Entirely different circumstances
on July 5, 2021 at 12:01 amWOW laying on the DUMBING OF AGE SOON real quick, aren’t I. This is the final Joyce and Walky! Saturday update, which ran September 4, 2010. Dumbing of Age was set to start September 10, and with Shortpacked! still ongoing (for the next five years), I needed to prune Joyce and Walky! out of my comics schedule to focus on Dumbing of Age. I’m prolific, but I still have my limits! Two concurrently-running comic strips is fine!
Anyway, I wanted a nice coda to the Walkyverse, as such, and so picked some of my favorite and/or important Joyce and Walky moments. There’s no wedding panel here because, surprise, the wedding wasn’t drawn yet at the time. And so “Walky and Joyce meet their kid from the future” is a perfectly important-enough milestone from Joyce and Walky! to include.
Meanwhile, eleven years later, things aren’t looking so great, vis-a-vis Dumbiverse Walky and Joyce getting together.
NEXT UP: The day of the gaddanged wedding!!!
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It’s still weird how long it took me to connect this and DoA
This is the latest Joyce and Walky! strip I ever saw. Everything from here on out is completely new territory for me.
…we never saw what happened to Machete after HAII teleported them away, did we?
The strips with the future kids were definitely new to me since I had never read the subscription strips before this rerun. This strip was the last Joyce and Walky strip I read in the initial run though.
To be fair, everything else from here out is from behind the paywall
I find it kinda funny that literally every drawn reference to the “it’s the rain” speech is based on the limited print and not on any of the panels from the actual scene in-comic. I guess the print has supplanted the original as canon now.
I hope they never get together, honestly. The notion of one destined soulmate as your only happy ending is too prevalent in modern media as it is.
I could possibly bend on Sal and Danny hooking up, just because their dynamic is COMPLETELY different.
I’m actually really excited about Danny and Sal in Dumbing of Age. In hindsight, they’re the big two characters who were probably served worst by the Walkyverse–Danny because of all the moral baggage attached to him, Sal because her personality had a lot of moving parts and it took forever for the comic to line them up cleanly.
And in the Walkyverse their relationship is built almost entirely on nostalgia. They’re together on panel for three months and then occasionally take turns pining for each other. And Danny never really knew Sal while they were together–her goofy happy comedy-character front is one of those moving pieces that never quite clicked.
And of course they’re not even soulmates here. They could’ve been, sure, but Billie exists. Danny moved on.
The versions we get in Dumbing of Age are much more well-rounded, thought out, coherent. I enjoy them immensely. And astonishingly, despite Sal starting and remaining way too cool for Danny, they work together. I won’t be gutted if they don’t, but I’d love to see them give it a shot. And though I’ve long since stopped seeing Dumbing of Age as a replacement or reparative for the Walkyverse, it’s so thoroughly its own thing now–Sal/Danny as something that makes sense feels like one last challenge to fulfill.
Agreed 100%!
Yes to all of this!
I could see Sal and Danny in DoA becoming a pretty decent couple, probably much better than what they were in the Walkyverse.
It also helps that DoA Sal isn’t so murder-happy and DoA Danny isn’t such a holier-than-thou prick.
I didn’t think of it as a soulmate so much as in most universes they just clicked, like Chidi and Eleanor
Of course I also have Opinions about the afterlife, including that being with one person for literally eternity may sound romantic but The Good Place suffered from all the sameness, why would anyone limit themselves like that (as much as I love my person, I would be fine if we ever were “done” enough with each other after so many Bearimies)
2010. Jesus.
I just…I need a minute.
I don’t remember exactly when I started reading this stuff. But it was definitely in proximity to this. It felt weird! I’d just gotten acquainted with all these guys and their lore and backstory and picked up god knows how much trivia. I didn’t resent Dumbing of Age–I remember posting the first comment and being pleased with myself and then the site crashed and it was gone. But a lot of it felt like looking through a cracked mirror. I was still very protective and rose-colored-glasses about the Walkyverse and knowing it was good that these folks were changing and evolving didn’t make them feel less like strangers.
I can’t remember the exact moment Dumbing of Age stopped feeling like a weird little corner of a broader universe and the Walkyverse started feeling like a footnote in DOA‘s illustrious history. Shortpacked! ending certainly forced me to make peace with some things. But I imagine this site launching had a lot to do with it. David acknowledging the holes and flaws made it okay for me to do so too. And of course I was getting older, leaving high school and gradually developing some goddamn taste. Webcomics were changing too, the aughts were ending and a lot of things that felt like high water marks were getting eclipsed as technology and basic decorum caught up.
This strip still makes me feel melancholy, though. This Joyce and this Walky will never stop meaning something to me, I suppose, even if my brain can’t accept them as the real deal anymore.
I suspect the Other Shortpacked Storyline here’s going to be one of my all-time favorites, and yeah, I’m fine with DoA as a whole but since Shortpacked! was the first Willis comic I read, I admittedly feel a little twinge whenever DoA Robin and Leslie interact. While I’ve adjusted with everyone else, those two being adults and thus out of the spotlight as much means Shortpacked is still my ‘default’ version of them in a lot of ways. I don’t want them getting together in DoA, at least not for the foreseeable future, but I do still miss the Robin who’d grown enough as a character to say ‘you make me not want to run anymore.’
I started with Dumbing of Age, mere months ago as of this writing, but I read Shortpacked! pretty much immediately afterwards and she left a stronger impression on me there, so I also just end up feeling sad most of the time when DoA Robin shows up. I think she’s started to grow a bit, but she’s still got a looong way to go.
The “Other Shortpacked! Storyline,” assuming we’re both talking about the same thing, is something that even in the short time since I’ve gotten into this has really hit deep within me and has already become one of my favorite works of fiction ever created. Seeing it with commentary will be amazing.
As I only picked up on DofA in 2016, all the Walkyverse was backgrounding for me. Binged on it a couple of times but I do appreciate reading it one-a-day in “real time”, even though I know what’s wrapping up.
It turns out the answer is “No, but we can definitely become decent frenemies.”
I tend to describe them as “antagonistic pseudo-siblings”. Joyce feels more like Walky’s sister than Sal does. And I think that dynamic fits them better than being a couple ever did.
Fun fact: As someone who came in during Joyce and Walky, never bought the paid strips and never went back in the archive, I had no idea if panels 2-7 were flashbacks to what their life together had been like, or glimpses of the alternate life that this was obviously foreshadowing.
I also had a vague idea that the alternate life wouldn’t be a new-continuity strip, but Head Alien and Dorothy (I’d picked up some of this stuff) doing something timey-wimey at the wedding.
Wow. This is an excellent ending to the one-off strips. Onward to the finale!
Man… I only came to It’s Walky when this had already more or less concluded, I think this strip was already published at that point, and even on my first reading I had the strongest sense of nostalgia then. Maybe it was because I was rapidly passing the midpoint of my own time in high school at the time, or maybe had been in college for a while by then before I found the series?, but it had a great sense of Finality And Beginning to me, really resonated.