Having spent more time than I care to in hospitals with people on boop boop machines, I can say that Hollywood has lied to you – 95% of the time, when the machine goes “booooooo” it’s because something came unstuck or slipped out of place or some other entirely mundane reason.
They did ask before doing it to my daughter. And before redoing it coz the first one came off… And the bit where we were in back to back labour and she had the cord around her neck, and they needed to use salad tongs* to get her out was probably more traumatic for her, all things considered? And the massive bruise from said tongs over her face was a lot more obvious… She was still the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. (My oldest. Middle one slithered out on the picotin drip, youngest tried to come out elbow first and was an extended emergency C section, around the time we were entering lockdown.)
My first was an emergency c-section at a Children’s Hospital, then taken immediately to her own little OR next door to be intubated. Poor thing went through so much. (She’s fine now.) I just had baby #2 this January. Easy as pie, I had no idea things could NOT be traumatic!
I have to say that the hospital did an amazing job. It was only after we were home with my first that I really grasped that they weren’t just erring on the side of caution, and that she had been really distressed.
My husband had me laughing during my C section – he did a fab job of keeping me calm. Again, the midwife and doctors were amazing. Number 3 spent most of his first day in a high dependency ward – he breathed in some merconium – but he did really well. In fact, he did so well that when somebody reviewed his charts they decided that he could stop the IV antibiotics and removed the cannulas. Unfortunately they forgot to check his X-ray… So I got to spend at least 45 minutes on (British) Mother’s Day watching them try to re-cannulate my three day old baby so he could complete the course (eventually they gave up and prescribed oral antibiotics). THAT was pretty traumatic – my tiny baby shrieking frantically with pain and terror… (Midwife confirmed, when we were back up on the ward and I was sobbing about this, that it’s horrible enough when it isn’t your baby.)
Doctor: I don’t understand, I’ve never seen the boop boop machine do this!
Technician or something idk: What do you mean?
Mike’s heart machine: boob boob booooooooob butt
Mem’ry
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
Life was beautiful then
I remember
The time I knew what happiness was
Let the Mem’ry live again
Probably the best individual song in Webber’s history with the stage I feel (Music of the Night is the only one that comes close, though it is also way more dependent on who is singing it). Much as i love Betty Buckley’s rendition, I have multiple recordings, on CDs bought decades ago now, that I also dearly love including, funny enough, both Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford.
Though that is a great song, Webber wrote so many great musicals i cannot decide which of his songs I like best. His early works were more tongue in cheek.
They should do a fully animated, Dreamworks/Pixar-esque version. Don’t try to CG live actors in suits, that’s just weird. It will just come out like an even more unsettling Cat in the Hat (the live action one with Mike Myers).
I’m with AG. No last words! No last words that are going to fuck with them forever!… I know that would be fitting, but you are making at least ONE earnest attempt to be less of an asshole, don’t ruin it with years of guilt on top of the trauma pile!
If there is one moment where I’d expect to be free of having to cradle my vigilante cape friend’s tattered psyche, it would be on my death bed, after having fought in her war.
Nice typo on the username there, me. There’s a comment awaiting moderation now, but to restate: Mike has admitted to consciously fucking with Amber (the stairway fight, and given his realization afterwards I do think he was sincere when he said that one) and made comments that have definitely made it worse (in the aftermath of the dorm fight on Freshman Family Weekend, ‘if you’re doomed to repeat your parents’ pattern but never pick jerks, which of them does that make you?’ Even if there WAS a benign intention there, the phrasing played straight into Amber’s self-doubt and made the Amber Bad/AG Good dichotomy really ramp up. Given he admitted to fucking with her intentionally, I feel safe saying he DIDN’T mean it purely benignly and missed the mark.)
I feel like, after you’ve spent years knowingly making someone’s mental state worse for kicks, you do in fact owe them some consideration in a positive way for once! He’s not in a good state to do it but I can still call it a dick move on the part of this fictional character because it would still be playing into his pattern of cruelty and occasional acknowledgement of friendship so they stay on the hook.
(I can cite Mike admitting to that one too, but since it was just last storyline I’m going to single out the oldest and most coloring-my-opinion-of-Mike comic.)
But see, I don’t think Mike is a “pure” a$$hole, much as he may try to be or as he alt-timeline could have been. This Mike is still a teenager, and there has been decent evidence that he has had well-buried romantic-ish feelings for each/both of his best friends over time which could lead to him feeling hurt/jealous/waadyameanofcourseIdontreallylikeyou! (Think of how he reacted after he and Ethan had sex and Ethan was super casual about it.) I think the comment you mentioned during parents’ weekend was at least in part a subconscious jealousy towards Danny. That doesn’t make it less jerky, but perhaps more typical teenagery.
Sure. He’s still admitted he was ‘poking Amber’s bear for years,’ in part, because he wants her upset. (‘She’s multiple time bombs. Just wind her up and point her Dadwards.’)
Once you have that as your motive even a LITTLE, I judge. And I suspect that’s part of your motive in ANY interaction like that. So, again: he REALLY owes Amber some positive consideration for her mental wellbeing.
When your friend’s dying but he’s calling you his friend, but he was an asshole, but also tried defending you, but also could be shitty, but it was clear his disillusionment with the injustices in the world were taking a strong mental toll on him.
I think overall Mike was a good person, he was just a good person who REALLY enjoyed fucking with people. When push comes to shove he always did the right thing
I really hope Mike pulls through and isn’t permanently affected by this. Besides the obvious effects of not jumping off any more buildings and any mental trauma associated with almost dying.
Willis wouldn’t kill 2 characters in such a short time, right?
They say who you are drunk is who you are with all the masks torn off. Remember in SP! Drunk Mike was the Nice Mike. Some parts of the SP! and IW! characters from the Walkyverse stayed the same in the Dumbiverse and it seems that Mike is also playing a character all the time in the Dumbiverse.
it would be especially cruel to us readers, in that he said he was breaking some of his rules, and we all got to go, “phew, it was just ross that died”
It means his heart is still beating. That’s the way being dead eventually saved my life with the giant hole blown in my lower leg from the wreck. With no pulse pushing blood out of the massive hole in my leg from where the truck hit me that meant I still had most of it still inside when they scraped me off the street and didn’t start really bleeding again until I was in the ambulance with the EMT there to control the bleeding.
So more blood on the outside of the head means he’s Not Dead Yet, and also that’s less intracranial bleeding because there is an escape for the blood to not put pressure on his brain.
I can vouch for that. Had a crash on my bike and my glasses gouged me on the side of my head. Just a bad scratch that didn’t even require stitches, but from the amount of blood you’d have thought someone had tried to brain me with an axe.
Don’t be so sure. I would absolutely expect Mike to have a last will that distributes all the audio recordings of the various mother sexes he’s had.
“And for you, Amber O’Malley, he left enough insurance money to make sure your flash drive got an extra 2 GB of space, but it turns out in the months since his last visit he ended up going over his expected space so we just made sure to pick out the boring parts to get the rest to fit.”
Mike gets to the Pearly Gates and gets the “You weren’t good enough for Heaven, but you weren’t bad enough for Hell, so we are sending you back for a while” speech.
Curse you Willis, I literally just cried. I’ve been waiting like 15 years for make to say something so loving to Amber and it had to under such gut wrenching circumstances. Guuuuuh. :'(
There is something really… pathetic – and I try to say that as non-condesending I can – in that the only people Mike counts as friends are the misfits from highschool that keep tolerating him.
I have found him uninteresting for the longest time, but I think the self destructive elements of his nihilism are really starting to make him an interesting paralell to amazi-girl.
Yeah, I am way more interested in a Mike that lives, keeps the realization he had that he was way too much like Blaine and he’s not comfortable with that, and starts actually grappling with the ways his edgelordiness have made his life worse along with everyone else around him. ‘Asshole Sage’ Mike is irritating even when he’s not being pointlessly mean with NO possible spin.
Is it possible that he didn’t already know that? That being a mean-spirited jerk makes things worse?
I always read it as some sort of dare to the universe and the people around him. “Yeah, that’s right. I’m a jerk. What are you gonna do about it?” and an endless dissapointment when no one does anything about it. The problem is of course that haven proven that point …then what?
Interesting. I hadn’t thought about it this way before, but it adds a fascinating take to that time he pointed out that he gets away with things because he’s a white male. The fact he recognizes that means that he recognizes the inherent injustice there, but instead of joining a BLM march, he pushes as if he wants to see how far he can get on that, and hates the fact no one ever stops him. (Bearing in mind that he’s a masochist, it’s a fair assumption that he’d like to be stopped.)
Of course, the one time he did do the equivalent of joining a BLM march, when he pointed out to the teacher that she didn’t believe Amber because she’s a girl, he got physically thrown out of a room, which may have had some impact on why he doesn’t make his point openly anymore.
He sees the wrongs, but the one time he tried to do something about it, it failed. Now he doesn’t know what to do. It doesn’t help that he by nature and choice is a jerk that needlessly antagonizes people.
There are some paralells to Sal – who also tried and failed – and amazi-girl – who also tries to combine righting wrong and working through her own baggage in a not always perfect manner.
Yeah, basically I agree, I’ve said something like this before: I don’t think he actually *enjoys* hurting people, rather, he reads very much like someone who actually feels quite a bit of empathy for people, enough that it’s painful for him but acts like a jerk because he doesn’t know how else to deal with that feeling. Kind of like yelling at others, “stop being an idiot, it’s hurting me too!” His realization with Blaine was that whatever his intent/motivation, his behavior has been not very different from someone who actually *doesn’t* care.
I think he did realize it on at least some level, because yeah, he’s self-aware that he gets off easier with his shit by virtue of being a white guy. I think the direct realization was less that he’s a jerk and doesn’t particularly enjoy it, more ‘I’m a jerk who justifies himself the same way THIS GUY does,’ and that any ‘it’s for their own good’ he’d been trying falls flat as a result.
Mostly I just want Mike to actively change his behavior more than I want another character dying. He realized it made him unhappy. I think he realized Amber and Ethan don’t actually trust him anymore not to have an ulterior, malicious motive. (At the very least, he noticed they’re pulling away.) Neither of those really sunk in before the stairway fight. If ‘I’m using the same justification as THAT abusive turd, shit’ actually caused some change and not just a single grand, dying gesture, great! But if it was that single grand gesture… well, it’s better than keeping on being a manipulative jerk, but it kind of feels less like redemption equals death and more like ‘I’ve fucked up too much to even try fixing things, may as well give my death a purpose.’ Which is DEEPLY sad. And well… how do you trust even a dying ‘best friends’ when the guy’s admitted he’d say they were friends five percent of the time to keep hope alive? I don’t want Mike fucking with Amber’s psyche anymore than he has already, not when he’s said he did so intentionally before.
Yeah, this pretty much sums it up. I do have to say I’m not entirely sure where Willis can go with Mike after this, without losing his essential Mikeness, but I hope he’s got something up his sleeve.
It’d be difficult, but we do know ways he’s weaponized his asshole for, if not totally good, at least more benefit than detriment (Walky had to scramble after the ‘HAIL SATAN’ Mike pulled, but it did effectively distract Carol from the Becky matter! I call that one a win.) So I think it’s possible, just a matter of ‘Would Willis do this and pull it off?’
Honestly I think it’s entirely possible Mike survives, gets to have a meaningful talk with Amber and Ethan, and then leaves the strip due to lengthy convalescence.
After the encounter with Amber’s dad pushing him against the wall in school, I thought the keeping people away was his way of keeping them safe at the cost of closeness. It looks like he has no chinks to an outside observer, so he can do what he can inbetween the lines. I think he’s still awful and I don’t think that the reasoning makes him anymore complex.
another paralell is Billie who also entered college clinging to the memory of her glory days with no willingness to change. She was knocked down and forced to develop almost immediately (even if the self destructiveness is still there), but Mike was strong and detached enough to stay in his self-imposed “too cool to care” bubble while the rest of his peers moved on. Even finally scoring with his childhood crush did nothing to elevate his lack of motivation.
another example would be Walky, although he was shaken out of that state with the drop of a monkey.
Repeated boops are good, that indicates the peak of the EKG readout caused by the contraction of the heart muscle. When there are no more peaks the audio makes the boop continuously which is the classic drawn-out BEEEEEEEE-of the dead guy in the movie/TV show.
That’s the same car Yuri drove to pick up Faz from outside Read Hall. It’s probably hers.
Toedead’s green Kia Forte Koup was totaled in the rollover accident from the last time he attempted kidnapping Becky. If it’s not in a wrecking yard, it’s being held in evidence at a police impound.
Good thing Mike wasn’t conscious to see you not be there for him, Amber! That’d be just like the thing with the teacher before huh!
I was genuinely expecting that parallel and this is a relief in a way but.. Amber really got “off the hook” given that Mike wouldn’t understand her absence. He could have possibly been jaded for the millionth time.
This came out like I’m mad at Amber, when I’m really just like ‘whooo boy luck saved you from another bump in the friendship road you would feel bad about caused by no fault of your own.’
Mike specifically pushed them away because he saw the threat level of Amber’s dad. Pretty sure he’d understand a distance play. As he seems to be aware AG and Amber are separate I think there would be double understanding.
Definitely in a coma, probably not fully cognizant.
Not a doctor, but I think this is evidence of brain trauma setting in. He was speaking a lot more clearly right after the fall. Maybe brain swelling? In that case they’d do emergency surgery to relieve the pressure, which would explain the huge bandage.
This is one of those weird American things about having to pay to get into an emergency room, isn’t it? Though I suppose it could just be so the hospital knows who he is…
Hospitals have to admit pretty much everyone. They figure out how much they’re going to charge after the dust settles and they figure out which insurance company you’re under. Sometimes that number gets hyperinflated, so they can make a “deal” with the insurance company so on paper the company sees a big percentage off to make the shareholders happy, but the hospital ends up charging as much as they would have anyway.
This has a happy, happy bonus of greatly increasing medical costs for anyone WITHOUT insurance (or, say, who has to go out of network because there was no in-network emergency room within a hundred miles).
Hospitals get to keep doing their thing and sometimes get extra money, big insurance companies get to construct a cartel out of something that people will pay any price for, and their shareholders watch the stock price go through the roof. Everyone who was in on the deal wins. Hurray capitalism.
Moral of the story: A public option is communism and therefore unAmerican.
The “capital” in “capitalism” has two meanings: it’s both “money” and the level of punishment you get for the heinous crime of not having enough of it.
The emergency room has to treat everyone. Other hospital services, not so much.
And they only have to stabilize you. Once it’s no longer an emergency and you can be released, you’re on your own if you can’t pay. Even if that leads you to wind up back in the emergency room for lack of follow-up care or a relatively cheap medication.
This also leads to people without insurance using the emergency room for routine care, which is the most expensive way for the hospital to provide it.
In this case though, as He Who Abides says, the intent was to keep him anonymous so Blaine (and his corrupt cops) wouldn’t be able to find him.
Yeah, pretty sure it’s about ensuring the hospital doesn’t know who he is, actually. If she keeps his wallet, he’s anonymous, and that much harder to find by people who would do him harm to get to her.
So… the hospital staff knew who he was. Did no one contact Ruth to let her know that, yeah, by the way, this entire day one of your students has been in coma here. Just FYI
Huh, and I had almost convinced myself that the gang had just been imagining Mike the whole time, while he’s studying at UIndy and is blissfully unaware of all this drama.
General, pedantic note: Nothing in a hospital room goes “boop boop boop boop”. I spent all of last year in and out of ERs and Hospitals helping to care for a cancer patient. I was surprised (for some reason) that Hollywood got it wrong. Though I’ll admit, it does help communicate the idea of what’s happening sonically.
No, the thing I hate about hospital rooms is the deafening, soul shattering silence when you sit for hours with someone who you are just about certain will never speak to you again. That’s the hard part…
“No, the thing I hate about hospital rooms is the deafening, soul shattering silence when you sit for hours with someone who you are just about certain will never speak to you again. That’s the hard part…”
Amen to that! It’s like nothing’s going on outside the door. It’s a surprise when the nurse comes in and it’s a different nurse than the last few times the nurse came in.
In the ER, you’re likely to have some noises, such as a ventilator if you’re on one, the automatic blood pressure cuff that will turn on every ten minutes or so to get your BP, or an IV or morphine pump that will make a noise when it kicks in. In the regular room, not so much so unless you are still on an IV or morphine pump.
Hospital beeping is a TV convention. Like you know you’re in a wilderness because there’s a hawk’s cry. Hawks also live in cities and aren’t that verbal, because they’re hunters. But if someone is in a semi-wild place, there is immediately a hawk’s call because its a video shorthand.
Or if the show is based in a submarine, you hear the sonar ping noise. If you hear that in real life, you can expect to have a close personal relationship with a torpedo very shortly.
Okay, but, in that last panel- is she hiding a yawn, eating skittles, or contemplating whether or not it’s worth stealing his ventilator to take it for a spin?
’cause those are really the only interpretations of that posture that I can come up with.. 😛
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bust freds
I was about to make a job about having some “bust Freds” in my day… but I have never actually had sexual contact with anyone named Fred.
Unfortunate that my past lovers failed to step up and have the correct names to land a joke on the internet.
The bastards.
Progeny of an unwed canine.
Th bst rds.
“Busted Freds”, a Right Said Fred cover band.
boop
boop
boop
booooooooooooooooo
Don’t you fucking dare.
Having spent more time than I care to in hospitals with people on boop boop machines, I can say that Hollywood has lied to you – 95% of the time, when the machine goes “booooooo” it’s because something came unstuck or slipped out of place or some other entirely mundane reason.
If it’s a foetal heart one, if that happens too much and they’re worried during labour, they safety pin one to the baby’s scalp.
they WHAT
This is true and I was horrified when I saw it on my new son.
They did ask before doing it to my daughter. And before redoing it coz the first one came off… And the bit where we were in back to back labour and she had the cord around her neck, and they needed to use salad tongs* to get her out was probably more traumatic for her, all things considered? And the massive bruise from said tongs over her face was a lot more obvious… She was still the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. (My oldest. Middle one slithered out on the picotin drip, youngest tried to come out elbow first and was an extended emergency C section, around the time we were entering lockdown.)
*Not actual salad tongs 😉
Can confirm! Teh Heir and Littlol both had them.
Teh Heir will be 30 and still has a tiny scar where no hair grows.
Congrats on the new little!
My first was an emergency c-section at a Children’s Hospital, then taken immediately to her own little OR next door to be intubated. Poor thing went through so much. (She’s fine now.) I just had baby #2 this January. Easy as pie, I had no idea things could NOT be traumatic!
Congratulations on your one too 😀
I have to say that the hospital did an amazing job. It was only after we were home with my first that I really grasped that they weren’t just erring on the side of caution, and that she had been really distressed.
My husband had me laughing during my C section – he did a fab job of keeping me calm. Again, the midwife and doctors were amazing. Number 3 spent most of his first day in a high dependency ward – he breathed in some merconium – but he did really well. In fact, he did so well that when somebody reviewed his charts they decided that he could stop the IV antibiotics and removed the cannulas. Unfortunately they forgot to check his X-ray… So I got to spend at least 45 minutes on (British) Mother’s Day watching them try to re-cannulate my three day old baby so he could complete the course (eventually they gave up and prescribed oral antibiotics). THAT was pretty traumatic – my tiny baby shrieking frantically with pain and terror… (Midwife confirmed, when we were back up on the ward and I was sobbing about this, that it’s horrible enough when it isn’t your baby.)
You just spoiled the joke for the next strip.
Doctor: I don’t understand, I’ve never seen the boop boop machine do this!
Technician or something idk: What do you mean?
Mike’s heart machine: boob boob booooooooob butt
Mike’s machine lights up with a red sign that says: “Insert another nickel.”
Mem’ry
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
Life was beautiful then
I remember
The time I knew what happiness was
Let the Mem’ry live again
*joins in*
Probably the best individual song in Webber’s history with the stage I feel (Music of the Night is the only one that comes close, though it is also way more dependent on who is singing it). Much as i love Betty Buckley’s rendition, I have multiple recordings, on CDs bought decades ago now, that I also dearly love including, funny enough, both Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford.
Though that is a great song, Webber wrote so many great musicals i cannot decide which of his songs I like best. His early works were more tongue in cheek.
I have heard that song for years. There’s a video of the stage production. When Betty sang that song, and I finally heard it in context, I cried.
Ah yes, the only video release of Cats.
They should do a fully animated, Dreamworks/Pixar-esque version. Don’t try to CG live actors in suits, that’s just weird. It will just come out like an even more unsettling Cat in the Hat (the live action one with Mike Myers).
The concept art looks really good; too bad the studio folded: https://catsmusical.fandom.com/wiki/Animated_Film
Kinda Tim Burton, and apparently T. S. Eliot didn’t want his story to be adapted into a bright, colorful cartoon…
That would work!
… an had yur mum… fr nickel…
beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep
You know the head injury must be bad if he’s talking crazy like this.
This makes so much more sense! Head injury Mike=Drunk Mike in niceness. Mike is like a reverse Phineas Gage.
NO LAST WORDS, NO DYING ALLOWED
Can’t die if you don’t say last words.
[Roll Safe guy tapping on his head meme]
[Tries and failed at finding the one where he is holding his head in his lap while doing so]
[It’s a Monty Python thing]
The only Safe Guy I know is the enemy in Evil Within.
But he does bang on his head and even respawns when killed so…it still works? Kinda?
I’m with AG. No last words! No last words that are going to fuck with them forever!… I know that would be fitting, but you are making at least ONE earnest attempt to be less of an asshole, don’t ruin it with years of guilt on top of the trauma pile!
If there is one moment where I’d expect to be free of having to cradle my vigilante cape friend’s tattered psyche, it would be on my death bed, after having fought in her war.
Nice typo on the username there, me. There’s a comment awaiting moderation now, but to restate: Mike has admitted to consciously fucking with Amber (the stairway fight, and given his realization afterwards I do think he was sincere when he said that one) and made comments that have definitely made it worse (in the aftermath of the dorm fight on Freshman Family Weekend, ‘if you’re doomed to repeat your parents’ pattern but never pick jerks, which of them does that make you?’ Even if there WAS a benign intention there, the phrasing played straight into Amber’s self-doubt and made the Amber Bad/AG Good dichotomy really ramp up. Given he admitted to fucking with her intentionally, I feel safe saying he DIDN’T mean it purely benignly and missed the mark.)
I feel like, after you’ve spent years knowingly making someone’s mental state worse for kicks, you do in fact owe them some consideration in a positive way for once! He’s not in a good state to do it but I can still call it a dick move on the part of this fictional character because it would still be playing into his pattern of cruelty and occasional acknowledgement of friendship so they stay on the hook.
(I can cite Mike admitting to that one too, but since it was just last storyline I’m going to single out the oldest and most coloring-my-opinion-of-Mike comic.)
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/ensnared/
But see, I don’t think Mike is a “pure” a$$hole, much as he may try to be or as he alt-timeline could have been. This Mike is still a teenager, and there has been decent evidence that he has had well-buried romantic-ish feelings for each/both of his best friends over time which could lead to him feeling hurt/jealous/waadyameanofcourseIdontreallylikeyou! (Think of how he reacted after he and Ethan had sex and Ethan was super casual about it.) I think the comment you mentioned during parents’ weekend was at least in part a subconscious jealousy towards Danny. That doesn’t make it less jerky, but perhaps more typical teenagery.
Sure. He’s still admitted he was ‘poking Amber’s bear for years,’ in part, because he wants her upset. (‘She’s multiple time bombs. Just wind her up and point her Dadwards.’)
Once you have that as your motive even a LITTLE, I judge. And I suspect that’s part of your motive in ANY interaction like that. So, again: he REALLY owes Amber some positive consideration for her mental wellbeing.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/02-to-remind-you-of-my-love/zeal/
Being Mike you cannot really be sure topping the trauma pile is not among his intentions.
Yr Mm…
Nkl…
“Good, you are yourself again”
Amazing. His attempted last words weren’t about his listener’s mother.
His first attempt was.
When your friend’s dying but he’s calling you his friend, but he was an asshole, but also tried defending you, but also could be shitty, but it was clear his disillusionment with the injustices in the world were taking a strong mental toll on him.
Now I’m falling asleep, and she’s calling a cab, and he’s having a smoke, and she’s taking a drag
But I still wanna know why he was wearing her dress? ;D
THANK you god BLESS
He said she was “taking a drag” he didn’t say where to.
I think overall Mike was a good person, he was just a good person who REALLY enjoyed fucking with people. When push comes to shove he always did the right thing
yaaaay feelings are complicated
Alexa, play “The Death of Optimus Prime”.
Alexa, Play Could we start again, please?
SUCH PATHOS!!
The Importance Of Being Earnest
A+
Seeing trash lad in pain is surprisingly bad
Get better trash lad
I’m pullin’ for you trash lad
wait guys is he dying
Is a song forever?
Of course he is. He’s alive.
WHY DOESN’T THIS COMMENT SYSTEM HAVE A WAY TO UPVOTE?!
+1
Mike, goddammit, you are not allowed to pull redemption equals death.
Mike would be an asshole and do that, it’s all the reward of redemption, with half the effort.
Seriously. Most asshole way to do something half decent for once in his life.
For one thing, it would be a terrible way to ‘resolve’ the narrative problem of Mike. I expect better of Willis.
This is why I trust that he will not die.
What I been saying since January. Willis is too good a writer to kill off Mike at the very start of his redemption arc
I really hope Mike pulls through and isn’t permanently affected by this. Besides the obvious effects of not jumping off any more buildings and any mental trauma associated with almost dying.
Willis wouldn’t kill 2 characters in such a short time, right?
I think it’s going to change him quite a bit.
Like, he won’t stop being an asshole, but he’s not going to be mean for the hell of it either.
They say who you are drunk is who you are with all the masks torn off. Remember in SP! Drunk Mike was the Nice Mike. Some parts of the SP! and IW! characters from the Walkyverse stayed the same in the Dumbiverse and it seems that Mike is also playing a character all the time in the Dumbiverse.
unless he gets double mean and uses ‘I almost died saving my friend’ to make anyone who calls him mean feel like the asshole
it would be especially cruel to us readers, in that he said he was breaking some of his rules, and we all got to go, “phew, it was just ross that died”
and then we’d have mike’s death sneak up on us
*sees panel three* *sees panel five* More blood is a good sign, right? 😬
It means his heart is still beating. That’s the way being dead eventually saved my life with the giant hole blown in my lower leg from the wreck. With no pulse pushing blood out of the massive hole in my leg from where the truck hit me that meant I still had most of it still inside when they scraped me off the street and didn’t start really bleeding again until I was in the ambulance with the EMT there to control the bleeding.
So more blood on the outside of the head means he’s Not Dead Yet, and also that’s less intracranial bleeding because there is an escape for the blood to not put pressure on his brain.
Head wounds are known to bleed dramatically, you’ll bleed a gallon from scratching your forehead
I can vouch for that. Had a crash on my bike and my glasses gouged me on the side of my head. Just a bad scratch that didn’t even require stitches, but from the amount of blood you’d have thought someone had tried to brain me with an axe.
Well this confirms he’s gonna live. Mike’s last words are gonna be something implying sexual intercourse with someone’s mother.
Don’t be so sure. I would absolutely expect Mike to have a last will that distributes all the audio recordings of the various mother sexes he’s had.
“And for you, Amber O’Malley, he left enough insurance money to make sure your flash drive got an extra 2 GB of space, but it turns out in the months since his last visit he ended up going over his expected space so we just made sure to pick out the boring parts to get the rest to fit.”
Come on, Mike. You can beat this.
I’ve always disliked phrases like this for issues with your body that you literally cannot control.
Mike gets to the Pearly Gates and gets the “You weren’t good enough for Heaven, but you weren’t bad enough for Hell, so we are sending you back for a while” speech.
Curse you Willis, I literally just cried. I’ve been waiting like 15 years for make to say something so loving to Amber and it had to under such gut wrenching circumstances. Guuuuuh. :'(
Mike*
Mike will say whatever you don’t want to hear at that moment, even if it’s true.
Especially if it’s true.
Sometimes Mike hurts you by not giving you the fight you want.
There is something really… pathetic – and I try to say that as non-condesending I can – in that the only people Mike counts as friends are the misfits from highschool that keep tolerating him.
I have found him uninteresting for the longest time, but I think the self destructive elements of his nihilism are really starting to make him an interesting paralell to amazi-girl.
Yeah, I am way more interested in a Mike that lives, keeps the realization he had that he was way too much like Blaine and he’s not comfortable with that, and starts actually grappling with the ways his edgelordiness have made his life worse along with everyone else around him. ‘Asshole Sage’ Mike is irritating even when he’s not being pointlessly mean with NO possible spin.
Yeah… I have a bit of a problem with that.
Is it possible that he didn’t already know that? That being a mean-spirited jerk makes things worse?
I always read it as some sort of dare to the universe and the people around him. “Yeah, that’s right. I’m a jerk. What are you gonna do about it?” and an endless dissapointment when no one does anything about it. The problem is of course that haven proven that point …then what?
Interesting. I hadn’t thought about it this way before, but it adds a fascinating take to that time he pointed out that he gets away with things because he’s a white male. The fact he recognizes that means that he recognizes the inherent injustice there, but instead of joining a BLM march, he pushes as if he wants to see how far he can get on that, and hates the fact no one ever stops him. (Bearing in mind that he’s a masochist, it’s a fair assumption that he’d like to be stopped.)
Of course, the one time he did do the equivalent of joining a BLM march, when he pointed out to the teacher that she didn’t believe Amber because she’s a girl, he got physically thrown out of a room, which may have had some impact on why he doesn’t make his point openly anymore.
Yeah, that’s a bit like my take on him.
He sees the wrongs, but the one time he tried to do something about it, it failed. Now he doesn’t know what to do. It doesn’t help that he by nature and choice is a jerk that needlessly antagonizes people.
There are some paralells to Sal – who also tried and failed – and amazi-girl – who also tries to combine righting wrong and working through her own baggage in a not always perfect manner.
Yeah, basically I agree, I’ve said something like this before: I don’t think he actually *enjoys* hurting people, rather, he reads very much like someone who actually feels quite a bit of empathy for people, enough that it’s painful for him but acts like a jerk because he doesn’t know how else to deal with that feeling. Kind of like yelling at others, “stop being an idiot, it’s hurting me too!” His realization with Blaine was that whatever his intent/motivation, his behavior has been not very different from someone who actually *doesn’t* care.
It’s the Tump MO, except Mike is hoping he DOESN’T get away with it.
He probably spends a lot of time thinking “For fuck’s sake you morons, why aren’t you doing anything to stop me?”
I think he did realize it on at least some level, because yeah, he’s self-aware that he gets off easier with his shit by virtue of being a white guy. I think the direct realization was less that he’s a jerk and doesn’t particularly enjoy it, more ‘I’m a jerk who justifies himself the same way THIS GUY does,’ and that any ‘it’s for their own good’ he’d been trying falls flat as a result.
Mostly I just want Mike to actively change his behavior more than I want another character dying. He realized it made him unhappy. I think he realized Amber and Ethan don’t actually trust him anymore not to have an ulterior, malicious motive. (At the very least, he noticed they’re pulling away.) Neither of those really sunk in before the stairway fight. If ‘I’m using the same justification as THAT abusive turd, shit’ actually caused some change and not just a single grand, dying gesture, great! But if it was that single grand gesture… well, it’s better than keeping on being a manipulative jerk, but it kind of feels less like redemption equals death and more like ‘I’ve fucked up too much to even try fixing things, may as well give my death a purpose.’ Which is DEEPLY sad. And well… how do you trust even a dying ‘best friends’ when the guy’s admitted he’d say they were friends five percent of the time to keep hope alive? I don’t want Mike fucking with Amber’s psyche anymore than he has already, not when he’s said he did so intentionally before.
Yeah, this pretty much sums it up. I do have to say I’m not entirely sure where Willis can go with Mike after this, without losing his essential Mikeness, but I hope he’s got something up his sleeve.
It’d be difficult, but we do know ways he’s weaponized his asshole for, if not totally good, at least more benefit than detriment (Walky had to scramble after the ‘HAIL SATAN’ Mike pulled, but it did effectively distract Carol from the Becky matter! I call that one a win.) So I think it’s possible, just a matter of ‘Would Willis do this and pull it off?’
Honestly I think it’s entirely possible Mike survives, gets to have a meaningful talk with Amber and Ethan, and then leaves the strip due to lengthy convalescence.
After the encounter with Amber’s dad pushing him against the wall in school, I thought the keeping people away was his way of keeping them safe at the cost of closeness. It looks like he has no chinks to an outside observer, so he can do what he can inbetween the lines. I think he’s still awful and I don’t think that the reasoning makes him anymore complex.
another paralell is Billie who also entered college clinging to the memory of her glory days with no willingness to change. She was knocked down and forced to develop almost immediately (even if the self destructiveness is still there), but Mike was strong and detached enough to stay in his self-imposed “too cool to care” bubble while the rest of his peers moved on. Even finally scoring with his childhood crush did nothing to elevate his lack of motivation.
another example would be Walky, although he was shaken out of that state with the drop of a monkey.
Did we just get a code blue? Trying to figure out the booping.
Heart monitor.
It found Mike’s.
I think that is just the heart monitor, it would be a code blue if it was just one longe boooooooooooooooooooooooop
Repeated boops are good, that indicates the peak of the EKG readout caused by the contraction of the heart muscle. When there are no more peaks the audio makes the boop continuously which is the classic drawn-out BEEEEEEEE-of the dead guy in the movie/TV show.
Continued booping is generally good. Cessation of booping is bad.
It usually means some idiot just accidently kicked out the power cord.
alt text is right i live for mike being genuine content
DAMMIT, WILLIS!
*nose boop*
not “magical nose beepage”?
*HYPERVENTILATES IN ANXIETY*
GEEZ MIKE
READ THE ROOM
The content I’m clamoring for is when Joyce confronts her mother
“Ur my hrro.”
It’s when he follows that up with “yr … th’wind … b-b’neath …” that Amber realizes he’s fucking with her.
I’m genuinely surprised that those weren’t red panels.
Today’s comic strip title looks rather Welsh language-y, by the by. Wonder what this portents?
You have to admire a language where W is a vowel. It goes its own way!
She used her dad’s own car ? Or was it Toedad’s ?
That’s the same car Yuri drove to pick up Faz from outside Read Hall. It’s probably hers.
Toedead’s green Kia Forte Koup was totaled in the rollover accident from the last time he attempted kidnapping Becky. If it’s not in a wrecking yard, it’s being held in evidence at a police impound.
Good thing Mike wasn’t conscious to see you not be there for him, Amber! That’d be just like the thing with the teacher before huh!
I was genuinely expecting that parallel and this is a relief in a way but.. Amber really got “off the hook” given that Mike wouldn’t understand her absence. He could have possibly been jaded for the millionth time.
This came out like I’m mad at Amber, when I’m really just like ‘whooo boy luck saved you from another bump in the friendship road you would feel bad about caused by no fault of your own.’
Mike specifically pushed them away because he saw the threat level of Amber’s dad. Pretty sure he’d understand a distance play. As he seems to be aware AG and Amber are separate I think there would be double understanding.
I still don’t quite get why you think Mike would expect her to stay. It’s not like Blaine and Toedad were no longer a threat.
Is he “in a coma” or is he just “unconscious”? Is there a difference? Is a coma simply not *stopping* being unconscious for a long time? I need info.
From Google:
“a state of deep unconsciousness that lasts for a prolonged or indefinite period, caused especially by severe injury or illness”
Coma is just a really long unconsciousness where you can’t wake them up from so yes Mike is currently in a Coma.
But that doesn’t mean he has to be in a coma for a long time you can be in a coma for like 2 days lmao
Definitely in a coma, probably not fully cognizant.
Not a doctor, but I think this is evidence of brain trauma setting in. He was speaking a lot more clearly right after the fall. Maybe brain swelling? In that case they’d do emergency surgery to relieve the pressure, which would explain the huge bandage.
The content YOUR MOM has been clamoring for
Dumbing of Age Book 10: You’re Being Earnest and It’s Frightening
Good friends… Bst frds…. *falls into coma*
*wakes up* … with YOUR MOM
“I’ve got your wallet”.
This is one of those weird American things about having to pay to get into an emergency room, isn’t it? Though I suppose it could just be so the hospital knows who he is…
Pretty sure its the latter.
Hospitals have to admit pretty much everyone. They figure out how much they’re going to charge after the dust settles and they figure out which insurance company you’re under. Sometimes that number gets hyperinflated, so they can make a “deal” with the insurance company so on paper the company sees a big percentage off to make the shareholders happy, but the hospital ends up charging as much as they would have anyway.
This has a happy, happy bonus of greatly increasing medical costs for anyone WITHOUT insurance (or, say, who has to go out of network because there was no in-network emergency room within a hundred miles).
Hospitals get to keep doing their thing and sometimes get extra money, big insurance companies get to construct a cartel out of something that people will pay any price for, and their shareholders watch the stock price go through the roof. Everyone who was in on the deal wins. Hurray capitalism.
Moral of the story: A public option is communism and therefore unAmerican.
If said individuals can’t pay those costs, the hospital will just roll them into the cost of their overhead for everybody else.
FrEe mARkeT capitaLiSm, BAbY!
The “capital” in “capitalism” has two meanings: it’s both “money” and the level of punishment you get for the heinous crime of not having enough of it.
The emergency room has to treat everyone. Other hospital services, not so much.
And they only have to stabilize you. Once it’s no longer an emergency and you can be released, you’re on your own if you can’t pay. Even if that leads you to wind up back in the emergency room for lack of follow-up care or a relatively cheap medication.
This also leads to people without insurance using the emergency room for routine care, which is the most expensive way for the hospital to provide it.
In this case though, as He Who Abides says, the intent was to keep him anonymous so Blaine (and his corrupt cops) wouldn’t be able to find him.
I believe AG wanted to keep Mike anonymous, and men tend to keep their ID in their wallets.
Yeah, pretty sure it’s about ensuring the hospital doesn’t know who he is, actually. If she keeps his wallet, he’s anonymous, and that much harder to find by people who would do him harm to get to her.
So… the hospital staff knew who he was. Did no one contact Ruth to let her know that, yeah, by the way, this entire day one of your students has been in coma here. Just FYI
Mike doesn’t live on Ruth’s floor. His RA is the laid back trekkie guy, I think?
Yup, it is.
Probably contacted Mike’s next of kin, though.
I don’t think so: She dropped him off anonymously and she kept his wallet with his ID.
ah got it. I read it wrong two different ways.
Inside Amber’s head, Brain!AG is replaying these memories for Brain!Amber on a big viewscreen.
Brain!AG: THIS is what I was TRYING to tell you about yesterday.
Brain!Amber: *Silently watching in horror exactly the same as the last panel*
Because Amber doesn’t already have enough trauma in her life due to her mental health issues.
Huh, and I had almost convinced myself that the gang had just been imagining Mike the whole time, while he’s studying at UIndy and is blissfully unaware of all this drama.
Mike’s last words are good. What a relief.
Do people finally get him?
He is an asshole but that never meant he didn’t care
He is an asshole
i won’t say he was
you are crying…
General, pedantic note: Nothing in a hospital room goes “boop boop boop boop”. I spent all of last year in and out of ERs and Hospitals helping to care for a cancer patient. I was surprised (for some reason) that Hollywood got it wrong. Though I’ll admit, it does help communicate the idea of what’s happening sonically.
No, the thing I hate about hospital rooms is the deafening, soul shattering silence when you sit for hours with someone who you are just about certain will never speak to you again. That’s the hard part…
At this point it’s just a Hollywood shorthand trope for “this person is in serious medical danger”.
“No, the thing I hate about hospital rooms is the deafening, soul shattering silence when you sit for hours with someone who you are just about certain will never speak to you again. That’s the hard part…”
Amen to that! It’s like nothing’s going on outside the door. It’s a surprise when the nurse comes in and it’s a different nurse than the last few times the nurse came in.
In the ER, you’re likely to have some noises, such as a ventilator if you’re on one, the automatic blood pressure cuff that will turn on every ten minutes or so to get your BP, or an IV or morphine pump that will make a noise when it kicks in. In the regular room, not so much so unless you are still on an IV or morphine pump.
Hospital beeping is a TV convention. Like you know you’re in a wilderness because there’s a hawk’s cry. Hawks also live in cities and aren’t that verbal, because they’re hunters. But if someone is in a semi-wild place, there is immediately a hawk’s call because its a video shorthand.
Unlike crows, which are ‘effin EVERYWHERE
Or if the show is based in a submarine, you hear the sonar ping noise. If you hear that in real life, you can expect to have a close personal relationship with a torpedo very shortly.
I guess Mike is like an onion, he has layers.
That is my first and hopefully last time I quote Shrek.
The big question is if Mike dies, who will he pass the Matrix of Snark to?
To The Unshadow, of course.
So when he talks about good friends, best friends. Is he talking about Amber and Ethan, or is he talking about Amber and Amazi-Girl?
Renée. She’s supposed to be female Mike so maybe she can upgrade from negging.
it’s okay I didn’t need my heart anyway
Mike: Even as I fell I knew I wouldn’t die.
AG: oh? I thought he was the only one who’s immortal.
Mike: I’ve always known, I’ll die fucking your mom.
Okay, but, in that last panel- is she hiding a yawn, eating skittles, or contemplating whether or not it’s worth stealing his ventilator to take it for a spin?
’cause those are really the only interpretations of that posture that I can come up with.. 😛
🙁