161

Messagin’
Posted on April 23, 2021 by David M Willis
The Dumbing of Age Book 10 Kickstarter continues!  We're past $57K, working our way up to $60K, when we unlock the next character magnet: ERIC (the fingerguns guy)! Five days to go!

161 thoughts on “Messagin’”

  1. Ana Chronistic

    good Low cost cosplay tips

  2. Sirksome

    Wait…maybe Robin is actually qualified to teach this class.

    1. Clif

      Wait till she assigns the Hompkwork!

    2. Sunny

      Let’s say that she can definitely teach the students something and leave the qualifications out of it.

      1. James

        Robin is absolutely the best teacher you could have about politics, if she really works at it she might do it intentionally one day.

  3. Doctor_Who

    “This bowtie? A bat than randomly decided to land on my collar. Shhh, it’s sleeping.”

    1. Clif

      Male-bat and Robin? The ultimate team.

    2. Deanatay

      NOOO!!! I NEEDED the bowtie, at least, to be real!!!

  4. Jane

    That’s… A surprisingly good lesson. Setting aside the implication that she’s not qualified to teach it, of course.

    1. Doctor_Who

      Considering the nature of the lesson, one could argue that the less qualified to teach any other lesson she is, the more qualified to teach this one.

    2. TrueVCU

      “Implication” implies some degree of subtlety

    3. Hrodvitnir

      Heh, I actually hate this whole set up because Robin as a lecturer makes me want to scream – even with comic logic it burns my eyeballs. But yes, I am pretty down with this.

    4. DudeMyDadOwnsaDealership

      Life Experience is her qualification, sadly.

  5. Littlebit

    Who said Goddamit?

    1. Cattleprod

      I think if it was a named character they’d have a tag.

      1. Dara

        also my deduction but we can’t be sure yet

        1. Clif

          Pretty sure it was J.D. Salinger.

          https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/400204-god-damn-it-he-said-there-are-nice-things-in

    2. NinjaNick

      Eric Cartman?

    3. Needfuldoer

      This might be a different class than the one Becky, Dorothy, Joyce, amd Roz are in.

      But if it was that class, I’d assume it was Roz (if she didn’t just spend the whole time seething).

    4. Sambo

      My guess is it’s whoever said “what the f” at the end of this comic:
      https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/rondeau/

    5. Alex

      I figured it was Roz, who was hoping to learn from an actual professor. I feel for her.

  6. Octopus Ink

    I mean, she ain’t completely wrong… particularly regarding today’s politics.

    1. Jamie

      No, this was always true. Why do you think so many kings ended up also being gods?

      1. William Leonard Reese Jr.

        A tradition of Ancestor worship that ended up being extended to earthly power over the passing of generations?

        Honestly pretty easy to follow and. . . honestly not the worst religious tradition that I’ve seen irl or in fiction.

        I wonder how far back that idea of “God-Kings” goes in Human history.

        1. Clif

          General concensus is about 23rd century BC. Earliest known example was Naram-Sin of the Akkadian Empire.

      2. Swissaboo

        Because part of the ancient perception (or at least, some ancient perceptions) of divinity was the ability to do things “with a nod” and it turns out kings and emperors do have the ability to do things “with a nod.” A king nods and a village might be built or be destroyed, men might be put to death or their lives might be saved. Under this conception, kings and emperors just straight DO possess the defining trait of a god, more than some of the smaller gods even. A king would at least seem to gave more power to do things “with a nod” than the god of a particular river, for instance.

        1. Vegetalss4

          Yeah that’s one of those things that really changed my view of ancient deification of rulers. With their view of gods, particularly “small” gods, well a particularly “big” humans like a king or an emperor really could fit the definition pretty well.

        2. milu

          Let’s maybe not forget that a huge chunk of recorded history before industrial times was written by or at the behest of the ruling classes…

  7. Proto_Eevee

    She’s saying what we’re all thinking!

    1. Clif

      That Mike should be written back into the comic with no explanation ever?

      1. I am Nothing

        Yeah, the comic should really pull a Kenny with Mike.

        He just shows up again and nobody questions it.

        1. He Who Abides

          NO.

        2. I am Nothing

          “The reports of my Death were greatly exaggerated.“

        3. Demoted Oblivious

          YES!

          Mine has more weight because of the exclamation point. The ayes have it. Motion carried.

        4. thejeff

          I mean, that’s basically how Shortpacked did it.

  8. Dean

    She deliberately picked the worst Batman story in order to drive home her point.

    1. Svata

      Hush is not even top 10 worst Batman stories. There’s some real RANK Batman stories out there. ASBAR for the first example that comes to mind.

      1. Delicious Taffy

        I think the worst Batman story has to be The Night Gwen Stacy Died, hands down.

        1. Undrave

          Seriously! Alfred’s not in that one, we never go to the Batcave and his costume is weird.

        2. Clif

          I mean, Robin herself barely appeared in it.

    2. Ana Chronistic

      “but it’s Abraham Lincoln: Fo’ Shizzle!”

      1. Clif

        I assume that’s the blurb on the backcover.

        1. Sunny

          Panel 4. It says “Fo’ Shizzle” on the front.

        2. Ana Chronistic

          Just realised it could also be “Fo’ Rizzle”

  9. Kyrik Michalowski

    Robin has to be the epitome of doing something wrong the right way. I would totally believe she was smarter if I didn’t already knowmthe truth.

  10. Wagstaff

    Looks like Robin has successfully turned “political scientist” into an oxymoron.

    1. Clif

      Pfft. Like it wasn’t already.

    2. Demoted Oblivious

      Well, it used to be confined to the study of morons. She may be broaching study /by/ morons, except she hasn’t actually studied others beyond herself. Study of/by a moron is more auto-biographical than oxymoronic.

  11. Bicycle Bill

    You do need a real pipe, even if you never light it up Bubble pipes are plastic and that would be a dead giveaway.

    Secondly, any professor worth his salt smokes a bent pipe, not a straight stem.

    1. Nono

      Are there many lady professors that smoke pipes? I say it’s time to stop associating them with just men. Clear the pipes!

      1. Shitbird

        I assure you there are plenty of lady professors who smoke pipes, not sure if they smoke tobacco pipes though.

        1. Orson Smelles

          But the sticker on it in the store said “for tobacco use only”! How could it be used for anything else???

      2. Bicycle Bill

        As a former pipe smoker, I encountered very, very few female pipe smokers of any profession; and with (tobacco) smoking falling farther and farther out of favor, I doubt that I will see too many new devotees.  Unfortunately, the day of enjoying a pipeful of your favorite blend with your after-dinner drinks, even outdoors in some public parks, has gone the way of the T. rex, the passenger pigeon, and the dodo bird.

        1. Clif

          I’ve encountered very few professional pipe smokers of any gender.

        2. Dean

          The head sports teacher at my old high school was a pipe smoker. This was in the days when teachers could still smoke in staff areas.

        3. Lingo

          It’s a dying sport.

    2. Jhon

      The pipe is made of licorice and chocolate. (try a nibble)

  12. Nono

    Bets on how many classes before Roz has an aneurysm?

    1. RassilonTDavros

      An aneurysm out of sheer stupidity?

  13. NotThatDrew

    Scariest part of this is I swear to god I had a college mathematics professor who pulled this stunt (almost word for word) once.

    1. milu

      “Mathematics is all about optics?” I mean optics does rely on some trigonometry, but

    2. Rose by Any Other Name

      … why?

      1. NotThatDrew

        Like I said, NEARLY word for word. It was the first day, and this professor just wanted something to break the ice and drive home the fact that he wasn’t someone we needed to be overly formal towards

    3. Orson Smelles

      They were probably being more honest than you’d think – many faculty are never specifically trained in teaching. Some grad programs provide instructional workshops for TAs, but (especially in disciplines with a lot of RAs) that might be a very small part of a person’s time in grad school.

      Then they get a faculty position on the strength of their research and are dropped in front of a class for possibly the first time in 5+ years. Some discover a latent knack for teaching, and others… only teach upper-division/grad electives, because that way the chair at least doesn’t get complaints from *other* departments about how bad they suck.

      1. Rycan

        That’s why it’s ‘publish or perish’, not ‘teach or perish’.

  14. Newllend(henryvolt)

    So the moral of the lesson is “fake it till you make it” actually works out more often then you think.

    1. Bicycle Bill

      Not naming any names, but there are some politicians who didn’t even try to “fake it” and were still able to “make it”.

    2. Bicycle Bill

      And on a pedantic note — shouldn’t it be “fake it ’til you make it.” since the actual word is ‘until’ and one is just using a contraction?

      1. milu

        Nope:

        “Interestingly, while it is commonly assumed that till is an abbreviated form of until (the spellings ’till and ’til reflect this), till is in fact the earlier form.”

        1. Demoted Oblivious

          TIL: Use till or until, but I still shan’t use ’til, waiting ’til I’ll need till or until.

      2. Pedantic Jerkass

        https://www.dictionary.com/browse/till

    3. Amos Batista

      it’s a great lesson I’ve learned in computer programming

      1. Demoted Oblivious

        Fake it until it compiles?

        1. Clif

          First get hired. Then quickly learn the language being used.

        2. thejeff

          Languages are easy to learn if you know how to program. Syntax isn’t the hard part.

        3. Demoted Oblivious

          To expand on your point: Many languages operate on the fairly common procedural and/or OO paradigms, and thus are easy to jump between, however there are other ways of thinking about programming, and that represents the bigger hurdle to overcome. So, yes syntax is absolutely the easy part, but “how to program” is a multi-tailed devil and grasping one facet of it does not obviously translate to grasping another.

          (As a painful example, I’ve seen Masters of Comp Sci write 50 sequential lines of code, manually incrementing a single value, rather than introduce a loop.)

    4. Rycan

      Not really. BS’ing your way through a couple of lectures is one thing; BS’ing your way through an entire semester is something else. What’s she going to do on Day 3? Day 4? Day 5? How long can she keep pulling something that vaguely resembles a lecture or lesson out of her ass?

      1. Demoted Oblivious

        There are people who really can just talk forever. (I am guilty of being verbose myself.) It’s not a lot different than bad writing. You just sit down and go, and don’t worry about consistency or a point. You’ll stumble across them eventually. And then you keep going.

  15. RassilonTDavros

    Anyone else notice Robin’s… unique take on what BLM stands for?

    1. milu

      Oh wow. creative

      1. Clif

        Beautiful Land Merman as near as I can make out.

        1. Bicycle Bill

          Beautiful Land Mermaid – obviously a reference to Disney’s Little Mermaid, Ariel.

  16. Stephen Bierce

    *plays “Mean Mister Mustard” on the hacked Muzak* (Fab Four if you care, though to me the Bee Gees version from the movie is just as good.)

  17. Strafe

    Is that a ‘fo rizzle’ i see on that dust jacket

    1. Demoted Oblivious

      Fo’ shizzle i thought.

      1. milu

        which could it be???

  18. sultryglebe

    There is also the implication that if the college hires her and makes her class available that she must be qualified, so institutional approval and how closely it is tied to quality and ability may make for another important lesson.

  19. HeinousActsZX

    Chris Sims was the guy Robin ran against, I’m assuming.

  20. Joe Moose

    “The secret, o innocent supplicant, is that there is no secret.”
    – P. Anthony, “For the Love of Evil”

  21. Qube

    well if politics and academia ever not work out, she could probably make some money in the field of security penetration testing

    1. milu

      Or snake oil huckstering

      1. Clif

        Joe wanted to get into penetration testing and was then very disappointed.

  22. BBCC

    Robin has something of a point about optics, but Robin, I promise you, nobody has ever once mistaken you for a professional. 😛

  23. Wagstaff

    Reminds me of a commercial where a DJ dressed up as an insurance agent and effectively convinced a couple to go with his fake agency. The suit really makes all the difference, doesn’t it?

    1. milu

      And was that a commercial for the suit by any chance?

      1. Wagstaff

        I think it was for insurance.

        1. Rycan

          How…?

          Then again, most insurance commercials don’t make any sense nowadays beyond promoting brand recognition.

  24. Clif

    Rookie mistake. If she reveals everything in the first class, she’ll have no material for later on.

    1. milu

      Presentations. Let the students pick the topic. Then fill the hour with them. After each one make inane remarks and give a random grade.

      1. Clif

        While I have had classes that resembled that, I’m not sure it would work for Robin.

        It would mean letting all the attention be focused on someone else.

    2. Keulen

      I’m sure she’ll come up with more material somehow. No idea what it’ll be next, but she seems to be weirdly good at this despite having no idea what she’s doing.

    3. Demoted Oblivious

      I thought it was Roz who reavealed everything. Robin has plenty left to reveal.

  25. Marcus Wallaby, M.D.

    LOVE the Magritte subtext.

    1. milu

      What, more meta? Goddammit

      1. Clif

        This is not a subtext.

        1. saltchocolate

          Precisely. It’s a hovertext.

  26. Bryy

    …. holy shit. Well done, Robin.

  27. Varangian

    C’eci ne pas un professeur.

    1. Clif

      Where!

      1. Clif

        Dammit, that was supposed to be Wheee!

        1. milu

          Don’t worry it also ended up being funny ^^

  28. Bagge

    I’m now slightly less envious of Robin’s clothes

    1. Clif

      And slightly more envious of her sauce.

      1. Bagge

        That goes without saying

  29. Zor

    Robin is the Bunny-Ears Lawyer trope taken to its natural extreme and I love it

    1. Clif

      Thank you for not linking.

      1. Zor

        Oop. My bad. Lemme just https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BunnyEarsLawyer

  30. Andy

    I started to wonder how she managed to get elected in the first place. Them I remembered it’s Indiana and she had the R next to her name, and it all makes sense.

    1. Ray Radlein

      She is SO MUCH MORE DIGNIFIED AND PROFESSIONAL than Marjorie Taylor-Greene (of the next district over from me), Lauren Boebert of Colorado, or Matt Gaetz (of the Federal Penitentiary) that’s it’s amazing.

      And she is also clearly much smarter than Louie Gohmert of Texas.

  31. auroki

    And now students, how to use this very lesson to trick the cleaners into dry cleaning this Honey Mustard Sauce off my jacket for free!

    1. Clif

      No, no. Then you would have to buy actual patches.

    2. Lone Duck

      Honey Mustard?! You steal men’s souls, and make them your slaves!

      1. StClair

        Perhaps the same could be said of all condiments.

      2. auroki

        It is not by my hand I was once again given flavor!

  32. BenRG

    I wonder if the class are even half-ready for all the truths Robin is going to teach them!

  33. Rainhat

    If it was all in service of anything, then it’d be charming.

  34. TheFlamingonator

    where does one even get a bubble-blowing pipe? is it just something you can win at carny games?

    1. BenRG

      Comic books used to have ‘jokes and novelties’ mail-order catalogue pages back in the 1970s. These days? Try Amazon if you can stand the stench of modern slavery.

  35. NinjaNick

    I believe Robin’s not a true professor, but I did believe she spent some nights at the Holiday Inn Express. 😛

  36. Lars

    Dumbing of Age Book 11: Beautiful hand Mermaid

    1. Keulen

      DoA Book 11: I Just Keep Accidentally Dunkin’ My Elbows In Honey Mustard Sauce

  37. Kravis

    “I’m not even a real lesbian!”

  38. Varangian

    ALTERNATIVE EVEN BETTER TAKE:

    The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth; it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

    (I would actually fucking love to see Robin teach a whole unit on Baudrillard like this)

  39. Keulen

    Holy shit, Robin may be the best political science teacher without even trying or actually knowing jack shit about teaching.

  40. Lone Duck

    Politics aren’t about theory, ideas, or even people. Politics is always, at it’s root, one person’s willingness to do anything for power. Aaaaaand, that’s class for today!

  41. Rabisch

    Let’s face it. Robin is the best teacher ever. In her own weird way. They can learn so much from her!

  42. Spencer

    Batman Hush is a very boring comic whose defining feature is reminding you that better comics exist but it does do one thing that makes it notable enough to talk about: It killed Harold, the mute guy with hyperkyphosis (the medical definition of “hunchhback”, only Harold was depicted in-line more with Quasimodo) who was a genius with everything mechanical, and he died because after not appearing in the comics for three years at that point Harold came back suddenly able to speak and cured of his hyperkyphosis, revealed he had betrayed Batman and wanted to atone, and then Hush shot him to death a panel later.

    Harold first appeared in 1990 and if you love your jokes about Batman indoctrinating children then buckle the hell up because Harold was basically kidnapped into the Batcave after Batman rescued him from having his mechanical genius exploited by the Penguin, since now Harold can “use his talents for good” and so plonked him in the Batcave doing maintenance on his car. Mostly his inclusion seemed in service of explaining how Batman has all his gear and vehicles, a question you only want answered if you’re a very boring person who needs to scientifically explain why Superman can fly or catch Lois when she falls, but otherwise never really did anything important. He was just there in the background building something while the other members of the Bat family talked about stuff, and if you were new to these comics you just had this guy repairing the Batmobile off to the side rarely getting acknowledged.

    Come 2000 and the No Man’s Land story (a kinda famous one where Gotham gets hit by an apocalyptic earthquake and gets abandoned by the United States because even though the law doesn’t work like that it sure does make for a cool story) Harold was written out as he leaves the Batcave for the first time since his introduction, surveying the damage caused by the earthquake and deciding he’ll use his talents to fix Gotham.

    And then Jeph Loeb killed him off, because as was soon as established over at Marvel, that’s just kind of his thing.

    1. David M Willis

      from yesterday’s patreon comments, i expected more harold talk than this

      1. Spencer

        I was hoping for a lot of “what the hell are you talking about” because weird comics minutiae is always fun, but nobody bit. Maybe I need to try my hand at the Batman Who Laughs, or god forbid Batman: White Knight.

        Also it’s really hard to talk about Harold because my one quarter of a paragraph description of his role in the comics is all there was to him. You’d just read a Batman comic in 1994 and there he would be in the corner and nobody would acknowledge him.

  43. Vegetalss4

    I’m not surprised that Robin thinks or would present politics as only being about optics. That way she can more easily distance herself from all the real harm she personally did to real people.
    It’s a pretty self serving viewpoint.

    1. C.T Phipps

      That would be too calculating when it is very clear Robin DID think it was just about optics. The reason she ended up leaving politics and throwing the election is that she realized that she was causing real harm.

      1. Vegetalss4

        I don’t think people have to be aware of the lies they tell themselves are lies to be fooled by them. Self-serving viewpoints are very tempting for people to adopt exactly because they are self-serving.
        Robin is the most important person for Robin to convince to distance herself from what she did.

  44. Sombrero

    Robin and Becky are uncannily alike in their ways, almost like mother and daughter.

  45. thumb

    Robin is teaching them kids that politics is a terrible field for terrible people. Which is only a half-truth, and therefore politically accurate.

  46. Pat

    Hush is like 240 pages long, right? Seems like that would be a rather thin hardcover, Robin. We all assumed you were waving around a children’s book on Lincoln.

    1. Smooti

      Perhaps it is multiple copies of Hush put together. Ruses on top of ruses.

  47. Smooti

    The thing is, she ain’t wrong. That’s kind of an important lesson about politics – you can study the theory and learn the in’s and out’s all you want, but if you don’t make yourself look good to your constituents, you really ain’t getting anywhere.

    And also it’s important to immediately realize that your professors are fallible, if you hadn’t already figured that out from your teachers in high school already.

    1. thejeff

      She’s also not right though.

      Yeah, you’ve got to make yourself look good to your constituents to win elections, but campaigning isn’t all there is to politics. And the skills to campaign well seem to be more and more decoupled from the skills to do things well once you’re in office.

      1. C.T Phipps

        Robin’s major issue is that apparently she never considered that the issues were important at all.

        It was always a scam for her.

        So the revelation that people were being hurt by her actions is what shook her.

        1. Needfuldoer

          And that last point is how we know she’s a fictional Republican politician; the real ones are indifferent at best or revel in it at worst.

        2. thejeff

          Absolutely, though it’s not just issues. There are practical skills to accomplishing things in politics, even if all you want to accomplish is paying off your donors and catering to bigoted supporters. Even grifting properly relies on understanding how things work.

  48. J

    Robin and Batman

  49. BenRG

    “Where am I going with all this? Before any of you are ready to practice politics, you’re going to need to understand what politics actually is. So, buckle up, class, ’cause I’m gonna take you to see the man behind the curtain!“

  50. FacelessDeviant

    Teaching by fooling everyone with bogus credentials.

    Lets hope Robin never teaches flight school or nuclear engineering.

  51. Hydrargentium

    +100 point to Willis for “ceci n’est pas une pipe”!

    Hg

    1. khn0

      But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

  52. MacareuxMoine

    How did the sleeve patches suddenly change their shape? Or is this just my mind playing a trick on me in the first panel, cause it knows how sleeve patches are supposed to look? 😉

    Also Robin didn’t have sleeve patches in the previous strip – I wonder if this is Willis wiggling his way out of having to draw them every time.

  53. Moonie

    I feel like Walky would really get on baord with the honey mustard elbow patches

  54. Jennifer Bak

    Love the “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” reference! (I’m also assuming Scott McCloud reference as well?) 🙂

  55. C.T Phipps

    Robin: The important thing to understand is that it doesn’t matter if you kill a baby, only if you are SEEN killing a baby.

    Becky: It matters to the baby.

    Robin: STOP RUINING POLITICS, BECKY!

  56. Teddae

    professor desanto is the best addition to DoA2 so far

Leave a Reply to Keulen Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

*

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.