Justin

From Candypedia
Justin
GenderMale
Age9
BirthdayOctober 12, 1999 (Libra)
SpeciesDog
DebutOnwards to Adventure, page 2
February 23, 2007 (2007-02-23)

Adventurous yet gullible, Justin is a mostly average grade-schooler who had the bad luck to walk past David on the one day David needed a sidekick.[1] His substantial appearances tend to end with him pulled into somebody else’s adventure, first David’s and later Molly’s in the BCI story Molly’s Adventure, and protesting loudly about whatever he has just been talked into. Both stories are kidnapping farces, and he has yet to be the one doing the kidnapping.

Personality

Justin is a small kid with a full set of sensible rules and no ability to keep any of them. He knows not to talk to strangers, believes babies come from storks, skips his field trip when something more exciting comes along, and grumbles his way through whatever he has just been talked into. When David finally gives him a chance to walk away, he has to follow anyway because he no longer knows how to get home.

The stranger-danger training is there, and it lasts about a page. When David first accosts him in Onwards to Adventure, Justin gives all the right answers, demanding to know who this grown-up is and pointing out that he isn’t supposed to talk to strangers.[2] Then David says the words “secret agent”, and Justin is saluting him and volunteering his camera for the mission on the very same page.[2] This is also the kid who answers a crack about wombs with “I came from a stork!”, so perhaps the con was never going to be hard.[2] In the BCI story Molly’s Adventure, it takes Molly one garbled word about a man who eats people to send him sprinting for the horizon.[3]

Being gullible doesn’t make him agreeable, though. Justin complains the whole time he is being led astray, telling David he is all talk and they aren’t actually going anywhere, and asking whether the name David just guessed for him is some kind of joke.[4] He is a practical sort of grumbler, too. He wants to know how many boxes of cookies Molly actually has to sell and objects that carrying the backpack because he’s a boy is not fair.[5] He also asks what is going to happen to the cookies once the excitement is over.[6] He is blunt as well, in the way little kids are. His observation that Molly’s ears are “always down” makes her look down and go quiet until the door opens.[7]

Molly’s Adventure makes his crisis response a running joke: his first instinct is to save himself, and his second is to feel terrible about it. He runs the moment Molly is dragged off, reasoning that he’d better leave before the same thing happens to him.[8] He feels guilty pretty quickly, and he stomps around admitting he feels bad and remembering how sad she looked, until he calls himself a big fat baby through his tears and goes back for her.[9][10] Afterwards he is starry-eyed because he believes Molly made it through without crying, which is a bit rich from a boy who cried when David choked him and cried again on the way to the rescue.[11][12]

Appearance

Justin knows the rules, and he is delighted to explain them to David.

Justin is a gray dog with brown eyes, flopped short ears, a short snout, and a short stature; he comes up well below David’s shoulder.[2] He wears a blue jacket, black shorts, and dark gray goggles pushed up on his forehead, which the comic itself calls blue.[1][13] The goggles are his signature. David guesses his name from them, and the television news later identifies the kidnapped kid by nothing more than his brown eyes and blue goggles.[4][13]

He debuts with a camera strapped around his neck and loses it the moment David grabs him, since the strap snaps and the camera is left lying on the grass.[1][2] He evidently has a camera again by the Class of ’08 prom, where he turns up clutching it.[14] The jacket, shorts, and goggles are a fixed look, and what appears to be a younger Justin is drawn in the same outfit in a Pillow Talk flashback.[15]

Significant events

Justin’s one big day in the main comic is Onwards to Adventure. On a February morning when he was supposed to be on a field trip, David spots him walking past and talks him into playing sidekick for David’s birthday truancy.[1][2] The afternoon goes about as well as anyone could expect, and by the time Justin wants out he is too far from home to leave.[4][12] Then a television in a shop window reports a kidnapped boy with brown eyes and blue goggles. Justin has just enough time to realise the story is about him before he is yanked onto a rooftop to face a line of police guns.[13] By the end of the day Justin is in hospital, and David has a restraining order keeping him away.[16]

Justin wisely reconsiders offering his camera after witnessing Tess’s photographic standards.

His later main-comic appearances are cameos. At the Class of ’08 prom in Love My Way he stands outside with his camera, watches Tess flatten a photographer, and concludes, “I guess I shouldn’t offer to take a picture..”[14] He skips along the sidewalk behind Lucy on the first morning of the new school year in A Distance Apart,[17] and what appears to be a younger Justin chases a kickball across a field in Jessica’s memory of Tess’s bullying days in Pillow Talk.[15]

His other adventure happens in the BCI story Molly’s Adventure. Molly conscripts him as her fake cookie-selling partner, gets snatched into a stranger’s house while he watches, and is pulled out of the basement once Justin talks himself into going back for her.[18][19][20] He comes out of it with a friend, and with a fresh reason to run screaming from David.[6] The pair also turn up in a what-if strip in Ships Ahoy, Season Four.[21]

Major relationships

David

In Onwards to Adventure, David blames Justin for the girl he never kidnapped.

Justin wanted to be anywhere else for most of his brief acquaintance with David. In Onwards to Adventure, David talks straight past Justin’s refusals with a joke about wombs and a story about being a secret agent, and introduces himself as Sergeant Rainpop, which Justin shortens to “Mr. Pop”.[2][4] He guesses Justin’s name from his goggles and happens to be right, then hauls him into a bush to spy on the Flower girl.[4] When Justin remarks that she’s pretty, David screams at him for looking at his woman and chokes him until he cries.[12] Justin sticks around only because he’s lost, and David never once notices that the kidnapping on the news is the one he is committing.[12][13]

David gets all the blame afterwards and still doesn’t quite see why. His mother informs him they will be apologising at the hospital, once the restraining order expires, and David protests that “I threw him back when they asked for him”, as if that ought to have settled things.[16] The two never share a main-comic panel again. They do cross paths once more at the end of Molly’s Adventure, where David bursts out of Molly’s front door yelling surprise and Justin flees screaming into the distance. David’s only reaction is “Who’s he?”, so the boy he kidnapped, throttled, and threw back apparently didn’t leave much of an impression.[6]

Molly

Molly and Justin are a fairly even match for bickering. In Molly’s Adventure she grabs him off the sidewalk to pose as her cookie-selling partner, guilts him into staying by asking whether he’d really let her get kidnapped, and makes him carry the backpack on the grounds that he’s a boy.[18][22][5] He needles her right back about her mood and her ears.[7] Then a spiky-haired cat snatches her through his front door, and Justin does exactly what she made him promise he wouldn’t, and runs.[19][8]

Going back for her is the bravest thing Justin does anywhere in the comic, and he does it for a girl whose name he doesn’t even know.[23] He kicks in a basement window, pulls her out with a cry of “NONE OF US WILL BE EATEN TODAY!!”, and only then do they get around to introductions.[20] He tells her she was brave because, as far as he knows, she never cried, and she deflects with a remark about having seen scarier things that she might tell him about someday.[11]

Once the excitement dies down she ditches the cookies to go play with “my new friend”.[6] Veronica has since referred to Justin as Molly’s dog friend and placed him a few years younger than her, so the friendship stands outside the story too.[24]

The what-if strip in Ships Ahoy, Season Four plays the pairing as a settled routine. Molly turns up with a whole box of his favourite cookies, Justin asks “Alright, where are you taking me today”, and her suggestion of a creepy abandoned house in the forest earns a flat no while he eats.[21]

Minor relationships

The Flower girl tends her garden, entirely unaware of the trouble brewing nearby.

Flower girl

Justin and the Flower girl have never exchanged a word, and she is still the reason he ended up on a rooftop. Peering out of a bush in Onwards to Adventure, he decides “She’s so pretty!” and gets throttled by David for saying so.[12] He never gets a second look at her.

Quotes

Grown-ups can be strangers and I’m not supposed to talk to them! Justin, correctly sizing up David in Onwards to Adventure

I came from a stork! Justin, settling the matter of wombs in Onwards to Adventure

YES, Mr. Secret Agent Sir!! Justin, abandoning the stranger-danger rules one panel later in Onwards to Adventure

Ohhhh no! You are NOT talking me into climbing up a building!! Nosiree!! Justin, shortly before following David anyway in Onwards to Adventure

NONE OF US WILL BE EATEN TODAY!! Justin, returning for Molly in Molly’s Adventure

Trivia

  • Veronica isn’t sure whether the camera fell off because she didn’t feel like drawing it anymore or because it would let people work out his identity, and adds that at least the kid won’t be taking creepshots of the flower girl, since this isn’t Pokémon Snap.[2]
  • David’s running set of names and comparisons escalates from “Adventurer Justin” to Blinx the Time Cat and, while throttling him, “Justin ‘Spirit Stone’ Johnson”.[4][12]
  • His kidnapping makes national television as an extraordinary mass kidnapping, with the anchor clarifying that by mass they mean one kid.[13][16]
  • Some readers take Justin for a rabbit, which Veronica has grumbled about, pointing out that dogs can have perked-up ears too.[25]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Chapter 33: Onwards to Adventure, page 2
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 Chapter 33: Onwards to Adventure, page 3
  3. ↑ Molly’s Adventure, page 19 🔒 (members only)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Chapter 33: Onwards to Adventure, page 4
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Molly’s Adventure, page 8 🔒 (members only)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Molly’s Adventure, page 24 🔒 (members only)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Molly’s Adventure, page 9 🔒 (members only)
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Molly’s Adventure, page 11 🔒 (members only)
  9. ↑ Molly’s Adventure, page 17 🔒 (members only)
  10. ↑ Molly’s Adventure, page 20 🔒 (members only)
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Molly’s Adventure, page 22 🔒 (members only)
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 Chapter 33: Onwards to Adventure, page 5
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 Chapter 33: Onwards to Adventure, page 6
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Chapter 39: Love My Way, page 4
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Chapter 61: Pillow Talk, page 29
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Chapter 33: Onwards to Adventure, page 7
  17. ↑ Chapter 50: A Distance Apart, page 1
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Molly’s Adventure, page 6 🔒 (members only)
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Molly’s Adventure, page 10 🔒 (members only)
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Molly’s Adventure, page 21 🔒 (members only)
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Ships Ahoy, Season Four, page 3 🔒 (members only)
  22. ↑ Molly’s Adventure, page 7 🔒 (members only)
  23. ↑ Molly’s Adventure, page 18 🔒 (members only)
  24. ↑ “Ask response on Molly’s dog friend”. 2018-03-23.
  25. ↑ “Ask response on readers mistaking Justin for a rabbit”. 2015-07-18.
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