I have to do SOMETHING
on June 2, 2016 at 12:01 amIt’s 9/14/2001 and WHOA HEY it’s Joyce, look at Joyce, she’s tired of watching everyone die from afar and is going to go save everybody, no one can possibly see how transparently joyce stands in for myself, GO JOYCE GO
Loading ...
I…
I couldn’t see.
Or anyone else…I sure as hell didn’t put two and two together.
In my defense, this plot development seemed to make sense. Joyce was kept out of the plot, and this was her dramatic come-back moment.
“I’m not going to sit here while my family dies down there” just seemed like it was further establishing how much Squad 128 meant to her, a mind-wipe victim.
And I read this archivally, so I didn’t have the real-world context for when this was happening.
With the benefit of time reminders and artist commentary, it really is pretty obvious.
They’re like hindsight that way. Totally didn’t notice it the first go-round. (Though that’d be just one of a long list of things I didn’t notice first go-round.)
Honestly, I never guessed that’s what it was about. It just seemed like the natural progression of the plot.
I guess the question is, where was the plot heading before? Willis might have an idea, but this is the direction I know about, and it makes it really hard to imagine another.
[33-years-old Star Wars spoilers]
It’s like that time Leia sensed her brother through the force as they started to leave Bespin in Empire Strikes Back, it’s like, “wait, you mean that wasn’t planned when you started writing it???” Or that time Owen and Beru were talking about Luke having “too much of his father in him”, and Owen being all ominous and saying “that’s what I’m afraid of”, and then it turns out his father is, well, you know, and it makes a whole extra kind of sense on top of the original reason.
Somewhere presumably much darker.
You’ll see what I mean in a couple days.
Hero time!
Yup Joyce a as a human being. With a giant lasergun
Lookie there, a new chapter called “Hope.”
Also, it’s very weird to me how all the characters suddenly became very tall and skinny and adult-shaped very recently!
Don’t worry, even if Walky will look mature, he’ll still act childish, I think.
So this is where the buffer ran out after 9/11/2001?
Check the author’s comment on yesterday’s strip.
I never even thought about it before, but this strip always felt totally genuine to me. I guess there’s a good reason why.
Yeah, stop being so damn hard on yourself, David. All us creatives were affected by 9/11 and it was reflected in our work (I made sure my first post-9/11 story was a rollicking relationship comedy because people were telling me they needed to laugh), but this is wayyyyy too subtle to be “blindingly obvious” to anyone but you.
“Obvious” would have been dropping in some thinly coded reference to collapsing towers or hijacked planes or firefighters, the imagery associated with that day. 9/11 doesn’t own general heroism, though.
And it’s not self-indulgent when your audience needs it too. I remember watching SPIDER-MAN (2002) in the theaters and the scene where New Yorkers rally against the Green Goblin– “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!”– and this full-throated cheer went up. And I live in the South.
I was in my still-active hiatus period at the time. I really want to get back to writing, but I’m scared.
Like that “This is it – ground zero.” quote in the beginning of “Fight Club” – a movie which actually ends with collapsing towers?
Well that reference was a little late, the movie came out in October –
1999!
What’s the reference equivalent of a “backronym”? A “backference”? Or rather a “reforwardence”?
Prophecy.
“I’ve seen the lights go out on Broadway, I’ve seen the mighty skyline fall,” Billy Joel wrote in 1976.
Oh shit the drawing got good
I didn’t start reading the strip until almost a year after this point, and I didn’t notice a big change in tone when I went through the archives… although most of my comments on these reposted strips have been ‘I missed the very obvious thing.’
I wasn’t around in those days. But Hope is probably what was needed, which helps make this feel genuine. I think this was the right call.