some praise for Dumbing of Age

I’ve been a big fan of webcomics since I first discovered they existed in the early-to-mid 2000s. I’ve been following Order of the Stick for about twenty years(!), I’ve read the entire web run of Dr. McNinja, xkcd makes frequent appearance in my lecture slides, and there are other comics that I’ve jumped in and out of over time. It hasn’t been that long since I started following Dork Tower again, but last Fall, it did a crossover with Dumbing of Age, which I mentally noted I should check out sometime.

It took a while to act on that, but in February, I decided I was going to check it out. Because I wanted to do things properly, I did a full archive binge and got caught up with nearly 14 years worth of comics over the course of a month or so. That was a wild experience because David Willis (the cartoonist) works on a particular time scale, with a month or so worth of strips only adding up to a day in-universe; however, pop culture references, video game consoles, and other things evolve with our timeline, so I also had the sense of moving through time really quickly over that month as I noticed 3DS handhelds turn into Switch handhelds, etc. At any rate, the webcomic began when I was still a junior in college, but the series is still going strong (with most of the main characters still freshmen) now that I’m a tenured professor.

There’s a lot to like about Dumbing of Age, to the point that I had links to three different specific strips saved in the “hey, blog about this” list on my phone. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of those strips were related to Joyce; Joyce begins the comic as a naïve, fundamentalist evangelical Christian and pretty quickly starts to go through a bumpy faith transition. I gather that Willis has gone through that experience himself, and while my Mormon upbringing wasn’t as sheltered or fundamentalist as his (or his character’s), there’s so much of Joyce’s journey that nicely captures my own experience in deconstructing and reconstructing faith. It’s a fantastic depiction of what that experience is like that balances the kind and the critical toward religions and the religious. (I’m also pleased that Willis is conversant enough with Mormonism to have a bit LDS character show up every once in a while—a lot of people screw up writing believable Mormons, but Willis gets the lingo and culture down).

For the record, the three Joyce-related strips I’ve wanted to blog about but am now admitting I will never dedicate their own posts to are:

• Joe’s quip about Jews creating “something cool” in both the Bible and Superman only for “Protestant nerds ruin[ing[ it by trying to make it make sense to them”
• Joe’s comment about the power of choosing for ourselves what has meaning
• Dorothy’s calling Joyce out on the way that fundamentalist believers can retain the same jerky ethos when their faith falls apart and they become atheists (lots of ex-Mormons like this out there)

Willis has a Dumbing of Age Kickstarter going on right now, and I signed up for the tier that will get me access to all of the PDF books up to this point (plus a magnet, because I can always use more additions to my office magnet collection). I don’t know when I’ll read them—again, I just completed an archive binge—but this is a darn good series, and I know I’ll want to come back to it. What’s more, I like the business model of giving stuff away on the internet and making the money through things like this. I want to put more of my money toward supporting people whose content I’ve consumed for free.

• macro
• Myself
• Dumbing of Age
• webcomics
• faith transition
• Dork Tower
• Dr. McNinja
• Order of the Stick
• xkcd