mozenrath87 asked:

You've said before how Danny, Walky, Ethan I think?, and Joyce draw aspects of themselves from you. Was that sort of the case from inception, or has it been a case where the new "main character" takes on parts of you? I guess writers give part of themselves to their creations in general, so maybe it's not so cut and dry?

Both Danny and Walky were created by me in grade school, and they both started out as David Willises. They got their own names by the time I was about 12, and they diverged from there. They did get parts of myself put into them as they took turns being the main characters in Roomies! and It’s Walky!, subsequently. By the time I was putting together Shortpacked!, I knew enough to purposefully put aspects of myself in my main characters – gotta have something to talk about! And so, yeah, Ethan likes Transformers and Batman and he’s a little anal about nerd stuff!

When I was planning Dumbing of Age, once I realized, hey, Joyce should be the main character instead of Danny again, I basically swapped around a lot of stuff that used to belong to Danny to Joyce. Walkyverse Danny grew up in La Porte, Indiana, like I did. But if Joyce was going to be the main character, I was gonna want to use all that familiar background for her. So she got to be from La Porte now, and Danny’s (and Joe’s) hometown got moved. She got my childhood house and my church and my dog.

and well uh i didn’t actually have to change a lot else really, joyce was very much like me already