My wife hit her head and went to the hospital recently, the doctor said its ok to fall asleep once you are in the hospital, but not before. I’m not sure if its in the hospital specifically, or just beingi n the process of receiving care. I can see going to sleep after a head injury when noone is helping you to be a bad idea, as you don’t get help that you may need.
As far as I understand it, the doctor probably said that because it was made clear that your wife didn’t have more damage going on than just the concussion. It’s fine to sleep with concussions, as long as there’s no signs of further trauma (like dilated eyes, etc), and being in the hospital meant that she was checked for that and being monitored (I assume?). 🙂
I had a severe concussion when I was ten. The doctor told my parents to wake me up every hour, and to head straight to the Emergency Room if they couldn’t wake me up.
Yes, but it is very dangerous to mistake an other loss of consciousness for sleep. If someone gets a blow to the head and afterwards becomes woozy, then unconscious, that can be a sign of serious intracranial injury. So you check. You try to wake them, you determine whether they can remain awake. If so, okay. If not, check for other neurological signs, and rush the patient to Radiology for images.
There are reasons to say “Wake up! Look at me! Try to stay wake!” that happen not to have anything to do with sleep itself being dangerous. Just as you give patients a little shove on their shoulders to check their balance without wanting to push them over, or you weave from side to side to check that their eyes are tracking without having a clinical reason to dance the shimmy.
so what you do is 1. let the person get to a safe place where consciousness doesn’t matter and 2. call an ambulance so if trauma has occurred it can be attended to
but the “NUUUUUUU YOU MUST STAY AWAKEN” seems a bit putting a bandage on a severed artery
the only “downside” is in this case Amazi-Girl would most likely lose her cover, but having a superhero persona isn’t on the top most suggested list from doctors FOR SOME REASON
Well, I agree that Sal ought to call an ambulance, or at least take Amber to an ER and make up some story about falling off a motorbike, and not attempt amateur triage. But then, I’m one of the fuddy-duddies who thought Joyce ought to call the cops, not Amazi-Girl, and that Amazi-Girl ought not to have engaged in insanely dangerous movie stunts on two moving cars, ….
I’m just saying that the myth that falling asleep is dangerous when you have a brain injury is neither here nor there: there are good reasons to try to wake up an unconscious person when you fear brain injury, and to ask a woozy person to try to stay awake. I think that Sal is doing something that is terribly inadvisable, but acting on the myth that waking up concussed people protects them from injury does not seem to be the problem. There is a reason to say “Wake up Amazo! … Gimme a sign yer melon’s bruised and not mushed” that has nothing to do with believing that myth.
I believe you live in the spaces between time, where Willis hides all the good feels. its an achievement that my phone even loaded the page with 0 comments
On the other hand, without tomorrow’s comic we don’t know which personality she woke up as. And I’d say it’s hard to determine if she actually fell unconscious from this strip – instead of just groggy and in a pain only panic can allay.
That advice just means you don’t need to wake the person up every few hours with a head injury…once they’re checked out they can sleep. This usually means a doc has ruled out a head bleed either via CT or pt history.
It’s still ABSOLUTELY a good call to do that initial assessment after head trauma/LOC to rule out a bleed in the first place.
Basically, “it is OK to sleep following head trauma” is not the same as “don’t be concerned if they lose consciousness immediately following head trauma”.
I just feel like there’s concern (“okay, we’ve ruled out serious trauma, you can rest now”), then there’s paranoia (“DON’T FALL ASLEEP AFTER A CONCUSSION EVER EVER YOU WILL COMA AND NEVER WAKE UP”)
Well, according to the source you have given “[a] person can go to sleep following a concussion if he or she is awake and able to hold a conversation. No other symptoms, such as dilated pupils or trouble walking, should be present before sleeping.” So Sal is perfectly right in checking if Amazi-Girl is awake and can talk and walk and doesn’t have dilated pupils before allowing her to sleep.
Don’t know if it’s in the plot, but I sure would like it if they developed a grudging respect for each other or even a partnership. Sal seems a little wiser than AmaziGal in this arc. Don’t know if AG is able of willing to taking any of her advice, though!
“I don’t think there’s been enough drama today, let’s have Amber have to confront one of the people that’s she’s been traumatized by!” – Willis. Probably.
Gosh…It’s not like Willis at all to change viewpoints on a cliffhanger to preserve that cliffhanger feeling. Tomorrow’s comic will just be Mike drinking a soda. Because that would be a very Mike thing to do to you.
Huh. Speaking of which, the tags indicate that it really is Amber’s normal self and not her Amazi-Girl persona waking up right now. So that’d explain the reaction, at least.
Yeah, i know, ain’t that weird, each episode pretty much provide TWO(2) already pre-quoted lines of great values, hmmm, when i think about it, by the numbers of episodes it got i guess it can a little many to remember:-P
Could it be? The elusive “Holy Grail” first comment?
Naa, unlikely.
Looks like we’re gonna have some 1 on 1 time between Sal & Amazigirl. No, wait, it’s Amber that’s tagged. Interesting. not surprising, she is just waking up from being flung around like a doll by G forces…
It cannot be the Family Weekend encounter. For one thing, on the cover page, Dorothy is up and walking around (to me it looks like she’s coming back from a run) wearing her Kraft shirt. On Family weekend she had fallen asleep over her books the night before and only woke up when her parents were at her door, and she wasn’t wearing that shirt.
Plus, Willis has said that it’s based on events that haven’t happened in-comic yet.
That seems like it’d be a gigantic cop out. Besides that, Willis’ slipshines have always been positive, affirming moments between two lovers. Danny having a wet dream and waking up sexually frustrated and humiliated doesn’t seem to fit in that.
Danny’s been established to resent his attraction to Ethan because he thinks it’s going to make him cheat on Amber. We know that, right now, it’s something he wants to put walls up against, which is why he’s insisting that Ethan needs a boyfriend. What’s sex positive about a scared bi dude being embarrassed about his sexual feelings?
Can it just not wait until they’ve actually gotten together? You know it’s going to happen.
And as for that part about readers enjoying it; Danny’s sexuality exists for more than just reader titillation. He’s bisexual because that’s who he is, not just so he can kiss hunky boys because omgsohawt.
Let me restate: regardless of whether the sex scene were presented as occurring within the context of a dream sequence, cannon, or a play within a play – there are a lot of readers who would subscribe to Slipshine and not feel to much concern about whether or not it’s a cop-out within cannon.
While I’m sure there are readers who just like to see boys kissing – I mostly feel that the popularity would come from an investment in the characters and wanting to see that happen because they’d be good for each other.
Except they’re not together yet and won’t be for a while, maybe even years, and they have other stuff to work out. We can hold off for now. Danny can do other things than boff Ethan.
What investment can there be in a relationship that’s mostly been Danny being uncomfortable being attracted to Ethan?
Doesn’t everyone use a cannon? -_-
Let’s blame this on having had a wisdom tooth out today.
@ Spencer
That’s a summation of the relationship which is very tightly focused on Danny being uncomfortable with his sexuality. Yes, Danny has been uncomfortably attracted to Ethan – and spent a lot of time overcompensating for it. But there’s been a good deal of Danny and Ethan spending time together and just clicking with one another. Ethan seems to enjoy their time together and his visual cues could be read as displaying an attraction to Danny as well. And then there’s this: We mostly see Ethan with Joyce and Amber. But with them, Ethan takes on a caretaker role that doesn’t exist when with Danny. He gets to relax a little bit and actually sees Danny as someone who lightens the load (although that is because of their relationship with Amber). That opens up his character development a bit.
Though, when it comes down to it, I don’t feel that investment or what one wishes to see happen is or should be strictly bound by where the plot is right now. But we disagree on that I think.
I understand the logic behind it (and what you said about Danny being someone Ethan can just be himself with instead of trying to be a caretaker is completely true), but I don’t think any actual romance is something that should happen any time soon. What’s more important than Ethan having a boyfriend is Danny figuring out what being bi means to him, and how he should deal with it. Dating a dude is secondary, if that.
As for your latter paragraph, well, that’s not what I said. There’s a difference between “I want them together” and “I want Danny to immediately bang Ethan even though he’s already with someone else and has major romantic hang-ups.”
That’s not what you said, but your position is very solidly based on where the characters are now/the pace which you see things going. Because you’re approaching it as “I want Danny to immediately bang Ethan even though he’s already with someone else and has major romantic hang-ups,” rather than “I want to see Danny and Ethan bang… maybe a dream sequence so it doesn’t cock up the character development?”
It wouldn’t mean anything to either character, wouldn’t follow the rest of the slipshines in how they’ve all been about actual intimacy between couples, if it weren’t Danny or Ethan dreaming it than it would be even more irrelevant, I can’t imagine Ethan even considering eyeing his best friend’s boyfriend, and if it were Danny then we already know it’d be something he wouldn’t want at this point in time because right now he’s all “oh no hes hot im going to cheat.”
Maybe I’m being presumptuous, but I saw Willis’ intent with the slipshines to be about exploring a healthy, positive, intimate moment in a relationship (like how Billie and Ruth only ever got one over a year after they initially got together, because when they did they were in the throes of suicidal, alcoholic depression) and I can’t see where an irrelevant sex dream that serves nothing for either character fits into that.
Wouldn’t a slipshine between the two mean way, way more if there was actual emotional weight behind it?
I can think of a few ways to work a sex dream into the narrative in a meaningful way, though I doubt they’d reach your requirement that they be without problematic implications. For instance, Amber has a history of having sex dreams involving two men and ‘writing fanfiction in her head’ which involve two men being intimate….Amber has a sex dream and then we have a segue into her and Danny exploring what his bisexuality means in the context of the relationship.
The only thing I can recall Willis saying about the Slipshines is that they would be between characters that would conceivably shtup. As for “exploring a healthy, positive, intimate moment in a relationship” …. I should first say that I have not read the pornographiques and can only speak from context…. but I don’t buy it. “Head of the Class” is Sal and Jason, who are not truly in a relationship, and kinda hate each other. Nothing wrong with casual sex, but a sexual relationship between a student and a TA is not unproblematic. Jason and Sal both explicitly acknowledge that their sexual relationship is “unethical in a staggering number of ways”. And wasn’t “Mask or No Mask” is set dead on the heals of Danny having a sex dream involving Ethan? And the whole you’re dating AmaziGirl vs. Amber thing ….
I don’t regret unsubbing from Slipshine, because I’m not paying to see Joe have sex with anyone. (No offense meant to Willis and his work. I liked his other Slipshine comics, but I just can’t stand Joe and don’t want to see him in any more comics than I have to.)
Will the truth finally come out of the secret connection between Sal and AmaziGirl? Or will Willis set this secret aside to be revealed another year? Find out tomorrow, same AmaziTime, same AmaziWebSite!
I see some people remember the Flintstones shows from the late ’70s and early ’80s where Fred had a helper dinosaur in the back. That was the only way they could do a show about the gas crunch and Arab oil embargo. The CB craze show was just Stoopid.
I can remember a few elements before cartoons became “role model conscious.”
-It was a huge deal when Wilma announced she was pregnant because that meant ‘cartoon characters have sex.’
-Barney made subtle sex jokes as he and Betty were trying for children and having trouble so, they went to a physician who told them she couldn’t which triggered her extended depression.
When a baby wandered into their yard, Barney took the baby into their house and hid him. Betty refused to return him to the Stork, who was actively trying to reacquire the baby.
Essentially, Bamb-Bamb was abducted due to being handed to the wrong woman, right after delivery. No one corrected it.
-As Fred sat in their living room, he smoked. Pebbles would play on the floor, nearby.
Yep, and they can tell the ER that Amber suffered her injuries taking a spill off a motorbike, which is at least as plausible as half the shit ER staff get told, and enough to head off any compulsory reporting requirements.
Noticing 2 things here that are pretty minor but pretty significant:
1) The tags say Amber instead of Amazi-Girl.
2) Sal has one of her gloves off. Not the glove covering her scar (which is on her right hand, if memory serves), and it may have just been to make snapping her fingers easier, but it;s still pretty significant given how rarely we see them come off.
It was the right hand that got stabbed — and I think it is the group consensus (although I’m not sure if Willis ever confirmed it) that Sal is actually left-handed.
I have known several people in meatspace who are right prime ambidextrous and left prime ambidextrous for similar reasons… usually broken hands rather than stab wounds though.
I’m strongly right-handed, but I still find it easier to snap my fingers with my left than my right. It may just be practice, but it can totally work that way.
“Doctor! When I touch my head, it hurts. When I touch my elbow, it hurts. When I touch my leg, it hurts. What do you think?”
“Well, I think you’ve broken your finger.”
No joke, but I actually think she would make a great EMT. She’s great at trauma response and de-escalation after a crisis. She probably already has a lot of first aid for minor injuries knowledge just growing up with Marcie and here we see that she has a good bedside manner which while simplified, does do a good job in checking out the important bits before further transport. She’s also good at keeping people with high emotions calm…ish, and especially is good at remaining calm and focus in crisis situations. Finally, she is also a bit of an adrenaline junkie and wouldn’t be burnt out on the crazy hours or high drama.
Plus, it would be a way to get back at her parents who are wanting to groom Walky for med-school for her to get a successful career in the medical profession.
I really hope this ends with Sal apologizing to Amber for what she’s done to her. It’d be nice for Sal to get off her high horse and finally show some humility and it might even help Amber heal emotionally. Fingers crossed.
Would Sal even recognize her without it? Amber was hiding for most of the robbery, and she ran up to Sal from behind with the knife. She may have never seen her face at all.
just to clarify that is me referencing the bongo drums that play during that sort of run and not me advising one of these ladies to run while using a slur
… ” and little Sal knows of how with that finger snap, like a magic thunder, she has undone several years of hipnosis therapy. Amber, once more the shy and stuttering little girl now comes out from the deeps of the personality disorder that usurped her body for years long to face her most horrific nightmare once more … “.
I’d wondered if something like this would happen. Whatever Sal thinks of Amazi-Girl, I figured that after years of court involvement, therapists and boarding school, she would not want to leave an unconscious AG to face a similar fate.
Am the only one that feels the law officials gonna have a heck of job piecing everything what have happened together and which more then likely may trigger some unwanted effect for more drama? Ya know, the WHOLE minute of 911 call that was recorded including someone’s windshield that got crushed that need some splaining with a student in a costume doing dangerous things which they feel the need to find out who are?
Well, i guess she seems to been dragged away from a safe distance by sal(as she more then likely would prefer not get involved with the blues again) but if the damage serious enough it need to be medically treated and they gonna ask question how it happen and I’m sure they got a new-flash that some gurl in a costume is missing with damage and she happen to have similar damage pretty close to the date of accident…just sayin….
I was hoping they would pull Ambers costume of and say she was riding with Becky, that’s how’s hurt.
And AG would have just been the mysterious costumed person who disappeared.
They don’t even need to make up stuff that would contradict a lot of other peoples’ stories. These are college students. College students do a lot of stupid shit that gets them hurt merely because they’re still kids. All Sal would really have to do is take Amber to a hospital and just kinda shrug and go “Iunno” when asked what happened.
That doesn’t look like a road in the background; I think Sal and Amber/Amazi-Girl are actually on the creek bank a little ways distant from the bridge — and out of sight of the soon-to-be-arriving cops, so Amazi-Girl’s secret identity is still safe.
For now.
The cops will want to talk to her because she was a witness, and her testimony will be a key part of the prosecutor’s case against Ross. If her friends want to prevent the cops from finding out about Amazi-Girl, they will have to commit obstruction of justice and risk weakening the prosecutor’s case against Ross (because every witness would be lying to police, so every witness’s credibility would be impeached). A bunch of total strangers would have to do that too. In fact, so would Ross! Because they’re going to interview him about what happened and what incentive does he have to not mention the kid in the Halloween costume?
If she really wants Ross to go away forever, she’s going to have to tell them what happened, because someone will tell the cops that she was involved, and her testimony can only help put him away forever. He got out of the car while it was moving and tried to shoot her, that’s a felony in and of itself, on top of the other ones; he would be in prison for decades and he’ll effectively never be able to hurt Becky again. If Amber would rather hide from the cops to preserve her superhero thing, well, then I guess that tells you what Amazi-Girl is all about.
Also what Amazigirl girl is about is providing emotionally overwhelmed Amber a super -competent stereotypically disciplined defense that can safely channel her darker emotions.
He tried to shoot her, that makes her a pretty important witness if they want to charge him with attempted murder. And even if they don’t use her testimony at trial, she’d still be sought out because she was absolutely a central witness to several of the likely charges Ross is about to get. And since the investigation will absolutely want to know what happened to the red car and what caused Ross’s car to crash, it means realistically, she can’t hide. Or, she can, but only if every witness to what she did (including Ross) lies about her involvement…which impeaches their credibility on anything they say, including their testimony as to what Ross did. Short of some ass-pull, she has no way out of this.
Since what she does is illegal, she probably would be charged with a few crimes herself. But that would be tantamount to killing her, as far as this comic goes; she’d have to go away for months of comic-time on end and that means we would essentially never see her again and everyone would be bummed about it. I would expect the DA to just not pursue those charges because they’d be much harder to prove and not really in the DA’s interest. So instead Amber would get off with being told to knock it off and/or being sent to counseling, and either way that would realistically spell the end of Amazi-Girl.
Just because the cops want to talk to her, doesn’t mean they will, or even need to. No one else has to lie about her – they don’t know her identity. Amazi-girl has been in the campus newspaper, so it’s not hard to prove there’s an unidentified, costumed nut running around the campus. Even if they tried to trace Amazi-girl back through Dorothy (and I doubt they’d go to the effort since no one is dead), all Dorothy has to say is she has a “bat signal” and shine her phone light a few times or something. (She could legitimately protect a news source, but the aggravation of having it dragged out in police records and/or court would be trouble for her presidential aspirations, so fibbing about how she contacts Amazi-girl would be the better route; she’s going to have to get used to passing off believable fibs if she wants to be a politician anyway.)
I’m more concerned about the police wanting to talk to Sal, TBH. She’s A) black and B) has a record. Reckless driving is -bare minimum- going to get her stuffed in a cool-down tank while they yank her license and decide if they can trump up anything else to charge her with.
If these kids are smart, Sal and Amazi-girl will high tail it out of there before the cops see them, and Joyce will have the mental wherewithal to play the fundie-when-it’s-convenient card and just tell the cops an “angel” on a motorcycle helped her save Becky and Amazi-girl and Becky will hopefully play along. Ross, the car driver, and the truck driver didn’t see Sal with her helmet off, so they can’t identify her outside the color of her bike and gear, and with the drivers’ minds in crisis mode at that point and Ross likely not seeing much of anything, they’re not going to be able to give a lot of detail outside “blue, and maybe some stripes or something.” Joyce being on the back of the bike was actually a plus in not being able to identify Sal, because they’ll remember seeing a white girl with blonde hair (or was it brown? or maybe tan?) and if Joyce isn’t there when they give their statements, they won’t remember if she was wearing blue or if the motorcycle driver was. They would also remember Ross hanging out of the car with his gun while it was moving if Becky, the cops, or anyone else mentioned it to them. Eyewitness memories, especially in stressful situations that are over quickly, are notoriously bad. https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory/transcript?language=en
The 911 call is enough for them hold Ross on the kidnapping charge, especially if Becky follows up on it and files a formal complaint, and the witnesses at the fountain are enough to slap him with reckless discharge of a firearm. The windshield of the red car and the damage to Ross’s car would need to be sorted out in civil cases if either party decides to pursue it.
This is fairly ridiculous. Of course they’re going to want to talk to Amber about this, because she was a witness and a participant, and so many people saw her that it strains credulity to think that they’re all going to lie for the sake of a total stranger in a Halloween costume (and risk being charged with obstruction of justice). And of course they’ll get to, because they get to do things like issue subpoenas, and the penalty for not heeding subpoenas is contempt of court, and you can ask Kim Davis what happens when you do that. Not to mention, Ross saw her, he knows she was involved, and he has zero incentive to lie about her involvement. And if he keeps mentioning some weird kid in a Halloween costume when nobody else does, that will tip off the police as well, who will likely be wondering where those caltrops came from and how that red car’s windshield got smashed anyway. The point of an investigation is to reconstruct what happened, and any reconstruction of this event that doesn’t include Amazi-Girl leaves enough holes that anyone with two brain cells to rub together will think it important to find out what she did and account for her. Any prosecutor with two brain cells to rub together will want to do the same, to make sure that Amazi-Girl doesn’t involve something that blows the case over.
Not only that, but if the witnesses are all lying about her involvement, then they will damage whatever case there is against Ross. That’s because by lying, they are impeaching their own credibility as witnesses–which means *any* statement they make about *any* part of the case, the jury is free to disbelieve. So anything that relies on witness testimony to nail Ross gets potentially taken off the board, because all his attorney has to do is point out that the witnesses are lying about a significant part of the case, and if they’re lying about that thing, why would you trust anything else they say? Which potentially means Ross gets away with a reduced sentence, or a suspended sentence, or goes free. Which would be a fitting outcome in a comic that is about young people making stupid decisions, I guess.
But if anyone values getting Ross put away forever, they’ll tell the cops what they saw, and that includes Amazi-Girl. It strains credulity to think that, with as much as Amazi-Girl has done in this whole incident, the police would not look into it or a whole bunch of total strangers would lie to make sure she never talks to police.
I’m not sure Sal’s parents thought enough of her to get tangled up in court involvement and pretty sure no therapists were involved.
The parents made a deal to ship her off to a reform school ..er boarding school…and washed their hands of her. They had darling Walky after all.
Also pretty sure Sal is not thinking about leaving AG to face a similar fate because she doesn’t know AG or Amber personally. She is, imo, just being a decent person and not wanting to leave a hurt person laying on the ground.
Apparently Amber recognizes a close up Sal from the store robbery and that is on heck of a reaction.
Somehow, I doubt this will be a ‘healing’ reunion. Hope I’m wrong.
Through work, I have seen the kind of parents who give up on their kids once they get involved with the criminal justice system. For all their failings, Sal’s parents don’t actually seem like they didn’t think enough of her to do their best after the convenience store. The therapists, boarding school…..these are the options caring parents plump for over jail or a juvenile placement.
It’s also the things rich abusive parents opt for in lieu of actually ceasing their abusive behavior or seeing their kid as a full person. It’s very much the model of “oh we’ll just pay someone else to take care of it” (these parents get very upset when the aid organizations they view as the help to “handle” their “problem” child figure out why they’re doing all these unsafe coping strategies in the first place).
In Sal’s case, they probably gave up very early on her and that has clearly gotten worse and worse since her youthful arrest. I mean, just look at the outpouring of love she got on Freshman Family Visit Day:
And that arc is even worse when you realize her mom spent the entire attempt yelling at Walky about meeting his girlfriend and didn’t even acknowledge her presence in the room. Like, at all. No hi, no bye, not even a “oh why aren’t you perfect like my beautiful baby boy”. Literally nothing.
In that very strip that Linda is being cartoonishly shitty, Charles is making an effort to start up a conversation with Sal and seems genuinely disappointed that he will not be spending the afternoon with his daughter. The relationship Sal has with her parents is frought and has it’s problems. But I don’t think they’ve stopped caring.
Also, having had an emotionally abusive parent, I have a really hard time seeing an emotionally abusive parent sending their child away for months or years at a time. How would they be able to be manipulate you and be horrible if you’re not around?
The way I see it, while I think he genuinely was trying to be supportive, the fact he sees as a “your hair is better when its whiter” as a compliment is a huge problem.
A-yup. But his internalized racism is a different problem and it wouldn’t necessarily follow that he would not have cared enough about Sal to try to act in her best interests or have used it as an excuse to get rid of her, as was the allegation of the original poster.
Yeahhhh, no, that doesn’t mean that they care. My parents shipped me off to boarding school (albeit not because I broke the law, they were just sick of me), and after a few incidents (not of a legal nature) the boarding school said “either put this kid in therapy or she can’t go here anymore.” To this day my parents don’t believe in psychology and only sent me to therapy cause the boarding school required me to go or else I’d get kicked out and how would that make my parents look in front of their friends~
It’s pretty sad the the second I saw panel three I went “Hey, cheek-blushies! That’s not Amazi-Girl Sal’s talking to!” without even having to look at the tags. Amber, now I’m starting to buy into your dissociative personality issues for you!
Yeah, as someone with the same condition (DID), it is somewhat painful to watch her make all the mistakes to how to manage that condition (enforcing strict separation of the alters, attempting to separate emotions into one alter or the other, viewing one of the alters as potentially dangerous and thus needing to be “managed”). But then, I did the same sort of things when I was younger and just trying to figure things out on my own.
I think this might be the best moment for this confrontation to happen. At this point, Amber’s body must be way too exhausted for her to be bale to try and beat up Sal again, which means she really has no choice but to use her words.
I just hope the police won’t ruin everything by showing up and arresting the vigilante.
This is the moment, I think, where Sal learns just who she is in Amber O’Malley’s life and just what role she played in the origin of Amazi-Girl. I wonder what she’ll think of the tale?
Sal finally took one of her gloves off. If she takes the other one off and Amber sees the scar… Damn it, Willis, how long are you going to keep baiting this hook?
Amber doesn’t need to see the scar; she knows who Sal is. It’s Sal that hasn’t made the connection that Amber is the person who stabbed her. And as others have suggested, since the attack came from behind (and she then had her eyes tightly closed in pain) Sal may not have ever gotten a good look at her assailant (Amber) before she was bundled off for medical treatment.
So Amber’s going to have to tell Sal herself if the secret is to come out at all. <bTHAT is going to be interesting.
It’s not impossible that
Sal already knows who AG is and also
knows her own relationship to Amber.
It wouldn’t be difficult to figure out because the person Sal would recognize is Ethan.
Sal’s the “person who is actually cool” type:
If revealing that information
wouldn’t help a person in a more than trivial way,
she wouldn’t say, either way.
That being said, “The Gloves” don’t seem to represent her relationship with Amber.
The Gloves and Scar
seem to represent Sal’s desire, effort and failure to please Linda Walkerton so,
if she took them off while Amber, in particular, could see the Scar,
“the show would end.”
All good points, except: Sal already met Ethan. “Ah like tall” (at Joyce’s party) But, Ethan was scrawny when she “met” him before, so she wouldn’t remember him. Ethan was satisfied that the reason she looked familiar was the twin thing. (which blew Danny’s mind, hilariously)
AG can’t be seen by the responders. No matter how serious one person or another is taking her, it’s clear: She’s a costumed vigilante.
AG’s identity has to be kept secret. The day after she’s taken to a hospital as AG, Amber will be arrested for the suspected aggravated assault of Blaine.
At the very least, if someone x-rays her hands and scans her head, they’ll suspect she’s an abuse victim and she’ll be questioned which, again, leads to Blaine because of her name.
I get that Sal doesn’t like authority, but Amazi-Girl nearly got everybody killed.
As for your point about Blaine, does it matter if it eventually came to light that it was his daughter who beat him up, let alone when he had kidnapped and threatened Danny?
Reviewing the evidence shows a different story than Blaine account of it.
They’d care about what they can tell actually happened versus he said happened.
From that perspective, the state can accuse Amber of a felony without his cooperation.
The evidence shows the assault but, does not show an abduction of Danny because Danny enters WcD’s voluntarily.
Also, some states make self-defense really really weird. Here in Florida you can kill someone if you merely feel “threatened” and it’s still self-defense, but in other states if the attacker doesn’t go down in one hit you’re fucked because after one hit it’s no longer self-defense. The victim then becomes the attacker and can thus be charged with assault.
Not that I know the specific rules about self-defense in Indiana. Just saying considering how much damage she did to him the law MIGHT just decide self-defense doesn’t apply despite Blaine’s violent (possibly undocumented?) violent history.
Can any interaction between the two of them objectively be called “self-defense?”
The way I remember the first interaction, Blaine is in the dorm when she enters, he provokes her to anger then, she hit him in full view of (whom I think is) Mr and Mrs Saruyama.
That made me think Mr Saruyama sided with Amber since Dina was not immediately moved.
The second time, I think she hit him after he restrained Danny from speaking. That one, maybe.
Did she keep hitting him after he was down?
———
About self defense:
In the 80’s, I had a friend, “T,” a couple years older, who studied martial arts. Lee was his idle.
He worked nights in a local hospital cafeteria and always traveled on foot or, by bus. One night, he was waiting for a bus, next to a young lady who worked near but, not in the same place as he.
As they were chatting, a kid about 15-ish, jumped out of a car, ran over and pointed a loaded .38 revolver, no safety, at the side of T’s head and screamed: “CHECK IT IN!!! (give me your wallet and purse)”
The chick didn’t have time to react but, T was on automatic.
T’s right hand pushed the kid’s wrist upward, so the gun was no longer pointed at T’s head. The kid fired the gun.
The other hand grabbed the kid by the scrotum and lifted him, not enough to pick him up but, hard enough the kid couldn’t rest on his heels.
“Drop the gun.” T said quietly but, sternly. The kid complied.
“Please, call the police.” The chick ran to a pay phone.
T was ordinarily a VERY meek, shy person. He was KNOWN for being a kitten.
The kid was loaded into an ambulance with injured testicles. After surgery, they sent him home later that week. He was not even detained.
T served 2 of 5 years and was required to register his hands once released.
The chick testified AGAINST T and the ruling read: “Once T had control of Kid’s wrist, T and Chick were no longer in danger…”
Also, that chick needs to go die in a fire. *thumbs up* (and the kid too, but I’d figured that went without saying until I remembered this is the internet)
They figured since the kid couldn’t sit in the police car due to shattered nuts, he’d suffered enough. THAT led to tossing T in the clink for maiming him.
T was NOT the bully the prosecutor made him out to be but, think Kung Fu Joe, he even dressed like that on a regular basis and had a similar voice but, a personality like Mouse in The Matrix.
When he found out the kid may never have children, T wept openly.
Being genuinely ashamed of having used so much force, tearing as he explained to me why he’d been in the clink, it seemed he hadn’t gotten over the whole thing.
I think he’d just gotten out that day, maybe the previous.
To T, “an ass kickin’ would have been more than enough if he gets the point.”
The only thing I told him was that having known him, I understood his action and I suspected he was simply frightened by the gun discharging, a real attempt at murder.
At the end, he seemed like he felt better having talked.
Because Amazi-girl is a costumed vigilante, who while heroic, also threw possibly illegal caltrops on a major highway to intentionally cause a car accident (for a good cause), after participating in reckless endangerment with her stunt behind the car. She also committed an assault on top of that car (again for a good cause), and nearly caused an even bigger accident. I mean, she lucked out and ended up doing exactly what was needed and her heart was in the right place, but those are generally actions law enforcement tend to frown on.
Additionally, any type of official care in her Amazi-girl outfit would spell the end of her superhero identity, which at this point is a critical alter for her function in society and could lead to worse DID-related issues (trying to “shut off” an alter is basically the worst possibly treatment you can do for DID and often leads to more violent disassociations with less communication of events).
Sal probably thinks she is doing her a solid (and is probably right) and already distrusts law enforcement (as an anti-authoritarian black woman with a “reputation” I’m sure she’s had her share of general police harassment in addition to the fallout from her convenience store robbery). Which will probably quickly lead to Sal regretting the decision as Amber tries to re-establish control over the situation.
That’s what’s confusing me: why is Sal doing her a solid? Apart from assaulting her and her friends (and Malaya) over some beer, Sal thinks Amber nearly got everyone killed thirty times over. She should want her to go to jail. If she’s just pulling her aside to make sure she’s still alive that makes sense, since the police and paramedics haven’t arrived yet, but if she’s trying to help her escape then I’m kind of lost.
Because it’s in Sal’s nature. She’s one of those irritatingly nice and heroic people who will act in accord with what she considers to be ‘right’, irrespective of whether or not it is personally convenient to do so.
In this Amazi-girl and Sal are very much the same. Both are suicidally brave. Both have an internal sense of right and wrong. Both have been traumatized and abused by a parent and both have been done wrong by authoritarianism of one stripe or another. Both are night owls and prefer solitude. Both will try and help even if it puts themselves at risk or involves helping someone they don’t particularly like. They are both very take-charge leader type personalities (when Amber is in her Amazi-girl alter).
Their similarities are also what leads them to clash and their key difference (that Sal has given up on the notion of authority or systems to help her whereas Amber has adopted a very strictly legalistic definition of authority for her Amazi-girl alter) does not help that clash be pleasant.
Because she hates the cops more than she hates “Amazo”. Because she begrudgingly respects someone who has been in the news media climbing buildings. Because Amazi-girl just badassedly saved her new roommate who is also the person Joyce got all rebel badass to save. Because Sal is actually a kind person, underneath the rough-and-tumble front and was always going to be the more likely of the two to try and extend an olive branch. Because she really hates cops and thinks they do even less good than Amazi-girl. Because she wanted to get the heck out of there herself because black person at the scene of a place where a shooter has been reported is the worst idea ever. Because she doesn’t believe that jails help anyone and refuses to support that corrupt system even though she thinks Amazi-girl is dangerous.
There’s a lot of reasons that Sal wouldn’t be in mind to stick around and would figure Amazi-girl would appreciate not being around too.
You’ve misunderstood something about Sal: She acts out of high empathy more than once. This isn’t even the second time.
At this point, she appears to be successfully processing issues, having some interesting phrases lately, some quotable.
-“I never met a therapist worth shit…”
Has she seen MULTIPLE therapists, voluntarily?
If you go through the sum of Sal’s agency, she tends to help the person next to her as if to say “I may or may not like you but, I’ll feel bad I see you suffer.”
I think the key word there is “voluntarily”. Multiple therapists? Yes. Voluntarily? ……probably not. I get the impression that Sal doesn’t feel like there’s anything wrong with her behavior, certainly not to the point that she’d seek out professional help to try and fix it, and considering the fact that one of her outlets for her frustration was (poorly planned) armed robbery (and her parents’ solution was apparently BOARDING SCHOOL), I’m betting her therapy was court-ordered. So extra dose of authority issues there.
You’re more likely to get anything from therapy if the premise is “something is wrong with me and I need help” than if the government says “something is wrong with you andyou need help,” ya know?
We agree about some things but, it was the wording that made me suspect there was more than just court-ordered.
She said “not worth shit” which sounds like
“therapy is valuable but, I haven’t met a therapist that led me to it so, I found my own way.”
To me, Sal is self-correcting. I thought David’s joke about her was “in being so unhappy with the therapy she was given, she’s on the way becoming a decent therapist.”
We know Amber’s response and likely thought process here (oh crap, the red flashback panels are going to eat me, run run run, switch alters, fight). But the more interesting for me is how Sal must be interpreting these events.
I mean she doesn’t know Amber is Amazi-girl and even if she did, she’d have no reason to know that Amber was the girl who stabbed her. And even if she did, she’d have no reason to assume that that is taken by Amber to be a central traumatizing moment that led to the birth of an alter due to priming by years of abuse from her father, leading to intense panic attacks whenever she sees Sal.
Which means in Sal’s eyes, she rescued this chick who was harassing her before and now, looking into her eyes, she backpeddles away like she just threatened to shoot her. Which means the most likely explanation Sal is going to come to is that Amazi-girl is some incredibly racist white girl who can’t stand to be in close proximity to her.
I mean, in her interactions with her, she had Amazi-girl hassle her for a petty crime in very similar fashion to how racist police officers hassle black men and women for non-violent offenses and seemed to be especially intent on starting a fight with her and enforcing a really strong authoritarian dogmatism on her. And treating her openly as a criminal, which Sal would have encountered a lot just being a black woman interested in counterculture.
And here, Amazi-girl has just literally fled her presence, risking reinjury at the sight of her, simply because she’s close and touching her shoulder. Maybe she associates that with trauma more given her earlier interactions with Joyce, but it wouldn’t be an out-of-left-field assumption for her to make to link that more with the way black people are treated as inherently dangerous (especially in Indiana) and the way white people will intentionally cross the street to avoid walking past them.
The worst part of all this is that if this is the way that Sal’s brain is thinking (and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think so), then that’s going to lead to some badness when the Amazi-girl alter takes back over to try and interrupt the panic attack. After all, Amazi-girl has been shown to be at her worst with Sal and it’s likely she’ll try and regain a sense of control over the conversation (in order to re-establish her sense of safety) likely by picking a verbal fight with Sal. So I can definitely see Sal having this run and just writing her off as some ungrateful racist who just sees her as a thug.
Or maybe they’ll just have a pleasant conversation and learn to see each other as friends and allies. Or I’m way off base on my assumptions about Sal’s thought process.
Neither Amber nor AG have a memory of Sal saving their life, since she was already drawn with little birdies flying around her head at that point. Her last memory will be falling and facing death – and then she awakens to Sal. We know Sal saved her, but she doesn’t.
Since she passed out and had the little stars around her head, concussion is very likely. She may not even remember what is happening in this strip when she recovers. She also doesn’t know how the whole car chase ended or if Becky is saved. Has no idea why Sal is here or if she is involved.
Like the strip because we really don’t know what will happen next. This could go a lot of ways and DYW has been cagey enough not to tip it off in the preview panels.
This does seem the end of the high Amber’s been on since Dorothy didn’t out her. Botching a rescue and having to be saved by your Joe Chill? Can’t be good for any superhero’s confidence.
If Willis doesn’t draw a full page reference to that Spider-Man cover where Peter throws his costume in the trash I will be greatly disappointed.
hostage actually unharmed
criminal stopped
no collateral damage that cant be afforded
vs
collateral damage
required civilian aid
what could drop it to a c for me is if this is not a reform of sal but a super villain pride moment. but comparing this to what the cops do – i woul want amazi-girl instead of 911
Ship! Ship! SHIP AHOY! All aboard for Slipshine!
There. Had to get that out of my system. Now Danny – mediate between them, since both like you, and let nature take it’s course… while you watch.
Damn it. I had scrolled almost all of the way to the bottom without seeing that. Good for you, though. Especially since you have the right avatar for it.
“Amber is doing it wrong!” they said.
“She is only putting everyone in danger!” they said.
“She should have called 911 and leave the chase to the police, who will handle it professionally”.
Amazi-Girl has the advantage of living in a universe in which physics is optional. That wasn’t apparent until she levitated onto the windscreen of the red car. In reality she’d have gone under the red car’s bumper, not over its hood.
Yeah, normal physics rule rule do not apply and she is defying gravity. Obviously this is not our reality and what works here may be a “Don’t do this at home, kids!”.
It is still sad that in our universe the “obvious” correct solution fails in so many cases and Superman appears to be missing.
Am I the only one kinda hoping that Amazi-girl is outta action? I mean, I can’t think of any time I’ve seen her (Amazigirl, not Amber) that I didn’t think, “There must be a less asshole way to deal with this.”
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Sal has the worst advice
…well, okay, I guess sustaining MORE injuries won’t help with existing injury
of COURSE it changed from the Patreon preview when my desktop dies and I vaguely remember what I was gonna post
What did the Patreon preview say?
don’t fall asleep
which is like feeding a fever and starving a cold
(except I don’t know that feeding a fever is actually bad advice)
Feed a fever and feed a cold. Eat more, you look too skinny, aren’t you chilly? here is a sweater.
Feed a fever and feed a cold. Eat more, you look too skinny, aren’t you chilly? here is a sweater. It’s time to get better.
I thought it was “Feed a cold, starve a yak.” That’s what the Lounge Lizards told me.
Sal was specifically speculating that Amazo had a concussio and that meant she shouldn’t sleep.
That’s actually a myth.
My wife hit her head and went to the hospital recently, the doctor said its ok to fall asleep once you are in the hospital, but not before. I’m not sure if its in the hospital specifically, or just beingi n the process of receiving care. I can see going to sleep after a head injury when noone is helping you to be a bad idea, as you don’t get help that you may need.
As far as I understand it, the doctor probably said that because it was made clear that your wife didn’t have more damage going on than just the concussion. It’s fine to sleep with concussions, as long as there’s no signs of further trauma (like dilated eyes, etc), and being in the hospital meant that she was checked for that and being monitored (I assume?). 🙂
I had a severe concussion when I was ten. The doctor told my parents to wake me up every hour, and to head straight to the Emergency Room if they couldn’t wake me up.
Yes, but it is very dangerous to mistake an other loss of consciousness for sleep. If someone gets a blow to the head and afterwards becomes woozy, then unconscious, that can be a sign of serious intracranial injury. So you check. You try to wake them, you determine whether they can remain awake. If so, okay. If not, check for other neurological signs, and rush the patient to Radiology for images.
There are reasons to say “Wake up! Look at me! Try to stay wake!” that happen not to have anything to do with sleep itself being dangerous. Just as you give patients a little shove on their shoulders to check their balance without wanting to push them over, or you weave from side to side to check that their eyes are tracking without having a clinical reason to dance the shimmy.
so what you do is 1. let the person get to a safe place where consciousness doesn’t matter and 2. call an ambulance so if trauma has occurred it can be attended to
but the “NUUUUUUU YOU MUST STAY AWAKEN” seems a bit putting a bandage on a severed artery
the only “downside” is in this case Amazi-Girl would most likely lose her cover, but having a superhero persona isn’t on the top most suggested list from doctors FOR SOME REASON
Well, I agree that Sal ought to call an ambulance, or at least take Amber to an ER and make up some story about falling off a motorbike, and not attempt amateur triage. But then, I’m one of the fuddy-duddies who thought Joyce ought to call the cops, not Amazi-Girl, and that Amazi-Girl ought not to have engaged in insanely dangerous movie stunts on two moving cars, ….
I’m just saying that the myth that falling asleep is dangerous when you have a brain injury is neither here nor there: there are good reasons to try to wake up an unconscious person when you fear brain injury, and to ask a woozy person to try to stay awake. I think that Sal is doing something that is terribly inadvisable, but acting on the myth that waking up concussed people protects them from injury does not seem to be the problem. There is a reason to say “Wake up Amazo! … Gimme a sign yer melon’s bruised and not mushed” that has nothing to do with believing that myth.
I believe you live in the spaces between time, where Willis hides all the good feels. its an achievement that my phone even loaded the page with 0 comments
She still woke AmaziGirl up, which might not be the absolute best idea.
+1
I only know of one person who woke up in character, and that was Sascha Cohen after drinking himself to sleep in a wine tasting as Borat. I think this is closer to how Batman thinks of himself as “Batman” rather than “Bruce Wayne” (and a level of induced schyzophrenia or at least the beginning of a split personality disorder akin to http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/02-i-was-a-teenage-churchmouse/sheshere/ than http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/03-up-all-night-to-get-vengeance/real/
On the other hand, without tomorrow’s comic we don’t know which personality she woke up as. And I’d say it’s hard to determine if she actually fell unconscious from this strip – instead of just groggy and in a pain only panic can allay.
psst: Willis fixed the dialogue in panel 2.
…and you noticed before my comment went through. (sorry)
Hence the name! =D
What was the original dialogue?
And you will forget all this when I snap my fingers.
“though, uh, also don’t forget that there’s a tree behind you”
That advice just means you don’t need to wake the person up every few hours with a head injury…once they’re checked out they can sleep. This usually means a doc has ruled out a head bleed either via CT or pt history.
It’s still ABSOLUTELY a good call to do that initial assessment after head trauma/LOC to rule out a bleed in the first place.
Basically, “it is OK to sleep following head trauma” is not the same as “don’t be concerned if they lose consciousness immediately following head trauma”.
I just feel like there’s concern (“okay, we’ve ruled out serious trauma, you can rest now”), then there’s paranoia (“DON’T FALL ASLEEP AFTER A CONCUSSION EVER EVER YOU WILL COMA AND NEVER WAKE UP”)
Well, according to the source you have given “[a] person can go to sleep following a concussion if he or she is awake and able to hold a conversation. No other symptoms, such as dilated pupils or trouble walking, should be present before sleeping.” So Sal is perfectly right in checking if Amazi-Girl is awake and can talk and walk and doesn’t have dilated pupils before allowing her to sleep.
Flintstones!
Meet the Flintstones!
They’re the modern stone-age fam-i-ly!
From the the town of Bedrock!
They’re a page right out of history.
Lets ride! With the family down the street!
Through the … courtesy of Fred’s two feet.
Flintstones, meet the Flintstones!
Have a yabba dabba do time.
A dabba-doo time
We’ll have a gay old tiiiiimmmmeeeee
…this is why I love this community
Seconded…
Thirded.
WILLLLMAAAAAA!
It’s the Hanna Barbera bongos, not the Flintstone skedaddle. And it was bongos, not the other B-word that gets masked as “bongo”.
we be kvetching now
Yeah, they used that sound effect on a ton of cartoons, not just the Flintstones.
http://www.soundboard.com/handler/DownLoadTrack.ashx?cliptitle=Scrambling+Feet&filename=nt/NTk5MTQ0Nzk4NTk5MTk2_kZuoJSm1boE.MP3
(I don’t know how to create an elegant link)
http://www.soundboard.com/sb/Hanna_Barbera_sound_effec
(the first one)
Followed quickly by “Fred Drops The Ball” further down…
It would look something like this: Elegant Link
Elegant LinkOK… so that did not work. It is kind of hard to give an example of HTML using this editor.
It worked, though!
Is it okay if I heard the Scooby Doo running sound effect instead?
Same here.
It means Saturday morning cartoons have permanently damaged your mind.
Zoinks!
Hanna-Barbera
Wiiiiiiillllmmaaaa!
Simpson!
Homer Simpson!
He’s the greatest guy in history!
From the town of Springfield
He’s about to hit a chestnut tree!
‘mazing!
She’s amazing!
She’s a modern superhero girl!
Here in… Indiana,
She’s about to go and rock your world!
(that last one was a half-rhyme)
The comic relief is appreciated.
Apparently I am doing it wrong.
And flashback memories.
Well, this is interesting.
Yeah, I can’t wait to know where this is going. I’ve been waiting for them to interact in a non-hostile way for YEARS.
It’s… it’s really been that long, hasn’t it?
I’ve been looking forward to this.
Don’t know if it’s in the plot, but I sure would like it if they developed a grudging respect for each other or even a partnership. Sal seems a little wiser than AmaziGal in this arc. Don’t know if AG is able of willing to taking any of her advice, though!
Amazigirl Lives!
22-skiddo! Amber’s traumatized, how bout’ you!
Gosh, I wonder why she’d backpeddle rapidly from ooooh yeah the convenience store.
“I don’t think there’s been enough drama today, let’s have Amber have to confront one of the people that’s she’s been traumatized by!” – Willis. Probably.
Thank Mercury this strip updates 7 day a week…
Gosh…It’s not like Willis at all to change viewpoints on a cliffhanger to preserve that cliffhanger feeling. Tomorrow’s comic will just be Mike drinking a soda. Because that would be a very Mike thing to do to you.
Amber’s soda.
and leaving Amber’s brand new transformer that she got today superglued into a sexually-suggestive position and holding a nickel
I don’t think there’s a Nickel toy yet.
http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Nickel
Huh. Speaking of which, the tags indicate that it really is Amber’s normal self and not her Amazi-Girl persona waking up right now. So that’d explain the reaction, at least.
She’s just coming to, and the deep emotional fear response from recognizing Sal clicked before she could get back into character.
Well yeah. You can tell by the rosy cheeks 🙂
ERROR: SAL. AMBER DOES NOT COMPUTE.
Fight or Flight reflex, anyone?
(And I’d quote a song from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic but I’m sure nobody wants it.)
And another thing I want to quote but cannot is the Saint’s chant/warning to Dr. Reid from the “Corazon” episode of Criminal Minds.
Eggun buruku ni ki ori baje ni iche paraldo tete tete!
http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=criminal-minds&episode=s06e12
Reid met Simon Templar?
Remember where you are? The majority of people just don’t care, and most of the rest are fans.
I’m not sure why you cannot quote Criminal Minds.
Yeah, i know, ain’t that weird, each episode pretty much provide TWO(2) already pre-quoted lines of great values, hmmm, when i think about it, by the numbers of episodes it got i guess it can a little many to remember:-P
When I was a little filly and the sun was going doooooown… https://youtu.be/Gz7YMspaCPQ
Please please let this be a humorous and healing arc between Sal and Dorothy. Please
OK I’m up too late. Obviously I meant Amber not Dorothy.
Well, it was sort of a plot point that they look similar. Danny has a “type”.
He wants his braaaaaaaaaaaains shaken, not stirred.
You mean Dorothy isn’t Amazigirl?
Silly amber. Thee Wheel o’ Feet is an advanced maneuver, and should not be attempted backwards from a sitting position.
feels like looney tunes, smells like making things square
Four out of five doctors say don’t hit your head any more.
…lest you end up melon-choly. 😀
And the fifth doctor is Dr. Phil.
I’m pretty sure the Fifth Doctor is Peter Davison.
*point*
Dr Phil: I’m sure hitting your head again is fine!
Dr Davison: Really? Have YOU hit YOUR head?
Actually, Doctor Davidson would probably do something with his sonic screwdriver.
And then offer a comforting/encouraging “Brave heart, (name).”
Followed with an eyeroll and a look of absolute disdain.
THE GLOVES ARE COMING OFF
I wonder what delicious puns I can make about this.
…
…
…schist.
ya gotta hand it to Sal, she knows how to snap to it and ohIdon’tknowwhereIwasgoingwiththat
Well the knife scar would be on the right hand, so I guess it would be handy to remember such things when taking off gloves…
Good thing that Sal, as a lefty, would default to snapping with her left hand, then.
The mittens of disapproval are coming on.
Give her a break, Sal. She woke up as the wrong person.
+1 🙂
I just noticed the tags. 404: Amazi Girl not found.
Heh.
Amazi-Girl remembers Sal, but Sal doesn’t remember Amber.
Dunno, kinda hard to forget the girl who stabbed your hand.
Waking up to find her second greatest trauma trigger staring her in the face probably isn’t helpful to her mental health either.
So we just need Blaine come by and hit it off with Sal to make the day perfect?
Ahhhh Crack pairing! CANNOT UNSEE
Sals. Why’s it always gotta be Sals?
“second greatest trauma trigger”
“… but for me… it was Tuesday.”
(bother, I forgot that’s auto-blocked here. :p)
Wakin’ up to a nightmare
I should be in bed but NOOO I’m waiting for a webcomic to update… augh…
And now we cut to another dangerous situation, but just a little less so. I wonder if Sal will finally learn how her and Amazi-girl are linked?
Also shame on Sal for not being badass enough to be able to snap her fingers while wearing gloves! BoukenRed could do it!
Oooh, Sal has removed a glove to snap!
Time for a heartfelt talk.
I misread this as “time for a heart attack” at first and honestly feel that’s more likely.
Could it be? The elusive “Holy Grail” first comment?
Naa, unlikely.
Looks like we’re gonna have some 1 on 1 time between Sal & Amazigirl. No, wait, it’s Amber that’s tagged. Interesting. not surprising, she is just waking up from being flung around like a doll by G forces…
You meatsacks can be squishy, can’t ya…?
PROTIP: when you say, “am I first?” you aren’t
Yeah, kinda figured it’d be something like that. That’s why there’s also the “Naa, unlikely” bit. Still, for 1 glorious moment, it seemed possible…
“One comment to rule them all.”(sorry)
Oh snap
A Flintstones Skidaddle in panel 4, and a Quick Draw McGraw “KaBOOOOOONNNNNGGG” between 4 and 5.
No, he wasn’t Quickdraw then, he was “El Kabong!” Kinda like Amber isn’t Amazigirl.
Yes, but “Quick Draw McGraw” is the name of the show too, same as “Flintstones”. Plus, saying “El Kabong ‘KaBOOOONNNNNGGG'” sounds redundant.
Sounds redundant redundant.
The redundant sound sounds redundant.
I’ll do the kabonginnnnnn’ around here! And don’t you disremember it!
Waking up to your worst nightmare…..which really isn’t one.
Kind of like an Unconscious Batman wakes up to find the Joker looking at him, but with a look of concern.
Amber, Sal isn’t your Joker anymore.
Okay, also for Slipshine speculation, we see this panel
http://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/132698797207/a-small-snippet-of-page-3-of-my-next-slipshine
And a lot of people are guessing Joe but compare the colour of chest hair to previous shirtless Joe, I’m going to bet it’s Joe’s dad.
The Conception of Becky: Act I
Joe’s dad (Richard) and Amber’s mom (Stacy).
Here’s the set-up: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/mister/
Note the color of the sleeve in the Slipshine preview and compare it to the outfit Stacy was wearing.
That’s a completely different shade of blue!
They’re different shades of blue? the slipshine blue is more akin to AMBER’s coat than to stacy’s coat.
It’s close enough for a comic strip. Maybe Willis couldn’t remember the exact Pantone number he used originally and just eyeballed it?
exactly what i thought of with that hand lol
It cannot be the Family Weekend encounter. For one thing, on the cover page, Dorothy is up and walking around (to me it looks like she’s coming back from a run) wearing her Kraft shirt. On Family weekend she had fallen asleep over her books the night before and only woke up when her parents were at her door, and she wasn’t wearing that shirt.
Plus, Willis has said that it’s based on events that haven’t happened in-comic yet.
Compare the time I made my guess/prediction with the time Willis posted that on his Tumblr.
Jim & Sayid seem to be prominent so far. Maybe it’s them?
Wait, that would be Bryan and Sayid. Jim’s the other guy.
Methinks you are correct.
Toedad and Blaine. CONSENSUAL.
(Yes, I know. I’m evil.)
Ahhh! My eyes!!
I’m sure Blaine needs a new pawn for his schemes.
Or, there’s the boring option; Danny and Ethan.
I don’t think Danny’s interested in cheating on Amber.
Sex dream.
That seems like it’d be a gigantic cop out. Besides that, Willis’ slipshines have always been positive, affirming moments between two lovers. Danny having a wet dream and waking up sexually frustrated and humiliated doesn’t seem to fit in that.
Cop out or not, there’s significant number of readers who would enjoy seeing it.
And who says it’s Danny’s wet dream or that anyone has to be humiliated? Kind of a buzz kill there, dude.
Danny’s been established to resent his attraction to Ethan because he thinks it’s going to make him cheat on Amber. We know that, right now, it’s something he wants to put walls up against, which is why he’s insisting that Ethan needs a boyfriend. What’s sex positive about a scared bi dude being embarrassed about his sexual feelings?
Can it just not wait until they’ve actually gotten together? You know it’s going to happen.
Eh, I wouldn’t have assumed it was Danny’s dream or even that it slotted in at this point in the plot.
But then I checked all the info on tumblr that went up after I last checked.
And as for that part about readers enjoying it; Danny’s sexuality exists for more than just reader titillation. He’s bisexual because that’s who he is, not just so he can kiss hunky boys because omgsohawt.
Let me restate: regardless of whether the sex scene were presented as occurring within the context of a dream sequence, cannon, or a play within a play – there are a lot of readers who would subscribe to Slipshine and not feel to much concern about whether or not it’s a cop-out within cannon.
While I’m sure there are readers who just like to see boys kissing – I mostly feel that the popularity would come from an investment in the characters and wanting to see that happen because they’d be good for each other.
Except they’re not together yet and won’t be for a while, maybe even years, and they have other stuff to work out. We can hold off for now. Danny can do other things than boff Ethan.
What investment can there be in a relationship that’s mostly been Danny being uncomfortable being attracted to Ethan?
@JQuire
Sex scene and cannon == “DOES NOT COMPUTE”!
Please tell me you intended to write canon – because …
there’s a difference!
@Amazistool
Doesn’t everyone use a cannon? -_-
Let’s blame this on having had a wisdom tooth out today.
@ Spencer
That’s a summation of the relationship which is very tightly focused on Danny being uncomfortable with his sexuality. Yes, Danny has been uncomfortably attracted to Ethan – and spent a lot of time overcompensating for it. But there’s been a good deal of Danny and Ethan spending time together and just clicking with one another. Ethan seems to enjoy their time together and his visual cues could be read as displaying an attraction to Danny as well. And then there’s this: We mostly see Ethan with Joyce and Amber. But with them, Ethan takes on a caretaker role that doesn’t exist when with Danny. He gets to relax a little bit and actually sees Danny as someone who lightens the load (although that is because of their relationship with Amber). That opens up his character development a bit.
Though, when it comes down to it, I don’t feel that investment or what one wishes to see happen is or should be strictly bound by where the plot is right now. But we disagree on that I think.
I understand the logic behind it (and what you said about Danny being someone Ethan can just be himself with instead of trying to be a caretaker is completely true), but I don’t think any actual romance is something that should happen any time soon. What’s more important than Ethan having a boyfriend is Danny figuring out what being bi means to him, and how he should deal with it. Dating a dude is secondary, if that.
As for your latter paragraph, well, that’s not what I said. There’s a difference between “I want them together” and “I want Danny to immediately bang Ethan even though he’s already with someone else and has major romantic hang-ups.”
That’s not what you said, but your position is very solidly based on where the characters are now/the pace which you see things going. Because you’re approaching it as “I want Danny to immediately bang Ethan even though he’s already with someone else and has major romantic hang-ups,” rather than “I want to see Danny and Ethan bang… maybe a dream sequence so it doesn’t cock up the character development?”
What would a sex dream accomplish though?
It wouldn’t mean anything to either character, wouldn’t follow the rest of the slipshines in how they’ve all been about actual intimacy between couples, if it weren’t Danny or Ethan dreaming it than it would be even more irrelevant, I can’t imagine Ethan even considering eyeing his best friend’s boyfriend, and if it were Danny then we already know it’d be something he wouldn’t want at this point in time because right now he’s all “oh no hes hot im going to cheat.”
Maybe I’m being presumptuous, but I saw Willis’ intent with the slipshines to be about exploring a healthy, positive, intimate moment in a relationship (like how Billie and Ruth only ever got one over a year after they initially got together, because when they did they were in the throes of suicidal, alcoholic depression) and I can’t see where an irrelevant sex dream that serves nothing for either character fits into that.
Wouldn’t a slipshine between the two mean way, way more if there was actual emotional weight behind it?
I can think of a few ways to work a sex dream into the narrative in a meaningful way, though I doubt they’d reach your requirement that they be without problematic implications. For instance, Amber has a history of having sex dreams involving two men and ‘writing fanfiction in her head’ which involve two men being intimate….Amber has a sex dream and then we have a segue into her and Danny exploring what his bisexuality means in the context of the relationship.
The only thing I can recall Willis saying about the Slipshines is that they would be between characters that would conceivably shtup. As for “exploring a healthy, positive, intimate moment in a relationship” …. I should first say that I have not read the pornographiques and can only speak from context…. but I don’t buy it. “Head of the Class” is Sal and Jason, who are not truly in a relationship, and kinda hate each other. Nothing wrong with casual sex, but a sexual relationship between a student and a TA is not unproblematic. Jason and Sal both explicitly acknowledge that their sexual relationship is “unethical in a staggering number of ways”. And wasn’t “Mask or No Mask” is set dead on the heals of Danny having a sex dream involving Ethan? And the whole you’re dating AmaziGirl vs. Amber thing ….
He said it doesn’t involve Ethan on tumblr.
Hey, I must’ve missed that preview.
I don’t regret unsubbing from Slipshine, because I’m not paying to see Joe have sex with anyone. (No offense meant to Willis and his work. I liked his other Slipshine comics, but I just can’t stand Joe and don’t want to see him in any more comics than I have to.)
Will the truth finally come out of the secret connection between Sal and AmaziGirl? Or will Willis set this secret aside to be revealed another year? Find out tomorrow, same AmaziTime, same AmaziWebSite!
…and only about 5 minutes later, continuity-wise.
we find out in 2018, willis’ kid graduates uni before they reconcile
Oh Amber, your head is so messed up and I’m not talking about your head wounds.
Gotta take off yo glove to snap properly.
Lucky lucky the scar is on the other hand.
Panel 3.
I ship it.
Can you go to any webcomic page and say:
“Panel x.
I ship it.”
and it always work?
In a Willis comic, that happens surprisingly often.
THANK YOU.
I was going to post “now kiss!” But then I forgot to because I got distracted and now it’s 12 hours too late.
This is going to be interesting.
Yes but, then, you wonder: Why did their cars make that Chysler V8 noise if they’re foot powered…?
Was asking the same thing. If they use their feet to move the car, why does it make sounds like an engine powered one?
They keep a small dinosaur in the engine compartment to make the appropriate sounds.
“It’s a living.”
I see some people remember the Flintstones shows from the late ’70s and early ’80s where Fred had a helper dinosaur in the back. That was the only way they could do a show about the gas crunch and Arab oil embargo. The CB craze show was just Stoopid.
I can remember a few elements before cartoons became “role model conscious.”
-It was a huge deal when Wilma announced she was pregnant because that meant ‘cartoon characters have sex.’
-Barney made subtle sex jokes as he and Betty were trying for children and having trouble so, they went to a physician who told them she couldn’t which triggered her extended depression.
When a baby wandered into their yard, Barney took the baby into their house and hid him. Betty refused to return him to the Stork, who was actively trying to reacquire the baby.
Essentially, Bamb-Bamb was abducted due to being handed to the wrong woman, right after delivery. No one corrected it.
-As Fred sat in their living room, he smoked. Pebbles would play on the floor, nearby.
Man, if Billie could see this.
Oh right, Billie still thinks Sal is Amazi Girl. She’s going to be very confused if they both end up in the news.
Please don’t let Dina be dead in the woods!!!
Dina is not dead in the woods, for lots of obvious reasons.
Just give her a change of clothes and take her to the hospital. Jesus. Just say she fell and her her head.
Don’t even need a change of clothes. Amazi-Girl wears her Amazi-Suit® over her street clothes.
Yep, and they can tell the ER that Amber suffered her injuries taking a spill off a motorbike, which is at least as plausible as half the shit ER staff get told, and enough to head off any compulsory reporting requirements.
So, Amber wakes up to find herself face to face with Sal. I’m quite curious to see how this will play out.
slipshine
… Oh…yeah, my brain just melted. 🙂
An amused, ‘Nevah gonnuh happen, but…’ +1 to this.
Apparently you are reading more banging into that “thunk” than I did. I have to admit that Amber puts herself into position in panel 4.
**slowclap**
And now I can’t unsee it.
Sal should do something horrible just to screw with fans. 🙂
Some fans wouldn’t mind if Sal screwed with them.
This was a nice tone shift from the high paced action. Thank you Willis.
Noticing 2 things here that are pretty minor but pretty significant:
1) The tags say Amber instead of Amazi-Girl.
2) Sal has one of her gloves off. Not the glove covering her scar (which is on her right hand, if memory serves), and it may have just been to make snapping her fingers easier, but it;s still pretty significant given how rarely we see them come off.
It was the right hand that got stabbed — and I think it is the group consensus (although I’m not sure if Willis ever confirmed it) that Sal is actually left-handed.
Even if Sal is right handed she probably ended up using her left hand a lot in the immediate period after she was stabbed in the right hand.
I have known several people in meatspace who are right prime ambidextrous and left prime ambidextrous for similar reasons… usually broken hands rather than stab wounds though.
During the hold-up Sal was brandishing the knife in her left hand. Also here and here. So I’m of the opinion that she was left-handed to start with.
I’m strongly right-handed, but I still find it easier to snap my fingers with my left than my right. It may just be practice, but it can totally work that way.
I’m right-handed but I routinely hold my drink in my left.
I think Sal would be a great doctor. She’s already got the basics down, like “Don’t hit your head on things” and “Make sure the brain is not mashed”.
“Doctor, it hurts when I do this.”
“Don’t do it then.”
“Doctor! My arm hurts in two places!”
“Well, stay out of those places!”
Hah, nice. Is that from you, or is it a quote?
Bill and I are quoting old vaudeville jokes. Also used on old teevee skits.
“Doctor! When I touch my head, it hurts. When I touch my elbow, it hurts. When I touch my leg, it hurts. What do you think?”
“Well, I think you’ve broken your finger.”
LOL…that one I haven’t heard before.
Psychic Tanya, everybody.
“Doctor! Every time I drink my coffee I get a terrible, stabbing pain in my right eye!”
“Take the spoon out then!”
Still much better than the TF2 medic.
Amazi-Girl could really use an Uber now, though.
Joyce could have really used a kritzkreig…
I was thinking “Doctor Who” Doctor, and I never knew I needed this so much.
“‘Ey, Amazi-Girl… All o’ time and space? Ah got me a TARDIS, ya know. Ah’ll have ya back before class. Wanna go?”
This needs to happen!
No joke, but I actually think she would make a great EMT. She’s great at trauma response and de-escalation after a crisis. She probably already has a lot of first aid for minor injuries knowledge just growing up with Marcie and here we see that she has a good bedside manner which while simplified, does do a good job in checking out the important bits before further transport. She’s also good at keeping people with high emotions calm…ish, and especially is good at remaining calm and focus in crisis situations. Finally, she is also a bit of an adrenaline junkie and wouldn’t be burnt out on the crazy hours or high drama.
Plus, it would be a way to get back at her parents who are wanting to groom Walky for med-school for her to get a successful career in the medical profession.
An EMT’s not a real doctor though, so I doubt Mommy would be at all impressed. “I suppose that’s the best you can do…”
Not insulting EMTs, just considering how Linda would look at it.
I really hope this ends with Sal apologizing to Amber for what she’s done to her. It’d be nice for Sal to get off her high horse and finally show some humility and it might even help Amber heal emotionally. Fingers crossed.
That would require Amazi-Girl to take off the mask in front of her archnemesis! That doesn’t seem likely at this juncture.
It would also require Sal to connect Amber to the crime scene. Sal just thinks Amber is “Weird” and Amazi-Girl is crazy. Not the same people.
Would Sal even recognize her without it? Amber was hiding for most of the robbery, and she ran up to Sal from behind with the knife. She may have never seen her face at all.
She’s seen Amber around and hasn’t recognized her, so I doubt it.
BONGO RUN
just to clarify that is me referencing the bongo drums that play during that sort of run and not me advising one of these ladies to run while using a slur
Welp moral crisis for AG in 3… 2… 1…
Well, as some people said above in the comments, that’s currently Amber who is afraid of Sal.
… ” and little Sal knows of how with that finger snap, like a magic thunder, she has undone several years of hipnosis therapy. Amber, once more the shy and stuttering little girl now comes out from the deeps of the personality disorder that usurped her body for years long to face her most horrific nightmare once more … “.
I wish hypnotism worked like that
The most amusing I’ve done was making it so a guy put his shoes in a freezer and forgot about them
That was a fun day
Wait, really? You did that? Was he impaired in any other way, and can I learn to do silly pranks like that too?
I’d wondered if something like this would happen. Whatever Sal thinks of Amazi-Girl, I figured that after years of court involvement, therapists and boarding school, she would not want to leave an unconscious AG to face a similar fate.
Aaah Sal, you’re not supposed to get so close to the wild animal until it trusts you.
(also that’s the first time we see her without a glove, isn’t it.)
Except in pre-hand-stabbing flashbacks.
She actually took off her gloves once before, during Family Weekend.
And she still kept her right hand hidden behind back even then.
Oh, right, there was that.
Technically No. We see Sal without her gloves the day after Joyce’s ‘Incident’. Though this was before Willis revealed the hand-stabby.
She also doesnt have her gloves on when her parents visit but I do note she takes efforts to hide her right hand behind her back….
Am the only one that feels the law officials gonna have a heck of job piecing everything what have happened together and which more then likely may trigger some unwanted effect for more drama? Ya know, the WHOLE minute of 911 call that was recorded including someone’s windshield that got crushed that need some splaining with a student in a costume doing dangerous things which they feel the need to find out who are?
Well, i guess she seems to been dragged away from a safe distance by sal(as she more then likely would prefer not get involved with the blues again) but if the damage serious enough it need to be medically treated and they gonna ask question how it happen and I’m sure they got a new-flash that some gurl in a costume is missing with damage and she happen to have similar damage pretty close to the date of accident…just sayin….
I was hoping they would pull Ambers costume of and say she was riding with Becky, that’s how’s hurt.
And AG would have just been the mysterious costumed person who disappeared.
They don’t even need to make up stuff that would contradict a lot of other peoples’ stories. These are college students. College students do a lot of stupid shit that gets them hurt merely because they’re still kids. All Sal would really have to do is take Amber to a hospital and just kinda shrug and go “Iunno” when asked what happened.
Seems falling down stairs is an easy thing to do. People get some nasty bumps & bruises like that…
That doesn’t look like a road in the background; I think Sal and Amber/Amazi-Girl are actually on the creek bank a little ways distant from the bridge — and out of sight of the soon-to-be-arriving cops, so Amazi-Girl’s secret identity is still safe.
For now.
The cops will want to talk to her because she was a witness, and her testimony will be a key part of the prosecutor’s case against Ross. If her friends want to prevent the cops from finding out about Amazi-Girl, they will have to commit obstruction of justice and risk weakening the prosecutor’s case against Ross (because every witness would be lying to police, so every witness’s credibility would be impeached). A bunch of total strangers would have to do that too. In fact, so would Ross! Because they’re going to interview him about what happened and what incentive does he have to not mention the kid in the Halloween costume?
If she really wants Ross to go away forever, she’s going to have to tell them what happened, because someone will tell the cops that she was involved, and her testimony can only help put him away forever. He got out of the car while it was moving and tried to shoot her, that’s a felony in and of itself, on top of the other ones; he would be in prison for decades and he’ll effectively never be able to hurt Becky again. If Amber would rather hide from the cops to preserve her superhero thing, well, then I guess that tells you what Amazi-Girl is all about.
“her testimony will be a key part of the prosecutor’s case ”
Only against herself
I think in the real world Amazigirl would get charged for reckless endangerment, plus a lot of crimes of assault.
Amazigirl isnt necessary as a witness what Ross did.
Joyce and Becky are enough plus every other driver, and all the kids around the fountain.
Also what Amazigirl girl is about is providing emotionally overwhelmed Amber a super -competent stereotypically disciplined defense that can safely channel her darker emotions.
He tried to shoot her, that makes her a pretty important witness if they want to charge him with attempted murder. And even if they don’t use her testimony at trial, she’d still be sought out because she was absolutely a central witness to several of the likely charges Ross is about to get. And since the investigation will absolutely want to know what happened to the red car and what caused Ross’s car to crash, it means realistically, she can’t hide. Or, she can, but only if every witness to what she did (including Ross) lies about her involvement…which impeaches their credibility on anything they say, including their testimony as to what Ross did. Short of some ass-pull, she has no way out of this.
Since what she does is illegal, she probably would be charged with a few crimes herself. But that would be tantamount to killing her, as far as this comic goes; she’d have to go away for months of comic-time on end and that means we would essentially never see her again and everyone would be bummed about it. I would expect the DA to just not pursue those charges because they’d be much harder to prove and not really in the DA’s interest. So instead Amber would get off with being told to knock it off and/or being sent to counseling, and either way that would realistically spell the end of Amazi-Girl.
Just because the cops want to talk to her, doesn’t mean they will, or even need to. No one else has to lie about her – they don’t know her identity. Amazi-girl has been in the campus newspaper, so it’s not hard to prove there’s an unidentified, costumed nut running around the campus. Even if they tried to trace Amazi-girl back through Dorothy (and I doubt they’d go to the effort since no one is dead), all Dorothy has to say is she has a “bat signal” and shine her phone light a few times or something. (She could legitimately protect a news source, but the aggravation of having it dragged out in police records and/or court would be trouble for her presidential aspirations, so fibbing about how she contacts Amazi-girl would be the better route; she’s going to have to get used to passing off believable fibs if she wants to be a politician anyway.)
I’m more concerned about the police wanting to talk to Sal, TBH. She’s A) black and B) has a record. Reckless driving is -bare minimum- going to get her stuffed in a cool-down tank while they yank her license and decide if they can trump up anything else to charge her with.
If these kids are smart, Sal and Amazi-girl will high tail it out of there before the cops see them, and Joyce will have the mental wherewithal to play the fundie-when-it’s-convenient card and just tell the cops an “angel” on a motorcycle helped her save Becky and Amazi-girl and Becky will hopefully play along. Ross, the car driver, and the truck driver didn’t see Sal with her helmet off, so they can’t identify her outside the color of her bike and gear, and with the drivers’ minds in crisis mode at that point and Ross likely not seeing much of anything, they’re not going to be able to give a lot of detail outside “blue, and maybe some stripes or something.” Joyce being on the back of the bike was actually a plus in not being able to identify Sal, because they’ll remember seeing a white girl with blonde hair (or was it brown? or maybe tan?) and if Joyce isn’t there when they give their statements, they won’t remember if she was wearing blue or if the motorcycle driver was. They would also remember Ross hanging out of the car with his gun while it was moving if Becky, the cops, or anyone else mentioned it to them. Eyewitness memories, especially in stressful situations that are over quickly, are notoriously bad. https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory/transcript?language=en
The 911 call is enough for them hold Ross on the kidnapping charge, especially if Becky follows up on it and files a formal complaint, and the witnesses at the fountain are enough to slap him with reckless discharge of a firearm. The windshield of the red car and the damage to Ross’s car would need to be sorted out in civil cases if either party decides to pursue it.
Do long-distance truckers commonly have dashcam in the USA?
This is fairly ridiculous. Of course they’re going to want to talk to Amber about this, because she was a witness and a participant, and so many people saw her that it strains credulity to think that they’re all going to lie for the sake of a total stranger in a Halloween costume (and risk being charged with obstruction of justice). And of course they’ll get to, because they get to do things like issue subpoenas, and the penalty for not heeding subpoenas is contempt of court, and you can ask Kim Davis what happens when you do that. Not to mention, Ross saw her, he knows she was involved, and he has zero incentive to lie about her involvement. And if he keeps mentioning some weird kid in a Halloween costume when nobody else does, that will tip off the police as well, who will likely be wondering where those caltrops came from and how that red car’s windshield got smashed anyway. The point of an investigation is to reconstruct what happened, and any reconstruction of this event that doesn’t include Amazi-Girl leaves enough holes that anyone with two brain cells to rub together will think it important to find out what she did and account for her. Any prosecutor with two brain cells to rub together will want to do the same, to make sure that Amazi-Girl doesn’t involve something that blows the case over.
Not only that, but if the witnesses are all lying about her involvement, then they will damage whatever case there is against Ross. That’s because by lying, they are impeaching their own credibility as witnesses–which means *any* statement they make about *any* part of the case, the jury is free to disbelieve. So anything that relies on witness testimony to nail Ross gets potentially taken off the board, because all his attorney has to do is point out that the witnesses are lying about a significant part of the case, and if they’re lying about that thing, why would you trust anything else they say? Which potentially means Ross gets away with a reduced sentence, or a suspended sentence, or goes free. Which would be a fitting outcome in a comic that is about young people making stupid decisions, I guess.
But if anyone values getting Ross put away forever, they’ll tell the cops what they saw, and that includes Amazi-Girl. It strains credulity to think that, with as much as Amazi-Girl has done in this whole incident, the police would not look into it or a whole bunch of total strangers would lie to make sure she never talks to police.
I’m not sure Sal’s parents thought enough of her to get tangled up in court involvement and pretty sure no therapists were involved.
The parents made a deal to ship her off to a reform school ..er boarding school…and washed their hands of her. They had darling Walky after all.
Also pretty sure Sal is not thinking about leaving AG to face a similar fate because she doesn’t know AG or Amber personally. She is, imo, just being a decent person and not wanting to leave a hurt person laying on the ground.
Apparently Amber recognizes a close up Sal from the store robbery and that is on heck of a reaction.
Somehow, I doubt this will be a ‘healing’ reunion. Hope I’m wrong.
Sal mentioned to Joyce about having seen many different therapists, after robbing a convenience store at 13.
Through work, I have seen the kind of parents who give up on their kids once they get involved with the criminal justice system. For all their failings, Sal’s parents don’t actually seem like they didn’t think enough of her to do their best after the convenience store. The therapists, boarding school…..these are the options caring parents plump for over jail or a juvenile placement.
It’s also the things rich abusive parents opt for in lieu of actually ceasing their abusive behavior or seeing their kid as a full person. It’s very much the model of “oh we’ll just pay someone else to take care of it” (these parents get very upset when the aid organizations they view as the help to “handle” their “problem” child figure out why they’re doing all these unsafe coping strategies in the first place).
In Sal’s case, they probably gave up very early on her and that has clearly gotten worse and worse since her youthful arrest. I mean, just look at the outpouring of love she got on Freshman Family Visit Day:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/appointment/
And that arc is even worse when you realize her mom spent the entire attempt yelling at Walky about meeting his girlfriend and didn’t even acknowledge her presence in the room. Like, at all. No hi, no bye, not even a “oh why aren’t you perfect like my beautiful baby boy”. Literally nothing.
In that very strip that Linda is being cartoonishly shitty, Charles is making an effort to start up a conversation with Sal and seems genuinely disappointed that he will not be spending the afternoon with his daughter. The relationship Sal has with her parents is frought and has it’s problems. But I don’t think they’ve stopped caring.
Also, having had an emotionally abusive parent, I have a really hard time seeing an emotionally abusive parent sending their child away for months or years at a time. How would they be able to be manipulate you and be horrible if you’re not around?
I’m less inclined to stand up for Charles when the second thing out of his mouth is a passive aggressive comment about Sal’s hair.
Mm, I read it as making stupid comment in attempt to make awkward conversation….but I can see how you’d read it as passive aggressive.
The way I see it, while I think he genuinely was trying to be supportive, the fact he sees as a “your hair is better when its whiter” as a compliment is a huge problem.
Oh yes.
A-yup. But his internalized racism is a different problem and it wouldn’t necessarily follow that he would not have cared enough about Sal to try to act in her best interests or have used it as an excuse to get rid of her, as was the allegation of the original poster.
Yeahhhh, no, that doesn’t mean that they care. My parents shipped me off to boarding school (albeit not because I broke the law, they were just sick of me), and after a few incidents (not of a legal nature) the boarding school said “either put this kid in therapy or she can’t go here anymore.” To this day my parents don’t believe in psychology and only sent me to therapy cause the boarding school required me to go or else I’d get kicked out and how would that make my parents look in front of their friends~
Holy crap! Sal’s not wearing a glove!
It’s pretty sad the the second I saw panel three I went “Hey, cheek-blushies! That’s not Amazi-Girl Sal’s talking to!” without even having to look at the tags. Amber, now I’m starting to buy into your dissociative personality issues for you!
Yeah, as someone with the same condition (DID), it is somewhat painful to watch her make all the mistakes to how to manage that condition (enforcing strict separation of the alters, attempting to separate emotions into one alter or the other, viewing one of the alters as potentially dangerous and thus needing to be “managed”). But then, I did the same sort of things when I was younger and just trying to figure things out on my own.
Hard to snap your fingers while wearing gloves.
Where’s Dina?
Dina is extinct.
I saw no asteroid.
No exploding space freighters either.
I get it!
I was kind of expecting there to be scars on Sal’s hands from what Amber did and that that was why she always wears the gloves.
She only took off one glove…
There are and it is. But she only got stabbed in the one hand.
Cue the ‘Kill Bill’ siren music…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOy6hqzfsAs
This was NOT how Amber expected the situation to unfold.
no no, see, everyone knows that the best way to fix a concussion/head trauma is to get another one to reverse the damage.*
*that was a joke, please don’t do this.
Goes with the sound effect(s).
Took me a second to remember why she was doing that.
Ruh-roh
Well now I can’t STOP hearing the skedaddle effects in my head DAMN YOU WILLIS
Hah! “Moe, Larry, cheese! Woop, woop woop!”
The first one!
http://www.soundboard.com/sb/Hanna_Barbera_sound_effec
I think this might be the best moment for this confrontation to happen. At this point, Amber’s body must be way too exhausted for her to be bale to try and beat up Sal again, which means she really has no choice but to use her words.
I just hope the police won’t ruin everything by showing up and arresting the vigilante.
Amazi-Girl confronts her enemy, and it is herself!
The gloves are OFF!!!
Well, one of them, anyways….
Amazi-Girl is acting like a scared cat who didn’t realize you were looking at them.
This is the moment, I think, where Sal learns just who she is in Amber O’Malley’s life and just what role she played in the origin of Amazi-Girl. I wonder what she’ll think of the tale?
‘That girl’s more fucked up than I thought.’
Sal finally took one of her gloves off. If she takes the other one off and Amber sees the scar… Damn it, Willis, how long are you going to keep baiting this hook?
BTW, best alt text ever.
That scar is private. She won’t take off that glove until she realises who Amber is and her role in her past, IMO.
Amber doesn’t need to see the scar; she knows who Sal is. It’s Sal that hasn’t made the connection that Amber is the person who stabbed her. And as others have suggested, since the attack came from behind (and she then had her eyes tightly closed in pain) Sal may not have ever gotten a good look at her assailant (Amber) before she was bundled off for medical treatment.
So Amber’s going to have to tell Sal herself if the secret is to come out at all. <bTHAT is going to be interesting.
> So Amber’s going to have to tell Sal herself if the secret is to come out at all. <bTHAT is going to be interesting.
And the sound effect for that will be
KABONG!
http://www.soundboard.com/sb/Hanna_Barbera_sound_effec
(#5)
It’s not impossible that
Sal already knows who AG is and also
knows her own relationship to Amber.
It wouldn’t be difficult to figure out because the person Sal would recognize is Ethan.
Sal’s the “person who is actually cool” type:
If revealing that information
wouldn’t help a person in a more than trivial way,
she wouldn’t say, either way.
That being said, “The Gloves” don’t seem to represent her relationship with Amber.
The Gloves and Scar
seem to represent Sal’s desire, effort and failure to please Linda Walkerton so,
if she took them off while Amber, in particular, could see the Scar,
“the show would end.”
All good points, except: Sal already met Ethan. “Ah like tall” (at Joyce’s party) But, Ethan was scrawny when she “met” him before, so she wouldn’t remember him. Ethan was satisfied that the reason she looked familiar was the twin thing. (which blew Danny’s mind, hilariously)
Yes, yes. I recall.
“I go fer tall. I’d remember the heck outta ya…”
Puberty hit Ethan kinda hard.
Her melons look fine to me 🙂
Amber needs to bugger off quick and then some r’n’r. Sal could help her but I’ve a feeling that there’s more drama ahead for this pair.
BTB, they’d make a lovely couple, or shipping which I believe is the appropriate à la mode phrase.
I’ll be in my bunk.
And my thoughts fly apart! Can this girl be believed? Can her sins be forgiven? Can her crimes be reprieved?
* AG skidaddle
* AG Smacks the tree, long pause
* The tree breaks just above AG’s head
* The tree smacks Sal over the head…
THAT would be the Warner Brothers way of doing it — Road Runner/Coyote style.
Are they still near the bridge? If Amber had a concussion why would Sal drag her away?
AG can’t be seen by the responders. No matter how serious one person or another is taking her, it’s clear: She’s a costumed vigilante.
AG’s identity has to be kept secret. The day after she’s taken to a hospital as AG, Amber will be arrested for the suspected aggravated assault of Blaine.
At the very least, if someone x-rays her hands and scans her head, they’ll suspect she’s an abuse victim and she’ll be questioned which, again, leads to Blaine because of her name.
I get that Sal doesn’t like authority, but Amazi-Girl nearly got everybody killed.
As for your point about Blaine, does it matter if it eventually came to light that it was his daughter who beat him up, let alone when he had kidnapped and threatened Danny?
Reviewing the evidence shows a different story than Blaine account of it.
They’d care about what they can tell actually happened versus he said happened.
From that perspective, the state can accuse Amber of a felony without his cooperation.
The evidence shows the assault but, does not show an abduction of Danny because Danny enters WcD’s voluntarily.
Also, some states make self-defense really really weird. Here in Florida you can kill someone if you merely feel “threatened” and it’s still self-defense, but in other states if the attacker doesn’t go down in one hit you’re fucked because after one hit it’s no longer self-defense. The victim then becomes the attacker and can thus be charged with assault.
Not that I know the specific rules about self-defense in Indiana. Just saying considering how much damage she did to him the law MIGHT just decide self-defense doesn’t apply despite Blaine’s violent (possibly undocumented?) violent history.
Can any interaction between the two of them objectively be called “self-defense?”
The way I remember the first interaction, Blaine is in the dorm when she enters, he provokes her to anger then, she hit him in full view of (whom I think is) Mr and Mrs Saruyama.
That made me think Mr Saruyama sided with Amber since Dina was not immediately moved.
The second time, I think she hit him after he restrained Danny from speaking. That one, maybe.
Did she keep hitting him after he was down?
———
About self defense:
In the 80’s, I had a friend, “T,” a couple years older, who studied martial arts. Lee was his idle.
He worked nights in a local hospital cafeteria and always traveled on foot or, by bus. One night, he was waiting for a bus, next to a young lady who worked near but, not in the same place as he.
As they were chatting, a kid about 15-ish, jumped out of a car, ran over and pointed a loaded .38 revolver, no safety, at the side of T’s head and screamed: “CHECK IT IN!!! (give me your wallet and purse)”
The chick didn’t have time to react but, T was on automatic.
T’s right hand pushed the kid’s wrist upward, so the gun was no longer pointed at T’s head. The kid fired the gun.
The other hand grabbed the kid by the scrotum and lifted him, not enough to pick him up but, hard enough the kid couldn’t rest on his heels.
“Drop the gun.” T said quietly but, sternly. The kid complied.
“Please, call the police.” The chick ran to a pay phone.
T was ordinarily a VERY meek, shy person. He was KNOWN for being a kitten.
The kid was loaded into an ambulance with injured testicles. After surgery, they sent him home later that week. He was not even detained.
T served 2 of 5 years and was required to register his hands once released.
The chick testified AGAINST T and the ruling read: “Once T had control of Kid’s wrist, T and Chick were no longer in danger…”
*idol…
Yeah… I never said the law wasn’t bollocks.
Also, that chick needs to go die in a fire. *thumbs up* (and the kid too, but I’d figured that went without saying until I remembered this is the internet)
They figured since the kid couldn’t sit in the police car due to shattered nuts, he’d suffered enough. THAT led to tossing T in the clink for maiming him.
T was NOT the bully the prosecutor made him out to be but, think Kung Fu Joe, he even dressed like that on a regular basis and had a similar voice but, a personality like Mouse in The Matrix.
When he found out the kid may never have children, T wept openly.
Being genuinely ashamed of having used so much force, tearing as he explained to me why he’d been in the clink, it seemed he hadn’t gotten over the whole thing.
I think he’d just gotten out that day, maybe the previous.
To T, “an ass kickin’ would have been more than enough if he gets the point.”
The only thing I told him was that having known him, I understood his action and I suspected he was simply frightened by the gun discharging, a real attempt at murder.
At the end, he seemed like he felt better having talked.
It was the last time I saw him.
Because Amazi-girl is a costumed vigilante, who while heroic, also threw possibly illegal caltrops on a major highway to intentionally cause a car accident (for a good cause), after participating in reckless endangerment with her stunt behind the car. She also committed an assault on top of that car (again for a good cause), and nearly caused an even bigger accident. I mean, she lucked out and ended up doing exactly what was needed and her heart was in the right place, but those are generally actions law enforcement tend to frown on.
Additionally, any type of official care in her Amazi-girl outfit would spell the end of her superhero identity, which at this point is a critical alter for her function in society and could lead to worse DID-related issues (trying to “shut off” an alter is basically the worst possibly treatment you can do for DID and often leads to more violent disassociations with less communication of events).
Sal probably thinks she is doing her a solid (and is probably right) and already distrusts law enforcement (as an anti-authoritarian black woman with a “reputation” I’m sure she’s had her share of general police harassment in addition to the fallout from her convenience store robbery). Which will probably quickly lead to Sal regretting the decision as Amber tries to re-establish control over the situation.
That’s what’s confusing me: why is Sal doing her a solid? Apart from assaulting her and her friends (and Malaya) over some beer, Sal thinks Amber nearly got everyone killed thirty times over. She should want her to go to jail. If she’s just pulling her aside to make sure she’s still alive that makes sense, since the police and paramedics haven’t arrived yet, but if she’s trying to help her escape then I’m kind of lost.
Because it’s in Sal’s nature. She’s one of those irritatingly nice and heroic people who will act in accord with what she considers to be ‘right’, irrespective of whether or not it is personally convenient to do so.
In this Amazi-girl and Sal are very much the same. Both are suicidally brave. Both have an internal sense of right and wrong. Both have been traumatized and abused by a parent and both have been done wrong by authoritarianism of one stripe or another. Both are night owls and prefer solitude. Both will try and help even if it puts themselves at risk or involves helping someone they don’t particularly like. They are both very take-charge leader type personalities (when Amber is in her Amazi-girl alter).
Their similarities are also what leads them to clash and their key difference (that Sal has given up on the notion of authority or systems to help her whereas Amber has adopted a very strictly legalistic definition of authority for her Amazi-girl alter) does not help that clash be pleasant.
Because she hates the cops more than she hates “Amazo”. Because she begrudgingly respects someone who has been in the news media climbing buildings. Because Amazi-girl just badassedly saved her new roommate who is also the person Joyce got all rebel badass to save. Because Sal is actually a kind person, underneath the rough-and-tumble front and was always going to be the more likely of the two to try and extend an olive branch. Because she really hates cops and thinks they do even less good than Amazi-girl. Because she wanted to get the heck out of there herself because black person at the scene of a place where a shooter has been reported is the worst idea ever. Because she doesn’t believe that jails help anyone and refuses to support that corrupt system even though she thinks Amazi-girl is dangerous.
There’s a lot of reasons that Sal wouldn’t be in mind to stick around and would figure Amazi-girl would appreciate not being around too.
Well, that clears things up. Probably not a great idea to carry off a concussion victim, but you’re dead on about why she would want to help her.
Well said.
You’ve misunderstood something about Sal: She acts out of high empathy more than once. This isn’t even the second time.
At this point, she appears to be successfully processing issues, having some interesting phrases lately, some quotable.
-“I never met a therapist worth shit…”
Has she seen MULTIPLE therapists, voluntarily?
If you go through the sum of Sal’s agency, she tends to help the person next to her as if to say “I may or may not like you but, I’ll feel bad I see you suffer.”
I think the key word there is “voluntarily”. Multiple therapists? Yes. Voluntarily? ……probably not. I get the impression that Sal doesn’t feel like there’s anything wrong with her behavior, certainly not to the point that she’d seek out professional help to try and fix it, and considering the fact that one of her outlets for her frustration was (poorly planned) armed robbery (and her parents’ solution was apparently BOARDING SCHOOL), I’m betting her therapy was court-ordered. So extra dose of authority issues there.
You’re more likely to get anything from therapy if the premise is “something is wrong with me and I need help” than if the government says “something is wrong with you andyou need help,” ya know?
We agree about some things but, it was the wording that made me suspect there was more than just court-ordered.
She said “not worth shit” which sounds like
“therapy is valuable but, I haven’t met a therapist that led me to it so, I found my own way.”
To me, Sal is self-correcting. I thought David’s joke about her was “in being so unhappy with the therapy she was given, she’s on the way becoming a decent therapist.”
I really liked watching her chat with Joyce…
Fellow super-heroes and all that 🙂
Well now…
Pleeeeeease let Amber realize that Sal JUST SAVED HER LIFE and she shouldn’t attack her or throw it in her face.
Oh never mind, this comic has almost never been about sensible decisions 🙁
Sensible decisions aren’t exactly high on the list of things college students are known for, either.
At first I didn’t add any mental sound effects, but after reading the pop-up text the cartoony skidaddle is all I hear now.
I can’t. I just hear completely non-cartoonish scuffing, like a frightened animal.
I was thinking panel #4 looked like the Road Runner right before he took off from Wil E. Coyote’s latest failed attempt to catch him.
…and then a coconut falls out of the tree and hits her head as well.
I just noticed the rosy cheeks. That’s Amber waking up, not Amazi-Girl.
She’s also tagged as Amber.
I hadn’t thought about how Amber might react to Sal. I mean, Amber is crazy and she’s probably in shock right now.
We know Amber’s response and likely thought process here (oh crap, the red flashback panels are going to eat me, run run run, switch alters, fight). But the more interesting for me is how Sal must be interpreting these events.
I mean she doesn’t know Amber is Amazi-girl and even if she did, she’d have no reason to know that Amber was the girl who stabbed her. And even if she did, she’d have no reason to assume that that is taken by Amber to be a central traumatizing moment that led to the birth of an alter due to priming by years of abuse from her father, leading to intense panic attacks whenever she sees Sal.
Which means in Sal’s eyes, she rescued this chick who was harassing her before and now, looking into her eyes, she backpeddles away like she just threatened to shoot her. Which means the most likely explanation Sal is going to come to is that Amazi-girl is some incredibly racist white girl who can’t stand to be in close proximity to her.
I mean, in her interactions with her, she had Amazi-girl hassle her for a petty crime in very similar fashion to how racist police officers hassle black men and women for non-violent offenses and seemed to be especially intent on starting a fight with her and enforcing a really strong authoritarian dogmatism on her. And treating her openly as a criminal, which Sal would have encountered a lot just being a black woman interested in counterculture.
And here, Amazi-girl has just literally fled her presence, risking reinjury at the sight of her, simply because she’s close and touching her shoulder. Maybe she associates that with trauma more given her earlier interactions with Joyce, but it wouldn’t be an out-of-left-field assumption for her to make to link that more with the way black people are treated as inherently dangerous (especially in Indiana) and the way white people will intentionally cross the street to avoid walking past them.
The worst part of all this is that if this is the way that Sal’s brain is thinking (and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think so), then that’s going to lead to some badness when the Amazi-girl alter takes back over to try and interrupt the panic attack. After all, Amazi-girl has been shown to be at her worst with Sal and it’s likely she’ll try and regain a sense of control over the conversation (in order to re-establish her sense of safety) likely by picking a verbal fight with Sal. So I can definitely see Sal having this run and just writing her off as some ungrateful racist who just sees her as a thug.
Or maybe they’ll just have a pleasant conversation and learn to see each other as friends and allies. Or I’m way off base on my assumptions about Sal’s thought process.
I’m strongly expecting Amber’s first words to be: “I’m sorry for cutting you! Please don’t hurt me!”
Or just “you!!!”
Tho arguably this strip conveys that reaction pretty well.
Neither Amber nor AG have a memory of Sal saving their life, since she was already drawn with little birdies flying around her head at that point. Her last memory will be falling and facing death – and then she awakens to Sal. We know Sal saved her, but she doesn’t.
Since she passed out and had the little stars around her head, concussion is very likely. She may not even remember what is happening in this strip when she recovers. She also doesn’t know how the whole car chase ended or if Becky is saved. Has no idea why Sal is here or if she is involved.
Like the strip because we really don’t know what will happen next. This could go a lot of ways and DYW has been cagey enough not to tip it off in the preview panels.
I’ve been thinking for awhile now that it is past time to see some progress on the Sal/Amber storyline.
This does seem the end of the high Amber’s been on since Dorothy didn’t out her. Botching a rescue and having to be saved by your Joe Chill? Can’t be good for any superhero’s confidence.
If Willis doesn’t draw a full page reference to that Spider-Man cover where Peter throws his costume in the trash I will be greatly disappointed.
I don’t think she botched the rescue. She did stop toe-dad. But she would have died without Sal.
Does it count as a successful rescue if your intended rescuee nearly died because of you?
Maybe a C+.
at least a solid b
hostage actually unharmed
criminal stopped
no collateral damage that cant be afforded
vs
collateral damage
required civilian aid
what could drop it to a c for me is if this is not a reform of sal but a super villain pride moment. but comparing this to what the cops do – i woul want amazi-girl instead of 911
Ship! Ship! SHIP AHOY! All aboard for Slipshine!
There. Had to get that out of my system. Now Danny – mediate between them, since both like you, and let nature take it’s course… while you watch.
Danny and Sal pretty quickly established they were uninterested in one another.
Must we?
Now kiss!
Damn it. I had scrolled almost all of the way to the bottom without seeing that. Good for you, though. Especially since you have the right avatar for it.
“Amber is doing it wrong!” they said.
“She is only putting everyone in danger!” they said.
“She should have called 911 and leave the chase to the police, who will handle it professionally”.
Here, enjoy a reality alternate to the Dumbiverse where police handled it “professionally”!
And that happened only yesterday.
Amazi-Girl has the advantage of living in a universe in which physics is optional. That wasn’t apparent until she levitated onto the windscreen of the red car. In reality she’d have gone under the red car’s bumper, not over its hood.
Yeah, normal physics rule rule do not apply and she is defying gravity. Obviously this is not our reality and what works here may be a “Don’t do this at home, kids!”.
It is still sad that in our universe the “obvious” correct solution fails in so many cases and Superman appears to be missing.
I stand by what I said.
[Bishop from Frozen voice] Your majesty… the gloves.
Plot twist. Sal has no scar. She robbed a different store and AG has been projecting this entire time.
Am I the only one kinda hoping that Amazi-girl is outta action? I mean, I can’t think of any time I’ve seen her (Amazigirl, not Amber) that I didn’t think, “There must be a less asshole way to deal with this.”
I was doin’ it wrong. Now I’m doin’ it right.
So I saw this next Slipshine preview on Willis’ Tumblr and thought “Which character could have gray chest hair?”
And then I froze in terror.
Luckily, the other clues Willis has given seem to rule out that it’s about Toedad and Mrs MacIntyre conceiving Becky.
Clues like wanting people to actually buy it?
Isn’t this the first time Sal takes off a glove?
Does she have the calluses needed for snapping her fingers?
I think “Temple Blocks” is the sound effect name for panel 4.
hey does anyone remember which hand sal got stabbed in? i always assumed she kept the gloves on to hide the scar, but now she has one off.
Sal got stabbed in her Right Hand. The hand that is still in the glove in the comic.
thanks
I have been reading we’d comics forever. I just turned 50 and realized that I am gettingg too old to wait up for updates. I need them to come earlier!
Happy birthday!
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/mark/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/badfriends/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/assistance/
how fast can she transition from amber to amazi-girl
… Orc rage much?