When the Riddler’s Death Machine requires a perfect rendition of “Over the Rainbow” and your right hand is currently occupied with holding the “Death Crystal of Shaballah”, then it really helps to save the day.
I enjoy this scenario because it might mean Batman is using the Death Crystal as a ukulele pick. And that seems exactly like something that might happen in a comic.
…And now I have to tell my brain that this was a daft joke and it doesn’t actually need to run through the whole of Marvel Vs DC and JLA/Avengers to confirm this is accurate.
Well, Bruce Banner and Bruce Wayne…
I figured they’re both geniuses, and Banner had to finance his Gamma Bomb SOMEHOW, so…
Bruce Banner is Bruce Wayne’s other, OTHER secret identity…
As a southpaw who plays guitar LH-strung, I’m used to not being able to play anyone’s guitar. But aren’t there some uses which use the same strings and can be tuned for lefties?
Super doable. I played guitar once using only the top four strings after realising that I could use mandolin chords upside-down. If you want to sound like you’re not doing that you have to invert your strum pattern, but that’s not hard.
Jimi restrung his guitar left handed though; he didn’t play it actually inverted, just the body was.
Albert King and Lefty Dizz on the other hand did play right handed guitars backwards; they didn’t restring, just flipped them over and played. Lefty is sadly mostly forgotten, but was an awesome guitarist, while Albert King is better remembered. I recommend both.
As a left-handed guitarist, it blows my mind to watch Elizabeth Cotton. Playing the bass with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. How does she do that?
… it occurs to me that if her hand winged out on her when she was biking that it could have been a major issue. So I wonder if tyoing or anything else is hard for her.
I’m guessing from my own experiences with nerve pain that it’s probably positional. Like, holding things certain ways might set off her nerves, but she’s probably accustomed enough to biking that she knows how to hold her hands without setting it off.
My guess is that she lost some fine motor control, range of motion, and/or feeling in at least a couple fingers on her right hand. Reconstructive surgery is pretty good, but they’re never exactly the same again after tendons and nerves get severed.
She has enough grip strength to pull the front brake lever on her motorcycle, at least. (And to carry a book.)
It’s not that kind of injury, fine motor control isn’t the same thing as losing your grip. Especially not with something like holding handlebars, where you have multiple fingers. She won’t be playing piano but she can still climb a ladder.
Is Sal left-handed? Or is the ukulele typically played with the right hand on the fretboard? She doesn’t seem comfortable holding it like one would a right-handed guitar
I had to follow back up on a couple of things via their character tags: she frets guitar with her left hand, like most right-handed people. Danny frets the ukulele with his left hand, so it’s not likely laid out for fretting with the right hand.
A ukelele only has four strings. They’re also tuned in any of a number of re-entrant tunings (high notes on the outside strings, lower notes between them). Flipping it upside down and playing it that way would take just a little effort to figure out, and if you’re used to it, it would be no issue whatsoever, neither strummed nor finger-picked.
Thinking about how given that a left fretting hand gets prioritized on a lot of string instruments, and most picking methods don’t require significant dexterity, she’s not set up as bad there as she probably thinks.
like… I know she’s left handed, but aren’t the customary way to play stringed instruments kind of backwards? When you use a bow, it’s supposedly because of keeping the bow straight and control over volume. I’m not sure that couldn’t be learned though. Dexterity on the neck would be pretty beneficial.
I don’t know much about strumming, but pizz was easier than bowing.
As a left-handed guitarist who frets with their right hand, I don’t see any issues playing in that manner. Like you need more strength in your hand to fret that than to strum anyway.
Strength, maybe a little. But if you do finger-picking, that takes a lot more dexterity than fretting does. I’m a lefty who plays right handed guitars flipped upside down – I can’t imagine doing any finger-picking with my right hand.
It’s very learnable either way though. I’m left-handed, but piano taught me to use both hands pretty well, often favoring the right hand for the melody. When I picked up guitar I decided to learn it right-handed, just for ease of… being able to pick up a guitar and use it. It’s definitely not the direction that feels natural when picking up the instrument for the first time, but once you start that way you learn so many new hand movements anyway…
There’s another comic that has a lesbian bassist/guitar player commenting on how it was a good thin she played fretted string instruments so she would have enough strength/dexterity to finger her partner properly. Menage a3 near the end of its run Zii talking to DeeDee, Zii is the guitar player in question and DeeDee is the person getting “played”.
Hmm, I tried to figure out if Sal was left- or right-handed, and did a bit of research. In flashback panels, she seems consistently left-handed – she holds the knife in her left hand (which was an indicator of the knife-wielder fake-out, BTW, Amber’s red panel shows a right-handed grip – which is how se holds it when she stabs Sal), and she places her money on Marcie’s bed with her left hand.
Some (though by no means all) more recent (comic-chronology-wise) strips, however, often show her as though she were right-handed (for example, when Joyce hovers over her in bed, she grabs her with her right hand, and she also points with it a lot). This makes me wonder if she has effectively trained herself to be ambidextrous or right-handed, but is/was originally left-handed. Either that, or Willis simply sometimes forgets she’s a lefty.
When I got stabbed through the back of my left hand, post-surgical physical therapy made me more ambidextrous, as I started to do things like write left-handed to help strengthen the hand back up (also, I thought it would be cool to write on the chalkboard with both hands while I was teaching, so I did)
When I developed carpal tunnel syndrome, one of the things I did to ameliorate it was force myself to mouse with my left hand to reduce the load on my very dominant right hand. Though I have now realized I switched back to right hand mousing at some point.
Picked up our dog from the vet yesterday. In the office was another dog being picked up. When he faced us (we were still outside, I had just opened the door for my wife to enter) I thought, oh my god, that thing looks like a bat! The face and ears looked just like a bat head stuck on a medium sized dog’s body. Then I realized the owner had a batman themed harness on him. My wife and I both just cracked up, laughing out loud. I got embarrased we did that and stammered an apology to the man. He laughed and said, no don’t worry about it, that’s why we got the harness, after all.
Now I can’t help but think about how the Walkertons sent their daughter away with a relatively fresh, debilitating injury/surgery and probably didn’t help her at all. They certainly don’t ask about it nowadays. They certainly ruined their relationship with their daughter such that she wouldn’t ask for help even if she needed it.
but maybe that’ll work. It’d require retraining, and the right hand would still be strained depending on how fast the song to play is, but it may work T_T
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Playin’ the uke like Paul McCartney
Funny, I’d always thought Paul McCartney would be the sem- (I am immediately drawn off stage by a pack of wild cougars)
Looks like she’s… fret-ting about it.
Batman is judging you.
Batman trained for years to be the best at playing the ukulele left-handed.
It’s not a skill that comes up very often, but rest assured when it does he’s got it covered.
When the Riddler’s Death Machine requires a perfect rendition of “Over the Rainbow” and your right hand is currently occupied with holding the “Death Crystal of Shaballah”, then it really helps to save the day.
I enjoy this scenario because it might mean Batman is using the Death Crystal as a ukulele pick. And that seems exactly like something that might happen in a comic.
Jack Black IS batman.
Its true Ive never seen them both in the same room…
I thought he was Hulk?
I’ve never seen Batman and Hulk in the same room either.
…And now I have to tell my brain that this was a daft joke and it doesn’t actually need to run through the whole of Marvel Vs DC and JLA/Avengers to confirm this is accurate.
Actually, they had a team up in a giant-sized crossover….
Well, Bruce Banner and Bruce Wayne…
I figured they’re both geniuses, and Banner had to finance his Gamma Bomb SOMEHOW, so…
Bruce Banner is Bruce Wayne’s other, OTHER secret identity…
and thus…
BatHulk was born…
As a southpaw who plays guitar LH-strung, I’m used to not being able to play anyone’s guitar. But aren’t there some uses which use the same strings and can be tuned for lefties?
Batman can play the ukelele left-handed in space.
I understand this referenced dot gif.
I understand this reference to I understand this reference dot gif
…because he can breath in Space..?!?
Amazi-girl is judging you, but for non-ukulele reasons
Maybe it’ll help if she wears a hat.
🥲
*plays “Somewhere Over The Rainbow on Ukelele” on hacked muzak*
Oh, my FAVORITE! Thank you! What a star.
Gonna have to restring it if she’s gonna play it left-handed.
Elizabeth Cotten played a rightie guitar left handed, as did Bill Staines. It’s doable.
Super doable. I played guitar once using only the top four strings after realising that I could use mandolin chords upside-down. If you want to sound like you’re not doing that you have to invert your strum pattern, but that’s not hard.
Jimmy Hendrix likewise inverted a right-handed guitar and played it left handed, back in the 1960s.
Jimi restrung his guitar left handed though; he didn’t play it actually inverted, just the body was.
Albert King and Lefty Dizz on the other hand did play right handed guitars backwards; they didn’t restring, just flipped them over and played. Lefty is sadly mostly forgotten, but was an awesome guitarist, while Albert King is better remembered. I recommend both.
As a left-handed guitarist, it blows my mind to watch Elizabeth Cotton. Playing the bass with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. How does she do that?
Especially on the Uke. Two less strings to keep track of
Absolutely not necessary, especially on a ukelele, which is nearly always strummed. I’m a lefty who plays right handed guitars, it’s no big deal.
Sal invents hard rock ukulele. Someone get that girl a whammy bar.
Comedian Wayne Federman already did that almost 40 years ago.
Feng E from Taiwan also plays a mean rock ukulele:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngdwpNWjw9s
Waiting for this comic, I realized what the last one reminded me of. Well, who. Sal was totally Zendaya in that one. Saldaya.
In general, or specifically in the Challengers movie?
I have no idea what movie that is.
Honestly she and Danny have been reminding me of Hadestown’s take on Eurydice and Orpheus
Damn, can’t unsee
… it occurs to me that if her hand winged out on her when she was biking that it could have been a major issue. So I wonder if tyoing or anything else is hard for her.
I’m guessing from my own experiences with nerve pain that it’s probably positional. Like, holding things certain ways might set off her nerves, but she’s probably accustomed enough to biking that she knows how to hold her hands without setting it off.
My guess is that she lost some fine motor control, range of motion, and/or feeling in at least a couple fingers on her right hand. Reconstructive surgery is pretty good, but they’re never exactly the same again after tendons and nerves get severed.
She has enough grip strength to pull the front brake lever on her motorcycle, at least. (And to carry a book.)
It’s not that kind of injury, fine motor control isn’t the same thing as losing your grip. Especially not with something like holding handlebars, where you have multiple fingers. She won’t be playing piano but she can still climb a ladder.
“Ladders? Where we’re going* we don’t need ladders”
* up the side of a dorm building
I lost both grip and fine motor control from a single injury. Not the same injury as Sal, though, I’m pretty sure.
Yeah, that doesn’t look fun.
gotta learn to play with your teeth
If Sal has no fans I’m DEAD!!!
Put down the ukelele, only then can the healing begin.
I was literally scanning the comments to check if someone hadn’t already posted this:)
…shit, that’s good.
Yeah, it is! That should be a book title.
Is Sal left-handed? Or is the ukulele typically played with the right hand on the fretboard? She doesn’t seem comfortable holding it like one would a right-handed guitar
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/mmnph/
The guitar here is left-handed. If Sal lost some functionality with her dominant hand, that makes the injury a lot more debilitating
YEAH OKAY you found it yourself while I was typing glacially lol
I had to follow back up on a couple of things via their character tags: she frets guitar with her left hand, like most right-handed people. Danny frets the ukulele with his left hand, so it’s not likely laid out for fretting with the right hand.
A ukelele only has four strings. They’re also tuned in any of a number of re-entrant tunings (high notes on the outside strings, lower notes between them). Flipping it upside down and playing it that way would take just a little effort to figure out, and if you’re used to it, it would be no issue whatsoever, neither strummed nor finger-picked.
She frets with her right hand. She’s apparently a southpaw.
No, she frets with her right hand. That’s how she starts with ukulele in this strip, and that’s how she plays the guitar in the strip linked above
“I know something you don’t know: I’m not left-ukuleled!“
Danny returns. “There’s something I ought to tell you. I’m not left-ukuleled either.”
*epic ukulele duel ensues
“You want to see the dueling ukeleles?
I’ll show you the dueling ukeleles.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7sbTIN37lk
Thinking about how given that a left fretting hand gets prioritized on a lot of string instruments, and most picking methods don’t require significant dexterity, she’s not set up as bad there as she probably thinks.
I think it just sucks that what felt natural wasn’t possible because of an injury.
A cute, half-naked girl playin a uke feels like a viral Youtube short if I ever saw one
Why are there not already seventeen links?
But what is she apologizing for?
Sal looks cute in those. Kind of a fun contrast with Joyce’s style, previously.
If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to do
Can’t believe Batman is out here silently judging Sal’s playing technique
like… I know she’s left handed, but aren’t the customary way to play stringed instruments kind of backwards? When you use a bow, it’s supposedly because of keeping the bow straight and control over volume. I’m not sure that couldn’t be learned though. Dexterity on the neck would be pretty beneficial.
I don’t know much about strumming, but pizz was easier than bowing.
Picking, though. You want your better hand for that.
If you’re a pure rhythm guitarist (ukulelist, whatever) however… yeah, I can see it.
Check that out with Guitar George – he’s the one to get confirmation on that.
(He knows all the chords)
But he doesn’t want to make it cry or sing.
“We are the Sultans of Twee”
Does Sal downplay how much her stab hand is disabled as well as how it looks to others?
As a left-handed guitarist who frets with their right hand, I don’t see any issues playing in that manner. Like you need more strength in your hand to fret that than to strum anyway.
Strength, maybe a little. But if you do finger-picking, that takes a lot more dexterity than fretting does. I’m a lefty who plays right handed guitars flipped upside down – I can’t imagine doing any finger-picking with my right hand.
It’s very learnable either way though. I’m left-handed, but piano taught me to use both hands pretty well, often favoring the right hand for the melody. When I picked up guitar I decided to learn it right-handed, just for ease of… being able to pick up a guitar and use it. It’s definitely not the direction that feels natural when picking up the instrument for the first time, but once you start that way you learn so many new hand movements anyway…
Sorry I meant frets with their left hand (or like a right-handed guitarist).
You called today’s strip Dexterity?
I’d have called it Strumming of Age.
*badum tss*
That’s sinister.
Oh my god I got that
gauche too
Usual convention is that frets are handled with your left hand to my knowledge-it’s how I’ve learned basic ukulele and how you usually see guitar.
That being said given Sal’s injury/loss of dexterity, trumpet, french horn, or trombone would be possible instruments.
Sal’s already sufficiently brazen as is.
[Nathan Lane voice] It starts.
Sal trying to figure out how Danny played HER so good….
There’s another comic that has a lesbian bassist/guitar player commenting on how it was a good thin she played fretted string instruments so she would have enough strength/dexterity to finger her partner properly. Menage a3 near the end of its run Zii talking to DeeDee, Zii is the guitar player in question and DeeDee is the person getting “played”.
“She didn’t have guitarist fingers”
Hmm, I tried to figure out if Sal was left- or right-handed, and did a bit of research. In flashback panels, she seems consistently left-handed – she holds the knife in her left hand (which was an indicator of the knife-wielder fake-out, BTW, Amber’s red panel shows a right-handed grip – which is how se holds it when she stabs Sal), and she places her money on Marcie’s bed with her left hand.
Some (though by no means all) more recent (comic-chronology-wise) strips, however, often show her as though she were right-handed (for example, when Joyce hovers over her in bed, she grabs her with her right hand, and she also points with it a lot). This makes me wonder if she has effectively trained herself to be ambidextrous or right-handed, but is/was originally left-handed. Either that, or Willis simply sometimes forgets she’s a lefty.
When I got stabbed through the back of my left hand, post-surgical physical therapy made me more ambidextrous, as I started to do things like write left-handed to help strengthen the hand back up (also, I thought it would be cool to write on the chalkboard with both hands while I was teaching, so I did)
It seems likely that that’s what’s going on here, then, too. Thank you for sharing 🙂
When I developed carpal tunnel syndrome, one of the things I did to ameliorate it was force myself to mouse with my left hand to reduce the load on my very dominant right hand. Though I have now realized I switched back to right hand mousing at some point.
Confirmed on tumblr.
Grabbing or pointing or whatnot with a non-dominant hand doesn’t really mean anything.
As a southpaw, it would seem natural to grab with my right if going for the throat; presumably to keep my strong hand free for working them over.
With a bit of practice she’ll be ready to make a youtube apology.
Picked up our dog from the vet yesterday. In the office was another dog being picked up. When he faced us (we were still outside, I had just opened the door for my wife to enter) I thought, oh my god, that thing looks like a bat! The face and ears looked just like a bat head stuck on a medium sized dog’s body. Then I realized the owner had a batman themed harness on him. My wife and I both just cracked up, laughing out loud. I got embarrased we did that and stammered an apology to the man. He laughed and said, no don’t worry about it, that’s why we got the harness, after all.
Now I can’t help but think about how the Walkertons sent their daughter away with a relatively fresh, debilitating injury/surgery and probably didn’t help her at all. They certainly don’t ask about it nowadays. They certainly ruined their relationship with their daughter such that she wouldn’t ask for help even if she needed it.
the more I think about it
I just realized that Sal’s not wearing the shirt she came in in, but rather the one that Joyce left there.
Which was her shirt to begin with.
Yes, but now with the added bonus that another set of titties was in it just a little while ago.
She likes how it smells now (new cigarette smoke).
Stale booze, Joyce, Joe, and a hint of Dorothy.
Then Danny walks in
And does that Fangasm reaction Po tends to make when he sees some cool Kung Fu thing
A new hand touches the beacon.
Do the world a favor Sal … fill his uke with concrete and hang it back up.
Second that
I like Sal and all, but she’s super hot and really fun to read.
Sals learned to adjust to the good things life has provided.
Alas, poor Sal T___T
but maybe that’ll work. It’d require retraining, and the right hand would still be strained depending on how fast the song to play is, but it may work T_T
Is she switching from playing left-handed to playing right-handed in this comic?
I’m mostly just grossed out that Sal is wearing the dirty sweaty shirt Joyce wore all night to drink and then wore while having diarrhea.
No G-String puns yet?
I don’t think Ukes have a G open string.
Depends on the tuning, and Sal has been seen tuning Danny’s ukulele with a G string: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/02-this-is-the-way-that-we-love/tune/