A number of people called Asher setting off the alarm. What isn’t clear to me is what this accomplished. A batch of people left their dorm room. It’s not clear how the dastardly dad’s could count on being able to abduct someone without being seen and without a noisy struggle, and failing that, what was accomplished? Admittedly a number of people have departed to locations unknown, but Asher just now sent the message that the deed was accomplished so presumably whatever step 2 is yet to take place. What’s step two? No one in the comic except Dorothy, Mike or Carla plans this far ahead and I think we can rule them out. So???
I think perhaps you are not considering the possibly that Asher isn’t the only Korean Mafia agent in play. In fact, this would almost have to include more players. The Despicable Duo are only two, after all. And the cast is getting picked off in groups greater than that. Plus, Toedad isn’t exactly a Solid Snake operator. I’m betting that there are some hitters in play. Blaine the Bastard would absolutely go into further debt just to break his daughter. Plus vengeance for the nosebreak on AG, whose identity he hasn’t realized yet.
Well, maybe it’s not as bad as we think? Maybe Amber finally became too tired to hold Amazi-Girl back and AG is yanking everyone relevant out of the open because last time she was pout Blain and Ross were around?
Yeah, I have some sympathy for him here because none of his options were good. Either he does this or he ends up dead in a ditch when grandpa finds out who took his money.
Yeah, not a lot of good options when your gramps’s goon shows up with blackmail.
Still, Sal is DEFINITELY kicking his ass if and when she finds out what happened. (And depending on how public this is about to go – my guess is ‘extremely’ – he’s probably going to go ‘yeah, okay, fair.’)
My guess is that he has done something more complex than follow Blaine’s directions, and that what he has done he intended should effect Blaine’s destruction with no come-back. His treason will turn out to make a significant contribution to the downfall of the bad dads; Sal, Walky, and Amber will end up assessing Asher as an ambiguous figure, not as an evil one.
It looks like it might be a cigarette lighter or a pack of cigarettes. Maybe he set off the alarm that way — lighting a cigarette and using the smoke to set off a smoke detector — rather than activating a manual pull station.
We’ve seen a number of overhead shots with no sign of smoke or flames so presumably there is no fire. It appears to be a card Asher is holding and so it is presumably a student entry card he used to access the building.
most teenagers I know write texts “correctly,” maybe because they’re good at using phones and it doesn’t really matter to hit one extra key to punctuate or whatever
(most 40+ moms I know use weird shorthands and the wrong autocorrect words, but I don’t know why it’s specifically moms)
That doesn’t make sense if Ball-Peen needs Asher to tell him what’s going on. My guess is Joyce got a bad feeling about things and ran off to find Becky, Sarah and Dorothy followed her, Amber’s sneaking along to protect them, and Ethan and Walky are looking for her.
For now. Until they all run into some horrible dads and beat them up.
The obvious answer is that because of her ninja-like ability to be unseen, she was the only one not kidnapped. Thing is, I don’t think anyone was kidnapped.
She’s also been looking in the direction of everyone who has disappeared so far. Their last appearance and then Dina is looking in their direction of where they just went. Something is going on and only Dina knows.
It’s 24 hours later, roughly – the previous chapter showed the aftermath of the party which was concurrent with those events, followed by Amber’s vague sense of unease for much of the day which ultimately culminated in her hallucinating Mike’s presence (and thus leading to her current exhausted state).
Now we will have to wait five months to find out what happen with them as well. as people keep dissapearing, the comic will focus exclusively on agatha.
FUCK YOU ASHER! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU AND YOUR FUCKING KOREAN MOB FAMILY! MAY THE AFTERLIFE EXIST AND YOU ALL MOBSTERS GO TO HELL AND BURN OR FREEZE IN THE NINTH CIRCLE!
Asher, Asher, Asher. What did you do? Why do you think that you’ll ever be able to face Sal again (and not be carried away in a canvas sack) ever again?
Does “McAwesome’s” refer to someplace on/near the IU campus in the same way “Galasso’s Pizza (and Subs)” references “Mother Bear’s”, or is this just Willis’s way to mention that fast-food place that advertises “billions sold” without actually naming names?
It could be either, but I hope there’s a counterpart to Galasso’s here.
For anyone who started with DoA, “McAwesome’s” was Shortpacked!’s equal-but-opposite competitor back in the Walkyverse. It was staffed by doppelgangers of the main cast, so that’s where Rose (Amber) and Zaph (Faz) came from. Mike also worked there when he was Drunk Nice Mike.
Not sure why they’d bother faking a suicide for someone who in fact jumped off a building [unless you’re assuming that he survived and then they killed him after]
I think people are hating Asher too much, he really had no choice in the matter all things considered. Man’s trying to turn his life around and Blaine literally threatened to ruin it all and possibly get Asher killed.
One thing that kind of sucks for Ruth is that even though she’s right that obviously the most likely explanation for people missing in a fire drill is that they wandered off, she probably on paper does have a responsibility to report that several people are unaccounted-for.
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*types* “I saved 15% or more by switching to Geico”
Actually they’ve switched their slogan to “75 years of savings and service” he’s gonna have to swap that one over.
“I saved more than that in half the time.”
“I unfriend you.”
“That’s not how it works! That’s not how any of this works!”
It’s a little disturbing how often I find myself using that last line.
I don’t like this. I HIGHLY DISLIKE THIS VAGUE SENSE OF UNEASE.
for just $5 on Patreon, there is a chance things become less vague
or maybe it’ll be like everyone who ponied up on January 7
that’s just a chance you’ll have to take
(but really, this storyline is gonna be fantastic and rewarding creators for stories like these is a good idea)
Are you talking about the comic, or the pandemic? Either way I have to agree.
Yes.
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
Yes, I much prefer my unease to be certain, quick and brutal.
called it https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/03-when-it-crumbles/fouram/#comment-1454860
What you guys said coincides with it potentially being a
phone, ha hakeycard in Asher’s hand as wellA number of people called Asher setting off the alarm. What isn’t clear to me is what this accomplished. A batch of people left their dorm room. It’s not clear how the dastardly dad’s could count on being able to abduct someone without being seen and without a noisy struggle, and failing that, what was accomplished? Admittedly a number of people have departed to locations unknown, but Asher just now sent the message that the deed was accomplished so presumably whatever step 2 is yet to take place. What’s step two? No one in the comic except Dorothy, Mike or Carla plans this far ahead and I think we can rule them out. So???
…perhaps the idea is to get into the dorms undetected while the students are out. Blaine did send Faz here a few days ago to snoop for dirt on Amber.
I think perhaps you are not considering the possibly that Asher isn’t the only Korean Mafia agent in play. In fact, this would almost have to include more players. The Despicable Duo are only two, after all. And the cast is getting picked off in groups greater than that. Plus, Toedad isn’t exactly a Solid Snake operator. I’m betting that there are some hitters in play. Blaine the Bastard would absolutely go into further debt just to break his daughter. Plus vengeance for the nosebreak on AG, whose identity he hasn’t realized yet.
If Blaine had access to squads of mob muscle, why would he need Ross? Just as a fall guy?
I called it above you. But 10 minutes later.
\o/
Gotta say I really don’t like Ruth’s expression there. Gives me ‘no regrets’ vibes.
But Mike already acted with integrity 76 days ago
Better than “No Regerts.” 🙂
Everyone is disappearing. Soon the comic will just be scenery.
https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/rerun
Hey! I made that joke yesterday!!
Well, congrats on being hilarious.
Well fuckshit. This …this is definitely gonna be bad.
Oh, Asher.
At the very least it’ll be over the top
For someone with just 20 appearances, he’s been quite the catalyst
Well, maybe it’s not as bad as we think? Maybe Amber finally became too tired to hold Amazi-Girl back and AG is yanking everyone relevant out of the open because last time she was pout Blain and Ross were around?
Asher gonna drop a very strategic dime one of these days.
See, Mike, twice as handsome as you, or twice as good a lover. For a Dime!
At least he looks kind of regretful? Maybe he’ll do a face turn later.
I mean we already know he doesn’t want to do this, he’s being blackmailed into it. Dude just wants to get an education
Yeah, I have some sympathy for him here because none of his options were good. Either he does this or he ends up dead in a ditch when grandpa finds out who took his money.
Whoever said it was Asher working for Blaine, YOU MADE THE RIGHT CALL. (/theme from Monday Night Football)
Yeah, McAwesome at 4 am, not good.
Yeah, their best stuff is obviously served during the daytime.
as my work friends and I say (bc no cursing on the clock), this situation is VERY HECK
This is gonna be a long day
I see Thanos has entered the webcomic.
“Mr. Rosenthal? I don’t feel so good…”
In the first panel, Dina is seen looking on as the shadow person from yesterday’s strip turns to dust.
Now everybody down at McDonnellzzz
They down with Ronnell McDonnell
And now they hittin’ the bottle
And everybody cooooool
I had kind of forgotten Asher’s part in this. Wonder if he pulled the alarm, and that’s what is done here, or if it’s something worse than that.
For some reason I assumed he stole Amber’s phone.
For what it’s worth, it’s a possible match for her phone [i.e. light blue, camera on the center axis, dark shape of unclear purpose on the top edge above the camera] in https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/02-to-remind-you-of-my-love/surrendering/ – anyone have a better shot of her phone? We’ve never seen Asher’s phone, by the way.
Oops, guess Asher is a scumbag after all. Too bad, he’s kinda hot. Oh, well.
Whatever bad dad is counting on Asher is making a big mistake. Asher has track for you can’t trust him when you’re doing crimes.
In fairness, Asher will end up dead in a ditch if it comes out he stole his grandfather’s money. Mobsters don’t tend to like that.
Yeah, not a lot of good options when your gramps’s goon shows up with blackmail.
Still, Sal is DEFINITELY kicking his ass if and when she finds out what happened. (And depending on how public this is about to go – my guess is ‘extremely’ – he’s probably going to go ‘yeah, okay, fair.’)
Yeah, my guess too.
My guess is that he has done something more complex than follow Blaine’s directions, and that what he has done he intended should effect Blaine’s destruction with no come-back. His treason will turn out to make a significant contribution to the downfall of the bad dads; Sal, Walky, and Amber will end up assessing Asher as an ambiguous figure, not as an evil one.
DYW
Is Asher holding something in his right hand? I can’t tell for sure, let alone what it is.
Looks to be a keycard… oh shit
Maybe a pack of cigarettes?
It looks like it might be a cigarette lighter or a pack of cigarettes. Maybe he set off the alarm that way — lighting a cigarette and using the smoke to set off a smoke detector — rather than activating a manual pull station.
OR, he actually started a fire.
We’ve seen a number of overhead shots with no sign of smoke or flames so presumably there is no fire. It appears to be a card Asher is holding and so it is presumably a student entry card he used to access the building.
That would be the smart thing. Smokes don’t pop vials of ultraviolet dye on your hands like pull stations do.
No teenager sent that text message. He used the correct contraction for “it is”, complete with apostrophe.
Autocorrect?
autocorrect is really really bad at homonyms
really bad
What about autocorrect?
Maybe the text we see is not what Asher typed.
The tail of the speech bubble is coming from the right side of the screen, though. That usually means those are the outgoing messages.
Yes. It is what he sent. But it might not be what he typed. Because of autocorrect. Which might have inserted an apostrophe into “its”.
But. That is how I would send texts as a teenager. Was I just imaginary.
Same. I’ve always sent texts like that.
Me too.
I used to write and speak more formally when I was a teenager. But we didn’t have text messaging back then.
most teenagers I know write texts “correctly,” maybe because they’re good at using phones and it doesn’t really matter to hit one extra key to punctuate or whatever
(most 40+ moms I know use weird shorthands and the wrong autocorrect words, but I don’t know why it’s specifically moms)
So, what? Did Blaine and Toedad silently kidnap like 7 different people from a large public gathering without anybody noticing?
That doesn’t make sense if Ball-Peen needs Asher to tell him what’s going on. My guess is Joyce got a bad feeling about things and ran off to find Becky, Sarah and Dorothy followed her, Amber’s sneaking along to protect them, and Ethan and Walky are looking for her.
For now. Until they all run into some horrible dads and beat them up.
Walky and Ethan have gone back in the building after Amber who they believe (rightly or wrongly) to have gone back after her phone.
Or else they both believe she’s off being Amazi-Girl.
Maybe Amazi-Girl has gone back for her phone.
And so Ruth enters the “Who will kick the most square inches of Blaine’s ass?” pool.
She already had her go.
Personally I’m rooting for Joyce.
So Asher pulled the alarm… and SuperVillain Dad swooped in and kidnapped everyone?
No, Asher’s the Reverse-Flash.
We’ve established his name as ‘Ball-Peen’. *sigh*
Still prefer ‘The Dad-Joker’…
How is Dina the only one visible?
Opposite Day?
The obvious answer is that because of her ninja-like ability to be unseen, she was the only one not kidnapped. Thing is, I don’t think anyone was kidnapped.
So with that logic, nobody remembers Becky exists.
The closet silently reforms around her.
She’s also been looking in the direction of everyone who has disappeared so far. Their last appearance and then Dina is looking in their direction of where they just went. Something is going on and only Dina knows.
Comics like this are what makes it difficult to cancel the patreon subscription I should have cancelled 5 months ago
TOW A COMIN’
*toe
So. It has come to this
Whatever this is.
Could this be concurrent with the Mike/Blaine/Toedad storyline from earlier?
It’s 24 hours later, roughly – the previous chapter showed the aftermath of the party which was concurrent with those events, followed by Amber’s vague sense of unease for much of the day which ultimately culminated in her hallucinating Mike’s presence (and thus leading to her current exhausted state).
So no.
A few people actually called that it was Asher.
PIECE OF SHIT!!!
You survive a mob boss you stole money from
They failed one night, so they try again the next… Are they Pinky and the Brain now?!
Toedad and the Blaine
Pinky-Toe and the Blaine
NAARF!!
Not really Brain, no.
Pinky and the Big-Toe?
Now we will have to wait five months to find out what happen with them as well. as people keep dissapearing, the comic will focus exclusively on agatha.
Asher, you pig.
FUCK YOU ASHER! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU AND YOUR FUCKING KOREAN MOB FAMILY! MAY THE AFTERLIFE EXIST AND YOU ALL MOBSTERS GO TO HELL AND BURN OR FREEZE IN THE NINTH CIRCLE!
Hey, we’re friends here. You can tell us what you really think.
I was starting to think Asher might be ok after all, but it’s looking like I was wrong.
What is Dina looking at?
Please don’t have killed Mike. :((((((
Oh crap. The evil dads are coming…
Oh Asher. You failed at being better.
He failed at being better under duress* he kinda had his arm twisted
it’s “done done DOONE”!
Calling it here; this is the storyline where Ruth finally beats someone to death with a femur.
But not their /own/ femur. She and Blaine are gonna have a femur fight.
Worst case scenario:
RUTH: “Act with integrity. No regrets.”
Asher, Asher, Asher. What did you do? Why do you think that you’ll ever be able to face Sal again (and not be carried away in a canvas sack) ever again?
I think the only thing he did was pulling the fire alarm. Toedad and Blaine did the rest
Do you think the three silhouettes to the left of the stairs are Sarah, Joyce, and Dorothy?
It’s possible, but previously named characters usually get tagged if they appear in a strip at all.
AH WELL THAT AINT OMINOUS
Well, at least we are free now.This was clearly a mass kidnapping made by ous less favorite fathers.
Asher deposited Mike (either dead or unconscious) in his dorm room using the distraction from the pulled alarm.
That’s highly plausible.
Now to figure out what happened to Joyce & Co.
Does “McAwesome’s” refer to someplace on/near the IU campus in the same way “Galasso’s Pizza (and Subs)” references “Mother Bear’s”, or is this just Willis’s way to mention that fast-food place that advertises “billions sold” without actually naming names?
It could be either, but I hope there’s a counterpart to Galasso’s here.
For anyone who started with DoA, “McAwesome’s” was Shortpacked!’s equal-but-opposite competitor back in the Walkyverse. It was staffed by doppelgangers of the main cast, so that’s where Rose (Amber) and Zaph (Faz) came from. Mike also worked there when he was Drunk Nice Mike.
We’ve seen McAwesome’s in DoA. They do sushi.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/ami/
Sushi at 4:00 AM?
I’m worried that he dumped Mike’s body in the dorms somewhere with some sort of staging to make it look like a suicide.
(Please let me be wrong)
Ooh! Nice hypothesis!
Well, if we wanted to go the weird hypothesis route, we could hypothesize that Asher was sending the text to Live Mike.
Not sure why they’d bother faking a suicide for someone who in fact jumped off a building [unless you’re assuming that he survived and then they killed him after]
Asher’s here. The good side of it is that we will see more Sal. The bad side of it is that Sal will definitely have more reasons to still being angry.
Also: We know Ruth is in femur-hungry mode once again. This time she will be a tougher match for Blaine.
mcawesome’s – it’s awesome [tm]
and at least ruth’s on the case
I think people are hating Asher too much, he really had no choice in the matter all things considered. Man’s trying to turn his life around and Blaine literally threatened to ruin it all and possibly get Asher killed.
Did anyone else notice that the file name of the webcomic image contains the word “diddle”? Any theories on why?
One thing that kind of sucks for Ruth is that even though she’s right that obviously the most likely explanation for people missing in a fire drill is that they wandered off, she probably on paper does have a responsibility to report that several people are unaccounted-for.