All I knew going into this was that I wanted both the parental Saruyamas to wear hats. And on strip 4 of Dumbing of Age, they certainly did! Now we get a closer look.
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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.)
Hey, it’s an honest-to-gosh older brother of Joyce! In the Original Continuity, Joyce’s older brothers were relegated to photographs or token appearances at weddings and I don’t think any of them got official names. But here in Dumbing of Age, I had this storyline about families visiting, and I forced myself to include one of her brothers as an actual speaking character, finally, for the first time. Why “forced”? Well, it’s a much simpler dynamic to have just parents and one of their kids. The parents can easily work as a single voice versus their offspring, and so you have an easy conversation to write between the two entities. But with another sibling in there, it adds another voice and another someone to squeeze into a panel. It complicates a story and creates more work all around! But I’m a glutton for such things, so here we go.
So let’s introduce Joshua Brown. Like his sister, he’s kind of adorable.
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.
It’s Howard! Seriously, it’s just Howard. No changes from the original Walkyverse Howard, down to the shirt and pants and everything. Well, he’s younger, I guess. But I didn’t see any reason to redesign him.
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