Dumbing of Age

Amber’s mom, Stacy O’Malley, suffered no huge changes in her translation from Shortpacked! other than shaving about a decade off her age.  (Shaving a decade off one’s age doesn’t matter quite as much when we’re talking about scooting it from 50 to 40, versus, say, 20 to 10.)  She’s a smidge skinnier and her chin is sharpened, but that’s about all that’s visibly altered.

That said, this process seems to have moved her from “I’d hit that, sure” to “God daaayyum.”  Speaking for myself.

Don’t judge me.

The Original Universe’s Joe’s Dad was Joe with a beard.  But Walkyverse Joe has a beard now, so I decided to grizzle up Dr. Richard Rosenthal’s beard a bit in the Dumbiverse.  That’s right, he’s a doctor.  A BONE doctor.

He is not above using wordplay to that effect to try to pick up chicks.  It might be why he chose that specialty.

(Weirdly and completely coincidentally, today’s republished Roomies! strip is kind of pertinent, in a cross-universal sort of way.)

Joyce’s parents are a bit older than the other characters’ parents.  Joyce is the youngest of four siblings, while the rest of the cast are mostly first or second in birth order, so I get to gray and wrinkle up the Browns a bit more.  They’re likely pretty close to the age of my own parents.

You can probably see in them the general design philosophy of how I draw parents.  They’re almost patient zero for that, being designed second only after Danny’s parents some time in 1998.  Mr. Brown gets Joyce’s eyes and headshape and Mrs. Brown gets Joyce’s nose and slightly shorter version of her daughter’s hair (and a more round physique that Joyce is likely to take on as she gets on in years).  I always find it helps to give the most distinctive physical characteristics to the opposite-sexed parent and then throw all the other features at the other parent — and few characteristics are more distinctive than Joyce’s big blue eyes.  I don’t want moms to always look like aged-up daughters and dads to always look like aged-up sons.    They can be sometimes, though, for lulz.

Here’s Danny’s parents, the Wilcoxes.  I haven’t really, truly drawn them since they appeared in late Roomies! stuff back around the early 00’s, so this was another case of “how do I translate these ancient character designs into my current style.”  In this case, I did less translating than usual.  There are purposefully some artifacts from how I drew stuff at the time kept in their DNA, like the shape of Mr. Wilcox’s face and the shape of Mrs. Wilcox’s hair.  Why not?  It varies up my people a little more.

Have some character models!