My personal theory at the moment is that if she doesn’t simply wear them because she likes them Mary wears wristbands because she has wrist problems of some sort.
When I think of people who wear wristbands, it’s either athletes or anime kids. For some reasons, wrist bands are a thing with anime fans. We know Mary is the latter, so that’s my guess as to why she’s often wearing wristbands…
It’s Morton’s Fork. She’s doomed if she goes for the box and ignores the contraption, and she’s doomed if she focuses on the contraption and ignores the box.
Morton’s fork is more about alternate paths of reasoning rather than alternate choices. John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor under Henry VII reasoned that anyone who was living extravagantly was rich, and so could afford high taxes, whereas anyone who was living frugally had saved a lot, and so could afford high taxes
Simple:
Carla: “Oh, hey Roz. Want to see this Rube Goldberg set up I made.”
Roz: “Umm. I guess. Uh, what’s in the box?”
Carla: “It’s for Mary.”
Roz: (devious smile) “How can I assist?”
That’s the sheer brilliance of the plan, there was no way it would have worked on anyone but Mary.
I mean, here’s the thing, that measuring earlier? That wasn’t just to get Mary’s attention and her curiosity, it was to confirm that when Mary and Roz are inside, only Mary goes to investigate soft noises. Mary’s the curtain twitcher and she always does the little door pull and head poke outside pretty quickly the second anything and I mean literally anything is happening in the vague surroundings of her door.
So that’s contingency number one. The second part is that the Rube Goldberg machine wasn’t the trap, the box was. So even if Roz accidentally tripped it, all it would do would be the Rube Goldberg step which so far seems to mostly be subterfuge and distraction. So, if Roz tripped it, it’d just be cool and nifty and Roz would go, ooh, now what’s the point?
Contingency number 2. The third is that the box is the trap. So, Carla needed Mary to follow her to Billie and sneak around and get curious/paranoid about the box and to be enough of an asshole to yank the box out of her hands even when she said it was nothing. Roz wouldn’t have been that type of asshole, so the real trap wouldn’t have gone off in her face.
Basiclally, Carla perfectly designed this trap so the only possible person it could actually hit was Mary.
I don’t mean the trap, the “what if Roz opened the door and set off the thing while Carla stood there and both watched the thing do its thing” scenario
but doesn’t matter I guess since it went off without a hitch =d
Her revenge was cold, swift, and absolutely ridiculous. And something that Mary wound up doing to herself, taking the box away from Carla and opening it. — Well done, Carla.
Holy crap. He’s they’re quality control tester. He doesn’t really want to catch the roadrunner, he just wants to make sure the products work. Roadrunner is probably an ACME employee as well, maybe even Wiley’s subordinate since he is a participant in these quality assurance tests.
Thanks for the new, less depressing headcannon! Never thought I’d ever leave the comment sections of one of the comics on this site happier than I was before…
Eh, it was more hopeful than called. I think a lot of the cream pie predictors are here from Shortpacked. It was kinda her thing, and we’ve missed it. We’ll probably never see it again, except for in our dreams.
The best part, the absolute best part is that it takes the thing Mary was priding herself on (snooping around in order to get the information she needed to blackmail people) and flipped it against her. This plan relied on her being a snoop who tries to take the upper hand by force. This plan relied on her being a curtain-twitcher who goes peeking out into the halls at the slightest of noises.
And it punishes her for it. It makes it so that which gave her all this blackmail on Ruth and got her all up in Carla’s business in the first place was also the thing that condemned her to be the butt of this elaborate prank.
If I remember right, Carla in this universe is obsessed with the Ultra Car tv show, so this might actually be a working replica of Ultra Car’s robot arm in the cartoon.
Holy crap but that was amazing. Despite many of us calling something like this happening, it is still just pure unadulterated schadenfreude. Plus, Mary took the box, because Carla played her like a fiddle. I think I’m going to refer to her as Carla the puppet master from now on, since Mary just danced like one for her.
I’m pretty sure that if I were to see this go down in real life, I’d have almost the exact emotional reaction of Dr. Grant in Jurassic Park when he sees the dinosaurs for the first time
Goddamnit that was glorious. I need to read that again or maybe see it animated. Someone give Willis an award for “Best Payoff to a Plot Arc” trophy. It CAN be yet another BotCon Custom Ratchet.
though I feel that if any of the strips villains commit a heel face turn, its going to be Mary. She’s fairly young, and she hasn’t reached the level of evil that Ryan or Ross or Blaine have. You can’t really compare the girl who says slurs with the attempted (hopefully there wasn’t anyone before Joyce) rapist, the guy who has hit his daughter and wife, and the guy who kidnapped his daughter with a shotgun. Mary is awful, but she’s not irredeemable.
That would be cool, but I feel there’s still so much more narrative power Mary serves for awhile as a potential foil for literally every other character in the cast.
I don’t think Carla has actually slept since Mary unleashed her bucket of transphobia. Which is the only way I can think of why she’s been up in the early morning of late.
I mean, she nearly swore at Ruth during the Ding-Dong Dilemma, but she was cut short by a (very rightly deserved) bongo slap. Hence, I think this might be Mary’s first time swearing without interruptions.
I’m calling it now; there is more to come. Chekhov’s Three-Armed Upright Posts, you know.
Perhaps that item I saw leading offscreen to the left yesterday is plumbing, and there’s a little marble that falls out of the balloon and rolls down the track, and as it does it triggers switches so that she gets sprayed, one by one, by sprays of water like the Dancing Fountains in front of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas.
If you like Kevin Spacey, see it. I’d argue the man gives Anthony Hopkins a run for his money as “best movie villain psycopath/sociopath” with his performance in that movie.
“Price War. What I want, gentlemen, is a simple war. Not class war, not drug war, not race war, and certainly NO COLD WARS!! (Blue balled for over fifty years.) No what I want is a true war. A German war. The sequel you’ve all been waiting for. I WANT WORLD WAR 3!!!!”
I think this will be even better later. The RG machine will probably blow celebratory streamers, Mary will try to get Carla in trouble for the pie only to get rebuffed because Carla merely points out that it was an anti-theft device, and Mary gets a warning over taking other people’s things from them (she did rip the box out of Carla’s hands, after all).
Of course it was a pie, what else would it be? And yet I am still grinning from ear to ear at this strip (and the accompanying soundtrack). Bless you, Willis.
Most of the reference points from the bottom up seem fine, but the door behind her seems to be shorter. Like the man said, he’s got twin babies and is doing 13 panel comics. Something gave.
What’s really great about this is that Mary has no recourse to complain to any authorities. I mean, what can she even say?
Mary: Carla made a thing that flung a pie in my face!
Carla: Excuse me, but I was peacefully holding my boxed pie flinger, not bothering anyone, and Mary violently grabbed it from me, setting it off.
Mary: But what about the… the… trap thing?
Carla: You mean my Device for Inducing Lateral Motion in a Balloon? My little project for demonstrating interacting subsystems that can’t even hurt a fly?
(and so on and so forth)
===========================
Hey, I just noticed that when Carla got the box from Billie, it had flaps, but now it has a lid (pfft, I know, work of a moment with some glue).
Yup, she’ll still try because appeals to authority and violence are her only two responses to embarrassment, but she’s got literal nothing and if she tries to escalate to downstairs, they’ll just shake it off like the dumb college prank that it is and something that’s mostly her own fault.
I keep wondering if Carla’s true revenge will be Mary going to the RA’s office to spew her venom, only we find out the RA is post-operative trans (very sympathetic to Carla), a lesbian (sympathetic to Ruth, Billie, Becky, et al) , or both.
At which point Mary’s demands to have a student removed from the dorm will find fertile ground, and the RA will remove Mary from the dorm.
I really hope she also needed the rube goldberg machine for a class (or at least extra credit), excluding the box, because then her only thing is that she tied it to Mary’s door without telling her (but hey, it did nothing to her anyway and doesn’t obscure her path to the elevator/classes)
OK, so I’m thinkin’ of how you’d actually design one of those arm box things and I’d appreciate a little input.
I’m thinking a bunch of torsion springs chained together to make the arm connected to some kinda pressure activated switch, hence why it activated after Carla let go. What I’m having trouble conceptualizin’ is how the box lid just flies off without getting in the way of the pie’s trajectory.
That’s easy. You use spring-loaded rams on one side of the box to pop it off a quarter-second before the arm activates.
The two real challenges are: A) keeping it from going off midswipe, and B) making sure it flings the pie in the right direction. Of the two, B seems more serious. I think you’d need the arm to be on a turntable at the bottom of the box, and… let’s say there’s a few infrared cameras hooked up to some simple circuitry to aim it.
Yeah, that’s the beauty of it. Carla didn’t actually set up much reason for Mary to get obsessed about the box, but Mary is the type to see collusion against her personally in everything anyone does and to obsess about things like that and get all possessive about them. And so of course she freaked about the box and tried to steal it.
Awesome. Absolutely fantastic.
Mary hates ridicule (we all do, but most of us have a sense of humor at least).
Mary does not.
And what can she do now, run to the office and say she snatched a box out of another students hand and he sprung a pie in her face? How to explain why she snatched the box? Hehe.
Great flashback to Ultra-Car and flinging cream pies.
I wonder what happens when the pin is pricked by the ballon and the gun goes off? It may be just a flashy bit of setup for the pie-in-the-face, but….
Engineers are fucking magical. I mean, I’m assuming Carla is an Engineering Student, no one else would be capable of building that beautifully complicated monstrosity of wonder.
And the best part is that it had no means of going off unless the victim was a total prick. Like, anyone decent in its vicinity would just see a cool RG machine in the middle of the hall. Only someone who was enough of a fuck to get obsessed about the box and snatch it out of Carla’s hands was ever at risk of getting pied.
That video was not bad, but the audio edits were odd and poorly executed. I like this one: w3FCRr3t9WU or this one: qaC0vNLdLvY a bit better. The latter one is the full original song.
Carla is obviously far smarter than for which I previously gave her credit. She’s also clearly a mistress of deductive psychology (at least in Mary’s case).
That aside, oddly enough my strongest emotion is anger that Carla has wasted a perfectly good cream pie on this stunt!
This was a beautifully designed Rube-Goldberg Machine. A lot of the old designs had a human element, and here we see Carla implementing Mary as part of the machine. Most of the machine including Carla’s whistling had an end goal of ramping up Mary’s paranoia so she’d take the box. Carla has spent the whole weekend setting this up by conditioning Mary for this moment.
And as others have pointed out, Mary can’t really do anything due to having essentially robbed Carla. Though Carla may get a reprimand for testing her model in the dorms, which despite requiring Mary to open the door wouldn’t have done anything to her. It’s a smooth revenge.
Yup, and it’s a lovely bit of classical conditioning. Setting up the tone and associating it with danger and promise so that when the time came, she’d come streaming out the door at the slightest hint of the tune and have her attention drawn to Carla and her box and the paranoia that elicits.
There is a recent/current CBS TV sitcom by the name of Mom. In the first season, one of the main characters, Christy, works as a waitress. At one point, she gets in a fight with the restaurant manager in the kitchen over personal issues between them. As they are arguing, the head chef (played by French Stewart) walks over next to Christy and holds out a baked good. Christy, still angry, turns to him and snaps, “What is this??” Calmly, the head chef queries back, “What do you think it is?” Christy pauses a moment, says ‘Oh’, takes the banana cream pie and splats it right on the restaurant manager’s face. It is a great moment, and I wish I could find a clip of it on Youtube.
What I’m saying is… The classics never get old, and pie to the face is a true classic.
I want to echo what someone said on yesterday’s comic- this is a great strategy because while also not harming Mary or being able to get Carla in trouble, it also shows that she is by no means powerless.
WOW, it’s like getting the punchline early! Or, a bonus punchline!!
…I’m curious what contingency Carla had in case it had been Roz to open the door
(unless she informed Roz, or planned for Roz to not be there, or Roz herself just knew to GTFO this weekend)
Her sister is campaigning, and Roz is probably gone to a party.
I imagine Roz spends as little time in their room as possible, if only because Mary is mostly naked in there as late as 3 PM.
Still an odd habit for some one as prudish as her.
I thought that was just a joke or a rumor or a rumoke?
Nah, we only found out about it because Billie ducked into her room as a hiding spot and Mary was clad only in panties.
And wristbands, IIRC, there was a big deal made about her wristbands in the comments.
My personal theory at the moment is that if she doesn’t simply wear them because she likes them Mary wears wristbands because she has wrist problems of some sort.
When I think of people who wear wristbands, it’s either athletes or anime kids. For some reasons, wrist bands are a thing with anime fans. We know Mary is the latter, so that’s my guess as to why she’s often wearing wristbands…
Thanks Willis! Nothing like a little Raymond Scott music to cheer a guy up at 3AM;-)
So, the device as whole was a ploy? or was it behind the spring arm.
I believe the spring arm is the distraction needed to keep Mary on her X.
It’s Morton’s Fork. She’s doomed if she goes for the box and ignores the contraption, and she’s doomed if she focuses on the contraption and ignores the box.
Feathers or lead?
But really I think Mary is just predictable.
Morton’s fork is more about alternate paths of reasoning rather than alternate choices. John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor under Henry VII reasoned that anyone who was living extravagantly was rich, and so could afford high taxes, whereas anyone who was living frugally had saved a lot, and so could afford high taxes
Roz wouldn’t have grabbed the box, so she would have just watched a convolted way of blowing a balloon around then Carla would have had to reset it.
Simple:
Carla: “Oh, hey Roz. Want to see this Rube Goldberg set up I made.”
Roz: “Umm. I guess. Uh, what’s in the box?”
Carla: “It’s for Mary.”
Roz: (devious smile) “How can I assist?”
My Headcannon is:
Roz: Hey, Carla. Cool kinetic sculpture.
Carla: Thanks.
Honestly, I just imagine Roz walking past it unconcerned; they both know it doesn’t involve her, after all.
….Or better yet, she could go back inside, grab Mary, and push her out the door to deal with it instead.
That’s the sheer brilliance of the plan, there was no way it would have worked on anyone but Mary.
I mean, here’s the thing, that measuring earlier? That wasn’t just to get Mary’s attention and her curiosity, it was to confirm that when Mary and Roz are inside, only Mary goes to investigate soft noises. Mary’s the curtain twitcher and she always does the little door pull and head poke outside pretty quickly the second anything and I mean literally anything is happening in the vague surroundings of her door.
So that’s contingency number one. The second part is that the Rube Goldberg machine wasn’t the trap, the box was. So even if Roz accidentally tripped it, all it would do would be the Rube Goldberg step which so far seems to mostly be subterfuge and distraction. So, if Roz tripped it, it’d just be cool and nifty and Roz would go, ooh, now what’s the point?
Contingency number 2. The third is that the box is the trap. So, Carla needed Mary to follow her to Billie and sneak around and get curious/paranoid about the box and to be enough of an asshole to yank the box out of her hands even when she said it was nothing. Roz wouldn’t have been that type of asshole, so the real trap wouldn’t have gone off in her face.
Basiclally, Carla perfectly designed this trap so the only possible person it could actually hit was Mary.
I don’t mean the trap, the “what if Roz opened the door and set off the thing while Carla stood there and both watched the thing do its thing” scenario
but doesn’t matter I guess since it went off without a hitch =d
can’t say she did not warn her 😉
Her revenge was cold, swift, and absolutely ridiculous. And something that Mary wound up doing to herself, taking the box away from Carla and opening it. — Well done, Carla.
That is an amazing trap there, Billie
HAHAHAHA YESSSSSS
yassss. Well timed Calra!
CARLA. CARLA and Billie.
*Cal-Ra of Kryton
*Formerly of Kryton, now of Eath.
Satisfying! ^_^
Cute 🙂
We have ridicule! Repeat, we have achieved ridicule!
And I don’t have to provide any Muzak content because of the YouTube video.
Nice to see Acme Corp. is still in business.
And their quality has improved! (Either that or they ship the crazy coyote all their malfunctioning stuff….)
If he’s their beta tester, it explains how he can afford all that stuff.
Holy crap. He’s they’re quality control tester. He doesn’t really want to catch the roadrunner, he just wants to make sure the products work. Roadrunner is probably an ACME employee as well, maybe even Wiley’s subordinate since he is a participant in these quality assurance tests.
that explains so much!
Thanks for the new, less depressing headcannon! Never thought I’d ever leave the comment sections of one of the comics on this site happier than I was before…
The salt and cutlery is just his way of keeping in-character…
Yeah…
If you watched the cartoons, you would know the answer to that. Beep-Beep, zip-tang!
The Roadrunner owns Acme. That’s why the Coyote gets the bad stuff.
The coyote gets store credit though.
Can we give Carla the internet? I’m pretty sure she just won the internet
But then what will we give her tomorrow when the Rube Goldberg machine finishes?
Yeah, it looks like the scoop on the end activates something back at the very begining.
The pin will pop the balloon, releasing the item (an egg?) inside, into the receptical, which will roll down the shoot, and then…
Lies that work on Mary are the best lies.
Wouldn’t most lies fall under that category? She’s not exactly the brightest bulb in the box.
But there isn’t a bulb in the box
It was a pie
I had to jam my hand in my mouth to keep from laughing loud enough to wake people up. Thank you, Gigafreak, that was awesome.
Bad. Ass.
Wow. SO many people called that. I’m glad Willis didn’t change the punchline.
Eh, it was more hopeful than called. I think a lot of the cream pie predictors are here from Shortpacked. It was kinda her thing, and we’ve missed it. We’ll probably never see it again, except for in our dreams.
Yup, it’s a total call-back! Right down to the robot arm!
Given Willis’s buffer, I doubt he ever changes a strip at the last minute, because it would likely require him to change several subsequent strips.
Yeah and then it makes people proud when they were right, which is pat on the back for an otherwise pretty mistreated (in a good way) audience.
Speaking of calling punchlines….
Really? Nobody?
We’re not gonna talk about how Mary just got pie’d in the FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!
No. Maybe later.
After we take your mom for a nickle.
Ah, Mary. When will you learn that being overly suspicious of everything is a bad idea?
Oh, that’s right, never. Because you’re an idiot.
The best part, the absolute best part is that it takes the thing Mary was priding herself on (snooping around in order to get the information she needed to blackmail people) and flipped it against her. This plan relied on her being a snoop who tries to take the upper hand by force. This plan relied on her being a curtain-twitcher who goes peeking out into the halls at the slightest of noises.
And it punishes her for it. It makes it so that which gave her all this blackmail on Ruth and got her all up in Carla’s business in the first place was also the thing that condemned her to be the butt of this elaborate prank.
Ah, literally the oldest trick in the book.
The Kansas City Shuffle (am I using that right?) with the Rube Goldberg machine or the pie in the face?
Cream pies for those commenters who called it.
Please tell me another pie is on the way
There’s gonna be some pie soon, but it’s not for Mary
Clif called it yesterday, love it.
Among others.
I love absolutely everything about this. IN YOUR FACE, MARY. Literally.
Mmm, pie. 😀
:DDDDDD
I had hoped so!
Of course what else was this going to be, honestly the real reason why I’m laughing right now is that for some reason I didn’t see this coming.
Wondered what had happened to ultra cars chest arm.
YES! Return of the arm! 😀
I actually headcanon that this box is a Futurama Dimension Box, and that’s actually Ultracar, giving a sister a…
…helping hand…
(ar ar ar ar ar)
…with her enemy.
And I’m hoping that the RG device isn’t finished yet. Maybe it’ll launch a little victory parade down the hall. That’d be good.
Out pops a roll of paper towels.
If I remember right, Carla in this universe is obsessed with the Ultra Car tv show, so this might actually be a working replica of Ultra Car’s robot arm in the cartoon.
Hail Mary, face full of pie
Ultra-Car nostalgia? Sign me up!
If she hadn’t been a vindictive suspicious bongo then she wouldn’t be bothered, it was literally a trap for her specifically bwa ha ha
#BEST
I give it 3.14 Stars.
What you did there. I see it.
She concealed the shark in a school of red herrings. Excellent revenge plan.
Excellent strip.
+1 for an excellent figure of speech. Metaphor, I think?
I dunno, I’m still kind of wondering if the Rube Goldberg device isn’t going to just heap more delicious, delicious misery on.
Another commenter suggested the posts might shoot water or confetti, either of which would make an excellent follow-up.
<3
Yes! Best outcome – and most delicious!
Holy crap but that was amazing. Despite many of us calling something like this happening, it is still just pure unadulterated schadenfreude. Plus, Mary took the box, because Carla played her like a fiddle. I think I’m going to refer to her as Carla the puppet master from now on, since Mary just danced like one for her.
I think this arc proves that the last thing you want is Carla’s complete and undivided attention.
Now strand her in the Amazon!
Ah, if only.
Strand her in the recycling bin full of empty Amazon package boxes.
And then the bin gets picked up by a garbage truck.
Is Casey Jones driving it?
“Oops!”
I’m pretty sure that if I were to see this go down in real life, I’d have almost the exact emotional reaction of Dr. Grant in Jurassic Park when he sees the dinosaurs for the first time
Goddamnit that was glorious. I need to read that again or maybe see it animated. Someone give Willis an award for “Best Payoff to a Plot Arc” trophy. It CAN be yet another BotCon Custom Ratchet.
Awesome!
I love Carla and she is everything I aspire to be in life
Seriously! I’m so happy that not only is there a character who is a trans ace girl like me, but that she’s also just the world’s biggest badass.
That’s great, but I’m assuming the machine is not done yet….
It is technically still running.
Maybe there’s 13 of ’em, but they’re small?
Very dynamic layout today, Willis!
Is it too much to hope the pie is full of horrific acid and she’s about to become Two-Face?
That implies that she’s hiding a darker part of herself. Or maybe a lighter side.
Lighter side? I don’t think there was ever good in her.
though I feel that if any of the strips villains commit a heel face turn, its going to be Mary. She’s fairly young, and she hasn’t reached the level of evil that Ryan or Ross or Blaine have. You can’t really compare the girl who says slurs with the attempted (hopefully there wasn’t anyone before Joyce) rapist, the guy who has hit his daughter and wife, and the guy who kidnapped his daughter with a shotgun. Mary is awful, but she’s not irredeemable.
That would be cool, but I feel there’s still so much more narrative power Mary serves for awhile as a potential foil for literally every other character in the cast.
It would be both cool and horrifying to see Mary go full blown nutcase
Mary: (holding a knife to Joyces face) I’ve always hated that stupid smile of yours, lets see if we can’t get rid of it. (slasher smile)
or
takes knife and carves a cross into her cheeks.
Why so pious?
ha ha ha “pie-ous”
I know, right? Don’t know when I’ll be able to get another joke like that again.
Well, here’s one of mine: I guess you could say Carla’s a pie-romancer.
…
You know, cause she’s controlling pies, and it can sound like pyromancer?
…
Sorry.
I was thinking acid-spitting beetles.
Demon cockroaches?
*ahem*
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES
*bows, leaves*
Where does Carla find the time to build all this stuff? Doesn’t anyone in this dorm ever study or do homework?
That could be her engineering homework, like a freestyle project.
I don’t think Carla has actually slept since Mary unleashed her bucket of transphobia. Which is the only way I can think of why she’s been up in the early morning of late.
https://youtu.be/YQPHsONF_tE?t=5m43s
Is…is this the first time Mary’s sworn in DoA?
I mean, she nearly swore at Ruth during the Ding-Dong Dilemma, but she was cut short by a (very rightly deserved) bongo slap. Hence, I think this might be Mary’s first time swearing without interruptions.
I was confused at first, then remembered that ‘hell’ is a swear.
Hell is a swear?
To Christians. Perhaps other religions that use it in their lexicon.
It isn’t one of Carlin’s seven, but nobody ever used it while addressing a teacher, for instance.
Especially protestant Christians, since Catholics seem to have fewer problem with it.
I mean, my sister picked up OMB–Oh My Buddha to avoid saying Oh My God.
Carla’s majoring in engineering.
She paid special attention to social engineering.
I’m calling it now; there is more to come. Chekhov’s Three-Armed Upright Posts, you know.
Perhaps that item I saw leading offscreen to the left yesterday is plumbing, and there’s a little marble that falls out of the balloon and rolls down the track, and as it does it triggers switches so that she gets sprayed, one by one, by sprays of water like the Dancing Fountains in front of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas.
And the elaborate trap is still unfolding. Inwas expecting Rube Goldberg and got Spy V Spy. Nice one.
What was in the box? What’s in the box?!? What’s in the fuckin’ box?!?!?
Pie?
Sorry, trying to make a Se7en reference/joke. Guess I needed to try to type out Brad Pitt’s inflection a bit more.
No, I got it. Just never seen the movie. I’d of given a parody quote if I had.
If you like Kevin Spacey, see it. I’d argue the man gives Anthony Hopkins a run for his money as “best movie villain psycopath/sociopath” with his performance in that movie.
One of many, one of many.
“Who gets the box? What’s in the box? How much is what’s in the box worth?”
“Price War. What I want, gentlemen, is a simple war. Not class war, not drug war, not race war, and certainly NO COLD WARS!! (Blue balled for over fifty years.) No what I want is a true war. A German war. The sequel you’ve all been waiting for. I WANT WORLD WAR 3!!!!”
London Bridge… Is falling down.
Universe A?
I think this will be even better later. The RG machine will probably blow celebratory streamers, Mary will try to get Carla in trouble for the pie only to get rebuffed because Carla merely points out that it was an anti-theft device, and Mary gets a warning over taking other people’s things from them (she did rip the box out of Carla’s hands, after all).
I forget who called it first, but the predictions of a pie in the face were spot on. I’m still hoping there’s glitter in the balloon.
This is a wonderful revenge scheme but I can’t fully enjoy it because I’m worried about what Mary will do in retaliation for this.
But, we need our pre-drama tag moment!
I said it yesterday: Don’t mess with engineering majors!
And yes, the balloon popping on the needle has to do *something* besides make noise…
Of course it was a pie, what else would it be? And yet I am still grinning from ear to ear at this strip (and the accompanying soundtrack). Bless you, Willis.
Distraction…the ultimate weapon.
Did Carla spontaneously get six inches taller from the previous comic?
Most of the reference points from the bottom up seem fine, but the door behind her seems to be shorter. Like the man said, he’s got twin babies and is doing 13 panel comics. Something gave.
Carla is really fucking tall.
GLORIOUS. Well played, Carla.
What’s really great about this is that Mary has no recourse to complain to any authorities. I mean, what can she even say?
Mary: Carla made a thing that flung a pie in my face!
Carla: Excuse me, but I was peacefully holding my boxed pie flinger, not bothering anyone, and Mary violently grabbed it from me, setting it off.
Mary: But what about the… the… trap thing?
Carla: You mean my Device for Inducing Lateral Motion in a Balloon? My little project for demonstrating interacting subsystems that can’t even hurt a fly?
(and so on and so forth)
===========================
Hey, I just noticed that when Carla got the box from Billie, it had flaps, but now it has a lid (pfft, I know, work of a moment with some glue).
Yup, she’ll still try because appeals to authority and violence are her only two responses to embarrassment, but she’s got literal nothing and if she tries to escalate to downstairs, they’ll just shake it off like the dumb college prank that it is and something that’s mostly her own fault.
Hoisted by her own vile petard.
Beautiful! And since she snatched the box out of Carla’s hands any attempt to report it will make it look like her own damned fault!
And then she died to a SEVERE cream allergy.
I know Willis is invoking Bugs Bunny here, but it mostly reminds me of how Sean Connery beat Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love.
I keep wondering if Carla’s true revenge will be Mary going to the RA’s office to spew her venom, only we find out the RA is post-operative trans (very sympathetic to Carla), a lesbian (sympathetic to Ruth, Billie, Becky, et al) , or both.
At which point Mary’s demands to have a student removed from the dorm will find fertile ground, and the RA will remove Mary from the dorm.
Ruth is their RA.
I mean Ruth’s boss. If Mary goes to a higher authority than Ruth.
Tomorrow:
Mary: *licks cream from her lips* …Sweet pickle pie? With whipped cream on top? Where the hell do you even get sweet pickle pie?!
(Carla would probably have to bake it herself, I imagine, because who sells those?)
Nearest I can find on the Internet only sold at the Sunglow Motel in Bicknell UT https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Sunglow_Motel-Cafe_Pickle_Pie
Duh DAH duh, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah dah, duh DAH dah, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah dah, duh DAH duh, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah dah… Dah duh-duh-duh DAH dah!
(Part B of “Powerhouse”, by Raymond Scott, commonly used by Carl Stalling in various Looney Tunes)
i did so miss carla pie-ing people in the face. Now all i need is a triple bird flip.
She’s got the three hands now to do it.
I really hope she also needed the rube goldberg machine for a class (or at least extra credit), excluding the box, because then her only thing is that she tied it to Mary’s door without telling her (but hey, it did nothing to her anyway and doesn’t obscure her path to the elevator/classes)
Not that making a rube goldberg machine for fun would be against the rules, but for class is a more reasonable reason to be testing it in the hallway
OK, so I’m thinkin’ of how you’d actually design one of those arm box things and I’d appreciate a little input.
I’m thinking a bunch of torsion springs chained together to make the arm connected to some kinda pressure activated switch, hence why it activated after Carla let go. What I’m having trouble conceptualizin’ is how the box lid just flies off without getting in the way of the pie’s trajectory.
That’s easy. You use spring-loaded rams on one side of the box to pop it off a quarter-second before the arm activates.
The two real challenges are: A) keeping it from going off midswipe, and B) making sure it flings the pie in the right direction. Of the two, B seems more serious. I think you’d need the arm to be on a turntable at the bottom of the box, and… let’s say there’s a few infrared cameras hooked up to some simple circuitry to aim it.
What puzzles >me< most is the flawless aim and perfect timing.
And also what the devil Mary's arms were up to in panel three…
What could Mary have possibly overheard Carla and Billie talk about? All she heard was “This will do great with my needs.”
Mary always assumes everything is nefarious.
After all, the devil is sending his minions to mess with the righteous.
Yeah, that’s the beauty of it. Carla didn’t actually set up much reason for Mary to get obsessed about the box, but Mary is the type to see collusion against her personally in everything anyone does and to obsess about things like that and get all possessive about them. And so of course she freaked about the box and tried to steal it.
I only dealt with one newborn (now he’s three months) and I feel like I can’t get ANYTHING done. Your comics are a feat of strength.
Awesome. Absolutely fantastic.
Mary hates ridicule (we all do, but most of us have a sense of humor at least).
Mary does not.
And what can she do now, run to the office and say she snatched a box out of another students hand and he sprung a pie in her face? How to explain why she snatched the box? Hehe.
Great flashback to Ultra-Car and flinging cream pies.
I wonder what happens when the pin is pricked by the ballon and the gun goes off? It may be just a flashy bit of setup for the pie-in-the-face, but….
drat edit…supposed to read “…..snatched a box out of another students hand, and it sprung a pie in her face…”
I don’t know why but the site is completely unloadable on a wii u browser
Hmm, I wonder if the balloon has feathers in it or is just an alibi to give Mary a friendly balloon
Now that’s the Ultra Car-la I know. Of course it takes longer since she lacks the internal pie factory and third arm.
That one reminds me of Ultra-car splatting a pie at Ethan. Nice touch, dude!
In this world we call our home there’s lots of room to roam
Plenty of time to turn mistakes into rhyme
Engineers are fucking magical. I mean, I’m assuming Carla is an Engineering Student, no one else would be capable of building that beautifully complicated monstrosity of wonder.
So, DoA Carla and Walkyverse Carla really do share a love for Pies in the face via mechanical arms. Nice! Plus we get sound effects to go with it.
Carla is going to be an amazing engineer.
Amazing, the gag is actually funny if the victim deserves it.
And the best part is that it had no means of going off unless the victim was a total prick. Like, anyone decent in its vicinity would just see a cool RG machine in the middle of the hall. Only someone who was enough of a fuck to get obsessed about the box and snatch it out of Carla’s hands was ever at risk of getting pied.
That video was not bad, but the audio edits were odd and poorly executed. I like this one: w3FCRr3t9WU or this one: qaC0vNLdLvY a bit better. The latter one is the full original song.
It’s a pie! Pie!
Four words from a Patreon person: it gets better tomorrow!
So, the balloon pop that’s imminent is just to make enough noise to get everyone out of their rooms so they can see the pie on Mary’s face?
Carla’s calculation included which angel Mary would hold the box from. nice !
…angLE.
You just got Punk’d, Mary. 😛
Carla is obviously far smarter than for which I previously gave her credit. She’s also clearly a mistress of deductive psychology (at least in Mary’s case).
That aside, oddly enough my strongest emotion is anger that Carla has wasted a perfectly good cream pie on this stunt!
YES. That’s the song I heard the instant Carla’s rube goldberg device was triggered.
This was a beautifully designed Rube-Goldberg Machine. A lot of the old designs had a human element, and here we see Carla implementing Mary as part of the machine. Most of the machine including Carla’s whistling had an end goal of ramping up Mary’s paranoia so she’d take the box. Carla has spent the whole weekend setting this up by conditioning Mary for this moment.
And as others have pointed out, Mary can’t really do anything due to having essentially robbed Carla. Though Carla may get a reprimand for testing her model in the dorms, which despite requiring Mary to open the door wouldn’t have done anything to her. It’s a smooth revenge.
Yup, and it’s a lovely bit of classical conditioning. Setting up the tone and associating it with danger and promise so that when the time came, she’d come streaming out the door at the slightest hint of the tune and have her attention drawn to Carla and her box and the paranoia that elicits.
I read this on my phone, so actually had to scroll over to see the last panel. Oh, it was sweet moment. 😁
That last panel is the part in the 1812 Overture where the cannons start being fired.
Congrats on the twin newborns!!
Classic Ultra ca–I mean Carla
Flawless execution.
http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/001/070/061/d96.jpg
The Goldberg Rube was a… DISTACTION!
…I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist.
Well, you are not wrong ^^
There is a recent/current CBS TV sitcom by the name of Mom. In the first season, one of the main characters, Christy, works as a waitress. At one point, she gets in a fight with the restaurant manager in the kitchen over personal issues between them. As they are arguing, the head chef (played by French Stewart) walks over next to Christy and holds out a baked good. Christy, still angry, turns to him and snaps, “What is this??” Calmly, the head chef queries back, “What do you think it is?” Christy pauses a moment, says ‘Oh’, takes the banana cream pie and splats it right on the restaurant manager’s face. It is a great moment, and I wish I could find a clip of it on Youtube.
What I’m saying is… The classics never get old, and pie to the face is a true classic.
…I love you, Carla. ;;;;;;;;;; I would ask you to marry me, if I thought I could handle a lifetime of face pies.
Just imagine every day is your wedding day and she’s shoving cake in your face.
That is the worst. THE WORST. WHY IS THAT A TRADITION???
*clapping intensifies*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F4qzPbcFiA
I want to echo what someone said on yesterday’s comic- this is a great strategy because while also not harming Mary or being able to get Carla in trouble, it also shows that she is by no means powerless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIgfiSzCy1o