Yeah, I think this part of the storyline was a combination of nonexistent buffer and demands of the story being in conflict with each other. Â Joe gets to have his moment with Joyce, Sal gets to have her moment with Joe, and some important character beats are hit, but at the expense of SEMME-the-organization’s competence. Â Seriously, why were they walkin’ off leaving Joyce and all this junk on the ground behind?
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TO THE DOME!
…so why do people like Sal again? I always assumed the reason people were so fond of characters like her and Jason because of these appearances in Roomies but apparently they’re both still just as terrible here.
Well, terrible as in arrogant, assholes who fuck everything up, not as in terribly written. I mean, okay, Sal’s a badass in combat, and I’ll give her points for that but her personality is just so unpleasant. Is it just because of my personal character preferences? Was it due to the waits between strips making them seem less like screw ups?
I’m not trying to be a dick or anything, I genuinely don’t get it. hat am I missing?
I guess she’s one of the less hateable characters by this point.
[Jason 4 EVAR]
Have you read IW? She gets some humanizing moments there. Admittedly one of them involves her almost destroying the universe with a tree branch, though.
That’s the thing, I read through It’s Walky after seeing people being so happy to see them when they showed up in Shortpacked and the reaction baffled me since I thought they came across terribly in It’s Walky but everyone seemed happy and excited to see them back.
Characters can become beloved to a fanbase, even if they’re objectively, deeply flawed. If JK Rowling ever writes another book in the Harry Potter universe, there will be people offering to sell their souls, just to have Draco Malfoy make an appearance.
Sal is deeply flawed, but she’s still likable in some ways, and people care about her because she was a main character. Plus, later on, she does get some good mitigating circumstances. Kinda.
Perspective change with time, and character development alters your opinion too. I HATED Joyce up until the conclusion of IW! She annoyed me in Roomies!, and by the time she *spoiler* shoots her “evil” clone*spoiler* I was completely fed up with her and hoped she’d just die, but I knew Willis had a fetish for her and she was for whatever reason inexplicably hugely popular.
Rereading these now, I find her somewhat charming. Dunno if that’s me or just knowing where her character ends up, or maybe both.
Better question: Who the fuck cares about Joe?
Willis, you were right when you posted a comment a while back about people judging the ladies, specifically Sal and Dorothy, and Joyce here, harsher. Lines straight up with the whole “likeable female character” bullshit.
Heaven forbid a female have flaws and still be beloved.
While everyone adores Joe and his loveable sexually harassing ways.
… People seem a lot more hostile to Sal than she’s earned in this comic. Or even than she’s earned in her later appearances. She’s unstable, violent, and in desperate need of good influences and some freaking therapy, but she’s not some sort of pure irredeemable hate monster with no humanity. And Joyce has serious issues, especially this early on, but some people’s sheer loathing for her still seems disproportionate.
It’s been a while since I’ve read all the way through It’s Walky, but from what I remember, she filled a pretty popular character type at the time. It’s like asking why Shadow the Hedgehog was popular.
As long as your relatives are a priority.
Semme was trying to protect the universe(s) against the aliens. As this is a new organization, with a big problem (aliens), and each and everyone of the Semme members have some serious baggage: I can see them walking away and leaving all that evidence behind them.
As to Sal, she had a very, shall we say odd, mother. And thought she saw her parents killed in front of her if I remember the sequence of events right. She ran.
She had to leave Danny against her will (and yeah he’s a ah screwup …but he was her boyfriend.
And she got abducted too?, like the rest of them, not exactly good for ones mental stabitliy.
So, yeah I like her. She tries.
She tried hard not to hurt Joe, but Joe is now a people and wouldn’t cooperate…so she had to do what she had to do. She couldn’t let Joyce be examined. If just Joyce, they would lock her up and throw away the key. But with Joe as a backup, they just might be believed.
So, Sal could take both of them and clear up the mess, or one. Joe probably a better choice to take, and let Joyce get her self locked up as a looney.
But Sal, wants Joyce out of the picture I think, because of Danny. At least that’s what I think. So now Joe has only his word to backup what he saw, and no evidence.
And Semme has covered it’s tracks.
Sal should take BOTH of them since they’re both abductees.
Sal is leaving Joe behind so that no one at SEEME knows anything about her past so she can seem more badass and less attention seeking.
She’s leaving Joe behind because he’s Danny’s best friend.
He’s Danny’s best friend, he’s not in immediate life-threatening danger right this second, he’s more likely to discuss her past and who she really is (something she doesn’t want to bring up, and not just to “seem less attention seeking”)… there’s a fair number of reasons not to take him.
Man, SEMME is like the least competent organization in existence. I swear that they would’ve been effed if Walky hadn’t gone all Super Sayin on the aliens.
I think cultivating a SEMME that would cause Walky to do so was actually, canonically a thing.
That kind of scheme has never made sense to me. If someone told me “hey, there is a guy that can pretty much single-handedly save all our asses” the logical response does not seem to be “Then lets make an organization dedicated to sucking balls so his mental anguish will cause him to haphazardly use his powers in an entirely unpredictable way”. Still, it made for a really good comic arc, so I guess I can’t complain too much.
Taking into account that SEMME is the intersection of about five different conspiracies, none of which have actually fighting the Aliens as their primary concern, and all of which treat the field agents like mushrooms, I think they’re actually doing pretty well. It’s not like anyone ever gave them any training worth speaking of, or even told them what they’re actually supposed to be accomplishing.
I’m more worried that Sal knocked Joe down while he was carrying Joyce, who needed medical attention already. True, concussion doesn’t exist in comic strips.
Eh, they’re all abductees, even if only Sal is wearing the stripe so far. A little getting knocked in the head is just Tuesday for them.
Agree with David’s assessment. “Writing for the moment” is a fairly common phenom in comics scriptwriting, and it was my approach for God-knows-how-long. The emotional “beats” often work, but only if you don’t think too much about the spaces between them. “We’ll just tell them we’re making a movie” was a little dodgy as an explanation even in 1998– that’s what CGI was for.
The notion of a secret war between a government agency and a group of aliens is exciting, but it only makes sense if the aliens have any interest in maintaining secrecy about their activities. Even at this juncture, they are abducting and torturing people seemingly at random and with no regard for who might see them. By the time Head Alien’s full diva-esque personality solidifies, it really becomes questionable how he doesn’t already have his own reality show.
Really sal?..Really so she’s giving Joyce medical attention and needed to give joe a concussion to do so I think joe needs medics more then joyce
He got his head slammed into a building by a giant metal claw without real effect. Abductees can take it.
….why would Joyce be dying if she didn’t receive medical attention? As far as I noticed, all they did was show her porn (which, while being cruel and unusual, isn’t usually lethal.).
I think the implication is that SEMME will kill her unless she goes.
SEMME’s benevolence as an organization is largely proportional to their competence.
Maybe the suspension beam was amplifying mental stress as well, somehow? I mean, the darn thing put her into a coma, so evidently there’s more going on than is apparent to the visible eye.
*naked eye.
And when the HECK did Mike get abducted? I really, REALLY, want to see his conversation with the l’il aliens.
Originally posted:
April 30, 1999