Artcow David "Walky" Willis / Shortpacked - Fingerwagging Cishet Shitlord

[Fluoxetine Man]

Didn't he send pictures of his penis to a 16 year old?

Was it actually confirmed that he did that? The pic on ED has very red, ginger hair, which doesn't seem to match Buckley's dark hair. There is almost no links on ED about the whole 'Jackie' thing. When I was young and visited SA (Allah forgive me) I took that at face value, but now after the shit that happened with Vic and Johnny, I wanna see more concrete proof.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

So, I am coming back trying to make Dave Willis great again! And the first thing I find is... this?

Ok, you might be confused about what on earth this is, it ties into the previous strip

And then this

Ok, you might be asking what on earth happened this century on the Walkyverse. What happened is just that this time yet another fan favourite creator's pet, the angry black woman misanthrope racist stereotype turned out to be a lesbian! Innovative! Ground breaking! The pillars of entertainment have been shaken! Shaken I say! She's in love with Joyce, sweet, naive christian girl turned sour, jerkass, brainwashed, bitter misanthropic SJW atheist much like pretty much everyone else but Walky who matters in this shit.

But Joyce's new Willisian heroine* is now paired up with deconstructed macho alpha male turned meninist mangina Joe, oh, the drama! So she somehow asked big black muscle nerd (lol?) to do shit and he said "Naw, dawg, I'mma not doing shit, I be like, a man, dawg, dooown to my nerdy shit. Nigga's not helping you wit'cha gay sheit"

(Did this guy discover he's non straight already? He's dyed his hair blond so I guess yes?)

Now, dumb plot notwithstanding, the gag has some vague reminder that Willis was once able to be funny in it, but it's overly dragged on like a Family Guy gag, and much like a Famiy Guy gag it invites the suspicion that this was done so that WIllis could slack on actual art or storytelling or such things.

Moreover, the gag would actually works if the context wasn't totally retarded.

*Willisian heroine: A white, quirky, hard left lesbian who is an oddball and, like, totally unpredictable and adept to random access humor. As if Phoebe from Friends had a son with Chris-chan and then that son had a daughter with Ramona Flowers.

 

[Flexo]

Did he literally just use the exact same drawing only adding a tilt to one to try and make it seem different?

 

[Anonitolia]

View attachment 5355704

Did he literally just use the exact same drawing only adding a tilt to one to try and make it seem different?

no, there are still some minor differences- look at the eyebrows, the eyes, the shirt collar and the mouth shape- but he may as well have
I think he used the same sketch and stuck really closely to it. Either that, or he copy-pasted the linework and added a bunch of minor differences like collar length and mouth width to make it look unique.

I'm more preoccupied with the fact that he can't seem to color within the lines or hide his sketch work lol

 

[Arthur Morgan]

View attachment 5355704

Did he literally just use the exact same drawing only adding a tilt to one to try and make it seem different?

While he copy/pastes backgrounds, he's autistic about drawing the characters individually in every panel, even if he could get away with the same drawing, which is funny because he admitted he dropped all his other projects for DoA because it's easier to draw.

But now, I must jump to a more recent strip. So, recently, there was an arc where Walky and Sal's parents came back, and they immediately hated Walky's new girlfriend Lucy for being a fake nerd girl a black, but started treating Sal better because she was dating Danny. Well, the next day, Sal shows up to meet her parents without Danny, and the mother just starts lashing out for no reason because Willis has mommy issues, so Sal walks away... and then this strip happens:

Sal... you were caught red-handed robbing a convenience store, the second one that night/afternoon/whenever it was supposed to be. There were eye witnesses, one of whom was a boy you took hostage by holding a knife to his neck. A knife sharp enough that a teenage girl was able to drive it through your hand. And this was after an extended period of time where you as a teenage girl were staying out and not coming home until dawn. Your mother punished you by taking the one thing you really cared about until you straightened up, and your reaction was to go rob two convenience stores.

Why the fuck would any parent try and fight the charges? You were clearly heading down a bad road and nothing they did was going to fix it, the only thing they could do was keep you out of juvie. Yes, they're rich, but you had proven yourself to not be worth the time or effort. You were not the victim, you were a criminal. Stop pretending it was the other way around.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

While he copy/pastes backgrounds, he's autistic about drawing the characters individually in every panel, even if he could get away with the same drawing, which is funny because he admitted he dropped all his other projects for DoA because it's easier to draw.

But now, I must jump to a more recent strip. So, recently, there was an arc where Walky and Sal's parents came back, and they immediately hated Walky's new girlfriend Lucy for being a fake nerd girl a black, but started treating Sal better because she was dating Danny. Well, the next day, Sal shows up to meet her parents without Danny, and the mother just starts lashing out for no reason because Willis has mommy issues, so Sal walks away... and then this strip happens:


View attachment 5375951

Sal... you were caught red-handed robbing a convenience store, the second one that night/afternoon/whenever it was supposed to be. There were eye witnesses, one of whom was a boy you took hostage by holding a knife to his neck. A knife sharp enough that a teenage girl was able to drive it through your hand. And this was after an extended period of time where you as a teenage girl were staying out and not coming home until dawn. Your mother punished you by taking the one thing you really cared about until you straightened up, and your reaction was to go rob two convenience stores.

Why the fuck would any parent try and fight the charges? You were clearly heading down a bad road and nothing they did was going to fix it, the only thing they could do was keep you out of juvie. Yes, they're rich, but you had proven yourself to not be worth the time or effort. You were not the victim, you were a criminal. Stop pretending it was the other way around.

Willis, for "some reason", always tries to paint mothers as racist, hypocritical, authoritarian monsters and fathers as weak willed, limp wristed, faggy cucks or over-the-top pshychotic chaotic evil super villains (?). He always fails to do so with the women.

Joyce's mom is supposed to be something in between Carrie's mum from Carrie and Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest -As fitting since Joyce is female!Willis- yet she comes across as an average "Bless your heart" all-american christian mum who will be blunt about how she doesn't like your faggy ways but she'll still bake cookies for you.

Sal and Walky's (another Willis expy) mum is supposed to be a psychotic, racist, self-hating hypocrite yet she comes across as a despairing, hard-working disciplinarian who tries to bring some sense into her nigger, criminal daughter and her nigger, lazy, autistic, oh-so-quirky manchild son both of which keep acting like niggers and expect to be allowed to do so because they're black. Not unlike Lois from Malcolm in the Middle.

Of course they would like Danny, the mild mannered, responsible, level-headed ukulele player whose guts are thoroughly hated by Willis, and distrust creator's pet Walky's judgement.

This sort cognitive dissonance between what characters and situations Willis intend and what they come across as is so hard that in the Bad Webcomics Wiki it was theorised that Willis is still a hardline conservative turned alt-right and pulling stealth trad propaganda under the guise of a woke comic.

Also, Willis, since you like to read what we write about you, this is a gentle reminder that your mother was not an extreme evangelical matriarch but a milquetoast non-denominational christian.

That if she was the sort of extreme christian you have deluded yourself into thinking she was, there's no way you would have been allowed to swallow up every eighties goyslop IP you could get your greasy hands on, from Transformers to Batman. At best, she tried to win you with christian media that you obviously didn't give a fuck about. Also, she allowed you, apparently, to watch raunchy comedies that informed your views on university and inspired your Roomies! strip back in High School.

Also, gentle reminder that we don't know you mother but we know you. Pepperidge farms remember how desperate for pussy you were as soon as you stepped a foot outside your parent's house, how you had a vitriolic, hilarious, sus as fuck distaste for homosexuals and homosexuality and how your evil parents had to drive all the way to Bloomington to take your ass back home because, as the pussy you are, you had a meltdown when you had to interact with the sort of people you populate your comics now with.

Your story is highly reminiscent of that of another long-time friend of this forum who took the private, half-baked thoughts of his boomer conservative parents about the world and run with them to an hilariously extreme to later recant it all for spurious reasons.

 

[Flexo]

Sal... you were caught red-handed robbing a convenience store, the second one that night/afternoon/whenever it was supposed to be. There were eye witnesses, one of whom was a boy you took hostage by holding a knife to his neck. A knife sharp enough that a teenage girl was able to drive it through your hand. And this was after an extended period of time where you as a teenage girl were staying out and not coming home until dawn. Your mother punished you by taking the one thing you really cared about until you straightened up, and your reaction was to go rob two convenience stores.

Wait... are you serious?

She took a child hostage and is complaining about a punishment where she wasn't sent to Juvie? Bitch you were lucky to not be tried as an adult and sentenced for 20-50 years!

This just strikes me as further proof of how psychotic Willis and his fans are. If you don't think about their feelings or needs then that just proves how much of a monster you are, giving them all the justification they require to lash out at others without thinking about other people's feelings or needs...

 

[Ewan McGregor]

On another note, he used to be a somewhat passable artist, but every time he draws Sal these days it's like somebody's open the Ark of the Covenant.

 

[Arthur Morgan]

She took a child hostage and is complaining about a punishment where she wasn't sent to Juvie? Bitch you were lucky to not be tried as an adult and sentenced for 20-50 years!

Yep, and I think they're actually younger than I remembered, looking at this artwork. I went back and looked at the strip where Walky talks about them not interacting much. I could have sworn it used to say two years but now it says five. Maybe Willis changed it, but thirteen makes sense. And it makes things even worse, because she pulled that psycho shit at that age, and doing shit like staying out all night and smoking as a tween. And Willis thinks that this makes her mother the bad guy.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

New Willis dropped

Whatever the fuck this means, I don't know. The only thing I know is that we've got a batch of sanctimonious cunt Dorothy, hooray!

So basically Dorothy wants to be another autistic womanchild like pretty much everyone that matter in this comic but she is too busy trying to be Hillary Clinton a super important girlboss (Gentle reminder she dumped Danny because he had "no ambitions" only to fuck Walky afterwards) so, since Becky is out of the scene, she goes to the next-in-line in the hierarchy of dumbest assholes she knows to use as an excuse to be a dumb, childish slob herself.

This is a completely absurd, aggressive-for-no-reason, faux-ebonics, empty dialogue as only WIllis is able to write.

So, faux-intellectual, pseudo-Seinfeldian dialogue is another of Willis specialties. Apart from that, Sancimonious Cunt feels the need to chastise the lazy, childish slobs she was intending to use as an excuse to be a lazy, childish slob herself.

So, more pretentious language and Sanctimonious Cunt being a Sanctimonious Cunt, and that's it.

Whatever the fuck this is.

 

[Flexo]

Yep, and I think they're actually younger than I remembered, looking at this artwork. I went back and looked at the strip where Walky talks about them not interacting much. I could have sworn it used to say two years but now it says five. Maybe Willis changed it, but thirteen makes sense. And it makes things even worse, because she pulled that psycho shit at that age, and doing shit like staying out all night and smoking as a tween. And Willis thinks that this makes her mother the bad guy.

View attachment 5381172

Hold up... in that last panel, is the "never again" girl kicking the knife person? Because it looks like kick-subject in the last panel is wearing glasses. Who is doing what to whom in that last panel? I'm so confused!

 

[Ewan McGregor]

Hold up... in that last panel, is the "never again" girl kicking the knife person? Because it looks like kick-subject in the last panel is wearing glasses. Who is doing what to whom in that last panel? I'm so confused!

It's her dad, a dorky suburban conservative boomer who doubles as a haw-haw psychotic wacko that acts as something in between Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance and a Scooby Doo villain.

 

[Arthur Morgan]

Hold up... in that last panel, is the "never again" girl kicking the knife person? Because it looks like kick-subject in the last panel is wearing glasses. Who is doing what to whom in that last panel? I'm so confused!

Sorry, I should have explained it better for people not familiar with this comic. The first four panels are flashbacks, the last one is 'present day'.

So Amber, the girl doing the kicking, used to dress up like a superhero as a way to cope with her trauma from being in the hostage situation, and having a shitty dad, and her boyfriend being too gay to fuck her. This strip is happening in the middle of an arc where she has a mental breakdown from Ethan, her gay ex, willing to pretend to be gay for Joyce instead of her, her dad showing up at her college, finding out that Sal is also a student there, and Walky and Dorothy chasing her around for a photo.

At this point, Amber's dad has duped Danny into helping him, because Danny is supposed to be an idiot despite Amber never telling him anything about her father. I think her attacking her dad is supposed to be her drawing parallels with the hostage crisis. I don't know, it makes sense to Willis, and he doesn't care if it doesn't make sense to anyone else.

 

[Flexo]

Sorry, I should have explained it better for people not familiar with this comic. The first four panels are flashbacks, the last one is 'present day'.

So Amber, the girl doing the kicking, used to dress up like a superhero as a way to cope with her trauma from being in the hostage situation, and having a shitty dad, and her boyfriend being too gay to fuck her. This strip is happening in the middle of an arc where she has a mental breakdown from Ethan, her gay ex, willing to pretend to be gay for Joyce instead of her, her dad showing up at her college, finding out that Sal is also a student there, and Walky and Dorothy chasing her around for a photo.

At this point, Amber's dad has duped Danny into helping him, because Danny is supposed to be an idiot despite Amber never telling him anything about her father. I think her attacking her dad is supposed to be her drawing parallels with the hostage crisis. I don't know, it makes sense to Willis, and he doesn't care if it doesn't make sense to anyone else.

One, I would buy you a drink for all this. Not even after stealing your own money - but pickpocketing a stranger! Appreciate it.

Still, I feel like this half needs one of those boards with the red string. I remember Amber being a hero in that Shortpacked! thing, but wasn't her boyfriend the psycho Mike or something? Did she and Ethan date at the beginning?

But it also makes Willis seem even more psychotic the more you explained it. It looks like in the flashback Amber was there and it was her person that got taken hostage. It would make sense if THAT was the "never again" she was thinking of while kicking Sal, but her father? Damn that is some top shelf parent issues there. I bet Willis blames his parents for Putin invading Ukraine.

Wait a minute! I just remembered! They made a movie about Willis' life...

 

[Ewan McGregor]

Still, I feel like this half needs one of those boards with the red string. I remember Amber being a hero in that Shortpacked! thing, but wasn't her boyfriend the psycho Mike or something? Did she and Ethan date at the beginning?

Unfortunately a good chunk of the Bad Webcomics Wiki forums got wiped out and I am totally not re-reading this shit but Dumbing of Age is a reboot of all of Willis' previous books.

IIRC Amber's dad was a psycho for shits and giggles who tortured her just because. She got caught in Sal's delinquent exploits as she was bearding for Ethan. That is her backstory.

In the current year!events her father manipulated the dim-witted, absurdly retarded, father of Becky to go on a shotgun spree on the University of Indiana because University made her daughter gay. Becky's mum had committed suicide apparently because she was married to a retarded bible thumper and had a BPD annoying cunt as a daughter.

Becky's dad, aka toedad, got sniped or something and there was some bizarre stunt with a car that ended up with Walky, the surly negress and Danny all kidnapped in a basement by amber's dad, where the surly negress outright said something along the lines of "I'd rather be murdered here than be rescued by police, ACAB!"

Amber defeat his dad with the lasting effect of breaking his glasses, and Amber dad's moves on to recruit Asher, Sal's old korean delinquent boyfriend, threatening him with his influence on Indiana's korean mafia or something.

All this chain of events makes Joyce realize God doesn't exist and her mum is a monster and Sal mumbles about how much of a racist monster her mum is and Becky acts absurdly deranged about her absurdly dramatic family life and Wacky, sorry Walky, eats some nachitos.

Also, in between, a lot of people went gay or bi or something.

I cannot be bothered to remember how Amber's dad was defeated because it was retarded.

In this continuity Mike dates... Danny.

P.S. Just FYI all of this are strips from more than 4 years ago yet in-universe it's happened 1 or 2 months ago. You would not realise given the copious amounts of padding, empty pseudo-intellectual buffy-speak and nerd shit that steals any possible drama and because if the story was consistent with the gravitas it tries to embed into the stupid shit that passes for 'action' and 'drama', it would have been four years of angst, which Willis loves to invoke but is deeply scared of and awfully incompetent to pull off.

 

[Arthur Morgan]

Still, I feel like this half needs one of those boards with the red string. I remember Amber being a hero in that Shortpacked! thing, but wasn't her boyfriend the psycho Mike or something? Did she and Ethan date at the beginning?

In this continuity Mike dates... Danny.

To add on to Ewan's post: In this continuity, Amber, Ethan and Mike have known each other since they were ten or so. Amber was Ethan's beard for a while, and then they broke up before college. At some point, Willis got shit for having one gay dude who immediately went back into the closet, and hinting that Danny was bi but hesitant about exploring that side, but had a dozen lesbians/lugs who would make out with another chick with no hesitation. So he said that Mike is openly bi since he fucked Ethan in Shortpacked just to mess with him, so close enough. Also, it allowed Willis to have yet another queer character who was a raging asshole ever since he realized what a great shield it was for criticism. I think he and Ethan fucked in this timeline as well.

For the superhero thing, in DoA, Amber is taking it 100% seriously, fighting dudes bigger than her, being a narc, and hiding from her problems. She acted like Amazi-girl was this whole other personality, until apparently it actually happened, but I'll get to that later. At one point, she goes psycho and beats the shit out of a dude who tried to date rape Joyce, but Amber let get away because she wanted attention.

Anyway, tying this back to Amber and Mike. So Amber and Becky's dads team up to get revenge, and it leads to Mike getting injured and Amber... completely forgetting about it the next day. Because Willis has no idea how mental health works outside of pop culture. Anyway, then they have the big superhero fight mentioned above and it turns out Mike's in the hospital and then he dies. But Amber imagines his ghost around, until this strip when she tells herself to be okay with his death, and she's magically fine now.

I'm pretty sure the only reason this comic hasn't been Loss memed is because there isn't one strip everyone can point to that everyone can easily identify as the meme.

 

[Flexo]

Thanks, guys! As someone who followed Shortpacked! for a bit, this is all an amazing trainwreck.

I'm surprised this panel isn't the meme.

You know looking at the mournful comic linked what I realized? Willis is apparently obsessed with this close-up, tight framing in his comic. I went to shortpacked! and let's see... we'll pick comic 1 from book 10 to be our random sample:


See that? Even the "close up" frames at the end there? There's still space for the word balloons!

Look at this first row from the loss2.0 comic:


Everything is extremely cramped. Nobody's full head is seen in any panel. Even panels 2 and 5 which come closest still have a character's head cut off by another or the frame.

Nobody can make any memes about this because it's too damn zoomed in! Nobody can see anything!

I might analyze how off the rails he's gone in other ways later but that just stood out at me.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

While I did follow Shortpacked! for a while, I think peak WIllis was always It's Walky.

Why? I think that's where his art was at a point malleable enough to work in a quirky formative way. It was by no means perfect but it was good enough. The art in Roomies! was abysmal but It's Walky! was showing an interesting evolution.

That's also the period where he, more or less, was able to balance drama, character development, comedy and dense plots while daring to experiment with drawing as a storytelling device. Overall, he was promising as an author.

However, it was flawed as can be, and that's first and foremost a consequence of Willis' character more than Willis' talent. See Willis was always a nerd and a momma's boy.

I think it's interesting that he has Joyce be treated as a 6 years old at 16 years old as a manner of conveying how authoritarian and castrating Joyce's mother is. While he intends comedy here he certainly doesn't intend exaggeration, he expects us to believe this is true.

Now, while I don't believe for a moment Willis' mother being abusive or as crazy religious and far right as he wants us to believe she is, I do think he was quite pampered, and I do believe he didn't really ever think of it as abuse. On the contrary, perhaps, he'd rather have had her as his personal slave forever.

The thing is when children are spoiled by their mothers as Willis was, the love can quickly turn into hatred as soon as the mother doesn't act as they want, especially as adults with arrested development.

Early years Willis was Chris-chan esque in the sense that he was so deep in is little world that he was painfully unaware of how the world at large worked. It is worth mentioning Roomies! is one very early webcomic dating back to the mid-90s and that the Internet during the 00s was overwhelmingly, aggressively liberal.

So liberal that woke wouldn't have been able to have such a traction if it wasn't, and an argument can be made that the Internet today is more conservative, not less, but I digress.

The thing is that Willis' late 90s-Early 00's post-Reagan christian republican politics were not prevalent in Roomies! but they did stick like a sore thumb whenever they emerged. What was everywhere in Roomies! was Willis' desperation for pussy, which I don't think his sheltered, tone-deaf personality had helped with.

But him, being the good boy points idiot that he is, had to confront the dissonance between the growing fandom he got as It's Walky! developed and, instead, of saying "OK, this is my work, my work is a different entity from me as a person, you don't have to like me to like my work, you don't even need to know anything about me to like my work" he seeked to translate love of his work to love of himself.

So he latched onto what was popular at the time on the Internet: Atheism. Militant antitheist atheism, at that.

Now I'm not saying he didn't become a sincere atheist, but he for sure became a really dumb one. As it has been pointed out in the BWW Forums, he doesn't know anything really about the religion (Christianity) he supposedly was a fervorous follower of, which casts further doubt on the idea of him being raised of religiously obsessed nuts. Furthermore, he really lacks any sort of finesse or thought to properly make a case for atheism, and it is highly unlikely he's spent any time reading the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins.

In what has to do with his creative output, this showed on It's Walky! as Walky was much more of a nihilistic atheist genius than the retarded oh-so-quirky Walky from Dumbing of Age. It was more Rick Sanchez, in a way, than saturday morning Homer Simpson. Whether if It's Walky! was better written and not as tract-y as his other works or it just happened to come out at a time when he tapped with the general Internet zeitgeist of its time is up for debate.

What is undeniable is that by the time he started Shortpacked! he was clear he wouldn't do the same amount of work he did for It's Walky!, a less dramatic work meant for him that he would stop caring about things like characterisation, plot or art. So, instead of improving, both his writing and his art further deteriorated as he moved from occasionally brilliant but generally lame observational humour to long, one-sided rants about geeky stuff to NPCs.

He happened to find himself comfortable with strawmanning stupid points and grievance about Transformers (He allegedly was a ruthless tyrant in anything Transformers he achieved some sort of authority over, such as the TF Forums) and once he discovered Tumblr and, possibly, TVTropes his fate was sealed.

Dumbing of Art, sorry, Dumbing of Age, is marginally better in terms of art, but abysmally worse in everything else, and while you can excuse a lot of its artistic flaws as "style", the thing is that his style is short of wholesome and light-hearted as he seems to intend, and comes off as strident and outright ugly with pretty much three face expressions: Dull face, Manic face and generic anime. His side views are just awful.

 

[Mad Mamba]

(He allegedly was a ruthless tyrant in anything Transformers he achieved some sort of authority over, such as the TF Forums)

Can absolutely confirm. One of the main reasons the Transformers fanbase is as awful as it is (aside from the obvious) is because he runs the wiki, which means casual/entry-level fans looking up information on the series will be exposed to his weapons-grade autism. He absolutely uses the wiki as a means of pushing his own opinions as "fact" regarding anything TF related; as just one example, after the then-current comics made fun of his semi-official OC (Shattered Glass Ravage) by killing them off in the background, he threw a fit and tried to make out that it wasn't SG Ravage at all, but actually the guy that Ravage's deco is based on, because...it just was, OK!?!

 

[Flexo]

Can absolutely confirm. One of the main reasons the Transformers fanbase is as awful as it is (aside from the obvious) is because he runs the wiki, which means casual/entry-level fans looking up information on the series will be exposed to his weapons-grade autism. He absolutely uses the wiki as a means of pushing his own opinions as "fact" regarding anything TF related; as just one example, after the then-current comics made fun of his semi-official OC (Shattered Glass Ravage) by killing them off in the background, he threw a fit and tried to make out that it wasn't SG Ravage at all, but actually the guy that Ravage's deco is based on, because...it just was, OK!?!

Every time I read about this (well, not this specific instance but others that have happened) I just can't believe it. I know folks have impressive level of autism (heck I won't go into the shit I've gotten into drunken fights about) but Transformers? It sounds so silly I can't believe anyone really cares that much. Any chance a video of one of his sperg outs has ever been caught?

And I've won Star Trek trivia contests against other trekkies. So I know about extreme autism. (you ever played Cards Against Humanity against someone who literally has no concept of humor?)