This is clearly Mike channeling an alternate universe Mike out there. One that actually somewhat doesn’t entirely dislike everyone he’s around all the time. Slightly.
Yeah, it looks like of all the people he feigns tolerance of their right to exist for, Joyce is his “favorite” and so she gets his closest to kind persona. I guess he must have really enjoyed her allowing him to go full asshole as the “chaperone” on her date with Joe and so is paying back a vague pantomime of cordiality in return.
Which is what would make him a useful ally. He’d likely just out and out tell Becky’s dad that he has no legitimate legal recourse here and that anything he’d try to do would just drive a deeper more irreparable wedge between him and his daughter anyway while his actions to date have put her future in serious jeopardy unless she can find some way to get some amount of post secondary education on her own.
Seriously, the current job prospects for most people without an Associates degree or training in a trade at the minimum are fairly poor and he pulled her out of school and she’s not at a point in her life where she could easily get funding to go back on her own.
Gunslinger
No, no, see, fundies don’t speak Rational.
Steve
Honestly? Some do. You have to test the waters with them and keep going if you get one of the ones that can be reasoned with. If you get one of the ones who will flip the fuck out, it can be fun to keep going anyways. Veins popping in foreheads can be fun to watch if you have time…
Which for Mike is one of those Win-Win cases. Either their world view starts to change, which can hurt emotionally. Or they just get irrationally angry and do stupid things that can get punished in other ways, like with assault and battery charges.
ExplorerRowan
Doesn’t matter. An irrational response on Toe-dad’s part toward Mike, Becky, or anyone else after Mike made such a statement would make Toe-dad even more the bad guy in such a situation.
And if Toe-dad punches Mike for something like that, we know that all incarnations of Mike use pain as fuel for future Mike-ness.
Nightsbridge
Her future financial success in secular society is nothing compared to the future of her Immortal Soul!!!
But she’s right to not trust him, because he hasn’t yet gone after an authority figure yet and so is just as likely to use the information to shame Joyce, Dina, and Becky for how doomed to failure their plan is.
Joyce is right to leave him out as he’s just too much of a wild card to trust that he’ll help in a way that is actually helping versus just doing something to fuck over one of his peers because that amuses him.
Spencer
Also keep in mind that he threatens Joyce with getting her in way if she doesn’t let him in on what’s going on.
People just trip over themselves justifying ways for Mike not to be a horrible asshole, the same way they do for Blaine andRoss.
There is that. And I fully agree on Mike being a complete asshole.
And not in the humorous nice way, giving a harsh truth way he’s trying to sell it here. He consistently goes against the most marginalized group members he can instead of taking a risk going against corrupt authority and seems to especially like going against women (it’s worth noting that with Sal and Jason, he goes after Sal, instead of the man abusing his position of authority to sleep with students, with Dorothy and Walky, he has consistently gone after Dorothy as a means of going against Walky (straight up creepily harassing her by putting post-sex pictures of her up on her facebook or essentially calling her an easy slut with no standards as a means of knocking down Walky), and with “truth telling” to Ethan and Amber, he’s mostly just been a dick to them when they are already struggling with things and knocks them for not living up to a perfect standard or feeding on their insecurities rather than lift a finger to intervene with the people who hurt them and are continuing to hurt them).
Not once has he intervened (in this Freshmen year) against Blaine, Ethan’s mom, Ruth, Jason, Chick Fil-A, or any of the other alpha bullies, instead going after people without the social means to bring any consequences down on him. And the flashbacks with Ethan and Amber seem to strongly suggest that it was left to Amber alone to push back against Ethan’s mom and Ethan alone to emotionally care for Amber with her dad, while Mike was either absent or doing what he’s been doing this Freshmen year (smugly being a jerk while not lifting a finger to help).
Based solely on his actions in the Dumbiverse, telling him about this would be far more likely to end with him adding even more shit to Becky and Joyce’s plate (like how his intervention with the phone call from Joyce’s mom put both of them in a lot more danger and may have helped confirm that there was something fishy going on with their daughter). Because Toedad can bring real consequences, he has more social power and Becky is vulnerable and easy to hurt and is desperately keeping up a facade to keep from breaking down. As such, she could be a far more inviting target for him than someone who can actually make life legitimately harder for him.
And yes, I agree it’s also frustrating how much of a free pass he gets because “he just cuts through the BS and tells people the harsh truth they need to hear”, because he doesn’t actually have a track record of that in either universe. Most of the times, his statements trigger massive psychological damage that leads them to make unhealthier decisions (Amber putting more strain on her fears of becoming her father, and thus creating a further division with her DID states, Ethan feeling enough shame about what he has lost because of how others have reacted to him being gay that he agreed to go in the closet again and date a woman who could “fix” him, Joyce going into a massive PTSD meltdown from the Whiteboard Ding-dong bandit situation, and Sal feeling even more withdrawn and getting her to escalate her “relationship” with Jason even more.
In fact, the only times he’s actually led people to a better place is when he was actively trying to do the opposite in order to get something he wanted.
And I’ll admit it’s a little annoying that he’s praised as some grand truth teller, when Roz got a flood of b-word comments for actually saying something harsh that lead to a major important character growth moment (the thing that Mike is supposed to be praised for) and when the cast already has someone who makes hard truth statements because they are necessary to actually address the issues in the room even if it makes them look like an asshole in Sarah.
And it’s somewhat telling that Roz and Sarah have much better records on this in the Dumbiverse than Mike, but Mike gets the praise and the free pass.
Spencer
Aaaallll of this.
Sure Roz was a childish jerk about it but ultimately Joyce had to realize that she was being hurtful to Ethan and Becky, and Sarah can be a real jerk but she’s also proven to be capable of tremendous acts of love and has shown she’s basically unable to express herself in any other way.
But Mike? Nah, he’s running some master plan to make everyone realize their flaws and work to improve them. That is totally his place to do that and he’s allowed to psychologically torment everyone around him for as long as possible so long as the characters eventually come to some form of realization years down the line they would have anyway without him, just with him causing way more pain and trauma.
I would be genuinely thrilled if Mike never appeared again.
Touchfuzzy
To me, the difference is that Mike knows he is an asshole, and has shown no real intentions of doing anything for any other reason than being an asshole, or really any master plan. I think he is amusing because he ISN’T trying to wrap his behavior in some kind of moral/ethical shield. He’s an asshole to be an asshole, and while I would never be friends with someone like that, and he’s possibly a sociopath, I honestly have much more vitriol for people who try to pretend that their asshole behavior is because its for the “greater good”.
Spencer
Which is what Mike is; he is absolutely just an asshole to be an asshole, and every Mike strip is as unfunny as humanly possible, mostly because DoA has a significantly different context than the screwball comedy of Shortpacked and he doesn’t work here.
But then you get the ones who swears up and down that he’s actually super caring and just trying to get everyone to learn or some shit.
It’s disgusting. I can’t believe so many people here romanticize his abuse.
A thought occurs… Perhaps that is what Joyce will end up doing. Instead of lying she will tell Buttoedad the truth. That she knows where Becky is, that she won’t tell him, and that she thinks what he’s doing is horrible.
And then he calls Joyce’s parents and they pull HER out of college for being an impediment to the salvation of becky’s eternal soul and thus clearly not ready for joining the secular world as a holy Christian soldier. Everyone’s a winner!
Mike can be very helpful. You don’t want to talk to your Mother; Mike can help. You want a chaperon for your date; Mike can help. Mike can be very helpful. It just may not be exactly the help you want.
Well, yeah, but that’s Drunk Mike. He’s got his own tag.
charlierw1
yeah i know, but hes still being VERY sympathetic, i feel as though he’d still be the tiniest bit sympathetic even if he was sober, anybody would if their “friend” (or anybody they know at all actually) was related to faz
Mike rarely lies though (and not very convincingly), his weapon of choice is the truth.
Joycy would be better off asking Walky to teach her to lie. The trick is to make the lie sound plausible. Almost nobody’s gonna believe Billie got mauled to death by a bear, ‘cos it’s just so implausible-sounding.
“Actual human being” not in the sense you mean. He senses an opportunity to exercise his special powers which will help Joyce’s cause, but not because he wants to be helpful
Maybe not. Maybe he simply sees a course of action that is likely to result in an awful mess and he just wants to help Joyce and Becky dig themselves deeper into it. Remember Walky and the pajama jeans?
If you have ideas of what he might do,then he’s not going to do them.As we know,he is what you don’t want him to be,so he will not do the things you think he might do.
203 thoughts on “Underhanded”
Some Name
But what if she actually did?
gkheyf
the mike who cried bear. or droned in a dead-pan manner before nickelin’ your mom
Inkblot
The truth hurts, bruh
gkheyf
i actually do have a shirt that says “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. except for bears. they will kill you”
so, ya. take that under consideration next time you feel like lying
Idon'tcarenomore
I have the same shirt 😉
Clif
So does Mike. He got it from your mom. For a nickle and other considerations.
inqntrol
This thing started to get unbeareable.
Abel Undercity
The whole thing is now bruin-ed.
Narf
“Nickeling” is now a verb, and I am okay with that
Cattleprod
Have you never heard the story The Boy Who Cried Bear? The twist involves a lesson in homonyms when has to warn people about nudity.
Silvester Crow
And your mom for a nickel.
Willoughby Chase
I think Walky believed him.
DarkoNeko
“Come on, let me help”
…hearing Mike say that is so creepy.
DarkoNeko
Well, I4m kinda badmouthing. It may be time for some Mike spotlight~
Damned Scholar
Any Mike spotlight is going to be a zero-sum game where someone else loses. This other person could be Ross MacIntyre.
Rusty Shackleford
This is clearly Mike channeling an alternate universe Mike out there. One that actually somewhat doesn’t entirely dislike everyone he’s around all the time. Slightly.
Cerberus
Yeah, it looks like of all the people he feigns tolerance of their right to exist for, Joyce is his “favorite” and so she gets his closest to kind persona. I guess he must have really enjoyed her allowing him to go full asshole as the “chaperone” on her date with Joe and so is paying back a vague pantomime of cordiality in return.
Cerberus
Which is admittedly rapidly undercut with him threatening her when he doesn’t get his way.
Baggy
Do you remember drunk mike?
JetstreamGW
Maybe he’s a bit buzzed.
Captain Batson
I believed it, actually.
Damned Scholar
Does the genderswap version of Ruth/Billie have Ruth as a bear?
Kim
Haha 😀
Yu'Karaya
RIP in pieces, Billie
Disloyal Subject
Hey, if I were a bear the last thing I’d expect would be for the shreds of the cheerleader I just mauled to maul me right back.
Bleeters
To shreds you say?
OnyxIdol
Rest in peace in pieces? That doesn’t make any sense.
liahansen
Mike is like what Calvin would grow up to be if at some point he had watched Hobbes get brutally eviscerated by a neighborhood dog
winter
OMFG and now I want to read fanfic where this happens and Calvin’s middle name is ‘Mike’ and they were the same person all along…
tim gueguen
Isn’t Mike what Calvin would grow up to be without any trauma whatsoever?
inqntrol
Mike’s right,the truth can be very painful most of the times.
fogel
Mike has an uncanny ability to target people’s truth vulnerabilities.
vlademir1
Which is what would make him a useful ally. He’d likely just out and out tell Becky’s dad that he has no legitimate legal recourse here and that anything he’d try to do would just drive a deeper more irreparable wedge between him and his daughter anyway while his actions to date have put her future in serious jeopardy unless she can find some way to get some amount of post secondary education on her own.
Seriously, the current job prospects for most people without an Associates degree or training in a trade at the minimum are fairly poor and he pulled her out of school and she’s not at a point in her life where she could easily get funding to go back on her own.
Gunslinger
No, no, see, fundies don’t speak Rational.
Steve
Honestly? Some do. You have to test the waters with them and keep going if you get one of the ones that can be reasoned with. If you get one of the ones who will flip the fuck out, it can be fun to keep going anyways. Veins popping in foreheads can be fun to watch if you have time…
Dorje Sylas
Which for Mike is one of those Win-Win cases. Either their world view starts to change, which can hurt emotionally. Or they just get irrationally angry and do stupid things that can get punished in other ways, like with assault and battery charges.
ExplorerRowan
Doesn’t matter. An irrational response on Toe-dad’s part toward Mike, Becky, or anyone else after Mike made such a statement would make Toe-dad even more the bad guy in such a situation.
And if Toe-dad punches Mike for something like that, we know that all incarnations of Mike use pain as fuel for future Mike-ness.
Nightsbridge
Her future financial success in secular society is nothing compared to the future of her Immortal Soul!!!
(You can smell my sarcasm right?)
Clif
No, it sounds like a perfectly rational comparison to me. The error is further back.
Cerberus
But she’s right to not trust him, because he hasn’t yet gone after an authority figure yet and so is just as likely to use the information to shame Joyce, Dina, and Becky for how doomed to failure their plan is.
Joyce is right to leave him out as he’s just too much of a wild card to trust that he’ll help in a way that is actually helping versus just doing something to fuck over one of his peers because that amuses him.
Spencer
Also keep in mind that he threatens Joyce with getting her in way if she doesn’t let him in on what’s going on.
People just trip over themselves justifying ways for Mike not to be a horrible asshole, the same way they do for Blaine andRoss.
Cerberus
There is that. And I fully agree on Mike being a complete asshole.
And not in the humorous nice way, giving a harsh truth way he’s trying to sell it here. He consistently goes against the most marginalized group members he can instead of taking a risk going against corrupt authority and seems to especially like going against women (it’s worth noting that with Sal and Jason, he goes after Sal, instead of the man abusing his position of authority to sleep with students, with Dorothy and Walky, he has consistently gone after Dorothy as a means of going against Walky (straight up creepily harassing her by putting post-sex pictures of her up on her facebook or essentially calling her an easy slut with no standards as a means of knocking down Walky), and with “truth telling” to Ethan and Amber, he’s mostly just been a dick to them when they are already struggling with things and knocks them for not living up to a perfect standard or feeding on their insecurities rather than lift a finger to intervene with the people who hurt them and are continuing to hurt them).
Not once has he intervened (in this Freshmen year) against Blaine, Ethan’s mom, Ruth, Jason, Chick Fil-A, or any of the other alpha bullies, instead going after people without the social means to bring any consequences down on him. And the flashbacks with Ethan and Amber seem to strongly suggest that it was left to Amber alone to push back against Ethan’s mom and Ethan alone to emotionally care for Amber with her dad, while Mike was either absent or doing what he’s been doing this Freshmen year (smugly being a jerk while not lifting a finger to help).
Based solely on his actions in the Dumbiverse, telling him about this would be far more likely to end with him adding even more shit to Becky and Joyce’s plate (like how his intervention with the phone call from Joyce’s mom put both of them in a lot more danger and may have helped confirm that there was something fishy going on with their daughter). Because Toedad can bring real consequences, he has more social power and Becky is vulnerable and easy to hurt and is desperately keeping up a facade to keep from breaking down. As such, she could be a far more inviting target for him than someone who can actually make life legitimately harder for him.
And yes, I agree it’s also frustrating how much of a free pass he gets because “he just cuts through the BS and tells people the harsh truth they need to hear”, because he doesn’t actually have a track record of that in either universe. Most of the times, his statements trigger massive psychological damage that leads them to make unhealthier decisions (Amber putting more strain on her fears of becoming her father, and thus creating a further division with her DID states, Ethan feeling enough shame about what he has lost because of how others have reacted to him being gay that he agreed to go in the closet again and date a woman who could “fix” him, Joyce going into a massive PTSD meltdown from the Whiteboard Ding-dong bandit situation, and Sal feeling even more withdrawn and getting her to escalate her “relationship” with Jason even more.
In fact, the only times he’s actually led people to a better place is when he was actively trying to do the opposite in order to get something he wanted.
And I’ll admit it’s a little annoying that he’s praised as some grand truth teller, when Roz got a flood of b-word comments for actually saying something harsh that lead to a major important character growth moment (the thing that Mike is supposed to be praised for) and when the cast already has someone who makes hard truth statements because they are necessary to actually address the issues in the room even if it makes them look like an asshole in Sarah.
And it’s somewhat telling that Roz and Sarah have much better records on this in the Dumbiverse than Mike, but Mike gets the praise and the free pass.
Spencer
Aaaallll of this.
Sure Roz was a childish jerk about it but ultimately Joyce had to realize that she was being hurtful to Ethan and Becky, and Sarah can be a real jerk but she’s also proven to be capable of tremendous acts of love and has shown she’s basically unable to express herself in any other way.
But Mike? Nah, he’s running some master plan to make everyone realize their flaws and work to improve them. That is totally his place to do that and he’s allowed to psychologically torment everyone around him for as long as possible so long as the characters eventually come to some form of realization years down the line they would have anyway without him, just with him causing way more pain and trauma.
I would be genuinely thrilled if Mike never appeared again.
Touchfuzzy
To me, the difference is that Mike knows he is an asshole, and has shown no real intentions of doing anything for any other reason than being an asshole, or really any master plan. I think he is amusing because he ISN’T trying to wrap his behavior in some kind of moral/ethical shield. He’s an asshole to be an asshole, and while I would never be friends with someone like that, and he’s possibly a sociopath, I honestly have much more vitriol for people who try to pretend that their asshole behavior is because its for the “greater good”.
Spencer
Which is what Mike is; he is absolutely just an asshole to be an asshole, and every Mike strip is as unfunny as humanly possible, mostly because DoA has a significantly different context than the screwball comedy of Shortpacked and he doesn’t work here.
But then you get the ones who swears up and down that he’s actually super caring and just trying to get everyone to learn or some shit.
It’s disgusting. I can’t believe so many people here romanticize his abuse.
Sunny
A thought occurs… Perhaps that is what Joyce will end up doing. Instead of lying she will tell Buttoedad the truth. That she knows where Becky is, that she won’t tell him, and that she thinks what he’s doing is horrible.
neeks
And then he calls Joyce’s parents and they pull HER out of college for being an impediment to the salvation of becky’s eternal soul and thus clearly not ready for joining the secular world as a holy Christian soldier. Everyone’s a winner!
Oh wait.
Sunny
Well, this IS a DYW-comic after all.
charlierw1
mike… help, what is this
Clif
Mike can be very helpful. You don’t want to talk to your Mother; Mike can help. You want a chaperon for your date; Mike can help. Mike can be very helpful. It just may not be exactly the help you want.
gkheyf
that could be his slogan:
“mike not the help you want.
…maybe the help you need?”
Cybersnark
I still believe Mike has a future in counseling. His patients/clients would end up hating him, but he’d get them over their issues.
charlierw1
hes the help joyce deserves, just not the help she needs right now… wait actually she deserves and needs much better help, nevermind
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Mike is the help that Joyce needs right now. He’s just not the help she deserves.
Actually scratch that, Mike isn’t the help that ANYBODY deserves. Ever. 😛
Neil Robertson
Panel four has the most sympathetic face I’ve ever seen on Mike.
charlierw1
http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=1271
Captain Batson
Well, yeah, but that’s Drunk Mike. He’s got his own tag.
charlierw1
yeah i know, but hes still being VERY sympathetic, i feel as though he’d still be the tiniest bit sympathetic even if he was sober, anybody would if their “friend” (or anybody they know at all actually) was related to faz
JessWitt
Nins out of ten disgraced politicians agree the truth does do more harm than lying.
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Mike rarely lies though (and not very convincingly), his weapon of choice is the truth.
Joycy would be better off asking Walky to teach her to lie. The trick is to make the lie sound plausible. Almost nobody’s gonna believe Billie got mauled to death by a bear, ‘cos it’s just so implausible-sounding.
Someone
mikes greatest failure
inqntrol
Failure? He was experimenting methods of tormenting and chose his style.
Gram91
I think in Mike’s case, it would be more fun to mess around with the religious zealot…and for us watching XD
Ruthful
I don’t know how to feel about this strip. Mike is behaving like an actual human being? I thought that was reserved for the Walkyverse!
DarkoNeko
It’s like, is he drunk ? but nope.
fogel
“Actual human being” not in the sense you mean. He senses an opportunity to exercise his special powers which will help Joyce’s cause, but not because he wants to be helpful
BenRG
For Joyce, he would dare much.
Arianod
Maybe not. Maybe he simply sees a course of action that is likely to result in an awful mess and he just wants to help Joyce and Becky dig themselves deeper into it. Remember Walky and the pajama jeans?
Mada
I am now eager to see what shenanigans Mike can bring to this plot 🙂
inqntrol
If you have ideas of what he might do,then he’s not going to do them.As we know,he is what you don’t want him to be,so he will not do the things you think he might do.