When I was ten
on March 22, 2021 at 12:01 amThe last of the BEGINNINGS OF THE ENDS full page strips! This one was delayed until now for obvious reasons. It clearly goes here rather than back there with the other ones.
In middle school, I wrote a series of stories about Danny and Joe and Ultra Car in the even-more-future, timeskipped to the point where their kids were teenagers. Before Danny’s Girlfriend Sally was created (when I was in high school) it was established backstory that Danny’s wife (and D.J’s mom) died on a plane crash. And so this is me kinda folding that in, because NOTHING FROM MY CHILDHOOD PROSE GETS LEFT UNUSED in the Walkyverse.
It’s nice to see Dina! Alive! And in business with Joe, it seems. (“Rosenthal and Sarazu Technology” on the wall behind them.) Pretty nice universe other than the plane crashes.
And honestly it’s just weird to see Sal dressed all mom style. Sensible mom jeans, a purse, shorter hair. Like some kind of mom or something!!!!
anyway this is why sal was missing from most of the free saturday strips we just burned through, cuz *gestures* all this was going on in the meantime
I kinda dislike the multiple tenses in the last panel.
Mom Sal reminds me of Freida somehow 🤔
I think it’s the nose. Sal’s nose doesn’t usually look like that.
Yeesh, this kid’s not having a good day, is he?
And yeah, no, mom Sal is weird.
I think mom Sal looks kinda cute. But definitely weird as well.
Second. It’s mostly the shorter hair, but that also works surprisingly well.
Huh.
Before reading the commentary, I thought that Panel 3 was implying that Joe and Dina were a couple in DJ’s universe, and that my theory about DJ being from the Sirsverse (Slyverse? Ultraverse?) was therefore bunk, since I know that Joe and Rachel were a thing in those stories (I believe they had a daughter named Jean?). I hadn’t considered Joe and Dina simply being business parters because… well, it’s Joe.
…and then I remembered that Joe’s last name was “Ranksman” in those stories and “Rosenthal” here, so it still can’t be the same universe! On the plus side, though, this means that there’s nothing to contradict my theory that this is a universe where Ruth survived and she lived happily ever after with Billie, so that’s nice.
Also DJ was an adorable kid, and even if it’s right before a tragedy it’s nice to see Sal so… happy. This whole page is just really good.
Ouch, that last panel DJ. Poor kid looks rough. No wonder HA II wrote him off for dead.
At first sight, I honestly thought DJ had been cut in half and that Sal’s legs were his. Then I realized that was Sal’s hair and not just a huge blood stain, and I discovered I was wrong.
I kind of still like my original interpretation, though.
That pattern over DJ’s lower half and the rest of the nearby floor… that’s a shoe print, right? To indicate that Monkey Master killed DJ by stepping on him.
… which also implies that Monkey Master wears shoes with common boot patterns on them. Which is neat.
And yes, also ouch.
Are you SURE thats not a huge blood stain? It doesn’t look spikey enough to be her hair.
It’s both. Her hair ends around the middle of her back, and the blobby part is the bloodstain. But they’re both solid black with no defining line between them, so they just look like one big shape.
Almost six months to the day since the last Beginnings of the Ends. Wow. But you’re right, it definitely goes here.
“But no, my cousin was dumb in multiple universes” is very good.
After the end of this I’m definitely going to have to go back and reread Shortpacked (I still hope DMW will eventually get around to selling ebooks of SP so I can buy them, since that’s still my favorite Walkyverse comic and second-favorite DMW comic after DoA).
Sal’s taken worse hits
I think
Hopefully