: Convince someone to do something personally harmful because you say so and think that what you say should always go.
What? No, that’s not the hardest thing to convince somebody of.
Getting the sociopath who has arranged to be the investigator for the crime that they committed to find the actual guilty person is harder than this.
Might you be referring to our less-than-illustrious Attorney General?
That’s the most obvious allusion.
It’s Karen vs. Karen! Who wins? WE DO!!
Well that’s a relief. Linda’s not a total idiot.
Now in the immortal if slightly problematic words of O-ren Ishii: tear that bongo apart!
Carol: Silly Rabbit…
Linda: …Trix are for kids
Nice reference, and I wouldn’t say Linda is an idiot. She clearly has some intelligence, she just chooses to use it for the wrong reasons on tne wrong things.
Anyone else hear the Kill Bill Siren kick in?
Carol is technically correct! Which is the what kind of correct?
The best kind!
Also the douchiest, as I like to joke when my boyfriend says that. 😛
I mean, she said he didn’t shot up, but if you check the records, I think you’ll find that he DID ‘shoot up’
Perhaps, but he didn’t shoot up the school. All the school buildings remained standing without unsightly holes in the windows. No school officials were wounded. Very few bullets were dug out of walls.
She said he didn’t shoot anybody, which seems to be true. He shot at the air.
I wonder if where they got the bail money to start with is going to come up. That would probably make Linda even angrier. Whether it will make her more pissed at the Church or Amber I do not know,
I can’t believe I’m saying this but Linda, keep talking. With any luck, they’ll kill each other within 15 minutes.
God, we can only hope.
For science, would you mind being hooked up to an EEG machine while realising that you’re going to have to be on Linda’s side for once?
I don’t know. I think it’s possible to take the stance that they should keep arguing with each other in the hopes that they’ll take each other out without actually siding with one of them.
I have to do nothing of the sort! I’m on team ‘fuck both of ’em, let ’em take each other out’.
But eh, what the hell. I need to be hooked up to an EEG machine every so often anyway, what’s one more time?
over/under on screaming happening
Oh, cool.
A religious Karen having to put up with a regular Karen.
And vice versa! Truly a treat.
The last storyline was all about terrible fathers and now this one is all about terrible mothers, I’m glad that we’re seeing both sides of the coin in this strip.
Sue for what? Bail was set by a judge and was met. They didn’t know that would happen.
My best guess is child endangerment, but just because Linda doesn’t have a case doesn’t mean she isn’t going to try.
It should be easy.
Lawyer: Did you know that Ross would kidnap his daughter again?
Carol: It’s not kidnapping if you’re a male relative’s property.
Linda might not be able to get a judgment in her favor, but she will keep the case bleeding billable hours only Linda can afford until the church is fucking exsanguinated. This is how the rich typically circumvent the legal system, but this is the abyss the church hurled itself into.
Mob ties, homosexual reprogramming (illegal in Indiana even if voluntary), kidnapping, and murder.
Mike Pence will donate a huge amount to her church’s legal fund.
Still, Carol might win!
It’s a feature, not a bug.
If your rich.
Conspiracy to commit kidnapping perhaps?
Conspiracy and kidnapping are criminal offences, not torts. Does Indiana still allow private prosecutions?
But criminals can still be sued by their victims. Doesn’t happen much because criminals usually don’t have any money, that’s why they’re criminals.
Where do you get that idea? There’s a bunch of rich criminals running things as we speak. They have been for years.
I guess the question is whether there were any indications that there COULD be problems with Ross…i.e. they knew Ross was unrepentant and would likely try to kidnap Becky again once released.
If the majority of the church maintained a strict anti-gay/pro-ross attitude they might claim the church was part of a conspiracy.
Carol: No remorse.
It’s a sad, sad day when Linda has the moral high ground but they’re not even on the same staircase.
I think it would be more appropriate to say they’re in different holes throwing dirt at each other than to say either of them has any sort of “high ground”.
Plus Carol get sympathy points for being the more ‘simple’ less ‘Martha Stewart-y’ of the two. Carol’s age could also be used to make excuses for the things she says. “Christ, that was bad, but you should have heard my grandmother go on about cannibals in Africa!” or such and such.
Linda’s real advantage lies in that she knows more about litigation than simple hearsay at the local potluck or from Rush Limbaugh’s old radio show. The funds to cover how ever far she wants to take this, too.
Panel 5… these are the eyes of a man wondering why he’s still married.
I imagine he’s thinking a variation of what he said in the car about punching Toedad.
“They say you’re not supposed to divorce your wife, but…it’s okay just this one time, right?”
Hank can see a not-married-orce coming up in the near future.
‘Hank can have a little divorce, as a treat.’
Eh, they’re evangelicals. At least one divorce is practically necessary to prove you aren’t Catholic.
someone save hank he doesn’t deserve this
Dunno…. The morality of Hank is a long and complicated story. He is doing a lot of good, but he has also enabled the people who released ToeDad for many years. He did nothing to blunt Toedad over the years except almost saying something. When he tried to kidnap Becky he did so with the conviction that God and church was with him, and Hank had never given any reason to think otherwise.
It could be argued that being chewed out by Linda is exactly what he deserves.
maybe most to the point – if Joyce had grown up to be the kind of person he had told her to be rather than the kind of person who does the right thing, she would have called ToeDad when Becky first showed up.
The fact that she didn’t is thanks to her, not thanks to him.
(and yes, I still try to supervise the transport of a “Daddy of the year” mug large as an oil tanker to him, thanks to how he has stepped up as a father to Becky. But my points above still stand)
Hank is… salvageable. I kinda suspect he will be by the end of the story, but we are not there yet.
Hank is a Good Person, but in this day and age, just being a Good Person isn’t enough if you’re turning a blind eye to your loved ones’ prejudices.
That’s right, you should make these good people miserable until they have right opinions.
Okay, I know that’s not what you’re suggesting, but I’m at a loss about what you are suggesting.
Yeah, and don’t forget that it’s only a few weeks since Hank tried to use God-talk to intimidate Joyce into shunning Dorothy because Dorothy is an atheist. He’s not a homophobe, but he is a bigot.
Has it only been a few weeks? Must be at least a month or two by now.
Month and a half. Not even to Halloween yet, and IIRC they started either just before or just after Labor Day. Checked and 3 strips in there is an August calendar displayed.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/reputation/
LetThemFight.gif
I was looking for this.
Really, really, really hate Carol.
Same. Like, I hate Linda too, but Carol, Carol is a fucking piece of work…
Linda is a Mama Bear, but with the savage stupid callousness that animal comparison entails. But still: she will defend her protectorate.
Carol is a rabid dog.
Linda is NOT a Mama Bear. Mama Bears nurture and support their children in addition to defending them to the death. Linda is a Karen: an entitled parent who uses their personal frustrations with how their life has turned out so far to make defenseless service workers miserable. She views Carol as someone who she can blame and vent at; but unfortunately for her Carol is a fundangelical – someone who has long discarded concepts like personal responsibility and taking the blame for anything.
The fact that Linda is technically in the right here doesn’t actually matter to either of them. Which is why disgonnabegood.gif.
Actually Linda is technically in the wrong and Carol is technically in the right. He really didn’t shoot up the school as Linda claimed. Pointing it out kind of misses the point, but yeah.
He did fire a shot, but the school survived intact and not shot up.
On the other hand, if Becky hadn’t gotten in the car, the cops might have shot things up.
I meant like instead of comparing her to the metaphorical Mama Bear, comparing her to a literal one that will eat its own cubs in a pinch, in addition to other departures from ideal motherly behavior.
I can’t believe we’re in the timeline where we’re rooting for Linda.
(Also, how rich are the Walkertons?)
I think Doctor level rich. Not millionaire rich.
Speak for yourself, I’m rooting for them to kill each other. 😛
And as far as I can tell, upper middle class. Enough they can afford a lawsuit or to send a kid to boarding school but nowhere near Billie or Carla’s level.
Not quite at least, though enough to live in the same neighborhood as Billie and to act as substitute parents.
Do they live in the same neighbourhood? We’ve never actually seen or (to my recollection) heard of them hanging out before school age and they went to the same public school. All they need to do is be put in the same class.
Same public school, on the elementary level, tends to mean ‘same neighborhood or thereabouts’ in that kind of suburban area. (School districts are weird, but looking it up the Evansville district – which I’m pretty sure is theirs? – has eighteen different elementary schools.) We also saw Billie, Walky, and Sal playing together when they were clearly REALLY young – probably kindergarten or younger – when Sal first met Marcie.
On the other hand, I don’t think Billie and Marcie’s families would be anywhere close in terms of financial status. So I don’t think living in the same neighbourhood is a direct indicator of wealth level; for all we know the Billingsworths may just be notoriously thrifty about where they live.
I guess? It didn’t really for me, unless you give neighbourhood a much wider berth than I usually do.
I mean, the ones in my area generally serve a single development, but it’s also a HEAVILY urban-sprawled commuter county so I admit it may not be typical. (*Looks it up* Yeah okay my county has more than QUADRUPLE the number of elementary schools that Evansville does, deeeeefinitely not typical.)
(And thank god they decided today for all virtual schooling for the fall semester, because our population density is high enough that ALL THOSE SCHOOLS are pretty much packed. And a lot of them are old buildings with aging or ill-designed ventilation systems.)
Okay, fair enough. I live in a city but most of the schools covered several neighbourhoods – at least a handful of the ones closest to them.
Morally rich.
also, I THINK Anthony is the dean? so Linda is likely getting the school to back her if thats correct.
Or she was trying to get Amber kicked out
Maybe both!
Correct, Anthony McHenry Sr. is the dean of IU in the Dumbiverse. (He was the big boss of SEMME in the Walkyverse.)
Tony is Anthony McHenry Jr. He only plays bit parts, but the poor kid deserves a break.
I’m not rooting for Linda. I’m pulling for mutually assured destruction.
You get me.
Someday I hope to see a parent in Dumbing of Age whose a monster in all walks of life except for being a parent. Perhaps Carla’s parents have an island where they hunt people.
I hear they buy babies from the poor and eat them.
Or maybe that was Dilbert’s boss.
That’s actually Bob Murray, and that’s a true fact about him.
He didn’t shoot anyone, but he did shoot up at the school:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/risk/
Ah! He did actually discharge his weapon. I’d actually forgotten about that.
It seems like that should matter.
Not much in my opinion. I wouldn’t give him much credit if he’d only threatened with the gun, not actually fired it.
Yeah, he might technically not have “shot up the school”, but he showed up with a gun, prepared and ready to do harm. Arguing semantics is just pedantry at best, defending a monster at worst.
Also later aimed towards Amazi-Girl when she was on the roof of the car, but missed.
She said that with such conviction.
And I think… technically right?
As if that’s really the point of the matter.
I got to wonder if I rolled up to the nearest college campus and shot at a bunch of people but missed would I still get pegged for attempted mass murder?….oh wait I’m black, I’d be lucky just to survive long enough to be convicted.
Pfft, you wouldn’t live long enough to be handcuffed.
From what I’ve seen, me being dead isn’t going to stop them from handcuffing my corpse.
Exactly.
Well, he teamed up with Evil Blaine and kidnapped people.
Is there a Good Blaine of whom I was not previously aware?
Are we supposed to pretend that the church actually was out any money? They only used donations so… They didn’t lose anything.
That line reminded me a bit of the Catholic Church’s reaction whenever people bring up increasing accountability in some form for sexual abuse of minors.
*Sits atop billions of dollars worth of gold-plated property* “But we already lost so much when we lost all those initial lawsuits! And now you want to allow more people to sue? Haven’t we suffered enough?!”
The Catholic Church notably sits on a huge amount of land that is actually unsellable since it exists to provide public services. The idea it’s some massive rich organization is based around anti-Catholic bigotry akin to anti-Semitism.
I say that also saying every single person involved in the sex scandal needs not just to pay up but be sent to prison. Money cannot make up for sexual abuse–says someone who has relatives who suffered it.
no. The Catholic Church is an actual organization that has actual wealth, including real estate that is actually sellable, and not some preternaturally “public service” dispensing fields. Noticing that the Catholic Church has billions in assets, that they hide from settlements, is not akin to someone claiming that Jews make matzoh out of the blood of Christian babies. so, just no. no no no.
Recently, the KKK shot a Catholic priest in my area so my feeling toward anti-Catholic bigotry is pretty low right now. There’s a lot of people who try to make Davinci code-esque conspiracy theories and ignore the actuality of situations. Basically, the Browns are all about their hate for Catholics and their organization.
The Catholic Church has about 30 billion dollars in assets, which sounds big until you remember they have a billion members.
They produce and defend rapists. They put men in positions of power over children and then, as a powerful organization, defend those men with the billions of dollars at their disposal.
You claim one (1) priest was shot by the KKK. more black men have been lynched this summer than Catholic priests targeted.
people are mad at Catholicism because it’s so large and powerful and uses its power to hurt people. comparing anger at Catholicism to real bigotry is a fucking insult to every person suffering from racism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, all of which are gleefully carried on through, you guessed it, the Catholic church. so please kindly fuck off.
I’m not sure I understand your argument. How is murdering black men not evil? The KKK doing it to priests is the same as the Nazis did to priests and other victims. It’s a sign of the complete moral bankruptcy of bigotry. I’m really confused.
All hate is evil.
No, no, no. All hate is evil, except for the things I hate. Get it right.
The KKK is evil as anything. That they hate Catholics however doesn’t make the Catholic Church morally unassailable. Or poor.
The world doesn’t revolve around the USA! You’re aware the Roman Catholic Church is the dominant religion in a lot of countries, right? They’re not a poor persecuted minority there.
With more than 1 billion adherents, the Catholic Church is one of the largest, if not the largest, nongovernmental landowners in the world. One estimate puts the church’s holdings close to 177 million acres, or 277,000 square miles. If those properties were grouped together and placed on a list of the world’s countries by land area, it would fall within the top 50, higher than both France and Spain.
In Massachusetts, the state Supreme Court recently ruled that only a portion of a Catholic shrine’s nearly 200 acres were used for worship purposes and therefore were exempt from paying local property tax. The shrine was sent a tax bill for $92,000.
Would money make everything better for victims? No. Would it at least pay for therapy, anxiety meds, and so forth brought on by the trauma? Yes.
And is the gold on that property also unsalable because it too is part of the public service? Kinda hard for the Catholic Church to plead poverty when all you have to do is look at the interior of St Peter’s Basilica to know that plea is a lie.
Net worth of the Vatican ALONE, ignoring all the dioceses, is estimated in the 10-15 billion dollar range. That’s a positive figure, assets in excess of debts. The church is in the black. Even if that estimate is high by 400%, that still fits regina’s claim of “billions of dollars”. And we can’t pretend that it’s tied up performing public services, because the Vatican is its own nation, its only public is its priesthood and employees, and whatever laws it might have against selling the property it is more than free to change whenever it likes.
But in all fairness, the Vatican isn’t gold-plated. Electroplating is a recent technique and would not have been used in, say, decorating St Peter’s Basilica.
>The idea it’s some massive rich organization is based around anti-Catholic bigotry akin to anti-Semitism.
The diocese my family used to belong to had a private jet for the archbishop and other priests who were assigned there.
A. Private. Jet.
They were relatively landlocked – they were close to the coast (and well within plane rides to more tropical locals, like the Bahamas and the Keys), but 100% didn’t need to use the plane to minister to their parishioners.
In the interests of a civil comment section, I just deleted a really long flame I was about to post. Instead, I will limit myself to four points.
1) Prejudice against Catholics and the murder of a priest is, indeed, contemptible. That should go without saying, but I know the Internet, and if I don’t say it someone somewhere will assume that I’m arguing the opposite.
2) Calling out the bad actions of the Church (meaning the instituion/heirarchy/priesthood, rather than the general body of believers), including how it refuses to make adequate compensation when it has the means to do far more than it actually doing, is completely legitimate criticism. Perhaps open to factual debate, but not any sort of transgression. Point 1 does not change this.
3) Equating the two, and leveling the charge of bigotry justly earned by the people doing point 1 against the people doing point 2… well I’m trying to keep this civil, so I’ll err on the side of understatement and just say that it is unjustified.
4) Declaring this anti-Catholic bigotry as being akin to antisemitism, and particularly making that declaration in defense of the Catholic Church, is… I again err on the side of understatement here… problematic.
I acknowledge that certain recent events have left you raw, and so for civility’s sake I am forgoing a more pointed and expansive (not to mention hotter) exploration of these topics.
I left the Catholic Church notably as a result of the rape and coverups. I had spent much of my early adult years heavily involved in charity works that were orchestrated by them ranging from homeless shelters to elderly care for those who couldn’t afford it. However, my relatives have suffered childhood sexual abuse and it was unforgivable to me. The Church protecting individuals like that disgusts me. I also know that people involved in the clergy have been murdered and firebombed in my area for their activities against the local church. The casual bigotry against them and portrayal of the church as a massive business irritates me greatly because I also know the for-profit ministries and megachurches that do nothing but bilk their followers of wealth.
I have complicated feelings regarding the church as such and am sensitive to these issues. It was a…I don’t have words for it…moment to find out my relatives were sexually abused and that I couldn’t do anything to make it better or help (it had happened years in the past).
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,833509,00.html
Oh the estimate for how much the Catholic Church has come from Time Magazine which is that it is not nearly as wealthy an organization as it appears. Previous articles stuck with me as several churches in my areas shut down and we lost the charitable services they provided.
And finally, my apologies. The emotionality of recent events had me state a lot of stupid things. None of which were well done and I wish I hadn’t said most of them.
Thank you for your patience and taking time to discuss things. I appreciate it.
Ah, yes, the great public services of *checks notes* promoting homophobia, transphobia, pedophilia, and anti-choice.
What’s this “unsellable” fuckery? The Catholic Church has never not been a private, parasitical organisation that is the biggest landowners in the world if you don’t count actual countries. Research has shown that most of the money dontated to the Catholic Church goes to maintain the beast and not to any actual social work. The only reason they’re finidng themselves in monetary woes right now is because its victims are fighting their fears and coming forward and suing the fuckers for everything they got – if you’re running out of money because you need to pay compensation to all the victims of the pedophilia you enabled you are entitled to exactly ZERO whining.
Also feeding the poor, free hospital care, caring for the mentally ill, and giving care to the dying. Mind you, I’d like to get rid of all homophobia, transphobia, and anti-choice in the church while keeping the rest.
Wouldn’t you?
Also, what “research” is lying to you? I mean it’s not that hard to disprove that. It’s the largest charitable organization in the world. Go downtown to any city and check it out. Its like denying gravity.
A big chunk of that came from Blaine, at that.
And by extension, the mob! So the church is now involved with the mob!
Imma pretty certain the mob, or at least Asher’s granddad, was unaware of and not likely to support Blaine’s dipshittery. At a minimum it is waaaay too visible for any serious mobster’s comfort level.
Wait, is John part of the same church? The ‘skimmed the funds to buy himself a new car’ John? Because suddenly that also makes quite a bit of sense.
I don’t think John personally skimmed anything. The church board itself may have, but that’s a group responsibility, like corporations and CEO salaries.
Of course, he may have found ways of hinting to the board that he was the sort of person who deserved as much as he did because reasons. Grifters gonna grift.
That aside, I don’t think it’s the same church as Hank and Carol’s. I note that John was not present at services when Hank, Carol, Joyce, and Becky went.
IIRC, the Browns’ current church is based off the one Willis’s mom was part of? Didn’t that one end up going bankrupt (after she donated the family house to the church), if memory serves?
Yup. Bodes well for the future…
Do you have a link to details on that story? I’m interested to read more.
In most states the bail money would actually be refunded because the defendant in deceased. However in some jurisdictions the bail money belongs to the defendant even if posted by a third party.
So it might actually be refunded to Becky.
If they used a bailbondsman then their SOL.
Well, he immediately went out to commit the same crime he originally did.
Pretty sure that’s irrelevant he was murdered before the bail could be fortified. He’s dead so legally speaking he’s not guilty of anything and can’t be charged with anything.
Forfeited?
Since Blaine’s name was apparently the one on the bail paperwork (or at least a name, but that’s how Becky got him in the Twitter Thread,) and Blaine is now in jail for the one crime Indiana doesn’t allow bail for, that might also affect things some.
I’d assume he’s going straight to prison for this… unless he pulls some strings and get more of the short-term offence.
Pulling the mob strings would be… interesting.
Seriously, CANNOT overstate how much I want to see Gramps’s reaction to this bullshit. I am sure I would regret this the moment I got this wish, but seriously it is difficult to imagine a more ill-conceived or -executed plan than Blaine’s whole scheme and I have to assume an Actual (Presumably) Competent Mobster is gonna have the same ‘oh my god are you fucking kidding me’ reaction we have.
Yeah I’m not going to lie if I was blains Boss I’d be fed up this his crap to. He’s fucking up so badly and wasted much of his own time and money just to fail at bringing in his own daughter. On top of that his blunders are drawing attention to his own mob and getting his grandson involved. The appropriate thing to do would be “Forget the fool let him rot in there for all I care.”
Blaine’s a money launderer – he knows where the mob’s hiding at least some of its money and he has enough contacts to know local corrupt cops.
I’ll be shocked if this doesn’t end with ‘he ‘committed suicide’ in his cell’
He and Asher recognized each other on sight, too, which means he is DEFINITELY connected enough Gramps does not want to risk him turning state’s witness on the mob stuff to reduce his charges.
And given the incredibly visible displays of Serious Money To Burn putting this plan in action (posting an extremely high bail for a total stranger chief among them,) his nickel-and-diming Amber in the dorm – though I’m pretty sure she knows it’s not really about that – and how he hid his conflicting tax returns so badly a 13-year-old could find them, he’d damn well better hope no one who’d heard him gripe about tuition gets deemed relevant enough to be interviewed. The mob has a vested interest in that investigation being cut off before it starts.
Heck, ignore Gramps for a second. Those corrupt cops are known by Blaine as mob contacts. They have plenty of reason to take him out themselves.
Seriously I’d be shocked if Blaine makes it a week without a Mysterious and Unfortunate Accident courtesy of one of the many enemies he made with that stunt.
He will probably commit suicide by hanging…in a room with no movable furniture, while the cameras mysteriously glitch, the guards both take a smoke break, and using a coathanger he couldn’t have had access to.
But wouldn’t it then go to whoever Ross designated as an heir in his will? What if Ross’s will says something like “Women can’t inherit money, so all of my money goes to Becky’s husband, if she has one, or to the church, if she doesn’t have one.”
Contestable.
Ross doesn’t seem the type to make a will to me. God will ensure he lives a long and healthy life, after all.
Wait, how does Linda know that the Browns are affiliated with the church that released Ross?
Probably the article on the front page of the local paper.
Yeah, that or the televised news were the only possible ways I could imagine.
Might’ve been in the news. Ross shooting up the campus was.
Yep that did come to mind. I suppose Hank and Carol are distinctive looking enough to stand out.
…I dunno, they’re pretty Generic White Couple.
Process of elimination:
How many sets of parents would be on campus at all, never mind loitering in the Read lobby, while there isn’t an event? Basically just the kidnapping victims’.
They’re probably not Sarah’s parents (hey it’s possible she could be adopted, they don’t know).
They can’t be Becky’s (both are deceased, even if Linda didn’t know about Bonnie it would be odd for her to show up with another man already).
They’re certainly not Amber’s (Blaine’s in jail) or Walky’s (that’s them).
Walky dated Dorothy for a while, so they might know her parents (at least in passing). She also doesn’t look anything like Hank and Carol.
That leaves Joyce as the last possibility.
They know Dorothy’s parents. They met when the two of them were dating. I faintly remember Linda talking about how Walky was going to be a doctor, whether or not he realized that yet.
Ethan’s and Dina’s as well, though Dina can be eliminated for the same reasons as Sarah. Given how both the Browns’ hair is graying, it’s not inconceivable they could be mistaken for Ethan’s parents, but their skintones and facial shapes do differ just enough to make it less likely. (Provided Linda and Charles had a chance to see and pay any attention to what Ethan looked like. Fairly big ‘if’ there.)
She already talked to her kids, yah? They may have given her the gist “so this guy who tried to kidnap someone we know before got out on bail and kidnapped me to get to her”
Saw Joyce on the news and recognized the parents from seeing her at the fountain?
*gets the popcorn and red/blue 3d glasses ready*
This is going to be amazing.
Move away Hank, you’re about to get caught in the blast radius.
Duck! And cover!
My only hope is that Charles/Linda notices that even Hank is going “wtf” at his wife, and don’t rip into him.
Linda won’t because she’s in Mama Bearzerker mode.
Charles might, but won’t say anything.
Best case Charles and Hank hang out a little to the side and become friends.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahyou’re a monster.
I mean…Linda’s not WRONG, for once
He didn’t hit anybody with the bullets he shot, so technically correct.
Or any thing. At least not the school.
We don’t actually know where that bullet came down.
It hit the handgun of someone who was about to commit suicide. This event caused them to rethink things, get professional help, resolve the issues in their life, reconcile with their family, find a partner, a fulfilling job, and live happily ever after.
At least that’s my headcanon.
Beat her ass!
Bring up that Joyce was kidnapped, tied up, had her life threatened, and then kidnapped again in a van.
“bUt ShE wAsN’t ShOt.” Go to hell Carol.
Karen vs. Karen. Let’s do this.
Linda vs Carol https://imgur.com/gallery/1XBAShc
The most epic of hatefucks.
This isn’t a kismesitude I wanted.
The next slipshine will sure be interesting.
“He didn’t shoot anyone, he just threatened to shoot people (which is a crime) and kidnapped someone (which is also a crime).”
“But he did it because something-something God! God loves guns and violence!”
Preettty sure that the Bible says nothing about God loving guns.
I got into an extensive Twitter argument with a man who insisted Jesus was all about material rewards and that riches will follow a righteous man.
Some people don’t care what the book ACTUALLY says.
There is at least one passage about arming yourself for the coming bad times. Going so far as to sell your coat to afford a weapon.
Luke 22:36
There’s another passage about dying by the very implement you lived by.
Matthew 26:52
I choose to interpret that as meaning don’t pick fights expecting your martial prowess bail you out, but be prepared to defend yourself and your own by any means necessary.
The Bible is widely open to interpretation, of course. But as I recall, those passages were about swords, not guns. 😉
In practice the Bible’s pretty much an inkblot test, where what people take away from it says more about them than it does about the Bible. You can do a lot worse than “don’t pick fights… but be prepared to defend yourself”, so you won’t get any debate from me about your interpretation.
Charles: So Hank, you want we should both get divorced and Gay married? I mean yeah, I don’t swing that way and you probably think it’s a mortal sin and an ABOMINATION, but it’s gotta be better than this right?
Hank: ….
Charles: Ok, just putting it out there, no offence meant.
Hank: No no, hang on. I’m thinking…
🙂
You. I like your thinking.
Joyce when she realizes her dad’s married to another man: *supportive but confused*
Joyce when she realizes Sal’s her stepsister: 😀
Joyce when she realizes Walky’s her stepbrother: *Shocked Joyce face*
I wish it were possible to ‘like’ comments here.
*like*
This is beautiful.
I see the soupe du jour is a big steaming bowl of side-eye, served with saltines and a lemon wedge.
Let’s not overlook the worst part of Carol’s defending Ross: her daughter was kidnapped too and it was her daughter he was threatening when he fired his gun. The man she’s defending endangered her daughter’s life TWICE.
Says everything about her priorities that her first response wasn’t “My daughter was kidnapped too! My daughter was taken *hostage* as a human shield! Don’t you act like we had any way of knowing he was capable of something like this!”*
*although they did. Random guy shows up out of nowhere to pay bail for someone he doesn’t know, and no one thinks to ask why? Ross was as dumb as a box of rocks, an easy tool to manipulate.
Aaaaall of this. Go fuck yourself, Carol. I can’t even bring myself to be disappointed, because that would imply I had any expectation whatsoever it would EVER be anything but this, but you suck beyond words.
Yeah seriously, if that doesn’t make Hank divorce Carol, nothing will. (They’re not Catholic so divorce might be okay, right?)
No. The Bible is all over the place in a lot of subjects as a result of being written by a bunch of people over a long period of time, but Jesus is very clear that divorces aren’t an actual thing, and neither is remarrying. It’s aaaatttttt… the Sermon at the Well, I think.
No, although her adultery comes up there. It’s elsewhere.
Matthew 5:32
Matthew 19:5-9
Mark 10:9-12
On the flip side. Paul leaves it as a prescription for being “unevenly yoked”, but that was Paul.
2 Corinthians 6:14
Doesn’t mean they won’t get separated.
Jesus is clear about not divorcing except in cases of adultery.
But yeah, like SeanR says, unevenly yoked often gets cited as grounds for divorce.
I think the Hank/Carol type of evangelical prefer the idea of “maybe it’s a sin, but Jesus forgives. Once saved always saved.” That brand of Christians do divorce a lot, significantly above the national average.
Nope. Joyce doesn’t even like to SAY the word.
Sure, but how much of that is faith in doctrine, and how much of that is being a kid who wants her parents to love each other? Having your parents break up is awful, regardless of age.
Even before her parents had problems, she wanted to get Joe’s parents back together like the parent trap. Divorce seems to be a no go.
Surely he shares their Good Old Christian Values ™ (not to be mistaken for anything Jesus actually advocated for) so strongly fronting megabucks for a stranger made sense? The Lord was clearly acting through him, why would they have questioned it?
“ThAT’s fInE, i kNOw roSs WOUld nevEr hUrT JOyce, ANd he onLY WAnTed to DO wHat’S BeST FoR bEcKy.“
– Carol’s personal narrative
She thinks what they tried to accomplish was the right thing to do. Remember her ominous call to Joyce after the last time Hank called her?
“Random guy shows up out of nowhere to pay bail for someone he doesn’t know”?
“See, God will provide.”
I note that Linda’s already on the phone with the dean trying to get Amber expelled. BOY does she work fast.
But yeah wow Linda’s not wrong re: her indignation in this instance. Feels like everyone here is turning on Carol though given she’s clearly completely missing the point.
Wow holy shit, big my mom vibes from Carol here
Same.
My sympathies to both of you.
Carol, you ae digging your grave. Just stop before Hank helps Linda do what Benny did to the protagonist of Fallout New Vegas.
Shoot him in the head, steal his stuff and get shot by him later in the story or potentially have a one night stand?
Why the hell would Linda care if the church is already broke? Carol please, I know it’s asking a lot of you, but use your fucking brain for once.
Also i just wanna point out that Hank agreed that the church is wrong, so Linda please keep him out of the blast zone. Carol only pls. (:
Because the point isn’t getting the money, the point is hurting and getting rid of the church.
yeah, I’m wondering why Carol even bothered to argue that the church is broke. Besides the obvious of Carol being Carol.
I think she’s trying to frame the church (and thereby Ross) as the “real victims”, because that’s what they are in her narrative.
I’m actually supporting Linda in this decision
Linda, you are making Carol look reasonable, even if only for a single second. That should not be possible.
How is Carol the one that looks reasonable in this strip? I genuinely want to know.
For only a second because of Linda’s hyperbole. Ross did not, in fact, shoot up the school. Carol is wrong in everything else, in perpetuity.
Technically correct is not, in fact, the best kind of correct. And that does in no way make Carol look reasonable.
Fair enough. I just don’t like Linda and am instantly bound to empathize with anyone she is in conflict with. Usually that is Sal, but this time it is another abysmal character.
Also as pointed out above, Ross literally shot up(wards) at the school. He opened fire on school grounds. That should count, I think.
At the very least, assault with a deadly weapon. Probably a law against discharging a firearm within city limits, discharging a firearm on school grounds, HAVING a firearm on school grounds, and whatever that amplifies the kidnapping charge to.
He didn’t shoot at anyone only because Becky caved at the warning shot, and he did not get the chance to shoot AG (and Sal and Joyce, who caught up to the chase after he started talking about sending Becky’s friends to hell for aiding her in defying him) before being stopped.
And he still brought a gun on campus with the intention of using it (and causing a police shootout, if necessary. Probably by ACTUALLY shooting some of these corrupt, secular students,) and did fire it as a warning shot and threaten people at gunpoint. That qualifies as, at minimum, an attempted shooting up, and the distinction for any students in hearing/threatened range is basically meaningless.
I hate Linda with the fire of a small magma flare, but in this ONE moment, she is entirely correct in putting blame on Carol and the church.
Still says nothing good about her that her first impulses have been ‘blame (and attempt to expel) a student for the actions of her father’ and ‘blame (and attempt to sue) the church that bailed the Dead Chump out’, though! So much blame. No onscreen attempt whatsoever to actually support or check in on or even remotely LISTEN TO her children (both of them, given Sal was involved in the rescue.)
But yeah, stopped clocks.
A clock that runs backward is right even more often than a stopped clock.
Wouldn’t go that far. We have this instance and basically nothing else of Linda Actually Being Right.
He fired a shot, though. And towards the sky. That is, in its most literal sense, “shooting up”.
He did shoot up the school as others have said. Carol’s response here is pure deflection.
Shooting up the school is a phrase with a different meaning than shooting upwards while at the school. I think maybe you have never seen a building that’s been shot up.
Linda isnt wrong though
Yeah no, the point is that THAT doesn’t justify anything
Was it even church money used for the bail, or was it church members’ money.
Hank better be angry if Carol used family money to bail out a man who threatened their daughter’s life.
Go ahead and sue, Linda. I very much doubt that putting up money for bail makes you liable for any crimes committed while out on bail.
I am very here for this
A broken clock is right twice a millenium. Congrats, Linda.
Carol, you realize firing a gun repeatedly at a university campus is generally considered to be “shooting up the school”, even if no one got hit, right? It’s still a horrifying thing to do that terrified and traumatized quite a few people!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/necks/
Oh that was the last thing you should’ve said
No, Karen–sorry, Linda–you can’t sue someone for posting bail. Every bail bond company in the country would have been sued out of existence if you could.
But dammit, Carol, just shut your frickin’ mouth for a change! Forget Linda, I want to see Hank, Joyce, and Becky tear into her! Heck, I want to see Hank invoke “the husband is the head” Scripture and just completely destroy Carol. Dammit, Hank, grow an effing pair!
Hank invoking Scripture on Carol to make her shut up would certainly be interesting…
I doubt that’s how it would play out, though. More likely going down that route would invite a lecture from Carol about her idea of how a ‘proper’ patriarch should be and how Hank wasn’t measuring up.
Sadly, I think you’re right. Hank has been cuckolded by his own ideals.
Carol: “He didn’t shoot anybody.”
*awkward pause*
*BAM*
Carol: “You… you punched me! What the hell!”
Hank: “She didn’t punch anybody.”
Hanks eyes in the last two panels is an education.
Wait, what Carol?
She is technically correct. The worst type of correct.
“Carol. Not helping.”
Welp, time to see the irresistable force of a Karen meet the immovable object of a fundangelical christian.
Terrible people deserve each other. I haven’t been this happy to read a DOA comic in a long time >:D
Also Hank is starting to realize that he should probably leave Carol; but i’m wondering where Charles is at?
Don’t be too happy, Linda was on the phone with the dean in panel 1, presumably trying to get Amber expelled.
and most likely also trying for Becky I imagine.
just she isn’t actually enrolled. so she can’t do much there.
Charles is freezing up at How real shit is getting right now.
Hank and Charles just slip away in the chaos. They then team up to solve mysteries.
…and possibly get married?
Well the option isn’t ruled out, no.
Oh my……
This is one of those Immovable object vs. Unstoppable force situations isn’t it.
Yes, semantics is definitely the right way to defend a kidnapper and attempted murderer, Carol /s
And Charles, are you the dad or the butler? All you do is hang around, take orders and only actively participate in conversations that are trite and superficial. This strip really exemplifies that.
It’s all she’s got. It’s easier to keep digging than admit she’s wrong. Attempting to process the cognitive dissonance she’s built up will make her have a stroke.
“He didn’t shoot anybody…he didn’t even have a gun…what friend?…since when did we go to a church?”
For those who predicted an alliance you’ve been proven wrong.
“Hey, um, if we were to show that we were contrite and recognized the error of our ways… like, say, helping you get signatures for a petition to get that O’Malley kid out of the college… would that maybe get you to hold off on the suing our church thing?”
Okay, YES, you can sue a church.
But I’m pretty sure you can’t sue anyone, church or not, for bailing somebody out of jail. (Except the bondsman can sue you for the balance of the bond money.) That’s not actionable. Maybe it should be, but it isn’t.
And you DEFINITELY can’t sue for all their money, just actual damages irrespective of how much money they have. And you can’t sue to wipe a church off the map in the equity sense of getting a court order to close the church down. (Maybe force them to move if they’re squatting on your property, but not shut down.)
That said, if Linda uses some mix of connections and money to sue that church out of existence despite not really being able to, I’m not going to complain all that loudly. Yeah, she’s vile, but so is the church in question.
Suing for damages is actually very easy. You just have to convince the jury to award them and that the person is liable. In this case, all they need to prove is that they knew Ross would try to kidnap his daughter again.
Um, yes and no.
Juries make determinations of fact — that is, whether things happened in this or that way in any given case. Judges make determinations of law.
So if you took the case to court that their church bailed out Ross and therefore should be made to cover the damages Ross caused, you would have to convince the jury of the facts of the case like, yes, the church did bail out Ross and, yes, Ross did cause those damages, and maybe also yes, those things were foreseeable.
But you’d also have to convince the judge that the law says that all those facts together, if the jury found they were true, would entail legal liability. THAT’S where it would all fall apart. The whole case would be dismissed prima facie long before a jury was even empaneled.
Otherwise, as just one of a million potential examples, an extremist evangelical could sue me or you for the emotional distress caused to them by the thought that us not converting to his particular denomination would land us in hell, and it would be entirely up to a jury whether or not that was something that we were on the hook for regardless of what freedoms the law says we have.
Yes, in fact we have lawsuits like that all the time in my area.
All they need to do is convince the jury.
…. huh.
Could you name some of those cases that have been concluded? I’d love to read up on them.
You can also sue for punitive damages – probably wouldn’t apply in this case, but it is a thing.
You can go beyond the actual damages is the point.
And the actual damages would likely be high – particularly for Mike.
True, but what I’m saying is that there wouldn’t be any legal grounds to sue the church for this, any more than there would be legal grounds to sue, say, Asma for this. The damages caused by the guy who was out on bail exist, but the parties that posted bail are not legally liable for them.
I think Linda would just sue their church for whatever might stick, with the goal that the church would have to spend all their money on legal fees. Linda doesn’t need their money, she’s trying to close the church.
*she would be trying to close the church.
At this point she clearly hasn’t thought this through it at all (given that she’s only just learning that suing a church is even possible). She’s lashing out / establishing that she has weight she can throw around. But her wild threat is still reasonably plausible.
Aye. This feels like one of those situations where people are going “The church deserves to be severely punished for what they did!” and skipping over the whole, um, legality of it.
Not all bad things are illegal, and you can’t sue someone for doing something that isn’t in breach of a law or contract or something. It feels like the only way the church would be at all liable is if the people organizing the bail funding had knowledge that Ross would try to do what he did again, bail be damned… and I can’t bring myself to believe that they’re that callous.
He was just trying to raise his child right. Why would they think he wouldn’t try again?
Given Carol’s warning call to Joyce, I think at least some of them were aware another kidnapping attempt on Becky was at least a possibility.
That’s still a criminal charge, not a tort. The BEST Linda could come up with is some form of negligence suit, MAYBE, depending on Indiana negligence law,
and even that is an INCREDIBLY shaky premise. But since the church can’t defend itself, it might actually get Linda’s goal (ie, punish SOMEONE, personally, for her son getting kidnapped) accomplished.
It is nonetheless an UBER-Karen move.
I didn’t interpret that as a warning call. At least, not warning about *Ross*.
In America you can sue anybody for anything. Winning, or even not getting the case thrown out of court is something else again. But you can sue.
Linda’s having such a hard day. That’s twice in about an hour that she’s been left speechless, and in one case by her own son.
But seriously, Carol, congratulations on being batshit enough you can actually leave Linda speechless.
I’ve had some of those situations before. You’re in a argument with a far-right basket-case and despite the fact you’re explaining to them in refined detail exactly why they’re so far in the wrong, they start using their mental gymnastics to condone why doing certain terrible actions are ok, and you’re just standing there astonished at how stupid their logic is.
And when you do they strut around like they won, like the proverbial pigeon shitting on the chessboard.
Maybe they’ll get each other kicked out of the lobby so Joyce and everyone can leave
No, Joyce needs to have the chance to shout at Carol first.
I don’t think Joyce wants that, at least not right now
Maybe she doesn’t want it… but does she need it?
Phew, I thought they were going to gang up to kick Amber out of the Uni…
…hang on a sec though, I thought Blaine bailed Ross out of jail?
If I remember correctly. Blaine “helped” but it was mainly their church pushing for it and using their ‘name’ for it.
so blaine helped with it. but it was mainly the church.
Shitastic-dad just nudged things along in the end, and then scooped ross up
So, what is Zoomer? A Google for people on Zoom?
Zoomer is name of Ciri in this universe.
People are using it to refer to Boomers in this universe, though I’m actually sure these are all Generation X parents.
Specifically, I don’t think it’s so much a name for Siri as it is a Siri-equivalent app/virtual assistant/whatever released by the Rutten parents, IIRC.
The name comes from a line of sentient cars Joe’s company released, somewhat modeled after Ultra Car, back in the Walkyverse. (It was a mid-late Shortpacked! arc.)
Probably a reference to LegalZoom, an online law services site.
Well, if I’m reading this situation correctly I feel like we’re two to three days of strips from someone else interrupting/escalating this fiasco. Naomi would probably be an entertaining example for some here based on above comments.
No, I’m pretty sure that Joyce is going to come down with her friends to go to see Mike. Carol will say something selfish and psychotic-sounding about the previous events and Joyce will lose her temper with her, possibly for the first time ever. Hank will tell Joyce to calm down, then turn to Carol and say: “But you know she is right.”
Then, just as Linda is enjoying the show, Walky, Billie and Sal will turn up and demonstrate to her that she doesn’t have anywhere near the control over 2/3 of the youths in her life that she thought.
If that ends up being what happens, my cheering will be heard from SPACE.
Friggin mike drop (pun not intended here) with that horrible statement.
Time for everyone to turn, walk aaway from her and hannk to make a clean break.
In which Linda finally encounters someone whose view of the universe is more nihalistically sopolistic than hers. It’s worse in Carol because she’s fighting a rearguard action to shore up her view of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in her personal universe.
Meanwhile, Hank is going to find out that it is hard to prevent problems from turning into disasters when everyone else seems to be sure that the disaster is somehow a moral victory. I also think that he’s beginning to see Jordan’s point.
You know, although Linda is an awful parent, I kind of agree with her sentiment here…
Linda’s a weird parent to hate. She definitely does a lot of things wrong (her treatment of Sal in general, taking away Sal’s money, her ‘my word is final’ approach). At the same time it kind of feels like her heart is in the right place; she wants to make sure her kids have the best life.
At the same time though, she is insanely strict and absolutely refuses to compromise with her children. On top of this, it’s *her* definition of what a ‘good life’ is (Walky becoming a doctor, Sal not hanging out with Marcie because she’s apparently a bad influence) and any attempt by her kids to stray away from this will be met with consequences.
She assumes she knows best even before she has all the facts, and assumes everyone who isn’t her isn’t being the rational party of the group.
In short, she’s a dick, but less of a dick than Carol.
So… Linda is a dick, while Carol is a fana-dick. 🙂
But isn’t that pretty much the same thing as Carol? Or Ross for that matter?
They want what they think is best for their children, but without any consideration for what those children are actually like or what they want?
Yup.
There’s a lot of people for whom the phrase “Their hearts are in the right place, but their heads are up their asses” applies.
And the phrase “There’s nothing like a good cause to bring out the worst in people” is super applicable here as well…
Linda is Terrible, but it’s a terrible, that, while very very very difficult, can be unlearned given enough of an intervention/epiphany.
Carol’s is much much harder. Hank is on the road to recovering from that but more often than not, Carols tend to bunker down.
I’m not really sure either of those are easy to unlearn. Conversions away from religious bigotry do happen. Drastic changes in parenting styles are rare.
Though to be fair, Linda may wind up adapting after some years without the kids at home and needing to learn to treat them as adults if she wants any contact with them.
It’s possible, but I anticipate Linda learning that yes, there ARE in fact things you can do to a 13-year-old that break their trust in you permanently.
It’s gonna be a LOOOOONG realizatiom, though.
Fight
FIGHT!
FIGHT!!!
That’s not a thin excuse, Carol. That’s an excuse from a theoretical higher dimension of negative width.
Imagine if someone told you a man took a gun to your daughter’s school in order to, for political reasons, kill his child, anyone who might get in his way and probably himself. “Let’s spring him out of jail so he can get right back to it, perhaps with the aid of an emotionally disturbed career criminal” would probably not be plan A, nor making excuses for why he didn’t succeed. Unless it turns out he’s your friend in which case he can do no wrong.
I’m sort of looking forward to Hank and the Walkertons’ reaction to Carol’s upcoming “he was a good, god-fearing man” speech elegising Ross.
FWIW, I wouldn’t be surprised if this scene ends with Hank telling Carol that he’s going to seek and immediate divorce because he doesn’t know who she is but she doesn’t resemble the woman she married (which will be a triumph of rose-tinted memories).
Bad mom brawl
Damn. There it is. When they divorce she’s going to sell Joyce’s home to to cover the lawsuit or toedad bail fiasco.
🙁
Yep. She’ll probably also contrive to find some way to blame Becky for the church trustees having to wind up the organisation because of financial problems.
This arc’s going to be eye-opening for Hank, too. He’ll get to watch Carol go for the gold in mental gymnastics trying to justify all this.
It’s like The Empire vs The Hutts.
Oh no, IRL internet arguments.
The “they shouldn’t have” (and Carol continuing to refer to the church in the third person) makes me think that Hank doesn’t yet know how much Carol contributed… And she knows he’ll be really unamused when he finds out…
I’d expect her to present it as a ‘test of faith and ideological purity’ to him. As several people have already said, the chances are that this is going to lead to a brutal divorce.
FWIW, I’m wondering what the likelihood is that Carol was having an affair with Ross.
Agh, uhh, no. Thanks for the mental image…
“ Thine Adulteries, and Thy Neighings, the Lewdness of Thy Whoredom ”, a Dumbing of Age pornographique by David “pass the brain bleach” Willis
Part of me wishes that they’re using “They” because the Browns are no longer part of that particular church.
Feels unlikely though.
“They” being the subset of the congregation that was in on this plan. Hank didn’t appear in the comic where Blaine got them involved.
“He clubbed them to death with a hammer, that’s way worse”
Divorce incoming.
I doubt Linda would be able to sue them for bailing out Ross. But Linda could sue them for other things, or help strangers with their lawsuits.
I’m having trouble seeing what they could sue the church for. It’s the court that let Ross free on bail, and they had the facts of the case to judge him a danger to others no less than Carol’s church did.
What illegality, criminality or other wrongdoing can the church be actually sued for? It’d make better sense to sue the court for letting him go on bail.
‘Reckless endangerment’ is an obvious option. In civil cases, there is a long trail of precedents that being too stupid or optimistic to know just how badly something will likely go doesn’t relieve an entity of liability for said bad outcome.
I can’t help but doubt any court would let you sue someone for posting bail. That kind of precedent would be really dangerous.
If Linda was able to prove that they posted bail with the hope and intent that Ross would re-offend. I’m not sure but I think then she could sue.
But in a they should have know better situation the court has already decided how much someone can be charged for giving Ross freedom in the event that he re-offends.
The court had no choice under Indiana’s constitution – bail can only be denied for murder cases. Of course, they seem to have used the usual loophole to get around this by setting bail higher than he could possibly make in order to keep him in jail. Even with the help of his church and community, he couldn’t make bail until an actual mobster stepped in to help.
Of course, this highlights all sorts of things wrong with the bail system.
In the last panel Linda has the face of a person who has suddenly understood that she’s talking with another maniac. If really Linda is going to sue the church, I’m with her. Sure, Linda is a horrible parent, but Carol is probably worse than her.
Not ‘a maniac’, just someone with a divergent view of reality. Imagine Carol and Linda both looking up at a cloudless sky. One says ‘blue’ and the other says ‘green’ and both are right in their own minds because what they see is what they define that particular colour. You can’t reason with people like that because their foundational view of reality is different.
Sorry but not. I don’t think Linda, however she’s bad as a parent, would have done her best to bail a man who threatened teenagers on a campus. That’s totally another level of madness.
Yeah, he didn’t shoot anybody! He just THREATENED to shoot people. With the gun he had, that he pointed at them.
Even Hank is like “Jesus Carol what is wrong with you?”
Hank: Yep, setting him free was a stupid idea.
Carol: He was doing the right thing because he was showing her how much he loved her and trying to help her find the right path. That’s just called good parenting!
Joyce: My parents are a united body that share a small hive mind.
Poor Hank!
Linda proves that a stopped clock is still right twice a day on 12 hour time and once a day on sensible time.
I want the next strip to be Joyce reacting to what her mom just said. Seeing carol defending Ross will break something inside her.
As far as we know, Joyce is still in her dorm room.
And it’s not actually anything new, unfortunately. Which is why Joyce has been holed up in her dorm room avoiding her parents.
She already has! And it already did.
I never thought I would read a line from Linda and react with “OH THANK GOD”
Ooh, great defence! For a moment, I thought something bad had happened.
On the real, the fact that the guys who was freed on bail also happened to be the only one killed should mean something. I don’t know what it should mean exactly, but it should mean something.
It means that Carol and the rest of the ‘good’ people sent Ross right to his death. This happened because they basically trusted a serpent offering them an apple and because they refused to understand or accept the nature of the man they were trying to help.
I really hope theres more spine shown from these dads in the future.
“Brandishing? Now honestly what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for picking up a test tube?”
the willis is… merciful? today.
“it’s a trick. get an axe”
Was that a LittleKuriboh reference? 😀
Hank? Charles? Do yourselves a favor; walk away, and let the Karens fight it out.
HankxCharles as Reasonable Gay Dads is my brain new crackship and they both deserve each other after years with these fucking spouses.
I dunno, I think Hank could do better, but unfortunately all the other good dads also have good wives.
Blaine only covered what Ross’s church family fell short of? Hrhm…
This is a pretty neat direction for this to go. *Let the crappy parents duke it out between eachother!* Linda’ll come off as a bully just trying to make herself feel better about not being in control all the time, and the Browns’ little church family will be outed at how inept and pathetic they are at the “right way.”
We may get back at Blaine trying to work with Ross before it got ugly again. Yay.
Huh, Linda’s cleared the low bar I set for her. I expected her to collude with Carol to get Amber expelled.
Though I think she still is trying to get Amber expelled as she was on the phone to the Dean.
Yeah, she has just been temporarily side-tracked by discovering an even bigger entity that she’s decided deserves punishment. She has infinite wrath to deal out, because she is The Good People and bad things primarily exist to give her this self-righteous endorphin high.
I was worried about the same thing; I’m so relieved.
Essentially, panel 2:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/overbearin/
“holy CRAP, Joyce’s parents”
He brought a rifle to a school and discharged it. “Well yeah, but it’s not like he HIT anyone…”
LINDA: “Response does not compute.”
HANK: “Dear merciful heaven! I married that!”
Yes Henry Brown, you DID marry that. YOU lived YOUR LIFE and estranged ALL four of your kids as a part of THAT, you Jon Arbuckle-ly flavor-drained vanilla-standard of a man!
Does Carol even have an opinion on Mondays? That doesn’t make the conversation turn to the authenticity of Jesus Christ as the messiah, that is? Wellllllllllllllll, Henry Brown?!
I’m so used to Linda being wrong about everything that comes out of her mouth that for a moment I was like “oh come off it Linda you can’t sue everything you don’t like”
Then I realized
Oh, shit she’s right
I mean…shit you’re right he TECHNICALLY didn’t shoot anyone…but he DID threaten students with a shotgun, so…>.>…tit for tat?
I believe it was specifically depicted as a single-shot varmint rifle (which, considering Ross’s views on his daughter, was oddly…befitting of him) – more specifically, a Ruger No. 1 – rather than a shotgun, but aye.
Linda, not Carol
Joyce’s parents will be divorced before this comic ends!
Before this arc ends
Probably “only” separated.
They might already be separated but not told anyone. Nothing like a gay kid to break up a family by value changes.
Divorce! Divorce! Divorce!
I really dislike that woman.
Good old Zoomer.
I’ve said (and it’s being debated) that the church can’t be sued for this.
(… well, okay, it CAN be sued for this, but the suit would get tossed out as groundless in an early motion to dismiss.)
But assuming Linda tries to follow through (which I’m not sure of, she seems to be frantically retargetting her anger at whatever comes into her field of vision next), here’s a likely scenario.
She takes it to a lawyer.
The lawyer says that no, it won’t work if you try it THIS way… but give me a couple days to look into it and I’ll see if there are some things that WILL work.
If the actual goal is to hurt or disband the church, rather than recover damages, the lawyer doesn’t actually need to find something that will work… just something that will get to trial rather than get promptly dismissed. A competent lawyer WILL be able to do this, even if an ethical lawyer will think it’s skeevy and might not want to be part of it.
The church would then need to hire an attorney, which Carol has helpfully told Linda it can’t afford to. Getting someone to do it pro-bono is theoretically possible, but the bad press the church has already generated around this case makes it unlikely. (Though the fact that it’s generated press at all might make it more likely.)
Unable to afford to mount a defense, the church goes bankrupt regardless of the trial’s outcome. Linda wins.
This kind of nuisance suit, where you’re using the lawsuit itself as a weapon to hurt someone rather than to recover damages, is a bit on the unethical side. But it happens all the time.
It’s 100% on the unethical side. It’s attempting to pervert the legal system to damage and harass someone who’s done nothing that the legal system finds actionable.
Best case is that it’s a “it’s an awful, ugly thing to do, but it’s the best option out of a lot of bad options” thing.
So if I’m following your logic correctly, it would be unethical to sue a branch of the KKK that’s not yet done something actionable in order to damage and harass them ?
Yes. The KKK is a horrible institution and they deserve worse, but it would be extremely unethical to file such a suit. It would be tantamount to repressing their free speech and assembly rights.
Dude. If you have to bring up the KKK as a justification, you know it is unethical and not the right way to do something. The KKK shouldn’t be allowed to exist from the get go as a group.
Yes it would be wrong and unethical even if the person you are targeting is themselves unethical. Because you can’t allow double standards in ethics where it is fine if it is a bad guy but not if it is a good guy without cosigning that to screw over a bad person, it’s inevitable that good people will be screwed over by it too. Anything you suggest as fine as revenge against a bad guy is something that the wrong people will use as revenge against a good guy and if you find it unacceptable against the latter, as cathartic as it may be, it cannot be allowed against the former either.
There are things that should be illegal, basically on the grounds that you can’t draw lines to allow them without allowing other worse things, but nonetheless remain morally correct.
Punching Nazis is the canonical example: it is assault and is and should be illegal. It is still a moral good.
Unethical according to professional standards of ethics for lawyers in the united states.
Whether it’s ethical in a more general sense of write or wrong is a different question.
*right or wrong grrr
It’s unethical (possibly including under ABA guidelines – I only know them as they’d pertain to paralegals), but:
1) That does not stop lawyers from doing it, because unfortunately unsavory lawyers exist,
2) Linda Walkerton is not ethical, as demonstrated by the fact that she wants Amber expelled for getting herself kidnapped.
As to the KKK discussion… we could get into an incredibly heated debate here but I will suffice it to say: case studies indicate that hate speech on that level does not stay peaceful if left to fester. The First Amendment’s stance on hate speech has been inconsistent over the years, but ‘fighting words’ are explicitly not protected, and frankly I think by this point generalized hate speech should be understood as such. That’s a completely different argument that would require being brought to an appellate court, but seriously hate speech should not be a protected category in and of itself.
Tldr on that last bit: Don’t use a nuisance suit, you have an actual fucking case there on some level (though you’d need a MUCH different Supreme Court makeup for any success.) Now, if that branch can’t fight your suit… well, one less branch, aim higher.
At this point it’s gone beyond casual hate speech and into full blown propaganda and that can and has led to atrocities.
This is something we as a country really need to grapple with in our understanding of “Free Speech”.
It’s about to be a what?
Mom Fight!
Ken Wanabe voice: Let them fight.
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
YIKES.
I love how even Hank is just like “wtf bongo”
OK Zoomer? More like OK Corral
Linda has a habit of like.. treating Charles like a secretary? Is it just that she’s technologically illiterate (unlikely, like another commentator said the parents are probably gen X), or does she see him as someone who should do these things for her? He’s quite complacent, and she seems to be using that, like that’s the role he’s supposed to play or something.
Just “Charles” instead of “hey honey, can you look it up?” or at the very least, “Charles, please?”
Rereading, I note that she’s on her own phone in the first panel, so it’s not like she couldn’t google it herself.
“Yes your honor, my client walked into a bank with a mask and gun and demanded money, but he was tackled to the ground before anything else happened so we feel the robbery charge isn’t appropriate here.”
Why are all the Mom’s evil and the Dad’s Milquetoast? Can we see a strong, decent father figure in this strip once? Or does Willis not do that?
Mike has a patent on all the good parents and refuses to let anyone else use it.
May I direct you to Sierra’s dad, Reno? Obviously, an extremely minor character, but his brief appearance during the hallway chase has forever endeared him in my heart.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/blood/
Just look at that. Steps right in between Blaine and Amber, attempts to deescalate Blaine, and lets Amber get the fuck away. Beautiful.
Other decent dads include Jacob’s brother Harrison (though his son is a baby, so it’s a cheat to list him here,) along with Dorothy’s and Mike’s dads (both pleasant men, married to pleasant women.) The Saruyamas also appear to be evenly-matched temperament-wise, but that temperament is fairly mild so I wouldn’t exactly call Ryou a strong father figure. (Notably, they insisted on being polite and letting Blaine in the dorm room, but apologized when they realized their mistake.) He hasn’t had an onscreen line yet, but given Haruka only had the one and an offscreen phone conversation, and Dina and Becky have both referred to her parents, plural, being supportive of the relationship, we can assume he’s just quiet.
And of course, Hank seems to be building to the point where he can no longer tolerate Carol’s bullshit. He’s been helpful to Becky away from Carol, and starting to realize he needs to have Joyce’s back here, but what he’ll say to Carol’s face is going to be a real questiom. Still, a lot of us have hope he’ll do better in the end.
All that aside, the Crushingly Overbearing Mom figure’s recurrence in Willis’s work is… um, likely something to do with the artist’s life, shall we say. Wouldn’t be surprised if the meeker dads were as well.
Anyone else notice in Panel 5 when Carol, uhm, “speaks up” that the background completely vanishes and then comes right back with a collective look of “WTF” from all parties involved? It’s as if Carol’s “logic” broke all sense of reality for a split second & then snapped right back when she went quiet.