Unfortunately, while I’m free to murder parts of myself on paper without much consequence, Joyce definitely has to be brought in.
In this moment, she feels it was worth it.
Unfortunately, while I’m free to murder parts of myself on paper without much consequence, Joyce definitely has to be brought in.
In this moment, she feels it was worth it.
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Sal looks quite angry in the last panel.
I think that’s a bang
SHE wanted to be the murderer on the team!
Sal is going into ‘fight mode’. She knows how dangerous Abductees can be and she wants to be ready if Joyce suddenly decides to just keep on killing people.
That or the bangs.
Despite my name… Joyce, I am disappoint =|
Wouldn’t Sororicide be more appropriate?
Homocide
I still claim it’s suicide.
Clearly!
Oh, hey! I got what your name is a pun of now!
I love Sal and Walky’s exaggerated cartoon shock. SO inappropriate for this situation, hahah.
Glad that’s settled and we’ll never hear of this again.
See, this storyline would have been great if Joyce just got carted off to jail right now. A tragic end to a secondary character.
Problem is, she’s not a secondary character, she’s a main character, the author still has plans for her. And so everyone, characters and readers alike, need to let this slide.
What makes it worse is that, expression of personal issues aside, leaving Anti-Joyce alive would have been great. Especially if she was allowed to develop as a character and her opposition to Joyce involved more than just teh seks.
I know! Anti-Joyce had potential. I was really disappointed that she never came back. I thought she could’ve been really interesting.
Well, she’s still in Joyce’s head the entire rest of the series. We see her a couple times. Joyce just becomes a much more stable person over time so there’s no need for her.
I feel like that actually makes Anti-Joyce better, almost? Like she’s a clone who was created at the end of last storyline, she’s a character who was born to die… but at the same time, it’s a sacrifice of the potential that such a character could have had, making it a death with meaning instead of just something that happened. Anti-Joyce’s potential as a member of the story leads into the realization of her potential to live and grow as her own person, and so we realize just how fucked up what Joyce just did is, and that she has to live with the consequences.
WOAHWOAHWOAHWOAH I DID NOT NOTICE THE WALKERTONS’ GUNS HOLY SHIT!!!!
I always thought everyone was just awkwardly standing around a traumatised Joyce.
Oh man, this changes things. I thought everyone just ignored the murder.
I didn’t agree with your take on this story anyway but HOLY SHIT I never noticed that either.
The reaction of the Walkertons in panel 1 doesn’t work for me. I know it’s supposed to illustrate their shock but it’s just way too cartoony.
I dunno. I think if you ignore the exclamation points, Walky’s are pretty good.
And twist was that this was actually the evil clone and not the other one….WOOPS.
It was right around here, I think, that IT’S WALKY went from “one of the strips I check out every so often because we’re on the same network” to “daily ritual.” I had no idea of the dynamics playing out in David’s mind at the time, but this was like no “evil double” story I’d ever seen and it seemed to know it.
Agree. If any one strip hooked me for life it was this one. It was just so totally mind-blowing.
Where’s Mike I wonder?
I see what you did there….
Gotta put her away. That’s how you get ants!
And thus we lost a perfect opportunity for Joyce to shout “She’s the evil one! Shoot her!”
KILL US BOTH SPOCK!
meanwhile mike hasn’t done anything because he’s pretty okay with the situation. no wait, it would have been a bigger jerk move to let the evil twin move in with them. yup.
Nah, I’m pretty sure letting the Pollyanna of the group commit murder and deal with all of the consequences that entails was the bigger jerk move.
Joyce doesn’t look like she feels it was worth it in that last panel.
Also, Jason’s expression. Was he in live with Anti-Joyce after all?
He’s sad because he has to put Joyce in jail. Also he’s taking her gun.
I’m also guessing materializing from thin air in the last panel was quite draining on him. 😛
Jason was in this scene before.
Y’know, I think the most disturbing thing about this strip is the implication that they let Walky carry a gun.
As if Sal carrying a gun is better.
She has to be brought in, sure, but on what charge? Murder? Suicide? Murder-suicide? Does it even count if it’s an alien-generated clone derived from your own id?
The courts are going to be tied up for years on this one.
Given the nature of SEMME and its mission, the most likely outcome is this: After a closed-door internal review the panel of which was probably was made up of only Big Boss and Alan, Joyce would get a note of reprimand for ‘discharge of weapon without proper authorisation’ placed on her permanent record and that would be the end of it.
I’d call it murder, no question. Anti-Joyce was her own living, breathing person. She may be derived from Joyce, but she is independent of her.
I mean, parents go to jail for murdering their kids, right?
I’m pretty sure that Joyce is pretty ripe for a spell in a padded cell! Of course, that’s always true of most SEMME agents!
To tell the truth, from the old days, I never felt this murder to be actual murder. Anti-Joyce wasn’t an actual person after all, she was created from an alien machine. So I felt kind of, “why are they all so troubled by this”.
The new run and the explanations clear some things up though :P.
… Remind me to stay far, far away from you, forever.
Of course, SEMME isn’t about to prosecute the murder of a person who doesn’t exist and was created by technology that doesn’t exist, and killed by a person who wasn’t abducted to serve as a secret paramilitary agent.
Exactly.
Man, between DoA and this, this is a big day for upset Joyces.
So… did they bury Anti-Joyce? Put her in the morgue? Sent her to the research lab?
I want to know what they did with the body.
My guess is that the Professor probably dissected her down to nearly the molecular level to scrape every bit of data they could out of the incident. Then the remains were incinerated and the ashes dumped off the loading ramp of one of their VTOLs somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. As far as anyone outside a tiny number of people authorised to view the file would ever know or care, she never existed.
Nope.
Think to yourself, is SEMME competent? What’s the dumbest thing they could do with it?
…
Hang it by a flagpole on the property of the White House and announce “LET THIS BE A LESSON TO ALL WHO WILL NOT KNEEL IN DEFERENCE!!!”
Resurrect her and send her out into the world.
Stuff it and mount it in a lifelike sitting position in the visitors reception lobby as a ‘conversation piece’.
Use it to practice juggling?
Interesting that you are reprinting this strip detailing Joyce’s dark side, while in DoA you are also highlighting Joyce’s violent, and profane side.
Joyce killed her worst enemy. Doesn’t that count as self defense?
Anti-Joyce didn’t do anything really awful. She sexually assaulted Jason and harassed Joyce while physically assaulting her. Nothing worthy of an execution.
Maybe she was attempting murder? I’d believe it, but there was no clear expression of that. No line like “Would anyone even care if you were REPLACED?”
You’re forgetting what Anti-Joyce was. She’s all the repressed negative behavioural characteristics (including sociopathic selfishness) of a young woman who was never the poster girl for ‘stable’ anyway. This was combined with a body and mind that’s the result of SEMME paramilitary agent training. That’s how you spell clear and present danger. If she’d lived, she’d have spent the rest of her life in an SEMME isolation cell.
None of this justified Joyce’s actions. Her justifications for it was that Anti-Joyce was essentially a demon in human form: everything about herself that she considered evil and unworthy of life. Killing such a creature bordered on a duty for her.
All these people saying “Anti-Joyce wasn’t a real person, she didn’t really exist”… what the hell is wrong with you? Sure, she wasn’t born the usual way, but she was alive by her own self and had her own personality. I’m not sure if the laws in the US would actually award her nationality (that would depend on how broad the definition is on being born), but regardless of her origin as Joyce’s counterpart, she was her own person and so this was not any variant of suicide but MURDER.
Legally speaking, Anti-Joyce never existed, since there are no documents that prove her existence: no birth certificate, no high-school degrees, no credit cards to her name… She never was. She had no relatives who could denounce her murder, etc.
So, Joyce didn’t (legally) commit murder, because the person she killed never existed, as far as the law is concerned.
Actually she did as Joyce brown. Joyce killed Joyce brown that day so again on some levelstuff kind of still in a way suicide.
Which would make the investigations even weirder: the victim looks like Joyce Brown, but that girl died months ago in a car accident, so… who the hell is this girl?
This’d be a GREAT case for some supernatural-themed investigation show.
Remember, she had her records changed so that instead of dying, she went to an African country as a missionary, because Walky felt sorry for her and for her friends and family.
If you secretly give birth and kill your baby and the police find it, they’re still gonna prosecute you.
But in that case there is a trail to follow: the baby’s father, the fact that the mother can’t hide the signs of pregnancy, somebody who noticed something was off, etc. In this case, if a cop was told of all this, he’d think that he is being messed with.
What? No, that’s exactly backward. The humanity of the body is the thing that matters, not the paper trail of the life it had. There are lots of actual people in the actual world that don’t have any of those things, and you would still be breaking a law if you killed them. The law tends to assume that things that look like humans are humans unless you can prove otherwise… and how could you possibly prove that AJ isn’t just Joyce’s twin?
I mean, if that were the case, then Joyce would be untouchable since SEMME faked her death and she legally doesn’t exist right now… when instead they’d doubtless just assume that the paperwork was dodgy and move forward.
Well, the difference is that no body will ever be found. SEMME will cover this up, and there will be no investigations. Again, as far as official paperwork is concerned, this never happened.
Also, this is sort of “Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”: Anti-Joyce was part of Joyce, and by killing AJ she metaphorically purged herself of that part, just like Dr. Jekyll committed suicide to kill Hyde, but I don’t recall anybody ever denouncing Jekyll’s actions as immoral. Is it really murder if the only one being killed is part of your psyche?
Anti-Joyce had her own body and Hyde didn’t. You’re confusing “getting away with murder” for “didn’t commit a murder.” Again, if Joyce killed a real person who lacked documents and SEMME covered it up, there would a similar lack of paper trail, but it would very obviously be murder.
Now, mindwiping herself? Not murder of Anti-Joyce. But once AJ is reified, killed her is straight up murder. She’s not “part of Joyce,” any more than Ralphie is “part of” Ralph in Melonpool. They’re different people! Just… ones that sprang from a similiar head. I mean, flip it around: if AJ killed Joyce, would that ALSO not be murder? Everything you’ve said applies to her no less than Joyce.
Once again, SEMME didn’t fake her death. They were going to, but Walky changed the documents so the cover story was instead “Is a missionary in an African country that doesn’t really exist.” No-one cared enough to fix it, since it still worked. This is actually kind of a major plot point and ties in to his visit to the Roomies! cast.
This strip is pretty much perfect. The reactions for Walky especially. And Jason is just quietly asking Joyce to hand over the gun, and the lack of words ties the whole thing together.