Dumbing of Age

Despite Ethan arguably being the main character of Shortpacked! for about eight years, we never saw much of his parents.  In fact, we only got one glimpse of his mom’s arm.  So I just kind of whole-hog made ’em up.  Here Saul and Naomi Siegal are, for the first-ish time!  And boy, do they have some weird ideas about homosexuality.  In the Old Continuity, I imagine they figured out Ethan was gay before he did, and had kind of resigned themselves to it by the time he told them he was gay long after college, but in Dumbing of Age, Ethan came out in high school and his parents are still young and stupid.

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.

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.