Midwestern Monday-Dumbing of Age, Book 1: This Campus is a Friggin' Escher Print

Nothing sucks away all my time and focus like diving headfirst into the archive of a good webcomic. For those of you who don't know, webcomics are exactly what the name implies: comic books published electronically on websites, usually drawn digitally as well. Because many of them started way back in the earlier days of the web, you can watch as the art and writing improves with time in a way that is harder with other mediums. Not only that, but webcomics are also (usually) one-person shows.

Pretty much all of those qualifiers apply to Dumbing of Age, a webcomic that first started in 2010. This wasn't the author's first rodeo, however. David M. Willis is also the creator of the Walkiverse, a series of web comics that shared a universe that started with It's Walky and ran all the way until Shortpacked. What makes Dumbing of Age so fascinating is that it's a more realistic AU of the Walkiverse.

What that means is that Dumbing of Age took the characters from all the other series and set them in the same place, at a state college. Where the Walkiverse was full of silly science fiction, Dumbing of Age is mostly realistic, a slice of life story about these people and their lives. Because the situations for these existing characters is very different from their original works, they end up forming completely different relationships with each other was well.

The cast here is frankly enormous, but before the end of the first book you get a good handle on them. While a few of the main characters are less interesting than the rest (lookin' at you, Danny), the book still has one of the best ensemble casts I've ever seen.

It's also frequently hilarious, with most of the humor coming from maturity-inept silly boy Walky, though Joyce the nicest Christian in the multiverse brings her share of laughs too. Honestly, I find it difficult to talk about just this first book, which ends with one of the main character getting some hardcore trauma.

The series has the general formatting of a newspaper comic strip, in that it's usually horizontally formatted and leads up to a joke (again, usually). But the comics move from one to another smoothly, giving the series a unique form of pacing that only works in Webcomics.

If you're not a fan of interpersonal character fluff, drama, and jokes than this won't be for you, because that's basically the entire thing. But if you love Slice of Life anime, sitcoms, or just want to read something that feels unlike anything you've tried before, I'd heavily recommend starting Dumbing of Age from the beginning here or buying the first book of it here.

#webcomic #internet #monday