It’s a webcomic for those who don’t know. But if you don’t know that, this thread is going to make no sense.
My assumption is that Mike is dead, his body hasn’t been discovered yet, Amber has blanked his death out of her mind, and she’s hallucinating his presence.
Or am I’m wildly misreading the current story arc?
Mike is not dead.
Mike being dead would make Amber, Amazi-Girl, Ethan, Danny, and Walky unusable for the rest of the comic.
Amber, however is obviously hallucinating.
I can’t figure out at all where the current comic plot is going re Mike and his ‘death’, if that happened. Willis is excellent at writing this comic, and I guess this is going somewhere, but I can’t figure out if there was a time jump, either forwards backwards or sideways, after Mike fell from that fire escape. The recent previous strips’ preoccupation with protecting Becky from Toe Dad’s release when he’s affirmatively released points toward backward time jump, but I just can’t make it all fit.
People said that in the comment section, too, and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out the logic.
The only characters who have any way of knowing that he’s out are Robin (who got the call, but is a fucking idiot) and Amazi-Girl (who saw him, but has not come out since the night). And Mike, but he also hasn’t been on-panel since the night before.
Also - It is not blue or red, therefor it is not a flashback.
Well, the blue/red thing is someone having a memory. If this is a time jump, to say a week ago, one of these characters could still have a red/blue flashback.
It definitely looks like a flashback to me. I can see one character repressing what happened that night, but not all of them.
Nobody except Amazi-Girl and Mike have anything to repress and they haven’t been seen since the fall. Because the only thing that happened to anyone else is a party.
The fact that Amber is having vague anxiety, and now hallucinations, concerning Mike is all the evidence anyone should need that this isn’t a flashback. Without bleed-through from Amazi-Girl seeing the fall, there’s no reason for Mike to be added into her mental illness roster.
(And flashbacks are always blue or red. We have never had one that wasn’t. Not even the extended one to Mike’s adolescence, which was not a memory, except in the sense that all flashbacks are something the people involved would remember. But nobody is actively remembering it.)
Why? It seems to me that having somebody they all knew die would be exactly the kind of dramatic tragedy Willis loves. And Mike seemed to be turning into a better person recently which means he experienced character growth and can now die. Keeping him around after the character growth would mean figuring out a new role for him in the narrative. He works better as a sad memory than as a living character.
Plus, there was a reference to Mike in another webcomic that said he was dead. It’s possible that Randy Milholland is in on the joke with Willis and is planting clues to misdirect DoA readers. But that seems too convoluted to me. I’m assuming his portrayal of Mike as dead was on the level.
Maybe, but there’s obviously unfinished biz between Mike and Ethan. Why set that up to just kill him and drop it?
I’m glad I’m not the only one who has been bamboozled ever since the fire escape.
I won’t weigh in with an opinion because I’ve only been following this strip for three years, and much about it still baffles me.
On the issue of the timeline, I don’t think there’s been a jump or flashback. I feel the story has been generally moving in a linear fashion albeit very slowly.
The current day in the strip started with the January 8 strip. Amber is waking up the morning after the confrontation with her father where Mike fell off the building. We haven’t seen what happened after Mike’s fall but something more must have because Amber, Blaine, and Ross were all still up their on the fire escape.
It’s clearly the next morning because we see people still in Becky’s room from the birthday party. And when Joe and Jacob talk, Joe mentions events that happened “yesterday”.
A strip later Amber says she feels like “I’m forgetting something big and terrible and important” but then there’s a joke about studying for midterms. But she says it again a few strips later. She goes to Mike and Walky’s room and asks if Mike’s there. When Walky says he isn’t, says she thought she heard him and then says she feels there something she needs to “solve something somewhere”.
Mike “appears” as soon as Walky leaves (even though we don’t see him entering the room). Amber talks about hearing a voice in her head and Mike begins talking. Amber says hearing his voice is “little less crazy” then hearing a voice in her head and Mike says “wait for it”.
Mike hasn’t appeared in a scene with any character besides Amber since his fall.
I think it was finished. Mike realized that while he loved Ethan, he wasn’t good for Ethan. Ethan would be better off with somebody else, like Danny.
Just read the new strip. I think this is moving from theory to canon.
Because the comic moves at a pace that makes a particularly leisurely snail seem like a cheetah on crack.
If Mike died, Amber and Amazi-Girl would be unusable for the rest of the comic (which Willis has said probably won’t go past the first semester) due to guilt.
Ethan’s story with Mike is nowhere near finished, And Mike was one of Ethan’s best friends. He would mourn - doubly so, given Amber’s likely reaction to it.
And Danny being Danny and resenting Mike, and Walky having actively claimed he wanted Mike to die for that tragedy grade would, like Amber and Amazi-Girl, be wracked with guilt, though not being Amberzigirl, and not having a reasonable way to believe they’re actually responsible, they’d get over it quicker…
But.
A year, real-time, is maybe a week in-universe (10 years on, we’re still mid-October). It would still be interminable.
And I disagree that it’s the kind of drama he loves. In the Walkyverse, there were only 7 deaths of people anyone in the main cast gave a shit about, and only 3 (Sal’s parents and Amber’s dad) got more than a couple panel’s focus after their death (until Mike came back to life and became a major character in Shortpacked!). Hell, I don’t actually remember if Jason even learned that Dargon was dead. And the Walkyverse moved (well…moves, he still occasionally dips back for one-off strips) at more or less real time, so he could have given them reasonable space without locking up the characters for years at a time.
Yep. Either Mike vanished in a puff of ghostly ectoplasm, or he moves REAL quick.
He also specifically promised that he was never going to kill off a character, specifically because having to deal with a death would bog down the story like Kamino Neko says. (I bet she knows this, as I see her a lot in the webcomic discussion community.)
On the other hand, you kinda need something bad enough for Amber to get even more delusional like this. And there sure was a lot wrapping up Mike’s storyline and making him less bad before the end.
On the third hand, she could merely think he was dead and the same stuff would apply. It wasn’t that high up. And it would be very Willis to use a technicality to keep his promise.
I actually intended to mention that in my post, but it looks like it got lost in the edits.
no you missed the part that no one knew but joyces parents and it eas infered that joyces dad either didnt know until the last minute or couldnt get away from his wife to make the call and robin because joyce didnt bother answering her phone for most of the day before and the day of the party
in fact robin says shes known about it (or the possibility of it ) for a few days when she set up the security detail
To be a bit more specific - he said he wouldn’t kill anybody that anyone in the core cast gave a shit about - Not-Ryan could get it because the results would only be some brief guilty celebration. Toedad could get it because Becky’s mourning is basically already done, and what’s left would be mixed with joyous freedom (that is a kind of drama he could milk from a death without bogging the strip down for years to come).
But a member of the core cast, who’s connected to other members of the core cast, who are connected to other other members of the core cast? Would stop the story dead for a long time.
Even the other evil (grand)parents - Blaine, Carol, Sir, Ethan’s-mom-whose-name-I’ve-forgotten (…Naomi? I want to say Naomi.) - would have too much of a negative effect on the narrative momentum. (Sir could even result in Ruth being removed from the cast, since he was the only reason she was there, and I don’t think her mental health recovery could be sustained enough to have her self-motivate (even if she wouldn’t lose her ability to pay) if she had to worry even more about (or even be responsible for taking care of) Howard.)