#yashy

he's not even doing anything, girl. what are you pining about? WATCH THE MOVIE

david barks at paulo for trying to steal his popcorn (bad friend, you don't deserve a plush, etc.) and when the other unseen moviegoers throw their food at him for being a nuisance, he says this:

i have no idea what that means. why would the popcorn be bloody? in the redraws, this line is change to "fur-free!" which makes more sense, but like, wouldn't he just say something like "hey, free food!" was the popcorn not fur-free? was there a chance it wouldn't have been?

...or maybe "fur-free" is just him saying "for free" with food in his mouth...?

because a single SA2 reference is never enough. and this from people who only like the classic games! i guess sonic 3 isn't known for its memorable quotes...

for some reason, the campiest movie ever manages to affect paulo and lucy emotionally. (swirls wine in glass) ahhh, just like how early chapters like the vacation arc have an effect on me... truly life eez like ze bittairesweet candy bowl...

in the redraw, mike is less cruel when daisy stops hanging off him to go pester paulo about his emotions. look at him ignore lucy crying right next to him, hahahahaha. he probably thinks that's just a default state for her. oh she's crying again? ahh, she'll be done in a minute. she's probably thinking about that time her blocks got knocked over in first grade.

the rest of this chapter isn't too much to note. paulo explains his phobia of dogs barking (which is funny because its a noise half the population makes, more on that in a second) and mike and lucy have a goofy interaction where they ruminate on the really obvious connection between the movie and their lives and then lucy is like Nooo thats Stupid ha ha ha ha ha good Bye

but more importantly, there's a change in paulo's backstory where he originally specified that they weren't just any high school-age bullies, but DOG bullies.

now paulo has enough to have an internal struggle over later on, but man, it's REALLY funny that he stares david in the face and says YEAH SOOO I HAVE A DOG PHOBIA in the original chapter. don't worry david, you're one of the good ones. i'm just scared of other dogs.

imagine how RACHEL would feel!

anyway, i'm not gonna bother dedicating a post to Catty Remarks, because i simply don't have enough to say. it's two pages of cat puns, but more notably, it's the first "intermission" chapter, where they take a quick aside to do something else before getting back to important things like hitting each other and referencing sonic.

all i'm gonna note is this panel where it looks like yashy bursts out of lucy's chest like an alien:

and also the fact that, once again, mike and lucy are magnetically attracted to each other to the point where they can't exist in close proximity without one of them sighing and thinking "UUUUGH I WISH WE WERE MARRIED RIGHT NOWWW"

get a friggen' room! sheesh!

if i had to hazard a guess why it took me 386 days to read Chirpy's Introduction, it's probably because i'm not the die-hard pet fanatic i claim to be. don't get me wrong, the pets (especially yashy) are an invaluable asset to early BCB. they create conflict, make for good gags, and generally ruffle everyone's feathers in a way that i find entertaining (again, mostly yashy...) but they don't really work as well on their own. it's like reading a comic about toddlers. (no offense intended to Bleating Hearts, which is, to my understanding, a comic about toddlers)

back when i talked about Flying Lessons, i somehow wasn't aware of how many deleted chapters are still available on the site, so i assumed this was defunct deviantart HASHTAG LOST MEDIA. let's see what we were missing out on!

see in this case, the gag is that the pets are the only characters in the entire world that are dumber than the protagonists.

i don't know if i've pointed it out before, but i like that the capital "i"s here are written so hastily that they look like uppercase "z"s. the first time i saw someone do that was ask stoned trixie. RIP to ghost, as always.

i took note last time they did the cat thing, so look, they did the cat thing.

like in Flying Lessons, chirpy's backstory begins with mike and lucy doing what they usually do: being competitive with an added layer of unnecessary violence. yashy watches lucy run off with mike, and then gets scared, because she doesn't have object permanence i guess...?

as lampshaded in Flying Lessons' page descriptions, yashy was very blatantly a baby yoshi in these original pages.

actually unreadable. how am i supposed to enjoy this if she doesn't scream DANGER!!!! like a wet floor sign anymore? RUINED

this goes as far as her literally doing the yoshi tongue thing to save the day, which is obviously not present in the redraw.

when the egg is hatching later, she reverts to yoshi language again, but it's always an easy fix when she does that since she's considerate enough to offer subtitles.

notable differences from the final pages here: in Flying Lessons, mike's line here is "I'm calling child services." in the original... he's got blur's egg! what the hell?

poor yashy. being a kindergarten mom must be rough.

i don't remember exactly how mike comes into possession of blur (FAKE FAN) but evidently mike didn't hatch him, at least not anymore

mike is also violently punished for this little crack. one more instance of lucy being needlessly cruel that's been scrubbed from the omnibus chapters. mike, the poor sap, he was set up! he has really good reasons to hate her, trust me, there's just... no evidence, anymore...

see, okay, the chapter is directly contradicting itself. mike found blur looking like a drowned rat. the egg is now some confusing third party that either did or didn't hatch.

maybe it was a bad egg.

maybe it's error.

Flying Lessons really tones down how mean yashy was to blur in this chapter. she's calling him a big fat stupid idiot even while talking about what was presumably a near-death experience of his. she still says Die, Idiot though.

can yashy's egg's hatch? the world may never know.

this chapter actually starts out pretty pleasantly! mike and lucy have casual banter about how school's been lately, they talk about sports, lucy is weirdly quirky with her violence...

...and all in all, they actually seem like friends here! isn't that nice?

anyway, they get so into their conversation that mike accidentally follows lucy into the girl's locker room.

every guy in this comic is basically just paulo lite at the start.

after a bit of sexual harassment from david (it's not funny enough to screenshot, sorry) we get this cute little scene where daisy is impressed by paulo's badassery. planting seeds, perhaps? david sure seems grouchy on this page.

daisy and katie are both struck out by paulo, but then yashy goes up for some reason? apparently, she's too subhuman to go to school, but just subhuman enough to be fodder on a baseball team.

this is more condensed violence than we've seen for most of bcb so far! turns out paulo deserves it though, because he's got *gasp* BALLS IN HIS POCKET!!!

i feel like they could've noticed that he was pulling out spare balls, though. i mean, didn't they see where the other ones landed?

Oh My God Fine Fucking Parasite

i need to post this whole sequence again, because it's just so funny to me.

i love the way they drag her offscreen and then she just appears again without any panel in between. this is such perfect comedic timing. i wish this was still canon so we could have some weird dynamic where paulo's scared of her.

see, like that! sadly, up to bat is pretty inconsequential. oh well!

AND WHAT A START. i didn't skip any panels, this is just how the chapter reads. let's all give a very, VERY generous thank you to the author for still allowing us to read these and not completely burying them. holy cow, man.

lucy shows up to watch paulo's "sermon" and paulo tries to use her an example. shockingly, she doesn't go along with it and kicks his ass!

dude, if abbey was in these early chapters, paulo would be dead before high school.

paulo asks mike how he's able to "keep lucy in line," to which mike obviously replies. "i don't, we aren't dating" and leaves. that's an extra funny thing to say considering lucy spends most of these early pages kicking mike in the shins. what version of bcb is paulo reading?

mike flashes back again to ponder about the fact that lucy's never pursued anybody. when she shows up in the same first grade class as him, he isn't even happy to see her! these are your treasured memories, mike?

also, cute baby david and daisy:

first grade mike makes a valiant attempt at avoiding first grade lucy, but they apparently have recess on a giant slab of concrete so she can just keep looking at him no matter how far away he walks. then we get this sequence where it's revealed that the only reason lucy cares about mike at all is because he was the first one to talk to her.

after trying to tear him limb from limb for no reason, lucy and mike abruptly fall into their dynamic of constantly going head-to-head at everything they do. then they walk each other home, which is by far the most unrealistic part of this comic so far. they're so small! where are their parents!!

this part's not that unrealistic though. she's hilariously mean and adhd here but like, they are little kids. it's not THAT crazy.

the scene after this is actually a little sweet. mike is the only one lucy wants to be around, they're both protective of each other, and they're both staunchly insistent that their relationship is platonic. over time, lucy softens up a bit and actually starts spending time with other friends. sue and daisy also show up! how nice.

she even has her iconic red jewel, which famously gives her her power.

SANDY JUMPSCARE!!!

once again, at the current point we're at in the main comic, sandy hasn't shown up yet. if she's been mentioned at all, i don't remember it. this is the second time they've brought her up and deleted it later.

mike is probably the only guy on earth to call third grade an "unforgettable time."

anyway, mike starts getting closer to sandy and drifting away from lucy. lucy is pretty obviously torn up about it. i have to imagine they deleted this chapter because they understood how unintentionally comedic it was for lucy to have traumatic memories of being four years old.

this sort of continues on for a while until summer vacation, where lucy finally breaks. then, suddenly...

surprise! yashy cured lucy's first grade depression!

and yeah, damn, here's a depiction of sandy leaving. just like that! this probably would've been placed within the first ten chapters. i wonder why they take so long to tell us about her now?

once again, lucy breaks mike out of his memories by beating him in the head. there's just no way to know why he might have a stick up his ass later in life!

but actually, he deserves it this time. apparently, mike ate lucy's pet goldfish that she won at some fair. that's kind of a fucked up thing to do! also, weirdly catlike. this reminds me of that part in Flying Lessons where they land on all fours...

anyway, yashy makes a sex joke and lucy sends her into the cave.

if these damn webcomic makers knew what they were doing they'd put in less unnecessary sex scenes and more instances of characters being sent into the cave.

funny how willing they are to refer to the pets as their children, but more importantly, this page reveals that the AYU BEEM!!! seen later is actually a callback! this must be the original! i have even more appreciation for ayu beem now, if such a thing was even possible.

also, remember that "see you next page" moment from way back when?

mike and lucy are telling me to Like and Subscribe and Pledge to the Patreon

got crazy about bcb again recently, so i'm back to reviewing random old crap from 2006! man, making a reading order for this comic is a pain! so many old things shuffled around, removed from the archive, etc... it's a completionist's nightmare!

welp, somebody's gotta do it. while i was gone, i updated the blog's organization a little- that's the blog you get from putting the .tumblr.com AFTER the url, not doing that new-age tumblr.com/url junk!

anyways, welcome to The First Meeting! the first of many, many flashback chapters to when mike and lucy were younger. except this one is so early that we're basically just looking at toddlers! probably not the most relevant thing in the world. wonder why it was removed!!!

wahaha, look at that yashy face. they're really laying on the "mike and lucy have weird hearing" stuff pretty thick. they do a bit with lucy's deaf ear again and then lucy yells at him on purpose so he'll collapse in pain. best of friends, they are!

also, check out this yashy.

#Yup #ItsCute

lucy and mike meet up with daisy, talk about tutoring, yashy calls daisy a whore again, the usual. lucy goes home and leaves lily to take yashy home, which, no offense to lily, is probably about as safe as letting yashy walk home by herself. they're both small enough to be stepped on, even if one of them is covered in quills.

for some reason, a pretty normal conversation with mike and daisy has really pissed lucy off.

"your stupid friends" is interesting wording. this is something she echoes years and years later, but is she not supposed to be friends with the rest of the core cast here?