College is fine
on September 10, 1997 at 12:01 amChapter: Roomies!
Characters: Danny Wilcox, Joe Rosenthal
Updates begin September 10, 2012.
Joyce and Walky!
Two xennials live in sin!
Polls
Will there be a newer poll than the Bart O'Ryan one?
- No (66%, 602 Votes)
- Yes (34%, 312 Votes)
Total Voters: 914
Loading ...
Discussion (77) ¬
From the depths of time come CORDED PHONES!
Lol, I was watching Battlestar Galactica yesterday and I felt the same thing. Corded phones! from the prehistoria! I’m sure dinosaurs used corded phones, right?
I love that Batman appears in YOUR VERY FIRST COMIC ON THE INTERNET EVER.
Well, Batman practiced hard to be the best at *everything*.
Even webcomic cameos.
So this means that when I get all my Digimon and Power Rangers Series drawn out into webcomics, I will HAVE to include Batman on the first comic.
It begins again! Engage wavy flashback effect!
ACTIVATE THE VIOLINS!
Diddlydoo! Diddlydoo! Diddlydoo!
Man, it’s been a long time since I looked at this strip…
Oh, man, comments section! Sweet! Time to archive binge and leave notes everywhere!
…He said, just then noticing there was only one page on the whole site.
Whom whom whAAAAAAAAAA!
This’ll be great. I loved Roomies and It’s Walky but archive binging the whole run got annoying trying without being able to click on the actual comics, since the pages would change size.
Dang, and I just finished reading the entirety of It’s Walky!, too.
When this comic was first released, I was about 17 days old.
oh god
Make you feel older I was six when this was first made.
You can all shut up, I was 15 and a bit.
Mind you I’m guessing as it’s set in college, freshman year, this pegs Willis as probably 3 years older still…
(the information is likely freely available but I’m roleplaying this as if it were 1997 … when internet search engines were still rather experimental, the google team probably hadn’t even got online themselves yet, and no-one had heard of blogging or web-based CVs… heck I’d only been introduced to the internet maybe 1 or 2 years earlier?)
Wait … published in college newspaper … early september… therefore almost certainly had to be at -least- a sophomore. So, 4 or maybe 5 years older then.
… all of which discussion can’t really be helping his state of mind. I’ll shut up now. 😀
I was a Freshman. I didn’t work for the newspaper itself. I just sent in strips.
Making and sending in slice-of-college-life strips before you’d even started the semester? Talk about precocious…
Or do things start a couple weeks earlier in the US vs the UK? Our 16+ “further education” college year is -just- starting, but the 18+ “higher education” (as in, degrees etc) is yet to kick in.
Yeah, the academic year started a couple weeks ago here.
Hmm, I was 8
Lol.. I was 10
I was 21.
Roflmao. You’re a legacy.
Yeah… um, I was… um, 28… eesh.
Just did the math. I was just over 6 and starting 2nd grade when this comic first came out.
I was a negative year old.
12 days for me!
Sounds great, I can’t wait until everyone starts acting like they’ve never read this before.
Sweet! My childhood comes back!
RSJ = Rebecca St. James? I had to look on Wikipedia to figure that out.
Christian artist, I believe. Remember, Willis used to be a fundie.
Notice how every time this page gets redrawn or homaged the RSJ poster disappears.
That’s not true! I even lampshaded the poster in later strips and gave it a backstory.
I know! I remember Joe asking Danny if he wants it in “Is A Song Forever?”. But when this specific comic gets redrawn–take the tenth anniversary, for instance–the RSJ poster is gone, even when the Batman one remains.
I have no idea why you would assume I intentionally left out the RSJ poster in the Tenth Anniversary Strip for nebulous nefarious reasons rather than, I don’t know, take notice that the second panel is only a third as wide as the ten-year-old panel it’s homaging, naturally cropping out where the poster would be on the wall in the room. It didn’t “disappear.” It’s out of frame. Does your computer “disappear” when you look the other direction? No, I’m pretty sure it’s still there.
Does everything have to be a conspiracy? Please don’t fabricate insidious motives for me. It’s not nice.
I’m sorry, really, I am. My memory, god knows why, contains the idea that this strip has been homaged other times, also absent the poster. I double-checked and couldn’t find any evidence of this. I apologize for this bizarre and inexplicable mix-up.
But I wasn’t trying to be accusatory in any case. Sorry if it sounded like I was accusing you of something. That wasn’t my intention at all.
My computer disappears when I’m not looking, but I live in kind of a bad neighborhood.
And there I thought it was some other early webcomicker for some reason … though I think my brain was hooking onto JDR, which would have been 100% the wrong direction.
Wait. Are you telling me that the roomies! stuff started, real-time, when I started college? like, all this shit has been happening real-time this whole-time?
god fucking damnit dude.
(now i want to show up in shortpacked all fat with a kid and shit. except i kind of don’t.)
You can’t, remember? You died a zombie!
Eh, I’m pretty sure the one survivor brought back a head with extra SEMME bits stuck in the teeth, he could still be revived.
Forget someone ELSE’s head…
See? There’s plenty. The problem’s just in getting all the SEMME chunks out and separated so it doesn’t create a horrible Fly-like abomination.
Stop denigrating flies … just stick with the Faz, that will be more than enough for everyone.
Name’s Lith, and she’s awesome.
Is this a teaser in order to get us to buy the books, or will the rest slowly reappear over the coming months and years?
As far as I understand (which you can tell from the above conversation is not much) the current plan is to update one page at a time, in proper reading order. So, hypothetically, we’d get to It’s Walky! updates in two years roughly, and Joyce & Walky! updates roughly five years after that.
Basically, the site will be acting as though these comics never appeared before.
Cool, thanks… I’ve also since seen that the original site is still there anyway, I was just being dumb in my inability to find it :-p
Oh, and: First named character = Sal. And if you’re reading each frame left-right, top-bottom, she’s ostensibly the first one to “appear”, before you see Danny’s face. That’s got to be something worth putting in the roomieverse encyclopaedia if it’s not there already, right?
Walkypedia! is sadly defunct. Wonder if that was mentioned on Sal’s page when it existed.
Whoa. I was 10 years away from starting at IU (and 11 years away from working at the IDS) when Roomies! started. This is old (and awesome!).
Is there a date for when this site starts daily reposts?
September 10, the fifteenth anniversary of Roomies!.
+1 for the larger size. When you say daily do you mean M-F or 7 days a week? Are going to post comics continuously even if there was a break? (Like Roomies! first summer.)
Seven days a week without interruption, fullstop.
Good to know!
Excellent, something to read on the weekends.
This… is going to take a while.
I’m okay with this.
ONE MORE DAY! I’M SO EXCITED!
Wow, when this comic was first released my phone had a green monochrome screen and mobile web didn’t exist. Now Apple claims to have created colour screens, mobile web and this comic and they’ll sue all the thieves who created them first.
In 1997, the only person I *knew* with a mobile phone was my mother, who was given it by her employer as part of her workaday kit (home-visit teacher). Chunky, green screen, with a flip-down mouthpiece and pull-up aerial, and it made voice calls. Only. Didn’t have one of my own (which was only very slightly better) for at least another year if not longer, and I resisted (!) at first as I thought it was a pointless waste of cash which I could have found better things to spend on if they’d just given it to me direct…
We had interweb, at a screaming fast 33.6kbit, but we paid per-minute for the connection O_O
…and now I’m trying to figure out what was the first comic I ever found and started reading regularly online.
It’s a toss-up between Elf Life, Freefall, Triangle And Robert, College Roomies From Hell!!!, User Friendly and Unicorn Jelly, I think. Or maybe a couple other long-since-defunct ones whose names I’m trying to remember…
Out of which six, Freefall is the only one I still keep up with to this day. It’s been worth it. Especially as what was once a fairly quick archive trawl (that strip also had it’s genesis offline…) is now a 2000-strong life-ruiner. OK, it’s not exactly Homestuck, and Questionable Content would take longer because of more panels and text per strip, but it’s still one hell of a trek.
Oh, I remember those …. plus a few others like “Crazy Larry” and some I lost track of … Diesel Sweeties, Sunday Morning Coffee, Zebra Girl, … Zortek? ….. ….. then there were all those mediocre ones that piddled along and others that were great and well written if weird where the artist just stopped.
Yeah, you are right, and it makes me wonder where some of those went. Did they just evaporate into the electric ether when their servers were shut down?
My first, which I remember explicitly because for a long time it was the ONLY comic I read online, was Kevin & Kell, which I found in 2005 and still follow. The strip has gone from a bizarre parody-bordering-on-deconstruction of furry comics, which took risks and had a complex internal mythology, to a gag-a-day strip with easily resolved conflicts and a refusal to seriously fuck with its status quo. It’s not even funny anymore, even though the style of gag remains the same a lot of the bite (for lack of a better word) has been taken out of it. Sad, really.
The other two comics I read in my early days were Count Your Sheep, which was consistently charming and cute and actually really funny, a worthy successor to Calvin & Hobbes, which followed the typical webcomic process of updating more and more sporadically until it just petered out altogether and stopped abruptly…
…and Sinfest, which started out as raunchy and offensive as possible before gradually becoming a bit lighter and more character driven. These days it seems mostly fixated on talking about feminism–which isn’t bad, if I thought it was I wouldn’t still be following Willis’s stuff–but it’s generally unfunny and Ishida pretty blatantly has no damn clue what he’s talking about, completely dismissing third-wave feminism (and with it the idea that women can enjoy sex and be liberal about it) and promoting the works of Andrea Dworkin and the S.C.U.M Manifesto as “proper feminism”. At this point I’m mostly sticking around to watch the train wreck.
WELP one more URL to add to my ‘Daily Comics’ folder.
Did Joe learn how to do that from Sal?
I’m pretty new to your comics I only just started really reading shortpacked and let me tell you that’ a lot to catch up on. Is this comic even older? Am I suppose to start here first? DOA is it’s own thing right?
I think Joe just ‘knows’ where girls are and the shortest way to get to them.
Kris Yes to all. Sorta.
Sortpacked is a separate universe.
They all are, with more or less the same cast in sometimes diff. roles.
Roomies’. It’s Walky. Shortpacked. Dumbing of Age. All I can think of right now.
Also: Joyce and Walky
This strip was originally published on September 10, 1997.
It was posted on the original website on September 8th, 1997 in the archives because once the Indiana Daily Student skipped two of the strips, and so Willis moved the online archives back two days to keep them matched up.