This is in response to fabforest asking what movie the screengrab is from (for some reason I can’t respond to fabforest’s comment directly): it’s from Repo Man, from 1984, maybe my favorite movie of the 80’s. It’s sort of a satirical, hardcore punk, sci-fi, black comedy. I highly recommend it.
Back in the 1980s “generic” branding was all the thing. While in Indianapolis in 1985 I found a couple of stores that sold “BEER” — no brand name, just black letters on yellow cans — so this is actually an accurate depiction.
Although considering how long it’s been that I’ve seen the stuff since then I realize how old these cans would have to be. Trust me, Billie, you don’t want to drink it!
I recognize that art style (and the name that went with it) as the work of the artist that drew the comic FemmeGASM that just ended around the beginning of this year. He lives (or lived) in the Metromess.
But no energon. Seriously, the only place to get energon on your planet is Thundercracker’s bachelor pad and North Korea! Unless you mine some Ore-13 yourself.
Jennifer Billingsworth waited. The lights above her blinked and sparked out of the air. There were nerds in the cafeteria. She didn’t see them, but had expected them now for years. Her warnings to Ruth Lesnick were not listenend to and now it was to late. Far too late for now, anyway.
Billie was a head cheerleader for four years. When she was young he watched the sports teams and she said to dad “I want to be on the teams daddy.”
Dad said “No! You will BE DISS BY NERDS”
There was a time when she believed him. Then as she got oldered she stopped. But now in the Chick-Fil-A of the IU she knew there were nerds.
“This is Ruthless” the radio crackered. “You must fight the nerds!”
So Billie gotted her uinform and flipped up the table.
“SHE GOING TO DISS US” said the nerds
“I will fight at her” said the cybernerd and she ran the campus grounds. Billie sneered at her and tried to flipped her off. But then the blood alcohol level fell and they were trapped and not able to diss.
“No! I must diss the nerds” she shouted
The radio said “No, Billie. You are the nerds”
And then Billie was a dork.
I’m not convinced yet that Alice is being a dick here. I think she honestly didn’t like Billie in high school, maybe even was bullied by her, and now is trying to get away from her.
Yeah, but if you look at the comic from 2 days ago, Alice is genuinely uncomfortable with Billie’s appearance, and today she’s confused when she’s accused of being a dick (in panel 2). I think Billie is the issue here, not Alice.
Then what Billie needs is to be purged of the idea that Alice was ever her friend, most favorably by Alice explicitly telling her so.
I think that this is all an extension of what Ruth told her back a few strips ago. The whole thing about not getting things that you don’t deserve in college like you did in high school. Maybe Billie is trying to cling to these undeserved things, like Alice’s friendship.
Billie sure seems to expect Alice would like her from their cheer squad days. Remember how she used to have a cabal of cheerleader hanger-ons that would pick on her older friends like Walky?
It sounds a lot like Alice was one of those. Someone memorable to Walky but not the other way around. Someone Billie recognizes as a friend, except now Billie isn’t part of the cheerleading crowd either.
I suspect that Alice is just trying to distance herself from high school entirely, including Billy. That doesn’t mean Wally is wrong to expect that this woman would be a jackass to him, but he could be surprised; it’s plausible she was only a jackass to him because Billie was being one, or because others that weren’t billie were.
That’s probably not why she was making excuses to keep Wally away, even if she dislikes him though. Staying away from Billie is almost definitely priority numero uno.
It may also be that Billie is the now-disgraced, former head cheerleader from her school, who is infamous for drunkenly crashing into a tree and being ejected from her current and any future form of cheerleading, and Alice wants nothing to do with a former friend she now thinks of as a pariah.
Same here. Alice is faking civility, hoping that Billie and “Wally” will go away or that Alice can make an excuse to hightail it out of the food court and get to class or her dorm room. And that’s basically what Alice is doing in panel one.
I’d like to add that Walky is being very understanding to Billie. I think Walky is still freaked out by discovering Billie lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, and he figures that spending time with Alice would be the best thing for Billie. Billie is wavering between wanting to hold onto her glory days and spend time with Alice and wanting to acknowledge that while Joyce and Walky aren’t “cool” they’re the best friends she has at college right now. Billie is ashamed of who she was, of the mistakes she’s made, and wants to make up for it. But she doesn’t want to give up on what she considers the good parts of her past, represented by Alice. Walky seems to know enough about Alice’s personality, that Alice probably is one of those people from high school Billie’s better off not hanging out with.
She releases Alice’s arm when Walky mentions Old Billie. Seems to me that she just realized she’s shoving Old Billie down Alice’s throat and has decided to stop. Billie is gradually growing accustomed to having self-awareness and this is good!
Wow, I hadn’t realized that! It seems that Billie might be starting to mature a bit. Next thing you know she’ll be able to tackle Ruth’s problems as well!
I know, I’m just saying that was a very quick realization, and I found it kinda hard to tell that that is what actually just happened. I’m definitely glad this is happening though! Can’t save Ruth until you can save yourself.
Yayyy. I mean, Billie might not be in her right self for other reasons, but refusing to abandon your friends when you could maybe seem cooler by doing so is a good sign.
Hey, sure, absolutely this is good on Billie and her accusation is more or less correct (though Alice may ALSO be ditching her because she’s a fat-by-cheerleader-standards alkie disgrace).
But I have to feel a little sympathy for Alice, who is definitely trying to cope with some crazy mixed messages here. “You’re my best friend! Get back here and act like it, stop being a shitty bongo! I don’t want to be the old Billie any more, the one that Alice pretended to have something in common with back in high school!”
Alice: “Um, are you still asking me to be friends with you? Or can I get out of here?”
She wants to be the new person that she is now, not taking friends for granted and pretending to be in some silly social hierarchy where she thinks she’s better than everyone else, while retaining the same friendship that she had in the past. I hope Alice can be as mature and see that the shit they did in high school should remain in high school. Unfortunately not everyone feels that way, and brings their high school drama to college.
I’m really starting to get the impression here that—judging solely by Alice’s nearly desperate behavior in these strips, trying to get away from Billie as quickly as she can—Billie might never have been as popular among her high-school peers as we were lead to believe.
Which makes a lot of sense, considering what we know of Billie’s character. From the start of the freaking comic, it never failed to shatter my willing suspension of disbelief (and in a webcomic featuring a straight-up costumed vigilante, mind you!) that someone as rude and UNFRIENDLY as Jennifer Billingsworth could ever have been the queen of the “popular” kids back at high school. But ingratiating her way into the “in” crowd by sheer force of will, and refusing to take any hints dropped that her behavior was turning off others or making them uncomfortable?
But all things considered, she DID have a nice house (or nice enough for her to show off to Daisy), she DOES like parties (meaning whe likely threw a bunch of wild ones back in the day), she DID take care of Joyce during that one frat party, she DID buy her clothes afterwards, she WAS the hot head cheerleader back in high school…
Even if she’s not a particularly nice person, or if she gets so bratty so easily, I never had much trouble picturing her as a popular bee -not queen bee like you say, or a well liked popular bee, but somewhere close, if anything because it would be convenient for the popular kids to have her around and because the popular boys wanted to bang her.
And then, she WAS prom queen. It had to have worked.
Character development and growth is all nice and well, but does she have to bring it upon the awkwardly bothered Alice…? It’s not like Alice actually told them off or anything. >_>
Alice has been subtly trying to get Billie and “Wally” to scram, and since they didn’t take the hint Alice gets up in panel one and starts to leave. If she was ever a friend of Billie’s in the past (best or otherwise) she’s not one now.
Any AA member will tell you that hanging around with your drinking buddies when you’re trying to get sober is a pitfall back into drinking that is best averted by avoiding said buddies. If Billie doesn’t want the old Billie back, she needs to stop hanging with the old Billie’s friends.
I didn’t, really, although that’s always a possibility.
When Walky says he wants the *OLD* Billie back, Billie responded that she was pretty sure she didn’t. So Billie needs to make a clean break from the past — and that would include her old high school cheerleader friends.
So, countdown to Alice saying “Yeah, I really didn’t want to hang out with YOU in the first place, either, I was trying to be polite but really this isn’t working at all”?
Personally I feel worst for the poor person Alice was eating lunch with before Billie showed up and did this. (You can see them in the last comic, first panel. At least I’m assuming they were eating lunch together.)
I think it’s both reasons. Alice is willing to tolerate Billie, up until the moment when Billie suggests Walky bring another table over for himself and Joyce. At that point Alice has had enough, and makes a lame excuse to not have to talk to Billie and her “dork friends” anymore.
I’m still kind of thinking it’s both, and next panel is going to be Alice still awkwardly trying to leave/telling Billie outright that she’s kind of moved on since high school.
I think she just wants to get away from Billie. If you look at the prev 2 panels, it’s clear that she no longer respects Billie (if she ever did) and is trying to make her escape.
Yes, but if you remember the last page, she seemed willing to TOLERATE Billie for a while but was trying to force Walky and Joyce to leave by saying there were no more chairs. She is trying to escape because though she could tolerate Billie for a short while, she doesn’t want to deal with her friends.
I’m not sure if the impending revelation is gonna be that Alice thinks Billie’s a jerk or that Alice is a jerk and Billie’s not in with the in crowd anymore, but either way it’s gonna sting.
Billie probably knows that she’s not part of the in crown anymore. I suspect the impending revelation is that since she’s not part of the in crowd, her old friends don’t want anything to do with her.
I’m confused as to this whole maturing-from-high-school thing. Granted, I’m not in the US, but is it possible to change that much in, like, ten weeks or whatever? Then again, over here most people go to uni in their city, so they end up keeping in touch with their HS friends somewhat longer. And generally you’ll spend 6 years in HS rather than four or whatever it is in the US.
American High Schools are literally like prisons. I’m not even exaggerating, I’ve read papers about the eerie and destructive similarities in their social structures. Getting out of American high school is literally like being released from prison. For some people this works out much better than for others, but for all but the most severely institutionalized it is a dramatic experience. Willis’s primary motivation for writing Dumbing Of Age was his own intense post-high school trauma.
In Billie’s case, she was someone who was well positioned and well adapted to the institution, so it was a relatively pleasant experience for her, much like a prisoner who manages to stay on the top of a prison’s pecking order. And just like a criminal released from prison who has been hardened by their experience on the inside, Billie’s first instinct upon getting out is to continue her old bad behaviors- and just like such a criminal, she may discover that her time inside has left her out of touch and with few practical skills with which to survive on the outside.
The first year of college is a traumatic culture shock for a frightening percentage of American post-secondary students, and while relatively few of them are so devastated that their entire education is derailed, some of our worse colleges are as big “drop-out factories” as our worst inner city high schools. The experience is definitely survivable, and surviving it is what Dumbing Of Age is all about, but very few individuals come through it without being greatly changed.
Killjoy, I have long felt that there are parallels between prison and school, and not just high school. School is an authouritarian structure that limits the autonomy of those inside it–teachers too. Some students react to the disempowerment by asserting their power over other students-this is commonly called “bullying”. Students close ranks for self-protection, forming groups that conflict with other groups. In the prison yard, the same things happen, only to greater degrees, and with more violence. But the forces at work are similar. That, I believe, is the problem with “anti-bullying” programs: they shame the bullies without aknowledging the role the adults play in creating conditions that make such behaviour inevidible(sp?). Damn, I can’t spell unstressed vowels because they are all pronounced alike, sorry.
This might sound super-weird, but from what I’ve seen, there is this strange and miraculous maturity upgrade just between graduation and the first few weeks of college. A lot of students become much more mature in that time period, and I can’t for the life of me figure out just why. People who don’t go to college right away mature in different ways, of course. But in my time as a student (I’m a grad student currently), I’ve seen a lot of change in very short amounts of time. Some people become someone completely different–usually for the better–once they reach college.
For me personally, when I entered college, I made new friends pretty quickly in my “university experience” class, because it was set up so that everyone in there was in the same classification of majors (theatre and dance). While I didn’t stay a theatre major (realized the program was utterly ridiculous), I have still kept my friends since then, and a fair portion of them actually changed majors not long after I did!
These friends that have stuck with me since 2008, even if we don’t talk too much anymore, are the ones that made me realize just how much high school sucked. I kinda liked it at the time. I was taking classes that I enjoyed and kept constantly busy with school clubs. And it was a million times better than middle school. There are many people that still have nightmares about middle school.
But once I got to college? I realized that most of my “close” friends were total crap. Not that they were bad people–not at all! but they were not good friends. They were terrible friends. The friends that I still talk to from my formative days are few and far between. I still talk on a regular basis with my friend that I met in preschool.
There are certain people that stay with you. There are others that are friends with you for five years and then suddenly decide that you aren’t cool enough for them, even though your friendship was primarily founded on your equal nerdiness. Not that I would know anything about that…
And you never know which ones are going to be which.
Based on my experience, Alice is the following type of friend: Oh, we’re in cheer squad together? I guess we’ll hang out. … Huh, we really don’t have that much in common. … Wait, she thinks we’re close friends? When did that happen?? Umm, that’s awkward… … The sound of her voice makes me want to set something on fire. I can’t wait until I get away from her. … She goes to the same college as me. Kill me now. Please let me make a quick escape…
Even as a good, accomplished student, high school is a whirlpool of bad choices. And each bad choice takes you to another, worse choice. Alice pretended she liked Billie over and over and can’t back out of it at this point. Billie thinks they were friends. She has a fondness for Alice. But Billie didn’t make as much of an impact on Alice as Alice did for Billie.
It’s like when you work any sort of customer-service job. You see a lot of people every day. You remember a few stand-outs, but that’s about it. People remember you because you were the only person they interacted at length with. But you? You saw a hundred people last week. To you, it’s just another person in a list. For them, you were the one who answered their questions.
I worked at my school’s writing center all last year. Yes, I have a decent memory for people, but I tutored about thirty people every week, in addition to observation hours, classes, being an officer of a school club of fifty people, and spending time with my friends. There are people who remember me because I was the one who worked with them the only time they came in. But by the time they come in again, I’ve tutored a hundred people and scheduled appointments with my co-workers for a dozen others.
It’s really frustrating when you remember someone fondly and they don’t remember you the same way. Billie was just someone she was basically required to be around. Alice probably has very little attachment to her.
Obviously, this is all conjecture, but these types of “friendships” I’ve detailed are extremely common–and equally depressing.
Sorry for making my reply about maturity into a discussion of friendships, but I do think that they’re linked. Realizing where you stand in the world is an empowering but terrifying moment. You realize that you had no idea what you were doing and that everything you thought was important actually means very little in the long run. Understanding your friendships of the past and present is a big step in realizing that your high-school experience is just the small pond. You are a part of something bigger, not the cesspool of stupidity and narrow-mindedness that is high school. High-school students are bred to follow instructions and to take things at face value. Stepping into college is when a lot of people realize that they need to get critical-thinking skills in order to evaluate themselves and their interactions with others. This often happens pretty quickly, and those who struggle with it are the ones that drop out. A large portion of freshmen don’t come back, not to mention the ones that don’t make it past the first week. The taste of independence and being in charge of your own fate for the first time? That’s when the lines are drawn. Billie is now realizing that she is capable of asking for respect and that she can’t hold onto her high-school experience forever. She doesn’t have to be pushed around like a high-school sheep. She is at last mentally capable of making choices that benefit her, even if that means realizing who her real friends are.
Of course it is – a single event, a single sentence – these things can completely change a person in some situations – people can change quite rapidly. In college it likely happens faster because you meet a lot more new people with different views quite quickly.
I know people who in the summer following high school went from friends with someone to stalking, degrading, and scary stuff at her because when her boyfriend and her (supposedly amiably) ended the relationship, they all took his side and flipped out. Of course, it’s not necessarily that extreme, but yes, people change and like/dislike different people over just a couple weeks.
I really don’t know how to feel about Billie in this one–it’s nice of her to stand up for her friends, but she also assumes that everyone views Joyce and Walky in the same way that she views them–uncool and not worth hanging out with (though she’s learning _that_ lesson now of course). Despite their sometimes immaturity/lack of social grace, Billie is really the only one who ever thought she was better than them. She just doesn’t seem to realize that it was only her.
Based on Alice reaction to seeing Walky (telling him to get lost) and Walky’s previous comments that it was Billie’s cheerleading friends that kept them from associating in high school, I think it’s safe to say that Alice also views Walky (and by association, Joyce) as uncool and not worth hanging out with.
Um, actually Alice has made it completely clear that she DOES view them as uncool by not even remembering Walky’s name, not even taking in Joyce’s name, and trying to force them to leave by saying there wasn’t enough chairs on the last page. Alice is essentially saying with her actions ‘I might be able to tolerate you for a while, but I will not tolerate your friends’.
This is literally the happiest I’ve ever been since I started this comic. Well, this and my avatar moment, but that turned out to be a huuuuge lie so happiest moment ever!
Oh, god, it’s like the most awkward scenes of The Office had a baby with the most awkward scenes of Frasier, and it’s just screaming headlong into a 12-embarrassment pileup.
I don’t see ‘Old Billie’ on Willis’s 2014 character poll, Walky, so we’re all going to have to adjust to this new Jennifer Billingsworth, whomever she is.
It’s easy to make assumptions based on which characters we “know”, and which are “strangers”.
We don’t get to see anything of their interaction in HS, so for all we know Alice has good reason to avoid Billie. I’ve run into people who treated me like dog crap in HS, and who seem to think I’m going to be happy to see them and want to hang out 20 years later.
The ones I’ve run into didn’t even wait until we were out of college 😛 As soon as we crossed paths on campus they acted like all the shit that happened before was water under the bridge -not their call to make at all!
Love that Walky is apparently planning to eat four chicken sandwiches. When does he get his freshman 15, or is Dorothy working the weight off him?
I would post a lengthy discourse on groups that matter and groups that are basically accidental, based on Kurt Vonnegut’s theories, but maybe tomorrow. Alice and Billie were in a group that seemed to matter, but that was basically an accident of happening to go to the same school at the same time and participate in the same activity. Now, off to the dentist.
Walky is clearly highly energy inefficient. He needs to consume much more energy than his mass would indicate. (On Cybertron he’d be called a “guzzler”.) Walky basically burns energy as quickly as he consumes it and needs to consume more and more. By contrast, Billie is very energy efficient, and if she consumes more energy than she requires her body efficiently converts the energy into extra mass. Not weight, by the way; weight is related to gravity, not to the amount of mass a carbon based life form has. So basically Billie needs reduce the amount of energy she’s intaking, maybe do a few laps at the speed track, and maybe make sure the energy she’s consuming has no impurities.
Also, beer is very high in energy. I suspect most of the mass Billie’s acquired has come from her drinking so much beer.
Those aren’t sandwiches; they are Chick-Fil-A’s version of McNuggets (see last panel of yesterday’s strip), and we already know Walky can go through fifty of those without breaking a sweat.
it could be the opposite though, considering how she first reacted to Billie, she may still be part of that crowd. It also doesn’t help the Billie was ostracized from the Cheerleaders almost immediately after entering College.
Using Vonnegut’s terms, high school cheerleaders are a gandfloon. A group of people who share only surface characteristics. This is opposed to a karass, where people actually some deeper relationship. Most high school relationships are gandfalloons and don’t have any reason to continue after graduation. See Cat’s Cradle or Wikipedia for more.
The question here is what they’re referring to as ‘Old Billie’? Billie as Walky remembers her as a kid? High school Alpha bongo Billie? Billie as she was for most of the comic? It really changes the tone of Billie’s response.
I’d originally assumed Walky wanted pre-high school Billie back and Billie was rejecting that but apparently everyone else read it differently. I don’t deny I could be wrong.
Walky has been commenting on Billie’s ‘expected behavior’ for a few weeks, now. Here’s a quick list (feel free to add, commenters):
Billie thinks very highly of herself.
Billie doesn’t hang out with dorks, especially those she knew before she was cool.
Billie insults and mocks Walky at every opportunity.
Billie always knows the correct solution for every problem. Any solution that conflicts with hers is, obviously, not the correct solution.
Billie requires your undivided attention at all times.
When Billie stops behaving in this way, Walky starts to worry about her.
Yes I know that, but what does BILLIE consider the ‘old Billie’. Also if you go further back a book or two Walky states he wants to go back to how they were before highs school.
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Go Billie!
Go [away] Billie!
Okay bye…
5 years later… Do you want to be old billy be a bongo and brag a lot, come on I know you miss it and so does dorky Walky “yes I do billy” …
Gawd dam it I forgot to add drunk bongo not bongo by itself
*knock knockknock*
Do you wanna rehash the paaast?…
Do you wanna rehash the past
Come on to Chick-fil-aaaa~
And here we can
Look and see
High school drama on displaaaay~
Go Dragons!
Much changed, you have. For the better, I believe.
Not return to the dark side you must.
You can (not) redo
You are (not) alone
You can (not) advance
… wait, that got dark pretty quickly XD
Although I can’t help we’ve seen this before…
*can’t help but think
You can (not) think.
Fuck yeah!
Damn right.
Your avatar… is that Billie carrying beer cans? Is it a commission? Most importantly, is there a larger version you’re willing to share?
I just typed «dumbing of age billie beer» but I think it was on this website in 201o as a fan art.
Here’s the link: http://www.dumbingofage.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/pembroke-billie.jpg
Thanks!
So that’s the trademark? “Beer”?
yup
Beer brand beer is the most famous brand in Hollywood.
Probably the best too!
http://img2-1.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/080208/repo-man_l.jpg
Sadly I couldn’t find a screengrab that had the entire can’s label visible.
They did it for all products. Love that movie.
What movie is that?
Reminds me of this:
http://xkcd.com/993/
This is in response to fabforest asking what movie the screengrab is from (for some reason I can’t respond to fabforest’s comment directly): it’s from Repo Man, from 1984, maybe my favorite movie of the 80’s. It’s sort of a satirical, hardcore punk, sci-fi, black comedy. I highly recommend it.
Back in the 1980s “generic” branding was all the thing. While in Indianapolis in 1985 I found a couple of stores that sold “BEER” — no brand name, just black letters on yellow cans — so this is actually an accurate depiction.
Although considering how long it’s been that I’ve seen the stuff since then I realize how old these cans would have to be. Trust me, Billie, you don’t want to drink it!
I recognize that art style (and the name that went with it) as the work of the artist that drew the comic FemmeGASM that just ended around the beginning of this year. He lives (or lived) in the Metromess.
Exactly, here’S the blog entry. His name is Pembroke.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/blog/billie-by-pembroke/
Ah, I knew I recognized that art style, but couldn’t place it, thanks.
A little surprised that she isn’t carrying Billy Beer.
So yeah, it’s not mine
Can Billie has character development? 😛
Only if she gets Cheezburger first.
Me thinks that cheeseburger is the last thing she needs right now.
So she didn’t get a chicken sandwich?
Honestly, I’ve never been to a Chick-Fil-A, so I have no idea what they have.
Chicken sandwiches. That’s about it.
And Waffle Fries (aka best fast-food fries on the planet), chicken salad, chicken nuggets, chicken strips…
But no energon. Seriously, the only place to get energon on your planet is Thundercracker’s bachelor pad and North Korea! Unless you mine some Ore-13 yourself.
I thought we humans called it Red Bull?
Chicken and god
Lmao, perfect menu description
She has to stop wearing the gold and blue first.
Yes, of course! Alice should make her take it off right away!
I see where you’re going with this…
and she up and down like a yoyo. Come on Billie, you can do it.
Billie…you’re the dork friend!
Battle not with dork friends, lest ye become a dork friend yourself.
And then Billie was a dork friend.
Jennifer Billingsworth waited. The lights above her blinked and sparked out of the air. There were nerds in the cafeteria. She didn’t see them, but had expected them now for years. Her warnings to Ruth Lesnick were not listenend to and now it was to late. Far too late for now, anyway.
Billie was a head cheerleader for four years. When she was young he watched the sports teams and she said to dad “I want to be on the teams daddy.”
Dad said “No! You will BE DISS BY NERDS”
There was a time when she believed him. Then as she got oldered she stopped. But now in the Chick-Fil-A of the IU she knew there were nerds.
“This is Ruthless” the radio crackered. “You must fight the nerds!”
So Billie gotted her uinform and flipped up the table.
“SHE GOING TO DISS US” said the nerds
“I will fight at her” said the cybernerd and she ran the campus grounds. Billie sneered at her and tried to flipped her off. But then the blood alcohol level fell and they were trapped and not able to diss.
“No! I must diss the nerds” she shouted
The radio said “No, Billie. You are the nerds”
And then Billie was a dork.
Thank you, I needed that.
That was beautiful. You deserve a Hugo.
And if you stare into the dork too long, the dork stares back
Really hope this is the next panel.
Billie. The Dork Whisperer.
Way to go Billie! The first step is the hardest and I think you just took it!
I’m not convinced yet that Alice is being a dick here. I think she honestly didn’t like Billie in high school, maybe even was bullied by her, and now is trying to get away from her.
I just think she dislikes Billie in the way you dislike a friend of a friend but tolerate them cuz you kinda have to hang out.
Maybe, but if look back at yesterday’s comic, Walky expected this treatment from Alice, and she kept calling him “Wally”, which isn’t a great sign.
Yeah, but if you look at the comic from 2 days ago, Alice is genuinely uncomfortable with Billie’s appearance, and today she’s confused when she’s accused of being a dick (in panel 2). I think Billie is the issue here, not Alice.
Then what Billie needs is to be purged of the idea that Alice was ever her friend, most favorably by Alice explicitly telling her so.
I think that this is all an extension of what Ruth told her back a few strips ago. The whole thing about not getting things that you don’t deserve in college like you did in high school. Maybe Billie is trying to cling to these undeserved things, like Alice’s friendship.
Well said.
Billie sure seems to expect Alice would like her from their cheer squad days. Remember how she used to have a cabal of cheerleader hanger-ons that would pick on her older friends like Walky?
It sounds a lot like Alice was one of those. Someone memorable to Walky but not the other way around. Someone Billie recognizes as a friend, except now Billie isn’t part of the cheerleading crowd either.
Could be both. Hanger-ons aren’t always treated well.
I suspect that Alice is just trying to distance herself from high school entirely, including Billy. That doesn’t mean Wally is wrong to expect that this woman would be a jackass to him, but he could be surprised; it’s plausible she was only a jackass to him because Billie was being one, or because others that weren’t billie were.
That’s probably not why she was making excuses to keep Wally away, even if she dislikes him though. Staying away from Billie is almost definitely priority numero uno.
It may also be that Billie is the now-disgraced, former head cheerleader from her school, who is infamous for drunkenly crashing into a tree and being ejected from her current and any future form of cheerleading, and Alice wants nothing to do with a former friend she now thinks of as a pariah.
oh god. Willis level character development. ;o; *squeeees*
I’m pretty sure Alice didn’t want any version of Billie
She probably didn’t want to be around any of them.
That’s the feeling I’ve been getting all along. Like it was one of those convenient high school clique friendships and she’s grown beyond it.
Same here. Alice is faking civility, hoping that Billie and “Wally” will go away or that Alice can make an excuse to hightail it out of the food court and get to class or her dorm room. And that’s basically what Alice is doing in panel one.
I’d like to add that Walky is being very understanding to Billie. I think Walky is still freaked out by discovering Billie lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, and he figures that spending time with Alice would be the best thing for Billie. Billie is wavering between wanting to hold onto her glory days and spend time with Alice and wanting to acknowledge that while Joyce and Walky aren’t “cool” they’re the best friends she has at college right now. Billie is ashamed of who she was, of the mistakes she’s made, and wants to make up for it. But she doesn’t want to give up on what she considers the good parts of her past, represented by Alice. Walky seems to know enough about Alice’s personality, that Alice probably is one of those people from high school Billie’s better off not hanging out with.
Good Billie.
[Panel 5]
That’s really shitty of you Ali-woah, you’ve got a pretty nice rack.
Ya I know ,You should check out my room mates when she dresses up as a super hero.
Yes!
Willis Damns Photoshop
Feels like an un-dumbing of age.
If all his characters keep maturing like this Willis may need to change his title.
He’ll simply keep introducing dumb ones to keep the average intelligence low.
It’s a hard job, but Danny has to do it.
It’s (not) a hard job, but Danny has to do it.
FTFY
Don’t worry, Joyce can help him out.
Not while he has a comment section.
Best avatar/comment correlation ever.
I feel you wasted an opportunity here. Still true, though.
Do you like what you see in panel 4 Billie?
Rock and Roll, baby!
She doesn’t want the old Billie back, yet she’s shoving old Billie down poor Alice’s throat.
She releases Alice’s arm when Walky mentions Old Billie. Seems to me that she just realized she’s shoving Old Billie down Alice’s throat and has decided to stop. Billie is gradually growing accustomed to having self-awareness and this is good!
Wow, I hadn’t realized that! It seems that Billie might be starting to mature a bit. Next thing you know she’ll be able to tackle Ruth’s problems as well!
I know, I’m just saying that was a very quick realization, and I found it kinda hard to tell that that is what actually just happened. I’m definitely glad this is happening though! Can’t save Ruth until you can save yourself.
Well what do ya know!
Yayyy. I mean, Billie might not be in her right self for other reasons, but refusing to abandon your friends when you could maybe seem cooler by doing so is a good sign.
Her heart is in the right place. Just not her head.
Double Insult with a side of fries. Think fast, Billie.
“Sit down and catch up with me. Don’t leave because of my dork friends.”
Yeah I don’t think that’s why she’s leaving Billie.
Hey, sure, absolutely this is good on Billie and her accusation is more or less correct (though Alice may ALSO be ditching her because she’s a fat-by-cheerleader-standards alkie disgrace).
But I have to feel a little sympathy for Alice, who is definitely trying to cope with some crazy mixed messages here. “You’re my best friend! Get back here and act like it, stop being a shitty bongo! I don’t want to be the old Billie any more, the one that Alice pretended to have something in common with back in high school!”
Alice: “Um, are you still asking me to be friends with you? Or can I get out of here?”
Billie: “Not now, Alice, I’m having an epiphany!”
She wants to be the new person that she is now, not taking friends for granted and pretending to be in some silly social hierarchy where she thinks she’s better than everyone else, while retaining the same friendship that she had in the past. I hope Alice can be as mature and see that the shit they did in high school should remain in high school. Unfortunately not everyone feels that way, and brings their high school drama to college.
Considering her face in that “Gooo, dragons!” bit, I think she got there well before Billie did.
I’m really starting to get the impression here that—judging solely by Alice’s nearly desperate behavior in these strips, trying to get away from Billie as quickly as she can—Billie might never have been as popular among her high-school peers as we were lead to believe.
Which makes a lot of sense, considering what we know of Billie’s character. From the start of the freaking comic, it never failed to shatter my willing suspension of disbelief (and in a webcomic featuring a straight-up costumed vigilante, mind you!) that someone as rude and UNFRIENDLY as Jennifer Billingsworth could ever have been the queen of the “popular” kids back at high school. But ingratiating her way into the “in” crowd by sheer force of will, and refusing to take any hints dropped that her behavior was turning off others or making them uncomfortable?
I can see Billie all over that.
But all things considered, she DID have a nice house (or nice enough for her to show off to Daisy), she DOES like parties (meaning whe likely threw a bunch of wild ones back in the day), she DID take care of Joyce during that one frat party, she DID buy her clothes afterwards, she WAS the hot head cheerleader back in high school…
Even if she’s not a particularly nice person, or if she gets so bratty so easily, I never had much trouble picturing her as a popular bee -not queen bee like you say, or a well liked popular bee, but somewhere close, if anything because it would be convenient for the popular kids to have her around
and because the popular boys wanted to bang her.And then, she WAS prom queen. It had to have worked.
er, I’m not saying you’re wrong btw, just pointing things out parallel to your comment
Dangit, another webcomic gets hit with the crash inducing video ads…
Yep, Flash from Hell.
NoScript FTW
Why would anyone install the Adobe Flash plugin on their devices in 2014?
You don’t need it for YouTube anymore.
Shes not quite there yet but shes going through this maturity phase a helluva lot faster then I ever did
This comic is so obvioulsly photoshopped. Total photoshop.
But is it a straw man?
Only if you spot cameltoe.
You said the forbidden word! Run! Run for your lives!
Can’t tell if the prospects for lesbian shenanigans are rising or falling
Falling. Definitely falling.
OMG. I’m starting to–to LIKE Billie.
PROGRESS!
Character development and growth is all nice and well, but does she have to bring it upon the awkwardly bothered Alice…? It’s not like Alice actually told them off or anything. >_>
Alice has been subtly trying to get Billie and “Wally” to scram, and since they didn’t take the hint Alice gets up in panel one and starts to leave. If she was ever a friend of Billie’s in the past (best or otherwise) she’s not one now.
Any AA member will tell you that hanging around with your drinking buddies when you’re trying to get sober is a pitfall back into drinking that is best averted by avoiding said buddies. If Billie doesn’t want the old Billie back, she needs to stop hanging with the old Billie’s friends.
What made you think her old friends were also drinking buddies?
I didn’t, really, although that’s always a possibility.
When Walky says he wants the *OLD* Billie back, Billie responded that she was pretty sure she didn’t. So Billie needs to make a clean break from the past — and that would include her old high school cheerleader friends.
So, countdown to Alice saying “Yeah, I really didn’t want to hang out with YOU in the first place, either, I was trying to be polite but really this isn’t working at all”?
Personally I feel worst for the poor person Alice was eating lunch with before Billie showed up and did this. (You can see them in the last comic, first panel. At least I’m assuming they were eating lunch together.)
I didnt realize until now that Alice wanted to leave because of Joyce and Walky. I had assumed it was because she didn’t like Billie or something.
While it’s probably just me being stupid, it would certainly be an interesting social experiment…
Don’t rule it out. It could be either. It could even be both.
I think it’s both reasons. Alice is willing to tolerate Billie, up until the moment when Billie suggests Walky bring another table over for himself and Joyce. At that point Alice has had enough, and makes a lame excuse to not have to talk to Billie and her “dork friends” anymore.
I’m still kind of thinking it’s both, and next panel is going to be Alice still awkwardly trying to leave/telling Billie outright that she’s kind of moved on since high school.
I think she just wants to get away from Billie. If you look at the prev 2 panels, it’s clear that she no longer respects Billie (if she ever did) and is trying to make her escape.
Yes, but if you remember the last page, she seemed willing to TOLERATE Billie for a while but was trying to force Walky and Joyce to leave by saying there were no more chairs. She is trying to escape because though she could tolerate Billie for a short while, she doesn’t want to deal with her friends.
I’m not sure if the impending revelation is gonna be that Alice thinks Billie’s a jerk or that Alice is a jerk and Billie’s not in with the in crowd anymore, but either way it’s gonna sting.
Billie has been called a nerd to her face in the third person by some IU cheerleaders before.
Billie probably knows that she’s not part of the in crown anymore. I suspect the impending revelation is that since she’s not part of the in crowd, her old friends don’t want anything to do with her.
Woohoo!!!!
Yes Billie!!! Yes!
I’m confused as to this whole maturing-from-high-school thing. Granted, I’m not in the US, but is it possible to change that much in, like, ten weeks or whatever? Then again, over here most people go to uni in their city, so they end up keeping in touch with their HS friends somewhat longer. And generally you’ll spend 6 years in HS rather than four or whatever it is in the US.
American High Schools are literally like prisons. I’m not even exaggerating, I’ve read papers about the eerie and destructive similarities in their social structures. Getting out of American high school is literally like being released from prison. For some people this works out much better than for others, but for all but the most severely institutionalized it is a dramatic experience. Willis’s primary motivation for writing Dumbing Of Age was his own intense post-high school trauma.
In Billie’s case, she was someone who was well positioned and well adapted to the institution, so it was a relatively pleasant experience for her, much like a prisoner who manages to stay on the top of a prison’s pecking order. And just like a criminal released from prison who has been hardened by their experience on the inside, Billie’s first instinct upon getting out is to continue her old bad behaviors- and just like such a criminal, she may discover that her time inside has left her out of touch and with few practical skills with which to survive on the outside.
The first year of college is a traumatic culture shock for a frightening percentage of American post-secondary students, and while relatively few of them are so devastated that their entire education is derailed, some of our worse colleges are as big “drop-out factories” as our worst inner city high schools. The experience is definitely survivable, and surviving it is what Dumbing Of Age is all about, but very few individuals come through it without being greatly changed.
This thing about the American school model having a lot of prison-like qualities, it’s not at all an exaggeration or misconception.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
http://www.thenewamericanacademy.org/index.php/home/our-philosophy-menu/the-prussian-industrial-model
Killjoy, I have long felt that there are parallels between prison and school, and not just high school. School is an authouritarian structure that limits the autonomy of those inside it–teachers too. Some students react to the disempowerment by asserting their power over other students-this is commonly called “bullying”. Students close ranks for self-protection, forming groups that conflict with other groups. In the prison yard, the same things happen, only to greater degrees, and with more violence. But the forces at work are similar. That, I believe, is the problem with “anti-bullying” programs: they shame the bullies without aknowledging the role the adults play in creating conditions that make such behaviour inevidible(sp?). Damn, I can’t spell unstressed vowels because they are all pronounced alike, sorry.
This might sound super-weird, but from what I’ve seen, there is this strange and miraculous maturity upgrade just between graduation and the first few weeks of college. A lot of students become much more mature in that time period, and I can’t for the life of me figure out just why. People who don’t go to college right away mature in different ways, of course. But in my time as a student (I’m a grad student currently), I’ve seen a lot of change in very short amounts of time. Some people become someone completely different–usually for the better–once they reach college.
For me personally, when I entered college, I made new friends pretty quickly in my “university experience” class, because it was set up so that everyone in there was in the same classification of majors (theatre and dance). While I didn’t stay a theatre major (realized the program was utterly ridiculous), I have still kept my friends since then, and a fair portion of them actually changed majors not long after I did!
These friends that have stuck with me since 2008, even if we don’t talk too much anymore, are the ones that made me realize just how much high school sucked. I kinda liked it at the time. I was taking classes that I enjoyed and kept constantly busy with school clubs. And it was a million times better than middle school. There are many people that still have nightmares about middle school.
But once I got to college? I realized that most of my “close” friends were total crap. Not that they were bad people–not at all! but they were not good friends. They were terrible friends. The friends that I still talk to from my formative days are few and far between. I still talk on a regular basis with my friend that I met in preschool.
There are certain people that stay with you. There are others that are friends with you for five years and then suddenly decide that you aren’t cool enough for them, even though your friendship was primarily founded on your equal nerdiness. Not that I would know anything about that…
And you never know which ones are going to be which.
Based on my experience, Alice is the following type of friend: Oh, we’re in cheer squad together? I guess we’ll hang out. … Huh, we really don’t have that much in common. … Wait, she thinks we’re close friends? When did that happen?? Umm, that’s awkward… … The sound of her voice makes me want to set something on fire. I can’t wait until I get away from her. … She goes to the same college as me. Kill me now. Please let me make a quick escape…
Even as a good, accomplished student, high school is a whirlpool of bad choices. And each bad choice takes you to another, worse choice. Alice pretended she liked Billie over and over and can’t back out of it at this point. Billie thinks they were friends. She has a fondness for Alice. But Billie didn’t make as much of an impact on Alice as Alice did for Billie.
It’s like when you work any sort of customer-service job. You see a lot of people every day. You remember a few stand-outs, but that’s about it. People remember you because you were the only person they interacted at length with. But you? You saw a hundred people last week. To you, it’s just another person in a list. For them, you were the one who answered their questions.
I worked at my school’s writing center all last year. Yes, I have a decent memory for people, but I tutored about thirty people every week, in addition to observation hours, classes, being an officer of a school club of fifty people, and spending time with my friends. There are people who remember me because I was the one who worked with them the only time they came in. But by the time they come in again, I’ve tutored a hundred people and scheduled appointments with my co-workers for a dozen others.
It’s really frustrating when you remember someone fondly and they don’t remember you the same way. Billie was just someone she was basically required to be around. Alice probably has very little attachment to her.
Obviously, this is all conjecture, but these types of “friendships” I’ve detailed are extremely common–and equally depressing.
Sorry for making my reply about maturity into a discussion of friendships, but I do think that they’re linked. Realizing where you stand in the world is an empowering but terrifying moment. You realize that you had no idea what you were doing and that everything you thought was important actually means very little in the long run. Understanding your friendships of the past and present is a big step in realizing that your high-school experience is just the small pond. You are a part of something bigger, not the cesspool of stupidity and narrow-mindedness that is high school. High-school students are bred to follow instructions and to take things at face value. Stepping into college is when a lot of people realize that they need to get critical-thinking skills in order to evaluate themselves and their interactions with others. This often happens pretty quickly, and those who struggle with it are the ones that drop out. A large portion of freshmen don’t come back, not to mention the ones that don’t make it past the first week. The taste of independence and being in charge of your own fate for the first time? That’s when the lines are drawn. Billie is now realizing that she is capable of asking for respect and that she can’t hold onto her high-school experience forever. She doesn’t have to be pushed around like a high-school sheep. She is at last mentally capable of making choices that benefit her, even if that means realizing who her real friends are.
Who you are depends on who you are with.
So if you are not with anybody, your are nobody?
No, you’re yourself.
I bet you people are maturing the whole time, but until they get to college they’re not really in a new framework where it can be applied.
This is assuming that everyone at college is mature. Which is not really the case. A lot are I suppose. I am for the most part, but not everyone.
Of course it is – a single event, a single sentence – these things can completely change a person in some situations – people can change quite rapidly. In college it likely happens faster because you meet a lot more new people with different views quite quickly.
I know people who in the summer following high school went from friends with someone to stalking, degrading, and scary stuff at her because when her boyfriend and her (supposedly amiably) ended the relationship, they all took his side and flipped out. Of course, it’s not necessarily that extreme, but yes, people change and like/dislike different people over just a couple weeks.
I detect a wave of feels incoming.
I really don’t know how to feel about Billie in this one–it’s nice of her to stand up for her friends, but she also assumes that everyone views Joyce and Walky in the same way that she views them–uncool and not worth hanging out with (though she’s learning _that_ lesson now of course). Despite their sometimes immaturity/lack of social grace, Billie is really the only one who ever thought she was better than them. She just doesn’t seem to realize that it was only her.
Based on Alice reaction to seeing Walky (telling him to get lost) and Walky’s previous comments that it was Billie’s cheerleading friends that kept them from associating in high school, I think it’s safe to say that Alice also views Walky (and by association, Joyce) as uncool and not worth hanging out with.
Um, actually Alice has made it completely clear that she DOES view them as uncool by not even remembering Walky’s name, not even taking in Joyce’s name, and trying to force them to leave by saying there wasn’t enough chairs on the last page. Alice is essentially saying with her actions ‘I might be able to tolerate you for a while, but I will not tolerate your friends’.
Could be she’s on a date andDAMMIT BILLIE YOU’RE RUINING EVERYTHING
(but maybe not)
This is literally the happiest I’ve ever been since I started this comic. Well, this and my avatar moment, but that turned out to be a huuuuge lie so happiest moment ever!
Seriously! Almost tears and stuff.
Regarding the 2014 “Who do You Want to See More Of” poll, please put my vote down for Daisy, Mr. Willis.
Oh, god, it’s like the most awkward scenes of The Office had a baby with the most awkward scenes of Frasier, and it’s just screaming headlong into a 12-embarrassment pileup.
Leave high school behind you must.
Will Billie burn her cheerleaders uniform?
I don’t see ‘Old Billie’ on Willis’s 2014 character poll, Walky, so we’re all going to have to adjust to this new Jennifer Billingsworth, whomever she is.
YEAH BILLIEEEE
I’m thinking Alice never thought that Billile was a “friend” in HS, and sees no reason to start now.
Ever tried Krita? (https://krita.org)
Anyone looking to escape from photoshop should give it a go.
…I’m feeling way more sympathetic toward Alice here than Billie.
It’s easy to make assumptions based on which characters we “know”, and which are “strangers”.
We don’t get to see anything of their interaction in HS, so for all we know Alice has good reason to avoid Billie. I’ve run into people who treated me like dog crap in HS, and who seem to think I’m going to be happy to see them and want to hang out 20 years later.
Heh! Same thing happened to me!
The ones I’ve run into didn’t even wait until we were out of college 😛 As soon as we crossed paths on campus they acted like all the shit that happened before was water under the bridge -not their call to make at all!
Ooh! I’m loving how this is developing! I can’t wait to read ho this turns out. 🙂
Love that Walky is apparently planning to eat four chicken sandwiches. When does he get his freshman 15, or is Dorothy working the weight off him?
I would post a lengthy discourse on groups that matter and groups that are basically accidental, based on Kurt Vonnegut’s theories, but maybe tomorrow. Alice and Billie were in a group that seemed to matter, but that was basically an accident of happening to go to the same school at the same time and participate in the same activity. Now, off to the dentist.
Walky is clearly highly energy inefficient. He needs to consume much more energy than his mass would indicate. (On Cybertron he’d be called a “guzzler”.) Walky basically burns energy as quickly as he consumes it and needs to consume more and more. By contrast, Billie is very energy efficient, and if she consumes more energy than she requires her body efficiently converts the energy into extra mass. Not weight, by the way; weight is related to gravity, not to the amount of mass a carbon based life form has. So basically Billie needs reduce the amount of energy she’s intaking, maybe do a few laps at the speed track, and maybe make sure the energy she’s consuming has no impurities.
Also, beer is very high in energy. I suspect most of the mass Billie’s acquired has come from her drinking so much beer.
I think it’s been well established that Walky has the metabolism of a hummingbird on meth.
Those aren’t sandwiches; they are Chick-Fil-A’s version of McNuggets (see last panel of yesterday’s strip), and we already know Walky can go through fifty of those without breaking a sweat.
In honour of double ink-ing I appreciated this for twice as long as usual.
YESSS BILLIE. Also will need to keep that comment on hand for when people say how much they miss the old conservative religious Dani.
I feel really bad for whoever Alice had already been sitting with when we first saw her.
I think Alice might be doing the same thing Billie is doing. Trying to avoid turning back into her old self from high school.
it could be the opposite though, considering how she first reacted to Billie, she may still be part of that crowd. It also doesn’t help the Billie was ostracized from the Cheerleaders almost immediately after entering College.
All these people communicating and having epiphanies? That is not realistic! C’mon Wilis, start with the silly misunderstandings that last for months!
Really though, I love where this is going although it is at a cringe-worthy stage at the moment.
Using Vonnegut’s terms, high school cheerleaders are a gandfloon. A group of people who share only surface characteristics. This is opposed to a karass, where people actually some deeper relationship. Most high school relationships are gandfalloons and don’t have any reason to continue after graduation. See Cat’s Cradle or Wikipedia for more.
Billie has unlocked the power of Maturness!!!
Intellingence +2
guts +3
Wisdom +4
Does she get any extra feats or just loses drunken flurry of blows?
The question here is what they’re referring to as ‘Old Billie’? Billie as Walky remembers her as a kid? High school Alpha bongo Billie? Billie as she was for most of the comic? It really changes the tone of Billie’s response.
I’d originally assumed Walky wanted pre-high school Billie back and Billie was rejecting that but apparently everyone else read it differently. I don’t deny I could be wrong.
Walky has been commenting on Billie’s ‘expected behavior’ for a few weeks, now. Here’s a quick list (feel free to add, commenters):
Billie thinks very highly of herself.
Billie doesn’t hang out with dorks, especially those she knew before she was cool.
Billie insults and mocks Walky at every opportunity.
Billie always knows the correct solution for every problem. Any solution that conflicts with hers is, obviously, not the correct solution.
Billie requires your undivided attention at all times.
When Billie stops behaving in this way, Walky starts to worry about her.
Yes I know that, but what does BILLIE consider the ‘old Billie’. Also if you go further back a book or two Walky states he wants to go back to how they were before highs school.
Why does Alice not have the cheek things? Answers, I need.
She must have a secret superhero/supervillain identity!
I don’t really know why, but I keep hoping that Alice won’t turn out to be a completely crappy person.
Yay Billy! A great step, nicely led up to over time.
Billie: Resisting urge to grab Alice’s boob.
Wow! Being the whiteboard dong bandit has really changed Billie.