BANG! SPLUT!
on April 13, 2019 at 12:01 amChapter: 'Cause When I'm Bad
Characters: Daisy Conrad, David Walkerton, Jason Chesterfield, Jennifer Billingsworth, Joyce Brown, Linda Walkerton, Penny Worthington, Robin DeSanto, Sal Walters, Steve Walkerton
Location: Professor Doc's lab
well that’s a series wrap for both beef and penny, huh
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Double KO!
…yay?
Linda is staring into my soul.
While she knew that Beef wasn’t her son, she *did* raise him, and as far as Walky knew, he was his brother.
She’s already pretty fucked up, this just sprays the whipped cream all over the top.
And, y’know, she just found out the darkest moments of her life were specifically set up by British Ninjas from another reality to manipulate her. So all around not a great day.
she can’t help it, she doesn’t have one of her own…
I think you got him.
You know, I’m still not sure any of those bullets actually penetrated Beef’s body. Of course, I imagine the impact of a bullet could do some pretty serious damage even without penetrating the body – I’m wondering if she just beat Beef to death with bullets.
Well she could have hit him in his eyes and mouth, no matter how hard his head is those are still soft targets…it would also explain the blood spewing out of his mouth like it was gurgling
Tony did that. Beef was bleeding from the mouth before Daisy shot him.
I bet we can figure that out, given a few data points. (Disclaimer: I’m not Randall Munroe, and I’m no expert in weapons, physics, or baseball. Some of this is probably screwed up. I just like pulling data from mostly-accurate sources and plugging it into semi-understood formulas to overanalyze webcomics.) Let’s do this.
First we need to know what that gun is. Daisy’s been repeatedly firing with one hand, so it’s semi-automatic and probably doesn’t have a ton of recoil. SEMME was backed by the government, so let’s assume it’s a standard issue 9mm service pistol.
That would mean she’s firing off 9x19mm rounds. There are many different cartridges this size, but a middle-of-the-pack example from the Wikipedia page says it should have a 124 gram bullet with a muzzle velocity of 1300 ft/s. (We’re ignoring air resistance because of the short distance and for simplicity.) That works out to 630 Joules of energy, applied to 63.62 square millimeters (a circle 9mm in diameter), repeated at least six times. That’s 9.91 Joules of energy per square millimeter.
For comparison, we can assume Jason’s firing the same ammunition. Look what just one did to Penny’s baseline human skull.
Just for fun, let’s see what the numbers look like for Tony’s desk attack earlier.
Tony’s 5’8″ and 170 pounds according to Walkypedia. I’m a little taller than that, but by guessing with a tape measure I think that desk needs to be 24 inches deep by 60 inches long for him to hold it like that. I found a solid wood “compact executive desk” that size, which weighs 200 pounds.
According to a few random sources, hitters in the MLB can swing bats anywhere between 60 and 80 MPH. Let’s say Tony’s swinging the desk at 70 MPH.
Tony’s also jumping through the air with the desk, but how fast is he going? He doesn’t have Robin’s super speed, but his abductee strength should let him get moving quickly. Let’s say he can accelerate like a trained athlete. Usain Bolt took 1.85 seconds to run the first 10 meters of a race from a dead stop at the 2008 Olympics, working out to 12 MPH. Let’s say Tony’s running leap with the desk was at 8 MPH.
Let’s use a pre-made calculator to figure out how much energy all this moving stuff should have, because I’m lazy.
Desk @ 70 MPH = 44,417.5 Joules
Desk + Tony @ 8 MPH = 1073.27 Joules
Now, that’s all the kinetic energy in them both, assuming Tony and the desk somehow came to a dead stop immediately like those swinging clacky-ball executive toys. The swing had follow-through and Tony was probably still moving when he landed. Let’s guess the post-impact swing was 50 MPH and he landed at 4 MPH. So post-impact they still have:
Desk @ 50 MPH = 22662 Joules
Desk + Tony @ 4 MPH = 268.318 Joules
Leaving us with 22,560.452 Joules of energy transferred to Beef’s face. But spread over how much surface area? That’s ambiguous.
If the impact site was the size of a CD-ROM (11,309.73 sq. mm), that’s 2 Joules per millimeter. That’s a lot less than 9.91. [citation needed]
If it’s the size of a fist (approx. 4500 sq. mm), that’s 5 Joules per square millimeter. Still half of the pressure exerted by the bullet.
Either way, the hit was enough to stun Beef long enough for Tony to beat the crap out of him, but even after all that he got back up again anyway.
Conclusion: Super-strength abductees can tank blunt force trauma, but are still weak to firearms.
To put that in perspective, according to this wonderfully titled web page, an expert boxer can throw a punch with approximately 400 Joules of energy behind it.
….Dang, Jason.
I’m not saying it’s undeserved, but that’s probably one of the coldest moments in the comic.
Of course Walky was about to kick her head off a few comics ago, so this shouldn’t be that surprising.
I’d think Penny killing Mandy & Grace in cold blood beats this by a mile.
Daisy at least had the excuse of being brainwashed though- Jason is unflinchingly shooting Penny in the face. It’s just not the kind of thing you expect the characters to do, even if they deserve it. Quite a tonal shift is all.
It’s well within his character though. That wasn’t cold, that was training and forcing your feelings aside to take care of a major issue at hand.
It’s why he was likely the most competent among the SEMME people, he knew what to do.
This is one of the reasons why I have always liked Jason a LOT in It’s Walky – he’s a freakin badass.
That’s not cold, that’s pure reaction- someone is trying to kill you and your loved one, you don’t screw around: you shoot to kill.
Shooting a serial killer in the head when they came in murdering people, gloated about murdering you, and now are literally in the process of slicing open your close friend – and yet still looking unhappy about it afterward – is cold?
Man, I wonder how you would describe somebody who actually set out to kill a villain, like Inigo Montoya or Luke Skywalker?
It’s only cold in that they used to be lovers, but I think her murdering his colleagues and gloating takes some of the edge off that
Ground Beef.
They went out with a bang.
Beef was a traitor, but I feel sorry for him. Finding out that his biological parents are dead and then his adoptive parents started to ignore him when Sal showed up (though that’s pretty much Linda’s fault), that sure made him snap.
Good riddance, Penny. (and sadly Beef, too.)
Did Jason have that gun under his coat the whole time and only he just now decided to use it? Or did I miss him picking up a gun in an earlier strip somehow?
Will be explained in a moment, if memory serves.
I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by mentioning a brief post-IW forum fan fic that somebody wrote and which stayed with me for quite some time. It’s about different characters reflecting on the ending events, and one in particular visits Beef’s grave…
It was really good, as I remember it.
Willis is pointing out the flaws and shortcomings of IW in this commentary, but in any case, the characters were never flat.
Does it still exist somewhere, or has it been lost to the ether? I think I’d be interested in reading that.
Hey, Robin.
Over the years, I’ve thrown a batch of ideas at Willis or in the general direction of his universe, some of which I eventually turned into guest content.
One of them that I did not pick up was a bit of a coda for Daisy here: in the days after Robin and Leslie’s split and before Malaya, I suggested that a version of Daisy– seemingly healed on the surface but not fully healed underneath– might end up being Leslie’s rebound relationship.
Sharing Robin’s war-hero status would give Daisy that larger-than-life quality that leads Les to fantasize about Leia and Starbuck and such, but even before this traumatic episode, she had almost none of Robin’s frivolity (a mild giggle at Jason’s Hawaiian outfit was as far as she’d go). And in this telling, Daisy would’ve spent some time in counseling addressing this horrible day, as opposed to Robin, who basically denied she had any real issues until they blew up.
But Daisy would’ve overestimated how “handled” and “managed” her emotional scars really were. And relationships can’t go anywhere if EITHER party has a problem with trust. Leslie, to her own surprise, would find it in herself to trust Daisy, but…
Woulda been interesting, maybe, but introducing Malaya was ultimately a better option. The temptation to look backward too much is a dangerous one for cartoonists. And while this kind of parallels Mandy and Grace’s end in that here’s another lesbian whose humanity is emphasized by unjust suffering, it’s still probably the strongest note for this minor character to go out on.
Daisy’s Dumbing of Age incarnation is so drastically different, she almost reads like a karmic apology to the raw deal this one got.
Finally. She’s had that coming for a long time.
I think I’ve read through It’s Walky a dozen times
But I don’t think I ever noticed that Billie is about to throw up in the last panel (Which is an appropriate reaction for her)
Nice touch Willis