A young woman joins a group of summoners who call forth Guardian Beasts to protect their isolated magical island. Unfortunately, her Guardian Beast is nothing like she'd imagined, and he's about to change her life, and everything she thought she knew about herself...
Sleepless Domain
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
In a world where magical girls and their battles are commonplace, loss has become all too common as well.
Augustine
Winter Jay Kiakas, Windy
August and her ragtag group are just like everyone else, simply surviving in the treacherous Crater... When they stumble into what may be an artifact of the ancient past, their lives are thrown into a much bigger loop as they trifle with bounty hunters, monsters and gods.
ARISE, YE SKELETON KING
Brian Clevinger, Escher Cattle, Lee Black
A troupe of wandering "adventurers" down to their last silver "acquire" a map only to find the real treasure was the fiend they dug up along the way.
Raruurien
Ann Maulina
To maintain a peaceful life without her husband, a witch has to assimilate with the villagers, become a role model for her sons and also keep a low profile by confining her powerful magyx in public.
Angel's Orchard
Harry Bogosian
After the events in Demon's Mirror, Gerda has accepted her role as a Demon Hunter, and Cezar has traveled back to the Demon City. Demons have existed alongside humans for millennia, so things begin to return to normal. But an impossibly powerful Relic has been taken by one of the Demon Masters, and a silent war enters its final stages.
Heroes of Thantopolis
Izzy Strontium Hall
A living boy fights to save the City of the Dead.
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Nigh Heaven & Hell
Scotty
Heather Vodihn is on a simple mission: find her father. However she becomes entangled with two strangers with mysterious powers being stalked by a group with bizarre demands. Heather must learn to trust her new traveling companions, even if she is untrustworthy herself.
Novae
KaiJu
A historical romance with a touch magic and a dash of astronomy. It chronicles the romantic adventures of Sulvain, a sweet tempered necromancer and Raziol, a passionate 17th century astronomer.
Darkling Bright
Chris Hazelton
Kieran Bright is a college student home for the summer and roped into an online reunion with his old neighborhood friends in the most recent update of their favorite childhood MMORPG.
At least, he was, and that was the idea...
Join Kieran and his friends as they are pulled into another reality that may or may not be real and are forced to confront their own identities, the nature of simulated universes and reality itself.
Monster's Garden
Ash G.
Champion pit fighter Kilo Monster was content to spend the rest of his days tending to his quiet garden alone... until he met a curious robot girl and her human family.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
Saint for Rent
Ru Xu
Saint Halliday runs an inn for Time Travelers. Unfortunately, he seems to attract other supernatural "guests," too.
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Not Drunk Enough
Tess Stone
Logan Ibarra is possibly the unluckiest repairman in the world. A late night job should not have landed him in the middle of a mad scientist's squabble, but he soon finds himself surrounded by monsters and further madness with little tools to get out.
Little Tiny Things
Clover
What are the little things that move us? The simple joys that warm our bodies and hearts? The micro life of insects that influence our world more than we think? The tiny steps we make everyday to have a happier tomorrow?
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Eric Lide
Ozzie and her best friend Kimmy are your average everyday normal art students – except one is an immortal vampire with superpowers and the other possesses a magic talking grimoire. Also they have to save their town from a demonic invasion.
Edison Rex
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The adventures of the world’s greatest villain who, after defeating his superheroic nemesis, decides that he’s the only one left to defend the world.
Barbarous
Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota
A crummy wizard and an anxious monster have to get over themselves and bring order to an apartment building full of misfits.
Cyanide & Happiness
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Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Peritale
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A fairy godmother with no magic tries her best to successfully fulfill a Fairytale and win the respect of her peers.
Sister Claire
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In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
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Lacey
Lysander's aimless and carefree life is turned upside down when he accidentally discovers that the cute boy next door, Simon, is a literal monster
Three Panel Soul
Matt Boyd, Ian McConville
It's a pretty rigid format but we keep the content loose, you know?
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A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
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A young woman pursued by bad luck is witness to the murder of the Fairy Queen of Summer. Can she get to the bottom of this mystery?
The Messenger
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In a ruin-abound town cursed with bad luck, Kai and Kalla--a young boy and a fledgling dragonbird spirit--take on a quest in hopes the reward will solve all of their problems.
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A festival of broken people, blood flows in the center ring. Come one and come all, to the greatest show in all of Paris.
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Our heroes must navigate a hazardous dating scene, overcome personal anxieties, and wrangle unruly seafood in order to find love, peace of mind, and a paycheck.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
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Imagine that this is like the ending of an episode of Scrubs, that throughout this scene we’ve still been hearing Sal sing Welcome to the Black Parade the whole time, and that she just got back to the line “Your memory will carry on”.
Yeah, but then Danny’s gonna pipe up with “Why’s his dad leaving him a bantam anyway?” and it becomes a whole thing where they’re explaining how he got the lyric wrong all those years ago and now Carla’s there and she’s asking what a bantam even is despite blatantly knowing.
Willis tweeted a few weeks ago about how they’d forgotten to remove the shading on Mike from an upcoming strip presumably months in the future and had to go in and fix it, so I’d bet it’s not the last we’ve seen.
Women all over the world are experiencing sudden and unexplainable orgasms. As if one by one, women are being ravaged by an invisible sex master. This phenomenon only seems to be affecting women who have previously given birth. Women are now frantically engaging in sexual activity hoping to get pregnant so that they too can experience this. Experts have named this Mother’s Inexplicable Koochy Explosion or “MIKE” for short.
Sorry, no. If Mike slept anyone, let alone someone’s Mom, he’d make damned sure the only orgasm was his. Unless he needed to record it for something like a marriage proposal.
People were wondering that the first time too. I am at least hoping his disappearance means Amber fell asleep cause she needs it. Plus there’s always Walky’s comic.
Amber has Imaginary Brain Sex with Imaginary Brain Mike, neither of them use Imaginary Brain Protection, and neither of them are aware that Robin has switched her Imaginary Brain Birth Control Pills with Imaginary Brain Breath Mints by mistake. Imaginary Brain Hijinks ensue.
Maybe Joe’s simple suggestion actually got through to Amber. Either way, for Amber’s sake I hope this is the end of Halluci-Mike. So how is Amber going to help Joe with Joyce?
I’m glad she’s willing to admit that Mike was an asshole, it would be boring if she only focused on the good parts (and it provides a nice contrast between her and Ethan)
This is hard but it might also be one of the things that helps – Amber knows that despite how complicated her feelings could be, she cared about Mike, he cared about her and he knows she cared.
I haven’t seen it personally, but after reading AITA threads on reddit, some people in grief literally turn into monsters.
Saddest comment I read was one by a therapist about how a client had a house full pictures of her dead daughter and mentioned her loss within minutes. There were none of her still very much alive daughter that also still existed.
I feel like oftentimes grief can accentuate the worst aspects of someone’s personality. It can be a lot harder control your negative behaviors when you’re dealing with something like that. And for some people, it’s definitely a way to excuse like any negative behavior.
I tend to process very quickly compared to most people so it is absolutely wild to me when someone is like ‘AITA for [insert behaviour that is absolutely an inappropriate unhealthy expression of grief that they are not entitled to do or a request that is unreasonable to ask]’ and then a comment reveals it didn’t happen recently or even in the last decade but something like 26 years ago.
Some people get stuck in the identity of being unhappy about a loss. And that is it. Their identity becomes ‘unhappy about loss of X’. And they don’t choose to take steps to be happy again or process to live with the moments of pain without being consumed by it or pay any attention to the still alive people around them. What was once a feeling becomes a permanent embodied identity of who they are and it is so weird to me.
I mean if it’s consuming years of your life and greatly impairing your ability to function I’d say that’s a pretty fair point to pathologize. Either way a person suffering this greatly would need professional help, there’s nothing wrong with trying to further understand it
But what exactly is “greatly impaired ability to function” anyway?
Vague things like this are somehow up to the judgment of clinicians, who surprise surprise have a hell of a lot of bias.
Getting to the meat of it, you can’t have a concept of mental disorder, of “incorrect” functioning, without a concept of “correct” functioning. Who and in what society and context gets to determine what size fits all? Very strictly speaking, I’d reckon that determining what counts as mental “disorder” is really an exercise in power.
In a way, yeah. Technically, I guess that’s basically true.
But something’s really do mess you up. Ruth lying in bed saying dying sounded nice isn’t something to handwave off as “biased clinicians just wanting people to fit normal ideals of correct functioning”.
The big revelation about Mike was the fact he THOUGHT he was a warrior therapist encouraging people to be better versions of themselves by standing up against bullies. That he was boosting them because he had a misanthropic confrontational worldview.
When he discovered, no, it just made him a monster, he either committed suicide by Blaine or tried to do everything to stop him.
So I think it’s interesting that Mike’s bullying was never motivated by an actual desire to HURT people.
Jennifer tends to wear a lot of yellow, especially paired with black or a very dark blue. IIRC that was also the color of her highschool cheerleader outfit.
Willis pointed out a few years ago that amber tends to wear amazi girls colors. Billie also wore blue and yellow bc Go Dragons! Joyce tends to dress thematically to her emotions for the story; red sweaters in the first post toe dad arc when she was still very angry, black and white now when she’s seeing and treating things in a very black and white way.
This is obviously a summation of Mike’s character and it makes me ask if Mike’s one major good made up for all the times he hurt people intentionally or otherwise. Mike did some real damage to people (in Joe’s case quite literally) and he didn’t have the opportunity to die for them. Even Amber and Ethan hold damage from knowing Mike in ways they probably don’t even realize he had a hand in. Is it all okay now that he’s dead?
I would say no. I think that Mike was moving to a place were he might have grown and been able to do good but then he died doing one good and that’s the tragedy of his character.
Eh, if you go by the overall good, it’s not his death but the fact that Ambers’ dad was stopped that did any good.
The trauma of Mike dying on them hurt most of the characters in the cast worse than his asshole deeds.
Your question would be relevant if we speculated on whether Mike’s existence as a whole did more good than bad.
It doesn’t. But it DOES at least make it clear that Mike really did care and that Amber mattered to him, even if he was an incredibly shitty friend who often made her feel like shit. Amber’s feelings are no doubt even more complicated as a result
^ this. Maybe they could have built something better after Mike’s revelation but they’ll never get to do that now because Mike died. That’s tragic and inevitably going to colour her thoughts for at least some time.
Likely not, which is why I would’ve preferred that Mike didn’t die so he could’ve had a chance to try to make things up with at least some of the people he hurt.
I’d say the point of this strip is that there’s no “making it okay”. These were a bunch of aspects of their relationship and now he’s gone. That’s it. There is no point or goal or arc to it. And it’s okay to miss him. He didn’t have to be a good guy to be a friend, or to be missed.
This would be better if I didn’t know that Ghost-Mike is just a PTSD-induced hallucination of Amber’s and that she’s just claiming that Mike was as friendless as she is, with little actual basis for that thought.
I heard Tibetan Buddhists did something really similar with something they called the “mind form”; I don’t know the details, but it has been alluded to several times in anime like DBZ and Avatar.
Who knows? She might just turn lemons into lemonade.
As somebody who liked Mike way more than most people seem to, I can safely say there is a lot of basis for the idea that he doesn’t have a lot of friends. So much basis.
He also seemed to jump into casual sex with Eric (Finger guns guy) very easily so I don’t think he had a problem making friends, but just chose not to, and it’s also hard to classify who he considered friends besides Ethan and Amber since he treated them both equally awful most times.
He definitely had no trouble getting other people to associate with him in ways he wanted them to, but I don’t think we ever actually witnessed him opening up or making himself vulnerable in a way that would imply friendship going the other way.
This is not to excuse anything, just an observation.
What Devin said. Please don’t conflate “can get people to do what he wants” with “has friends”.
I also think that comparing his behavior with Ethan and his behavior with Amber to figure out “is/isn’t friends” is also wrong since everyone explicitly agrees they’re *both* friends. You’d want to compare his behavior with Ethan to his behavior with Eric, or Danny, or Joe, or whoever.
Well, Mike’s last words were “You were good friends. My best friends”, so I think there’s some basis to Amber’s-subconcious-manifesting-as-Mike’s claim.
Mike certainly had the charisma, confidence and social skills to make friends (especially when compared to Ethan and Amber), but he purposefully kept the world at arm’s length by being a huge asshole. It’s not that much of a reach to consider Amber and Ethan to be those he was closest to.
…dang, now that you bring that up, Brain!Mike saying Amber was one of his only friends feels like Amber’s low self-esteem can’t comprehend anyone considering her one of their best friends unless it was purely by default.
Or she’s acknowledging that Mike was also a lonely kid rather than some implacable force of assholishness. The sort of clarity you rarely get about other people before their story is done. She takes that in and what they were to each other, and then she can understand the whole of it. It’s a painfully real thing.
In general I’m able to keep Walkyverse and Dumbiverse separate in my mind, but this one, man… this one hits hard, knowing they’re married in another timeline.
I was sort of hoping Brain Mike would stick around, just because it occurred to me that he was DoA’s version of Mike and Amber getting married in the Walkyverse. Oh well, they’re teenagers, those relationships don’t last very long anyway.
What a coincidence (really)! Mike and Wilbur (Mary Worth) gone in the same week both with a good chance of coming back to totally mess up a character’s life.
I feel like I did when I witnessed the Barney the Dinosaur balloon deflate during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. Happy to see it, crowd cheering, but you know he’ll be back.
Yeah, with Willis in the comments above nixing what I thought was an impending future appearance of brain-Mike by saying that it’d already happened, this does seem like it could be a series wrap for the character as a whole.
Why are we abandoning the word “few”? Why are we forgetting that “only” is an adjective form of “one”? That it means “alone in a category, making up a category of one”?
Nonono, OBVIOUSLY Amber had unrequited lust for him and Mike (being Mike) knew that, so he friend-zoned her JUST to be an asshole (as opposed to, say, not liking her or being opposed to sex with her in principle), and now he’s mocking her by pointing out they were ONLY friends. It’s the only way of parsing that sentence that makes sense!
I agree that “one of my only friends” sounds a little grammatically weird, but I also think it sounds a lot more poignant than “you were one of my few friends”. So, personally, I’d consider it a case of artistic license. Still, I’m not that young anymore, so maybe my feeling for what’s grammatically correct isn’t up to date with the Youths’.
I have to assume that “I’ll leave you a phantom” is about more than the appearance of the song. This is Mike’s swansong and it’s sung by Sal and Danny.
Been awhile since I watched Bebop.
I knew that phrase had meaning when you wrote it.
So I did a search for it using Bing (yes, I use Bing), and a YouTube video came up.
Now my head canon has this playing in Mike’s head when he tackled that sorry excuse for a father: https://youtu.be/rDZKTrhLRdU
The difference between Mike and Blaine was that Mike realized he’d horrifically mishandled his relationship to Amber and tried to make amends.
Which is the problem because that actually makes it worse: because it lets Ethan and Amber know he WASN’T just a toxic person they could completely write off but someone who loved them.
Mike was my favorite character by far, even though he wasn’t as fleshed out as some of the others. This gives him a bit more depth, even though he’s an ethereal being at best now.
So, who is the resident a-hole now? Carla?
oh man this is getting to me. I had a friend who died in college (well, I was in college, she wasn’t). It happened when I was 18 so it felt like the world was telling me “welcome to adult life!” in the worst way possible. She was also one of my only friends, even though I hadn’t talked to her in months. I’m still not sure if I can ever make friends again. (sorry for being depressing! I do love this storyline even as it’s destroying me)
Looks like Amber is finally on the road to recovery. It is fine to miss someone, even if that someone was a toxic bag of sh*t. For better, or for worse (hint, mostly for worse), Mike was in a significant portion of Amber’s life, her high school years. He was there for her, when she was down, just to kick her, mind you, but never the less. Amber admitting that she misses him, is the first step in letting him go, so that she can finally move on.
ROZ: Niles said you’re going on a date with a trans woman.
FRASIER: I suppose you don’t approve.
ROZ: Oh, no, Frasier, I really feel for trans women.
FRASIER: Oh? Do go on.
ROZ: Oh, I can just relate to any woman who has a useless prick they’d like to get rid of
Dear cis people,
It's well past the point where this kind of thing will fix everything, but I want you to take note of how easy this is.
These little freaks are soft-handed little babies that will fold like a napkin in the rain.
Light these fools up.
Ari Drennen@aridrennen.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Texas Republican Keithself storms out of the meeting he's supposed to be running because a Democrat asked him to treat his colleague Sarah McBride with respect. These people would not last one day as a trans person.
onion person @junlper.beer ⋅ 5h
Ari Drennen @aridrennen.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
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PAX East
oh no the FEELS
hook it directly to my veins!
Not me. Sticking with edibles, thank you.
Dude carefull! The instructions are in the name. You gotta eat edibles. Do not, I repeat, do NOT attempt to take edibles intravenously!
I meat drama edibles silly! What did you think I meant?
That you were injecting drama edibles, of course!
That’s what they implied!
Exactly! Surely the concentration is much too high!
Want to make it even worse?
Imagine that this is like the ending of an episode of Scrubs, that throughout this scene we’ve still been hearing Sal sing Welcome to the Black Parade the whole time, and that she just got back to the line “Your memory will carry on”.
Would that not fucking nuke your soul?
That might depend on how good Danny is with his ukelele
I got nuked by the uke!
Better than getting uked by the nuke. Probably.
Scrubs was sooooooooo good at being a magnificent tearjerker
Yeah, but then Danny’s gonna pipe up with “Why’s his dad leaving him a bantam anyway?” and it becomes a whole thing where they’re explaining how he got the lyric wrong all those years ago and now Carla’s there and she’s asking what a bantam even is despite blatantly knowing.
Will we ever see ghost Mike again?…Maybe.
Willis tweeted a few weeks ago about how they’d forgotten to remove the shading on Mike from an upcoming strip presumably months in the future and had to go in and fix it, so I’d bet it’s not the last we’ve seen.
That strip already came and went.
Know who else came and went? Mike with everybody’s mom.
You mother fucker.
You’re just determined to make everyone else look bad aren’t you? How is anybody supposed to match up to that?
By using the phrase “mother fucker”, completely by accident, totally not-at-all recognizing its double-meaning in this context?
I think it’s both. Schrodinger’s motherfucker: We won’t know if it’s literal or figurative until we open the box.
We know miked opened every mom’s box.
Wait… Are we still talking about DoA or have we moved onto the Beastie Boys?
How did Mike do your mom? Let me count the ways:
1. Like this
2. Like that
3. With a wiffle ball bat
Just to comment that I will be adding yhe phrase “Schrodinger’s motherfucker” to my vernacular.
Carry on.
next strip with Joe: HELLO NEW FRIEND
That would be both hilarious and very concerning for Joe’s mental health!
Plot twist: it’s the comic shifting genres into supernatural horror.
Mike’s shifting your mom into a supernatural whore!
Brilliant
Only 5lbs of pressure to break a skull, from the _inside_.
Then Joe gains a superhero persona
Sexo Loco
he’ll be back… for a nickle. ~<3
Wonder if this means he’ll never appear again.
Well, there are all those moms he has to sleep with in the afterlife…
Women all over the world are experiencing sudden and unexplainable orgasms. As if one by one, women are being ravaged by an invisible sex master. This phenomenon only seems to be affecting women who have previously given birth. Women are now frantically engaging in sexual activity hoping to get pregnant so that they too can experience this. Experts have named this Mother’s Inexplicable Koochy Explosion or “MIKE” for short.
Sorry, no. If Mike slept anyone, let alone someone’s Mom, he’d make damned sure the only orgasm was his. Unless he needed to record it for something like a marriage proposal.
So, always.
props for the backronym lmao
People were wondering that the first time too. I am at least hoping his disappearance means Amber fell asleep cause she needs it. Plus there’s always Walky’s comic.
Who knows, Amber might just summon him again but only as a dream-sex apparition like she did with him and Danny that one time.
That would actually be the worst, which maybe makes it more likely to happen.
This NSFW of Amber’s only gonna get more relevant, isn’t it?
https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/thewellerman/super-amber-69
Newgrounds still exists?
And people apparently still post stuff to it?
Huh, didn’t expect that.
HELL YEAH it exists!
And it’s a good thing too!
The censor-bots can suck my octagon!
Also, if you haven’t already, create a Newgrounds account! It’ll be awesome, trust me!!!!
Not only does Newgrounds exist, a game came out called Friday Night Funkin’ that is basically a hotpot of Newgrounds nostalgia.
In the face of the early 00s now getting its nostalgia throwbacks, we may need to accept that we are extremely old.
I tried that game and my old man hands failed miserably.
I’ll just go rewatch B.
Amber has Imaginary Brain Sex with Imaginary Brain Mike, neither of them use Imaginary Brain Protection, and neither of them are aware that Robin has switched her Imaginary Brain Birth Control Pills with Imaginary Brain Breath Mints by mistake. Imaginary Brain Hijinks ensue.
And Imaginary Donna is born.
Immaculate Conception was never so weird.
And it’s pretty weird.
This has been a long time coming and it will ultimately help lead Amber to a healthier place
Still hurts though
Yes.
Maybe Joe’s simple suggestion actually got through to Amber. Either way, for Amber’s sake I hope this is the end of Halluci-Mike. So how is Amber going to help Joe with Joyce?
Amber the wingman! Can’t wait to see that.
Oh my. A mutual symbiosis where Amber fulfills her warming up as bridges and helps Joe at the same time.
It might just work out TOO well.
Healing hurts
“It has to hurt if it’s to heal”.
That line from Neverending Story always stuck with me as a kid.
Which was, appropriately enough, about depression
…jesus christ, brain mike
This sort of coming-to-terms with losing someone you had a complex relationship with is great drama, love it
I’m glad she’s willing to admit that Mike was an asshole, it would be boring if she only focused on the good parts (and it provides a nice contrast between her and Ethan)
Amber needs a good cry.
Like I said the other day, she’s been fighting to keep it together but what she really needs is catharsis from letting herself fall apart.
And then a nice dream
As someone dealing with… all kinds of grief, this hurts.
This is hard but it might also be one of the things that helps – Amber knows that despite how complicated her feelings could be, she cared about Mike, he cared about her and he knows she cared.
…and then Mike died again
Grief is a terrible thing to go through, but being stuck in it can really mess up a person, as I have unfortunately seen it happen more than once
I haven’t seen it personally, but after reading AITA threads on reddit, some people in grief literally turn into monsters.
Saddest comment I read was one by a therapist about how a client had a house full pictures of her dead daughter and mentioned her loss within minutes. There were none of her still very much alive daughter that also still existed.
I feel like oftentimes grief can accentuate the worst aspects of someone’s personality. It can be a lot harder control your negative behaviors when you’re dealing with something like that. And for some people, it’s definitely a way to excuse like any negative behavior.
I tend to process very quickly compared to most people so it is absolutely wild to me when someone is like ‘AITA for [insert behaviour that is absolutely an inappropriate unhealthy expression of grief that they are not entitled to do or a request that is unreasonable to ask]’ and then a comment reveals it didn’t happen recently or even in the last decade but something like 26 years ago.
Some people get stuck in the identity of being unhappy about a loss. And that is it. Their identity becomes ‘unhappy about loss of X’. And they don’t choose to take steps to be happy again or process to live with the moments of pain without being consumed by it or pay any attention to the still alive people around them. What was once a feeling becomes a permanent embodied identity of who they are and it is so weird to me.
There’s actually a diagnosis for that. It’s called prolonged grief disorder and is a relatively recent addition to the DSM-5
https://prolongedgrief.columbia.edu/professionals/complicated-grief-professionals/overview/
We all heal and grief at our own pace. Why the hell is THAT a mental disorder too?!?!?!
Seriously, at this point I suspect the DSM dipwads are disease mongering.
I mean if it’s consuming years of your life and greatly impairing your ability to function I’d say that’s a pretty fair point to pathologize. Either way a person suffering this greatly would need professional help, there’s nothing wrong with trying to further understand it
I mean, I guess?
But what exactly is “greatly impaired ability to function” anyway?
Vague things like this are somehow up to the judgment of clinicians, who surprise surprise have a hell of a lot of bias.
Getting to the meat of it, you can’t have a concept of mental disorder, of “incorrect” functioning, without a concept of “correct” functioning. Who and in what society and context gets to determine what size fits all? Very strictly speaking, I’d reckon that determining what counts as mental “disorder” is really an exercise in power.
In a way, yeah. Technically, I guess that’s basically true.
But something’s really do mess you up. Ruth lying in bed saying dying sounded nice isn’t something to handwave off as “biased clinicians just wanting people to fit normal ideals of correct functioning”.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Yeah I don’t really get all this type of ‘he meant well’ stuff or whatever.
You are how you act, not always but mostly.
The big revelation about Mike was the fact he THOUGHT he was a warrior therapist encouraging people to be better versions of themselves by standing up against bullies. That he was boosting them because he had a misanthropic confrontational worldview.
When he discovered, no, it just made him a monster, he either committed suicide by Blaine or tried to do everything to stop him.
So I think it’s interesting that Mike’s bullying was never motivated by an actual desire to HURT people.
So with Amber’s pillow, I’ve noticed she definitely has a bit of a colour scheme (blue and yellow).
Joe has green and purples.
Anyone else? Joyce has a lot of pastels, Sarah uses quite a bit of purple, and obviously Dina has a bunch of green.
Ruth has dark blue as a Maple Leafs fan.
And also being deeply depressed. But that might have something to do with being a Maple Leafs fan.
She’ll blame the blue on the team rather than the depression, though.
Dorothy likes purple.
Joyce also often has the blue/orange combo, Carla really likes red and pink, and Danny usually wears blues and grays.
Jennifer tends to wear a lot of yellow, especially paired with black or a very dark blue. IIRC that was also the color of her highschool cheerleader outfit.
Willis pointed out a few years ago that amber tends to wear amazi girls colors. Billie also wore blue and yellow bc Go Dragons! Joyce tends to dress thematically to her emotions for the story; red sweaters in the first post toe dad arc when she was still very angry, black and white now when she’s seeing and treating things in a very black and white way.
Exorcism.
I know too many breakup songs.
Be glad I missed the “dead teenager” trend in pop music.
It’s not quite a break up song, but I think Bleach’s “Creeping Shadows” would go perfect with this.
There’s always “The Breakup Song” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLFfSDEA26o
Weird Al is the primary reason anyone remembers the Greg Kihn band. Is being a two song wonder twice as good as being a one song wonder?
Not that I’m knocking it as I’m a no song wonder.
Wash your mouth out! Tony Robinson on a Sinclair C5 as The Electric Leader of the Pack was a classic.
How about Jimmy Cross’ I want my baby back the song that killed the entire genre with malice aforethought
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0x8S1U7O3w
Mike
Goodbye, Mike. You’ll be missed.
This is the first comic in which I’ve really appreciated Mike as a character. Goodbye, Mike.
This is obviously a summation of Mike’s character and it makes me ask if Mike’s one major good made up for all the times he hurt people intentionally or otherwise. Mike did some real damage to people (in Joe’s case quite literally) and he didn’t have the opportunity to die for them. Even Amber and Ethan hold damage from knowing Mike in ways they probably don’t even realize he had a hand in. Is it all okay now that he’s dead?
I would say no. I think that Mike was moving to a place were he might have grown and been able to do good but then he died doing one good and that’s the tragedy of his character.
Eh, if you go by the overall good, it’s not his death but the fact that Ambers’ dad was stopped that did any good.
The trauma of Mike dying on them hurt most of the characters in the cast worse than his asshole deeds.
Your question would be relevant if we speculated on whether Mike’s existence as a whole did more good than bad.
It doesn’t. But it DOES at least make it clear that Mike really did care and that Amber mattered to him, even if he was an incredibly shitty friend who often made her feel like shit. Amber’s feelings are no doubt even more complicated as a result
^ this. Maybe they could have built something better after Mike’s revelation but they’ll never get to do that now because Mike died. That’s tragic and inevitably going to colour her thoughts for at least some time.
Likely not, which is why I would’ve preferred that Mike didn’t die so he could’ve had a chance to try to make things up with at least some of the people he hurt.
I’d say the point of this strip is that there’s no “making it okay”. These were a bunch of aspects of their relationship and now he’s gone. That’s it. There is no point or goal or arc to it. And it’s okay to miss him. He didn’t have to be a good guy to be a friend, or to be missed.
My only hope is Mike stopping have power in Amber’s life.
It’s like an old band-aid, I guess.
This would be better if I didn’t know that Ghost-Mike is just a PTSD-induced hallucination of Amber’s and that she’s just claiming that Mike was as friendless as she is, with little actual basis for that thought.
But I do know that. So…
I heard Tibetan Buddhists did something really similar with something they called the “mind form”; I don’t know the details, but it has been alluded to several times in anime like DBZ and Avatar.
Who knows? She might just turn lemons into lemonade.
When life gives you Mike, make Mike fluid.
(It’s what your mom did.)
As somebody who liked Mike way more than most people seem to, I can safely say there is a lot of basis for the idea that he doesn’t have a lot of friends. So much basis.
I’m pretty sure anyone who even vaguely knew Mike would know that making friends isn’t exactly his specialty.
He seduced a football player into catfishing a teacher he wanted destroyed. Making friends is his bender art.
He also seemed to jump into casual sex with Eric (Finger guns guy) very easily so I don’t think he had a problem making friends, but just chose not to, and it’s also hard to classify who he considered friends besides Ethan and Amber since he treated them both equally awful most times.
He definitely had no trouble getting other people to associate with him in ways he wanted them to, but I don’t think we ever actually witnessed him opening up or making himself vulnerable in a way that would imply friendship going the other way.
This is not to excuse anything, just an observation.
What Devin said. Please don’t conflate “can get people to do what he wants” with “has friends”.
I also think that comparing his behavior with Ethan and his behavior with Amber to figure out “is/isn’t friends” is also wrong since everyone explicitly agrees they’re *both* friends. You’d want to compare his behavior with Ethan to his behavior with Eric, or Danny, or Joe, or whoever.
But remember that even Ethan said he was only maybe 50% sure they were friends.
Well, Mike’s last words were “You were good friends. My best friends”, so I think there’s some basis to Amber’s-subconcious-manifesting-as-Mike’s claim.
Mike certainly had the charisma, confidence and social skills to make friends (especially when compared to Ethan and Amber), but he purposefully kept the world at arm’s length by being a huge asshole. It’s not that much of a reach to consider Amber and Ethan to be those he was closest to.
…dang, now that you bring that up, Brain!Mike saying Amber was one of his only friends feels like Amber’s low self-esteem can’t comprehend anyone considering her one of their best friends unless it was purely by default.
I doubt someone who was a huge jerk to most people like Mike would’ve had a lot of friends.
Or she’s acknowledging that Mike was also a lonely kid rather than some implacable force of assholishness. The sort of clarity you rarely get about other people before their story is done. She takes that in and what they were to each other, and then she can understand the whole of it. It’s a painfully real thing.
I’d hesitate to suggest that Amber now has clarity on Mike. Or that him dying leaves her with any great insight into him.
She’s certainly got a huge filter of guilt that she’s viewing this through and that’s likely to skew anything she thinks.
Well we know Amber and Mike are both products of the God-Willis’ mind so yes, it can be that he is actually speaking to her.
I love that Mike has no shadow.
In general I’m able to keep Walkyverse and Dumbiverse separate in my mind, but this one, man… this one hits hard, knowing they’re married in another timeline.
That’s what I’ve been feeling too.
YEP
[Scruffy the janitor]
Second.
100%
DON’T REMIND ME I’M FRAGILE.
I was sort of hoping Brain Mike would stick around, just because it occurred to me that he was DoA’s version of Mike and Amber getting married in the Walkyverse. Oh well, they’re teenagers, those relationships don’t last very long anyway.
I came here to say that seeing them on the bed together in this strip is the least good way to bring back some really great Shortpacked! memories.
What a coincidence (really)! Mike and Wilbur (Mary Worth) gone in the same week both with a good chance of coming back to totally mess up a character’s life.
I feel like I did when I witnessed the Barney the Dinosaur balloon deflate during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. Happy to see it, crowd cheering, but you know he’ll be back.
I’m so into Mary Worth right now, courtesy of Willis’s Twitter.
So what do you think happens next?
– Wilbur’s fish food
– Wilbur’s been treading water this entire time, somehow
– The ocean exhibits sentience like in Moana, throws Wilbur back on the ship and flips him off before receding
I don’t know if I’d rate Mike’s chances of ever coming back as “good”, unless we’re talking like in a dream or something.
That or as a side character in a flashback sequence. His main story seems over and done with, though.
Yeah, with Willis in the comments above nixing what I thought was an impending future appearance of brain-Mike by saying that it’d already happened, this does seem like it could be a series wrap for the character as a whole.
Why are we abandoning the word “few”? Why are we forgetting that “only” is an adjective form of “one”? That it means “alone in a category, making up a category of one”?
Well said. “One of the only” gets on my nerves.
It’s short for one of the only ones.
Ones is a perfectly good English word on account of English is weird.
“Only ones” is not a good phrase because “only” pretty much means singular, and ought not to qualify a plural noun. Use “one of the few”.
I’d quibble about it, but we’re the only ones who care.
Nonono, OBVIOUSLY Amber had unrequited lust for him and Mike (being Mike) knew that, so he friend-zoned her JUST to be an asshole (as opposed to, say, not liking her or being opposed to sex with her in principle), and now he’s mocking her by pointing out they were ONLY friends. It’s the only way of parsing that sentence that makes sense!
It’s a perfectly cromulent turn of phrase.
You calling my mom fat? Thems fighting words!
I agree that “one of my only friends” sounds a little grammatically weird, but I also think it sounds a lot more poignant than “you were one of my few friends”. So, personally, I’d consider it a case of artistic license. Still, I’m not that young anymore, so maybe my feeling for what’s grammatically correct isn’t up to date with the Youths’.
Mike went and Starbucked.
I really like how ‘mind figment’ Mike doesn’t have the same sort of shading as the rest of the room. The light simply isn’t hitting him.
“You won’t be forgotten.”
(and that was meant to be a response to Dana. ah well.)
HOORAY! HE’S GONE!!!! Joe has do a great job. He’s a great stepbrother ♡.
Bye, buddy.
Is this the last we’ll ever see of Brain!Mike?
Or did he just vanish to mess with her again?
Who will he haunt next?
Anyone with a nickel.
Anyone who’ll take a nickel
Or anyone who’ll offer one, the terms were never exactly clear.
I have to assume that “I’ll leave you a phantom” is about more than the appearance of the song. This is Mike’s swansong and it’s sung by Sal and Danny.
Oh snap I didn’t make that connection…
Inb4 first panel of next comic has Mike reappear and be like, “Nah, I’m just fucking with you. You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
*cries*
So yesterday was just a warning shot and the real attack on my feelings is today. Should have seen that coming.
Just when you think he’s done, Willis twists the phone.
Thank GOD this might actually be the end if Mike in the comic. Killing him didn’t stop him, maybe resolution will.
Nah, now Joe’s gonna start hallucinating him.
What? He promised!
See ya, space @sshole.
🥲 that was beautiful
You’re gonna carry that weight.
Been awhile since I watched Bebop.
I knew that phrase had meaning when you wrote it.
So I did a search for it using Bing (yes, I use Bing), and a YouTube video came up.
Now my head canon has this playing in Mike’s head when he tackled that sorry excuse for a father:
https://youtu.be/rDZKTrhLRdU
If only there’d been a stained glass window.
A long time.
Gotta say, i love the detail that even though Amber is making creases on the bed while mike isn’t.
It doesn’t look right, which mean it looks perfect since he isn’t there, she’s just having a very lucid (and self aware) hallucination.
Either you miss them or you hit them
Bye, Mike.
Bye Mike
(Unless its someone elses turn to face their losses)
You will be missed
Scene change to emo emanciated Ethan.
awww I know how this feels and it sucks……
This is so sad. Alexa, play Baka Mitai.
Oddly fitting
like an asshole, just drops another bomb and VANISHES, maybe FOREVER now. Ugghhh, Mike, you’re the worst, come baaaccckkkk
ACTUALLY sad.
Man, what’s with douchebags making me cry when they being good for once actually kills them
First it was Harry in Spiderman 3, then Shadow Weaver in She-ra and now Mike
As a non-tweeter, I can’t comment there, but your
Optimus Prime van Damme is sweet!
Or is it Jean Claude van Prime?
Even as an introject he’s an asshole.
The difference between Mike and Blaine was that Mike realized he’d horrifically mishandled his relationship to Amber and tried to make amends.
Which is the problem because that actually makes it worse: because it lets Ethan and Amber know he WASN’T just a toxic person they could completely write off but someone who loved them.
I never much liked Mike but I could see his relationship with Ethan and Amber was complex.
wow damn
I once again wish every single Amber a very therapy.
Mike was my favorite character by far, even though he wasn’t as fleshed out as some of the others. This gives him a bit more depth, even though he’s an ethereal being at best now.
So, who is the resident a-hole now? Carla?
Well thanks, it wasn’t like I was using those emotions or anything
oh man this is getting to me. I had a friend who died in college (well, I was in college, she wasn’t). It happened when I was 18 so it felt like the world was telling me “welcome to adult life!” in the worst way possible. She was also one of my only friends, even though I hadn’t talked to her in months. I’m still not sure if I can ever make friends again. (sorry for being depressing! I do love this storyline even as it’s destroying me)
Looks like Amber is finally on the road to recovery. It is fine to miss someone, even if that someone was a toxic bag of sh*t. For better, or for worse (hint, mostly for worse), Mike was in a significant portion of Amber’s life, her high school years. He was there for her, when she was down, just to kick her, mind you, but never the less. Amber admitting that she misses him, is the first step in letting him go, so that she can finally move on.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO [ face made by actor Aaron Paul playing Tobey Marshall, in the 2014 film adaptation of the game franchise Need for Speed. ]
DAMN you, Willis.
No matter how big an @$$hole he was, I still miss Mike…
RE: the alt text
Damn, Willis. Bravo.