Unused strips for March 3-5, 2025

SO MANY THROWN AWAY STRIPS FOR THIS SEQUENCE

As I showed in the previous Unused Strips post, there were a couple drafts of March 2's strip where it had a different ending than "dorothy last night you texted her a tiddy pic." The pencils up above would've been how the next strip resolved, putting that confrontation into the middle of a strip rather than at the end of the previous one. When you start a strip with "stop [reminding the audience what we were talking about before we went on some tangents]" that's usually a bad sign, so moving Joe's "tiddy pic" gauntlet throw to the end of the other strip fixed that as well.

 For a while, I was trying to recycle what bits of dialogue I liked from the 2023 version. "Joyce wants a HUSBAND" is one of my favorite deflections, but oh well. It wasn't working.

 Here's some more attempts at recycling dialogue from the 2023 version! "Joyce gets to decide for herself who she wants" and "do you really think she'd be a real option for me"? But a little too talky, and not in the right way. I realize trying to repurpose my favorite bits from the 2023 version is to this sequence's detriment.

 The 2023 version had Joe genuinely suggest to "bow out" for Dorothy to "save her" from himself, and one of the reasons that didn't work at the time was that Joyce hadn't had time to change any yet! But 2 years later, Joe had some data points to support that hypothesis. And so here he is... referencing, uh, the 2023 version nobody saw, and establishing that its premise is something he no longer believes. Whoof, convoluted. And then he says what becomes Dorothy's own realization in the published version, that Dorothy is "worse" than him.

It's way better for Dorothy to come to that realization herself. As she implodes.

man a lot of these were really bad