Okay. With this much setup, I am now convinced that this is maybe not going where we think it’s going. Sure, it’s a crash, but maybe it’s a train crash or maybe one of the cars slips on a banana peel at the last minute and there’s no crash. 🍌
Maybe she is trying to be cool and grown up around him? Her whole relationship with Joe has been basically her pushing her boundaries in escalating sequence. In a sense, her being with Joe is about her growing up.
On the other hand, Sarah is kind of like an older sister to Joyce, so Joyce likely feels more comfortable around her and temporarily be more child-like or at least not push boundaries she is not comfortable with and frame events in a way that are less painful for her to deal with. Who can blame her? Being an adult is a stressful mess, take a break when you can.
The free world ain’t a collection of countries or territories, it’s a collection of values and commitment to them, commitment to learning, compassion, allyship, community, and supporting each other in our struggles!
Stay safe, stay woke, and may peace be with you! ✌🏽
Mr. Willis may yet pull a 180 on us and have the news be something like her grandfather has cancer or her one jerk brother got arrested for misappropriating church funds. It don’t think this is a likely outcome, but it would be a funny rug-pull, and who is Willis if not a cruel and capricious god?
I find it baffling that someone tells Joyce they have a secret and Joyce intuits she already knows the secret because she doesn’t know of any other secrets it could be, when the very concept of a secret is that she wouldn’t know about it.
“there’s nothing else it could be” Honey literally EVERYTHING ELSE it could be.
Ugh, don’t let my alternative health fanatic mother find out, she thinks I’ve been surviving on the dew of a single ginko leaf and the energy of the universe.
I prefer to separate the concepts of someone who just enjoy some anime and Anime Fans(™), mostly because I heavely dislike a lot of them and prefer to distance myself from them in my mind
Yeah, she doesn’t have a very good map of knowledge. The whole “known knowns”, “known unknowns”, “unknown knowns”, and “unknown unknowns” square, for a start.
Oh, yeah, definitely. Seeing a family person whom you haven’t seen since before you underwent some major life changes…yeah, you can revert easily. You don’t expect them to be also changed.
Pretty sure she’s referring to the fact that that previous boyfriend she introduced “Joshua” to was, in fact, not ‘real’ in that Ethan only agreed to go out with her as cover because “maybe I just want to be Ethan instead of Ethan the gay guy for a little while”, and thus Ethan was “secretly gay” and Joyce’s evidence for Joe being hetero is that she just gave him a handy yesterday.
I believe it’s about the fact that her only other boyfriend here was Ethan who she knew was gay when she started dating him and they did zero adult hetero stuff together. Unsurprisingly.
Yes, correct. Thank you for your ability to read the words I typed, combine them with one another in the context of their native sentence, and then comprehend that one of those combinations was more likely than the others.
Always baffles me when people say “google it” about something that’s either way too obscure or way too generic to yield any helpful search results. Either help or don’t waste your time commenting that, pretty immature ngl.
For those who are wondering, I’m assuming ‘Tracer’ is referring to the Overwatch character
I tried 5 minutes of googling with various terms and combinations. No success. I’m guessing that “Tracer” (whatever it is) is too obscure. (That, and Google is less useful these days). My apologies about my non-success and Taffy’s unhelpfulness.
It’s a joke. Look up Kotaku and ask yourself when exactly Willis would have done an interview with them with specific details on tomorrow’s strip. Or just try to remember that if you see Taffy say something that you can’t make sense of, odds are that’s intentional.
I think Jocelyne will be fine. She has known Joyce for 18 years, right? Joyce and her unthinking conservative reactions plus innate kindness and her infamous Joyce-Face [tm] are well-known. What’s much less well-known is the new-and-improved adult woman person real sexual being Joyce who might actually think about and express happiness (after the initial surprise) upon learning about Jocelyne.
If Jocelyne actually is coming out to her little sister here, I expect she’s braced for a much worse reaction than the awkwardly (and amusingly) embarrassing one we’re about to see! 🙂
I counsel patience. It’s not hypocrisy to have surprise jolt out of one a few old ideas that one has only just begun working to discard.
I think we may be treated to a glimpse of Joyce’s internal struggle. Trust Joyce to remember, when the surprise is fading, that this is a person she loves regardless of past (and future) annoyance.
Joyce, please repeat your penultimate line here slowly a couple times.
…Anyway I’m betting the news is not going to be Jocelyn coming out to her, but that will also end up happening somehow anyway. Possibly due to Ethan accidentally Danny’ing it up.
Skirt/dress, significantly longer hair (it’s been many months in-universe, right?), and sweater is my guess.
At least Joyce is actively coming to terms with trans people. I know how that kind of shock to world view where you now want to accept everyone you can, but there’s built-in programming you’re literally fighting against. That’s how it was for gay people initially with me.
It wasn’t even that I had a personal problem with gay people. I’ve always tried really hard to be nice to everyone, but there was always a…shield? Like an “ew gross” type of primal reaction that is hard to force down. But it ends. Your inherent instinctual disgust can turn to acceptance if you fight it enough.
I tend to believe “inherent instinctual disgust” is learned, not real. What is real is an uncomfortable dissonance as your learned, but now automatic, male/female classification systems are returning multiple incompatable answers. If the transition is complete enough, there is no dissonance and any remaining discomfort is strictly your own.
So, you do realize there was nothing inherent or instinctual about your disgust, right? Unless you’re equally repulsed by the concept of all sex and dating, I suppose.
(Although even then, I find real life sex pretty gross – all those bodily fluids! – but I don’t feel disgust every time I meet anybody who has ever done it. I just… mostly don’t think about other people’s sex lives at all?)
Because springing massive, life altering news on your family with no previous setup or forewarning like that is just going to get you the full force of shame and anger from your parents.
I want Joyce to fully recognize her but not take her wearing a dress or something as anything significant. She marches over to her sister and goes, “I know about the divorce.” Joe’s there going, “Joyce… the dress…” and Joyce is just like, “Oh, yeah, sometimes he’d do that when we were growing up. Are you in another play?”
Considering she is a woman, any way she is dressed would be “as a woman”.
I know I’m being pedantic here but man just say “She’s gonna be wearing a dress/skirt isn’t she”. Like those are gendered pieces of clothing & get what you mean across just fine. “Dressed as” carries weird implications of dressing up instead of, like, just wearing clothes.
Maybe there will be like a Hank Hill moment where she meets some girl named Jocelyn and commiserates with her about how her brother needs to show up and get this difficult moment over with already.
Come on Joyce, the divorce is not even a secret. How is it going to be a secret when they’ve sold the house with all the kids’ stuff in it? How is it literally unthinkable that Josh may have anything going on you don’t know about? How hard is it to answer any texts?
To be fair, Joyce only learned the divorce was finalized and that the house was being sold maybe six days ago in-universe, and she only learned it because her mom showed up on campus. So she might figure that Jocelyne doesn’t know their mom showed up, so she doesn’t know that Joyce knows.
I would think Joyce might be guessing “the divorce OR the house being sold” as her guess, as the latter was the more shocking recent news to her. But she’s obviously approaching this with a very limited focus.
Speaking from personal experience: I sure hope Jocelyne(?) has not shown up in full femme mode because, oh boy, family members do not enjoy having that sprung on them
Jocelyne is going to get about two sentences out, Joe is going to realize what’s happening, and Joyce will go “Why are you wearing a mumu?” and he’ll go “oh god I have to actually sort this out won’t I?”
The fact that Willis is ramping up the anticipation this much makes me wonder if the punchline will be something completely different from what we’re expecting.
Y’know, I have mixed feelings about Joyce’s not checking her phone. Like, yes, this is clearly setting herself up to be caught by surprise on things she totally should know, and that’s a bad choice on her part.
But… if you know someone doesn’t look at a given medium, it’s pretty dumb to keep sending them important information that way. Like, I *know* my father-in-law does not care for texting. If something is important or time-sensitive, I need to call him. It’s not what I would want, but that’s a thing I know and if I ignore that fact, it’s on me.
She’s checking her phone in the last panel, presumably looking at a text saying Jocelyne has arrived. I don’t think any extra information was shared via text.
From what I can tell, she’s been reading the texts, but not answering the calls, so Jocelyne is doing the right thing here. She wants to tell Joyce her secret in person anyway. The calls/texts have been to set up the visit.
I considered for a moment what I’d like to say to Joyce in this situation, and that made me come to the realization that she acts like she doesn’t realize that her siblings have their own lives they’re living.
Joyce’s ideas about her family are still stuck in the past, as far as how she remembers her family members and their dynamics. News of her parents’ divorce was very difficult for her to internalize. Selling the house was painful for her to contemplate. She isn’t thinking that any of her siblings would go onward, change, and grow their own ways. (She’s still focused on her own changes.) I had some experience with this kind of surprise regarding my own family members, while I was busy undergoing my own developments, back in my college years.
That’s very consistent for Joyce. I don’t remember if it was explicitly stated, but I get the feeling she was coddled so much by her family as a child that she thinks all of their lives revolve around her. So everything they do that centres them in their own lives feels like a betrayal. From her parents’ divorce to whatever her gut reaction will be whenever she eventually sees Jocelyne.
i know like, Joyce doesn’t know that Jocelyne is a gorl but like, oof it feels bad to see her get unintentionally misgendered all the same. Not Joyce’s fault but i just bleh
Yeah, writing imaginary Joyce dialog where she uses the wrong pronoun even feels icky, decided against including Jocelyne’s deadname in it, even if that’s how I’d imagine Joyce saying it.
In tangential real world updates, I just put in for a legal name change for myself!
Even without the chapter title, we’d know it was her sister that she doesn’t know is trans because she referred to said sibling by her deadname in a previous strip.
Always get a certificate. You never know when you’ll need it. And if you don’t, you can always use it to help get a fire started once civilization ends.
I mean, he probably isn’t going to need to feign surprise when he meets a sister after being told to expect a brother. Joyce will be at a whole new level(but hopefully will regroup enough to try her new script on the appropriate person rather than Carla).
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ABSOLUTELY NO OTHER NEWS CAN EVER HAPPEN
NEW RULE
Wow, I’ve never before been so early that there’s only one comment! lol
Welcome to the party pal!
nice comment + avatar combo
If not for the volume titles all coming from characters’ actual dialog, we’d have a winner.
Well it’s always up to Willis, but if he wanted to steal a reader’s comment and use it as a comment, that would definitely be the one! 😀
I wish we could just draw an arbitrary line that says “nope, no more news today”…
It’s called going to bed
Amen.
Woulda been nice to have that rule, say, three days ago.
I want to upvote this!
poor naive Joyce
would we call this hubris?
“Hubris is a religious thing, so it doesn’t apply to me any more!”
Nah, “hubris” would be thinking “my brother needs a gf” and already having procured an introduction to someone living on her floor.
THE SUSPENSE
We’re gonna cut away to something completely different for a page or two, aren’t we
Maybe to someone standing in a lobby!
A mysterious woman lurking behind a potted palm.
It’s a good thing Joyce knows how to treat trans people now. Otherwise this meeting could be awkward.
yes awkward
She knows the correct thing to do is run up to them and yell about bathrooms.
I know, right? I can’t wait for everything to go nice and smoothly once they get to the lobby. There’s going to be SO much rejoycing 😀
foreplayshadowing
This is like watching a car crash happen in slow motion
Okay. With this much setup, I am now convinced that this is maybe not going where we think it’s going. Sure, it’s a crash, but maybe it’s a train crash or maybe one of the cars slips on a banana peel at the last minute and there’s no crash. 🍌
She’s not in a jumpsuit but we have at least one dummy.
Interesting that Joyce just calls it “divorce” around Joe but still has her ‘other’ words for it around Sarah.
Maybe she is trying to be cool and grown up around him? Her whole relationship with Joe has been basically her pushing her boundaries in escalating sequence. In a sense, her being with Joe is about her growing up.
On the other hand, Sarah is kind of like an older sister to Joyce, so Joyce likely feels more comfortable around her and temporarily be more child-like or at least not push boundaries she is not comfortable with and frame events in a way that are less painful for her to deal with. Who can blame her? Being an adult is a stressful mess, take a break when you can.
At the end of the day, Joyce just always wished she had a big sister 🙂
Great news!
I’ll try to act surprised!
Around Joe, “the d-word” is something else.
It was Joe who walked her through it, no?
Girl needs to stop walking into punchlines like this.
HERE WE GO…. FINALLY…?
back up da popcorn truck right here
dont forget soda and soft pretzels! and a tent and marshmallows!!! ^^
Any snack is welcome at this moment.
what y’all bringing to this spectacular event? ^^
Rocket launcher
are you gonna fill it with popcorn like those aliens from Killer Klowns From Outer Space? ^o^
Nah, with rockets. It’s not a party if nothing blows up.
I’m going to all of Taffy’s parties. At least until a stray rocket takes me out.
Today is a good day to blow up.
we a party, a team that loves rockets!
after the monsters that can go in our pockets!
prepare for trouble!
and make it double!
to protect the world from devastation!
to end the veneration of our oh-so “great nation”!
to denounce the evils of wealth and ivory towers!
community for queer, trans, autistic and minority power!
with our rockets we blast off at the speed of light!
get up and stand up for all our rights!
and we will not give up the fight!
If I was Ash, it’d be like
“Prepare for trouble!”
“Make it-” KABLAM
Huzzah! Sick rhymes! Keep on rocking in the “free world”!
That I and my homies shall!!!! ^^
The free world ain’t a collection of countries or territories, it’s a collection of values and commitment to them, commitment to learning, compassion, allyship, community, and supporting each other in our struggles!
Stay safe, stay woke, and may peace be with you! ✌🏽
Ooo, fireworks!
Among my selection would be Pizza, Donuts, French fries.
PUMP UP THE SETUP
Can Joyce make any more confidently wrong proclamations before the shoe finally drops?
Oh, she has done SOME hetro stuff… just she’s done some non as well.
Get your booty on the floor tonight?
Go Go Gadget I like her teeth
Go Go Gadget piss myself XD
Oh…which brother will it be? Would Willis be this obvious?
It’s Jocelyne, hence the chapter title, but Joyce is currently unaware she’s trans so only knows Jocelyne by her deadname
sister, actually ^^ <3
It’s the one that’s not actually her brother, we’ve established this.
I really like this
Willis is really telegraphing the news her sibling has for her.
Subtlety is overrated.
I know authors who use subtext, and they are all cowards!
Mr. Willis may yet pull a 180 on us and have the news be something like her grandfather has cancer or her one jerk brother got arrested for misappropriating church funds. It don’t think this is a likely outcome, but it would be a funny rug-pull, and who is Willis if not a cruel and capricious god?
Yer sayin’ Willis is Loki?
…Say more!
Worse than Loki. Willis is DamnYouWillis!
Oh huh! There’s a patreon by that name!
Well, ‘damnyouwillis69’ anyway.
(nice)
he’s only doing it so he can cut away to a scene somewhere else, and keep us all in the dark for a few more days XD
Right? It’s pretty obvious that Jordan heard about the divorce and is tentatively reestablishing contact.
Jordan shows up to tell Joyce about Jocelyne. Surprise all around.
+1!
I find it baffling that someone tells Joyce they have a secret and Joyce intuits she already knows the secret because she doesn’t know of any other secrets it could be, when the very concept of a secret is that she wouldn’t know about it.
“there’s nothing else it could be” Honey literally EVERYTHING ELSE it could be.
Jocelyn is gonna come out to Joyce as a Kingdom Hearts fan.
Worse, an anime fan
That’s basically the same as “a person who eats food”, nowadays.
Ugh, don’t let my alternative health fanatic mother find out, she thinks I’ve been surviving on the dew of a single ginko leaf and the energy of the universe.
Have some dew of the mountain once in a while.
Pretty impressive that your mom thinks you’re the Dragon Warrior!
I prefer to separate the concepts of someone who just enjoy some anime and Anime Fans(™), mostly because I heavely dislike a lot of them and prefer to distance myself from them in my mind
It’s all right. We all find creative ways to lie to ourselves.
novel categorization is not lying to ourselves, especially when it serves very valid desires
@Jeremiah, this is exactly why earthling social media has recently coined the term Anime Tourist XD
“A series of prompts our players have never seen before, isn’t that right, players?”
Brennan, a man after my own heart
“I keep telling you, I can’t actually tell you if I’ve seen them before or not until I see them!”
Yeah, she doesn’t have a very good map of knowledge. The whole “known knowns”, “known unknowns”, “unknown knowns”, and “unknown unknowns” square, for a start.
I feel like Joyce is kind of regressing to some kind of old family dynamic at the prospect of seeing her sibling?
Oh, yeah, definitely. Seeing a family person whom you haven’t seen since before you underwent some major life changes…yeah, you can revert easily. You don’t expect them to be also changed.
I think Joyce needs to look up the definition of “random”.
A real adult…..well, let’s see how you react to this visit.
Finally see Jocelyn? :3
Tag search is your friend.
“Try to act surprised”? I expect full-on dull surprise.
Screw Panel 2, what kind of teasing did Joyce get in the past
Pretty sure she’s referring to the fact that that previous boyfriend she introduced “Joshua” to was, in fact, not ‘real’ in that Ethan only agreed to go out with her as cover because “maybe I just want to be Ethan instead of Ethan the gay guy for a little while”, and thus Ethan was “secretly gay” and Joyce’s evidence for Joe being hetero is that she just gave him a handy yesterday.
And spooned with him in bed! While both were topless! She felt chest hair on her naked back and everything*!
(*’everything’ meaning she told him to put his hands on her boobs. she’s a woman of the world now.)
REAL ADULT HETERO STUFF, which is actually different to the REAL ADULT LESBIAN STUFF and I’m wondering if that’s actually happening in her brain.
really want Joyce to embrace this part of herself
like am i really supposed to believe this but some long-running comical gag?
i don’t think so XD <3
Yesss, I feel the wording of this is telling.
I believe it’s about the fact that her only other boyfriend here was Ethan who she knew was gay when she started dating him and they did zero adult hetero stuff together. Unsurprisingly.
Oh, Joyce.
Try not to act surprised, indeed!
It’s fun having knowledge that characters don’t.
It makes you anxious about how the fuck they’re going to react to things.
Nah. I’m anxious about how the fuck they’re going to react to things just fine even without dramatic irony.
(And by anxious, I mean barely restraining an evil grin of anticipatory glee and trying very, very hard not to cackle.)
Tomorrow’s comic will cut away to some other plotline isn’t it…
Willis confirmed in a Kotaku interview that tomorrow’s comic will feature both Jocelyne and Tracer.
I’ve been wracking my brain, I checked the archive tags, I even checked Walkypedia with no hits … who in the world is Tracer???
Google it.
It’s a motorbike. “The TRACER 9 features the world-renowned crossplane crankshaft 890cc CP3 engine”.
Or you could be an adult and use your words.
I used exactly the words I intended to. Be an adult and accept that you don’t always get your own way.
The surprise is that Jocelyne is the one who bought Sal’s motorbike.
Not only did she get her a new bike, she painted it to look like Sal.
Pretty sure the implication is Tracer, the Overwatch video game character is implied because Kotaku is a gaming website lol
Yes, correct. Thank you for your ability to read the words I typed, combine them with one another in the context of their native sentence, and then comprehend that one of those combinations was more likely than the others.
Even as someone whose first instinct was Tracer Overwatch I was doubting if that was what you meant.
Not sure what the relevance of the character is, and honestly I don’t expect to see Overwatch references in the wild these days
She’s completely irrelevant to this comic. I wasn’t being as literal as people wanted me to be.
You are not mad. Dont tell people they are mad.
Always baffles me when people say “google it” about something that’s either way too obscure or way too generic to yield any helpful search results. Either help or don’t waste your time commenting that, pretty immature ngl.
For those who are wondering, I’m assuming ‘Tracer’ is referring to the Overwatch character
“[When being deliberately unhelpful], Either help or don’t waste your time commenting”
Your premise is flawed from the start. I decide what’s a waste of my time, not you. Stay the fuck in your lane, Portal 2 reference.
I’m guessing: the cat.
Jocelyne’s cat is named DJ Pepsi Swappo, unfortunately.
I tried 5 minutes of googling with various terms and combinations. No success. I’m guessing that “Tracer” (whatever it is) is too obscure. (That, and Google is less useful these days). My apologies about my non-success and Taffy’s unhelpfulness.
It’s a joke. Look up Kotaku and ask yourself when exactly Willis would have done an interview with them with specific details on tomorrow’s strip. Or just try to remember that if you see Taffy say something that you can’t make sense of, odds are that’s intentional.
What? Are we pretending Tracer doesn’t exist now?
😉
Apparently.
Mental blue screen in 5… 4…
Prepare for MASSIVE Joyce Face in 3, 2, …
ABSOLUTELY.
Willis is ABSOLUTELY trolling us!
I 75% agree.
It’s Jocelyn but hasn’t transitioned yet. He just bought a ferret as a pet and wants to surprise her with it.
*She. My bad.
Maybe consider practicing not fainting.
So is Jocelyn just here to tell Joyce or is she gonna show up already in the process of transitioning?
Oh. you TEASE!
Time to find out if Joyce is a hypocrite or not.
I really, really want her to react positively. I want that for Jocelyne. I do not want her to get hurt.
In my experience: even if she reacts in the worst possible way there’s still a chance she’ll come around later
It’s Joyce, and Jocelyne is her favorite sibling. It’s a certainty she’ll come around, I would say.
I think Jocelyne will be fine. She has known Joyce for 18 years, right? Joyce and her unthinking conservative reactions plus innate kindness and her infamous Joyce-Face [tm] are well-known. What’s much less well-known is the new-and-improved adult woman person real sexual being Joyce who might actually think about and express happiness (after the initial surprise) upon learning about Jocelyne.
If Jocelyne actually is coming out to her little sister here, I expect she’s braced for a much worse reaction than the awkwardly (and amusingly) embarrassing one we’re about to see! 🙂
I counsel patience. It’s not hypocrisy to have surprise jolt out of one a few old ideas that one has only just begun working to discard.
I think we may be treated to a glimpse of Joyce’s internal struggle. Trust Joyce to remember, when the surprise is fading, that this is a person she loves regardless of past (and future) annoyance.
When she found out about Becky her first impulse was to protect her. Just saying.
Okay, just how stylish is Jocelyne’s dress going to turn out to be?
Good thing she dipped her toes at interacting with trans people with Carla?
Joyce, please repeat your penultimate line here slowly a couple times.
…Anyway I’m betting the news is not going to be Jocelyn coming out to her, but that will also end up happening somehow anyway. Possibly due to Ethan accidentally Danny’ing it up.
I think Jocelyne shows up in Girl Mode!
Like, in a dress, with hair slightly grown out.
Mainly because this is what I want to see, but also because it seems like we’re leading to a visual reveal.
Btw I think she’d wear something modestly casual, to communicate that she’s a girl, but not making a big high-femme fuss about it.
I almost want to draw it, but I’ll feel weird if I’m too far from her style.
Skirt/dress, significantly longer hair (it’s been many months in-universe, right?), and sweater is my guess.
At least Joyce is actively coming to terms with trans people. I know how that kind of shock to world view where you now want to accept everyone you can, but there’s built-in programming you’re literally fighting against. That’s how it was for gay people initially with me.
It wasn’t even that I had a personal problem with gay people. I’ve always tried really hard to be nice to everyone, but there was always a…shield? Like an “ew gross” type of primal reaction that is hard to force down. But it ends. Your inherent instinctual disgust can turn to acceptance if you fight it enough.
I tend to believe “inherent instinctual disgust” is learned, not real. What is real is an uncomfortable dissonance as your learned, but now automatic, male/female classification systems are returning multiple incompatable answers. If the transition is complete enough, there is no dissonance and any remaining discomfort is strictly your own.
So, you do realize there was nothing inherent or instinctual about your disgust, right? Unless you’re equally repulsed by the concept of all sex and dating, I suppose.
(Although even then, I find real life sex pretty gross – all those bodily fluids! – but I don’t feel disgust every time I meet anybody who has ever done it. I just… mostly don’t think about other people’s sex lives at all?)
dun dun duuuuuuuuun…?
Cut to: Walky shenanigans or Arnold telling Ken about his window conversation yesterday.
Willis cuts to a series of Fuckface crawling around for 2 months (our time). We find ourselves strangely cool with it.
Plot-related dialog happens off-panel, like The Angriest Dog In The World.
Do I want to briefly subscribe to Patreon just for this arc or should I hold out?
Questions…
Based on a thread from yesterday’s comment section regarding mac n cheese. https://imgur.com/J0yfZr0 SFW, but still in poor taste 😉
I might color it properly eventually but probably not.
Joyce should help Dorothy get cleaned up. Maybe accompany her to the laundromat.
Well there’s only one way to clean that!
It would be a shame to waste all that by-the-instructions mac and cheese.
Nope, I can’t figure it out, you’re gonna have to provide some manner of diagram to get your idea across here.
Good one!
I’m trying, but failing, to come up with a pun based on “bukake” and “mac-and-cheese”. The two terms are just too different.
“Makkake nd-cheese” it’s not that tricky
I bow to your expertise! “Makkake-and-cheese” it is!
How long can Willis delay this meeting?
How many episodes did Dragon Ball fights last?
Goddammit this is gonna be Namek all over again
I’m at the edge of my seat. Tomorrow’s strip can’t come soon enough.
Knowing Willis Joyce won’t realize until Monday
She’s going to be fully dressed as a woman and everything, isn’t she?
It’s the worst possible way to do it so, yeah, probably
Why is that the worst way?
Joyce will probably do a double take and just not get it for a bit and be like, “Huh, that’s weird. Where’s Joshua?”
Because springing massive, life altering news on your family with no previous setup or forewarning like that is just going to get you the full force of shame and anger from your parents.
I mean, it’s not her parents she’s springing it on, and that really pre-supposes there will be shame and anger which I really don’t expect from Joyce.
I wasn’t talking about Joyce. I was talk8ng about me when I did the exact thing Jocelyne is apparently about to do
Let me guess: Joyce won’t regognize her, until she speaks. May even ask her, “hey, I’m looking for my brother, have you seen a guy who looks like me?”
I want Joyce to fully recognize her but not take her wearing a dress or something as anything significant. She marches over to her sister and goes, “I know about the divorce.” Joe’s there going, “Joyce… the dress…” and Joyce is just like, “Oh, yeah, sometimes he’d do that when we were growing up. Are you in another play?”
I imagine her seeing Jocelyne and just going “Hey have you seen my brother he looks like you buuuuuu-“
Considering she is a woman, any way she is dressed would be “as a woman”.
I know I’m being pedantic here but man just say “She’s gonna be wearing a dress/skirt isn’t she”. Like those are gendered pieces of clothing & get what you mean across just fine. “Dressed as” carries weird implications of dressing up instead of, like, just wearing clothes.
Maybe there will be like a Hank Hill moment where she meets some girl named Jocelyn and commiserates with her about how her brother needs to show up and get this difficult moment over with already.
Come on Joyce, the divorce is not even a secret. How is it going to be a secret when they’ve sold the house with all the kids’ stuff in it? How is it literally unthinkable that Josh may have anything going on you don’t know about? How hard is it to answer any texts?
Yeah, this is what I’ve been wondering. How could she possibly think it’s about the very known and old news divorce???
To be fair, Joyce only learned the divorce was finalized and that the house was being sold maybe six days ago in-universe, and she only learned it because her mom showed up on campus. So she might figure that Jocelyne doesn’t know their mom showed up, so she doesn’t know that Joyce knows.
I would think Joyce might be guessing “the divorce OR the house being sold” as her guess, as the latter was the more shocking recent news to her. But she’s obviously approaching this with a very limited focus.
Famous last words.
That made me laught. It’s good to laugh despite impeding doom.
Yea no surprises whatsoever this is just gonna be a Regular Normal Time
Speaking from personal experience: I sure hope Jocelyne(?) has not shown up in full femme mode because, oh boy, family members do not enjoy having that sprung on them
Good news is I don’t think that’ll require much acting.
Are those share buttons under the comic new? If they are, keeping the real Twitter logo is a nice touch. (Almost as nice as putting it after Bluesky.)
If the reunion with Joyce and Jocelyne won’t have more than 1000 comments, like here, I’ll be disappointed.
Oh good Joe will be there to mitigate Joyce
Jocelyne is going to get about two sentences out, Joe is going to realize what’s happening, and Joyce will go “Why are you wearing a mumu?” and he’ll go “oh god I have to actually sort this out won’t I?”
My real question is how much like her mother will Jocelyn look? Will she be a prettier younger mom, or a dad in drag?
Would love for Joyce to turn into a Sci-Fi Nerd for a second
“Young Mom!? Did you Time Travel!?”
definitely wasn’t allowed to watch this sort of things at home
Maybe Walky’s Cartoon had a plotline about time travel?
The fact that Willis is ramping up the anticipation this much makes me wonder if the punchline will be something completely different from what we’re expecting.
That would be an AMAZING rug pull. Joyce echoes the readers in thinking that we know exactly what’s coming.
Yes, but there’s a 25% probability that the real rug pull is that there is no rug pool after all. Inscrutable are the ways of the Willis.
It’s gonna take them three whole months to get to the lobby isn’t it.
Yeah, it’s Xenu’s paragon or whatever.
*gets popcorn ready*
Good golly. If tomorrow’s storyline was telegraphed any harder, give co-writing credit to Samuel Morse.
Y’know, I have mixed feelings about Joyce’s not checking her phone. Like, yes, this is clearly setting herself up to be caught by surprise on things she totally should know, and that’s a bad choice on her part.
But… if you know someone doesn’t look at a given medium, it’s pretty dumb to keep sending them important information that way. Like, I *know* my father-in-law does not care for texting. If something is important or time-sensitive, I need to call him. It’s not what I would want, but that’s a thing I know and if I ignore that fact, it’s on me.
She’s checking her phone in the last panel, presumably looking at a text saying Jocelyne has arrived. I don’t think any extra information was shared via text.
From what I can tell, she’s been reading the texts, but not answering the calls, so Jocelyne is doing the right thing here. She wants to tell Joyce her secret in person anyway. The calls/texts have been to set up the visit.
Time to put your money where your mouth is accepting all sisters!
Gosh, a real grown-up woman person! An actual adult!
I considered for a moment what I’d like to say to Joyce in this situation, and that made me come to the realization that she acts like she doesn’t realize that her siblings have their own lives they’re living.
Pretty weird.
Joyce’s ideas about her family are still stuck in the past, as far as how she remembers her family members and their dynamics. News of her parents’ divorce was very difficult for her to internalize. Selling the house was painful for her to contemplate. She isn’t thinking that any of her siblings would go onward, change, and grow their own ways. (She’s still focused on her own changes.) I had some experience with this kind of surprise regarding my own family members, while I was busy undergoing my own developments, back in my college years.
That’s very consistent for Joyce. I don’t remember if it was explicitly stated, but I get the feeling she was coddled so much by her family as a child that she thinks all of their lives revolve around her. So everything they do that centres them in their own lives feels like a betrayal. From her parents’ divorce to whatever her gut reaction will be whenever she eventually sees Jocelyne.
How much foreshadowing can readers take? Will we actually see Joceylyn tomorrow, or will it be another fake-out?
We actually cut to Steve eating cereal
Thank God this comic doesn’t take Saturday and Sunday off. Even if we don’t get the reveal, I can at least not sit on the cliffhanger for 72 hours.
It will be real surprise.
Calling it now, Jocelyne has a completely different third thing to tell Joyce about.
She discovered that Mike is still alive and masquerading as Jennifer.
I cannot wait for Jocelyne to be full on girl mode and cute as fuck and Joyce to 100% not recognize her. I’m so excited for our sister. ~<3
Hang on to your seats folks
i know like, Joyce doesn’t know that Jocelyne is a gorl but like, oof it feels bad to see her get unintentionally misgendered all the same. Not Joyce’s fault but i just bleh
Yeah, writing imaginary Joyce dialog where she uses the wrong pronoun even feels icky, decided against including Jocelyne’s deadname in it, even if that’s how I’d imagine Joyce saying it.
In tangential real world updates, I just put in for a legal name change for myself!
Congratulations!
So looking forward to the reveal strip.
Calling it now, the person they are talking about is not her brother but instead her sister and that is what they want to talk about
Or it’s both her sisters, Tracer AND Jocelyne.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-15/02-the-one-where-jocelyne-returns/babysister/#comment-1832623
I mean that has been established by the chapter title
I suppose theoretically what Jocelyne wants to talk about could be unrelated to her gender identity but it seems unlikely
Even without the chapter title, we’d know it was her sister that she doesn’t know is trans because she referred to said sibling by her deadname in a previous strip.
I, too, have done real adult hetero stuff.
Then i found out i’m queer as fuck anyway.
*rubs chin thoughtfully
Was it REAL adult hetero stuff?
Or was it just sparkling adult hetero stuff?
i don’t know, i didn’t ask for a certificate of authenticity, i wasn’t aware that would be required later on!
Always get a certificate. You never know when you’ll need it. And if you don’t, you can always use it to help get a fire started once civilization ends.
Ahh, yes, that confirms the queerness. Heteros are always offering and asking for those things. They’re obsessed.
Sparkling PeeinVee.
Can’t wait for tomorrow’s strip to be the first appearance of Jordan
Willis really is MILKING the drama cow for every ounce of milk she’s got in her, and I’m here for it.
3………2……….
It’s Willis, so I’ll waiting for some disaster. I only hope not for Jocelyne.
I mean, he probably isn’t going to need to feign surprise when he meets a sister after being told to expect a brother. Joyce will be at a whole new level(but hopefully will regroup enough to try her new script on the appropriate person rather than Carla).
Honey, you’ve got a big storm coming.
Oh Cheese I am loving the build-up to Jocelyn’s reveal!
Is anyone surprised by this? In this comic? Really?
We’re surprised it wasn’t a big, deliberately misleading setup to some completely unrelated piece of news! This *is* Willis writing you know.