Dumbing of Age

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.)

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.