Sal was the third character I redesigned for Dumbing of Age. Joyce and Sarah were pretty easy. They were both college students 13 years ago, so reworking them was just a menial wardrobe update. But Sal, in her other life, was a alien-fighting superhero. Dumbing of Age was a fresh start that had no aliens, which presented a conundrum for Sal. What is Sal like in a world where she doesn’t have the tragic focal point that made her who she is, while still keeping her quintessentially Sal?
In Roomies! and It’s Walky!, Sal probably had the biggest variety of “outfits.” She went through a lot of visual evolutions. So I pulled from some of them, grabbing her jacket and her midriff shirt and her gloves, and, trying to create a “motorcycle girl” motif, I drew a homeless man.
My wife, Maggie, was all, “Dude, what the fuck. That’s awful.” This went on for some time. And she was right, of course. She helped me as we looked through Google Images of actual motorcycle-riding outfits. She told me what had to be done. And I did it. Sal is Maggie’s creation. She’s our little baby that we made together, and just like real babies, the wife did all of the actual work.
I knew there was some reason I married her!
So sometimes I spend a whole lotta time drawing backgrounds, only for them to get covered up almost entirely by characters. I mean, I know what parts are gonna get covered up, since I blue-pencil everything down before starting to ink, but I try to draw the complete background anyway, on its own layer. Hey, y’never know when I’ll be able to use it again! (Or use it to make a blog post.) And it’s much easier to reuse backgrounds if you don’t have to fill in people-shaped holes with the edges of trees or windows or whatever.
Regardless, this is what it looks behind our heroes in today’s strip. There’s four people standing in a row in most of the wide shots, so of course you can’t see much of it! But here it is for posterity.
Like clockwork, here’s Mike’s fashion closet. Some readers have commented that it’s kind of weird to think of Mike wearing things that aren’t either his original black t-shirt or the Shortpacked! uniform. I agree! Well, I agreed more about a year ago, before I started giving Mike some other things to wear, here and there. For example, above’s dark gray tee over the black-sleeved shirt is something I introduced in Shortpacked!‘s “This Man, this Manhattan” storyline just out of sheer necessity, since, well, he needed a change of clothes. Since then, it’s been easier. Mike wears browns, blacks, and grays. Not so hard, huh? Just had to break the ice.
I imagine Mike also has a collection of t-shirts that would make people mad, in certain company. He loves to wear his “Twilight” shirt to the local comic book store, for example. Feel free to brainstorm your own.
Indiana University denizens should recognize today’s strip’s setting as the northern sidewalk of Third Street. Here’s an image of the first panel as I’m starting to put characters onto the background.
Man, Google Maps Street View is a lifesaver.
Dana Simpson 
@danacorn.bsky.social ⋅ 6h
Dana Simpson @danacorn.bsky.social ⋅ 1m
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