Thank you for the link. I completely missed this, despite having it on my MWF comic list. I suspect I just tried to see the comic before it was posted that day, and then next comic fit so well with the one before this, I didn’t think I needed to go back a page to see what I missed.
I just continuously cycle through the front pages of the comics that I follow that fall under the “irregulars” heading in my head. S*P, Atomic Robo, Nerf Now, xkcd, all those.
I’m still worried but I’m not convinced till I see Ethan and/or Amber standing over a tombstone with words written on it saying “Here lies Mike, always willing to give somebody’s mother the business for a nickel.”
What, Walky AND Lucy both being unable to ask other people out? Daniel the Human noticed that possibility a while ago. Said something about “spotting someone in the same boat as him”, whatever that means…
There was a more timely, and definitely more recent!, hint: look at yesterday’s strip, where Walky’s bed is (mostly) made, and Mike’s is most assuredly not.
And as for shock and awe: does the new semester mean an end to the Garbage Roof (what with all those falling leaves and other nature scenes 🙂 ) and the “romance” between Walky and Amber/AG?
….Oh wait, you already did. Oh well. Pity, I did find the juxtaposition of Mike’s history and present behaviour some of the most interesting character building in the comic.
For any girls or women or boys or men or other thinking of asking a guy out:
If you want him to understand you, you MUST BE BLUNT. Anything else other than “Do you want to go out with me?” carries a very high probability of being not understood in the way you intend.
If you are a guy and think you may be getting asked out, make it blunt and reask, “Are you asking me out?” but please be kind and sympathetic. A yes is great, but if you’re going to say no, this person has now put their heart on the line and it is unkind to be needlessly cruel in rejecting them. Blunt yes, to be sure there’s no misunderstanding or false hope, but not cruel.
Yes. “No one could be that dense or clueless.” is one of those statements that isn’t ever true.
I don’t know if it applies to Walky, but there is also the 2nd order problem where once you’ve been wrong a few times you overreact in the other direction, assuming you are just wrong again like last time.
So, …. …uhh… if he was eighteen years old, in ten years
Would that explain the comic’s time dilation? Or not? Cause the extent of dilation seems a log function or something Math-y.
That code is already broken, since it appears he died last year. Also, returning current year or last year to the headstone won’t work as relative execution of the code will start returning different answers over the life of the code. It’s a special case and needs to be handled but a function to return based on the doaYear.
Huh, Mike would be proud, he has now become the basis for calendaring in doa.
🙂 Maybe, until sometime in realworld 2044/2045 when, based on the current time dilation (including timeskips) this year’s last year becomes the next year’s 2 years ago.
I agree that BWD and AW seem to be a reasonable calendar for DOA. 👍
Well, October is booked by something called a Bearricane, I think it’s like a Sharknado, and in November we have the election, but I think we just might be able to squeeze the martians in by Christmas.
That was an equivalent of a movie scene where you see a character flooring the gas pedal, and you think the car’s giving it all she’s got, but then boost button is pressed and the character is forced into the seat with a new burst of acceleration. That, but with taking a dead roommate joke too far.
He’s still putting them out, rarely but they’re there. His new work is quite inspired however, and in a completely new direction. See Depression Comix. Rarely funny, but very poignant and insightful.
Danny is very much an asshole when he feels justified in being so to the point I would stop being friends with him if I ever witnessed it myself. Danny is both a good egg in that he is generally kind, sensitive, and a goofus but also an absolute ass in that while his flaws rarely come up, they run deep. The issue is not just his approach, but his justifications for choosing that approach, his unwillingness to back down and letting his desire to be RIGHT matter more than being SENSITIVE because of his own feelings about it.
Seriously. Remember how everyone was like ‘oh you’re overreacting, Danny’s not actually saying he wishes Mike would die?’
Always remember the worst-case scenario before you say something to someone in a hospital! Because even if Danny didn’t mean it (and I don’t think he did,) he assuredly feels like SHIT now that it’s happened, and Ethan has every right to be pissed about it! (Hell, so does Amber.)
B) No major deaths was because the mourning period would last forever and nobody would want to read it. The several month time skip neatly jumps over the rawest part for Amber and Ethan and most of the mourning for everyone else.
Just because you considered Mike major though doesn’t mean Willis did. He had a storyline in the limelight but before that he only appeared every so often and not often in a major role.
He specifically said no deaths of major/main (don’t remember exact wording) characters. Minor ones were always on the table. And again, he explained his rationale for the rule as the mourning would go on forever. Blaine won’t be mourned much, Ross would only be mourned in complicated ways by Becky and Joyce, and Mike is only debatably a main character.
Yeah but his death affects several of the main casts and tbh a few months to mourn the loss of your best friend really won’t make that big a difference.
For a certain definition of rawest and depending on how close you were to the individual in question. Ethan and/or Amber may indeed still be in the worst of it.
Mike did not seem close now, but the flashbacks showed a sweeter Mike that cared much more openly and worked to help his friends out. Ethan and Amber won’t likely have a mental image that distances past Mike from recent past Mike.
There’s a distinct difference between “everyone is very focused on this” and “this is now a major part specifically of Ethan and Amber’s stories.” In much the same way that Becky’s storylines were very heavily influenced by her dad’s specific evils, and will be heavily influenced going forward by *his* death.
And where could Mike have gone from there? He’
Kind of hard to go back to being asshole Mike after realizing Amber is AG. Redemption arc would require making him a much more central character than Willis seemed to want to make him. He was enough of a one-trick pony that it would suck up a lot of oxygen to make anything more of him, so saving A/AG *was* his redemption arc.
I mean… “Redemption = Death” is definitely a thing that happens in writing; but in Mike’s case I’m not sure if his death *adressed* what he was doing wrong- Mike’s core conflict boiled down to “I help my friends in shitty ways that hurt them but lead to growth, but fundamentally that _form_ of help is problematic and also I have issues with intimacy.” Arguably, his death was the same as his life in a lot of ways- it was dramatic, agressive, and still didn’t really fix the problems around him so much as nudge them in a more fixable direction. How much more fixable is debatable- “Battle-Damaged Blaine” still neutralized Toedad pretty effectively- but it was less a redemption and more a continuation of his pattern.
Personally I’m biased, of course- I though mike’s brand of “deadpan asshole” was funnier than Malaya or Carla’s brands of being a jerk- but I do really think that Mike’s arc might’ve been cut short. Redemption isn’t just coming to terms with your actions potentially being a problem, it’s putting long term concerted effort into fixing them, mike’s last two acts of “goodness” were basically a grand gesture and being slightly-not-mean to danny
(Or in laymans terms, Mike got a “Vader” redemption instead of my preferred “Zuko” redemption) (also dang this is long welp too late to edit it now)
I suppose this would be a good way to keep Mike’s deadpan humor in the comic without the sticky problem of trying to redeem a character who did a lot of shitty things.
I’m of the opinion fictional characters don’t have to be 100% redeemed/make up for every bad thing they ever did to be likable/welcome in stories as anything other than Bad, because they are fictional, and fiction, while informed by, and influences reality, is still fiction. But I know not everyone shares that opinion and some people found him a very problematic character.
Although Joe’s still alive and kickin’ and on a possible redemption arc (and maybe Robin too?) so maybe that’s not why he was killed off. I dunno, we can only speculate.
The thing is, Joe and Robin have humanistic flaws that can be explored or deconstructed. Dunno if Willis is planning on focusing on that or not, but it’s possible (and we can do the heavy lifting here in the comments if he doesn’t). Mike, by contrast, is an asshole. That’s his primary character trait. And assholes rarely show genuine concern for being problematic. So with the direction and tone this comic wants to take, Mike is far more difficult to do all that much with without gutting already established character in not one but two universes. Or you just kill him.
I am also bummed Ethan apparently never gets to find out how Mike really felt about him. :/ It seemed like something was being built there with the whole “Mike tries to mess with a Ethan/Danny and get Ethan out of his shell for his own good” thing, only for it to backfire when Mike caught (or always had?) feelings and Ethan just wanted to sleep around.
Or maybe I really misread that whole storyline? I dunno, it just felt unfinished and now I am confused.
For me, that’s what makes this feel real. That’s how death works in the real words. Things just end without being finished and you have to deal with that.
I like stories that don’t have this “person x can’t die because their development/story isn’t finished” – safety net. But honestly, this is a whole lot darker than what I expected when I started reading a comic about a few teenagers.
I Kind of feel similar. Fiction can also be like life. In life, some people never change/never redeem themselves. Or they partially redeem themselves, like Mike.
It is common to conflate “redemption” and “repentance”, but they are not the same, the former is internal, the latter external. Anakin Skywalker was redeemed, in that he embraced the light side, but he never repented (and, frankly, the only form of repentance that would have sufficed would likely have been trial and execution.) Zuko was redeemed AND repented his actions by helping the Avatar.
Oddly, in the case of Mike (assuming he is dead), he may have achieved repentance without being redeemed, insofar as he didn’t really change, personality-wise–he was always an asshole who was nonetheless was willing to risk his life for his friends. Whether he even needed to be redeemed is an open question.
He did have that realization during the fight that he was using the same rationale for his shittiness that Blaine was. I was really interested to see where that would take him and how he would change. First time I’ve actually been interested in Mike as a character, but instead he died.
I don’t know about redemption, since that’s a story thing (or a religious one), but Mike definitely needed to change. Assholes may not need redemption or be able to achieve it, but they need to change and sometimes they can.
I didn’t say it was a *good* redemption arc! 😉
Mike is a difficult character to manage in an ensemble cast tale like this: he’s either so shallow as to be 2-dimensional or he’s so deeply complex that he needs to be a major, if not the major character to dig into him.
If he really is dead, I’d guess Willis thought he’d done as much with him as he could without turning him into a threadbare joke or as important as Joyce. So he killed him, allowing him to show he wasn’t completely awful.
Mike is a joke, that’s why he’s gone. He was not a major character, He was just an asshole who has the same punchline over and over and over. He got a bit of depth during his last arc to make everything make sense but he was never going to grow or change (he already did that in Shortpacked).
Jesus Christ Willis, I have been reading your comics for nearly fifteen years and you only grow more adept at making me feel things for fictional characters.
Why not? They have to start somewhere. If they like the writing and want to go on, they can go back to the beginning and catch up.
(I probably feel that way because I’m old. I grew up reading newspaper comic strips. If the paper added a strip that had already run for awhile elsewhere, or if people moved somewhere and the newspaper had different strips, we’d have to start reading midstream. If we wanted to find out what happened before, I guess we’d have to go to the library and read it on microfiche, unless there were books published of a run of the strips. )
OK, I remember microfiche. I can’t imagine using it to catch up on a comic strip. All that fiddling, placing the fiche in the reader, scanning back-forth-up-down (in reversed motion) to figure out where’s the page you want, to get to read one gray-blurry daily color-inverted image and then you’d have to do it all over with another fiche to read the next one… and the next…
Some guy did that for as much of Jim Davis’s pre-Garfield content he could find, and uploaded it all to Google Drive. Now we have all of Gnorm Gnat and a virtually forgotten proto-Garfield called “Jon” to read.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IG6y6FkMEQ4
(It’s a long video, but the most pertinent part begins around 44:30. Links to the microfilm scans are in the description.)
I salute his efforts; I don’t know if I would have had that kind of patience.
That’s like the various efforts to restore the original star wars prints. They keep doing the work the digitally cleanup the best prints they can find, then someone comes out of the woodwork with a cleaner original.
It’s possible Mr Davis has some of that content in original form, but a lot of it is as likely to be lost to time.
My first term my roommate left. Rather than get a random guy, I decided to move next door, where I guy I knew had a roommate not coming back. We both thought someone we knew was better than random chance.
(They had been called “The Crumpets” for silly reasons I won’t go into.)
But it turned out he’d flunked out, so I got to be single in a double room, plus with the cool lofts they’d built.
So my question is with Mike most likely now all dead and shit probably then who is that vaguely Mike shaped silhouette standing next to Sarah. I can’ t place them at all. Does Amber’s hallucination/ghost Mike actually warrant a spot in the cast photo?
….I…I really hope not. I do not want see more of that guy at all. The only reason I don’t hate him more than Walky is because he doesn’t have as much panel time.
And I guess Mike being dead would def explain the reason there’s no vaguely Ethan looking silhouette in the cast photo. He took that the worst I think I wouldn’t be surprised if he took off a semester or even dropped out. Not that the cast photo is at all a reliable source of information to begin with.
Also if I could crackpot theorize for a sec. Maybe the Mike we knew died but there’s a new Mike to take his place! Amnesia, secret clone, evil twin. sky’s the limit!
That silhouette is definitely still Mike. The back of the hair matches up with Mike’s too closely to be just a coincidence when giving people new hairstyles or something. Unless, of course, it’s actually a new character (or an old one with a new haircut) that Willis purposefully designed SPECIFICALLY to trick us.
I still think thats Mike. It wouldnt be off character for Walky to assume Mike died and not asking Amber about details both due to respect but also not realising how close they were. Mike’s parents probably picked up his stuff without him and might even have done so during classes to avoid people asking questions.
We’ll probably find out soon enough. Keep an eye on the blurry Patreon preview teasers, even when you’re not a subscriber you can usually make out which characters show up.
So walky’s comments and reactions don’t bode well for Amber still being around either … and with Mike gone, and her dad not paying her education, it’s even end more likely she’s left and gone elsewhere.
Ok first BS Mike is dead, that’s probably just Walky just assuming the worst so he doesn’t haft to feel bad if the worst happens.
Also Second Lucy I don’t know what to tell you but if he can’t get past Dorothy long enough to “give his heart” to the last girl he was romantically involved with it’s going hurt seeing you put yourself through this. But Who knows maybe two months is enough to get him over that.
I guess there’s room for Walky to be wrong. He’s not as connected to Mike as Amber would be and I doubt he even knows the full story of Mike’s condition or what happened to him. He’d have to be more diligent on the matter than he’s been shown to be to keep up to date on Mike’s true condition so he’s not a reliable source of information.
Most likely but considering Mike was hospitalized in a coma for an unknown amount of time between the semesters before his assumed death that’s more than enough reason for his parents to pull him out of school and pack up his stuff with him still alive. Would the school keep records of his condition at any point after that to inform Walky? I’m not saying it’s not what happened but there is still a lot of room for debate here and I think that’s the point of this scene. Until we cut to his gravestone I can’t 100 percent say he’s dead on Walky’s word alone.
Ah, now I see the reason for the time skip. No need to show people actually coming to terms with the death of a good friend, just show them already there.
Idk Willis, teasing this thing out forever and then dropping it like this feels kind of manipulative. I’m not particularly attached to fictional characters but this doesn’t sit right somehow so I think I’m gonna take a break from daily updates for a bit.
If I’m being honest, I’m kind of glad the whole “funeral/mourning” element got skipped over. Half, if not more, of the cast would have been pulling the same “I hated him but saying that would be an asshole thing to do” trope, and besides what else is there to say really that wasn’t already discussed?
Idc about cutting out the mourning period. Putting him in a coma before doing a timejump plus Mike shaped outline in new cast banner does set up some expectations for a plot twist though.
To clarify, I don’t care that main characters aren’t immune to death. Character deaths might be good for a story. I just don’t think teasing reader expectations with a potential character death just for a “psych!” moment is great.
I think Willis might have changed plans between writing Mike off a staircase and starting a new book. A lot has happened this year while the League of Evil Dads thread was in the buffer. Also (though this might be my perception being skewed by the fact that I didn’t like it myself) I don’t think that League of Evil Dads material was received as well as Willis might have liked.
I think the issue is the audience needing time to mourn- narrative catharsis, as it were. Mike being sustained as living until he wasn’t (and Amber’s assumption he’d be shot by the police being… difficult to determine how paranoid/practical it was due to recent events clashing with the strip’s general fatality levels) meant a lot of readers could easily be lead to assume he’d live- corrupt cops being one more challenge for Amazigirl to deal with.
Like to be honest, I think DoA’s “plot armor” for protagonists lead a lot of people to assume he’d be safe, so this probably caught some people off guard- I know it hit me sorta harder than normal because I was almost positive mike would live when willis didn’t kill him last arc. I liked that DoA didn’t kill chars. too much, too- it can be kind of stressful when you’ve know them for who knows how many years between multiple comics. But when something so major happens in universe, a lot of works (not GOT) go out of their way to help readers find closure- it feels like DoA will either skip that part; or we’ll end up seeing it manifested through Walky and Amber’s relative ineptitude at coping with things; and IDK how that fits with the “soft reboot/clean break” approach willis seems to be taking.
The thing is that when you are not going to kill characters you have to be very careful about letting the stakes or the level of conflict get too high.
Dunno whether I’m on the same page as you are. I find Joyce’s discovery of and adjustment to disbelief, Dina’s doomed love for Becky, Walky’s awakening awareness of his paren’ts’ flaws and his own obliviousness and so on — the “relationship stuff” — believable and compelling. But I find Mike’s cruelty and uncanny omniscience, Amazi-Girl’s ability to defy physics, EvilDad and his unworkable plan, the corrupt cops and so on — the adventure stuff — implausible, and I don’t really care about what happens in it. So if Willis is switching focus to the stuff I prefer, and if that requires pruning off some sticky story threads of the adventure component because threatened to overwhelm the more delicate material around them, and if abruptly writing out Mike and Lester during a time-skip is the alternative to ten real years of strips winding all that stuff neatly, then I’m not going to complain.
I mean, the adventure stuff did also serve a purpose – it’s a big emotional climax that has continuing fallout. (See Joyce’s crisis of faith being VERY MUCH informed by the fallout of the first kidnapping incident, see bailing Ross and defending him even after everything being the final straw for Hank.) But Blaine was definitely overescalating – thus, he HAD to die – and so AmbG got this opportunity to start sorting shit out in a big, spectacular fashion, and a character who wasn’t working anymore leaves the cast. (When our best case scenario was ‘coma after a serious fall, implying head trauma and probably SOMETHING broken,’ the recovery time was going to write him out regardless.)
I don’t think the high-stakes stuff is gone forever – Asher’s now set up as an antagonist – but it can definitely scale back dramatically now that Amber’s (presumably) gone through some serious mental health care. She was acknowledging she needed to before plural deaths, after all, so this might well be the shock to the system that AG would need to stop pulling serious sleep-deprivation shifts and getting involved in the stuff that’s less ‘risky’ and more ‘suicidal.’ No idea where they’ll be mentally once they reappear – AG’s not just leaving, and Willis designed the winter getup ages ago so I do want to see her use it – but they will DEFINITELY be different.
I think most commenters are joking when they say this is a headfake and Mike has gone into witness protection or something… but if that were the case it would be … worse actually? Like another level of reader deception the point of which I really can’t fathom…
Yeah. When Dumbing Of Age is good, it’s the best comic on the web; and it’s usually good, so I can accept a few Legion Of Evil Dads style storylines as the trade off, but… if Mike just turns out to be alive after all this, it’s going to be a bit much for me.
so we’re getting HeadMike instead, at least until Amber resolves all of her issues and trauma, which on the sliding timescale means…
(carry the 1…)
never?
Nah. He survived and healed fine. But then he hired an assassin to murder him as he walked out of the hospital just to fuck with Ethan who was with him.
Is this the true hidden meaning of the mysterious patterns of cars shifting around in the parking lot during the time-skip panels? What did the cars know? WHAT DID THE CARS KNOW??
Yeah, I’m in “when we see a grave or a body” territory with Mike. Could be Walky’s speaking metaphorically (I mean, being in a coma for months is in “might as well be dead” territory), could be that Mike did briefly die but was resurrected, could be misdirection, Willis has done this sorta thing before after all.
Ditto. I need a more reliable narrator than Walky to tell me.
I hope it’s not true. I enjoyed Mike as a character. But I’d understand if Willis thought he’d done all he could with the character and wanted to send him off in glory rather than be stuck with this two-dimensional character that just showed up to make snark every now and then.
It’s also been dragged out so long, it’s lost most of the impact for me. I’m vaguely annoyed by it, since I was interested in seeing how Mike would change after his realization during the fight, and now we’re just stuck with the heroic asshole thing.
It feels weird though. I guess it’s a subversion to not kill the character dramatically on screen, but to injure them, leave them in a coma and then let them die off screen to be casually mentioned later, but there are good reasons that’s normally how a character death is handled.
Yeah, three arcs was too long waiting for me as well. I can get why him dying wasn’t the last thing we saw before the timeskip, but we could have gotten the important stuff (Danny fucking up, Ethan being frustrated with Amber, massive amounts of guilt, ‘I would say what you need to’) with even a less ambiguous ‘they aren’t sure he will’ or some clear indication to the audience his parents weren’t just asking for privacy with their son, they were discussing options with doctors at at least one point and considering them. You can get most of them with him dying overnight between the kidnapping and Is A Song Forever, but that would have necessarily changed the tone of the entire arc and made the relatively hopeful note it ended on impossible, so I do get why that didn’t happen.
Given that there is a Mike-shaped form in the cast picture, it’s possible that Walky has been told Mike is dead when Mike is still alive somewhere having An Adventure.
I’m of the opinion that Lucy might not be being direct enough. Walky doesn’t seem to have gotten what she’s hinting at. Or he has and he’s just not into her, but I can’t be sure.
Or he’s tired and just back from spending weeks observing the little signs that his previously perfect parents are racist, and thinking about his dead roommate, which reminds him of being kidnapped and scared and seeing a man get beaten to death with a hammer.
IS there a Mike-shaped hole, though? I see Danny, and I see (probably) Joe, and one other guy, who MIGHT be Mike, but doesn’t look quite right. Unless his hair’s changed, which I guess is possible.
People like him are important, and often misunderstood. I told that to Willis when he offered me a free magnet while signig my books at a local comic store, and I picked Mike, because I liked him, flaws and all.
He’s on my fridge, even now, so at least he’s still somewhere.
Thanks for making a cool and complicated guy with a heart of gold coated in lead, Willis. I’m gonna miss him.
Same here. Well, not the magnet part. But ever since Shortpacked, I loved him even when I usually hate jerk characters. And I kind of had a candle for the possibility of him and Ethan actually making it as a couple in at least one universe.
Lucy, please find a scrap of dignity and just stop. If you’re going to cringe-worthy throw yourself at a guy, at least make him better worth it than Walky.
Also, “my roommate died” is not a great set-up for a come on.
“no one will die” — kills off Ross and Blaine.
“will probably never reach the end of the semester” — we are now in January of year 20XX + 1.
“no main character will die” — Walky announces that his roommate (Mike) is dead.
What other things has Willis been fibbing to us about? I betcha it turns out that he isn’t actually married; has only one child, not two (all those pictures showing “twins” are actually Photoshopped); and that child is actually the result of a drug-and-alcohol-fogged tryst between Willis and an out-of-control groupie one night following a book signing in someplace like Cleveland.
In fairness to Willis, before Ross and Blaine died, he mentioned breaking at least one of his major writing rules for DoA. I think we had fair warning, though most of us assumed he meant Mike died.
Yeah, especially since Ross and (so especially) Blaine were only going to be mourned by one or two characters each, and had exhausted their narrative purpose like that. (Blaine was never walking out of that arc alive.)
I’ll admit, I am lowkey disappointed Mike’s never going to ACTUALLY grapple with how much he fucked up Ethan and Amber’s psyches, ESPECIALLY Amber’s. But clearly, yeah, Willis wasn’t up for writing that arc and putting so much Mike in the limelight, and so Mike was better narratively served dying. Everyone else had a minute to grapple with the fact that they’re not immortal, there is that ‘sometimes people die without closure’ aspect, and that soft reboot includes time to grieve and a shifting of the strip away from a character who was so cartoonish.
The other thing is, that rule had come up ten years ago, or close. Probably not progressing semesters had been set ten years ago. A lot of things can change in that time about tone and planned character trajectory, and sometimes that includes a decision like ‘I don’t want to spend months on Halloween, I REALLY don’t want to worry about fall and winter breaks eventually, a time skip is appropriate here’ or… well, killing a character who’s been a major presence in the Walkyverse for twenty years because his schtick didn’t work in this universe, and it was more interesting to see how this impacted the more major characters tied to him.
Mike came out of his coma in mid-October, but was not moved back in with Walky because he needed physical therapy. He was moved into a room where he would have greater accessibility. He was wheelchair bound for a while, but is walking on his own now.
While Mike was moved out, Walky had another roommate move in at the end of October, one (*rolls dice*) Carter van Housen. Walky and Carter bonded quickly over a shared love of McNuggets and pizza. Carter — alas, we barely knew him — had an aneurysm a few days before the winter break, and Walky was alone again. And here we are.
I bet Walky’s “new” roommate will in fact be Mike again, now that Mike is walking again.
I think he’s just not thinking in that direction right now. He’s thinking about Mike – which has got to be hella conflicting. And probably about Amber – we don’t know what happened there, but it obviously didn’t work out for them and Mike’s likely tied into that.
Even if he and Amber ARE still a thing, I can’t imagine she’d want to spend time in this room, in particular, with that empty desk and bed.
Likely they’re not – wouldn’t be shocked if Amber was so emotionally shaken up in the aftermath that she couldn’t maintain even a casual relationship, just to name one possibility – but even if they were, he’d be coming back to this room alone eventually and it is fucking HAUNTED right now.
Look I’m not SAYING there’s still hope for a slipshine story where Mike, Danny and Ethan have a hospital bed threesome… but I’m not saying it’s IMPOSSIBLE either
It would require Willis to mess up consistently and catastrophically, both in the strip and in his reader interactions, leaving him with nothing but wild attempted short-term thinking fan-service as a method to bring back readers.
– Mike IS dead. There’s really no other way to get around that. And it’s not likely that Mike went home, was replaced by another roommate, and then HE died.
– It’s… not surprising that Mike died, for storyline reasons. Mike was always a toxic person, and his mere existence and attitude was kinda-barely OK, in a “wacky hijinks” late-2000s Walkyverse. Dumbing of Age is far more realistic, far more grounded, and so a perpetual jerk who constantly treats others like crap… just isn’t going to fly as well in 2020.
– Mike’s redemption arc was fulfilled. We saw his past, his present, his goals, and what was important to him. Despite his behavior, he was willing to sacrifice himself in so many ways for his friends. The major antagonist of his life, the one who was REALLY abusing his friends, has been defeated. Permenantly.
– With that, Mike got about as empathizable as he was ever going to get – and yet, in many ways, he’s STILL an abuser. You can’t un-Mike Mike, short of getting him drunk – and that’s self-abuse. There wasn’t anywhere else to go with Mike’s character. And dying to save his his friends is exactly how he’d choose to go.
– Mike is not gone from the comic strip. In fact, it’s fair to say we’re seeing a new beginning for the character, in a way- in Amber’s sub-conscious. I predict that we’ll still see many Mike strips in the future, specifically telling Amber exactly what she doesn’t want to hear about herself.
– WTF Lucy! Dang, girl, you may be my secret favorite character, but come on, you gotta let him know you’re interested, or move on. Fingers crossed that we’ll see more of you in the future, but realistically probably not a whole lot.
In some ways. We still have a superhero almost no one can recognize with her mask on, her dad who thought kidnapping a dozen people with mob help was a great way to get out of paying college tuition, Dina’s super-stealth ability…
it’s still more realistic. shortpacked had Historical Jesus in the main cast, a dimension-hopping alien, and a cat that was also some kind of space-time anomaly, among many other things. also mike had already died and been brought back, so
this is still a more realistic universe by a lot, imo
Shortpacked ended with an invasion of reality by the Soggies from old Captain Crunch ad campaigns, caused by ‘excess diversity’ opening a hole for an endless tide of indistinguishable white sludge. (Which our diverse team of toy store employees ended the series staring down, preparing to fight.) Shortpacked featured a physical tag in the world that was keeping drama from occurring, and we know this served a purpose because we eventually saw a universe where it hadn’t been pulled, establishing it was a necessary action. Shortpacked had Robin running for – and winning – her Congress seat high on Cadbury Cream Eggs, courting the ‘necrophiliac Star Wars toy fans’ vote, and ran her last campaign trying to get Dinobot inducted into the inaugural Transformers Hall of Fame, ending in a fight scene/extended homage to the Beast Wars episode Code of Hero. (This did actually work.) Shortpacked featured Ronald Reagan giving an inspirational speech about accepting the way things actually are and not ‘the way things should be’ to help a character come to terms with her queerness. Which may actually be the least realistic thing about it, honestly.
Shortpacked was also part of the Walkyverse, so sizable portions of the cast – Mike and Robin included – had literal superpowers and had spent their early 20s fighting a couple alien invasions. They were psychologically conditioned to be unable to escape bonds of duct tape and consider The Sound of Music actual, literal torture.
Like, if you’re wondering what Shortpacked was like, consider that Galasso was imported from it more or less straight, and he was entirely tonally consistent there. AG bending the laws of physics in her action sequences is still NOTHING, realism-wise, on Shortpacked.
I probably dislike this mostly because I hate that kind of redemption arc. Dramatically sacrificing yourself to atone for being an asshole your whole life is an easy out. Living through it and changing yourself to not be an asshole/abuser is both more realistic and harder.
Most people never get the dramatic redemption arc. If they change they’ve got to do it the hard way and if they can make it up to the people they’ve hurt it’s one moment at a time, not in a big dramatic gesture.
It’s also awful for the victims because they’re pushed to treat him as a hero, while they’ve still got all the feelings tied up with the abuse that they now can’t vent.
Danny was right. Ethan will be better off with Mike gone. But no one should ever acknowledge that.
Agreed. I was really hoping to see Mike wake up from the coma and try to work on being kinder. Learning to hold his tongue. Trying to be a better human in little ways.
Agreed. It was a dick thing to say because… well, this was always a possibility and it IS harsh to wish someone dead, especially an 18-year-old, but he wasn’t WRONG.
I think this was also the worst possible way for Mike to leave Ethan and Amber’s lives as well, honestly. They’re never going to get fed up with him and tell him to get lost. Ethan will probably put him on that pedestal, and Amber has rent-free survivor’s guilt brain ghost. But… well, can’t deny the writerly impulse to fuck characters over for maximum drama, can I.
Maybe Amber will be able to evict her brain ghost if she is finally going to therapy and that will be the catalyst for integration? Amber’s relationship with her abusers doesn’t end with their death, but her healing and not allowing their influence to be how she defines herself. Grasping at straws here, because it’s the only way I can enjoy this plot line and Amber needs a light at the end of the tunnel.
If you mean ‘integration’ as ‘only one personality’, I doubt it – from what all the system commenters have said, it’s a ‘not always, often not the best, and takes years either way’ sort of thing. Timescale involved seems unlikely, not when Willis was so hesitant to say ‘yes, this is DID’ because of concern about perpetuating shitty tropes.
That said, AmbG was noticeably sleep-deprived the entire time Brain Ghost Mike was around, and we HAVE seen Amber have a short-term hallucination in response to trauma – she had a hallucinatory Blaine right after the Ryan incident. If he was a specific circumstances thing, not fully associated with the DID, that might be doable.
Oh, I wasnt saying Brain Mike was a fragment. So far agree with hallucination theory, but still pretty traumatic to have to overcome. I was saying Amber/Amazagirl revolting against Mike and working together would lessen their separation. Full integration might not be their goal, they’d need to discuss that as a system, but increased sharing and at least a couple mutual goals are definitely needed for their health. If only so Amber doesn’t starve AG out with sleep deprivation again :/.
Oh, agreed. Would also give a bit of closure to AmbG, at least, since they were the one(s) Mike was deliberately psychologically harming… pretty much for shits and giggles. Them getting to say ‘you know what? You were a shitty friend’ would be so satisfying.
I do wish Ethan was going to get that closure, though. Maybe there’s still some record of Mike’s ‘seduce Ethan to cause jealousy’ plan somewhere? Something to remind him that yeah, Mike never had a purely benevolent motive for anything. Or at least some serious unpacking in therapy.
One, Mike helped people while deflecting credit by accepting the MANTLE of bad guy without causing harm.
Two, your sex drive shows a disgusting lack of empathy to DEATH. “Tell him how you feel or move on.”?? He just said he isn’t interested didnt he? “I know why you’re here, but my roommate died and I am not looking for girlness now please go away.” Andyou think you’re better than mike, right?
Ew
Mike death confirmed off-screen and in a casual way for maximum ease of writing and minimum chance for comment thread anger… until today.
Meanwhile, I wonder if Walky will ever realise that he and Lucy are sharing vulnerabilities? Normally, that’s a very intimate thing to do. However, and Lucy really needs to understand it, after everything that’s happened over the past six months or so, I don’t think Walky is in the right headspace to start a new relationship. Things are going to have to go slow, if they go at all.
The only way i could think of that this isn’t real death is if Mike like… died for 30 seconds and was then rescuscitated, and Walky is being hyperbolic while still being literal. But, uh, seems unlikely. Oof.
And during that short period of time a new Mike was Chosen, with a vague Caribbean accent, to come to the Hellmouth and stick “Mister Pointy” in your mom for a nickel
Well this strip is giving me lots of conflicting emotions. Combination of anger at Willis for probably killing off Mike, and some denial because maybe Walky is wrong and Mike is somehow still alive. Plus I’m still shipping Lucy with Walky and damn it she might want to be a bit more direct with him.
So since people are talking about the cast photo: I’m pretty sure that’s Malaya to the right of Lucy, then to her left are probably Danny, Leslie, and Amber. I thought the person to their left was Mike but apparently not. Obviously Carly behind Becky and I’m assuming Joe beside her. Not sure who that is between Dorothy and Ruth though. Could be Rose but up to this point she hasn’t been important enough to warrant that spot.
I’m now expecting his “new roommate” to just be Mike, back from the hospital, now with a cheery personality due to hitting his head hard.
Which will completely shock Walky.
I kinda feel stupid for ever reading the comments – they’re what told me the ‘no deaths’ ”rule”. If I hadn’t read the comments, I’d be able to just feel normal things, instead of feeling lied to.
I’m sorry guys. This is my fault. Y’see I have this curse where every single thing I watch or read, my favorite character dies. It NEVER FAILS. I mean Daniel Jackson died like 6 times in stargate, in the most extreme example of what I call the Chelsea’s Law of Fictional Fate.
I’m drawn to tragically doomed fictional characters apparently.
The law also states I must somehow be in denial that they will somehow come back (hey, it happens! A lot actually…) so I’m gonna tell myself Mike is still in a coma and Walky is just being fatalistic because he never woke up so he’s assuming he never will/is brain-dead.
I hope so. It would be a nice way to keep Mike around for laughs without dealing with the consequences of his often being a toxic person.
I was enjoying his jerk with a heart of gold development though (though I know it’s a cliched and overdone and sometimes harmful but trope in fiction…I still like it)
I don’t think Mike was a Jerk With A Heart Of Gold, but rather he thought he was. He was dispensing tough love onto everyone around him and it took seeing what that’s actually like in the form of Blaine for him to realize he was actively worsening the lives of his best friends.
Yeah part of why I think Walky is wrong here is that we’d be robbed of both one of three queer male main characters as well as a redemptive arc for Mike.
yea i never see people mention it but he pushed amber deeper into her trauma issues when he implied she was similar to her dad and i’m not sure why people aren’t angrier about that
Like, ‘she’s multiple time bonbs. Just work her up and point her dadwards’ isn’t all that ambiguous.
(Admittedly, I’d written Mike off since the flashback storyline and ‘maybe he’s lying that he INTENDED to put her in a car with her resentful abuser all day, but since he proceeded to actively suppress any possible better instincts who really cares’ alongside ‘may or may not have gotten another student to be the bait in his plan to deal with shitty teacher by outing her as a sexual predator’, with bonus ‘what POSSIBLE benevolent motive can you ascribe to literally recording Walky crying?’ But I really wish he could have done the hard work of being less of an asshole, instead of saddling AmbG with this guilt forever.)
Because that was followed shortly by first his realization that he was abusive and then by the Mike drop.
Now he’s the redeemed heroic dead and you can’t speak ill of him.
There’s hope. Mike was injured fighting a man with mafia ties and connections with dirty cops. It’s possible he’s just been put into witness protection.
Yeah, I’m thinking if he’s not revealed to still be alive within this chapter at most, he’s almost definitely dead, and if not he might as well be, and he’ll only return for a single chapter in 5 years, standing over his own grave talking about having some “unfinished business” or something, and then afterwards he’ll immediately leave forever again.
Hopefully after actually completing that unfinished business is what I meant, but him appearing and then disappearing and it never really being addressed is also possible.
Thanks. I remember getting sick of this after the 3rd day of scene change and “alright keep your secrets.”
But I got the impression a bunch of other people enjoyed the long maybe, and I suppose it could still be that Mike has recovered and tricked Walky into thinking he is dead but is just going to nonchalantly walk in as his ‘new’ roommate. Since “bongo, I lived” is a very Mike trope.
Honestly, we don’t know what kind of injuries he sustained. We saw no medical report, heard very little about the details.
We know he was bleeding from the head and that he was comatose in the hospital for a couple of days. That’s really about it. Unless I missed something.
Open enough to lead basically anywhere Willis wanted.
We did have a couple implications – Mike’s clearly losing coherence and consciousness in those flashback strips, and with the bleeding from the head that’s… not a good sign his coma was medically-induced and not because of a traumatic brain injury.
I know we discounted Amber’s anxieties that he’d die as not entirely rational and catastrophizing, especially since they were mobster-based, but in hindsight ‘he might not wake up for a while’ and ‘I’d say whatever you need to’ combined did not bode well. Probably would have been better to have that clearly stated before the timeskip, but I actually had more issues with the pacing of last arc (where Blaine’s death made sense, but kind of derailed all the other emotional fallout) than the kidnapping.
Yeah, it certainly could be read that way, but it also wouldn’t have been a contradiction for Mike to be back in the dorm room today – completely (or mostly) recovered. It was all vague enough you can’t really argue “he couldn’t have recovered that fast”.
Time for two other things to happen: 1) Pull back the camera and let’s see how Amber and Ethan are doing, and 2) where the school is putting the memorial plaque or garden commemorating the event and the people lost.
They may wait til the end of the semester for that, which means twelve more years for us.
I also think it’s worth mentioning that it seems that Walky and Amber have broken up, seeing as how it would be quite odd that he wouldn’t even consider asking her to join him.
Take a step back a couple strips and Ruth “losing” Billie is a huge deal. There’s beat panels and somber expressions and the whole strip was building up to that.
And here? Mike’s death is revealed in panel 2 and quickly brushed aside so that Lucy can continue awkwardly flirting with Walky. That’s not just subverting expectations that’s not giving the audience themselves any time to process the death of a major character, who only right before his supposed death showed even an inkling of being able to change.
Walky is wrong, and until we get further confirmation I’m sticking to that.
It’s ok. The non-canon novels will retcon his death by pointing out that it was all only ever shown in Riker’s holodeck simulation anyways, and he was really secretly recruited into Section 31.
Trying to think of a different way to interpret “My roommate died” but I can’t think of any. So Mike is dead.
Also, it would appear Amber is no longer in the picture. Did she leave the school (for lack of tuition money) or did they merely broke off their relationship.
Is Walky completely oblivious to Lucy’s interest (even though noticed her liking, disliking and liking his tweet and her eagerness to welcome him back) or is he just pretending not to? Maybe he’s just not that into her.
That’d be silly, of course. Lucy is awesome and steals every scene she’s in.
They’re close in stature and the hair could be either of them, but I still think it’s Amber. The silhouette looks like it’s holding a phone, which tracks for her.
Ruth said she hadn’t lost anyone in her hall. Billie was moved into another dorm due their relationship. Ruth wasn’t counting Billie as a loss, because Billie is still in her life (my guess).
oh my god. okay, possibilities that maybe Mike isn’t dead (shut up definitely not in denial):
– walky got another roommate and THAT guy died.
– walky assumed he’s dead because he has been in a coma so long, and he hasn’t had any news.
– walky knows he’s in a coma but is dealing with it treating like a death.
– mike has a twin or a body double.
– mike is in witness protection.
– mike made someone tell walky that he was dead just to appear later and fuck with him.
– mike is alive but he’s the first zombie of the universe so the doctors are keeping it under wraps.
– mike is alive but the mob kidnapped him and paid the hospital to say he died.
– amber lied to walky and said mike is dead now bc of reasons.
– walky saw how desolate amber and Ethan were one day and assumed mike had died but it was the day mike woke up
-aliens? vampires?
“Mike made someone tell Walky that he was dead just to appear later and fuck with him.” That would be SO on brand. Learning a bit from his mistakes with Amber, doesn’t mean Mile would be able to about face so quickly after revelations. Gotta unlearn him… being him.
Available plot twists:
1. Mike recovered, however remaining recovery would not allow him to return until next semester. Walky was issued a new roommate who subsequently died in a horrible toast making accident.
2. Mike recovered and requested someone tell everyone else he died. He will spend the next few months appearing in front of various characters while they are alone convincing them he is a figment of their grief and/or a ghost until he is eventually discovered.
Addendum to number 2: Mike will then express amazement that it took so long for these idiots to figure it out despite the fact that he continued to attend classes normally the entire time.
Well if Mike’s really dead, and I’m assuming Willis isn’t playing any mind games, that’s a bummer. I was looking forward to him having to confront his realization that he was an abuser like Blaine and not some tough love guru. This also sucks since Amber and Ethan could have used a break from the trauma.
Because this isn’t how you explain something in plot over weeks. “He was hurt and went into a coma before the time jump” is set up for a return, not for “and then he died offscreen, never to be seen again”.
As me and my friends used to say when we were deep into Supernatural (were people came back from the dead more and more as the seasons progressed): “Wingprint or they’re coming back.”
Just mentioning Mike’s death in one panel seems a bit too casual for the death of a character we’ve followed too long. Blaine and Toedad got more than that, and they were villains the audience won’t miss.
Walky’s comment seem to say Mike’s dead, cause how else should one interpret that, but still … I’m doubting, and will wait for more info.
I would guess Walky is just saying he’s dead/thinking of him that way because he doesn’t think he’ll ever wake up from the coma and just wants to move on.
Ugh, I’m so not into Lucy/Walky. It’s like Amber/Walky was a fully loaded bacon & eggs breakfast – delicious and slightly bad for you. Lucy is like no-name bran cereal :S
Guess my original comment didn’t go through
I have always loved mike and will miss his good hearted mischief
anyone who likes him only after he martyred himself should take a hard look at the cause of toxic behavior and the end results of toxic positivity and white privilege……
Surprised he’s been killed off… but it doesn’t make me like Mike. He was manipulative and abusive. Did he have some honorable moments? Sure… no one is pure good or evil. But going out in a well-meaning heroic way does not erase any damage that he caused others.
I have been going on a bit in the comments about how Mike must be a difficult character to write when translating Shortpacked’s farce to something more like a real life setting, since he was never anything like a real human person. I know Willis himself has made some comical commentary about it, mostly relating to how his hair isn’t even three-dimensional. This is a kind of drastic solution, breaking the one promise to the readers to not kill any regular cast members and all, but maybe it was necessary. And honestly, on a storytelling level, I like it. (On a story-enjoying level I’m sad for the people grieving him.) It makes things just a little real, in a story that has been – I will say very enjoyable – years and years of wish-fulfillment fantasy for those of us who remember public education. I’m absolutely sure no one else will die, but still. . .
Page 6 of the Dexter & Monkey Master comic book is up on Patreon!
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Did not see this coming.
There was a hint in Something Positive a while ago. I was just waiting for the other shoe to actually drop.
oh shit, Randy was serious?!
Nah, that was shortpacked! Mike. Maybe.
I… don’t remember which S*P that was. Care to link?
https://somethingpositive.net/comic/hardly-appropriate/
Thank you for the link. I completely missed this, despite having it on my MWF comic list. I suspect I just tried to see the comic before it was posted that day, and then next comic fit so well with the one before this, I didn’t think I needed to go back a page to see what I missed.
I use Piperka to track webcomic updates, and it’s pretty great about helping to avoid stuff like that.
I just continuously cycle through the front pages of the comics that I follow that fall under the “irregulars” heading in my head. S*P, Atomic Robo, Nerf Now, xkcd, all those.
feeder.co is a nice extension that also works for this!
That was 50/50 it was a hint or a joke, tbf
I commented about this when I first saw the S*P comic and was immediately told I was wrong, it was an AU Mike.
I’m still worried but I’m not convinced till I see Ethan and/or Amber standing over a tombstone with words written on it saying “Here lies Mike, always willing to give somebody’s mother the business for a nickel.”
Or “Yo mama’s so fat, I’m buried in her”Do not worry.
You will still see him as will Amber.
Everybody else, not so much.
Since that just happened, it needs to be asked…
Did Mike act with integrity? No ragrets? Not even a single letter?
What, Walky AND Lucy both being unable to ask other people out? Daniel the Human noticed that possibility a while ago. Said something about “spotting someone in the same boat as him”, whatever that means…
Or are you talking about Mike’s death?
We had literal weeks of telling you it was coming.
There was a more timely, and definitely more recent!, hint: look at yesterday’s strip, where Walky’s bed is (mostly) made, and Mike’s is most assuredly not.
And as for shock and awe: does the new semester mean an end to the Garbage Roof (what with all those falling leaves and other nature scenes 🙂 ) and the “romance” between Walky and Amber/AG?
That was a hint something might not be right but not really hinting directly at him being dead.
Mike is for real dead?!?!
Maybe he dropped out due to health issues?
Oh wait I just reread the part where Walky said he died
I can’t be the only one who thought Mike dying at that specific point in his arc would actually happen, right?
* wouldn’t
well, technically, being dead is a health issue
If I could upvote this I would.
I REFUSE TO BELIEVE IT
DAMN
*gestures at the audience* …you know the rest
(I guess, except yesterday’s alt-text’s new readers, they’re gonna find out quickly)
…YOU WILLIS
WILLIS!
….Oh wait, you already did. Oh well. Pity, I did find the juxtaposition of Mike’s history and present behaviour some of the most interesting character building in the comic.
YOU WILLIS!
Everything about today’s strip is, to me, unexpected.
Pretty sure Lucy’s interest in Walky is not new.
Y’know Lucy, there’s such a thing as being too available.
Has she tried asking him out?
No. She’s never asked anyone out before and is incredibly afraid to do it.
To anticipate the obvious suggestion: no, I don’t think she’s asked anyone to stay in either.
You’re no fun. Anticipating people’s jokes and whatnot.
More being too indirect.
I’m gonna have to agree with this. She’s not being direct enough.
For any girls or women or boys or men or other thinking of asking a guy out:
If you want him to understand you, you MUST BE BLUNT. Anything else other than “Do you want to go out with me?” carries a very high probability of being not understood in the way you intend.
If you are a guy and think you may be getting asked out, make it blunt and reask, “Are you asking me out?” but please be kind and sympathetic. A yes is great, but if you’re going to say no, this person has now put their heart on the line and it is unkind to be needlessly cruel in rejecting them. Blunt yes, to be sure there’s no misunderstanding or false hope, but not cruel.
I.e. the last two panels of this Questionable Content comic: https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=64
So, in other words, don’t be Eliot?
Yes. “No one could be that dense or clueless.” is one of those statements that isn’t ever true.
I don’t know if it applies to Walky, but there is also the 2nd order problem where once you’ve been wrong a few times you overreact in the other direction, assuming you are just wrong again like last time.
Blunt like a Louisville Slugger to the head, and if that doesn’t work, an actual Louisville Slugger may be needed to penetrate their thick skull.
Well, that’s a hell of a birthday comic.
And yet, if Mike was in charge of planning the celebration, he would be proud.
He’s have preferred to fuck Yumi’s mom first, though.
For a nickel.
Instead, he’s now with Blaine’s mom while Blaine watches, just like Mike promised
And Blaine has to watch from below, drenched in hellfire.
Jokes aside, Happy Birthday and look after yourself.
Happy birthday! <3
Happy birthday!!!
Happy birthday!
Thanks for the birthday wishes!
So the time skip was to get past the mourning phase of the characters.
Sigh.
That’s one heck of a loophole…
HAX!
Yep. Looks like.
Way to take the third option, Willis!
RIP DoA!Michael Warner, 2010-2020
So, …. …uhh… if he was eighteen years old, in ten years
Would that explain the comic’s time dilation? Or not? Cause the extent of dilation seems a log function or something Math-y.
Dim currentYear As Integer = DateTime.Now.Year
Dim bornYear As Integer = currentYear – 18
Comment.WriteLine(“RIP DoA!Mike: ” & bornYear.ToString() & ” – ” & currentYear.ToString())
That code is already broken, since it appears he died last year. Also, returning current year or last year to the headstone won’t work as relative execution of the code will start returning different answers over the life of the code. It’s a special case and needs to be handled but a function to return based on the doaYear.
Huh, Mike would be proud, he has now become the basis for calendaring in doa.
Fine.
Dim currentYear As Integer = DateTime.Now.Year – 1
Does that mean “this year” is 1 AW (After Warner)?
🙂 Maybe, until sometime in realworld 2044/2045 when, based on the current time dilation (including timeskips) this year’s last year becomes the next year’s 2 years ago.
I agree that BWD and AW seem to be a reasonable calendar for DOA. 👍
Well.. shit
Don’t panic.
We just need to wait for some martians to invade.
Well, October is booked by something called a Bearricane, I think it’s like a Sharknado, and in November we have the election, but I think we just might be able to squeeze the martians in by Christmas.
Oh wait, you meant in universe.
Bold to imply that disasters come one at a time in 2020.
In Soviet Russia, dumpster fires watch YOU!
I’ve spotted the other Babylon Bee Reader in the comments.
D:
dead ass?
I guess corpses can’t interrupt you when you bring a girl over.
unless they occupy the bed
That was an equivalent of a movie scene where you see a character flooring the gas pedal, and you think the car’s giving it all she’s got, but then boost button is pressed and the character is forced into the seat with a new burst of acceleration. That, but with taking a dead roommate joke too far.
Clay/Hard would never let the dead stop a love scene. Hell, dead roommate would be the basis for one in Sexy Losers
Sometimes I remember that and want to see if certain threads were ever resolved
Then I wonder if it would be worth looking, even if they were
He’s still putting them out, rarely but they’re there. His new work is quite inspired however, and in a completely new direction. See Depression Comix. Rarely funny, but very poignant and insightful.
rip
Well, Danny can now never speak to Ethan again.
Good. Danny is an asshole.
No, Mike was an asshole. Danny just needs to work on his approach to things.
Nonono, you’ve got it all wrong! Mike was Jesus mixed with that guy who always has the next round covered, and Danny was behind 9/11!
(That’s sarcasm, for anyone who has a hard time telling when it’s in text form)
Danny is very much an asshole when he feels justified in being so to the point I would stop being friends with him if I ever witnessed it myself. Danny is both a good egg in that he is generally kind, sensitive, and a goofus but also an absolute ass in that while his flaws rarely come up, they run deep. The issue is not just his approach, but his justifications for choosing that approach, his unwillingness to back down and letting his desire to be RIGHT matter more than being SENSITIVE because of his own feelings about it.
Danny can never even so much as look at Ethan again if Mike is dead and this is not going to be plot twisted away.
Danny attempts to apologize.
Danny: Listen, I know I said it’s a good thing if he died….but maybe it was?
Ooof. Not wrong.
Maybe /Danny/ tries to attempt for Yale to start a clean slate. (And away from Ethan).
First day, runs into Dorothy and he groans.
Then again I don’t know if I saw Ethan in that silhouette lineup.
(If so, addition: He also runs into Ethan in this scenario, as he begins trying to desperately run away from his high school ex).
Seriously. Remember how everyone was like ‘oh you’re overreacting, Danny’s not actually saying he wishes Mike would die?’
Always remember the worst-case scenario before you say something to someone in a hospital! Because even if Danny didn’t mean it (and I don’t think he did,) he assuredly feels like SHIT now that it’s happened, and Ethan has every right to be pissed about it! (Hell, so does Amber.)
Actually, most people seemed to go the “Fuck his flayed anus with a live wire” route at the time.
Wait what? Say it ain’t so. 🙁
I don’t buy it. I’m calling that he’s in the Witness Protection Program.
But the people who committed the crimes he witnessed are also dead
He knew what Amber’s dad’s real job was for many years.
He’d have enough information to point the right people in the right direction.
So what, the dirty cops put him in witness protection from… themselves?
I said right people. You know, the feds.
That’s very optimistic
What if it goes all the way to the top?
He will return at the critical moment as Mike The White.
“I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide. Also I banged your mom for a nickel.”
Protection from who? Blaine and Ross are both dead
But the mob bosses he’s seen Blaine’s cooked books for aren’t.
But the only one who knew he had that information of Blaine, who wasn’t going to tell anyone he’d been outsmarted by a teenager.
I thought you said no major deaths? DX<
Well yeah… but that was before 2020.
A) Who said Mike was major?
B) No major deaths was because the mourning period would last forever and nobody would want to read it. The several month time skip neatly jumps over the rawest part for Amber and Ethan and most of the mourning for everyone else.
And of course, C) Word of Willis is not immutable or unchanging and he’s always reserved the right to change his mind.
Me? I said that, just now,
And yeahhh the time skip the mourning thing to skirt around the “No deaths” thing is a decision I’m not thrilled with tbh….
He said no deaths, then killed off three characters x.x
It’s Willis’s story and I respect his right to tell it however he wants, I just kinda don’t know what rules he’s going to keep anymore :/
Just because you considered Mike major though doesn’t mean Willis did. He had a storyline in the limelight but before that he only appeared every so often and not often in a major role.
He specifically said no deaths of major/main (don’t remember exact wording) characters. Minor ones were always on the table. And again, he explained his rationale for the rule as the mourning would go on forever. Blaine won’t be mourned much, Ross would only be mourned in complicated ways by Becky and Joyce, and Mike is only debatably a main character.
Yeah but his death affects several of the main casts and tbh a few months to mourn the loss of your best friend really won’t make that big a difference.
It cuts the rawest part out for Amber and Ethan though, and the rest of the cast weren’t particularly close to him.
2-3 months is the rawest part? Dang I’m jealous, when I lost someone close to me the rawest part was 2 years!
For a certain definition of rawest and depending on how close you were to the individual in question. Ethan and/or Amber may indeed still be in the worst of it.
Mike wasn’t that close though. He didn’t let himself be.
Mike did not seem close now, but the flashbacks showed a sweeter Mike that cared much more openly and worked to help his friends out. Ethan and Amber won’t likely have a mental image that distances past Mike from recent past Mike.
There’s a distinct difference between “everyone is very focused on this” and “this is now a major part specifically of Ethan and Amber’s stories.” In much the same way that Becky’s storylines were very heavily influenced by her dad’s specific evils, and will be heavily influenced going forward by *his* death.
In other words, someone like Sierra is never safe.
Yeah, with death on the table who knows who’s gonna die next thb…
Don’t go in against a Sicilian!
More importantly, he said he’d broken a rule in that storyline, so debating major or minor isn’t really necessary.
And where could Mike have gone from there? He’
Kind of hard to go back to being asshole Mike after realizing Amber is AG. Redemption arc would require making him a much more central character than Willis seemed to want to make him. He was enough of a one-trick pony that it would suck up a lot of oxygen to make anything more of him, so saving A/AG *was* his redemption arc.
I mean… “Redemption = Death” is definitely a thing that happens in writing; but in Mike’s case I’m not sure if his death *adressed* what he was doing wrong- Mike’s core conflict boiled down to “I help my friends in shitty ways that hurt them but lead to growth, but fundamentally that _form_ of help is problematic and also I have issues with intimacy.” Arguably, his death was the same as his life in a lot of ways- it was dramatic, agressive, and still didn’t really fix the problems around him so much as nudge them in a more fixable direction. How much more fixable is debatable- “Battle-Damaged Blaine” still neutralized Toedad pretty effectively- but it was less a redemption and more a continuation of his pattern.
Personally I’m biased, of course- I though mike’s brand of “deadpan asshole” was funnier than Malaya or Carla’s brands of being a jerk- but I do really think that Mike’s arc might’ve been cut short. Redemption isn’t just coming to terms with your actions potentially being a problem, it’s putting long term concerted effort into fixing them, mike’s last two acts of “goodness” were basically a grand gesture and being slightly-not-mean to danny
(Or in laymans terms, Mike got a “Vader” redemption instead of my preferred “Zuko” redemption) (also dang this is long welp too late to edit it now)
It wasn’t that long and I think it was interesting, thank you for posting it.
Well, I’m sure we will see the ghost of Mike via Amber’s head cannon.
I suppose this would be a good way to keep Mike’s deadpan humor in the comic without the sticky problem of trying to redeem a character who did a lot of shitty things.
I’m of the opinion fictional characters don’t have to be 100% redeemed/make up for every bad thing they ever did to be likable/welcome in stories as anything other than Bad, because they are fictional, and fiction, while informed by, and influences reality, is still fiction. But I know not everyone shares that opinion and some people found him a very problematic character.
Although Joe’s still alive and kickin’ and on a possible redemption arc (and maybe Robin too?) so maybe that’s not why he was killed off. I dunno, we can only speculate.
The thing is, Joe and Robin have humanistic flaws that can be explored or deconstructed. Dunno if Willis is planning on focusing on that or not, but it’s possible (and we can do the heavy lifting here in the comments if he doesn’t). Mike, by contrast, is an asshole. That’s his primary character trait. And assholes rarely show genuine concern for being problematic. So with the direction and tone this comic wants to take, Mike is far more difficult to do all that much with without gutting already established character in not one but two universes. Or you just kill him.
I am also bummed Ethan apparently never gets to find out how Mike really felt about him. :/ It seemed like something was being built there with the whole “Mike tries to mess with a Ethan/Danny and get Ethan out of his shell for his own good” thing, only for it to backfire when Mike caught (or always had?) feelings and Ethan just wanted to sleep around.
Or maybe I really misread that whole storyline? I dunno, it just felt unfinished and now I am confused.
For me, that’s what makes this feel real. That’s how death works in the real words. Things just end without being finished and you have to deal with that.
I like stories that don’t have this “person x can’t die because their development/story isn’t finished” – safety net. But honestly, this is a whole lot darker than what I expected when I started reading a comic about a few teenagers.
Yeah ngl storylines that make me think about that send me into a mini existential crisis.
Waking up in the morning everyday gives me an existential crisis.
I Kind of feel similar. Fiction can also be like life. In life, some people never change/never redeem themselves. Or they partially redeem themselves, like Mike.
If I could ‘like’ or ‘heart’ comments here I’d do this one. +1
It is common to conflate “redemption” and “repentance”, but they are not the same, the former is internal, the latter external. Anakin Skywalker was redeemed, in that he embraced the light side, but he never repented (and, frankly, the only form of repentance that would have sufficed would likely have been trial and execution.) Zuko was redeemed AND repented his actions by helping the Avatar.
Oddly, in the case of Mike (assuming he is dead), he may have achieved repentance without being redeemed, insofar as he didn’t really change, personality-wise–he was always an asshole who was nonetheless was willing to risk his life for his friends. Whether he even needed to be redeemed is an open question.
He did have that realization during the fight that he was using the same rationale for his shittiness that Blaine was. I was really interested to see where that would take him and how he would change. First time I’ve actually been interested in Mike as a character, but instead he died.
I don’t know about redemption, since that’s a story thing (or a religious one), but Mike definitely needed to change. Assholes may not need redemption or be able to achieve it, but they need to change and sometimes they can.
I didn’t say it was a *good* redemption arc! 😉
Mike is a difficult character to manage in an ensemble cast tale like this: he’s either so shallow as to be 2-dimensional or he’s so deeply complex that he needs to be a major, if not the major character to dig into him.
If he really is dead, I’d guess Willis thought he’d done as much with him as he could without turning him into a threadbare joke or as important as Joyce. So he killed him, allowing him to show he wasn’t completely awful.
Mike was a major character. Whether or not B & C are applicable doesn’t change that. It’s weird that you’re arguing he’s not?
Mike is a joke, that’s why he’s gone. He was not a major character, He was just an asshole who has the same punchline over and over and over. He got a bit of depth during his last arc to make everything make sense but he was never going to grow or change (he already did that in Shortpacked).
He originally said “no deaths”, period
Then the Bad Dads died
Mike was only a captain, however…
That made me laugh, I’m terrible…I woulda argued he’s a Major Di- XD
The permanent loss of his deadpan violates the laws of equivalent exchange unless the shortpacked love of his life, Dina, can step it up.
That Mike, always breakin the rules.
The narration, in about a month:
“Mike un-died”
Mike is actually a whale?
He said no deaths of major characters. Mike was an oversized comedic prop.
Prop? Yes. Comedic? Nah, not really.
He’ll be back as a Force ghost.
This is not the first time Willis has tried to kill Mike and I will not be fooled a second time.
He’ll be replaced by his duplicate when their version of the dorm gets Quantum Entangled with an alternate reality version! Like that time on Voyager!
Soggies will rule, after all.
And then when someone makes a video game about it twenty years later, aliens will resurrect the corpse of the original Mike…
Like Chef?
Before long four guys will show up claiming to be Mike: a young Mike clone, a black Mike, a Mike energy being, and an evil cyborg Mike.
Didn’t I see that in the “Dexter’s Lab” movie?
Wait…but no but…holy shit.
Jesus Christ Willis, I have been reading your comics for nearly fifteen years and you only grow more adept at making me feel things for fictional characters.
He knows exactly where to jab the phone, how far to twist it, and when.
Well damn son I was not expecting that.
So I guess Walky got straight A’s then. Sweet, no more worries about his math grade.
I think that might be suicide only. It’s one of those things talked about that seems to be more of an urban myth.
There is no real rule in that regard. At least not at any campus I’ve ever taught at.
“Earn your Bachelor’s in just eight roommates.”
…or twelve if you’re on the quarter system
lol this is great
cue mike “stop telling people i’m dead” ?
…. please…
Nah that works better with Amber:
“Sometimes I can still hear his voice”
bomb dropped.
Mike dropped.
Ba-dum-tshhhh.
-Grumble, damn trash pandas always knocking my cans over.
Guess Walky never had a “your place, my place” approach with hanky-pankies with Dorothy…
…carry on.
Plus, to counterpoint yesterday’s alt:
“brand new readers: wait who is DEAD?????“
To be fair, why would new readers start so late in the comic?
Why not? They have to start somewhere. If they like the writing and want to go on, they can go back to the beginning and catch up.
(I probably feel that way because I’m old. I grew up reading newspaper comic strips. If the paper added a strip that had already run for awhile elsewhere, or if people moved somewhere and the newspaper had different strips, we’d have to start reading midstream. If we wanted to find out what happened before, I guess we’d have to go to the library and read it on microfiche, unless there were books published of a run of the strips. )
OK, I remember microfiche. I can’t imagine using it to catch up on a comic strip. All that fiddling, placing the fiche in the reader, scanning back-forth-up-down (in reversed motion) to figure out where’s the page you want, to get to read one gray-blurry daily color-inverted image and then you’d have to do it all over with another fiche to read the next one… and the next…
Some guy did that for as much of Jim Davis’s pre-Garfield content he could find, and uploaded it all to Google Drive. Now we have all of Gnorm Gnat and a virtually forgotten proto-Garfield called “Jon” to read.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IG6y6FkMEQ4
(It’s a long video, but the most pertinent part begins around 44:30. Links to the microfilm scans are in the description.)
I salute his efforts; I don’t know if I would have had that kind of patience.
That’s like the various efforts to restore the original star wars prints. They keep doing the work the digitally cleanup the best prints they can find, then someone comes out of the woodwork with a cleaner original.
It’s possible Mr Davis has some of that content in original form, but a lot of it is as likely to be lost to time.
The problem is that if ANY of the cast were to ever fake their death, it would be Mike. We can never be sure.
Mike faked his death to give himself a chance to take down the mob and corrupt cops all on his own… is probably not what happened.
So he will have to fight Daredevil?
Of course there’s the possibility that
a.)Walky got a replacement roommate who dropped dead for some reason.
or
b.)Mike’s death is fake and he’s in hiding of some sort.
My first term my roommate left. Rather than get a random guy, I decided to move next door, where I guy I knew had a roommate not coming back. We both thought someone we knew was better than random chance.
(They had been called “The Crumpets” for silly reasons I won’t go into.)
But it turned out he’d flunked out, so I got to be single in a double room, plus with the cool lofts they’d built.
A. crossed my mind, honestly, though if Mike is legit dead, that’s going to be mighty interesting in its own right.
So my question is with Mike most likely now all dead and shit probably then who is that vaguely Mike shaped silhouette standing next to Sarah. I can’ t place them at all. Does Amber’s hallucination/ghost Mike actually warrant a spot in the cast photo?
Isn’t that the annoying dude Ethan was macking on? Eric?
….I…I really hope not. I do not want see more of that guy at all. The only reason I don’t hate him more than Walky is because he doesn’t have as much panel time.
And I guess Mike being dead would def explain the reason there’s no vaguely Ethan looking silhouette in the cast photo. He took that the worst I think I wouldn’t be surprised if he took off a semester or even dropped out. Not that the cast photo is at all a reliable source of information to begin with.
Also if I could crackpot theorize for a sec. Maybe the Mike we knew died but there’s a new Mike to take his place! Amnesia, secret clone, evil twin. sky’s the limit!
Wouldn’t the replacement be the *good* twin?
Mike seems more like the bad cop/worse cop, or maybe bon cop/bad cop if Mike has a french canadian twin/clone.
Nah. Jason ditched the bow tie and grew his hair out. Well, that or Sydney Yus is going to get a dramatic increase in profile in this strip.
And shrank several inches?
It’s Mike’s good twin, M….arty.
Mikes good twin would be named Sike.
Ghost Mike, in direct contrast to Joyce now believing that nothing supernatural exists.
Honesty, the silhouette is probably Walky’s new roommate.
I’m 25% expecting it to be Mike under an assumed name insisting he really isn’t Mike. Well, 50%.
You know what? Fuck that! I 100% want that now!
wait, what cast photo? link?
Look right under yesterday’s comic.
The silhouette is definitely not mike. The end of his hair is hanging down slightly, and Mike’s hair completely defies gravity.
I was assuming it was Mike too. Now I can’t think of who else that silhouette could be.
That silhouette is definitely still Mike. The back of the hair matches up with Mike’s too closely to be just a coincidence when giving people new hairstyles or something. Unless, of course, it’s actually a new character (or an old one with a new haircut) that Willis purposefully designed SPECIFICALLY to trick us.
And he wouldn’t actually do that, right?
…right?
I still think thats Mike. It wouldnt be off character for Walky to assume Mike died and not asking Amber about details both due to respect but also not realising how close they were. Mike’s parents probably picked up his stuff without him and might even have done so during classes to avoid people asking questions.
I bet that’s exactly it.
We’ll probably find out soon enough. Keep an eye on the blurry Patreon preview teasers, even when you’re not a subscriber you can usually make out which characters show up.
I don’t see an Ethan shape. Maybe Ethan has adopted Mike’s haircut as a coping mechanism?
Might want to double check some toy stores in San Francisco before you use the “d” word walky
“Is that Ronald Reagan?!”
“I brought the historical Jesus Christ.”
Does this mean Wally got an A for the semester?
He faked his death to fuck your moms.
Legend Of The Horny Ghost.
And the good thing is that if he’s faking his death, he can’t charge the nickel.
You’ve never heard of pennies on a dead man’s eyes?
He’s only got two eyes, though. That’s a 60% discount.
Oh snap.
My jaw nearly dropped the first time I saw this. Holy shit, Willis.
Assuming of course he is actually dead. I’ve seen people speculating here and on Patreon on several possibilities but if not, well. Holy shit.
So walky’s comments and reactions don’t bode well for Amber still being around either … and with Mike gone, and her dad not paying her education, it’s even end more likely she’s left and gone elsewhere.
Who else could the silhouette be though? It looks too short for Billy.
Maybe Thiccer Doro-I mean, Other Rachel (stupid sexy wife, getting that name stuck in my head)-is getting called up to the main cast.
Richard can kick in to help now that he and Stacy are engaged (or did they marry in the time skip?)
So casual! So nonchalant!!!! <Z3
Should’ve known that Mike’s hair would never have been cut down to normal physics. But now who could that silhouette be…
Oh, man, with Mike’s death I sure do hope Walky got to be eligible to the “Dead Man on Campus” clause.
Even if the clause is an urban legend.
Whelp… Shit
We still haven’t seen a body. And hell, it’s Mike. If anyone could claw his way back out of the grave so your mom could claw his back, it’s him.
*We* haven’t, but it sounds as if Walky accepts the word of those who *have* seen the body.
Ok first BS Mike is dead, that’s probably just Walky just assuming the worst so he doesn’t haft to feel bad if the worst happens.
Also Second Lucy I don’t know what to tell you but if he can’t get past Dorothy long enough to “give his heart” to the last girl he was romantically involved with it’s going hurt seeing you put yourself through this. But Who knows maybe two months is enough to get him over that.
In fairness, he broke up with Dorothy months ago now, as opposed to fairly recently when he was with Amber.
I guess there’s room for Walky to be wrong. He’s not as connected to Mike as Amber would be and I doubt he even knows the full story of Mike’s condition or what happened to him. He’d have to be more diligent on the matter than he’s been shown to be to keep up to date on Mike’s true condition so he’s not a reliable source of information.
His roommate dying seems like something the school would communicate with him about. I don’t think social bonds factor in here.
Most likely but considering Mike was hospitalized in a coma for an unknown amount of time between the semesters before his assumed death that’s more than enough reason for his parents to pull him out of school and pack up his stuff with him still alive. Would the school keep records of his condition at any point after that to inform Walky? I’m not saying it’s not what happened but there is still a lot of room for debate here and I think that’s the point of this scene. Until we cut to his gravestone I can’t 100 percent say he’s dead on Walky’s word alone.
You know, a Scholls who tells someone their roommate died when they didn’t would open themselves up to a heck of a lawsuit.
…..wasn’t expecting that 🙁
Ah, now I see the reason for the time skip. No need to show people actually coming to terms with the death of a good friend, just show them already there.
I’m hoping Mike is just in witness protection since he does know a lot about the group Blaine was in, but realistically he’s dead 🙁
Sadness
OH. Cool. That’s just. How we’re gonna confirm that. Neat. Awesome.
wait what
What the fuck
At least he sort of took Blaine and Ross down with him.
Damn, Mike’s really gone…
Why is there a picture of Joe’s Dad gazing sympathetically at a nervous Nick Fury on the wall?
#1 and #2: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/secretsrevealed/
Fuuuuuuuuuuuudge
We have seen no body…
but I’m sorta convinced.
Unless, y’know, Mike got put under witness protection.
Still, though, I’m legitimately not sure if he’s dead or not.
Like, this might be the only thing we ever get.
Damn.
Idk Willis, teasing this thing out forever and then dropping it like this feels kind of manipulative. I’m not particularly attached to fictional characters but this doesn’t sit right somehow so I think I’m gonna take a break from daily updates for a bit.
If I’m being honest, I’m kind of glad the whole “funeral/mourning” element got skipped over. Half, if not more, of the cast would have been pulling the same “I hated him but saying that would be an asshole thing to do” trope, and besides what else is there to say really that wasn’t already discussed?
Idc about cutting out the mourning period. Putting him in a coma before doing a timejump plus Mike shaped outline in new cast banner does set up some expectations for a plot twist though.
To clarify, I don’t care that main characters aren’t immune to death. Character deaths might be good for a story. I just don’t think teasing reader expectations with a potential character death just for a “psych!” moment is great.
I think Willis might have changed plans between writing Mike off a staircase and starting a new book. A lot has happened this year while the League of Evil Dads thread was in the buffer. Also (though this might be my perception being skewed by the fact that I didn’t like it myself) I don’t think that League of Evil Dads material was received as well as Willis might have liked.
I think the issue is the audience needing time to mourn- narrative catharsis, as it were. Mike being sustained as living until he wasn’t (and Amber’s assumption he’d be shot by the police being… difficult to determine how paranoid/practical it was due to recent events clashing with the strip’s general fatality levels) meant a lot of readers could easily be lead to assume he’d live- corrupt cops being one more challenge for Amazigirl to deal with.
Like to be honest, I think DoA’s “plot armor” for protagonists lead a lot of people to assume he’d be safe, so this probably caught some people off guard- I know it hit me sorta harder than normal because I was almost positive mike would live when willis didn’t kill him last arc. I liked that DoA didn’t kill chars. too much, too- it can be kind of stressful when you’ve know them for who knows how many years between multiple comics. But when something so major happens in universe, a lot of works (not GOT) go out of their way to help readers find closure- it feels like DoA will either skip that part; or we’ll end up seeing it manifested through Walky and Amber’s relative ineptitude at coping with things; and IDK how that fits with the “soft reboot/clean break” approach willis seems to be taking.
The thing is that when you are not going to kill characters you have to be very careful about letting the stakes or the level of conflict get too high.
* Overdramatic masked Legion of Dads plot that was kind of stupid (certainly involved people *being* stupid.)
* Kill a character just as they’re being fleshed out
* Timeskip over the mourning period
* Profit?
I have trouble caring at this point. Can we go back to Joyce’s atheism?
I wouldn’t call the Dad Plot stupid at all. It involved both a heavily zealous religious brainwashing sect as well as a psychotic parent.
Dunno whether I’m on the same page as you are. I find Joyce’s discovery of and adjustment to disbelief, Dina’s doomed love for Becky, Walky’s awakening awareness of his paren’ts’ flaws and his own obliviousness and so on — the “relationship stuff” — believable and compelling. But I find Mike’s cruelty and uncanny omniscience, Amazi-Girl’s ability to defy physics, EvilDad and his unworkable plan, the corrupt cops and so on — the adventure stuff — implausible, and I don’t really care about what happens in it. So if Willis is switching focus to the stuff I prefer, and if that requires pruning off some sticky story threads of the adventure component because threatened to overwhelm the more delicate material around them, and if abruptly writing out Mike and Lester during a time-skip is the alternative to ten real years of strips winding all that stuff neatly, then I’m not going to complain.
I mean, the adventure stuff did also serve a purpose – it’s a big emotional climax that has continuing fallout. (See Joyce’s crisis of faith being VERY MUCH informed by the fallout of the first kidnapping incident, see bailing Ross and defending him even after everything being the final straw for Hank.) But Blaine was definitely overescalating – thus, he HAD to die – and so AmbG got this opportunity to start sorting shit out in a big, spectacular fashion, and a character who wasn’t working anymore leaves the cast. (When our best case scenario was ‘coma after a serious fall, implying head trauma and probably SOMETHING broken,’ the recovery time was going to write him out regardless.)
I don’t think the high-stakes stuff is gone forever – Asher’s now set up as an antagonist – but it can definitely scale back dramatically now that Amber’s (presumably) gone through some serious mental health care. She was acknowledging she needed to before plural deaths, after all, so this might well be the shock to the system that AG would need to stop pulling serious sleep-deprivation shifts and getting involved in the stuff that’s less ‘risky’ and more ‘suicidal.’ No idea where they’ll be mentally once they reappear – AG’s not just leaving, and Willis designed the winter getup ages ago so I do want to see her use it – but they will DEFINITELY be different.
… honestly, I feel the same way.
I would say more but I’d risk getting my entire subnet IP banned from the server.
I think most commenters are joking when they say this is a headfake and Mike has gone into witness protection or something… but if that were the case it would be … worse actually? Like another level of reader deception the point of which I really can’t fathom…
Yeah. When Dumbing Of Age is good, it’s the best comic on the web; and it’s usually good, so I can accept a few Legion Of Evil Dads style storylines as the trade off, but… if Mike just turns out to be alive after all this, it’s going to be a bit much for me.
Oh shit I didn’t think we were gonna find out like that!
So it appears Walky got a new roommate after Mike went into a coma, who then died in an unrelated accident.
Ruth murdered him.
Makes sense. It’s hard to preserve the femeral artery when pulling the femer out.
Maybe there was a resuscitation.
so we’re getting HeadMike instead, at least until Amber resolves all of her issues and trauma, which on the sliding timescale means…
(carry the 1…)
never?
Ah, fuck. Rip Mike, you beautiful bastard.
I like how Mike’s profile doesn’t confirm his status. Or maybe it just hasn’t been updated for today’s page yet.
I’d like to think its amnesia or brain damage so the Mike we’ve come to know is ‘dead’
Nah Walky wouldn’t be that poetic about it
Goddammit, Mike was my favorite 😛
Mike’s gone to a witness protection farm upstate, where he can insult all the jerks and fuck all their moms for a nickel. Honest.
So… confirmation Mike didn’t survive his injuries. 🙁
Nah. He survived and healed fine. But then he hired an assassin to murder him as he walked out of the hospital just to fuck with Ethan who was with him.
… So now he’ll spend time as a ghost before it’s revealed that his sapient island and his boss were keeping him alive?
Oh, fuck.
Maybe mike was too injured so he got a second roomate. Who died.
Is this the true hidden meaning of the mysterious patterns of cars shifting around in the parking lot during the time-skip panels? What did the cars know? WHAT DID THE CARS KNOW??
A tale for which the world is not yet prepared…
The answer is out there?
I’m in denial.
Yeah, I’m in “when we see a grave or a body” territory with Mike. Could be Walky’s speaking metaphorically (I mean, being in a coma for months is in “might as well be dead” territory), could be that Mike did briefly die but was resurrected, could be misdirection, Willis has done this sorta thing before after all.
Ditto. I need a more reliable narrator than Walky to tell me.
I hope it’s not true. I enjoyed Mike as a character. But I’d understand if Willis thought he’d done all he could with the character and wanted to send him off in glory rather than be stuck with this two-dimensional character that just showed up to make snark every now and then.
The shock of him being dead is the most I’ve cared about the character in either universe. So I’m not hurt much by this loss if it sticks.
Oh good, I’m not the only one who isn’t bothered by this.
It’s also been dragged out so long, it’s lost most of the impact for me. I’m vaguely annoyed by it, since I was interested in seeing how Mike would change after his realization during the fight, and now we’re just stuck with the heroic asshole thing.
It feels weird though. I guess it’s a subversion to not kill the character dramatically on screen, but to injure them, leave them in a coma and then let them die off screen to be casually mentioned later, but there are good reasons that’s normally how a character death is handled.
Yeah, three arcs was too long waiting for me as well. I can get why him dying wasn’t the last thing we saw before the timeskip, but we could have gotten the important stuff (Danny fucking up, Ethan being frustrated with Amber, massive amounts of guilt, ‘I would say what you need to’) with even a less ambiguous ‘they aren’t sure he will’ or some clear indication to the audience his parents weren’t just asking for privacy with their son, they were discussing options with doctors at at least one point and considering them. You can get most of them with him dying overnight between the kidnapping and Is A Song Forever, but that would have necessarily changed the tone of the entire arc and made the relatively hopeful note it ended on impossible, so I do get why that didn’t happen.
Given that there is a Mike-shaped form in the cast picture, it’s possible that Walky has been told Mike is dead when Mike is still alive somewhere having An Adventure.
Also, Lucy dial it back a couple hundred notches, you’re a raised eyebrow away from ripping off your clothes screaming “Take me you caramel god!”
I’m of the opinion that Lucy might not be being direct enough. Walky doesn’t seem to have gotten what she’s hinting at. Or he has and he’s just not into her, but I can’t be sure.
Yeah, basically. People can be oblivious. Sometimes you’ve got to be direct.
Or he’s tired and just back from spending weeks observing the little signs that his previously perfect parents are racist, and thinking about his dead roommate, which reminds him of being kidnapped and scared and seeing a man get beaten to death with a hammer.
That does seem most likely.
IS there a Mike-shaped hole, though? I see Danny, and I see (probably) Joe, and one other guy, who MIGHT be Mike, but doesn’t look quite right. Unless his hair’s changed, which I guess is possible.
Walky’s just stating Mike metaphorically died, right? Right?
Poor Mr. and Mrs. Warner.
He always was my favourite.
People like him are important, and often misunderstood. I told that to Willis when he offered me a free magnet while signig my books at a local comic store, and I picked Mike, because I liked him, flaws and all.
He’s on my fridge, even now, so at least he’s still somewhere.
Thanks for making a cool and complicated guy with a heart of gold coated in lead, Willis. I’m gonna miss him.
Same here. Well, not the magnet part. But ever since Shortpacked, I loved him even when I usually hate jerk characters. And I kind of had a candle for the possibility of him and Ethan actually making it as a couple in at least one universe.
But yeah, I will miss him too. For reals.
Lucy, please find a scrap of dignity and just stop. If you’re going to cringe-worthy throw yourself at a guy, at least make him better worth it than Walky.
Also, “my roommate died” is not a great set-up for a come on.
“no one will die” — kills off Ross and Blaine.
“will probably never reach the end of the semester” — we are now in January of year 20XX + 1.
“no main character will die” — Walky announces that his roommate (Mike) is dead.
What other things has Willis been fibbing to us about? I betcha it turns out that he isn’t actually married; has only one child, not two (all those pictures showing “twins” are actually Photoshopped); and that child is actually the result of a drug-and-alcohol-fogged tryst between Willis and an out-of-control groupie one night following a book signing in someplace like Cleveland.
This was supposed to go on its own at the end of this thread.
In fairness to Willis, before Ross and Blaine died, he mentioned breaking at least one of his major writing rules for DoA. I think we had fair warning, though most of us assumed he meant Mike died.
…Well, I guess he did, in a manner of speaking. 😛
Yeah, especially since Ross and (so especially) Blaine were only going to be mourned by one or two characters each, and had exhausted their narrative purpose like that. (Blaine was never walking out of that arc alive.)
I’ll admit, I am lowkey disappointed Mike’s never going to ACTUALLY grapple with how much he fucked up Ethan and Amber’s psyches, ESPECIALLY Amber’s. But clearly, yeah, Willis wasn’t up for writing that arc and putting so much Mike in the limelight, and so Mike was better narratively served dying. Everyone else had a minute to grapple with the fact that they’re not immortal, there is that ‘sometimes people die without closure’ aspect, and that soft reboot includes time to grieve and a shifting of the strip away from a character who was so cartoonish.
The other thing is, that rule had come up ten years ago, or close. Probably not progressing semesters had been set ten years ago. A lot of things can change in that time about tone and planned character trajectory, and sometimes that includes a decision like ‘I don’t want to spend months on Halloween, I REALLY don’t want to worry about fall and winter breaks eventually, a time skip is appropriate here’ or… well, killing a character who’s been a major presence in the Walkyverse for twenty years because his schtick didn’t work in this universe, and it was more interesting to see how this impacted the more major characters tied to him.
This. Exactly. I’m bummed as a reader, but I understand as a writer.
Oh, so Walky got a second roommate that died? Must be a cursed bed whose owners all suffer. I’m not in denial and crying, you’re in denial and crying!
I’m… not so sure how I feel about this sequence of narrative choices.
Your gravatar is especially fitting for this comment.
Triple Headfake Minority
OpinionConfabulation:Mike isn’t dead.
Mike came out of his coma in mid-October, but was not moved back in with Walky because he needed physical therapy. He was moved into a room where he would have greater accessibility. He was wheelchair bound for a while, but is walking on his own now.
While Mike was moved out, Walky had another roommate move in at the end of October, one (*rolls dice*) Carter van Housen. Walky and Carter bonded quickly over a shared love of McNuggets and pizza. Carter — alas, we barely knew him — had an aneurysm a few days before the winter break, and Walky was alone again. And here we are.
I bet Walky’s “new” roommate will in fact be Mike again, now that Mike is walking again.
Mike is dead and Walky is depressed. How else do you plan to make people suffer, Willis.
“Mike is dead, and everything is worse now.”
…well, shit.
Also damn, Lucy, read the room.
Or offer Walky a nickel. It’s what Mike would have wanted.
…oh, man, Danny is gonna feel (felt?) like absolute shit.
… Holy shit. I never, ever, imagined that Willis would kill off Mike. I swear to god my blood ran cold when I read that line.
This is a pretty innocuous page to be the one that’s had the biggest emotional impact on me, not gonna lie.
I really think Walky gets what Lucy tries to do… and just isn’t that into her.
That said, it’s Walky so who knows.
That’s my take on it too.
I think he’s just not thinking in that direction right now. He’s thinking about Mike – which has got to be hella conflicting. And probably about Amber – we don’t know what happened there, but it obviously didn’t work out for them and Mike’s likely tied into that.
Even if he and Amber ARE still a thing, I can’t imagine she’d want to spend time in this room, in particular, with that empty desk and bed.
Likely they’re not – wouldn’t be shocked if Amber was so emotionally shaken up in the aftermath that she couldn’t maintain even a casual relationship, just to name one possibility – but even if they were, he’d be coming back to this room alone eventually and it is fucking HAUNTED right now.
I think he might be exaggerating.
Or are least i hope so
Wait … so … this means … that the “You’re Fucked” poster is actually Walky’s. Whoda thunk it?
I prefer to think that Walky asked Mike’s parents if he could keep it. It really brings the room together, ya know?
i hope this doesn’t mean the silhouette is Asher, and if it is, then i hope Asher isn’t actually as much of a jerkass as i interpreted him.
still looks more like mike to me though.
ooh maybe Ken finally gets his time to shine
Could also be Danny bought a new hat.
Look I’m not SAYING there’s still hope for a slipshine story where Mike, Danny and Ethan have a hospital bed threesome… but I’m not saying it’s IMPOSSIBLE either
No comment.
I mean… Sheev came back.
It would require Willis to mess up consistently and catastrophically, both in the strip and in his reader interactions, leaving him with nothing but wild attempted short-term thinking fan-service as a method to bring back readers.
I’m figuring the Mike silhouette is Force Ghost Mike that bothers Amber from time to time.
Oh… OH! It’s official then. Canon and in story.
I’m–I’m not sure how I feel about this. I think part of me feels bad? But I also didn’t get a chance to bond with DOA Mike like SP Mike so…
My thoughts, not that it matters.
– Mike IS dead. There’s really no other way to get around that. And it’s not likely that Mike went home, was replaced by another roommate, and then HE died.
– It’s… not surprising that Mike died, for storyline reasons. Mike was always a toxic person, and his mere existence and attitude was kinda-barely OK, in a “wacky hijinks” late-2000s Walkyverse. Dumbing of Age is far more realistic, far more grounded, and so a perpetual jerk who constantly treats others like crap… just isn’t going to fly as well in 2020.
– Mike’s redemption arc was fulfilled. We saw his past, his present, his goals, and what was important to him. Despite his behavior, he was willing to sacrifice himself in so many ways for his friends. The major antagonist of his life, the one who was REALLY abusing his friends, has been defeated. Permenantly.
– With that, Mike got about as empathizable as he was ever going to get – and yet, in many ways, he’s STILL an abuser. You can’t un-Mike Mike, short of getting him drunk – and that’s self-abuse. There wasn’t anywhere else to go with Mike’s character. And dying to save his his friends is exactly how he’d choose to go.
– Mike is not gone from the comic strip. In fact, it’s fair to say we’re seeing a new beginning for the character, in a way- in Amber’s sub-conscious. I predict that we’ll still see many Mike strips in the future, specifically telling Amber exactly what she doesn’t want to hear about herself.
– WTF Lucy! Dang, girl, you may be my secret favorite character, but come on, you gotta let him know you’re interested, or move on. Fingers crossed that we’ll see more of you in the future, but realistically probably not a whole lot.
> Dumbing of Age is far more realistic
In some ways. We still have a superhero almost no one can recognize with her mask on, her dad who thought kidnapping a dozen people with mob help was a great way to get out of paying college tuition, Dina’s super-stealth ability…
it’s still more realistic. shortpacked had Historical Jesus in the main cast, a dimension-hopping alien, and a cat that was also some kind of space-time anomaly, among many other things. also mike had already died and been brought back, so
this is still a more realistic universe by a lot, imo
Shortpacked ended with an invasion of reality by the Soggies from old Captain Crunch ad campaigns, caused by ‘excess diversity’ opening a hole for an endless tide of indistinguishable white sludge. (Which our diverse team of toy store employees ended the series staring down, preparing to fight.) Shortpacked featured a physical tag in the world that was keeping drama from occurring, and we know this served a purpose because we eventually saw a universe where it hadn’t been pulled, establishing it was a necessary action. Shortpacked had Robin running for – and winning – her Congress seat high on Cadbury Cream Eggs, courting the ‘necrophiliac Star Wars toy fans’ vote, and ran her last campaign trying to get Dinobot inducted into the inaugural Transformers Hall of Fame, ending in a fight scene/extended homage to the Beast Wars episode Code of Hero. (This did actually work.) Shortpacked featured Ronald Reagan giving an inspirational speech about accepting the way things actually are and not ‘the way things should be’ to help a character come to terms with her queerness. Which may actually be the least realistic thing about it, honestly.
Shortpacked was also part of the Walkyverse, so sizable portions of the cast – Mike and Robin included – had literal superpowers and had spent their early 20s fighting a couple alien invasions. They were psychologically conditioned to be unable to escape bonds of duct tape and consider The Sound of Music actual, literal torture.
Like, if you’re wondering what Shortpacked was like, consider that Galasso was imported from it more or less straight, and he was entirely tonally consistent there. AG bending the laws of physics in her action sequences is still NOTHING, realism-wise, on Shortpacked.
I probably dislike this mostly because I hate that kind of redemption arc. Dramatically sacrificing yourself to atone for being an asshole your whole life is an easy out. Living through it and changing yourself to not be an asshole/abuser is both more realistic and harder.
Most people never get the dramatic redemption arc. If they change they’ve got to do it the hard way and if they can make it up to the people they’ve hurt it’s one moment at a time, not in a big dramatic gesture.
It’s also awful for the victims because they’re pushed to treat him as a hero, while they’ve still got all the feelings tied up with the abuse that they now can’t vent.
Danny was right. Ethan will be better off with Mike gone. But no one should ever acknowledge that.
Agreed. I was really hoping to see Mike wake up from the coma and try to work on being kinder. Learning to hold his tongue. Trying to be a better human in little ways.
Agreed. It was a dick thing to say because… well, this was always a possibility and it IS harsh to wish someone dead, especially an 18-year-old, but he wasn’t WRONG.
I think this was also the worst possible way for Mike to leave Ethan and Amber’s lives as well, honestly. They’re never going to get fed up with him and tell him to get lost. Ethan will probably put him on that pedestal, and Amber has rent-free survivor’s guilt brain ghost. But… well, can’t deny the writerly impulse to fuck characters over for maximum drama, can I.
Maybe Amber will be able to evict her brain ghost if she is finally going to therapy and that will be the catalyst for integration? Amber’s relationship with her abusers doesn’t end with their death, but her healing and not allowing their influence to be how she defines herself. Grasping at straws here, because it’s the only way I can enjoy this plot line and Amber needs a light at the end of the tunnel.
If you mean ‘integration’ as ‘only one personality’, I doubt it – from what all the system commenters have said, it’s a ‘not always, often not the best, and takes years either way’ sort of thing. Timescale involved seems unlikely, not when Willis was so hesitant to say ‘yes, this is DID’ because of concern about perpetuating shitty tropes.
That said, AmbG was noticeably sleep-deprived the entire time Brain Ghost Mike was around, and we HAVE seen Amber have a short-term hallucination in response to trauma – she had a hallucinatory Blaine right after the Ryan incident. If he was a specific circumstances thing, not fully associated with the DID, that might be doable.
Oh, I wasnt saying Brain Mike was a fragment. So far agree with hallucination theory, but still pretty traumatic to have to overcome. I was saying Amber/Amazagirl revolting against Mike and working together would lessen their separation. Full integration might not be their goal, they’d need to discuss that as a system, but increased sharing and at least a couple mutual goals are definitely needed for their health. If only so Amber doesn’t starve AG out with sleep deprivation again :/.
Oh, agreed. Would also give a bit of closure to AmbG, at least, since they were the one(s) Mike was deliberately psychologically harming… pretty much for shits and giggles. Them getting to say ‘you know what? You were a shitty friend’ would be so satisfying.
I do wish Ethan was going to get that closure, though. Maybe there’s still some record of Mike’s ‘seduce Ethan to cause jealousy’ plan somewhere? Something to remind him that yeah, Mike never had a purely benevolent motive for anything. Or at least some serious unpacking in therapy.
One, Mike helped people while deflecting credit by accepting the MANTLE of bad guy without causing harm.
Two, your sex drive shows a disgusting lack of empathy to DEATH. “Tell him how you feel or move on.”?? He just said he isn’t interested didnt he? “I know why you’re here, but my roommate died and I am not looking for girlness now please go away.” Andyou think you’re better than mike, right?
Ew
Fat Boy Slim isn’t the only one fucking in Heaven.
Eh? EH?
Wait, Mike DIED?!?
Yup!
Mike death confirmed off-screen and in a casual way for maximum ease of writing and minimum chance for comment thread anger… until today.
Meanwhile, I wonder if Walky will ever realise that he and Lucy are sharing vulnerabilities? Normally, that’s a very intimate thing to do. However, and Lucy really needs to understand it, after everything that’s happened over the past six months or so, I don’t think Walky is in the right headspace to start a new relationship. Things are going to have to go slow, if they go at all.
The only way i could think of that this isn’t real death is if Mike like… died for 30 seconds and was then rescuscitated, and Walky is being hyperbolic while still being literal. But, uh, seems unlikely. Oof.
And during that short period of time a new Mike was Chosen, with a vague Caribbean accent, to come to the Hellmouth and stick “Mister Pointy” in your mom for a nickel
I though of neede to be a virgin to be chosen? Ah, well, that’s unconfirmed at least for several backstories of Faith it doesn’t apply.
Well this strip is giving me lots of conflicting emotions. Combination of anger at Willis for probably killing off Mike, and some denial because maybe Walky is wrong and Mike is somehow still alive. Plus I’m still shipping Lucy with Walky and damn it she might want to be a bit more direct with him.
That is one way to confirm the death.
Oh, come on, it’s Mike.
He’ll be back before the next semester starts.
woah. shocker.
Yeah! Good girl Lucy dreams of being alone with a guy in his dorm room!
So since people are talking about the cast photo: I’m pretty sure that’s Malaya to the right of Lucy, then to her left are probably Danny, Leslie, and Amber. I thought the person to their left was Mike but apparently not. Obviously Carly behind Becky and I’m assuming Joe beside her. Not sure who that is between Dorothy and Ruth though. Could be Rose but up to this point she hasn’t been important enough to warrant that spot.
It’s definitely Dina between Dorothy and Ruth.
Probably Billie with a new haircut between Danny and Amber.
And it could still be Amber’s Brain Mike, if that’s going to keep being a thing.
mike drop
Heh!
I’m now expecting his “new roommate” to just be Mike, back from the hospital, now with a cheery personality due to hitting his head hard.
Which will completely shock Walky.
Or maybe that’s why Mike’s “dead” to Walky
It just isn’t the same
the
what
well fuuuuuuuck
My heart. Ow, my heart. Well, Slipshine is forever.
Mike being dead (or, to humor some theories, known to the cast as dead) makes me a lot more uncomfortable about Lucy trying to roommate him
This obliviousness is getting from sort of cute to annoying now.
Also, Mike, nooo!
Oh no )=
I kinda feel stupid for ever reading the comments – they’re what told me the ‘no deaths’ ”rule”. If I hadn’t read the comments, I’d be able to just feel normal things, instead of feeling lied to.
HO-ly shit, I did not expect it. Damn.
RIP Mike, the next few years sure gonna be interesting.
Plays Avenged Sevenfold’s Fiction
That’ a very casual way to address the elephant in the room, and then putting a much smaller, brightly colored elephant next to it.
Yes, Lucy’s alt-Joyce credentials are a lot stronger now. I’m not sure even Joyce would be so insensitive and self-centred to try that!
Remember that for them this is no revelation. This is months old.
I’m sorry guys. This is my fault. Y’see I have this curse where every single thing I watch or read, my favorite character dies. It NEVER FAILS. I mean Daniel Jackson died like 6 times in stargate, in the most extreme example of what I call the Chelsea’s Law of Fictional Fate.
I’m drawn to tragically doomed fictional characters apparently.
The law also states I must somehow be in denial that they will somehow come back (hey, it happens! A lot actually…) so I’m gonna tell myself Mike is still in a coma and Walky is just being fatalistic because he never woke up so he’s assuming he never will/is brain-dead.
FWIW, I’m pretty sure that Amber’s hallucination!Mike may still be around, living rent-free in her head!
I hope so. It would be a nice way to keep Mike around for laughs without dealing with the consequences of his often being a toxic person.
I was enjoying his jerk with a heart of gold development though (though I know it’s a cliched and overdone and sometimes harmful but trope in fiction…I still like it)
I do not know why the word “but” got autocorrected in there.
I don’t think Mike was a Jerk With A Heart Of Gold, but rather he thought he was. He was dispensing tough love onto everyone around him and it took seeing what that’s actually like in the form of Blaine for him to realize he was actively worsening the lives of his best friends.
“Tough love” is abusers’ bullshit.
No, they aren’t doing it because they love you.
No, you are not making them do it.
It does not hurt them more than it hurts you.
It isn’t for your own good.
Indeed. Mike thought he was an Asshole Sage and then was struck with the crucial realization that other peoples’ feelings matter.
Yup. I wish he was still around to deal with that, rather than leaving everyone with having to pretend how great he was and deny the abuse.
Yeah part of why I think Walky is wrong here is that we’d be robbed of both one of three queer male main characters as well as a redemptive arc for Mike.
Except for the consequences of being a toxic person to Amber in her own head. Amber, who is the one most damaged by him already.
yea i never see people mention it but he pushed amber deeper into her trauma issues when he implied she was similar to her dad and i’m not sure why people aren’t angrier about that
I mean, heck. Mike admitted it in strip. Maybe it isn’t mentioned as much because that is a spelled out dynamic rather than an interpreted one?
Like, ‘she’s multiple time bonbs. Just work her up and point her dadwards’ isn’t all that ambiguous.
(Admittedly, I’d written Mike off since the flashback storyline and ‘maybe he’s lying that he INTENDED to put her in a car with her resentful abuser all day, but since he proceeded to actively suppress any possible better instincts who really cares’ alongside ‘may or may not have gotten another student to be the bait in his plan to deal with shitty teacher by outing her as a sexual predator’, with bonus ‘what POSSIBLE benevolent motive can you ascribe to literally recording Walky crying?’ But I really wish he could have done the hard work of being less of an asshole, instead of saddling AmbG with this guilt forever.)
Because that was followed shortly by first his realization that he was abusive and then by the Mike drop.
Now he’s the redeemed heroic dead and you can’t speak ill of him.
If Dream Mike ends up sticking around… I might be done with this strip for good.
There’s hope. Mike was injured fighting a man with mafia ties and connections with dirty cops. It’s possible he’s just been put into witness protection.
That would still permanently write him out of the strip. Witness protection does not put you back where you were and where people knew you.
Unless it’s Law and Order and you want to bring the “killed off” character back for a guest spot.
Yeah, I’m thinking if he’s not revealed to still be alive within this chapter at most, he’s almost definitely dead, and if not he might as well be, and he’ll only return for a single chapter in 5 years, standing over his own grave talking about having some “unfinished business” or something, and then afterwards he’ll immediately leave forever again.
Hopefully after actually completing that unfinished business is what I meant, but him appearing and then disappearing and it never really being addressed is also possible.
WILLIS!
So how long did it take to resolve this from the mysterious, did he fall silhouette panel?
Since January 7.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/02-to-remind-you-of-my-love/dead/
Thanks. I remember getting sick of this after the 3rd day of scene change and “alright keep your secrets.”
But I got the impression a bunch of other people enjoyed the long maybe, and I suppose it could still be that Mike has recovered and tricked Walky into thinking he is dead but is just going to nonchalantly walk in as his ‘new’ roommate. Since “bongo, I lived” is a very Mike trope.
The kind of injuries he sustained are not the kind you just get better from three months later.
Honestly, we don’t know what kind of injuries he sustained. We saw no medical report, heard very little about the details.
We know he was bleeding from the head and that he was comatose in the hospital for a couple of days. That’s really about it. Unless I missed something.
Open enough to lead basically anywhere Willis wanted.
We did have a couple implications – Mike’s clearly losing coherence and consciousness in those flashback strips, and with the bleeding from the head that’s… not a good sign his coma was medically-induced and not because of a traumatic brain injury.
I know we discounted Amber’s anxieties that he’d die as not entirely rational and catastrophizing, especially since they were mobster-based, but in hindsight ‘he might not wake up for a while’ and ‘I’d say whatever you need to’ combined did not bode well. Probably would have been better to have that clearly stated before the timeskip, but I actually had more issues with the pacing of last arc (where Blaine’s death made sense, but kind of derailed all the other emotional fallout) than the kidnapping.
Ethan also mentioned something about internal injuries, IIRC.
Yeah, it certainly could be read that way, but it also wouldn’t have been a contradiction for Mike to be back in the dorm room today – completely (or mostly) recovered. It was all vague enough you can’t really argue “he couldn’t have recovered that fast”.
I think I’m actually angry about this one.
And there it is.
Goodbye, sweet asshole, and may flights of nickels sing thee to a mom.
LOL!
Yeah I dont buy it
Time for two other things to happen: 1) Pull back the camera and let’s see how Amber and Ethan are doing, and 2) where the school is putting the memorial plaque or garden commemorating the event and the people lost.
They may wait til the end of the semester for that, which means twelve more years for us.
Background information; Linda tried to block the memorial and this led to the dean finally cutting ties with her.
Well. I did not see today’s strip coming.
I also think it’s worth mentioning that it seems that Walky and Amber have broken up, seeing as how it would be quite odd that he wouldn’t even consider asking her to join him.
Here’s what I think.
Take a step back a couple strips and Ruth “losing” Billie is a huge deal. There’s beat panels and somber expressions and the whole strip was building up to that.
And here? Mike’s death is revealed in panel 2 and quickly brushed aside so that Lucy can continue awkwardly flirting with Walky. That’s not just subverting expectations that’s not giving the audience themselves any time to process the death of a major character, who only right before his supposed death showed even an inkling of being able to change.
Walky is wrong, and until we get further confirmation I’m sticking to that.
I hope so.
It’s ok. The non-canon novels will retcon his death by pointing out that it was all only ever shown in Riker’s holodeck simulation anyways, and he was really secretly recruited into Section 31.
And that he, Garak, and Julian meet up once a week to play poker?
Where the pot is your mom. For a nickle.
Good riddance. I’ve said before how I felt about Mike and I’m glad he won’t be making any more significant appearances beyond Ambers imagination.
100% agree.
[Tim Allen “Eeaauuugh?” grunt of confusion dot wav]
That’s quite the revelation to just casually drop.
Trying to think of a different way to interpret “My roommate died” but I can’t think of any. So Mike is dead.
Also, it would appear Amber is no longer in the picture. Did she leave the school (for lack of tuition money) or did they merely broke off their relationship.
Is Walky completely oblivious to Lucy’s interest (even though noticed her liking, disliking and liking his tweet and her eagerness to welcome him back) or is he just pretending not to? Maybe he’s just not that into her.
That’d be silly, of course. Lucy is awesome and steals every scene she’s in.
Amber’s silhouette is in the cast picture.
I’m not even sure it’s her.
I’m starting to think it’s actually Marcie. She’s smaller, but has a similar build to Amber.
They’re close in stature and the hair could be either of them, but I still think it’s Amber. The silhouette looks like it’s holding a phone, which tracks for her.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/02-but-the-sun-still-shines/barge/
Mike died?
We’re just now finding that out?
And, yeah — they lost Billie? What does that mean?
…..
And what about Amber?
Ruth said she hadn’t lost anyone in her hall. Billie was moved into another dorm due their relationship. Ruth wasn’t counting Billie as a loss, because Billie is still in her life (my guess).
This is totally me in college. I mean, not the dead roommate part, the oblivious part.
So Mike died because of course he did.
He knew that that’s what would spite us the most and let go, the arse
So, Walky and Amber have definitely break up? Sad.
Damn.
Nooooooooooooooo 🙁
But you said no one would die…. 🙁
Pretty sure at the beginning of the last arc Willis said he’d be breaking some long held rules.
Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt!
oh my god. okay, possibilities that maybe Mike isn’t dead (shut up definitely not in denial):
– walky got another roommate and THAT guy died.
– walky assumed he’s dead because he has been in a coma so long, and he hasn’t had any news.
– walky knows he’s in a coma but is dealing with it treating like a death.
– mike has a twin or a body double.
– mike is in witness protection.
– mike made someone tell walky that he was dead just to appear later and fuck with him.
– mike is alive but he’s the first zombie of the universe so the doctors are keeping it under wraps.
– mike is alive but the mob kidnapped him and paid the hospital to say he died.
– amber lied to walky and said mike is dead now bc of reasons.
– walky saw how desolate amber and Ethan were one day and assumed mike had died but it was the day mike woke up
-aliens? vampires?
see? there’s… so many plausible reasons…
“Mike made someone tell Walky that he was dead just to appear later and fuck with him.” That would be SO on brand. Learning a bit from his mistakes with Amber, doesn’t mean Mile would be able to about face so quickly after revelations. Gotta unlearn him… being him.
Walky could slide into bed and find her waiting in a nightie and he still wouldn’t get it.
Look Lucy, just let him be broken for awhile.
Again, I have significant noyay to Walky and Lucy.
Amber and Walky 4 Ever.
Available plot twists:
1. Mike recovered, however remaining recovery would not allow him to return until next semester. Walky was issued a new roommate who subsequently died in a horrible toast making accident.
2. Mike recovered and requested someone tell everyone else he died. He will spend the next few months appearing in front of various characters while they are alone convincing them he is a figment of their grief and/or a ghost until he is eventually discovered.
Addendum to number 2: Mike will then express amazement that it took so long for these idiots to figure it out despite the fact that he continued to attend classes normally the entire time.
Well if Mike’s really dead, and I’m assuming Willis isn’t playing any mind games, that’s a bummer. I was looking forward to him having to confront his realization that he was an abuser like Blaine and not some tough love guru. This also sucks since Amber and Ethan could have used a break from the trauma.
Yup. We’ll see where Willis goes with this, but it seemed to me there was much more potential in the other path.
We were never going to get a happy ending from DYW. This isn’t Happying of Age.
https://www.gocomics.com/sarahs-scribbles/2019/03/09
How is everyone broadsided by this thing that was explained in plot slowly over several weeks?
Because this isn’t how you explain something in plot over weeks. “He was hurt and went into a coma before the time jump” is set up for a return, not for “and then he died offscreen, never to be seen again”.
“Grandma is on the roof, and we can’t get her down….”
As me and my friends used to say when we were deep into Supernatural (were people came back from the dead more and more as the seasons progressed): “Wingprint or they’re coming back.”
Just mentioning Mike’s death in one panel seems a bit too casual for the death of a character we’ve followed too long. Blaine and Toedad got more than that, and they were villains the audience won’t miss.
Walky’s comment seem to say Mike’s dead, cause how else should one interpret that, but still … I’m doubting, and will wait for more info.
I would guess Walky is just saying he’s dead/thinking of him that way because he doesn’t think he’ll ever wake up from the coma and just wants to move on.
Wow. I was expecting Mike to have survived. I wasn’t ready for this.
Plot twist, Mike died but was comatose, so another student moved into Walky’s room, and was subsequently hit by a truck.
(facepalm) Mike “lived” I meant to type. Way to tank my own joke.
Nah that’s even better
Walky all, “Oh yeah and any roommates I have keep dying. It’s kinda creepy”
Now I’m waiting for Mike to appear as a waiter in Galasso’s without any explanation.
Probably I will wait forever.
“Mike is whatever you don’t want him to be.”
“How about ‘dead’?”
Honestly, that checks out
So Mike died to spite us? Yeah, that tracks.
She is precious. She must be protected.
Alrighty, this is where I get off. Thanks for the ride, it was really great. But these last few turns don’t sit well with me.
I’ll probably check back again eventually. But for now, I’m out.
After getting almost all day to get used to this…
So… is this a constant of every universe?
Mike has to die at least once?
Book 11: “Damn you Willis”
That’s all the Book 11 introduction will say, in big bold letters, spread across two pages.
Huh. Honestly not feeling much in particular about this development. Might feel bad for the people who cared about him later though.
Ugh, I’m so not into Lucy/Walky. It’s like Amber/Walky was a fully loaded bacon & eggs breakfast – delicious and slightly bad for you. Lucy is like no-name bran cereal :S
That being said…. I could see Lucy and Danny together. They’re both cringey, socially indept, and desperate lol.
*inept
No, no Indebt works too!~ They’re both in college.
Danny: “What do you want to do today, Lucy?”
Lucy: The same thing as we do every day, Danny!”
Both in unison: “Whatever YOU want to do!”
Then they sit unmoving for the rest of the day, never breaking eye contact, never blinking.
mike will always live on……. in our moms……. (╥_╥)
beautiful eulogy
Relatable Walky is relatable.
DAMNIT WILLIS!
My heart.
Taking all bets on the chances Walky’s overstating things.
Guess my original comment didn’t go through
I have always loved mike and will miss his good hearted mischief
anyone who likes him only after he martyred himself should take a hard look at the cause of toxic behavior and the end results of toxic positivity and white privilege……
Catching up…
Surprised he’s been killed off… but it doesn’t make me like Mike. He was manipulative and abusive. Did he have some honorable moments? Sure… no one is pure good or evil. But going out in a well-meaning heroic way does not erase any damage that he caused others.
Mike died as he lived, breaking all the rules.
I have been going on a bit in the comments about how Mike must be a difficult character to write when translating Shortpacked’s farce to something more like a real life setting, since he was never anything like a real human person. I know Willis himself has made some comical commentary about it, mostly relating to how his hair isn’t even three-dimensional. This is a kind of drastic solution, breaking the one promise to the readers to not kill any regular cast members and all, but maybe it was necessary. And honestly, on a storytelling level, I like it. (On a story-enjoying level I’m sad for the people grieving him.) It makes things just a little real, in a story that has been – I will say very enjoyable – years and years of wish-fulfillment fantasy for those of us who remember public education. I’m absolutely sure no one else will die, but still. . .
I knew a Mike character growing up. Cynical about everything. It’s always an, I think this character is amazing, in a ‘Fuck you’ kind of a way.