Ross McIntyre at least has this air of being “broken,” like he doesn’t understand the world he lives in anymore, and he’s had all his supports ripped away. His wife took her life, his daughter’s off at college until she comes home “different,” he’s got an Invisible Sky Wizard who calls for his daughter’s death. I wouldn’t say that all of that makes him *sympathetic,* but there’s still at least something tragic about him, because he could have been, and more than likely *was,* a better person, at some point. It is possible to picture a world where Mrs. McIntyre didn’t take her life, where Ross remained at least *stable,* even if he couldn’t accept his daughter’s homosexuality. Maybe he wouldn’t have let her live in his home, even, and that would be tragic and a terrible thing to do, but I do believe that in such a world, at least Ross wouldn’t have come to the school with a rifle.
Blaine, on the other hand, just actively enjoys making other people suffer, with a particular fixation on making Amber’s life miserable. I don’t think we’ve seen even a single panel of him being anything other than an absolute tool. Every single second of screentime, he’s 100% devoted to making Amber feel terrible. There’s no tragedy that he has suffered through, there is no hint of him ever having been a better person, or even of any possible path that might have produced a better person. He’s just an asshole, and the only tragedy here is that he exists in the first place.
Mike is an ass, but he hasn’t, to my knowledge, ever crossed the Moral Event Horizon (like, you know, trying to kill your daughter for Jesus). He engages in Comedic Sociopathy, and that’s about it. He is “salvageable,” Blaine is not. Ross probably isn’t, either, but I maintain that he once *was* salvageable.
Benjamin Geiger
I resent people like Blaine being called “tools”.
Tools are useful. In some universes (cough cough Erfworld cough), tools control the world.
Blaine is just a pile of rust.
Andy
Blaine is the sort of fool you get from a late-night infomercial when you’re drunk: he’s only useful for one thing, no one knows what that thing is, he’s not even good at it, and he broke the first time he was used for that thing.
I got the impression I got. I thought the comic was implying Ross DROVE his wife to suicide to show just how awful he was.
Drunk Mike
‘Not the impression I got.’
ditrysia
I also had this impression, yes.
HeySo
From what I understood, he was domineering and negative from the start (and thus, as per the impression we got, did in fact drive her to suicide to escape her bad situation). But even if that wasn’t the case, he certainly wasn’t the type to be sympathetic or supportive. So, no matter how you look at it, he’s responsible enough for how things turned out that you can’t give him any kind of sympathy on having to deal with the end result.
It’s like having sympathy for someone who got bit by a dog after they slapped it. Sure, they have an injury, but they’re also the ones who pushed for that outcome to occur. Meanwhile, a far more tragic thing has happened to the other party involved.
I don’t consider Mike evil. Sociopathic with amoral tendencies, but that’s not evil. Mary, on the other hand, is certainly evil. Blaine also.
Some1
Everyone is technically evil, its just that the degree of that evil varies dramatically. Evil is a just an imperfection in the soul, and don’t we all have imperfections?
Some1
Note that the use of “soul” doesn’t represent any belief in God or an actual soul, and is merely the best sounding moniker as saying mind might risk implying that mentally disabled people are evil.
I have imperfections, but I don’t have a soul. I traded it to a troll under a bridge for forty radishes and a box of knives.
Marsh Maryrose
You got radishes and knives?!? Man, I got hornswoggled.
All I got for my soul was a Klein bottle, an Escher cube, and a Hayward blivet.
Annonymouse
Dang and all I got was a Rubic’s Hypercube – I haven’t even figured out how many dimensions it has as yet
Deanatay
Ooh ooh! Is that the one where if you turn the left bit 90 degrees to the left, all the colors change? And if you turn the bottom bit 90 degrees up, it becomes a hemisphere? And if you turn the blueward bit 90 degrees to the past, someone assasinates Adolf Hitler?
Man, I hated that puzzle.
smparadox
You should put the Escher Cube in to the Klein Bottle, and mount the resulting anomaly on the Hayward blivet. It makes a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum! Very handy if you are ever running late and need to arrive before you leave, or if you want to visit Titan…
CJ
Since when is evil defined as imperfection of the soul?
By whom?
Just looked into Merriam Webster and wasn’t finding my own definition “acting with intent to damage and hurt and enjoy it” but things that are much much more vague. Hmm. And there I thought the English language was better equipped that the German language n this case.
Definition of evil
eviler or eviller; evilest or evillest
1 a : morally reprehensible : sinful, wicked an evil impulse
b : arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct a person of evil reputation
2 a archaic : inferior
b : causing discomfort or repulsion : offensive an evil odor
c : disagreeable woke late and in an evil temper
3 a : causing harm : pernicious the evil institution of slavery
b : marked by misfortune : unlucky
“Since when is evil defined as imperfection of the soul?” I mean, he didn’t say it was the definition of evil…I do find it a reasonable description of it. And since he was the one who first started talking about evil in this discussion, I think it’s reasonable for him to further describe what he means without making the dictionary into the ultimate authority.
CJ
What I was trying to say was that to me, defining evil as imperfections of the soul makes the word worthless, as everyone has those and not everyone is or even acts evil(ly). So this definition sounds to me as a term used to suppress everyone, not a term to describe what I perceive as evil. So, as words are only sounds wrapped around ideas, I tried to find out whose idea we a talking about (while finding that my idea an MWs idea differ greatly).
Kit
There was a piece in The New Yorker a few years ago that you might find interesting: “What Do We Mean By ‘Evil'” by Rollo Romig. From the article: “Neiman herself is understandably reluctant to offer a single, narrow definition of her own for what “evil” means today, but what she does suggest is a useful description of what effect evil has: calling something “evil,” she writes, “is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world.” Evil is both harmful and inexplicable, but not just that; what defines an evil act is that it is permanently disorienting for all those touched by it.”
Azhrei Vep
That’s an AWFUL definition of evil. By that definition, nothing’s evil, and that can’t be right.
Really? I see that as a decent description– not definition, as it says that’s not what she’s really offering it as– though one that could include things that aren’t actually evil. (Though maybe they are experienced as evil by those affected by them.)
Why do you think that nothing could fall under that description?
@CJ: He seems to be treating evil as a spectrum, rather than black and white, if that helps it seem less like suppressing everyone. And he’s describing people moreso than acts in his suggested description.
Some1
Because the world works in shades of grey, and I would say Willis writing is close enough to the real world for his characters to also work in shades of grey. No one is completely black, and no one is completely white (in morality not race) so to call someone completely evil or completely heroic causes us to fail to properly understand them as people.
CJ
Yes, spectrum, sure. If we have a spectrum of behavior that at one end start with “good” has lots of shaded between good and neutral and then goes off to the other end which i’m not sure how to name, with lots of shades between neutral an that end, “evil” to me starts a rather long way off between neutral and the not named end.
I can relate to the Neiman description quoted above by Kit. It describes something that is extreme and disturbing which matches with my idea of evil, whereas some1 definition talks of the normality of humans not being perfect.
Some1
CJ and Yumi I suppose. Let me make my argument a bit clearer.
A. Evil has a fairly broad definition, but to simplify let’s describe it as anything that harms either mentally or physically a person or other life form whether intended or not.
B. Everyone occasionally performs actions that harm others, whether in large ways or small ways. For instance, while Blaine beating his wife is obviously a much worse act that Joyce trying to break up Walky and Dorothy, both are based around harming someone else to fulfill your own desire and as such both count as being evil.
C. Having determined that everyone commits “evil” acts, if we describe someone who commits evil acts as being “evil” we therefore must describe everyone as evil.
D. Therefore we cannot describe anyone as being evil because while it might be simple to compare Joyce to Blaine on extreme ends of the spectrum as we get close to the center it starts to rely more and more on your own personal morality system.
E. Is this saying therefore everyone’s actions are okay, because everyone does bad things? Of course not, but we punish based on action not on how we feel about the person. You would never say someone should go to prison because they’re “evil” because that doesn’t mean anything.
—
Now sadly if we want to say no truly evil people exist, because of the reasons mentioned above, we must also concur that no truly good people exist. Once again, an action can of course be good and selfless, but life isn’t a video game with a meter telling you how evil or good your are.
thejeff
And good, I suppose, is anything that helps anyone, intentionally or not. Which leaves everyone and damn near any action as both good and evil, thus rendering the terms near meaningless.
Until we focus on the more extreme cases and get back to the conventional use of good and evil.
Some1
@thejeff, well the terms themselves aren’t meaningless, as I would say the difference between an evil and a good action is based on how many people it helps vs how many it hurts and to what degree. For instance, shooting a man before he can harm a child is good because typically children’s lives are seen as more important than dangerous maniacs. However if you were to shoot an unarmed shoplifter in the back, that would be seen as evil because stuff is always worth less than people’s lives.
Emily
If an amoral disregard for the well being of others or how your actions affect them (which isn’t even the situation with Mike because he actively seeks to hurt people for his own amusement) isn’t evil than what is anymore?
Leslie. Other parents, but they seem to be more one-off (though so is this flashback teacher). Jocelyn is technically an adult. I mean, so’s most of the cast, but she’s somewhat more adult than them.
She’s old enough to have some established writing and a place and (at least some) income of her own, at least. Probably late 20s, though I could see higher mid range.
I don’t think she’s the oldest (I think that’s John), so I don’t think there’s that big an age difference between her and Joyce…actually, remembering a Patron strip, I’d say she’s about five or six years older than Joyce is?
Nono
I think a conversation between Jocelyne and John indicated that there was enough of a gap that college was ‘different’ than when they went. I imagine Jocelyne’s on the lower end of the scale though, so it can’t be more than 8-9 years at most.
abysswatcher1993
John seems to be from generation x, the generation of the south park creators and nostalgia critic. They are the current 30 year old people that see people below them (millenials) as entitled and obsessed with social change. Jocelyn seems to be a millenial in her 20s. Because this comic has no specific time because of 8 years of writing and just a semester in the time of the story, it’s difficult to say which generation Joyce belongs to.
On the topic of nice adults, there’s the manager of the floor, there’s Robin’s aide that is the only member of her party that wished her luck and reminded her of stuff she easily forgets, there’s Mike’s parents, there’s Asma, etc.
I mean, generations on the whole are kind of stupid, but beyond that, I don’t see what’s stupid about 30 year olds being millennials? They have more claim to it than current 20 year olds, anyway.
TheKelliestKelly
Yeah, the millenial generation is 1980Ish to mid/late 1990ish/2000. I think a current 20 year old would be gen z but that’s debatable
Needfuldoer
There doesn’t seem to be a defined cutoff date, which is probably by design so aging boomers still have a fresh punching bag they can blame for things not being like Leave It to Beaver anymore.
How about we say Gen z is too young to remember 9/11 firsthand? That would put the line somewhere around 1997/1998. They’re the children of the youngest Gen X-ers and first-wave Millennials.
wwwhhattt
Surely the next generation will be called into being when millennials decide to hate young people?
thejeff
Generations are always kind of loosely defined, so it’s not a particular attack by boomers on millennials.
John would be millennial, unless he’s a good deal older than I think. Joyce is now a Gen Z or whatever we’re going to call them (though she would have been a millennial back when the strip started. And late Gen X in the Walkyverse, I suspect.) Jocelyne probably somewhere on the cusp, though by the time she appears again she’ll probably be solidly Gen Z.
Cory
According to Pew Research Center, millennials are 1981 to 1996.
Yeah, pretty sure it’s John, Jordan*, Jocelyn, Joyce, unless I’m forgetting one in the middle there. So probably more like mid-20s, I guess? She seems to have more of her shit together than I do at 25, so I was skewing older.
Consider this image from said bonus strip, featuring young Jocelyne and pregnant Carol. In the text of the bonus strip, Jocelyne is being asked what a good name for a girl would be, and she responds with Jocelyne (she says “Josswin” and likes it because it’s “pwetty,” so she’s probably even younger in that strip than I was remembering).
I was thinking it could turn out that was from she was pregnant with Jordan, they just didn’t know the sex of the baby at the time, but Hank does say “for your sister,” which makes it seem like they do know. Gonna go read the comments on it for any clarification, I guess. Took me way too long to find.
TheKelliestKelly
Ragelli is right about the birth order (and in the other universe, there would be extra siblings to include – 2, I think) though I couldn’t point to specific comics.
In the next panel of that comic, the parents suggest “Joyce” as a simpler to say alternative to “Jocelyn” so I’d say that’s def Carol’s last pregnancy
I agree that she’s pregnant with Joyce then, but I don’t know that them suggesting the name Joyce for a girl is actually definite proof of that. Like, it could be they decide on “Joyce if it’s a girl” and then it’s a boy, so they name the next one Joyce. But if the birth order you seconded is confirmed, then that’s moot anyway.
Needfuldoer
(This comment got eaten by the spam filter yesterday because I linked to two other strips. Let’s try again!)
Yeah, as far as we know in this continuity, Hank and Carol had the four kids in that order.
John is probably in his mid-thirties. He looks older in that bonus comic than Amber, Mike, and Ethan do in the current flashbacks. Joyce also said he’s by far the oldest, and been out of the house almost as long as she can remember (which would suggest he either moved out or went to college when she was five or six). He also went to public school “twenty years ago” according to Carol.
Jordan is almost a complete mystery. So far we know he was “too… Jordan” to come along on Freshman Family Weekend, and there’s a “situation” regarding him and his parents (which came from “squeezing too hard” according to Hank). I’m guessing he rebelled hard and severed.
Jocelyne is very little in the flashback bonus strip, and is old enough to be out of college now, but she’s most likely closer to 20 than 30.
We know Joyce is eighteen.
I’d guess there’s a bigger age gap between John and Jordan than there is between the others.
219 thoughts on “Amb”
Ana Chronistic
no good deed goes unpunished =(
abysswatcher1993
Now Mike feels like defying… social order.
butts
love how the placement of that new avatar’s eyes makes it look like Joyce is peering up at Amber’s “Batman Peens Superman: Dawn of Buttstuff” novel
Yumi
BABY ;_;
anone
same 🙁
TrueVCU
Mike copped a feel on his way out
Roger
what universe am i in
Wraithy2773
*looks at the news*
…….fucked if I know. Can we get back to the normal timeline please?
ProfessorDetective
This IS the normal timeline. Feel free to lose your mind to the existentialist dread of that fact. No one will blame you.
Djaevlenselv
Reminds me of this thing
https://i.imgur.com/pPJPpjR.jpg
Bathymetheus
trump . . . lizard overlords
lizard overlords . . . trump
I can’t DECIDE!
hof1991
I welcome our new lizard overlords.
threePwny
New? They’ve been around since the pyramids!
The Phule
Actually, there is no ‘normal timeline’ Causality is a lie. Stuff just happens, and sometimes it happens in order
butts
…Okay, maybe this whole tragic Mike backstory thing is legit.
Laladoria
The Breaking of Mike begins
):
miados
well so far we do see some hit on his face.
Doctor_Who
Aw man, first sympathy for Faz, and now Mike.
There had better not be a storyline coming up that makes me feel sorry for frigging Blaine.
DailyBrad
I wouldn’t count on it, no.
We did get small glimpses of humanity in Ross, but operative word being “small”, just with respect to the late Mrs McIntyre.
Jon Rich
Ross McIntyre at least has this air of being “broken,” like he doesn’t understand the world he lives in anymore, and he’s had all his supports ripped away. His wife took her life, his daughter’s off at college until she comes home “different,” he’s got an Invisible Sky Wizard who calls for his daughter’s death. I wouldn’t say that all of that makes him *sympathetic,* but there’s still at least something tragic about him, because he could have been, and more than likely *was,* a better person, at some point. It is possible to picture a world where Mrs. McIntyre didn’t take her life, where Ross remained at least *stable,* even if he couldn’t accept his daughter’s homosexuality. Maybe he wouldn’t have let her live in his home, even, and that would be tragic and a terrible thing to do, but I do believe that in such a world, at least Ross wouldn’t have come to the school with a rifle.
Blaine, on the other hand, just actively enjoys making other people suffer, with a particular fixation on making Amber’s life miserable. I don’t think we’ve seen even a single panel of him being anything other than an absolute tool. Every single second of screentime, he’s 100% devoted to making Amber feel terrible. There’s no tragedy that he has suffered through, there is no hint of him ever having been a better person, or even of any possible path that might have produced a better person. He’s just an asshole, and the only tragedy here is that he exists in the first place.
Mike is an ass, but he hasn’t, to my knowledge, ever crossed the Moral Event Horizon (like, you know, trying to kill your daughter for Jesus). He engages in Comedic Sociopathy, and that’s about it. He is “salvageable,” Blaine is not. Ross probably isn’t, either, but I maintain that he once *was* salvageable.
Benjamin Geiger
I resent people like Blaine being called “tools”.
Tools are useful. In some universes (cough cough Erfworld cough), tools control the world.
Blaine is just a pile of rust.
Andy
Blaine is the sort of fool you get from a late-night infomercial when you’re drunk: he’s only useful for one thing, no one knows what that thing is, he’s not even good at it, and he broke the first time he was used for that thing.
Drunk Mike
I got the impression I got. I thought the comic was implying Ross DROVE his wife to suicide to show just how awful he was.
Drunk Mike
‘Not the impression I got.’
ditrysia
I also had this impression, yes.
HeySo
From what I understood, he was domineering and negative from the start (and thus, as per the impression we got, did in fact drive her to suicide to escape her bad situation). But even if that wasn’t the case, he certainly wasn’t the type to be sympathetic or supportive. So, no matter how you look at it, he’s responsible enough for how things turned out that you can’t give him any kind of sympathy on having to deal with the end result.
It’s like having sympathy for someone who got bit by a dog after they slapped it. Sure, they have an injury, but they’re also the ones who pushed for that outcome to occur. Meanwhile, a far more tragic thing has happened to the other party involved.
Some1
Well if were going in order of relative evilness next up will probably be Mary.
Chaucer59
I don’t consider Mike evil. Sociopathic with amoral tendencies, but that’s not evil. Mary, on the other hand, is certainly evil. Blaine also.
Some1
Everyone is technically evil, its just that the degree of that evil varies dramatically. Evil is a just an imperfection in the soul, and don’t we all have imperfections?
Some1
Note that the use of “soul” doesn’t represent any belief in God or an actual soul, and is merely the best sounding moniker as saying mind might risk implying that mentally disabled people are evil.
Yumi
I have imperfections, but I don’t have a soul. I traded it to a troll under a bridge for forty radishes and a box of knives.
Marsh Maryrose
You got radishes and knives?!? Man, I got hornswoggled.
All I got for my soul was a Klein bottle, an Escher cube, and a Hayward blivet.
Annonymouse
Dang and all I got was a Rubic’s Hypercube – I haven’t even figured out how many dimensions it has as yet
Deanatay
Ooh ooh! Is that the one where if you turn the left bit 90 degrees to the left, all the colors change? And if you turn the bottom bit 90 degrees up, it becomes a hemisphere? And if you turn the blueward bit 90 degrees to the past, someone assasinates Adolf Hitler?
Man, I hated that puzzle.
smparadox
You should put the Escher Cube in to the Klein Bottle, and mount the resulting anomaly on the Hayward blivet. It makes a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum! Very handy if you are ever running late and need to arrive before you leave, or if you want to visit Titan…
CJ
Since when is evil defined as imperfection of the soul?
By whom?
Just looked into Merriam Webster and wasn’t finding my own definition “acting with intent to damage and hurt and enjoy it” but things that are much much more vague. Hmm. And there I thought the English language was better equipped that the German language n this case.
Definition of evil
eviler or eviller; evilest or evillest
1 a : morally reprehensible : sinful, wicked an evil impulse
b : arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct a person of evil reputation
2 a archaic : inferior
b : causing discomfort or repulsion : offensive an evil odor
c : disagreeable woke late and in an evil temper
3 a : causing harm : pernicious the evil institution of slavery
b : marked by misfortune : unlucky
Yumi
“Since when is evil defined as imperfection of the soul?” I mean, he didn’t say it was the definition of evil…I do find it a reasonable description of it. And since he was the one who first started talking about evil in this discussion, I think it’s reasonable for him to further describe what he means without making the dictionary into the ultimate authority.
CJ
What I was trying to say was that to me, defining evil as imperfections of the soul makes the word worthless, as everyone has those and not everyone is or even acts evil(ly). So this definition sounds to me as a term used to suppress everyone, not a term to describe what I perceive as evil. So, as words are only sounds wrapped around ideas, I tried to find out whose idea we a talking about (while finding that my idea an MWs idea differ greatly).
Kit
There was a piece in The New Yorker a few years ago that you might find interesting: “What Do We Mean By ‘Evil'” by Rollo Romig. From the article: “Neiman herself is understandably reluctant to offer a single, narrow definition of her own for what “evil” means today, but what she does suggest is a useful description of what effect evil has: calling something “evil,” she writes, “is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world.” Evil is both harmful and inexplicable, but not just that; what defines an evil act is that it is permanently disorienting for all those touched by it.”
Azhrei Vep
That’s an AWFUL definition of evil. By that definition, nothing’s evil, and that can’t be right.
Yumi
Really? I see that as a decent description– not definition, as it says that’s not what she’s really offering it as– though one that could include things that aren’t actually evil. (Though maybe they are experienced as evil by those affected by them.)
Why do you think that nothing could fall under that description?
Yumi
@CJ: He seems to be treating evil as a spectrum, rather than black and white, if that helps it seem less like suppressing everyone. And he’s describing people moreso than acts in his suggested description.
Some1
Because the world works in shades of grey, and I would say Willis writing is close enough to the real world for his characters to also work in shades of grey. No one is completely black, and no one is completely white (in morality not race) so to call someone completely evil or completely heroic causes us to fail to properly understand them as people.
CJ
Yes, spectrum, sure. If we have a spectrum of behavior that at one end start with “good” has lots of shaded between good and neutral and then goes off to the other end which i’m not sure how to name, with lots of shades between neutral an that end, “evil” to me starts a rather long way off between neutral and the not named end.
I can relate to the Neiman description quoted above by Kit. It describes something that is extreme and disturbing which matches with my idea of evil, whereas some1 definition talks of the normality of humans not being perfect.
Some1
CJ and Yumi I suppose. Let me make my argument a bit clearer.
A. Evil has a fairly broad definition, but to simplify let’s describe it as anything that harms either mentally or physically a person or other life form whether intended or not.
B. Everyone occasionally performs actions that harm others, whether in large ways or small ways. For instance, while Blaine beating his wife is obviously a much worse act that Joyce trying to break up Walky and Dorothy, both are based around harming someone else to fulfill your own desire and as such both count as being evil.
C. Having determined that everyone commits “evil” acts, if we describe someone who commits evil acts as being “evil” we therefore must describe everyone as evil.
D. Therefore we cannot describe anyone as being evil because while it might be simple to compare Joyce to Blaine on extreme ends of the spectrum as we get close to the center it starts to rely more and more on your own personal morality system.
E. Is this saying therefore everyone’s actions are okay, because everyone does bad things? Of course not, but we punish based on action not on how we feel about the person. You would never say someone should go to prison because they’re “evil” because that doesn’t mean anything.
—
Now sadly if we want to say no truly evil people exist, because of the reasons mentioned above, we must also concur that no truly good people exist. Once again, an action can of course be good and selfless, but life isn’t a video game with a meter telling you how evil or good your are.
thejeff
And good, I suppose, is anything that helps anyone, intentionally or not. Which leaves everyone and damn near any action as both good and evil, thus rendering the terms near meaningless.
Until we focus on the more extreme cases and get back to the conventional use of good and evil.
Some1
@thejeff, well the terms themselves aren’t meaningless, as I would say the difference between an evil and a good action is based on how many people it helps vs how many it hurts and to what degree. For instance, shooting a man before he can harm a child is good because typically children’s lives are seen as more important than dangerous maniacs. However if you were to shoot an unarmed shoplifter in the back, that would be seen as evil because stuff is always worth less than people’s lives.
Emily
If an amoral disregard for the well being of others or how your actions affect them (which isn’t even the situation with Mike because he actively seeks to hurt people for his own amusement) isn’t evil than what is anymore?
Clif
Disney corp.
Gojira
Every monster was once an innocent baby.
Proxiehunter
Except Damien. There was never anything innocent about him even as a baby.
AnvilPro
How many adults in this comic aren’t unabashedly pieces of shit? Hank, Amber’s Mom, Joe’s Dad seems to be recovering from being one.
Doctor_Who
Both Dorothy and Dina’s parents seem okay.
Weird to think that Galasso is probably a Top 5 Dad, though.
Inahc
Leslie and… mindy?
Nono
Sierra’s parents, Dorothy’s parents, Dina’s parents.
Chloe Pudding is naive but her heart is kinda in the right place.
Yumi
Leslie. Other parents, but they seem to be more one-off (though so is this flashback teacher). Jocelyn is technically an adult. I mean, so’s most of the cast, but she’s somewhat more adult than them.
Regalli
She’s old enough to have some established writing and a place and (at least some) income of her own, at least. Probably late 20s, though I could see higher mid range.
Yumi
I don’t think she’s the oldest (I think that’s John), so I don’t think there’s that big an age difference between her and Joyce…actually, remembering a Patron strip, I’d say she’s about five or six years older than Joyce is?
Nono
I think a conversation between Jocelyne and John indicated that there was enough of a gap that college was ‘different’ than when they went. I imagine Jocelyne’s on the lower end of the scale though, so it can’t be more than 8-9 years at most.
abysswatcher1993
John seems to be from generation x, the generation of the south park creators and nostalgia critic. They are the current 30 year old people that see people below them (millenials) as entitled and obsessed with social change. Jocelyn seems to be a millenial in her 20s. Because this comic has no specific time because of 8 years of writing and just a semester in the time of the story, it’s difficult to say which generation Joyce belongs to.
On the topic of nice adults, there’s the manager of the floor, there’s Robin’s aide that is the only member of her party that wished her luck and reminded her of stuff she easily forgets, there’s Mike’s parents, there’s Asma, etc.
Yumi
Asma– okay, IS, technically, an adult, but only in the same sense as the rest of the cast. She’s an undergrad.
Inahc
30 year olds are millennials too. Yes, this is stupid.
Yumi
I mean, generations on the whole are kind of stupid, but beyond that, I don’t see what’s stupid about 30 year olds being millennials? They have more claim to it than current 20 year olds, anyway.
TheKelliestKelly
Yeah, the millenial generation is 1980Ish to mid/late 1990ish/2000. I think a current 20 year old would be gen z but that’s debatable
Needfuldoer
There doesn’t seem to be a defined cutoff date, which is probably by design so aging boomers still have a fresh punching bag they can blame for things not being like Leave It to Beaver anymore.
How about we say Gen z is too young to remember 9/11 firsthand? That would put the line somewhere around 1997/1998. They’re the children of the youngest Gen X-ers and first-wave Millennials.
wwwhhattt
Surely the next generation will be called into being when millennials decide to hate young people?
thejeff
Generations are always kind of loosely defined, so it’s not a particular attack by boomers on millennials.
John would be millennial, unless he’s a good deal older than I think. Joyce is now a Gen Z or whatever we’re going to call them (though she would have been a millennial back when the strip started. And late Gen X in the Walkyverse, I suspect.) Jocelyne probably somewhere on the cusp, though by the time she appears again she’ll probably be solidly Gen Z.
Cory
According to Pew Research Center, millennials are 1981 to 1996.
http://www.pewresearch.org/topics/millennials/
Regalli
Yeah, pretty sure it’s John, Jordan*, Jocelyn, Joyce, unless I’m forgetting one in the middle there. So probably more like mid-20s, I guess? She seems to have more of her shit together than I do at 25, so I was skewing older.
* WHO ARE YOU, JORDAN?
Yumi
Consider this image from said bonus strip, featuring young Jocelyne and pregnant Carol. In the text of the bonus strip, Jocelyne is being asked what a good name for a girl would be, and she responds with Jocelyne (she says “Josswin” and likes it because it’s “pwetty,” so she’s probably even younger in that strip than I was remembering).
I was thinking it could turn out that was from she was pregnant with Jordan, they just didn’t know the sex of the baby at the time, but Hank does say “for your sister,” which makes it seem like they do know. Gonna go read the comments on it for any clarification, I guess. Took me way too long to find.
TheKelliestKelly
Ragelli is right about the birth order (and in the other universe, there would be extra siblings to include – 2, I think) though I couldn’t point to specific comics.
In the next panel of that comic, the parents suggest “Joyce” as a simpler to say alternative to “Jocelyn” so I’d say that’s def Carol’s last pregnancy
Yumi
I agree that she’s pregnant with Joyce then, but I don’t know that them suggesting the name Joyce for a girl is actually definite proof of that. Like, it could be they decide on “Joyce if it’s a girl” and then it’s a boy, so they name the next one Joyce. But if the birth order you seconded is confirmed, then that’s moot anyway.
Needfuldoer
(This comment got eaten by the spam filter yesterday because I linked to two other strips. Let’s try again!)
Yeah, as far as we know in this continuity, Hank and Carol had the four kids in that order.
John is probably in his mid-thirties. He looks older in that bonus comic than Amber, Mike, and Ethan do in the current flashbacks. Joyce also said he’s by far the oldest, and been out of the house almost as long as she can remember (which would suggest he either moved out or went to college when she was five or six). He also went to public school “twenty years ago” according to Carol.
Jordan is almost a complete mystery. So far we know he was “too… Jordan” to come along on Freshman Family Weekend, and there’s a “situation” regarding him and his parents (which came from “squeezing too hard” according to Hank). I’m guessing he rebelled hard and severed.
Jocelyne is very little in the flashback bonus strip, and is old enough to be out of college now, but she’s most likely closer to 20 than 30.
We know Joyce is eighteen.
I’d guess there’s a bigger age gap between John and Jordan than there is between the others.
BBCC
Carla’s parents and Joss are pretty cool.
anone