I really like that you can really feel Joyce's growth throughout the comic.

Because I don't think she would have asked this near the beginning. I feel the fact she feels okay asking Dorothy this is both a symbol of how much she trusts Dorothy and how far she's come.

1. ...No? I have followed this comic since the very early days of Book 1 and Joe was objectively the opposite of "small" throughout the entirety of the series. He was a loud, brash, abrasive misogynistic sex pest that only took a Gender Studies class because he thought it'd help him get laid somehow and quite literally had a list of every woman he met on campus numerically ranked by how much he wanted to fuck them. If anything, his coping mechanism was to deliberately mirror everything he hated about his father for...reasons, I guess?? I'm not gonna lie these attempts at retroactively trying to make Joe less overtly bad of a person make his character borderline incomprehensible to the point it undermines any redemption arc storyline he might be getting. Unless the implication is that Karen is supposed to be one of those endlessly enabling Boy Moms that make endless excuses for their son's behavior? But then that's not communicated at all in literally any other page or panel she appears in and flies in the face of how unambiguously positive the story treats her, especially in comparison to other parent characters the story is far more willing to critique.

2. The phrasing of "Stupid Dorothy stole her from me" is a legitimately skin crawling thing for a man to say about someone that helped a woman he ostensibly loves and treasures finally able to break free from the heteronormative repression forced onto her by her patriarchal conservative Christian upbringing. He phrases this like Joyce is an object that he is entitled to ownership of, like a child complaining that someone else is Playing With Their Toy.

I'm also not a fan of the attempt at correlating what Joe's dad did to Karen as equivalent to what Joyce did to Joe. Sure, they're both technically cheating, but they arose out of such different contexts that trying to equate them feels disingenuous.

Joe's dad was a misogynistic sleazebag who's infidelity was a manifestation of his dehumanizing view of women as sex dolls that existed for his pleasure.