No, it’s RACHEL JACKSON! Who I guess has been an Alien in Alan Rees-like human disguise for an unspecified amount of time! WHY???! I don’t know, at some point at the beginning of all this, I thought I needed a surprise or something, in the same way Head Alien here expects there to be one? And Rachel was, like, the most important character I thought I could mess with in this way and not get people mad at me. I just thought I needed some pathos, y’know?
I, uh, of course, would very visibly try to resolve this better later, after some regrets, but we’ll get to that eventually.
anyway she’s been tagged as simply “Rachel” (no Jackson) since the swap occurred, and now I can rename that tag to something more appropriate like FAKE RACHEL or whatever
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I’d just like to take this moment to apologize to people in the comments section who I spoiled this for accidentally a while back. It was a big deal in Shortpacked! and I just assumed everyone here had read it too. Sorry.
YAY I couldn’t remember her last name and now I don’t have to look!
also the follow-up arc was awesome, don’t apologise for it getting to exist
I mean, I get why it would have been terrible if this was the end of that story, and Joe went to being Depressed Character Regression Beard Joe forever, but yeah. It got us one of my absolute favorite Shortpacked arcs and absolute favorite Willisverse strips of all time, and so I’m willing to say it was worth it.
The last entry in the Rachel Jackson tag, by the way.
http://www.itswalky.com/comic/betrayed-my-kind/
Note that this is immediately before the Gift of the Walki storyline, and the first tag for ‘Rachel’ is one about sending Christmas cards months/a year of original publication later, shortly before the eloping storyline (which was itself a Christmas storyline, at least initially), so there’s still a fairly big window when the switch could have occurred. But we can narrow it down to about a year.
I mean, the timeline of the Walkyverse from 2005 to 2010 is kinda screwed up in general, thanks to the fact that there were two– hell, effectively three ongoing series, and they didn’t do a very good job of syncing time frames up with each other. Because fundamentally, the standalone free stuff and the ongoing subscribers-only storylines might as well have been two different comics, for as little as they synced up with each other. And that’s before you take Shortpacked! into account, with its extremely cutting-edge-news based humor. There’s no real way to work out all the contradictions, you just kinda have to accept it.
Fair, but because they each accompany a different Christmas storyline, I still feel comfortable saying they take place about a year apart.
It’s kinda funny that we got the follow up arc before this arc technically ended.
I second Jen on this one. The follow arc is amazing.
That arc is why I paid for the pay-only comics. It was that good.
*cringe*
As regrettable as this plot point was, I love panel 5. It’s the funniest thing to me and I’m not sure why
I think that it benefits from the contrast with Panel 4: same camera position and same basic framing of the character, but going from normal to OH DEAR GOD WHAT IS THAT FACE in only the time it takes to move your eyes.
Agreed. It is terrible, but a well-composed shot. (And really I think it’s the last row that takes it from ‘ill-thought out’ to ‘cringing forever.’)
Agreed on the last row. What’s… interesting (though not, I stress, in a good way) about it is that all of these events are targeted at Joe, specifically. Joe, the guy who was introduced in the very first strip of the entire canon climbing up a building to sexually harass women on the floor above him, Joe who had no qualms about molesting defenseless women who were frozen in time during the Anomalie arc, Joe who in general has a very bad track record when it comes to matters of consent… suddenly finds himself a victim of implied sexual assault. Because by any reasonable standard, impersonating someone’s partner to sleep with them deprives them of any ability to meaningfully consent, and sex without consent is sexual assault by definition. Is it meant to be some kind of… payback on the Head Aliens’ part? The “Karmic Rape” trope is a terrible one that needs to die, and it genuinely baffles me that Willis, intentionally or not, would write an example of it as late as 2012.
If Willis had been planning this that far back enough, averting That Implication might’ve been why there was that strip back then which explicitly stated that Joe and “Rachel” hadn’t slept together in a long, long time?
It’s not even inherently a bad twist. Destiny just did a fairly similar twist, and I think it was decently effective. But they’d been building up to that for almost a year.
This just feels thrown-in, where the primary purpose is ‘well, it’s the big climax, I guess somebody has to die’. It did result in probably the best Shortpacked plotline, but if that didn’t exist, yeah this would leave a bad taste in my mouth.
narrator: he banged that
Man, don’t you just hate it when you thought you were with Rachel but it turns out to be
her older sister Leahan alien in a robot suitLooking back through the tags for Alien Rachel, they apparently haven’t banged in “forever”: https://www.itswalky.com/comic/hey-lets-go-bang/
Probably a practical necessity. It’s a little suspicious to suddenly distance yourself from your partner, but not nearly as suspicious as your meat-suit failing to hold up to intimate scrutiny.
“Intimate scrutiny”? Is that what people call it nowadays?
Yes, but Joe (and us previously) didn’t have the benefit of the tags previously.
Plus the line here implies there might have been some sexual contact between them.
So either Joe was raped by fake rachel, or at this point he thinks he was. That’s a lot on top of all the other issues with this.
I’d probably be more annoyed at the fridging if I’d been reading at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, it’s… less bothersome.
Years after Head Alien complained about Joe and Robin having short lists he’s gone about trying to fix that.
(Yeah, this was not the best moment).
Well not this one, the world Conquering Head Alien alternate time-line version of him who’s an expert on messing with these guys is the one who covered all his bases.
Semantics.
👏👏👏 That’s A good one ! MAN that hast to be leaving Joe so stressed out that’s some good mind game fuckery right there.
Weirdly, I have read all of Shortpacked but did not remember this as having happened.
It didn’t happen in Shortpacked!. The fate of Actual Rachel was resolved in Shortpacked!, but the events surrounding her disappearance were hidden behind the Joyce and Walky! paywall until now.
*looks back at when the switch happened*
… So, that’s why she forgot he was Jewish.
Yeah, it actually does do a decent job of explaining some aspects of Rachel’s characterization in J&W! that were likely completely innocuous when Willis originally wrote them but work as foreshadowing nonetheless.
Head Alien makes the best facial expressions and it’s not even with his own face.
That is…
Horrifying
Actually…
Kudos, i guess
Is HA talking to Joe or Fake Rachel in the last panel?
(Answer: “Yes.”)
Oh man I just LOVE HADorothy’s facial expressions in that last row! That combined with their disheveled appearance, it’s actually what I remember most about this particular strip.
Boy, “Rachel” must have unhinged her jaw like a snake, there.
Is the “find the real Rachel” Shortpacked! story going to rerun here, like the honey bun chapter? (I know it’s up on the other site to read whenever, but the daily drip feed with new director commentary is fun.)
It’s been all but confirmed that we’re getting a rerun of that story— the beginning of the Honey Bun reruns said that it would be the first of two Shortpacked! stories on this site, and the ending said that we would especially see more of Leslie. As much as I’m enjoying the wedding story (aside from the issues I have with this specific page and plot point), I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t what I’m looking forward to most of all.
I think we’re getting It’s Pregnancy! before that though— possibly with an actual ending? Like, obviously once their IRL kids were born Willis was always going to prioritize parenting over writing a strip about the birth itself, but since this is meant to be the definitive archive of the main strand of the Walkyverse there’s probably a decent chance they’ll finish it here.
I asked Willis about It’s Pregnancy! running on this site a few years back, and IIRC they gave me a very noncommittal answer. (Basically “I don’t know yet, we’ll see”.)
A few years back, it was also unknown whether or not the paid Joyce and Walky! strips would air here.
I’m gonna have to agree with HA/Dorothy in the last row of panels. That’s kinda gross, and I hope Joe and Fake Rachel never actually banged.
At least giving HA a human face to emote with is paying dividends.
You may have had regrets, but the follow-up arc in Shortpacked is spectacular and you really acted with integrity writing it.
…was that really the best you could do?