Walky’s trapped in the helmet so we don’t see his meltdown over having _two_ Ambers. Shouldn’t she be tagged twice for this? It’s a mystery for these crazy kids no doubt.
That’s a flashback that’s been rehashed in every participants’ minds so much we should’ve had it in extra vibrant color, really. Though, having said that, I’m really glad that Willis didn’t turn the color saturation knob all the way up, that tends to be painful to look at. Also, the gas station robbery’s painful enough to look at already.
Amazing. I am sad now this isn’t in color, bet Dorothy makes for a cute Velma.
I do love the suggestion she dressed AS Amber, though, but I mean… if the shoe fits. There’s definitely not anything wrong with looking like Velma, though. *cough*
You make a good point, though cloning is a thing. However I’m pretty sure that The Wellerman is an alien virus, not a multinational business, and that the Scooby Snax were for their own consumption.
It’s bad enough that I rarely have comments to make without the few exceptions disproportionately often being after I’ve forgotten I’ve gone back to an earlier strip…
Maybe I should just call my commenting style “next day delivery”.
One year in high school, one of my closest friends dressed up as our other closest friend and actually managed to surprise/confuse some people.
That was the year I dressed up as one of the school hall monitors, which got varied reaction among the actual hall monitors.
Are hall monitors an actual thing? I thought they were invented for specific episodes of cartoons, to give one of the characters a God complex so they can inevitably learn to be less of a cop about petty things.
The only episode of that show I’ve seen was the one where the kids invented capitalism on the playground. There really was no adult supervision going on at that school.
Remembering another episode’s gonna cost ya two stickers.
(Seriously, go look up some more. Sometimes they’re actually better with an adult’s perspective because you can spot more of the references it draws from. I just with they had enough time to properly lampoon The Sting.)
As a former hall monitor, I can attest that hall monitors are an actual thing in some schools. In the school in which I was a hall monitor, it seemed pretty clear that it wasn’t a great deal of power, also it was rotated enough that nobody really got used to it. (Which is to say at the first hint of anyone reacting to the status as if it were something to flaunt, it’d rotate extra quick. But normally, I think we were only hall monitor for a week at a time, and it rotated to everyone not on the bad list. There was only one kid on the bad list for my grade at that school, and that was the one whose reaction to becoming the hall monitor was to threaten other students with undeserved demerits.
If I recall correctly, in the week I was hall monitor, I gave exactly 0 demerits.
I’ve never really been clear on the functional purpose of a hall monitor. Is it like a traffic controller, or do you just sort of stand off to one side and tell people not to run and get promptly ignored? On TV, they basically have the power to send you to the Supreme Court for sneezing.
To my knowledge the point is like to tell younger kids not to run or break school rules and check hall passes basically and it works usually because ‘I’m older than you’ is very effective on kids and they can be more willing to listen to older kids than adults at times.
Though in some cases or countries, they use hired adults instead.
Or, if you don’t want to eat it with a spoon, have popcorn with your favorite hot sauce. I like Frank’s Red Hot, but any decent hot sauce will do. Perfect for Halloween because the popcorn looks like someone bled all over it.
That sounded like sarcasm. Unfortunately, I kind of recall something hellish from the late 1970s whose existence you seem to be denying. Though hopefully it was just that one teacher, and she’s got to be retired by now, right?
This feels like a stretch to me. What cartoons only have impossible physics? I’m not saying that he’d have watched like, Motorcycle Helmets 101: The Animated Series, but it’s not like it’s an obscure or esoteric hand motion we’re talking about. Even just a character pulling up on a motorbike and flipping their visor real fast would do it. I’m not really married to the idea that he MUST HAVE seen it in a cartoon, but it’s weird to argue that it’s unlikely.
Not all full-face helmets have a hinged visor. Sal’s helmet probably isn’t supposed to be any particular model, but it’s generally similar to the Biltwell Gringo, which has a visor that just snaps on. (I think you’re supposed to wear goggles with it, like a motocross helmet.)
Walky could just shove chips through the visor hole, but the chin bar still gets in the way. (As it should, that’s one of the most important parts for safety.)
Okay, Walky, this’ll be easy. You can extract your hand by opening your fist and letting go of the cand– no, Walky. Open. OPEN. Your hand will only come out if you OPEN- YES THAT MEANS LETTING GO OF THE CANDY!
Standing on his head, with one hand trapped, precariously balanced while also trying to yank his hand free, while simultaneously attempting to eat, is probably a choking hazard.
….
…. this is exactly what he’s going to do, isn’t it?
This is the one recurring plot point that confounds me. I have *never* found Amber and Dorothy to look all that similar. The both have glasses… and are similar in height? Their figures are completely different. I’m not sure if this is a credit or indictment of Willis’ artistry (or maybe my observational skills).
They have similar highlight features like being short and wearing glasses. Most people don’t take the time to notice every detail of a person. Two or three things in common with someone else and you might as well be twins.
I remember getting them mixed up on my first read— I think they looked more similar in the early-2010s strips when the art was less well-defined. Their hairstyles were also a lot closer then.
It’s mostly the hair and glasses, I think. And generally round face-shape. Honestly, I think it’s amazing how much people tend to rely on hair, especially, as a way to recognize someone.
i have mild face blindness/some ppl do blend together after a while, it might be diff irl. tho once ppl thought i looked like another classmate b/c we were both the same race even tho i was taller, she had longer hair and our glasses was diff, and she had more of an accent than me but some ppl just don’t always look that unique either. Anyways amber sticks out to me as a bit more memorable b/c i read shortpacked for a bit as well
Okay so I don’t really want to think this but the signs just presented themselves in this strip so I can’t stop myself.
Dorothy looks a lot more like Amber right now and Walky is wearing a tinted motorcycle helmet with the visor down. This is looking like the setup to an accidental mistaken identity makeout with your ex scenario. Maybe it’s not and I’m just reading too much into some gags but the signs are there.
That’s the easiest part. You can lift the helmet part way off to get a kiss in and to eat snacks for that matter…. Y’know what never mind. This theory’s been immediately debunked. Walky just demonstrated he’s incapable of that.
More likely Walky chat up Dorothy thinking she is Amber and start talking about stuff about them being garbage (due to garbage roof stuff) and that will either send Dorothy spiraling or cause a fallout.
You don’t have to worry about accidental flagging. The threshold for sending to moderation has been adjusted to some substantial enough number that a bunch of people would have to accidentally flag the same post which is unlikely to happen.
wow, that’s quite a fast dye job if it’s not a temp spray paint from a halloween store (then again it’d prolly be faster for a blonde to go darker than the other way ’round)
As the flashback sequence goes further, I realize more and more how much the coloring contributes to my enjoyment.
I get why this is in flashbackochrome, of course, and the neat little double joke of “orange sweater!” when we can’t SEE that it’s orange is a great use of the medium to add a layer of humor.
But I’ll sigh in relief when we’re back to the Present Spectrum.
Yeah, I have to admit I was hoping it would transition to color like this one did. Though the “flashback in color” did only last very briefly there before the end of flashback strips.
depending on the quality of dye i’d think it was out after a couple weeks of showering unless she got it professionally done tho i doubt she did it in a salon and that quickly
As a fellow natural platinum blonde…“temporary” dye is often not actually temporary on us. As I unfortunately learned after two separate Halloween-based attempts: once with a supposed temporary brown dye, another time with just that spray on stuff, in blue.
My hair was copper and green, respectively, for weeks/months after each attempt and while I think the green from the blue spray on stuff EVENTUALLY washed out after many many many shampoos, the copper from the brown dye never did and I had to bleach my hair back to it’s original color.
So, yeah, even post time-skip Dorothy possibly would’ve had to bleach her hair back to normal. >.>
Heck my kid (who is also platinum blonde, and has curly hair, so super porous) tried to use HAIR CHALK once, which is supposed to be super temporary, and it took at least a month of weekly shampoos to get the pink tint out of her hair.
lol i’m jealous i have dark asian hair and would probably have to bleach it lighter or pay extra at a salon but i get how it would be a pain, though clipons and wigs are more of a popular thing for cosplay/dressing up on halloween than committing like dorothy would lol
Ah wait, looked back at old color strips and Dorothy isn’t quite platinum blonde, so maybe it would wash out? Me and my kid have like…Targaryen-white blonde hair but maybe other blonde shades cling to color less.
I thought I’d heard or read of a way to dye one’s hair using unsweetened Kool-Aid powder. And since that’s just food coloring, I’d assume it would wash out fairly quickly.
I’ve dyed my hair bright-ass pink before, and as long as you use cheap dye it does indeed was out pretty quickly. Ten bucks for the dye and a decent shampoo and you’re set.
Thank you, auto”correct”, for removing the H after I’d already finished typing and tapped “Post Comment”. Can’t put an apostrophe in “I’d” but you can do that.
Not sure what your natural hair color is, but word of warning as someone who share’s Dorothy’s natural hair color, it unfortunately does not often work out this way when your hair is super super light. Platinum blonde hair stains so easily.
I’ll take your word for how your own hair works, of course. Definitely not gonna share what color mine naturally is, aside from “not pink”, because I don’t need certain people here remembering details like that.
That said, it seems like a pain to have such easily stained hair.
If I recall correctly from the experiences of the platinum blonde in one of my classes in high school, the intended color of temporary dye indeed washed out really quickly. What lingered for weeks until she got fed up with it and had her hair dyed back to the right color was the off-color stain left after the hair dye washed out.
Sure, in weeks, her hair did grow out enough for her natural color to start to show at the roots. But that seemed to put the sickly green hair stain in sharp relief. (No, she hadn’t had her hair dyed any shade of green, at least according to the attendees of that Halloween party who actually saw her with the dye before she washed it out.)
Yup, that’s exactly what happened to me! And my mom, and my kid, any time we tried to dye our hair with something temporary. Blue and black leaves a green stain. Brown or red leaves it copper. Pink just…leaves it faint pink or strawberry blonde. It definitely fades a lot, but remains “toned” by that remaining stain.
Speaking of Dobie Gillis, Velma is directly inspired by the Zelda Gilroy character, as portrayed by Sheila Kuehl (credited then as Sheila James).
And just as an aside, her (Sheila Kuehl’s)Wikipedia bio makes for an interesting read…
It’s very telling that none of the other variations on the Scooby formula really kept existing. I think Josie got some comics, and some of the other characters have made brief appearances here and there, but nothing else ever truly stuck.
Josie and the Pussycats was already a successful comic book series from Archie Comics, then they made the Saturday morning cartoon with the characters.
Most of the copy/paste not-Scoobys ended up shelved until Cartoon Network and Williams Street started digging through the HB back catalogue for nostalgia gags in the early 2000s.
Props to Willis for drawing Dorothy with the little ribbons in her hair for this costume. He didn’t have to do that. Velma traditionally doesn’t wear those. But because she is, we all know that Dorothy is in fact dressed as Mystery Incorporated Velma.
Do they give out As for dressing up as traditional Velma?
To be clear, I don’t know how to get an A for a Halloween costume, the only time I got graded on one I got an F. To be fair, I did dress as a hall monitor during the week I was a hall monitor. I felt it was an impeccable costume, but our teacher disagreed.
Whoa, Amber! No need to be so salty at Dorothy! She’s got a good costume and you’re just jealous.
I wonder if that’s because Dorothy is superficially better at coping, right after the whole kidnapping y’all ‘ve been through. That is, Amber is jealous at Dorothy’s semblance of mental health.
Amber’s comment is not positive or welcoming. She could compliment Dorothy on her costume! Instead she chastises her for going the extra mile. And really, is dyeing your hair such a big thing? Is there an x amount of effort you should be spending on a Halloween costume without overdoing it?
The salt is in Amber’s denial of the need for effort. Dorothy does a nice thing and the first reaction she gets for it is: “Whoa, that’s really unnecessary.”
Randomly accusing random people of jealousy would be gaslighting in meatspace. I hope you don’t do that in meatspace.
To me it’s obvious that Amber just expresses sympathy – in the form of concern that Dorothy may have exhausted herself by putting far more effort into this than she needed to.
How is this gaslighting? I agree it may not be very nice in real life, but it’s an accusation. What’s manipulative about it? Also, it isn’t random, but a reaction to a specific interaction.
I find Amber’s expression hard to read, but it doesn’t seem malicious. So you may have a point there. Then again, how is Amber’s comment helpful after Dorothy already spent the effort? “Thanks, Amber! I’ll remember that for next year’s Halloween party!”
I..I really don’t think you know what gaslighting means, or possibly got the term from Reddit and don’t actually know the real definition, Thomas saying something kinda meanyheadish to a fictional character shouldn’t warrant you trying to shit on their character as a person IRL.
Geeze you guys… you can just say “Hey I don’t agree with that” without trying to twist it into a personal failing on the behalf of the person you disagree with.
“You made a comment at a fictional character who isn’t real. I’d better made irrational and needless insinuations about your personal moral character, because that’s a normal thing that normal people do.” Not even getting into the “random” part.
Right? Like what does “randomly” even mean? No dawg They didn’t just hit random and post this post on a random comic, and just RANDOMLY it made sense…XD
Dorothy made a good choice for the costume, I love it! But there are so many people obsessed with Velma, so many who consider her the girl of their dreams. I wonder if walky is one of these…
I find it highly implausible that Sal would not know who Velma Dinkley is; even being a little loose with the timeline, she would have been around for, “Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated”. Now, there is, “I’m too cool for this”, and then there is, “I’m completely unaware, to the point of stupidity”; right now, Willis is making Sal the later, and that’s just bad writing.
Scooby-Doo wouldn’t have quite the same cultural relevance for these kids, so it may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Or it may just be a joke, as Willis is implying.
I think even people who don’t know Scooby-Doo know who Velma is, or at least recognize the iconic orange sweater and red skirt. I’ve had plenty of people recognize my glams in video games as “Thelma”, for example, or in some odd cases they’ll confuse her and Daphne.
One habit I’ve noticed on this site is a tendency to leap straight to the absolute worst conclusion about even simple things, seemingly going out of one’s way to ignore the obvious answers to get there.
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see now I have to wonder if Walky’s doing a bit
…playing the part of Walky
Marginally better than playing the part of Dexter playing the part of Walky.
And by better, we mean worse.
Now I wanna see the Head Alien cosplay Walky.
Walky’s trapped in the helmet so we don’t see his meltdown over having _two_ Ambers. Shouldn’t she be tagged twice for this? It’s a mystery for these crazy kids no doubt.
Joyce: “Dorothy, you’re on your third bowl of oatmeal. What’s up?”
Dorothy: “My last trip to the bathroom was a B- at best. Need the fiber to improve my performance.”
Hope they don’t grade on a curve. That could get messy.
Insert joke about graded curves.
Insert second joke about “shitty jobs but someone has to do it” with a reference to what teaching assistants are for.
Dorothy’s pretty scrawny, so I don’t think she’d get a very high grade on her curves, at least not by quantity.
Definitely a slippery slope.
Ah ha! It’s in blue, so her costume is Blue’s Clues!
You know, I’ve completely gotten used to the blue shades by now. Going back to normal colours will be shocking.
I half-expected we would get the kind of muted color palette we saw during the “how it actually happened” flashback to the gas station robbery.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-9-comic/01-flyin-to-the-red/siiiventeen/
That’s a flashback that’s been rehashed in every participants’ minds so much we should’ve had it in extra vibrant color, really. Though, having said that, I’m really glad that Willis didn’t turn the color saturation knob all the way up, that tends to be painful to look at. Also, the gas station robbery’s painful enough to look at already.
President Doris has dark hair.
And we have a winner.
Amazing. I am sad now this isn’t in color, bet Dorothy makes for a cute Velma.
I do love the suggestion she dressed AS Amber, though, but I mean… if the shoe fits. There’s definitely not anything wrong with looking like Velma, though. *cough*
Blue is a color and Velma is sexy.
Apparently I can’t post a link to youtube, so look up PEAR哥 on youtube and admire his Velma video.
Let me try.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JszKbqxb484
That is the one, wonder why I couldn’t post it.
Isn’t that audio from an old educational slideshow about acne?
Gray is a color too, but grayscale tv isn’t “in color”
*plays Fun Lovin’ Criminals’ “Scooby Snacks” on the hacked Muzak*
😍 PERFECT!!!! I just made some Scooby Snax myself, in fact. Care to guess what the secret ingredient is?
As long as it’s not Scooby, it’s all good.
I don’t think a multinational business would survive very long if one of the main ingredients of their product was a single specific dog.
You make a good point, though cloning is a thing. However I’m pretty sure that The Wellerman is an alien virus, not a multinational business, and that the Scooby Snax were for their own consumption.
I don’t like to make assumptions about a person’s corporate status.
Alien parasite, actually. 😉
Pot 😉
Ding ding sing! 😁
*ding. 😅
Is it really an ingredient, if the pot’s just containing the snacks?
“My pot contains snacks, and vice versa.”
It’s bad enough that I rarely have comments to make without the few exceptions disproportionately often being after I’ve forgotten I’ve gone back to an earlier strip…
Maybe I should just call my commenting style “next day delivery”.
What a great song! Thank you for sharing.
One year in high school, one of my closest friends dressed up as our other closest friend and actually managed to surprise/confuse some people.
That was the year I dressed up as one of the school hall monitors, which got varied reaction among the actual hall monitors.
Varied is such an ambiguous term. A range from mild amusement to apathy is varied.
As is a range from “attempted murder” to “began to worship me as their god.” Which range better fits the situation? The world may never know.
My expectations were too modest. I was assuming a maximum range running from assault to being hired.
Hall Monitor. Being hired *is* assault.
Are hall monitors an actual thing? I thought they were invented for specific episodes of cartoons, to give one of the characters a God complex so they can inevitably learn to be less of a cop about petty things.
As is well known, whenever a fascist gains power in an administrative position, hall monitors are an inevitable consequence.
That’s basically how it went down in that one Recess episode, right?
(Damn that show holds up.)
The only episode of that show I’ve seen was the one where the kids invented capitalism on the playground. There really was no adult supervision going on at that school.
Remembering another episode’s gonna cost ya two stickers.
(Seriously, go look up some more. Sometimes they’re actually better with an adult’s perspective because you can spot more of the references it draws from. I just with they had enough time to properly lampoon The Sting.)
Honestly Recess was such a GREAT show because it absolutely nails the experience of being a kid from the perspective of a kid.
As a former hall monitor, I can attest that hall monitors are an actual thing in some schools. In the school in which I was a hall monitor, it seemed pretty clear that it wasn’t a great deal of power, also it was rotated enough that nobody really got used to it. (Which is to say at the first hint of anyone reacting to the status as if it were something to flaunt, it’d rotate extra quick. But normally, I think we were only hall monitor for a week at a time, and it rotated to everyone not on the bad list. There was only one kid on the bad list for my grade at that school, and that was the one whose reaction to becoming the hall monitor was to threaten other students with undeserved demerits.
If I recall correctly, in the week I was hall monitor, I gave exactly 0 demerits.
I’ve never really been clear on the functional purpose of a hall monitor. Is it like a traffic controller, or do you just sort of stand off to one side and tell people not to run and get promptly ignored? On TV, they basically have the power to send you to the Supreme Court for sneezing.
To my knowledge the point is like to tell younger kids not to run or break school rules and check hall passes basically and it works usually because ‘I’m older than you’ is very effective on kids and they can be more willing to listen to older kids than adults at times.
Though in some cases or countries, they use hired adults instead.
And the “I can’t tell Dorothy and Amber apart” may strike again!
That helmet has no visor hinge? Thank goodness we have foiled Head Alien III with fashion.
You can’t eat in a motorcycle helmet with just the visor up. It’s why ‘modular’ helmets exist.
This is everything I had hoped for thus far. I’ve got my popcorn ready for when everything explodes.
I probably shouldn’t eat popcorn, especially with all the butter and salt, but sometimes the situation demands it. Am i right?
Have you tried popcorn and salsa?
Surprisingly no, I haven’t. You’d think with all the peppers I like to eat, that it would be obvious. How is it?
I enjoy it, though it’s a little messy. Even using a spoon.
Or, if you don’t want to eat it with a spoon, have popcorn with your favorite hot sauce. I like Frank’s Red Hot, but any decent hot sauce will do. Perfect for Halloween because the popcorn looks like someone bled all over it.
I like nutritional yeast on popcorn when I’m opting for something that’s not butter and salt.
If you mix it with a little mustard, it actually makes for a nice cheese substitute too. 😋
But maybe not on popcorn.
Ever hear of a popcorn dog? 🙃
I have heard of using popcorn as the binder in meat loaf.
I have heard of (and even seen) a popcorn dog, but it was a dog constructed with popcorn held together with a thread running through the popcorn
What I wanna know is, what cheese are you eating that tastes similar to mustard.
I’m going to assume that acceptable substitutions don’t necessarily have to be similar in taste.
Or at least not if you’re a virus.
I mean, the other option was to assume a brand of mustard that tasted like cheese.
I mean nutritional yeast mixed with a little mustard is a great substitute for cheese, nice pungent and savory. 😅😋
Dorothy wants a good grade on Halloween costumes, a thing that totally exists and it is a reasonable thing to want!
You have now inspired a new fear that I will someday flunk Halloween costumes.
That sounded like sarcasm. Unfortunately, I kind of recall something hellish from the late 1970s whose existence you seem to be denying. Though hopefully it was just that one teacher, and she’s got to be retired by now, right?
Couldn’t he just lift the visor?
Shhh, let’s see how long it takes him to figure it out.
He’s probably never borrowed sal’s (or anyone’s) helmets enough to know that it’s possible
Television exists. I’d be surprised if he’s never at least seen a character do exactly that in a show.
i feel like he’d only see cartoons with impossible physics/logic as opposed to something realistic but i think it’ll prolly stay on for comedy reasons
This feels like a stretch to me. What cartoons only have impossible physics? I’m not saying that he’d have watched like, Motorcycle Helmets 101: The Animated Series, but it’s not like it’s an obscure or esoteric hand motion we’re talking about. Even just a character pulling up on a motorbike and flipping their visor real fast would do it. I’m not really married to the idea that he MUST HAVE seen it in a cartoon, but it’s weird to argue that it’s unlikely.
Not all full-face helmets have a hinged visor. Sal’s helmet probably isn’t supposed to be any particular model, but it’s generally similar to the Biltwell Gringo, which has a visor that just snaps on. (I think you’re supposed to wear goggles with it, like a motocross helmet.)
https://www.biltwellinc.com/collections/gringo/products/gringo-ece-helmet-gloss-white
Walky could just shove chips through the visor hole, but the chin bar still gets in the way. (As it should, that’s one of the most important parts for safety.)
Not generally, no. Eating/drinking while continuing to wear your helmet is the domain of the ‘modular’ helmet.
She really does. (Dorothy, I mean.)
Okay, Walky, this’ll be easy. You can extract your hand by opening your fist and letting go of the cand– no, Walky. Open. OPEN. Your hand will only come out if you OPEN- YES THAT MEANS LETTING GO OF THE CANDY!
But if he stands on his head and angles things properly, as he opens his hand the candy will fall into his mouth.
Standing on his head, with one hand trapped, precariously balanced while also trying to yank his hand free, while simultaneously attempting to eat, is probably a choking hazard.
….
…. this is exactly what he’s going to do, isn’t it?
When he starts choking, he’ll need some soda to wash it down.
When he’s finished, he’ll ask for a napkin.
(Oh wait, this is Walky we’re talking about. Never mind.)
Lucy seems like an appropriate avatar. 🙂
I think if your Walky is refusing to open his hand, you’re supposed to hook a finger around the side and sorta pry it open manually.
You can also show the Walky how to do it by taking your hand out of a similar jar. Trouble is, I just end up with my hand stuck in the jar too.
It’s okay, Dorothy. Amber can change your grades.
This is the one recurring plot point that confounds me. I have *never* found Amber and Dorothy to look all that similar. The both have glasses… and are similar in height? Their figures are completely different. I’m not sure if this is a credit or indictment of Willis’ artistry (or maybe my observational skills).
They have similar highlight features like being short and wearing glasses. Most people don’t take the time to notice every detail of a person. Two or three things in common with someone else and you might as well be twins.
I think it’s a roll over joke from it’s walky.
I remember getting them mixed up on my first read— I think they looked more similar in the early-2010s strips when the art was less well-defined. Their hairstyles were also a lot closer then.
You’re not wrong.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/05-media-rumble/composited/
It’s mostly the hair and glasses, I think. And generally round face-shape. Honestly, I think it’s amazing how much people tend to rely on hair, especially, as a way to recognize someone.
That’s me. IRL, if someone changes their hair, I usually have trouble recognizing them.
i have mild face blindness/some ppl do blend together after a while, it might be diff irl. tho once ppl thought i looked like another classmate b/c we were both the same race even tho i was taller, she had longer hair and our glasses was diff, and she had more of an accent than me but some ppl just don’t always look that unique either. Anyways amber sticks out to me as a bit more memorable b/c i read shortpacked for a bit as well
I have face blindness a fair amount. The difference I saw right away was Amber’s curves, but then again, that is playing to my type.
This is probably what it is for me too. I can maybe see it if I only look from the neck up.
Okay so I don’t really want to think this but the signs just presented themselves in this strip so I can’t stop myself.
Dorothy looks a lot more like Amber right now and Walky is wearing a tinted motorcycle helmet with the visor down. This is looking like the setup to an accidental mistaken identity makeout with your ex scenario. Maybe it’s not and I’m just reading too much into some gags but the signs are there.
…Tropes aside, how would Walky make out with Dorothy WHILE he’s wearing the helmet with the visor down?
Very carefully.
Same way Meg and Chris made out in that episode of “Family Guy” – a session of “Seven Minutes in Heaven” in a dark closet.
Yeah, except without the gross angle from that episode.
But how’s he going to make out with her with the helmet on?
That’s the easiest part. You can lift the helmet part way off to get a kiss in and to eat snacks for that matter…. Y’know what never mind. This theory’s been immediately debunked. Walky just demonstrated he’s incapable of that.
More likely Walky chat up Dorothy thinking she is Amber and start talking about stuff about them being garbage (due to garbage roof stuff) and that will either send Dorothy spiraling or cause a fallout.
Crap, hopefully whomever processes that flag will read this reply and realize it was a mis-click trying to reply. :/
One doesn’t talk about garbage roof off of garbage roof.
You don’t have to worry about accidental flagging. The threshold for sending to moderation has been adjusted to some substantial enough number that a bunch of people would have to accidentally flag the same post which is unlikely to happen.
One Halloween I was part of a group costume. “The Ron Paul” campaign. I was death because “death is following our campaign”
Oh no, this is going to end with Walky kissing the wrong person on accident, isn’t it?
Oh, that’s mortifying. Not, um, not speaking from experience or anything.
…
I’m virtually blind without my glasses, okay?!?
so is Velma!
wow, that’s quite a fast dye job if it’s not a temp spray paint from a halloween store (then again it’d prolly be faster for a blonde to go darker than the other way ’round)
Wig? They can also be quick.
Admittedly, this is from someone who got an F on his Halloween costume the one time it was graded, but…
As the flashback sequence goes further, I realize more and more how much the coloring contributes to my enjoyment.
I get why this is in flashbackochrome, of course, and the neat little double joke of “orange sweater!” when we can’t SEE that it’s orange is a great use of the medium to add a layer of humor.
But I’ll sigh in relief when we’re back to the Present Spectrum.
Yeah, I have to admit I was hoping it would transition to color like this one did. Though the “flashback in color” did only last very briefly there before the end of flashback strips.
Sorry I accidentally flagged your comment when I wanted to tap on the link!😥
But anyways yeah it could have been good too.
NOTE: This was funnier in Black & White
The *other* colour joke is that, indeed, everyone is being “graded” on this.
I can’t believe you’re dressing up as a character in a fighting game, Dorothy. Even if it is the one Kotaku thinks is best in the game.
“Orange sweater! Magnifying glass!”
“Come on, Dorothy, don’t you know this is a flashback? How are we supposed to know it’s orange?”
The turtleneck is the dead giveaway, regardless of color.
And I’ll bet Dotty is also rockin’ a pleated A-line skirt.
So she’s Miss Peach?
Awesome Amber costume!
Well that explains the time skip, to give time for Dorothy to get back to being fully blonde.
And also to avoid inviting comparisons between her and Chloe’s two-toned hair.
depending on the quality of dye i’d think it was out after a couple weeks of showering unless she got it professionally done tho i doubt she did it in a salon and that quickly
It’s even possible It’s just a washout style of hair coloring.
I would go so far as to say that’s probable
As a fellow natural platinum blonde…“temporary” dye is often not actually temporary on us. As I unfortunately learned after two separate Halloween-based attempts: once with a supposed temporary brown dye, another time with just that spray on stuff, in blue.
My hair was copper and green, respectively, for weeks/months after each attempt and while I think the green from the blue spray on stuff EVENTUALLY washed out after many many many shampoos, the copper from the brown dye never did and I had to bleach my hair back to it’s original color.
So, yeah, even post time-skip Dorothy possibly would’ve had to bleach her hair back to normal. >.>
Heck my kid (who is also platinum blonde, and has curly hair, so super porous) tried to use HAIR CHALK once, which is supposed to be super temporary, and it took at least a month of weekly shampoos to get the pink tint out of her hair.
lol i’m jealous i have dark asian hair and would probably have to bleach it lighter or pay extra at a salon but i get how it would be a pain, though clipons and wigs are more of a popular thing for cosplay/dressing up on halloween than committing like dorothy would lol
Ah wait, looked back at old color strips and Dorothy isn’t quite platinum blonde, so maybe it would wash out? Me and my kid have like…Targaryen-white blonde hair but maybe other blonde shades cling to color less.
I thought I’d heard or read of a way to dye one’s hair using unsweetened Kool-Aid powder. And since that’s just food coloring, I’d assume it would wash out fairly quickly.
Kool-aide was also a disaster for me, with pale blonde hair. Maybe it washes out of darker hair but def not super light blonde.
I’ve dyed my hair bright-ass pink before, and as long as you use cheap dye it does indeed was out pretty quickly. Ten bucks for the dye and a decent shampoo and you’re set.
Thank you, auto”correct”, for removing the H after I’d already finished typing and tapped “Post Comment”. Can’t put an apostrophe in “I’d” but you can do that.
Not sure what your natural hair color is, but word of warning as someone who share’s Dorothy’s natural hair color, it unfortunately does not often work out this way when your hair is super super light. Platinum blonde hair stains so easily.
I’ll take your word for how your own hair works, of course. Definitely not gonna share what color mine naturally is, aside from “not pink”, because I don’t need certain people here remembering details like that.
That said, it seems like a pain to have such easily stained hair.
If I recall correctly from the experiences of the platinum blonde in one of my classes in high school, the intended color of temporary dye indeed washed out really quickly. What lingered for weeks until she got fed up with it and had her hair dyed back to the right color was the off-color stain left after the hair dye washed out.
Sure, in weeks, her hair did grow out enough for her natural color to start to show at the roots. But that seemed to put the sickly green hair stain in sharp relief. (No, she hadn’t had her hair dyed any shade of green, at least according to the attendees of that Halloween party who actually saw her with the dye before she washed it out.)
Yup, that’s exactly what happened to me! And my mom, and my kid, any time we tried to dye our hair with something temporary. Blue and black leaves a green stain. Brown or red leaves it copper. Pink just…leaves it faint pink or strawberry blonde. It definitely fades a lot, but remains “toned” by that remaining stain.
No, wait, I know who you are, don’t tell me…
Debbie from “Speed Buggy”!
April from “The Funky Phantom”?
Tina from “Goober and the Ghost Chasers”?
Shelly from “Jabberjaw”?
Pepper from “Clue Club”?
One of Captain Caveman’s Teen Angels?
Anne Marie from White Noise Online?
It’s so weird to me, sometimes, to think that this – this endlessly repeated formula – is the most enduring legacy of “Dobie Gillis”.
(or second-most, I suppose, with Scooby Doo in all its iterations being the first, and also the closest imitation of the original.)
Speaking of Dobie Gillis, Velma is directly inspired by the Zelda Gilroy character, as portrayed by Sheila Kuehl (credited then as Sheila James).
And just as an aside, her (Sheila Kuehl’s) Wikipedia bio makes for an interesting read…
Well isn’t that a coincidence. Also good for Kuehl being such a trailblazer.
HB really tried to recapture Scooby’s lightning in a bottle again and again, didn’t they.
Maybe that’s why they settled on making endless spinoffs.
It’s very telling that none of the other variations on the Scooby formula really kept existing. I think Josie got some comics, and some of the other characters have made brief appearances here and there, but nothing else ever truly stuck.
Josie and the Pussycats was already a successful comic book series from Archie Comics, then they made the Saturday morning cartoon with the characters.
And then they went to space. For some reason.
Most of the copy/paste not-Scoobys ended up shelved until Cartoon Network and Williams Street started digging through the HB back catalogue for nostalgia gags in the early 2000s.
…
It just kinda dawned on me, if Walky keeps the pattern of dating Danny’s ex-girlfriends, he’s gonna end up dating Sal
can’t even appreciate the orange hair cuz of the flashback filter
*sweater
Amber is costumed as her own alter-ego.
Sal is costumed as Joyce’s alter-ego.
Dorothy is costumed as Amber. [Yes, Velma, but.]
What more madness will strike?
Carla’s gonna show up dressed as Mike.
No, Jennifer’s gonna show up as Mike and then Mike is gonna show up Jennifer then they’ll do the Spider-Man meme.
Props to Willis for drawing Dorothy with the little ribbons in her hair for this costume. He didn’t have to do that. Velma traditionally doesn’t wear those. But because she is, we all know that Dorothy is in fact dressed as Mystery Incorporated Velma.
Do they give out As for dressing up as traditional Velma?
To be clear, I don’t know how to get an A for a Halloween costume, the only time I got graded on one I got an F. To be fair, I did dress as a hall monitor during the week I was a hall monitor. I felt it was an impeccable costume, but our teacher disagreed.
I know manic panic comes in brown too but I have no idea if blondes can use it directly or if they have to bleach a litle so the color sticks.
Curse you, Flashback! Cause of you I do’nt get to see Dorothy’s disguise in color.
I hope we get to see full-color character models for everyone once the arc’s over, or at least once all the main characters’ costumes are revealed.
(Please?)
Whoa, Amber! No need to be so salty at Dorothy! She’s got a good costume and you’re just jealous.
I wonder if that’s because Dorothy is superficially better at coping, right after the whole kidnapping y’all ‘ve been through. That is, Amber is jealous at Dorothy’s semblance of mental health.
Where’s the salt? She’s making a completely neutral comment about Dorothy putting in a little extra effort.
Amber’s comment is not positive or welcoming. She could compliment Dorothy on her costume! Instead she chastises her for going the extra mile. And really, is dyeing your hair such a big thing? Is there an x amount of effort you should be spending on a Halloween costume without overdoing it?
I think you’re reading way too much malice into this extremely brief interaction.
The salt is in Amber’s denial of the need for effort. Dorothy does a nice thing and the first reaction she gets for it is: “Whoa, that’s really unnecessary.”
We’re just gonna have to disagree on this, I don’t have the energy for it.
Randomly accusing random people of jealousy would be gaslighting in meatspace. I hope you don’t do that in meatspace.
To me it’s obvious that Amber just expresses sympathy – in the form of concern that Dorothy may have exhausted herself by putting far more effort into this than she needed to.
How is this gaslighting? I agree it may not be very nice in real life, but it’s an accusation. What’s manipulative about it? Also, it isn’t random, but a reaction to a specific interaction.
I find Amber’s expression hard to read, but it doesn’t seem malicious. So you may have a point there. Then again, how is Amber’s comment helpful after Dorothy already spent the effort? “Thanks, Amber! I’ll remember that for next year’s Halloween party!”
I..I really don’t think you know what gaslighting means, or possibly got the term from Reddit and don’t actually know the real definition, Thomas saying something kinda meanyheadish to a fictional character shouldn’t warrant you trying to shit on their character as a person IRL.
Geeze you guys… you can just say “Hey I don’t agree with that” without trying to twist it into a personal failing on the behalf of the person you disagree with.
“You made a comment at a fictional character who isn’t real. I’d better made irrational and needless insinuations about your personal moral character, because that’s a normal thing that normal people do.” Not even getting into the “random” part.
Right? Like what does “randomly” even mean? No dawg They didn’t just hit random and post this post on a random comic, and just RANDOMLY it made sense…XD
We noticed, Dorothy. Nice Velma tho
(woops messed something in the name field)
Funny line on the outside, deeply concerning on the inside
Dorothy can’t not go 100% all-in.
Dorothy made a good choice for the costume, I love it! But there are so many people obsessed with Velma, so many who consider her the girl of their dreams. I wonder if walky is one of these…
I find it highly implausible that Sal would not know who Velma Dinkley is; even being a little loose with the timeline, she would have been around for, “Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated”. Now, there is, “I’m too cool for this”, and then there is, “I’m completely unaware, to the point of stupidity”; right now, Willis is making Sal the later, and that’s just bad writing.
……..Sal knows who Velma is
Scooby-Doo wouldn’t have quite the same cultural relevance for these kids, so it may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Or it may just be a joke, as Willis is implying.
I think even people who don’t know Scooby-Doo know who Velma is, or at least recognize the iconic orange sweater and red skirt. I’ve had plenty of people recognize my glams in video games as “Thelma”, for example, or in some odd cases they’ll confuse her and Daphne.
You’re right it’s Highly implausible that Sal doesn’t know who Velma is, therefore…. it’s probably Sal making a wise crack/ joke…
Why you gotta go for the nuclear option of deciding that Willis just can’t write good instead of “Oh wow Lol Sal musta been kidding with her”???
Like why???
One habit I’ve noticed on this site is a tendency to leap straight to the absolute worst conclusion about even simple things, seemingly going out of one’s way to ignore the obvious answers to get there.
DoA Book 12: I Do Everything As If I Were Being Graded On It
Naw dawg DoA Book 12: CONFOUND THESE SHIFTY SNACKS!
Willis Making A Whole Story Arc In Monochrome: Colours will be brought up at every opportunity.