Dumbing of Age

Want the last panel of Monday’s comic, but bigger?  Let’s hope so, ‘cuz here it is.

In addition to Monday’s new Joyce art, here’s some new Billie art.  This week I began drawing the “second day” of Dumbing of Age, and so I’m testing out characters in other clothes.

Here’s Billie, of course, in the universal language of current college-age girls, aka stretchpants and Uggs.

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.

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

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.