Hypocrites
on July 23, 2016 at 12:01 amMike, I’m pretty sure this is a false equivalence.  For example, the huge difference between a war and punching you in the face is that punching you in the face has a much lower chance of carpetbombing a wedding or a hospital.
Anyway, I enjoy how Jason just waits on the sidewalk for the crowd to finish knocking Mike’s teeth out.
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This is exhibit A for why I was so creeped out by the ‘Mike is a lovable scamp and Malaya is a worthless ****’ vibe in the Shortpacked comments section.
Yeah. Mike was always a horrible human being.
Mike occupies a different tier of reality than other chars, though. Half the time he’s a damn evil looney toons char* and the other half he’s an anti-hero. Malaya’s jerkiness was more realistic and less absurd, which makes it much harder to overlook. I’m not saying sexism wasn’t part of it, look at what happens to Carla in the comments, but there’s other reasons to love Mike and dislike Malaya.
* “If I hit him again it will give him back more of his blood than he currently has”, sleeping with at least 2 people repeatedly throughout a single night just to screw with their heads, this page…Mike’s actions are so far from reality that morality stops mattering to me.
He also doesn’t do things quite this awful in Shortpacked!, almost like he’s changed a bit. Gotten a bit … nicer? No, no, that’s not it. Not nicer. Less blunt, there we go.
I remember him still being horrible to kids the earlier shortpacked comics. But I do think he mellowed out a bit when the series got closer to ending
Probably on quite a few occasions, yeah, but I also remember a rather early strip where he’s saved for last in the grand beatdown against some douchebag who switched out a toy in the store for like a rock or something in the same box, suggesting there were in fact some things he wouldn’t stoop to. Or just that not doing it gave him an opportunity to beat up on people without the rest of the store turning on him and even with their express approval.
Actually it was probably that last one. Still.
Let’s not forget that he has gotten a bit dead in the meantime.
Maybe that changed perspective a bit?
Mike isn’t a “lovable scamp”, but he’s the best worst character ever, because he’s such an over-the-top horrible person. Meanwhile Malaya in Shortpacked was just a regular horrible person, so not as entertaining.
He’s a white dude, that sort of thing happens.
There’s an almost… academic component to Mike’s horribleness. He’s consciously testing boundaries to obtain reactions. In many cases, such active betrayal of the for-granted social contract, runs so intently against the grain of our expectations that it serves to provide some insight or at least provoke thought. I’m not saying that it excuses him, but attempting to explain why it feels more tolerable.
Malaya, on the other hand, is plain and simply a sociopath.
(Heh, I just noticed it’s pretty much the same reasons why Barney was so loved and Robin so disliked in HIMYM.)
See also: Why I’m so creeped out by a certain commenter’s insistence that Dumbiverse Linda is worse. Erm, no. She’s more realistic, but by any reasonable measure, this Linda does far more awful things.
I suppose you could argue that DoA Linda is worse, because she’s closer to a normal person. Racism is a real thing that lots of people have experience of or at least understand. We can’t really relate to someone who commited genocide on an entire race then swapped one of their kids over for… reasons?
Likewise, it’s harder to judge this Mike because he saves New York at least once in Shortpacked!, and is saving the world in general in IW! You’re more tolerant of an arsehole if he stops the human race from being wiped out, whereas Mike in DoA is just a college student being shifty.
TLDR; IW! is a broader story, so people can do worse things than in the more realistic DoA and not have them seem as horrible.
Is Mike really kicking a little girl in the back of the head?!
Look, I hate kids, and this is even making *me* angry.
Would this count as a crowning moment of awesome for the protesters?I mean they managed to beat the crap out of a guy who can lift cars. Too be fair, there does appear to be a lot of them
Considering the lengths Mike will go to just to make his point, he might not have even made much effort to fight back.
Using his full strenght would have attracted attention, because people don’t casually lift a car. Unless you are Hulk.
Though we don’t actually see it, I’ve always assumed that he just let them beat him up. Partly because, well, he literally has superpowers; I don’t think he would have gotten so beaten up if he had been fighting back. (Also, I don’t think Jason would have just stood by and let Mike fight a mob.)
But mostly because, as far as he’s concerned, the outcome of the actual fight is irrelevant. He won the moment they threw the first punch, and beating him to a pulp, especially if he isn’t fighting back, just further proves his point.
Also, I think getting beat up turns him on.
Originally posted:
November 3, 2001
Also,
Mike will always be an asshole. Trying to make people be hypocrites or expose them as such.
November 4th
You’re slipping, my dude.
I thought this was WAY worse at first– my initial reading was that Mike stomped the girl into paste, and that’s why he’s covered in blood. Not that the accurate interpretation is good, but good lord.
He was asking for it.
Anyone else spend just the splittest of seconds looking at panel 1, wondering who Lisa is and why she sux?
Nope… as a European, I immediately read “USA”.
I love the last panel, even though the perspective is distractingly wonky. It captures the essence of both characters so well. Mike has contempt for all of humanity, especially himself, and for their suffering. Jason is the world’s coolest, most badass prissy stick-in-the-mud.
You cover up the bow-tie and put him in a long coat and Jason suddenly becomes 400% cooler.
not 20% cooler?
Well, that was about 20% cooler, and with a sufficiently large margin of error, 400% is in that range.
This is one of my favourite strips in the whole series.
I feel like this might be the strip where David Willis figured out exactly what direction to go with Mike’s character. Not that that’s necessarily true. There might not have even been one individual strip where that happened, but this is just so perfectly Mike that it seems that way to me.
This is possibly my favourite Jason ever. I vastly approve of awesome British people in scarves and long coats.
Would you like a jelly baby?
There’s no way to interpret this in a way that doesn’t have Mike hurting the little girl, but I prefer the one where he pushes her down with a foot in her back to any of the ones where he stomps on her head or kicks her. It’s still horrible, but at least it doesn’t put her in the hospital.
Whatever he did, he deserved whatever he got, since that was a dick move right from the start.
And when protecting the weaker and more vulnerable members of society, the use of violence is not hypocritical.
-“BB”-