Hey, Joyce.
on July 27, 2019 at 12:01 amThis strip works a lot better if you ignore all the material that follows. Like, I wasn’t expecting there to be More after this. But as we’ll soon see, Joyce and Walky settle down as normal college students again and try to get teaching degrees. It’s weird enough that they’re basically World Saviors following this, without also throwing in “Walky wrote credibly about the goddamned afterlife,” that they can pass through the rest of their existence being essentially unremarkable. Being normal makes for better stories for them, though, rather than them being unmistakably famous, so whatcha gonna do.
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*sniff*
For a wiseguy that was pretty sweet.
I figure most people probably don’t know they saved the world, and Wally doesn’t have enough motivation to actually write much about the afterlife, so they can bask in relative anonymity.
Nope, Shortpacked made it clear (eventually) that everyone who didn’t live under a rock knew they and the rest of the squad were war heroes. And Joyce and Walky were both on TV, too, so they could be recognized on sight… though apparently not as often as one would think.
This is a good example of why I like these two together and why the Joyce and Walky comics are probably just as great as DoA compared Willises other work. What they have is genuine love not perfect love but love that is genuine and true. One loves the other not because being with them is an experience but because the person themself is an experience.
If any of that makes sense.
The love is not based on how they make each other feel but based on who they are at their core.
Not to say the way they feel is irrelevant but that it isn’t the structural foundation.
You’re awesome > Being with you makes me feel awesome > being with you makes me feel awesome.
Yeah exactly.
Maybe they just never published it and kept everything he wrote for themselves.
I guess this is as good a time as any for a not-quite-final post about the M&M It’s Walky game I ran where my wife played Joyce and ended up falling in love with Jason and Robin (and establishing a hinge-poly relationship with them both).
In that game, since no one picked up Walky to play, I downplayed his role and kept him around as a comic relief character for the occasional fart joke or similar. He, obviously was not qualified to do all this.
Sal, the only other person who could have done this according to Willis Canon, was locked up in Super Prison (as was Anti-Joyce, but that’s a previous tale) and not participating in the final battle.
Thus, the role of “becoming the Cheese” fell to Joyce.
My wife, I will note here, is an actual actress. Like, Shakespeare in the Park amateur stuff, but still pretty dang good. When she said goodbye to Jason and Robin, there wasn’t a dry eye at the gaming table.
Anyway, everyone was very relieved when Joe was able to get the resurrection chamber working. Since it was Joyce growing in the tube, it was Jason and Robin camping out awaiting her return. This was hilarious because, while they both loved Joyce and respected eachother’s relationships with her, they kinda hated being in the same room together. Jason in particular found Robin very irritating. And then they had to spend several months together. Fun was had – very welcome after the melodrama that preceded it.
And so, yeah, that was the penultimate game session. I had a “falling action” session thereafter, but the contents contain spoilers for what comes next, so I’ll leave off until then.
M&M?
Mutants and Masterminds, a superhero RPG.
Maybe they just never shared this stuff about Walky’s experience with the afterlife with anyone else? Though now that you mention it, it does seem kinda strange that after being famous for saving the world they just end up living fairly normal lives in the Joyce and Walky comic and nobody seems to recognize them.
When did Walky write this? There wasn’t really anything between the afterlife bit and going into the Cheese.
Was it based on his visions from before the fight, so that he hadn’t actually seen the afterlife, but knew that’s what was going to happen?
Sounds like he wrote it while he was The Cheese, before going back to the purgatory(?) where his soul went between death and Cheese-dom.
To answer your question, Ruth called it “Limbo” not purgatory.
Now I am envisioning Walky as The Cheese sitting down trying to write this note with a regular-sized pencil and paper or computer keyboard, using his comically-oversized Cheese hands.
That sounds funny. He probably asked someone to write it for him or used his powers to control the pencil or keyboard.