As a fully vested officer of the Grammar Gestapo, I shall now commence with whacking everybody about the head with textbooks until you all learn by osmosis. Or suffer concussions. Either way the Grammar Nazis will be pleased.
I think she needs to grab a bottle of hooch from her stash (we all know she’s got one) and go over to Ruth’s room and offer a peace shot. And then a few more shots, just for the hell of it. We all know how this is going to end up, and booze expedites that kind of thing.
Sometimes when I comment using my phone, Swype puts in words like “are” or “at” when I meant to say “a.” Swype has its own whole world of typos… Swypos… whatever. One of the funniest is that it sometimes substitutes “thou” for “you.”
I think it’s more like Billie’s afraid of what Sal’s gonna do……………….and panel 3 is Sal putting two and two together for and answer of “I. AM. GOING. TO. KICK. RUTHS. ASS!”
Sal have been going through the door for a while now. In fact, last time she used the widow she asked Billie permission first. She is taking the paper she signed seriously.
They don’t get much use otherwise – they’re sorta obsolete. They made sense when lifelong marriage was the norm, now it just means your first husband is dead…
Don’t worry, I didn’t either. I was expecting another strip of Sal and Jason so strongly that I didn’t even process what it meant to see Sal here. And happy.
I see it a little differently. I’m picturing Ruth taking solace in a bottle. Then Ruth can barge into Billie’s room like she did the last time. Only this time Billie will also be drunk. There can be a tasteful fade to black and the next panel can be Billie and Ruth screaming at each other as they wake up in a tangle of arms and legs.
Then he has the most willpower on the planet. A curvy, mixed, southern belle hops on your lap topless. If you can resist that then you’re either more or less man than me. Just not the same amount of man as me.
The meaning of “going to town on…” seems to have changed since I was young. It used to be an acceptable description of someone beating the hell out of someone else or attacking them in some unrelenting manner.
Sal’s look of suspicious confusion really sells this. “Now, if I hadn’t just fucked my TA I’d hear that as fighting, but since I just got done washing bowtie sweat out of my hair it sounds a lot like you had sex with someone.”
After reading the comments and checking out the panels again, I realize that is one interpretation.
Neither of them knew that the other has had the same ‘authority sex’ they had, but while neither of them ‘know’ this….Sal may now know it, and Billie just realized that she said too much.
Unless, Sal thinks that Billie is only talking about Sal and the bowtie man, and wondering how the heck Billie knows? And Billie would still be thinking she said too much in any case.
Besides, she can’t be surprized that Sal entered thru the door, she has her back to her.
I believe Sal’s expression is “Wait, was that sarcasm? Are you making a snide comment about me? Did I just get told? How the hell do YOU know about . . . ? Or is there something else going on here?”
I assume she knows Billie is (ostensibly) working for the school paper, so she might make the leap that Billie managed to “scoop” her little tryst with Jason.
Also love Billie here, it works on several levels. Is she concerned about how her words could be taken? Does she regret how things went down with Ruth?
Great stuff, shame about the damn weekend break T_T
Sal walked in with a smile on her face (a rare thing). I guess everything went as expected with Jason (and I suspect he has the same look on his face as Billie in panel 4).
Sal’s really kind of short. She usually seems bigger than she really is because she’s full of sass. I think the sass has been replaced with something else right now, though.
I guess this is as good a place as any to put this thought.
Robin/Leslie in Shortpacked vs. Ruth/Billie in Dumbing of Age. Both of them seem to provoke cries of “SMOOCHES SMOOCHES SMOOCHES” from the readership, but the situations are about as different as you can get, and I’m a little nonplussed at those who took Monday’s strip as a disappointment.
Robin and Leslie honestly love each other, support each other, and though they stumble (and sometimes screw up in serious ways), they make each other better.
Ruth and Billie have none of that. Ruth has, if anything, made Billie’s issues worse. She responds to Billie’s request for “stability” by choking her and then force-kissing her. The fact that Billie briefly returns the kiss is downright chilling, a sign that her self-esteem is at a record low (thanks for twisting that knife, Joe). She’s basically doing it because of her reason for trying to sex up Danny, only worse.
Billie hasn’t exactly been great for Ruth either. Mostly she’s been defending herself against bullying or understandably confused, but her interactions with others don’t suggest that she’s the best choice for a romantic partner right now.
And a brief fling is not going to make Ruth’s issues any better. Such a fling might help with Billie’s, but only if it were with someone like Danny or Joe, someone who’s not likely to cause more problems for her than he/(ehhh…*)she solves.
*”Ehhh” because Billie is very likely experiencing some conscious attraction to a girl for the first time, and that’s a problem of its own for her fragile ego. “You thought you were straight? Guess what, Billie, here’s ANOTHER area where you succeeded in college and now experience crushing failures! Let’s file ‘sexual self-awareness’ next to ‘cheerleadery attractiveness,’ ‘journalism,’ ‘street fighting’ and ‘nerd-dissing,’ shall we? Oops, ‘control of alcohol consumption’ shouldn’t be filed with these quite yet. Give it a couple more weeks.”
Ruth is trying to reach out in her clumsy, self-defeating way, and Billie needs to reinvent herself so badly that she might find it within her to be the FRIEND that Ruth clearly desperately needs. But right now this situation has had the “least worst” possible outcome.
Don’t worry, I still very much get what you are trying to say. You have remarkable insight into characters. You sir, kick ass. Thank you for being the voice of rationale in here. I think that these characters deserve to be treated as more than just a way to get us fan service.
Ruth didn’t kiss her from Billie’s demand of stability, Billie asked her what she meant to Ruth and that was how Ruth responded. Ruth has been shown to be terrible at confrontations before, or rather, nonphysical ones.
I agree with a lot of what you say here, but there are a couple of points I feel compelled to make. One, Ruth didn’t choke Billie. Billie grabbed Ruth by the shirt, Ruth responded by pushing her (hard) into the wall. But at no point did we see a hand or arm across Billie’s throat or see Billie gagging or having the slightest trouble breathing. Two, the previous hang-out scene made, for me, Billie returning Ruth’s kiss a little less disturbing than her response to Danny. Billie was willing to -sex- Danny, a complete stranger, because he said one nice thing about her. Billie is familiar with Ruth, and at -least- has -some- positive thoughts about her, since she was feeling conflicted in the first place. Lastly, and this is kinda two-fold: I realize you didn’t mean it that way (I did read P&A, after all) but your post almost seems to give the impression that “not being straight” is a “crushing failure”. And honestly, I think Billie was at least somewhat aware that she is sexually malleable. Based on comments she’s made through the series, I don’t think she thought of herself as 100% straight anyway. Either way we haven’t seen anything to convincingly argue that that is part of what’s bothering her ATM.
Readers! Billie is not staring off into space in thought. She is looking at her compute monitor, making her tweets. Thus her distraction and taking so long to realize how her non digital words could be interpreted.
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Billie needs are better CPU… Or a drink.
…
Maybe both.
And I need to improve my grammar.
You speak the internets fluently.
But it’s not perfect enough!
I must improve… AT ANY COST.
must travel to a parallel word to fix this mistake
oh no and now I do to as well and say travel to a parallel world
Oh no… It’s an ephydemy!
We are doomed to bad spelling and misused words!
if we had check ours comments before posting. If only
HK and xian, your dunk, goal hoem
Dibullba go dink, yurt holm.
There’s really no excuse for bad grammar.
There was supposed to be an error in that comment. My grammars were to good.
If you were aimming for a mistake, you just did one, it’s supposed to be ‘too good’ NOT ‘to good’.
It’s also “grammar,” not “grammars.” I think the errors in the second message were intentional.
Grammars to good, atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed?
but where does the energy go..? Entropy running out. The end is nigh…
As a fully vested officer of the Grammar Gestapo, I shall now commence with whacking everybody about the head with textbooks until you all learn by osmosis. Or suffer concussions. Either way the Grammar Nazis will be pleased.
Billie’s needs are a better CPU, or a drink. Maybe both.
PHYKZD
blue screen
cold reboot
processing
regret
x 2
I think she needs to grab a bottle of hooch from her stash (we all know she’s got one) and go over to Ruth’s room and offer a peace shot. And then a few more shots, just for the hell of it. We all know how this is going to end up, and booze expedites that kind of thing.
That’s actually Head Alien III in disquise – never really got the ‘smile’ to function properly…
Actually, my intention was to write “Billie needs a better CPU… Or a drink”, but for a strange reason I wrote “are” instead of “a”.
I blame my brain for not paying attention to what my fingers were doing.
Sometimes when I comment using my phone, Swype puts in words like “are” or “at” when I meant to say “a.” Swype has its own whole world of typos… Swypos… whatever. One of the funniest is that it sometimes substitutes “thou” for “you.”
Sal has been wierded out, lol!
Whole lotta “Wat.” goin’ on.
Nah, she’s just thinking “That’s what I was doin!”
I think it’s more like Billie’s afraid of what Sal’s gonna do……………….and panel 3 is Sal putting two and two together for and answer of “I. AM. GOING. TO. KICK. RUTHS. ASS!”
Man, those maths lessons don’t appear to have helped much! 😛
Yeah. The look on Sal’s face says “Gee, jumping out that window is looking pretty good right now. Damn roommate agreement!”
Sal’s so smiley in that first panel. I think she’s going to have a good sleep tonight.
It… doesn’t surprise her that Sal came in through the door? Wow.
Sal have been going through the door for a while now. In fact, last time she used the widow she asked Billie permission first. She is taking the paper she signed seriously.
We southerners always keep our word.
Still waiting for that rise you guys promised.
OH, SNAP!
OHGODIREADTHATINASOUTHERNACCENTWHY
Sal uses a widow?
That’s… Kind of odd.
They don’t get much use otherwise – they’re sorta obsolete. They made sense when lifelong marriage was the norm, now it just means your first husband is dead…
Bilile’s last panel face is also my reaction to this week’s events.
Who the hell is that and what is she doing in Sal’s body?
Seriously! She used the door! That is not Sal!
Bad poker face.
What’s with the faces in panel 4, has Billie got a boner or something?
No, she had a waking wet dream.
Dig it.
Her tail is wagging and Sal can see it.
Are you called Billie a bongo? 😛
I was thinking more of the guy who played George in Seinfeld but in Shallow Hall lol
Billie realized that no matter what gad happened with Ruth, “Goin’ to town” would still be a perfectly appropriate phrase to use
It’s a bit of a shame that Billie and Ruth didn’t go “downtown” on each other, it would have being great fanservice.
I expect Willis would make us pay for that.
She’s recounting the event and wishing she had grabbed a boob.
Instead of grabbing some ass.
I read it more of a “OH GOD WHAT ARE THESE FEELS” face.
You might want to rephrase that Billie
Captain Obvious sez: That’s what Sal’s been up to, too.
I am horribly, horribly disappointed in myself for not realising that before your comment.
Don’t worry, I didn’t either. I was expecting another strip of Sal and Jason so strongly that I didn’t even process what it meant to see Sal here. And happy.
Glad someone else saw that
Thank God for the comments section.
Didn’t catch it until my second time through the archives (i.e. now). Then I checked if someone made the appropriate comment. I was not disappointed.
I think the more important question here, Sal, is how was *your* day?
‘Yours, too?’
God, I’m embarrassed by how long it took me to get that joke.
yelling bird should do a fanfic of what billie said….oh wait, here it is…(warning, nsfw word) http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/262/001/913.jpg
I feel like Billie’s expression in that last panel sums up how the fandom feels about it too.
Billie needs to work with Amber on how to get that last panel expression correct.
It could be part of amazi-girls new community outreach program
You’re not getting the eyebrows right, Jennifer. I can’t explain it to you any simpler.
Wait a minute, did Sal just visibly enter the room through the door? O.o
lol noticed that too
Suspicious Sal is suspicious.
Now they have something in common they can bond over!
Hmm, just finished bonding with Ruth. I wonder how interested Billie is in bonding with yet another girl.
That wasn’t so much a bond with Ruth as a controlled detonation.
She’s a Bond Girl?
Going to town, huh? Well, that makes two of you XD Congratulations!
And then Billie and Sal realized if they could make out with their enemies, that they can overcome the sexual tension and make out with each other.
I heard of worse plans.
Your storyline is too good. Please leave the porn valley.
Somebody should give you a trophy for this comment.
I believe you have just won the internet.
I see it a little differently. I’m picturing Ruth taking solace in a bottle. Then Ruth can barge into Billie’s room like she did the last time. Only this time Billie will also be drunk. There can be a tasteful fade to black and the next panel can be Billie and Ruth screaming at each other as they wake up in a tangle of arms and legs.
I think screaming in general is an adequate response to waking in a sea of appendages.
wait… sea of appendages that seems like a bit much or does that mean joe get involved to make this into another threesome
And then it pans out to show the entire Dumbing of Age cast. And that’s how it ends.
no, No, NO!…
They wake up in a dumpster behind the medical school, in a “sea of amputated appendages” in addition to 3 sentient teratomas.
Two of them can speak – but it’s not until they speak their minds that things get weird.
Sal seems a lot more cheerful and friendly when she’s just gotten laid.
I felt the need to add some dialogue to the 4th Panel.
but sal did score nerdy lovin’. Jason and his bow-tie is about as nerdy as it gets
I could be wrong but I suspect that Jason will put a stop to those shenanigans.
Then he has the most willpower on the planet. A curvy, mixed, southern belle hops on your lap topless. If you can resist that then you’re either more or less man than me. Just not the same amount of man as me.
The fear of being fired and possibly charged can and has killed many a boner.
Thing is…boners jus’ don’t stay dead.
Ask Bill Clinton.
There are many, many circumstances wherein such a woman would be resistible.
Examples:
Lap-hoppee is already in a relationship (preferably with a more attractive, equally topless woman)
Lap-hoppee is homosexual (or a heterosexual woman, or asexual, etc.)
Lap-hopper is ‘mixed’ as in a Frankenstein’s monster of sewn-together pieces of southern belles.
Lap-hopper is ‘topless’ as in ‘missing the top half’.
Or alternatively, Lap-hoppee is more/less man than you.
on the other hand these don’t really apply to sal and jason
“Lap-hopper is ‘mixed’ as in a Frankenstein’s monster of sewn-together pieces of southern belles.”
Don’t you be dissin’ on U.N.I.T.Y..
She’s okay, but it would be too much like having sex with an older sister imo. Acting sexual also seems out of character.
You win the internet today!
Danke! 🙂
Man, Sal kinda did the same thing.
The meaning of “going to town on…” seems to have changed since I was young. It used to be an acceptable description of someone beating the hell out of someone else or attacking them in some unrelenting manner.
It means BOTH now!
Your definition of “going to town on” applies mostly. The only problem is the ‘beating the hell out of’ part. It’s all about context!
Well, Sal might have been beating the hell out of something too. Just in a different way . . .
Maybe Billie should’ve been a little more passive and just given her the finger.
Way to go Billie. You said too much, and Sal is thinking about what you said, and realizing that it applies to her as well.
More like she’s realizing she knows EXACTLY who that is…
Sal’s look of suspicious confusion really sells this. “Now, if I hadn’t just fucked my TA I’d hear that as fighting, but since I just got done washing bowtie sweat out of my hair it sounds a lot like you had sex with someone.”
I read that in her voice. Heh.
>bowtie sweat
After reading the comments and checking out the panels again, I realize that is one interpretation.
Neither of them knew that the other has had the same ‘authority sex’ they had, but while neither of them ‘know’ this….Sal may now know it, and Billie just realized that she said too much.
Unless, Sal thinks that Billie is only talking about Sal and the bowtie man, and wondering how the heck Billie knows? And Billie would still be thinking she said too much in any case.
Besides, she can’t be surprized that Sal entered thru the door, she has her back to her.
Thank goodness. I was starting to think I was the only one who’d read it that way!
. . . Storyline over?!?!? NOOOOOOO!
Billie farted and Sal smells it.
Beer + curry beans = silent but deadly
…
wait, what?
Silly Billie, there is only one thing you can do now; run to Ruth’s room and show her how much fun a(n ex-)cheerleader can be. ^_^
She just follows Ruth around all day cheering her on in everything she does.
“Brush Ruth BRUSH!”
“S-T-U-D-Y. You don’t need no allibi, you study, whoop whoop, you study”
“Ruth’s on a roll, Eating a Bowl, of Cere-owl”
AWESOME!
She Tweeted about it!
https://twitter.com/DamnYouWillis/dumbingofage
how did we miss that till now
*cracks up at “scuse me got an ra in my throat”*
So she’s going public with this? Huh. That shouldn’t have any repercussions…
(Hmm, I wonder if that’s what she’s doing right now?)
Ooh, the tweets have started up again!
Wait, are they considered part of the canon?
I’m almost proud of her for the ‘I’m not your Lifetime Original Movie’ tweet. No, scratch that. I am totally in love with that tweet.
My imagination is making this comic AWESOME.
I believe Sal’s expression is “Wait, was that sarcasm? Are you making a snide comment about me? Did I just get told? How the hell do YOU know about . . . ? Or is there something else going on here?”
I assume she knows Billie is (ostensibly) working for the school paper, so she might make the leap that Billie managed to “scoop” her little tryst with Jason.
I dunno, couple interpretations of that look.
I was thinking the expression was “Wait… you too… with Jason… that [censored]!”
This might be me, but does Sal look really small in panel 1? The perspective is bugging me.
The proportions are usually great in this comic, maybe that’s just a really big door.
They have a 15 foot door.
Sal IS really small. We’ve seen her stand next to Jason before and she’s like a foot shorter than him, at least.
Well, I can’t draw too well, so all I have left is modifications of other people’s art. So although there is absolutely no reason for it to exist, here is Billie’s face from the last panel bouncing up and down, set to music.
What.. why… I don’t.. what?
SAL’S USING THE DOOR!
THE SKY IS FAAAALLLIIINNNG EVERYBODY PANIIIIIC
They have things in common!
Kinda.
So how long until the afterglow wears off on Sal?
The shelf life of sex afterglow seems to be proportionate to how long one has been without it.
The storyling may be over but you can’t take back what happen. 😉
“Going to town”? As in, beating up? But she didn’t do that… and I’ve never heard that phrase used in a sexual sense. No comprendo.
Seems like Sal got some!
Also love Billie here, it works on several levels. Is she concerned about how her words could be taken? Does she regret how things went down with Ruth?
Great stuff, shame about the damn weekend break T_T
Sal walked in with a smile on her face (a rare thing). I guess everything went as expected with Jason (and I suspect he has the same look on his face as Billie in panel 4).
Are the dormroom doors at ISU something like 10-11 feet high? Or is Sal only 4 feet tall? Perspective Perspective Perspective…. 🙂
ISU is in Terre Haute, not Bloomington!
Sal’s really kind of short. She usually seems bigger than she really is because she’s full of sass. I think the sass has been replaced with something else right now, though.
Aww, they have something in common now. BONDING MOMENT!!
I guess this is as good a place as any to put this thought.
Robin/Leslie in Shortpacked vs. Ruth/Billie in Dumbing of Age. Both of them seem to provoke cries of “SMOOCHES SMOOCHES SMOOCHES” from the readership, but the situations are about as different as you can get, and I’m a little nonplussed at those who took Monday’s strip as a disappointment.
Robin and Leslie honestly love each other, support each other, and though they stumble (and sometimes screw up in serious ways), they make each other better.
Ruth and Billie have none of that. Ruth has, if anything, made Billie’s issues worse. She responds to Billie’s request for “stability” by choking her and then force-kissing her. The fact that Billie briefly returns the kiss is downright chilling, a sign that her self-esteem is at a record low (thanks for twisting that knife, Joe). She’s basically doing it because of her reason for trying to sex up Danny, only worse.
Billie hasn’t exactly been great for Ruth either. Mostly she’s been defending herself against bullying or understandably confused, but her interactions with others don’t suggest that she’s the best choice for a romantic partner right now.
And a brief fling is not going to make Ruth’s issues any better. Such a fling might help with Billie’s, but only if it were with someone like Danny or Joe, someone who’s not likely to cause more problems for her than he/(ehhh…*)she solves.
*”Ehhh” because Billie is very likely experiencing some conscious attraction to a girl for the first time, and that’s a problem of its own for her fragile ego. “You thought you were straight? Guess what, Billie, here’s ANOTHER area where you succeeded in college and now experience crushing failures! Let’s file ‘sexual self-awareness’ next to ‘cheerleadery attractiveness,’ ‘journalism,’ ‘street fighting’ and ‘nerd-dissing,’ shall we? Oops, ‘control of alcohol consumption’ shouldn’t be filed with these quite yet. Give it a couple more weeks.”
Ruth is trying to reach out in her clumsy, self-defeating way, and Billie needs to reinvent herself so badly that she might find it within her to be the FRIEND that Ruth clearly desperately needs. But right now this situation has had the “least worst” possible outcome.
Awp awp awp “succeeded in HIGH SCHOOL” not “succeeded in college”
The whole post is useless now
Don’t worry, I still very much get what you are trying to say. You have remarkable insight into characters. You sir, kick ass. Thank you for being the voice of rationale in here. I think that these characters deserve to be treated as more than just a way to get us fan service.
And now i feel silly, because of course you have insight into character development…you made Fans. O.O
Yes, as well as several others. You might want to check them out, if you are not aware of them already.
Campbell… we’re still waiting on “The Next Generation”… maybe you could bring Marc back so you could kill him again, more creatively.
I don’t think anyone in comic book history has died as many times as Marc did. Or so interestingly.
I don’t always agree with you (well, in this case I do) but I always enjoy reading your analysis.
Ruth didn’t kiss her from Billie’s demand of stability, Billie asked her what she meant to Ruth and that was how Ruth responded. Ruth has been shown to be terrible at confrontations before, or rather, nonphysical ones.
I agree with a lot of what you say here, but there are a couple of points I feel compelled to make. One, Ruth didn’t choke Billie. Billie grabbed Ruth by the shirt, Ruth responded by pushing her (hard) into the wall. But at no point did we see a hand or arm across Billie’s throat or see Billie gagging or having the slightest trouble breathing. Two, the previous hang-out scene made, for me, Billie returning Ruth’s kiss a little less disturbing than her response to Danny. Billie was willing to -sex- Danny, a complete stranger, because he said one nice thing about her. Billie is familiar with Ruth, and at -least- has -some- positive thoughts about her, since she was feeling conflicted in the first place. Lastly, and this is kinda two-fold: I realize you didn’t mean it that way (I did read P&A, after all) but your post almost seems to give the impression that “not being straight” is a “crushing failure”. And honestly, I think Billie was at least somewhat aware that she is sexually malleable. Based on comments she’s made through the series, I don’t think she thought of herself as 100% straight anyway. Either way we haven’t seen anything to convincingly argue that that is part of what’s bothering her ATM.
Oh, the many things you can say with facial expressions!
Sal: Huh, me too. Weird.
Willis, why are your dorm room doors 10 feet tall? This is not cool. You’re going to make all the normal doors feel inadequate. Shame on you.
Only a full day later I realise that applies to both characters. I was wondering why Billie used such odd phrasing.
It was never shown what happened with the math thing. What did she do to him that couldn’t be shown? O_O
Readers! Billie is not staring off into space in thought. She is looking at her compute monitor, making her tweets. Thus her distraction and taking so long to realize how her non digital words could be interpreted.
The moment you realize that both of them had similar days.
😀
Sal’s all like “yeah? Me too.”
So yeah, its college girl. learn to open your mind widen your horizons.
…I don’t think that’s the issue here. Like, at all.
Despite what the statistics may say, the new experiences and mind expansion in college really isn’t supposed to include sexual assault…
Sal, I wonder who she may be referring to!