Okay all panic aside, I incredibly appreciate that he just had a paradigm-altering epiphany immediately followed by a probably fruitless) Big Damn Hero moment, and he STILL DID IT WITH A MIKE WARNER ORIGINAL™ I-FUCKED-YOUR-MOM JOKE.
Right. Line one was yesterday’s alt text, line two is today’s, and line three is the chapter title: I predict tomorrow is end of storyline or something.
Don’t worry, DamnYouWillis can’t kill ANYONE!
(He’s already declared nobody will die in Dumbing…)
…but you’ll be surprised what you can live through… X_X
Close, Disney’s Aladdin 2. Not exact wording, but apparently Daniel the Human watched it enough times babysitting his Sister to learn it off by heart…
ASTAPHE
Otter got it. There were only three Aladdin Movies, and “The Vizier Strikes Back” both alludes to it being the middle movie of a trilogy as well as the actual plot of Return of Jafar
That’s from my autobiography describing the number of times I should have died, but didn’t. I have been hit by trucks 3 times, been set on fire once, fell out of a tree and bounced… The only thing that hasn’t happened to me is getting shot.
Clif
That’s because you’re a protagonist while most of the rest of us are just extras.
Honestly, I doubt his survival will be surprising. They got up there fast enough that Blaine got there before Amber could tackle him, and then she did parkour bullshit to reach him. They’re on the second floor, probably. That’ll be like a twelve foot drop. That’s plenty survivable, long as he doesn’t land directly on his head or neck. Gonna hurt though.
hof1991
But he’s falling head first.
JetstreamGW
I’m gonna guess that he’s actually tumbling. Momentum, yo.
(He’ll probably be okay eventually, but still need an ambulance and weeks of recovery and physical therapy. If he’s still tumbling, he might not land on his head.)
What I want to know is how Blaine grabbed that rope.
Same, his arms are pretty far from it in the panel before.
Joe Covenant
Yeah….
The “Comic Strip” physics have been strangely *off* in this scene.
First the chest kick (fixed though)
Then the hammer going flying, but then being in Blaine’s hand.
Now the clearly beyond reach rope being snag-able…
(Let alone Blaine being able to hold on ‘one handed’ with the weight of two bodies and the momentum behind enough force to take him off the balcony – I wish I’d known an off the peg kevlar suit was enough to make you bartman!) (Heh.. typo’d bartman… just leaving it!) 🙂
(I know.. I know.. it’s a comic…) 🙂
thejeff
The physics doesn’t really bother me. I doubt it would bother most if we weren’t stuck analyzing it panel by panel.
What’s been screwing with me this entire sequence is that Blaine’s suddenly capable of standing up to Amazi-Girl. That came out of nowhere, imo. Is it just that he put on a costume and is thus a threat by genre convention? Did Amber just catch him by surprise the other times?
Michael Joyce
it is quite likely a combination of amber catching him by surprise before… most likely because he flat out considers her pathetic and useless so he’d not have been prepared. he’s wrong, but blaines never had much in the way of awareness…
like, lets be fair here, blaine is a big guy, in body armour, and he’s a full grown adult who works in a physical job. in terms of strength/physical ability, he’s going to vastly outperform amber, who is a fairly nerdy teenager even despite her night time parkour, especially since he again has body armour and the like, while ambers in a regular jumpsuit
thejeff
Reasonable in a realistic worlds, but we’ve long seen that Amber isn’t exactly realistic. Her night time hobby isn’t just superhero levels of parkour, but also pretty casually getting into fights with multiple strangers. Which was perfectly inline with her previous fights with Blaine – Amber decking him in her room and Amber dressed as AG stomping him into the ground later.
Making that just surprise seems to retcon Amber’s abilities away.
If it’s onto Blaine’s car, he has a chance. And Blaine is now hanging on the rope.
Chrissy
He is not hanging on to the rope, he’s holding the free end…
vitalProximity
Oh my God, that’s actually even scarier in the real photo
Lexi
I have a cousin that survived like, a 6 storey drop onto dirt and stone? He was pretty badly roughed up, but it’s not unthinkable…
Otter
A Marine in my battalion fell out of the back of a CH-46 helo about 100 feet above wooded terrain, landing almost perfectly flat on his back. He was the achiest man on earth, but he was treated and released.
Needfuldoer
Peggy Hill had two skydiving parachutes fail and lived. Mike can survive a little 2 story fall.
Khyrin
Vesna Vulović probably the better comparison. She’s a Serbian flight attendant who holds the Guiness world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160m.
She also passed away 3 years ago at the age of 86, before anyone calls me out on referring to her in the present tense.
Bicycle Bill
To be honest, she was in the tail section of a DC-9 that was destroyed by a bomb in the baggage compartment. Air safety investigators attributed Vulović’s survival to her being trapped by a food cart in the plane’s fuselage as it broke away from the rest of the aircraft and plummeted towards the ground. When the cabin depressurized, the passengers and other flight crew were blown out of the aircraft and fell to their deaths. Investigators believed that the fuselage, with Vulović still pinned inside, landed at an angle in a heavily wooded and snow-covered mountainside, which cushioned the impact.[
Following the bombing, Vulović spent days in a coma and was hospitalized for several months. She suffered a fractured skull, three broken vertebrae, broken legs, broken ribs, and a fractured pelvis. These injuries resulted in her being temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. She made an almost complete recovery but continued to walk with a limp
Kinoko
All this talk of people who have survived these ridiculously high drops, yet here I am, a grown adult woman who slipped and fell in the shower a couple of years ago and FRACTURED A VERTEBRA. I AM NOT KIDDING.
(I’m okay. It hurt like the worst thing I’ve ever felt, I was in a back brace for two months, and then I had 9 months of physical therapy but I’m okay. I didn’t lose any range of motion. I also went to my first Burning Man before it was fully healed, where I biked around and rode on art cars in said back brace, because YOLO. :P)
Kinoko
Also: MIKE, NO. ;__;
Bicycle Bill
It’s only the second landing on the fire escape, but I estimate it’s still about a 20-foot drop.
Alanari
I’m estimating more like 3 meters, tops. Physics are a bit screwed up here but AG literally jumped up there. No human can jump 6 meters – sorry, won’t use a body part to measure distances.
BarerMender
Two stories is usually estimated as 20 feet.
Alanari
And high jumping world record is 2,50 meters, give or take a bit. I’m willing to give physics a bit of benefit of doubt, partly because superhero, partly because I’m not sure how that rope influences jump heights, but spontaneously doubling world record is a bit much.
King Daniel
Maybe it was a bungee cord or something? No matter what the height is, it’s certainly not just three meters.
Clif
Ya’ll are assuming that Amazigirl leapt from the ground. As a reminder, stuff happens between panels and we just get the highlights.
vitalProximity
Oh my gosh you guys, she jumped from the car! I never noticed that the first several times I looked at that strip, but I just checked and she totally did.
vitalProximity
… Unless Willis retconned?? Totally possible…
King Daniel
That does look like a redraw to me. And Willis did already completely redraw the panel in which Amazi-Girl’s initial kick made contact with Blaine.
Clif
Not saying your wrong cause my visual memory is crap, but Amber’s toss of the rope from the car and her subsequent swing into the fight shortly after that look as I remember them.
vitalProximity
Yeah I think so too. Looks like it would have been a pretty quick fix though, good job working on the fly, Willis 🙂
vitalProximity
@Clif I think the only thing that changed is he just drew the car in behind/under her. Everything else is identical, she was just on pavement before. It’s not like the Blaine retcon where he totally redrew it.
You can see the rope is wrapped around the fire escape. Amazi-girl swung down from a high place and whipped around. The double, or even triple, shortening of the arc, though, means she would’ve hit Blaine so hard she’d have easily broken his neck.
347 thoughts on “Dead”
Ana Chronistic
GAVE HIM THE SLIP
…wait no
Mr. Random
You’ve really started to take a shine to him, haven’t you?
vitalProximity
I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE
The answer is yes please.
…Wait, are we talking about Blaine or Mike now? Because that would definitely change my answer D:
Suet
*sniff* My boy… it’s now becoming dimes
vitalProximity
Okay all panic aside, I incredibly appreciate that he just had a paradigm-altering epiphany immediately followed by a probably fruitless) Big Damn Hero moment, and he STILL DID IT WITH A MIKE WARNER ORIGINAL™ I-FUCKED-YOUR-MOM JOKE.
Dave Van Domelen
Die as you would live.
Frank
His lifestyle DID determine his death-style!
Whitt
I will and have always loved mike.
facedepu
same.
RowenMorland
Does becoming dimes mean that when he hits the ground he’ll just explode out all the nickles he’s collected like Sonic?
Andrusi
Damn, and he had enough to get a Chaos Emerald, too.
King Daniel
“…to remind you of my love!”
Gerrico
“Da da da dat da dat da da da da ya da”
Thanks, Willis, for getting that song stuck in my head throughout this entire storyline.
PB
(Sad shoulder dance)
vitalProximity
Right. Line one was yesterday’s alt text, line two is today’s, and line three is the chapter title: I predict tomorrow is end of storyline or something.
Synnerman
oh no.
LeslieBean4shizzle
**puts on a coolaid man costume and explodes through the nearest wall**
OH YEAH!
Screwball
Don’t worry, DamnYouWillis can’t kill ANYONE!
(He’s already declared nobody will die in Dumbing…)
…but you’ll be surprised what you can live through… X_X
Kudos to anyone who gets where that’s from…
Otter
Aladdin V: The Vizier Strikes Back
Screwball
Close, Disney’s Aladdin 2. Not exact wording, but apparently Daniel the Human watched it enough times babysitting his Sister to learn it off by heart…
ASTAPHE
Otter got it. There were only three Aladdin Movies, and “The Vizier Strikes Back” both alludes to it being the middle movie of a trilogy as well as the actual plot of Return of Jafar
Opus the Poet
That’s from my autobiography describing the number of times I should have died, but didn’t. I have been hit by trucks 3 times, been set on fire once, fell out of a tree and bounced… The only thing that hasn’t happened to me is getting shot.
Clif
That’s because you’re a protagonist while most of the rest of us are just extras.
Opus the Poet
You know, I have suspected that to be the truth for most of the last decade.
Geneseepaws
Some of us are just “Cameo” parts, the director put in to shut us up whining about who to take to the Prom.
JetstreamGW
Honestly, I doubt his survival will be surprising. They got up there fast enough that Blaine got there before Amber could tackle him, and then she did parkour bullshit to reach him. They’re on the second floor, probably. That’ll be like a twelve foot drop. That’s plenty survivable, long as he doesn’t land directly on his head or neck. Gonna hurt though.
hof1991
But he’s falling head first.
JetstreamGW
I’m gonna guess that he’s actually tumbling. Momentum, yo.
Stygian Arcanum
Well, the next chapter of Book 10 is called, “When It Crumbles.” That’s not ominous at all.
Raen
That sounds more likely to be Jason’s downfall more than Mike’s, though.
TrueVCU
Does that include brain death?
vitalProximity
MIKE
vitalProximity
What the hell, I am NOT OKAY WITH THIS ?
vitalProximity
AG, *engage!* Er… Shit, how do you turn on the superpowers again???
StClair
If only you hadn’t lost the manual that came with the suit.
vitalProximity
And the remote. 🙁 I *knew* I should have converted everything over to one of those giant universal ones they were selling at 3am on PBS…
paleotectonics
Believe it or not.
Kensou
Mike is definitely NOT walking on air.
Needfuldoer
*Descending whistle* Splat.
(He’ll probably be okay eventually, but still need an ambulance and weeks of recovery and physical therapy. If he’s still tumbling, he might not land on his head.)
What I want to know is how Blaine grabbed that rope.
Xenocide
Same, his arms are pretty far from it in the panel before.
Joe Covenant
Yeah….
The “Comic Strip” physics have been strangely *off* in this scene.
First the chest kick (fixed though)
Then the hammer going flying, but then being in Blaine’s hand.
Now the clearly beyond reach rope being snag-able…
(Let alone Blaine being able to hold on ‘one handed’ with the weight of two bodies and the momentum behind enough force to take him off the balcony – I wish I’d known an off the peg kevlar suit was enough to make you bartman!) (Heh.. typo’d bartman… just leaving it!) 🙂
(I know.. I know.. it’s a comic…) 🙂
thejeff
The physics doesn’t really bother me. I doubt it would bother most if we weren’t stuck analyzing it panel by panel.
What’s been screwing with me this entire sequence is that Blaine’s suddenly capable of standing up to Amazi-Girl. That came out of nowhere, imo. Is it just that he put on a costume and is thus a threat by genre convention? Did Amber just catch him by surprise the other times?
Michael Joyce
it is quite likely a combination of amber catching him by surprise before… most likely because he flat out considers her pathetic and useless so he’d not have been prepared. he’s wrong, but blaines never had much in the way of awareness…
like, lets be fair here, blaine is a big guy, in body armour, and he’s a full grown adult who works in a physical job. in terms of strength/physical ability, he’s going to vastly outperform amber, who is a fairly nerdy teenager even despite her night time parkour, especially since he again has body armour and the like, while ambers in a regular jumpsuit
thejeff
Reasonable in a realistic worlds, but we’ve long seen that Amber isn’t exactly realistic. Her night time hobby isn’t just superhero levels of parkour, but also pretty casually getting into fights with multiple strangers. Which was perfectly inline with her previous fights with Blaine – Amber decking him in her room and Amber dressed as AG stomping him into the ground later.
Making that just surprise seems to retcon Amber’s abilities away.
Kyrik Michalowski
Blaine’s hand is clearly grabbing the rope, so that tells me the only person falling off is Mike. Well Mike, GG.
Alanari
If AG reacts fast, that can be fixed. She probably has a knife somewhere in her belt.
Also, I’m worried for Mike. How did that happen. I mean, it’s not that deep down I think, but he’s falling headfirst.
vitalProximity
I mean it’s like 2 flights of stairs onto pavement…
Bicycle Bill
It may not be pavement…. (checks the picture again) ….. oh, damn.
BarerMender
If it’s onto Blaine’s car, he has a chance. And Blaine is now hanging on the rope.
Chrissy
He is not hanging on to the rope, he’s holding the free end…
vitalProximity
Oh my God, that’s actually even scarier in the real photo
Lexi
I have a cousin that survived like, a 6 storey drop onto dirt and stone? He was pretty badly roughed up, but it’s not unthinkable…
Otter
A Marine in my battalion fell out of the back of a CH-46 helo about 100 feet above wooded terrain, landing almost perfectly flat on his back. He was the achiest man on earth, but he was treated and released.
Needfuldoer
Peggy Hill had two skydiving parachutes fail and lived. Mike can survive a little 2 story fall.
Khyrin
Vesna Vulović probably the better comparison. She’s a Serbian flight attendant who holds the Guiness world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160m.
She also passed away 3 years ago at the age of 86, before anyone calls me out on referring to her in the present tense.
Bicycle Bill
To be honest, she was in the tail section of a DC-9 that was destroyed by a bomb in the baggage compartment. Air safety investigators attributed Vulović’s survival to her being trapped by a food cart in the plane’s fuselage as it broke away from the rest of the aircraft and plummeted towards the ground. When the cabin depressurized, the passengers and other flight crew were blown out of the aircraft and fell to their deaths. Investigators believed that the fuselage, with Vulović still pinned inside, landed at an angle in a heavily wooded and snow-covered mountainside, which cushioned the impact.[
Following the bombing, Vulović spent days in a coma and was hospitalized for several months. She suffered a fractured skull, three broken vertebrae, broken legs, broken ribs, and a fractured pelvis. These injuries resulted in her being temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. She made an almost complete recovery but continued to walk with a limp
Kinoko
All this talk of people who have survived these ridiculously high drops, yet here I am, a grown adult woman who slipped and fell in the shower a couple of years ago and FRACTURED A VERTEBRA. I AM NOT KIDDING.
(I’m okay. It hurt like the worst thing I’ve ever felt, I was in a back brace for two months, and then I had 9 months of physical therapy but I’m okay. I didn’t lose any range of motion. I also went to my first Burning Man before it was fully healed, where I biked around and rode on art cars in said back brace, because YOLO. :P)
Kinoko
Also: MIKE, NO. ;__;
Bicycle Bill
It’s only the second landing on the fire escape, but I estimate it’s still about a 20-foot drop.
Alanari
I’m estimating more like 3 meters, tops. Physics are a bit screwed up here but AG literally jumped up there. No human can jump 6 meters – sorry, won’t use a body part to measure distances.
BarerMender
Two stories is usually estimated as 20 feet.
Alanari
And high jumping world record is 2,50 meters, give or take a bit. I’m willing to give physics a bit of benefit of doubt, partly because superhero, partly because I’m not sure how that rope influences jump heights, but spontaneously doubling world record is a bit much.
King Daniel
Maybe it was a bungee cord or something? No matter what the height is, it’s certainly not just three meters.
Clif
Ya’ll are assuming that Amazigirl leapt from the ground. As a reminder, stuff happens between panels and we just get the highlights.
vitalProximity
Oh my gosh you guys, she jumped from the car! I never noticed that the first several times I looked at that strip, but I just checked and she totally did.
vitalProximity
… Unless Willis retconned?? Totally possible…
King Daniel
That does look like a redraw to me. And Willis did already completely redraw the panel in which Amazi-Girl’s initial kick made contact with Blaine.
Clif
Not saying your wrong cause my visual memory is crap, but Amber’s toss of the rope from the car and her subsequent swing into the fight shortly after that look as I remember them.
vitalProximity
Yeah I think so too. Looks like it would have been a pretty quick fix though, good job working on the fly, Willis 🙂
vitalProximity
@Clif I think the only thing that changed is he just drew the car in behind/under her. Everything else is identical, she was just on pavement before. It’s not like the Blaine retcon where he totally redrew it.
NullSet
Car was already there on the 5th, 2 days ago. https://web.archive.org/web/20200105031813im_/http://www.dumbingofage.com/comics/2020-01-04-bucket.png
Bicycle Bill
Close enough for jazz.
BarerMender
You can see the rope is wrapped around the fire escape. Amazi-girl swung down from a high place and whipped around. The double, or even triple, shortening of the arc, though, means she would’ve hit Blaine so hard she’d have easily broken his neck.