Dumbing of Age

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.

Here’s some stuff I drew up for Billie to wear.  The “97″ on the shirt she wears in her first appearance refers to 1997, the date that Roomies! started.  I really like this shirt, but the others I might tweak before they appear, as they aren’t as visually compelling.  I do like the hoodie.  But then, I just like hoodies.

T Campbell and I are sitting adjacent to each other at Intervention this weekend, and we’ve been talking about the problems plaguing aging male artists attempting to nonlaughingly clothe teenagers.  How do those Archie folks do it?

Anyway, since I have no idea if it will actually ever come up in the strip, I might as well come out and say that Billie is half-Asian now.  Everyone always assumed she was Asian back in Roomies!, what with the black hair and fair complexion, even though she was conceived as thoroughly English.  So I figgered this go-round, hey, she’s half-Asian, why not?  These are the galaxy-sweeping alterations I am making!  The ones that make absolutely no real impact on the strip!  Her dad, of course, is still white through-and-through, because, dude, last name’s friggin’ Billingsworth, man.