This is clearly Mike channeling an alternate universe Mike out there. One that actually somewhat doesn’t entirely dislike everyone he’s around all the time. Slightly.
Yeah, it looks like of all the people he feigns tolerance of their right to exist for, Joyce is his “favorite” and so she gets his closest to kind persona. I guess he must have really enjoyed her allowing him to go full asshole as the “chaperone” on her date with Joe and so is paying back a vague pantomime of cordiality in return.
Which is what would make him a useful ally. He’d likely just out and out tell Becky’s dad that he has no legitimate legal recourse here and that anything he’d try to do would just drive a deeper more irreparable wedge between him and his daughter anyway while his actions to date have put her future in serious jeopardy unless she can find some way to get some amount of post secondary education on her own.
Seriously, the current job prospects for most people without an Associates degree or training in a trade at the minimum are fairly poor and he pulled her out of school and she’s not at a point in her life where she could easily get funding to go back on her own.
Honestly? Some do. You have to test the waters with them and keep going if you get one of the ones that can be reasoned with. If you get one of the ones who will flip the fuck out, it can be fun to keep going anyways. Veins popping in foreheads can be fun to watch if you have time…
Which for Mike is one of those Win-Win cases. Either their world view starts to change, which can hurt emotionally. Or they just get irrationally angry and do stupid things that can get punished in other ways, like with assault and battery charges.
Doesn’t matter. An irrational response on Toe-dad’s part toward Mike, Becky, or anyone else after Mike made such a statement would make Toe-dad even more the bad guy in such a situation.
And if Toe-dad punches Mike for something like that, we know that all incarnations of Mike use pain as fuel for future Mike-ness.
But she’s right to not trust him, because he hasn’t yet gone after an authority figure yet and so is just as likely to use the information to shame Joyce, Dina, and Becky for how doomed to failure their plan is.
Joyce is right to leave him out as he’s just too much of a wild card to trust that he’ll help in a way that is actually helping versus just doing something to fuck over one of his peers because that amuses him.
There is that. And I fully agree on Mike being a complete asshole.
And not in the humorous nice way, giving a harsh truth way he’s trying to sell it here. He consistently goes against the most marginalized group members he can instead of taking a risk going against corrupt authority and seems to especially like going against women (it’s worth noting that with Sal and Jason, he goes after Sal, instead of the man abusing his position of authority to sleep with students, with Dorothy and Walky, he has consistently gone after Dorothy as a means of going against Walky (straight up creepily harassing her by putting post-sex pictures of her up on her facebook or essentially calling her an easy slut with no standards as a means of knocking down Walky), and with “truth telling” to Ethan and Amber, he’s mostly just been a dick to them when they are already struggling with things and knocks them for not living up to a perfect standard or feeding on their insecurities rather than lift a finger to intervene with the people who hurt them and are continuing to hurt them).
Not once has he intervened (in this Freshmen year) against Blaine, Ethan’s mom, Ruth, Jason, Chick Fil-A, or any of the other alpha bullies, instead going after people without the social means to bring any consequences down on him. And the flashbacks with Ethan and Amber seem to strongly suggest that it was left to Amber alone to push back against Ethan’s mom and Ethan alone to emotionally care for Amber with her dad, while Mike was either absent or doing what he’s been doing this Freshmen year (smugly being a jerk while not lifting a finger to help).
Based solely on his actions in the Dumbiverse, telling him about this would be far more likely to end with him adding even more shit to Becky and Joyce’s plate (like how his intervention with the phone call from Joyce’s mom put both of them in a lot more danger and may have helped confirm that there was something fishy going on with their daughter). Because Toedad can bring real consequences, he has more social power and Becky is vulnerable and easy to hurt and is desperately keeping up a facade to keep from breaking down. As such, she could be a far more inviting target for him than someone who can actually make life legitimately harder for him.
And yes, I agree it’s also frustrating how much of a free pass he gets because “he just cuts through the BS and tells people the harsh truth they need to hear”, because he doesn’t actually have a track record of that in either universe. Most of the times, his statements trigger massive psychological damage that leads them to make unhealthier decisions (Amber putting more strain on her fears of becoming her father, and thus creating a further division with her DID states, Ethan feeling enough shame about what he has lost because of how others have reacted to him being gay that he agreed to go in the closet again and date a woman who could “fix” him, Joyce going into a massive PTSD meltdown from the Whiteboard Ding-dong bandit situation, and Sal feeling even more withdrawn and getting her to escalate her “relationship” with Jason even more.
In fact, the only times he’s actually led people to a better place is when he was actively trying to do the opposite in order to get something he wanted.
And I’ll admit it’s a little annoying that he’s praised as some grand truth teller, when Roz got a flood of b-word comments for actually saying something harsh that lead to a major important character growth moment (the thing that Mike is supposed to be praised for) and when the cast already has someone who makes hard truth statements because they are necessary to actually address the issues in the room even if it makes them look like an asshole in Sarah.
And it’s somewhat telling that Roz and Sarah have much better records on this in the Dumbiverse than Mike, but Mike gets the praise and the free pass.
Sure Roz was a childish jerk about it but ultimately Joyce had to realize that she was being hurtful to Ethan and Becky, and Sarah can be a real jerk but she’s also proven to be capable of tremendous acts of love and has shown she’s basically unable to express herself in any other way.
But Mike? Nah, he’s running some master plan to make everyone realize their flaws and work to improve them. That is totally his place to do that and he’s allowed to psychologically torment everyone around him for as long as possible so long as the characters eventually come to some form of realization years down the line they would have anyway without him, just with him causing way more pain and trauma.
I would be genuinely thrilled if Mike never appeared again.
To me, the difference is that Mike knows he is an asshole, and has shown no real intentions of doing anything for any other reason than being an asshole, or really any master plan. I think he is amusing because he ISN’T trying to wrap his behavior in some kind of moral/ethical shield. He’s an asshole to be an asshole, and while I would never be friends with someone like that, and he’s possibly a sociopath, I honestly have much more vitriol for people who try to pretend that their asshole behavior is because its for the “greater good”.
Which is what Mike is; he is absolutely just an asshole to be an asshole, and every Mike strip is as unfunny as humanly possible, mostly because DoA has a significantly different context than the screwball comedy of Shortpacked and he doesn’t work here.
But then you get the ones who swears up and down that he’s actually super caring and just trying to get everyone to learn or some shit.
It’s disgusting. I can’t believe so many people here romanticize his abuse.
A thought occurs… Perhaps that is what Joyce will end up doing. Instead of lying she will tell Buttoedad the truth. That she knows where Becky is, that she won’t tell him, and that she thinks what he’s doing is horrible.
And then he calls Joyce’s parents and they pull HER out of college for being an impediment to the salvation of becky’s eternal soul and thus clearly not ready for joining the secular world as a holy Christian soldier. Everyone’s a winner!
Mike can be very helpful. You don’t want to talk to your Mother; Mike can help. You want a chaperon for your date; Mike can help. Mike can be very helpful. It just may not be exactly the help you want.
yeah i know, but hes still being VERY sympathetic, i feel as though he’d still be the tiniest bit sympathetic even if he was sober, anybody would if their “friend” (or anybody they know at all actually) was related to faz
Mike rarely lies though (and not very convincingly), his weapon of choice is the truth.
Joycy would be better off asking Walky to teach her to lie. The trick is to make the lie sound plausible. Almost nobody’s gonna believe Billie got mauled to death by a bear, ‘cos it’s just so implausible-sounding.
“Actual human being” not in the sense you mean. He senses an opportunity to exercise his special powers which will help Joyce’s cause, but not because he wants to be helpful
Maybe not. Maybe he simply sees a course of action that is likely to result in an awful mess and he just wants to help Joyce and Becky dig themselves deeper into it. Remember Walky and the pajama jeans?
If you have ideas of what he might do,then he’s not going to do them.As we know,he is what you don’t want him to be,so he will not do the things you think he might do.
In shortpacked Jason told amber that Mike does do things that people want him to and if he does its because he wants to — but it might be for the reasons you’d want.
The thing is, Mike is generally most evil against people who deserve it. He goes after hypocrisy and delusion more than most other character flaws. Toedad is a target-rich environment, I see this going great.
I like, all my ship names sound inappropriate. Moyce sounds too much like moist and then the only possible danny ethan ship name is Siecox (like “see cocks”). Don’t try to come up with anything better than Siecox it works too well
Given that there’s basically no other viable Joyce-ships in this strip, I’d say it works. I mean, Walky and Danny are taken, (and Danny is possibly switching teams anyhow), Ethan is definitely gay, so he’s out. Joyce is definitely straight, so Becky, Sal, Dorothy, and every other female character won’t work. Really, who’s left? Jason? Too old (for Joyce – works fine for Sal). Joe? Too – icky. Jacob? I don’t think she’d do that to Sarah, especially after she tried to hook them up. Howard? Just don’t see it.
I don’t think that’s how that works. (In any case the reason Danny/Joyce most likely won’t happen is because even if Amazi Girl dumped Danny, he doesn’t actually know Joyce. And it’s rare for them to interact)
Yeah, I was oversimplifying, though it does work that way SOMEtimes. Anyhow, I only listed him because she was obsessed with him for the whole beginning part of Roomies!, so it was possible there’d be a thing in this universe as well. As for Mike, well, he did briefly have a thing for Joyce in IW, though he was drunk at the time, and possibly only doing it to mess with Walky, so who knows?
I get it. You’re right, I’m wrong. Can we drop it? It was meant as a joke anyhow. I was just pointing out how all the possibly Joyce-pairings are pretty much ruled out.
Its been a while since we’ve had one of the flaps that Mike causes. No doubt, tho, that he could be a powerful ally against toe dad IF he chooses to — for his own reasons, of course.
Right, that was just a few days ago in comic time that Mike claimed Billie had been drunkenly mauled by a bear.
Mike is kind of a wild card here. What would he do if he was let in on this? At least with a character like Mary, we can guess reasonably well how she would respond. Mike is harder to pin down.
That would be interesting. If this Mary is half the hypocrite her Walkyverse counterpart was, and assuming we’re correct about Mike being an asshole to stop hypocrisy, that might just be like tossing sodium in a beaker of water.
Mike is an asshole, but deep down he really does care about people. I sincerely hope the gang lets Mike in on this so he can fight this cinnamon roll monster of a problem that is Ross MacIntyre.
I don’t think we’ve ever seen any evidence that “deep down he really does care about people.” At best I think he wants people to be less hypocritical, which would make life better for him.
I think Mike values consistency. He is constant in his beliefs and behavior; you always know where you stand with him, if you think about it. He wants others to be the same.
Okay, here’s a question: would Mike be the kind of guy who’d rat out Becky? We know he thrives on chaos, and that line in panel 5 feels a little ominous, but he’s yet to do anything that was outright malevolent.
Hm. Walkyverse Mike was willing to do some pretty vile thing, like stomping on a little girl who was just there, or pushing a recovering sex addict off the wagon.
We don’t know that he was willing to, that he would have if the non-violence marchers hadn’t intercepted him and beat the cap out of him, WHICH he let them do even tho he’s super powered — not the only time he deliberately provoked people and accepted a beating to prove a point. Walk nearly killed him. And he counted on the peace marchers to be hypocrites … or, at least, he wanted to show that their “violence is not the answer” claims are not absolute in the was stated.
Sort of? Mike tells them things that MIGHT lead to enlightenment, put does he want that outcome or does he want to break their self-deception, hypocrisy, what ever, and then to see how they react. Hm. He did express surprise when Ethan took his advice that the closet was his less awful option, vs coming out. (And Ethan responded “don’t judge me”)
Seeing as how it would help a self righteous overbearing fundamentalist if he ratted Becky out I doubt it, but he wouldn’t be Mike if anyone benefited from his help so he would have to find a way to hurt everyone else too.
If you really wanted to be an ass to everyone, you wouldn’t help Toewdad. But you could make things more awkward for the people trying to avoid him.
For instance, imagine pushing things toward making Joyce confront her parents about this. In the long run, that could help her grow as a person, or at least push her toward learning to lie like she asks. In the short run it would be really mean and not helpful.
That’s the type of combination we’re all crediting him with, right? Though really, I harbor my suspicions that he just kicks people where they’re weak, and any lessons about their weaknesses are incidental.
To clarify: kicking people where they don’t know they’re weak, which is why they can learn from it. I don’t think he’s the common bully who picks on the obviously vulnerable.
Honestly, tell Mike the situation and that Becky’s dad is open season for Mike’s favorite game of making people miserable, then let him loose.
Mike will either reduce her father to a shell of a human being or report him to the police for filing a false missing person’s report and attempted kidnapping (of Becky), and a litany of other charges. Either way, Mike has fun, and Becky is safe.
Kinda? Last Wednesday (The Whiteboard Ding Dong Bandit) was the start of the sexy lesbian suicide pact. The Wednesday before that (Answers in Hennessy) was when they made a pact to quit drinking together. So it depends on when you want to say that their relationship started?
In shortpacked Mike came up with a convoluted plot to induce amber to reject him BECAUSE he loved her and therefore wanted to prevent her marrying an ahole like himself BUT loved too much to prevent their marriage directly, himself. As part of his plot he seriously messed up Jacob as a device to use him to hurt amber’s mom … except that Amber saw her mom’s hookup with Jacob as a good thing and told Mike they were going to pay for Therapy for Jacob, after his plot collapsed and Amber went ahead with marrying him. Trying to prevent amber from marrying him might have been the only selfless thing he ever did BUT he was willing to badly hurt two people amber cared about to do it AND Mike totes failed. So much for Mike being nice.
I sort of agree with you. Mike on the whole is not a nice person , but the fact that he was willing to sacrifice his relationship with Amber because he thought she deserved better shows that he can be nice, even if it is a little shortsighted and for someone he cares about. Also, he had to get drunk and become nice mike to force himself to do it, and we know that he doesn’t want to risk other people finding out about that. The fact that he did that in a public place (not counting his other job) seems kind of selfless. I suppose what I’m saying is that Mike (at least from the Walkyverse) is capable of having “nice intentions”, even if the way he acts them out is terrible.
Not equivalent, no. But a guide, yes. The same at the core, yes. This is a younger Mike who has not yet perfected his techniques. A dumber less experienced Mike who makes mistakes and miscalculations. Who has not yet discovered what happens when he gets drunk.
I think dumbingverse Mike is less mean then walkyverse Mike, like how dumbingverse Joe is less of a… sex mongerer then walkyverse Joe.
This Mike is more of a talk but not walk kind of person, where he will ruin people with words (and punches) but will not stomp on little kids or create a audio tape of someone’s mom having sex to propose to said moms daughter.
Mike is perfect for this situation. He is great at using the truth to eviscerate you. Then uses your guts to read your short future.
Actually, I think that he likes Joyce, if he likes anyone at all. He talks to her more than anyone else, if I remember the past strips right. I always thought that he feels protective of her, for whatever reason.
As for the “you might like me as a help rather than a hinderance’..s not a threat. It’s just Mike stating the obvious as usual.
Well, it’s worth remembering that her last run-in with Mike involved him harassing her with dick drawings and then swapping the marker with a permanent one so that when she joined in, she ended up marking everyone’s doors with dicks, so it’s understandable that she’d be a little gunshy about going to him as a “dirty deeds done dirt cheap” kind of fellow.
Eh, Mike was legitimately pretty helpful last time she asked. He did exactly what she wanted him to do. She briefly objected to his actions, he explained the reasoning behind them, then she encouraged him to take it even further. In the end she even joined in on the fun.
Kind of seems like Joyce is trying to absolve herself of blame here. It’s not that she enlisted Mike into a beatdown. It’s that Mike’s special brand of “help” took a perfectly normal request and turned it weird, ruining her date.
Mike in many ways is the best of them. Fronts as an asshole, but in the walkyverse when the chips are down, he’d die for the others. The term “foul-weather friend” comes to mind.
I like really like this because I feel like it’s the first time we’ve seen anything to Mike other than “likes to fuck with people” and “a jerk but clever.”
I have long wondered if Joyce kicking Mike in the shins convinced him that she is his kind of woman! That said, the only type of lie that he uses is, as Walky pointed out, the outrageous and overt kind. Now, if Joyce wanted to learn how to get people so angry that they can’t think and just want to leave…? Well, Mike is a master at that!
Still, everyone trying to teach Joyce to lie promises to be amusing in a surreal sort of way!
I like seeing Mike. He was my fave in the old continuity. I even liked him and Amber being written out when they were, since them no longer being regulars they got to stay in that semi-happy ending. That said, I’m looking forward to seeing if this Mike will go off on a new and interesting path based on his core personality traits like Danny and Joyce!
You know, all this talk about Mike and “niceness” and “helpfulness” makes me wonder: does Dumbiverse!Mike have the same reaction to alcohol that Walkyverse!Mike does? We’ve never seen him drunk here before.
Is… is Mike actually trying to be helpful here? Like genuinely, in his own way? ‘Wouldn’t you rather I be a help than a hindrance’ sounds like it….
Now that I think about it, Joyce’s first interaction with Mike was when she hired him to chaperone her date with Joe and not only endorsed Mike’s punching but participated, IIRC. It should not surprise me that Mike would be on board with being ‘helpful’ to Joyce again.
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But what if she actually did?
the mike who cried bear. or droned in a dead-pan manner before nickelin’ your mom
The truth hurts, bruh
i actually do have a shirt that says “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. except for bears. they will kill you”
so, ya. take that under consideration next time you feel like lying
I have the same shirt 😉
So does Mike. He got it from your mom. For a nickle and other considerations.
This thing started to get unbeareable.
The whole thing is now bruin-ed.
“Nickeling” is now a verb, and I am okay with that
Have you never heard the story The Boy Who Cried Bear? The twist involves a lesson in homonyms when has to warn people about nudity.
And your mom for a nickel.
I think Walky believed him.
“Come on, let me help”
…hearing Mike say that is so creepy.
Well, I4m kinda badmouthing. It may be time for some Mike spotlight~
Any Mike spotlight is going to be a zero-sum game where someone else loses. This other person could be Ross MacIntyre.
This is clearly Mike channeling an alternate universe Mike out there. One that actually somewhat doesn’t entirely dislike everyone he’s around all the time. Slightly.
Yeah, it looks like of all the people he feigns tolerance of their right to exist for, Joyce is his “favorite” and so she gets his closest to kind persona. I guess he must have really enjoyed her allowing him to go full asshole as the “chaperone” on her date with Joe and so is paying back a vague pantomime of cordiality in return.
Which is admittedly rapidly undercut with him threatening her when he doesn’t get his way.
Do you remember drunk mike?
Maybe he’s a bit buzzed.
I believed it, actually.
Does the genderswap version of Ruth/Billie have Ruth as a bear?
Haha 😀
RIP in pieces, Billie
Hey, if I were a bear the last thing I’d expect would be for the shreds of the cheerleader I just mauled to maul me right back.
To shreds you say?
Rest in peace in pieces? That doesn’t make any sense.
Mike is like what Calvin would grow up to be if at some point he had watched Hobbes get brutally eviscerated by a neighborhood dog
OMFG and now I want to read fanfic where this happens and Calvin’s middle name is ‘Mike’ and they were the same person all along…
Isn’t Mike what Calvin would grow up to be without any trauma whatsoever?
Mike’s right,the truth can be very painful most of the times.
Mike has an uncanny ability to target people’s truth vulnerabilities.
Which is what would make him a useful ally. He’d likely just out and out tell Becky’s dad that he has no legitimate legal recourse here and that anything he’d try to do would just drive a deeper more irreparable wedge between him and his daughter anyway while his actions to date have put her future in serious jeopardy unless she can find some way to get some amount of post secondary education on her own.
Seriously, the current job prospects for most people without an Associates degree or training in a trade at the minimum are fairly poor and he pulled her out of school and she’s not at a point in her life where she could easily get funding to go back on her own.
No, no, see, fundies don’t speak Rational.
Honestly? Some do. You have to test the waters with them and keep going if you get one of the ones that can be reasoned with. If you get one of the ones who will flip the fuck out, it can be fun to keep going anyways. Veins popping in foreheads can be fun to watch if you have time…
Which for Mike is one of those Win-Win cases. Either their world view starts to change, which can hurt emotionally. Or they just get irrationally angry and do stupid things that can get punished in other ways, like with assault and battery charges.
Doesn’t matter. An irrational response on Toe-dad’s part toward Mike, Becky, or anyone else after Mike made such a statement would make Toe-dad even more the bad guy in such a situation.
And if Toe-dad punches Mike for something like that, we know that all incarnations of Mike use pain as fuel for future Mike-ness.
Her future financial success in secular society is nothing compared to the future of her Immortal Soul!!!
(You can smell my sarcasm right?)
No, it sounds like a perfectly rational comparison to me. The error is further back.
But she’s right to not trust him, because he hasn’t yet gone after an authority figure yet and so is just as likely to use the information to shame Joyce, Dina, and Becky for how doomed to failure their plan is.
Joyce is right to leave him out as he’s just too much of a wild card to trust that he’ll help in a way that is actually helping versus just doing something to fuck over one of his peers because that amuses him.
Also keep in mind that he threatens Joyce with getting her in way if she doesn’t let him in on what’s going on.
People just trip over themselves justifying ways for Mike not to be a horrible asshole, the same way they do for Blaine andRoss.
There is that. And I fully agree on Mike being a complete asshole.
And not in the humorous nice way, giving a harsh truth way he’s trying to sell it here. He consistently goes against the most marginalized group members he can instead of taking a risk going against corrupt authority and seems to especially like going against women (it’s worth noting that with Sal and Jason, he goes after Sal, instead of the man abusing his position of authority to sleep with students, with Dorothy and Walky, he has consistently gone after Dorothy as a means of going against Walky (straight up creepily harassing her by putting post-sex pictures of her up on her facebook or essentially calling her an easy slut with no standards as a means of knocking down Walky), and with “truth telling” to Ethan and Amber, he’s mostly just been a dick to them when they are already struggling with things and knocks them for not living up to a perfect standard or feeding on their insecurities rather than lift a finger to intervene with the people who hurt them and are continuing to hurt them).
Not once has he intervened (in this Freshmen year) against Blaine, Ethan’s mom, Ruth, Jason, Chick Fil-A, or any of the other alpha bullies, instead going after people without the social means to bring any consequences down on him. And the flashbacks with Ethan and Amber seem to strongly suggest that it was left to Amber alone to push back against Ethan’s mom and Ethan alone to emotionally care for Amber with her dad, while Mike was either absent or doing what he’s been doing this Freshmen year (smugly being a jerk while not lifting a finger to help).
Based solely on his actions in the Dumbiverse, telling him about this would be far more likely to end with him adding even more shit to Becky and Joyce’s plate (like how his intervention with the phone call from Joyce’s mom put both of them in a lot more danger and may have helped confirm that there was something fishy going on with their daughter). Because Toedad can bring real consequences, he has more social power and Becky is vulnerable and easy to hurt and is desperately keeping up a facade to keep from breaking down. As such, she could be a far more inviting target for him than someone who can actually make life legitimately harder for him.
And yes, I agree it’s also frustrating how much of a free pass he gets because “he just cuts through the BS and tells people the harsh truth they need to hear”, because he doesn’t actually have a track record of that in either universe. Most of the times, his statements trigger massive psychological damage that leads them to make unhealthier decisions (Amber putting more strain on her fears of becoming her father, and thus creating a further division with her DID states, Ethan feeling enough shame about what he has lost because of how others have reacted to him being gay that he agreed to go in the closet again and date a woman who could “fix” him, Joyce going into a massive PTSD meltdown from the Whiteboard Ding-dong bandit situation, and Sal feeling even more withdrawn and getting her to escalate her “relationship” with Jason even more.
In fact, the only times he’s actually led people to a better place is when he was actively trying to do the opposite in order to get something he wanted.
And I’ll admit it’s a little annoying that he’s praised as some grand truth teller, when Roz got a flood of b-word comments for actually saying something harsh that lead to a major important character growth moment (the thing that Mike is supposed to be praised for) and when the cast already has someone who makes hard truth statements because they are necessary to actually address the issues in the room even if it makes them look like an asshole in Sarah.
And it’s somewhat telling that Roz and Sarah have much better records on this in the Dumbiverse than Mike, but Mike gets the praise and the free pass.
Aaaallll of this.
Sure Roz was a childish jerk about it but ultimately Joyce had to realize that she was being hurtful to Ethan and Becky, and Sarah can be a real jerk but she’s also proven to be capable of tremendous acts of love and has shown she’s basically unable to express herself in any other way.
But Mike? Nah, he’s running some master plan to make everyone realize their flaws and work to improve them. That is totally his place to do that and he’s allowed to psychologically torment everyone around him for as long as possible so long as the characters eventually come to some form of realization years down the line they would have anyway without him, just with him causing way more pain and trauma.
I would be genuinely thrilled if Mike never appeared again.
To me, the difference is that Mike knows he is an asshole, and has shown no real intentions of doing anything for any other reason than being an asshole, or really any master plan. I think he is amusing because he ISN’T trying to wrap his behavior in some kind of moral/ethical shield. He’s an asshole to be an asshole, and while I would never be friends with someone like that, and he’s possibly a sociopath, I honestly have much more vitriol for people who try to pretend that their asshole behavior is because its for the “greater good”.
Which is what Mike is; he is absolutely just an asshole to be an asshole, and every Mike strip is as unfunny as humanly possible, mostly because DoA has a significantly different context than the screwball comedy of Shortpacked and he doesn’t work here.
But then you get the ones who swears up and down that he’s actually super caring and just trying to get everyone to learn or some shit.
It’s disgusting. I can’t believe so many people here romanticize his abuse.
A thought occurs… Perhaps that is what Joyce will end up doing. Instead of lying she will tell Buttoedad the truth. That she knows where Becky is, that she won’t tell him, and that she thinks what he’s doing is horrible.
And then he calls Joyce’s parents and they pull HER out of college for being an impediment to the salvation of becky’s eternal soul and thus clearly not ready for joining the secular world as a holy Christian soldier. Everyone’s a winner!
Oh wait.
Well, this IS a DYW-comic after all.
mike… help, what is this
Mike can be very helpful. You don’t want to talk to your Mother; Mike can help. You want a chaperon for your date; Mike can help. Mike can be very helpful. It just may not be exactly the help you want.
that could be his slogan:
“mike not the help you want.
…maybe the help you need?”
I still believe Mike has a future in counseling. His patients/clients would end up hating him, but he’d get them over their issues.
hes the help joyce deserves, just not the help she needs right now… wait actually she deserves and needs much better help, nevermind
Mike is the help that Joyce needs right now. He’s just not the help she deserves.
Actually scratch that, Mike isn’t the help that ANYBODY deserves. Ever. 😛
Panel four has the most sympathetic face I’ve ever seen on Mike.
http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=1271
Well, yeah, but that’s Drunk Mike. He’s got his own tag.
yeah i know, but hes still being VERY sympathetic, i feel as though he’d still be the tiniest bit sympathetic even if he was sober, anybody would if their “friend” (or anybody they know at all actually) was related to faz
Nins out of ten disgraced politicians agree the truth does do more harm than lying.
Mike rarely lies though (and not very convincingly), his weapon of choice is the truth.
Joycy would be better off asking Walky to teach her to lie. The trick is to make the lie sound plausible. Almost nobody’s gonna believe Billie got mauled to death by a bear, ‘cos it’s just so implausible-sounding.
mikes greatest failure
Failure? He was experimenting methods of tormenting and chose his style.
I think in Mike’s case, it would be more fun to mess around with the religious zealot…and for us watching XD
I don’t know how to feel about this strip. Mike is behaving like an actual human being? I thought that was reserved for the Walkyverse!
It’s like, is he drunk ? but nope.
“Actual human being” not in the sense you mean. He senses an opportunity to exercise his special powers which will help Joyce’s cause, but not because he wants to be helpful
For Joyce, he would dare much.
Maybe not. Maybe he simply sees a course of action that is likely to result in an awful mess and he just wants to help Joyce and Becky dig themselves deeper into it. Remember Walky and the pajama jeans?
I am now eager to see what shenanigans Mike can bring to this plot 🙂
If you have ideas of what he might do,then he’s not going to do them.As we know,he is what you don’t want him to be,so he will not do the things you think he might do.
In shortpacked Jason told amber that Mike does do things that people want him to and if he does its because he wants to — but it might be for the reasons you’d want.
Yeah,that as well,but this Mike said it himself.
Yes. But is this Mike (or the other) fully consistent?
Pretty much, yes.
I hope my theory is right and Mike is the one who winds up encountering Becky’s dad. What a beautiful trainwreck that would be.
I smell shinanigans
In that Mike applies a baseball bat to Ross’s shins?
HE SAYS HE LUSTS
I GET TO PUNCH HIM
The thing is, Mike is generally most evil against people who deserve it. He goes after hypocrisy and delusion more than most other character flaws. Toedad is a target-rich environment, I see this going great.
“Seen your daughter? I’m screwing her! Several times a day!”
((Toedad smiles, leaves and, later, Joyce is told by her parents that he’s transferred Becky to IU because it has ‘saved her’.))
PREMARITAL HANKY PANKY!
“Becky… this time it was your dad for a dime. Apparently I’m branching out.”
Mike sleeps with Toedad, causing such confusion and self-doubt that Toedad leaves IU, never to return.
THIS
SO MUCH THIS
Please 😀
Lying is a skill like any other, and if you want to maintain a level of excellence, you have to practice constantly.
For the ninth time, no, I will not write a letter of recommendation for you to Starfleet Academy.
Worf and Garrak, a duo we didn’t get to see often.
and the lord did bless mike with cheekiness and constancy, but not yet.
just when we need mike to be evil! is there an optimal BAC at which he is conniving yet helpful?
Ha haaa, Ballmer Peak.
Everything leads back to xkcd, doesn’t it?
within 6 degrees, anyway. i was a perfectly generic stick figure in a black hat at a con last week, but somehow xkcd came into it
I wonder how that happened.
The truth may set you free, but that doesn’t mean your lies weren’t the only thing keeping you from falling off a cliff.
ya, but some people like the ride on the way down
It’s quite a spectical, really.
OMG WHAT IF RUTH IS THAT “RUTHLESS” (HUH, HUH, SEE WHAT I DID THERE) BEAR
Shouldn’t ship Mike and Joyce but I do. ._.
yas MOYCE
I call it ‘Scowling Smiles’!
I like, all my ship names sound inappropriate. Moyce sounds too much like moist and then the only possible danny ethan ship name is Siecox (like “see cocks”). Don’t try to come up with anything better than Siecox it works too well
Joymike ?
How about Joke?
Or Mice?
The correct ship name is “Former Smiths drummer Mike Joyce”
I’m glad I’m not the only one.
They seem to understand each other’s thought processes better than anyone else gets them.
Given that there’s basically no other viable Joyce-ships in this strip, I’d say it works. I mean, Walky and Danny are taken, (and Danny is possibly switching teams anyhow), Ethan is definitely gay, so he’s out. Joyce is definitely straight, so Becky, Sal, Dorothy, and every other female character won’t work. Really, who’s left? Jason? Too old (for Joyce – works fine for Sal). Joe? Too – icky. Jacob? I don’t think she’d do that to Sarah, especially after she tried to hook them up. Howard? Just don’t see it.
“Danny is possibly switching teams anyhow.”
I don’t think that’s how that works. (In any case the reason Danny/Joyce most likely won’t happen is because even if Amazi Girl dumped Danny, he doesn’t actually know Joyce. And it’s rare for them to interact)
Yeah, I was oversimplifying, though it does work that way SOMEtimes. Anyhow, I only listed him because she was obsessed with him for the whole beginning part of Roomies!, so it was possible there’d be a thing in this universe as well. As for Mike, well, he did briefly have a thing for Joyce in IW, though he was drunk at the time, and possibly only doing it to mess with Walky, so who knows?
I mean it’s not oversimplyfying, it’s just being wrong. Danny says right here that he’s still attracted to Amazi Girl, and women in general.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/04-walking-with-dina/glad/
I get it. You’re right, I’m wrong. Can we drop it? It was meant as a joke anyhow. I was just pointing out how all the possibly Joyce-pairings are pretty much ruled out.
Danny’s bi, not gay. He did not “switch teams” or anything.
Its been a while since we’ve had one of the flaps that Mike causes. No doubt, tho, that he could be a powerful ally against toe dad IF he chooses to — for his own reasons, of course.
*plays Billy Swan’s “I Can Help” on the Muzak*
…*followed by Steely Dan’s “The Royal Scam”.
Right, that was just a few days ago in comic time that Mike claimed Billie had been drunkenly mauled by a bear.
Mike is kind of a wild card here. What would he do if he was let in on this? At least with a character like Mary, we can guess reasonably well how she would respond. Mike is harder to pin down.
Mike vs. Mary would be fun to see, if he was interested enough to actually engage her. (Or just that bored)
That would be interesting. If this Mary is half the hypocrite her Walkyverse counterpart was, and assuming we’re correct about Mike being an asshole to stop hypocrisy, that might just be like tossing sodium in a beaker of water.
…so, OTP ?
the good news is that Mike has no real reason to work with Toe dad. I also want to see Toe dad vs Faz (no real reason)
I want to see them in an epic rap battle.
Mike is an asshole, but deep down he really does care about people. I sincerely hope the gang lets Mike in on this so he can fight this cinnamon roll monster of a problem that is Ross MacIntyre.
I don’t think we’ve ever seen any evidence that “deep down he really does care about people.” At best I think he wants people to be less hypocritical, which would make life better for him.
I think Mike values consistency. He is constant in his beliefs and behavior; you always know where you stand with him, if you think about it. He wants others to be the same.
I think he respects it when they’re consistent, but he must enjoy it when people make themselves easy marks for him.
Agreed; what he likes is to upset people and cause distress in a passive-aggressive way.
The only person to whom he’s been consistently a sort of bitter nice is Joyce. So, this strip is characterization-consistent.
At the very least, Mike does what entertains him.
I imagine he’d have more fun destroying Toedad than he would going after Becky.
Okay, here’s a question: would Mike be the kind of guy who’d rat out Becky? We know he thrives on chaos, and that line in panel 5 feels a little ominous, but he’s yet to do anything that was outright malevolent.
Is that a line that he’d cross?
Hm. Walkyverse Mike was willing to do some pretty vile thing, like stomping on a little girl who was just there, or pushing a recovering sex addict off the wagon.
We don’t know that he was willing to, that he would have if the non-violence marchers hadn’t intercepted him and beat the cap out of him, WHICH he let them do even tho he’s super powered — not the only time he deliberately provoked people and accepted a beating to prove a point. Walk nearly killed him. And he counted on the peace marchers to be hypocrites … or, at least, he wanted to show that their “violence is not the answer” claims are not absolute in the was stated.
He did, but in such a way that lead to a long term recovery and a substantial turning around of that character’s life.
Mike is kind of like a crazy wisdom Bodhisattva that uses his misanthropy to push people toward enlightenment.
Sort of? Mike tells them things that MIGHT lead to enlightenment, put does he want that outcome or does he want to break their self-deception, hypocrisy, what ever, and then to see how they react. Hm. He did express surprise when Ethan took his advice that the closet was his less awful option, vs coming out. (And Ethan responded “don’t judge me”)
Seeing as how it would help a self righteous overbearing fundamentalist if he ratted Becky out I doubt it, but he wouldn’t be Mike if anyone benefited from his help so he would have to find a way to hurt everyone else too.
It’s less scary to have a debt to Mike rather than taken to a de-gaying concentration camp by their own dad.
By a bit.
No, I don’t think he would from what I’ve seen of him. He’ll have a lot more fun with Toedad, than with turning Becky in.
If you really wanted to be an ass to everyone, you wouldn’t help Toewdad. But you could make things more awkward for the people trying to avoid him.
For instance, imagine pushing things toward making Joyce confront her parents about this. In the long run, that could help her grow as a person, or at least push her toward learning to lie like she asks. In the short run it would be really mean and not helpful.
That’s the type of combination we’re all crediting him with, right? Though really, I harbor my suspicions that he just kicks people where they’re weak, and any lessons about their weaknesses are incidental.
To clarify: kicking people where they don’t know they’re weak, which is why they can learn from it. I don’t think he’s the common bully who picks on the obviously vulnerable.
Mike knows what’s what.
He helps people in a really fucked up way that messes with your head but he still helps
Honestly, tell Mike the situation and that Becky’s dad is open season for Mike’s favorite game of making people miserable, then let him loose.
Mike will either reduce her father to a shell of a human being or report him to the police for filing a false missing person’s report and attempted kidnapping (of Becky), and a litany of other charges. Either way, Mike has fun, and Becky is safe.
I’m not used to Mike having full conversations. He usually just gets a line or two before people get fed up or he hits his target.
He’s had two others w Joyce that I recall.
This seems longer than normal, though. It just feels different.
It’s because Mike’s end result here *isn’t* antagonizing Joyce. At least, not his short term end result.
I sometimes wish I knew somebody like Mike in real life…
I then realize that would be a terrible idea.
Mike is, IIRC, based on someone Willis knew, long ago.
Hrm, I don’t know what to think about this. Mike is kinda a wild card.
Like gambling and playing russian roullete.
Wait, so Ruth and Billie have only been a thing for five days in universe?
Kinda? Last Wednesday (The Whiteboard Ding Dong Bandit) was the start of the sexy lesbian suicide pact. The Wednesday before that (Answers in Hennessy) was when they made a pact to quit drinking together. So it depends on when you want to say that their relationship started?
Mike’s…being…nice?
MIKE VERSUS TOEDAD DO IT
Nice, no. Will it help Becky if he goes after her dad? It very well might. But not because Mike is nice.
In shortpacked Mike came up with a convoluted plot to induce amber to reject him BECAUSE he loved her and therefore wanted to prevent her marrying an ahole like himself BUT loved too much to prevent their marriage directly, himself. As part of his plot he seriously messed up Jacob as a device to use him to hurt amber’s mom … except that Amber saw her mom’s hookup with Jacob as a good thing and told Mike they were going to pay for Therapy for Jacob, after his plot collapsed and Amber went ahead with marrying him. Trying to prevent amber from marrying him might have been the only selfless thing he ever did BUT he was willing to badly hurt two people amber cared about to do it AND Mike totes failed. So much for Mike being nice.
I sort of agree with you. Mike on the whole is not a nice person , but the fact that he was willing to sacrifice his relationship with Amber because he thought she deserved better shows that he can be nice, even if it is a little shortsighted and for someone he cares about. Also, he had to get drunk and become nice mike to force himself to do it, and we know that he doesn’t want to risk other people finding out about that. The fact that he did that in a public place (not counting his other job) seems kind of selfless. I suppose what I’m saying is that Mike (at least from the Walkyverse) is capable of having “nice intentions”, even if the way he acts them out is terrible.
Shortpacked Mike =/= DoA Mike
Like, imagine Walkyverse Joyce going through any of this stuff and reacting like this. You can’t anymore. It’s not equivalent.
Not equivalent, no. But a guide, yes. The same at the core, yes. This is a younger Mike who has not yet perfected his techniques. A dumber less experienced Mike who makes mistakes and miscalculations. Who has not yet discovered what happens when he gets drunk.
Mike truly is the best.
I think dumbingverse Mike is less mean then walkyverse Mike, like how dumbingverse Joe is less of a… sex mongerer then walkyverse Joe.
This Mike is more of a talk but not walk kind of person, where he will ruin people with words (and punches) but will not stomp on little kids or create a audio tape of someone’s mom having sex to propose to said moms daughter.
He never stomped that (unbearably adorable) kid. And the tape was intended to cause Amber to break up with him … but it failed.
The other Mike also had like a decade longer to perfect his assholery and dickishness.
Mike is perfect for this situation. He is great at using the truth to eviscerate you. Then uses your guts to read your short future.
Actually, I think that he likes Joyce, if he likes anyone at all. He talks to her more than anyone else, if I remember the past strips right. I always thought that he feels protective of her, for whatever reason.
As for the “you might like me as a help rather than a hinderance’..s not a threat. It’s just Mike stating the obvious as usual.
She helped him set up a position where he got to repeatedly punch a dude.
Well, it’s worth remembering that her last run-in with Mike involved him harassing her with dick drawings and then swapping the marker with a permanent one so that when she joined in, she ended up marking everyone’s doors with dicks, so it’s understandable that she’d be a little gunshy about going to him as a “dirty deeds done dirt cheap” kind of fellow.
Eh, Mike was legitimately pretty helpful last time she asked. He did exactly what she wanted him to do. She briefly objected to his actions, he explained the reasoning behind them, then she encouraged him to take it even further. In the end she even joined in on the fun.
Kind of seems like Joyce is trying to absolve herself of blame here. It’s not that she enlisted Mike into a beatdown. It’s that Mike’s special brand of “help” took a perfectly normal request and turned it weird, ruining her date.
See. I want Mike to help. I want Mike to have friends. I kinda wanna ship Mike with someone.
Mike in many ways is the best of them. Fronts as an asshole, but in the walkyverse when the chips are down, he’d die for the others. The term “foul-weather friend” comes to mind.
Well joyce looks like she had an epiphany
Yesss this is the best Mike comic since HAIL SATAN. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/answer-2/
Chris Pratt and scientifically correct raptor pal Blue, exit left.
my head: “this isnt ship tease”
my heart: “TAKE HIM UP ON THE OFFER”
I like really like this because I feel like it’s the first time we’ve seen anything to Mike other than “likes to fuck with people” and “a jerk but clever.”
theres also “turned on by being assaulted by superheroes”, thats something
“…only by justice”
She was mauled by a bear. A Canadian bear.
I have long wondered if Joyce kicking Mike in the shins convinced him that she is his kind of woman! That said, the only type of lie that he uses is, as Walky pointed out, the outrageous and overt kind. Now, if Joyce wanted to learn how to get people so angry that they can’t think and just want to leave…? Well, Mike is a master at that!
Still, everyone trying to teach Joyce to lie promises to be amusing in a surreal sort of way!
If this were a Marvel comic, there’d be a footnote saying something like:
* back in Sleepyhead, True Believers!
Mike : /
The truth is a dangerous weapon; it should always be handled with utmost care.
I like seeing Mike. He was my fave in the old continuity. I even liked him and Amber being written out when they were, since them no longer being regulars they got to stay in that semi-happy ending. That said, I’m looking forward to seeing if this Mike will go off on a new and interesting path based on his core personality traits like Danny and Joyce!
Well, it was certainly happier than the semi ending Ruth got.
Too soon?
get out <_<;
Yes.
Still way too soon!
Mike please die.
I hate you so much.
He’d just come back to life just to spite you.
Seconded
SHIPPING NEWS
Joyce is talking to a single straight guy.
I think Joyce/Mike is in crack-ship territory in this universe also.
Mike is “whatever you don’t want him to be.”
Ross: “Have you seen my daughter, Joyce?”
Joyce: “She got mauled to death by a bear”
That made me chuckle, thank you.
If by mauled you mean caressed and by bear you mean Ruth, yes.
I missed the comic where Becky was caressed by Ruth.
You know, all this talk about Mike and “niceness” and “helpfulness” makes me wonder: does Dumbiverse!Mike have the same reaction to alcohol that Walkyverse!Mike does? We’ve never seen him drunk here before.
Ah, if only he was (not dis-)invited to that dorm party.
“The Truth” is the name of Mike’s +4 dire maul.
Joyce, trust Mike. Enlist his help. When he pushes Toedad into traffic and makes it your fault, it will be hilarious.
Mike’s daily ritual: muddle with minds of people, reveal in the blustering, and sit back with a frown as they all burn the world down.
Since when does Mike use exclamation points?
Now Willis will have to go back to a pre-Becky chapter and insert a comic with Mike claiming Billie was mauled by bears.
He already did, here:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/sleepyhead/
Does anyone else want to see how ToeDad would react to Mike going up to him and making his usual “for a nickle” remark about Becky???
I know it’s a little late, but, Mike only does moms.
Is… is Mike actually trying to be helpful here? Like genuinely, in his own way? ‘Wouldn’t you rather I be a help than a hindrance’ sounds like it….
Now that I think about it, Joyce’s first interaction with Mike was when she hired him to chaperone her date with Joe and not only endorsed Mike’s punching but participated, IIRC. It should not surprise me that Mike would be on board with being ‘helpful’ to Joyce again.
Cue eureka moment where Joyce learns how to lie by telling partial truths!