You didn’t know.
on November 12, 2020 at 1:01 amThis was as close to “explaining” Mike’s death/rebirth as I’d planned to get. Honestly, I just thought it was funny that he was randomly alive again. But I poked at the pathos of it a bit here as I outright acknowledged the discrepancy for the first time in the strip. He was dead, and then he wasn’t! Close enough, right?
It wasn’t until Amber/Mike’s wedding down the line that I came up with an actual explanation to satisfy everyone’s curiosity. I’m not running that bit of story here, so I’ll SPOILER YOU ALL and lay it out here: Joyce explained that she leaked Joe’s resurrection chamber tech to an outside company on the condition that they bring Mike back first. After all, Mike saved her life and subsequently lost his own. She felt she owed him. And so Mike just appeared one day, alive, and I guess went to work at a toy store.
The explanation is less interesting than the ambiguity, but whatchagonnado.
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So wait, who has access to the resurrection chamber tech currently?
Wal-Mart.
I’d have expected Bezos to get on that to generate cheap labour
Ellon Musk would be interested in the idea and Jeff Bazos would pay him all the money in the world to make it happen to clone his best workers.
I’m telling you they do it if they could
Cloning wouldn’t actually work with the Martian resurrection tech as it’s been described – it doesn’t duplicate souls, rather retrieving the deceased person’s soul instead and putting it into a newly-made body. That means that making copies ad infinitum of low-wage workers to “employ” is right out.
Just as well, I suppose.
“Do the cloned low-wage workers really need souls? Even the regular ones lose theirs after a while. It seems like a cost reduction opportunity.”
– Megalomaniacal tycoon
Per established Walkyverse rules, a Martian-tech-recreated body without a soul is just an expensive slab of inanimate meat, more or less – so there’d still be a point where the megalomania would invariably, unavoidably, run up against the immovable wall of reality.
y’all, they’d be robbing the graves of young schmucks who lived hard and died fast
Actually, WalMart having cloning Technology would explain the male prostitute that Robin tries to buy for Ethan…That kind of works.
Shortpacked! maybe? I mean, Galasso did bring back Ronald Reagan and Historical Jesus.
I presume the government has access to Joe’s model, and Walky got dibs. There was probably a long list of people, so Joyce decided to cut the queue.
Joe developed it while working at SEMME, so Joe’s model is government property. Mandy, Grace, and Guns were next on the list.
I always thought Joe kept a couple blueprints and parts for his own company too.
Like the government would let it get anywhere near Galassos. They shipped all the equipment off to the scientists at Indiana University for study.
Honestly, since the outside company Joyce gave the chamber tech to was evidently Galasso’s toy store (given he’s responsible for resurrecting both Reagan and Historical Jesus later on,) it’s still pretty hilarious.
How many people did she consider before she decided the megalomaniacal supervillain who owns a toy store was the one to go with? And what were THEY like, if Galasso was the winning bidder?
* Reagan’s ‘later on’ in this case meaning ‘after Mike,’ since I know he’d been revived and I think he’d even left the strip by now.
It IS pretty funny that Galasso was just, “Hmm, yes, bringing back Reagan and Historical Jesus should be NEXT in my course of empire… I will get right on that.”
It’d also mean that everyone Galasso brought back ended up working at his store.
That made a lot of sense, and also I think, reminds us that Galasso may have wanted to bring back his wife…. but couldn’t, or decided not to…(?)
Remember that bit when Galasso silently and soberly burns the Drama Tag without making a big deal out of it? There are only hinted at layers of depth to his character… though I imagine that he’d call them something like “DIMENSIONS”.
It was “couldn’t”.
And, since there’s a good chance that section of Shortpacked! might also get this treatment, that is all I will say on the matter.
A bit of couldn’t and wouldn’t I’ll say. Galasso’s wife ask NOT to be resurrected, and even if she hadn’t: she died of sickness, resurrecting her wouldn’t cure her.
Wait, where did Galasso get Historical Jesus’s DNA?
He probably found the Holy Grail
Galasso’s powers are without limits.
Huh, never gave it thought that Galasso might be involved in that.
Makes sense, except where it’s GALASSO we’re talking about and I have so many questions.
The last two panels remain some of Willis’ best.
Everything with Mike’s dad is the best.
Even though I’ve read all of Shortpacked and knew Galasso brought back Reagan and Historical Jesus with Martian resurrection tech, somehow it never occurred to me that Galasso must have also brought back Mike. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that before now.
This page makes so much harder the feels of Mike’s death on DoA. :_(
[Also: I felt the explanation of Mike’s ressurection from Joyce, made a lot of sense and was great to finally found that out – even if it was funny as heck, to think that even Hell couldn’t handle him, and spat out Mike, senting him home]
FWIW, I’ve always thought that Mike has a need to be hated but I’ve never quite been sure why that is.
His parents are so loving its a weird form of teenage rebellion that never ended? That’s my best guess.
So… I just searched something for a comment. When I did so, this was #1 in Googles recommendations. How I’ve never come across it before I have zero clue.
My headcanon has long been that Conquest was the one who acquired the resurrection chamber to bring back her mom for her dad, and then slowly tried several methods of adapting it once she knew about the Martian DNA limitation, eventually arriving at “significant historical figure” the last we knew it had worked.
Wow, I half want to check that place out in person
Explaining Mike’s resurrection eventually was the right call.
Not telling us for a long while is sort of in keeping with Mike’s personality: “Oh, so you want this mystery unlocked? You want everything lined up in neat little boxes? Tough shit. (P.S. I lined up your Mom’s neat little box with my unlocking tool.)”
But ultimately, I didn’t find the ambiguity more interesting than the explanation, especially once Shortpacked stopped treating Mike so one-dimensionally–“The punchline is, he’s a sociopath!”– and started presenting him as someone worthy of Amber’s love. Developed characters don’t generally have big inconsistencies in their life histories without it needing resolution or looking like a mistake. It’s just as well you didn’t start Shortpacked with that kind of expository baggage, but I’m glad you didn’t close it out without addressing the elephant corpse in the room.
Yeah, plus I just think it’s really sweet that Joyce went through all of that work to find a blood sample and make sure he got resurrected? It’s a good character moment showing that at least one person from his squad felt it was important enough to do this.
Mike being Mike, he’s probably ambidextrous so no one even notices that he was recreated as a mirror image like the other resurrectees.
Willis being Willis he made darn sure Mike stayed dead next time. While I wouldn’t describe Mike as a sociopath so much as a sadistic idealist (he appears to enjoy hurting people for their own good) his cruel to be kind act is hard to sustain in a slice of life scenario where people would simply ostracize him for his behavior.