#mike warner

[theevilestvillainofthemall]

Booster calling Amazi-girl ("Slamber" lol) "one of" Amber's alters reminds me. We haven't seen if Amber has any other headmates yet, but I would kinda like that. and. I want Mike Tulpa to come back but as a full-blown alter. think of the damage this would do to Amber and Ethan and probably everyone else too.

[coreyww]

[hhayfever]

Dumbing of Age sillies!!

Full canvas under the cut

[calupos]

I wanna get into trouble

[golgothasterrorhorror]

I’m just gonna say it..

MIKE FROM DUMBING OF AGE DIDNT DESERVE TO DIE!!!

I forgot abt dumbing of age and oh my god how long has it been..

[billieownedcount]

Made a textless counter just for an eyeline gag

Source

[dumbingofage]

how long have you known mike was going to die? was that a tough decision to make? did you sacrifice him for the sake of the plot/other characters' development, or was there another reason he had to go? he's my favorite out of all your characters, and after he died i went and reread all of shortpacked just to cope, haha. and now i want to know everything about your thought process re: killing him. if you have the time!

Mike never really fit in very well in Dumbing of Age? There was always somebody who'd be better, narratively, delivering his observations. If he's saying something cutting and acerbic to Joyce, then that's something that Sarah would be better off saying. If somebody was going to be a sarcastic wise-guy, that's Walky's wheelhouse. If I want somebody to be mean out of spite, there's already Ruth. He was kind of a drain in that specific way. Plus, like, in a cast mostly full of ladies and such, it felt off having this white dude off to the side always there to have their upper hand. He worked better in a different comic.

That didn't mean I never tried to make him work, though! "Of Mike and Men" was an attempt of mine to give him a better foothold in the story, in that world, with (I think) limited success. You can only give the guy so much more depth without making him Not Mike. It's a very narrow tightrope to walk, with him. All the room for his growth was essentially covered in Shortpacked!, and I didn't want to retread that.

The plan for Mike's death came in the wake of my own mother's death. I wanted to process feelings about death, I suppose. At that point, I hadn't decided yet that Amber and Becky's evil dads were also going to die, and I figured, oh, hey, I'm doing a timeskip. I can kill somebody. Those are the rules I gave previously, the "Not Killing Anybody Because Of IRL Years Of Depression And Sadness, Because Of How Slowly My Comic Moves In Time." I was already going to skip ahead months, and so my need to figure things out aligned with my upcoming planned timeskip, and I had to figure out who was going to go so I could process those feelings. And after some "no, not them, not them, not them, no not them," I remembered, oh, huh, Mike fits into this need almost perfectly. 1) He's at odds with the narrative, as established above. 2) I just set up this "origin" story with him that I could directly follow through on. 3) He'd be dying before being able to "redeem" himself fully in the eyes of other people, which is important to the angle of story I wanted to tell. I've got so many other characters who have done shitty things and are working their way through them to hopefully a better space, and it was important to me to have somebody who didn't get that chance. Somebody who left their standing with other characters at an awkward place.

And I remembered one of my walking tours of Indiana University, and seeing a bunch of stairs on the side of one of the buildings, and thinking, Hrm, that's an Amazi-Girl setpiece.

And it's high up.

and it's one of the least gruesome and/or body-horrorish ways in which to die, so

anyway, tl;dr: since summer/fall 2019

[twilightofthesandwiches]