Dumbing of Age

Longtime readers of my webcomics might recognize this dress from before, originally featured in this now-ancient limited print:

It’s Walky: Joyce in Dress by ~itswalky on deviantART

Those of you who want a bigger version of today’s strip to crop up for your desktop wallpaper or something, as has been asked, I’ve uploaded that for you over at DeviantART as well:

Dumbing of Age: Dress by ~itswalky on deviantART

Dumbing of Age is full of roommates who are foils, so I wanted at least one pair of roomies to be so similar that its bad for both of them.  So meet the two social recluses, Amber and Dina.    Here’s some folks who won’t be leaving their room very often.  Amber will be faceplanting herself into WoW while Dina will be too busy obsessing about dinosaurs to chip away at her crippling social phobias.  Aren’t they a fun, largely invisible pair.  They enable each other.

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.

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.