I’m not sure why Ruth was the hardest to get in the mood for drawing alternate clothes for. I had a more difficult time thinking of her wearing something other than the first-day’s outfit for some reason. The green and black is basically perfect. Not any other dumb stuff.
But now that I have the hockey jersey in her arsenal, though, I’ve changed my mind. That’s totally Ruth. She will check you. And not out.
You will suffer grievous wounds.
Today’s midday post is a little different from the others. This one has nothing to do with Dumbing of Age at all, and everything to do with people on Twitter and Formspring asking me to put back online my greatest webcomic of all time.
LAWsome.
Back in 2004, when It’s Walky! was ending, I was struggling to find a new webcomic idea to follow it. It’s Walky! had left some big shoes to fill! My only recourse was to take the strip’s most popular characters, lawyer Bart O’Ryan and that asshole Mike Warner, and give them their own series.
Alas, it was too much for the world to take, and I had to settle for a less potent webcomic sequel about toys or some shit. But today, collected together on the Internet (and digitally remastered!) for the first time in half a decade, I give you LAWsome:
Hello everybody who’s visiting from Something*Positive! (Randy lost a bet.) I hope you enjoy my simple strip about a co-ed college dormatory.
If you’re new here, I’ve been posting my “model sheets” which show alternate outfits for the characters into the blog day to day as they show up in the comic. Today is Sarah’s day! I think I’m gonna go mostly purple, magenta, and green with her, as you can see, with lots of layered clothing.
A version of Sarah appeared in one of my older webcomics, but she didn’t get much chance to shine there. This will be different this time! The interplay between her and her roommate, Joyce, is going to be one of the big focuses of Dumbing of Age.
Let’s all bid a bittersweet farewell to Joe’s It’s Walky!-era purple luau shirt. A college freshman who wants to have intimate relations with multiple females is not going to be wearing that in 2010. Unfortunately, as, if I recall correctly, Starline Hodge pointed out to me the other day, the modern equivalent of the tacky luau shirt is the Ed Hardy shirt. I googled that, because I am 31, and, man, no way am I gonna be drawin’ those! All those patterns colors would double my drawing time!
So, as a concession, I found a fairly subdued example and tried to filter it down into an “I can do this in more than one panel” simplicity. Other than that, yay, stripes. We love stripes!
But goodbye, purple luau shirt. We had some good times. Let’s retire you… with a song.
I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you
I know you were right believing for so long
I’m all out of love, what am I without you?
I can’t be too late to say that I was so wrong
This is Danny, who was the main character in Roomies!. In Dumbing of Age, Joyce takes center stage, pushing Danny into the background a bit, but not so far into the background that he wouldn’t need a change of clothes. He used to be a hoodie guy, but I want to make that Walky’s thing, so I came up with some Stuff That Isn’t A Hoodie for him. Some, but not all.
Basically, Danny dresses himself like every character Breckin Meyer has ever played.
These were some clothes that Maggie and my friend Graham helped me with. Graham had read my blog post about Billie’s wardrobe in which I said I was an old, bloated dude who didn’t have any grasp of modern girls’ fashion (but I don’t remember using the word “bloated”), and pointed out to me that I did know, like, fifteen people who taught high school.
Hint taken, Graham. Hint taken.
(What this means is that everyone is going to be wearing Crocs.)
Those of you who are familiar with my older works have been seeing a lot of very familiar faces, but there’s going to be some unfamiliar faces as well. Which is fine, since this is a new continuity and I’m introducing everyone as if you’d never heard of them before anyway!
For 99% of you, Dorothy Keener is a new character. Her only appearances in the Old Continuity are in Joyce and Walky!, and almost entirely in the subscriber-only material. So don’t worry if you don’t know her. After all, you’re not “required” to, same as everyone else in Dumbing of Age. It’s a clean slate for everyone.
In today’s strip, she wears green and yellow, and you’ll notice that up above she’s in purples. See, at some point in the middle of drawing this storyline, I realized that I had too many characters who wore predominantly green. I am, like, a green fiend. Probably all those years of Shortpacked! getting to my brain. This green overabundance bothered me, but not enough to go back and recolor Dorothy differently, I guess. So, uh, hope you don’t like the greens, ‘cuz she wont’ be wearing them after this first “day” of strips. After that, it’s mostly purples for her.
The only post that I couldn’t retrieve from Google cache when rebuilding this website was the one about Walky and his change of clothes. I can’t really remember exactly what I wrote about it in length, but let me summarize best to my recollection:
Walky is a slob who should change his clothes more often.
First of all, after today’s strip everyone should probably recognize where the site’s wallpaper comes from. Yeah, it’s the actual tile pattern from the real-life lobby of Read Hall, which is where the strip’s characters live. I liked it so I’m using it!
I began working on what would become Dumbing of Age on the plane trip home from San Diego Comic-Con. To the left is a scan of the first page of my brainstorms. Joyce was a no-brainer, as was the outfit I started giving her post It’s Walky! for some Joyce and Walky! segments. It really suits her. Then there’s a prototypical Sarah to the left, before I figured out what to do with her hair.
And, hey, it’s Becky, Joyce’s friend from the J&W! material.
And, of course, down below is art of Billie, the nose of whom I botched so badly I had to call it out to myself. That makes it somehow better. This way if someone goes through my sketchbook (no one ever really does), they won’t think I thought the art was acceptable! I’m saved from the full measure of scorn!
And finally, there’s two attempts at Ruth. She used to wear overalls (why?) and wear glasses the size of her face. Both of these would have to go.
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