KD^3C^3 - 20250223 Tabloid footprints in your hair
Hard drives fail all the time. You should probably know that. They’re subject to entropy just like everything else. Do you have your data backed up? In multiple places? Have you checked them lately? Ok now that the PSA is out of the way, you may now continue reading the newsletter.
I’ve been reading Dumbing of Age since it started nearly 15 years ago. I had been aware of Dave Willis’s earlier works, including It’s Walky, it’s prequel Roomies and the technically set in the same universe but mostly unrelated Shortpacked. I read most(all?) of Roomies in a binge (i binged a lot of webcomics in high school) and fell off somewhere when it transitioned to It’s Walky, as the plots became more convoluted including aliens, evil clones and a magic tree branch. But in 2010 Willis announced that he was rebooting his universe. This was a novel idea and it seemed like a great jumping on point for reading a new comic (the beginning) from someone who had been honing his craft for a long time already.
I was right! It was a good time to jump in. I’ve been reading the comic (which publishes a new strip every day) for that entire time. This version of the characters starts with everybody in college, which is where Roomies started, but unlike roomies, it stays there. There are no big sci-fi set pieces. The comic has been running for almost fifteen years and all of the characters are still freshmen. Whatever the opposite of advancing in real time is, this comic is doing it. over fifteen years we have progressed to the early point of the second semester. And that was including a three month time skip that happened a couple of years ago. Typically a comic will cover a few minutes in a given day for a few of the characters (the main cast is around 2 dozen deep at this point) so a whole day can take up months of daily comics. Each year a new book collecting a previous year’s strips is released and for the last few years that has rarely been more than four days. We’re currently in the 61st day depicted in the series, if my counting is accurate. So really in 15 years we have had about two months of progress.
The outcome of this is that it makes mundane activities seem as important as they do to college freshmen. The comic revels in the small things (while also having the occasional big things happen.) The progress and growth that happens is mostly character driven, rather than even driven
And the character grows is really impressive, if perhaps a little quick to be happening in the timespan actually covered. I recently started a re-read of the whole thing (because why not) and it has been wild to see how different people are, while still being recognizable the same characters. Some of the early storylines are particularly funny or ironic given where things are going to end up (fifteen IRL years later.) Also the whole thing is on a bit of a sliding timeline, which means whatever year it is in real life is also this year in the comic. It’s a little weird in a binge, but it means that the characters can make realistic pop culture references in the latest comics. Although it’s not exactly full of those, being that the characters are more the focus than the outside world.
There’s also something else that buck wild about the strip, and that is the Buffer Watch. On the home page in an unobtrusive box on the left side of the page, under a banner ad, is the Buffer Watch. It’s an inbox that says “Comics are currently drawn and uploaded through:” and then a date. As of this writing, that date is currently in February 2026. A buffer of a year is ridiculous. It’s also the sort of thing that makes me want to keep reading the comic. I want to know what’s going on with these wacky teens making bad decisions. I’m slowly winding down my Patreon subscriptions because of choices the company made, but every so often I am tempted to subscribe to the Patreon for Dumbing of Age because the primary perk is that you get the strips a day early, and sometimes the cliffhangers are too strong.
When I was a kid I would often take the comics section of the newspaper (back when newspapers were printed on paper and delivered to your house) and methodically read through every single strip in the section. The majority of the comics were the expected gag-a day strips like Garfield or The Far Side or what have you, but thre were also the "adult comics" as I considered them at the time. This of course, wasn't "Adult" as in behind thebeaded curtain, but rather "adult" as in boring. There was Prince Valiant and Mark Trail and Mary Worth and probably a few others I can't remember. Doonsbury wasn't quite on that level because I knew it was supposed to have actual jokes, even if the content of those went over my head. No these were the comics that were glorified soap operas, with complicated stories serialized into three panels a a day. But now I have become that which I feared as a child: An adult. I read a daily serialized soap opera comic every day, and I'm looking forward to the next release.
I’ve been reading Dumbing of Age since it started nearly 15 years ago. I had been aware of Dave Willis’s earlier works, including It’s Walky, it’s prequel Roomies and the technically set in the same universe but mostly unrelated Shortpacked. I read most(all?) of Roomies in a binge (i binged a lot of webcomics in high school) and fell off somewhere when it transitioned to It’s Walky, as the plots became more convoluted including aliens, evil clones and a magic tree branch. But in 2010 Willis announced that he was rebooting his universe. This was a novel idea and it seemed like a great jumping on point for reading a new comic (the beginning) from someone who had been honing his craft for a long time already.
I was right! It was a good time to jump in. I’ve been reading the comic (which publishes a new strip every day) for that entire time. This version of the characters starts with everybody in college, which is where Roomies started, but unlike roomies, it stays there. There are no big sci-fi set pieces. The comic has been running for almost fifteen years and all of the characters are still freshmen. Whatever the opposite of advancing in real time is, this comic is doing it. over fifteen years we have progressed to the early point of the second semester. And that was including a three month time skip that happened a couple of years ago. Typically a comic will cover a few minutes in a given day for a few of the characters (the main cast is around 2 dozen deep at this point) so a whole day can take up months of daily comics. Each year a new book collecting a previous year’s strips is released and for the last few years that has rarely been more than four days. We’re currently in the 61st day depicted in the series, if my counting is accurate. So really in 15 years we have had about two months of progress.
The outcome of this is that it makes mundane activities seem as important as they do to college freshmen. The comic revels in the small things (while also having the occasional big things happen.) The progress and growth that happens is mostly character driven, rather than even driven
And the character grows is really impressive, if perhaps a little quick to be happening in the timespan actually covered. I recently started a re-read of the whole thing (because why not) and it has been wild to see how different people are, while still being recognizable the same characters. Some of the early storylines are particularly funny or ironic given where things are going to end up (fifteen IRL years later.) Also the whole thing is on a bit of a sliding timeline, which means whatever year it is in real life is also this year in the comic. It’s a little weird in a binge, but it means that the characters can make realistic pop culture references in the latest comics. Although it’s not exactly full of those, being that the characters are more the focus than the outside world.
There’s also something else that buck wild about the strip, and that is the Buffer Watch. On the home page in an unobtrusive box on the left side of the page, under a banner ad, is the Buffer Watch. It’s an inbox that says “Comics are currently drawn and uploaded through:” and then a date. As of this writing, that date is currently in February 2026. A buffer of a year is ridiculous. It’s also the sort of thing that makes me want to keep reading the comic. I want to know what’s going on with these wacky teens making bad decisions. I’m slowly winding down my Patreon subscriptions because of choices the company made, but every so often I am tempted to subscribe to the Patreon for Dumbing of Age because the primary perk is that you get the strips a day early, and sometimes the cliffhangers are too strong.
When I was a kid I would often take the comics section of the newspaper (back when newspapers were printed on paper and delivered to your house) and methodically read through every single strip in the section. The majority of the comics were the expected gag-a day strips like Garfield or The Far Side or what have you, but thre were also the "adult comics" as I considered them at the time. This of course, wasn't "Adult" as in behind thebeaded curtain, but rather "adult" as in boring. There was Prince Valiant and Mark Trail and Mary Worth and probably a few others I can't remember. Doonsbury wasn't quite on that level because I knew it was supposed to have actual jokes, even if the content of those went over my head. No these were the comics that were glorified soap operas, with complicated stories serialized into three panels a a day. But now I have become that which I feared as a child: An adult. I read a daily serialized soap opera comic every day, and I'm looking forward to the next release.