Today’s the day
on October 26, 2021 at 12:01 amEvery birth episode on television has everyone freaking the fuck out as everything in the world goes wrong and you somehow end up having the baby in the place where you work so that the television crew doesn’t have to put together a hospital set.
Real life is more like this.
The file info on this comic strip tells me I drew it after we got back from the hospital, which was about a week later. (yay complications!) It’s probably the first thing I drew after becoming a father! I had some Very Tentative Plans to do strips after this where we see Carol Brown try to bribe Walky to give her his hospital anti-contamination scrubs (which cover you head to toe) so that she could sneak in see her grandson’s birth herself, which is a very Carol thing to do, and of course I never got around to drawing it, and I thought (again, very tentatively) about trying to draw it for this rerun website, but in six years I also forgot how it ended. I only remembered the hook. And so eh. It’s Pregnancy! ends here.
Tomorrow, probably some pertinent Shortpacked! strips.
How many shortpacked strips are gonna be reuploaded here?
I know we’re getting the storyline with Leslie going into another universe but idk how many other strips will be put here as well.
Willis has previously said that only two Shortpacked! storylines would be reran here, and we’ve already gotten one – the story where Amber and Mike visited Mike’s parents in New York City, killed ol’ Mutant Frosted Honey Bun, and encountered Jason in the aftermath.
oh I forgot about the Honey Bun one.
I guess that means we’ll get the exclusive Roomies Book 2 story after the Leslie stuff and that’ll be the last thing.
I wonder how much ad revenue this re-run site generates.
It might be worth it to re-run more stuff with commentary.
That’s an idea, rerun from the beginning, with commentary on the commentary.
I’m pretty sure we got that a few years ago.
Personally I’m wondering what the “probably” in that final sentence means. Is there a possibility that it’ll be something other than Shortpacked!? I’m trying to think what else it could be– the “Last Roomies! Story Ever” has to take place after the Shortpacked! story, for reasons related to a character who appears in both.
Like, it’d be kinda neat to see commentary on, say, the first Dumbing of Age storyline with eleven years’ hindsight, but I dunno if that would really fit here?
I was hoping Willis might do this same kind of thing — walk us back through the whole history of Shortpacked! with “making of” commentary — over on that site. Pleeeeease, Willis??!!
Always felt like a very anticlimactic ending, but I guess that was the point. I dunno, I guess part of me was expecting “The End” or something
It’s probably good It’s Pregnancy doesn’t have a finale, even a goofy sitcom one, now that everything’s stacked up on itself like this. We just did a finale! Up next is a big action-y feelings-y storyline, and then the finale to end all finales! If It’s Pregnancy had run like 500 strips than maybe that’d play, but doing another finale now would be kinda exhausting.
kinda like actually giving birth!
(or so I hear)
Honestly, after all that stuff about him being this ridiculously-OP mind-eraser guy who dozens of universes would send help for, I kind of like the idea of Machete being the one next-gen Walkyverse character who we never see as a newborn.
Maybe he got so embarrassed by his parents (and grandma) telling him all about the day he was born that he just wiped the whole thing from all of their minds, accidentally causing them to forget what years the events of Joyce and Walky! happened in in the process and SHUT UP IT’S NOT FANWANK THIS IS TOTALLY NOT A STRETCH AT ALL
Wouldn’t Walky be immune from memory wipes or does Machete’s organic mind erase skill overpower that?
We might not see baby Machete, but he shows up as a toddler at Amber and Mike’s wedding over in Shortpacked!.
I’ll add that as somebody whose first kid was born via c-section after 24+ hours of labor and whose second kid was just born a couple months ago via a super quick scheduled c-section, getting the baby taken out via scheduled c-section is so wildly less dramatic I might even call it anticlimactic.
Granted, my wife probably has different feelings about the whole thing since she had to actually go through the process, but on my end it’s like you sit down for twenty minutes and then somebody shows you your baby. It was weirdly quick both times, but especially so for the scheduled one.
That was our experience as well. Though the second one was much easier to schedule time off of work for. lol
If you’re putting all the Shortpacked stuff here, are you still leaving the old site up with all of your blogs?
Not all the Shortpacked stuff, just two storylines. We’ve already seen This Man, This Manhattan. Tomorrow begins The Best Shortpacked Storyline, Ever.
‘Carve a human outta ya’? Did Joyce have a (planned in advance) C-section, or is Walky just being weird?
C-section makes the most sense. They’re really common these days, especially for twins and this is drawn from real life.
Yeah, my mom apparently started having contractions with me (Sibling was induced), but they weren’t frequent enough yet so she took a shower and played Tetris for a bit before going to the hospital.
Probably for the best we don’t have to deal with Carol. I really am out of fucks to give with Carol.
I read this series a couple years ago on Tumblr, and I remember thinking it was a weird coda to the Walkyverse. I’m glad to see it here with the other comics for completion’s sake.
And I am looking forward to the new commentary on Shortpacked, which is my favorite Walkyverse comic and my second favorite Willisverse comic after DoA.
(By the way, is there any change we could buy PDFs of Shortpacked the way we can for DoA?)
Is this definitely happening?
It always felt weird that you had a comic series about a pregnancy but then didn’t do anything about the delivery. It didn’t need to have a big finale, but the way this ended seemed like you and Maggie were planning on doing a couple more when things quietened down. Oh well, it still works.
We had a baby not long after this and yeah, I was struck how different it was from TV. My wife’s water broke Tuesday night, we went to the hospital Wednesday morning, they checked her over, she wasn’t in labour, so we went home with an appointment to be induced on Friday if her contractions hadn’t started.
Bugger was 4 weeks early and she hadn’t started maternity leave yet so we just both spent the evening doing work to try and clear the decks. It was very surreal.
5th November. For those not in the UK, fireworks night. Our son was six days over due, we had an appointment for my wife to be induced on the 7th. We were pretty relaxed, basically “let’s get this over with”. We went to bed. I was just falling asleep when an enormous firework went off right over our house. One of our dogs was terrified of fireworks, so she spent the next half hour barking and running around. We finally calmed her down. Lights off, back to bed. “Graham… I think I might be having a contraction…” He was finally born (by forceps) at half past four the next afternoon, with neither of us having had any sleep for maybe 33 hours. (Totally worth it!)
I remember first reading It’s Pregnancy a few years ago, and I’ve always kinda felt like it ended rather abruptly every time I’ve read it.
Sorta how pregnancies typically end?
I’d say it’s about time for Willis to get around to fulfilling his threat to finish Avalon for Josh Phillips.