I’ve noticed this throughout the reread, but this collection really got me thinking about the connections between Willis’s previous work and this reboot/remix. It’s also amazing to me just how long this series has been going on! I’m reading material that came out when I was just starting grad school.

I had been trying to read some of Willis’s other work, making it through the whole Shortpacked! archive and trying to go through Roomies!, etc., but ultimately I realized that what I really wanted was a Dumbing of Age reread, and so here I am. I enjoy this series much more in collected form than I do one strip at a time, and it was fun to start again at the beginning.

It is very strange to go back and read Shortpacked after a couple of years of reading Dumbing of Age, and now I wonder how people felt doing things in the opposite order.

Can’t even start a lazy Saturday archive binge of a decades-old webcomic without coming back to Jacques Ellul, concerns about quantification and metrics, etc.