Joyce in twenty years
Dumbing of Age’s current Joyce look is a stealth update of her first look twenty years ago.
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A week from Monday, on September 10, I will have been doing webcomics for fifteen years. Dumbing of Age will also be celebrating its second birthday! To celebrate this milestone, I have put together a limited poster! Suffice to say, it’s the busiest thing I have ever drawn in my life.
A while ago, Joel Watson was all, hey, you should do a parody of Superboy Prime punching the universe and all the pieces scattering into the Walkyverse and the Dumbiverse. That’d be a poster you can do. And it was a fine idea, but it wasn’t “all-encompassing work of horror” enough for me. I needed something that would take me a month to complete. And so I’ve parodied a different, better crisis instead.
As a result, every character who’s ever appeared in one of my webcomics is in this thing. I poured through my own archives day by day, grabbing folks to squeeze in here. Some of them are pretty in your face. Some may be less obvious, but still pretty easy to find. Some may be essentially unrecognizable mostly-obscured heads in the background. But they’re all here. And there’s both Walkyverse and Dumbiverse versions of everybody. (You can probably tell where the split in the composition takes place.) It’s an 11"x17" slab of cardstock gloss craziness, and there’s only 50 of them. I’ll number and autograph them all. If you want one, here it is in the store.
Some people who read Roomies! and It’s Walky! wonder why Joyce is suddenly a fundamentalist Christian in Dumbing of Age. (There’s a thread on TVTropes about it, even.)
The simplest answer to this is that Joyce was always a fundamentalist Christian, but that’s not the best answer. Sure, Joyce was, but so was Danny. And Mary. Even Sal. (If you have a really good memory, recall that when Sal learned her parents were moving, shortly before the Head Alien killed them, Sal ran away to her church youth group.)
I didn’t address a lot of this head-on at the time because, well, *I* was a fundamentalist Christian. So being one was the default. It’s not like Danny and Joyce are going to argue the finer points of the Bible, since they totally agree. It was “normal.” Plus, at the time I didn’t really want to address religion. I thought of it as a boring distraction, not something I could use to make things more interesting. Sal’s abandoning of Mary’s youth group during her Superhero Origin Story flashback was the first time I ever lingered on the idea of religion for more than a panel or two to make a Shortpacked!-esque “Take That” at dirty Pinko Atheist Commie Horoscope Readers. Sal’s implied abandoning of Mary’s youth group, and thus also her God, was a knee-quakingly bold move for me at the time, emotionally. I was afraid I’d get in trouble, or that my pastors would come and break my knees.
So by the time I worked up the courage to address it more, Joyce had already been mind-wiped for a number of years. She didn’t even remember the details of her religious beliefs for a long, long time. She grew and changed emotionally outside of those beliefs, and it wasn’t until she regained her memories (and a trip to her parents’ house) that she tried to reclaim that part of herself. And that more balanced Joyce is the one folks remember, at least where it came to the topic of religion.
Thirteen years removed, I’m merely doing a thorough job in Dumbing of Age of detailing what Roomies! Joyce believed in, since I now have the balls and the panel space to devote to it.
It’s my wedding anniversary today, and my wife Maggie’s favorite storyline is It’s Walky!’s “Anomalie,” which is currently in reruns at itswalky.com, so for fun and because I like doing nice things for her, I drew her Dumbing of Age Joyce and Walky all up in the “Anomalie” situation.
you can tell it’s the dumbiverse and not walkyverse versions because 1) sweatervest and 2)mcnuggets
The “Fifteen”/“Crisis on Infinite Walkyverses” posters were delivered this morning! I’ll be putting them up for sale on Saturday. They’re 11"x17" on cardstock gloss, will be limited to 50, numbered and signed, and I’m thinking they’ll be going for $25 each.
In the meantime, here’s the “coming soon” page up in the store.
Welp, SDCC has settled so it’s time to start plugging at this again.
why am i working on this instead of drawing more lesbian velma pics
This may be done, but I am allowing myself some tinkering time.
Also I’ll try not to introduce any new characters between now and September 10.
edging ever closer to completion…
Use code CYBERMONDAY to get 10% off in the store!
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