Introduction: An Abridged History of Webcomics

Webcomics are a fascinating medium to me. Like Web3, much of the modern landscape of webcomics is now dominated by rather sanitized mainstream romance and power fantasies on sites like Webtoon. However, if you know where to look, there is still a good portion out there that represents what the medium started out as: showcasing the best of what raw, unfiltered creativity can deliver. I’d argue that there are two waves of indie webcomic scenes: the old age, which started at the dawn of the internet and continued into the late 2000s and early 2010s, and the golden age, which ran from the early to mid 2010s into early 2020s. Let’s start with the old age first. Many, but not all, of the most popular and monetarily successful comics from this time were slice of life, comedy, absurdist, and/or autobiographical works (often fandom and or gaming related) that functioned more like newspaper comic strips in format and narrative continuity. Many of the creators from this era often ended up in the professional comics industry, like Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics fame. Stories like Ctrl + Alt + Delete, Cyanide and Happiness, SMBC, Penny Arcade, xkcd, Sluggy Freelance, Achewood, Hiimdaisy, and Hark! A Vagrant are some famous examples from this age of webcomics. You may notice if you read some of these comics that many of the characters in these comics are white men, and much of the humor involving race and sexuality could be rather…dated. This was indicative of the creators who were there at the time: (often white and male) computer nerds either really into fandom or gaming. Not to mention that this time period was famous for anti-gay and racist mentalities (ex. using gay as a slur).

Of course, there were exceptions. Many a successful long form comic was created at this time, and still continue int the present day. In addition, many of them were more likely to feature characters of color, queer people, and otherwise marginalized folks. Examples of these include Homestuck, Gunnerkrigg Court, Lackadaisy, The Less than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal (NSFW), Dresden Codak, and Bittersweet Candy Bowl. Other examples include comics from older collectives such as SpiderForest (the oldest one that's still around IIRC).

As the Internet grew with the rise of social media, more people gained access to it (and webcomics) than ever before. This influx of creators led to a golden age of webcomics, a time where webcomics were the ultimate form of expression without mainstream censorship. Many, but not all, of these creators were queer and/or racial/ethnic minorities, dissatisfied with the current state of mainstream media and representation, and decided to create their own stories that reflected their experiences. Comics that represent these include anything from Hiveworks (which along with several creators deserves its own separate write up*), as well as select comics from Smackjeeves and other smaller websites such as Todd Allison and the Petunia Violet (whose creator also deserves their own write up, lol).

>*I recommend checking out Chimera Comics Collective, which consists of several former Hiveworks artists that formed their own organization.

David Willis and his numerous webcomics are particularly interesting in the webcomics space, precisely because they span the entirety of the old and golden ages of webcomics, and often embody both.* Many of his older works, like Roomies, It's Walky!, and Shortpacked!, are all emblematic of the old guard styles of comics-often newspaper strip slice of life and wacky comedy/sci fi adventures. However, even early on, Willis was already writing complex narratives, character development, and marginalized representation into his works, and these all get better as his works move through the golden age of webcomics. One of the most important character of many of these works, Walky, is biracial and multifaceted, portrayed as a buffoon hiding a surprisingly competent and even heroic personality. But it’s Willis’ newest and arguably most popular comic, Dumbing of Age, that’s the subject of today’s write up.

>* Similar comics that straddle this line, or improve significantly in terms of representation include El Goonish Shive and Questionable Content.

A Brief Explanation of a Very Complex Comic

Dumbing of Age (DoA) is a semi-autobiographical coming of age story set in an alternate timeline Indiana University. The story centers around a dormitory hall of freshman attending their first semester of college, and all the wacky hijinks that result from it. Though the cast is absolutely massive, the main two characters at the center of it all are Joyce Brown and Dorothy Keener. Joyce, who is loosely based on a younger David Willis, is a white fundamentalist Christian girl who is ignorant but surprisingly kind and tolerant (even if she thinks you’ll burn in hell for your sins). Her conservative ideals and sheltered worldview are challenged when she begins college at the IU. Her best friend, Dorothy, is a white Type A pre-law student liberal atheist who is gunning to transfer to Yale (and dumps her boyfriend on the first day of college to do so) and become president of the United States. Though she is more “worldly” than Joyce, and is often the one to give her advice and support, her aspirations and worldviews are challenged just as much as Joyce’s are. Included in the mix are Sarah, Joyce’s grumpy heart-of-gold roommate, Walky, the perpetual slacker and man child that managed to capture Dorothy’s perfectionist heart, Becky, Joyce’s childhood bestie and fellow fundie who later comes out as a lesbian, Amber, basically female Walky with a literal superhero complex, and so many more.

DoA has got the classic hallmarks of a golden age webcomic: longer narratives and complex character development being the most notable. In particular, DoA tackles heavy topics such as religious indoctrination, homophobia and misogyny with a deft hand. This makes sense, as David Willis is writing the comic from their own experience as a formerly fundamentalist queer person. However, DoA still borrows heavily from the old age of webcomics aesthetic through its strict newspaper comic strip format, and decidedly mid 2000s to early 2010s fashion (see the cast page for copious Ugg, skinny jean, and flannel usage), politics (ex. White liberal feminism), and humor (the misogyny played for laughs is…painful at times). This contrast between the modern and sobering topics DoA portrays vs. the sometimes offensive or dated aesthetic it borrows from to make that point may be part of the reason it has generated so much controversy over the years. Particularly in its portrayal of relationships.

Relationships in Dumbing of Age

There is an entire volume of DoA that is called My Peer Group's Smoochy Chart is Basically Now an Ouroboros, and that pretty much describes the relationships in this comic.

For the sake of brevity, we’re going to be focusing on a handful of relationships that have occurred between the subjects of today’s controversy: Joyce and Dorothy.

Joyce's Relationships

For a sexually repressed Christian fundamentalist that considers pre-marital sex a sin, Joyce has had quite the dating repertoire.

Her first date was with Joe, a serial womanizer at the time who only agreed to the date to try and get in her pants. As you can imagine, this didn’t go well for either of them . She later goes on to date a closeted gay man Ethan, though to her credit, she breaks up with him after she realizes how messed up it is.

She remains single for the rest of the first semester (with one incident we’ll discuss later), but begins to build a genuine friendship with Joe when she needs support after her familial life begins to fall apart. By the beginning of the next semester, they are surprisingly solid friends, walking to class with their friends and attending figure drawing sessions together. As an artist, the figure drawing sessions are some of my favorite scenes of them.

They eventually become an official couple when Joe confessed that he liked her and they started dating up until the tear gas wedding incident. It was one of the most realistic portrayal of a sexually repressed former Christian dating that I’ve seen, and I really appreciated how respectful Joe was of Joyce’s boundaries. At the same time, they still had banter and riffed off each other well.

Dorothy's Relationships

Much more experienced than Joyce by pure number of partners, and continues to have some over the course of the comic. Her first relationship with her high school sweetheart, Danny, ends abruptly when she dumps him after the first day of college to focus on getting into Yale and disliking that he followed her to IU. Despite her focus on studies and transferring to Yale, she eventually ends up casually dating Walky, her opposite in every way-an immature jokester and slacker who coasts through college.

Their relationship, while sweet at times, has some pretty fundamental flaws: namely that Walky never feels good enough for Dorothy (as evidenced by the dialogue in the previous examples), and Dorothy, while well meaning, makes that clear by denigrating his interests * trying to fix his flaws in an almost motherly way, real and otherwise, and being wishy-washy about the status of their relationship, issues that continues in her later relationship with Joyce (we will get to their relationship a bit later). They end up breaking up and getting back together multiple times over the course of the first and second semester, with the “off” periods getting longer as Dorothy begins to crash out from multiple other events happening in her life (two kidnappings, rejecting a Yale acceptance, and having her dreams of being president crushed) but they finally get back together before the events of the titular tear gas wedding incident.

>* To be fair, Walky was acting like a dick earlier.

Dorothy and Joyce: Despite the copious amounts of M/F pairings Dorothy and Joyce had been a part of over the years (real time, not comic book time) there HAS been a metric fuck ton of simmering sapphic tension being slowly built up over the course of several years. While some of this can be attributed to Dorothy guiding Joyce through the world as a sort of mentor figure, the declarations of love for each other at different points in the comic (including some where it’s more than a bit inappropriate), overt jealousy of one another’s partners and willingness to forgo friends, partners, and even life goals to be with each other. For God’s sakes, they literally roleplay being a couple in their Gender Studies class at one point, with Joyce pushing aside Dorothy’s actual boyfriend to be Dorothy’s “wife.” It becomes so obvious that their latent gayness becomes a repeated inside joke in-comic.

However, this ship starts to get…stranger after the second semester of the comic. After Joyce and Joe become a couple, Dorothy, who had already not been doing well, becomes increasingly upset* over their relationship and possessive over Joyce. This begins to toe the line of cheating in a series of scenes, such as when she sends Joyce a titty pic and is later called out for it by Joe (scene starts here), after which Dorothy crashes out over not being able to have Joyce as a partner. There also this delightful scenes where Joyce and Dorothy go drinking and Joyce asks Dorothy if she can watch her have sex with Walky, as well as this scene where the two of them almost make out . But by far the most egregious example is when, in an attempt to prevent Joyce from having sex with Joe, Dorothy teaches her how to masturbate using the vibrations of a washing machine in the shared dorm laundry room…while they’re holding hands (scene starts here, NSFW warning).

>* For context: In this example, Dorothy views Joe taking Joyce on a date as Joyce being kidnapped in a previous arc. Extremely normal stuff!

The one thing I’d like to note about both Joyce and Dorothy’s approach to relationships is how much they try to justify or fix them based on their own definitions of morality and pure selfishness. In that regard, Joyce’s relationships are often morally fraught, whether it’s dating a closeted gay man because being homosexual is inherently sinful, or being okay with breaking up relationships (or being part and parcel to it) as long as it benefits herself, someone she cares about, or is morally correct in her eyes (aka validates the idea of “true love”). Dorothy is much less overt in this, but her repeated attempts to try and mold her partners to be more respectable and worldly , as well as her outright making moves on Walky when he’s going through a rough patch with his partner at the time, are good examples of this phenomenon. While these less-than ideal traits have been downplayed in the comic due to the sheer number of assholes running rampant in the comic (including but not limited to bigots, an actual rapist, a violently homophobic kidnapper, and ANOTHER violent kidnapper trying to dodge child support), they will become a major problem later.

The funny thing about all of this is that initially, many in the DoA fandom, including myself, did actually like Dorothy and Joyce together as a concept. They spent a lot of time together (around 790 strips so far!), helped each other grow as people, and had a camaraderie that as one commentor put it, was similar to Leslie Knope and Ann from Parks and Rec (whether that comparison holds up is up to you, as I’ve never watched the show). And man, they’re just cute sometimes idk. Even when they started to edge closer and closer to cheating territory* despite having semi-decent partners that liked them, many still wanted them to get together eventually, either just not under the aforementioned circumstances, or wanted to explore the messiness with the appropriate gravitas that it would require.

>* This just straight up ends up being confirmed cheating later and it's supposed to be cute. Lol.

And Willis is clearly capable of crafting such storylines-just look at one of the previous sapphic relationships in DoA, between Billie (a former cheerleader and alcoholic freshman) and Ruth (her also alcoholic RA). It literally started out with a bang, lol. While the ship generated lots of controversy due to the unlikability of both characters, its toxicity, and its power imbalance, it still had its cute moments. And this was, in my opinion, partially because the consequences of such a relationship were written so clearly within and outside their relationship. The repeat struggles against alcoholism affected every aspect of their relationship (NSFW example here). And when they were eventually caught, Ruth got placed into psychiatric care, and while she kept her job (after her grandfather chewed her out) Billie was moved to another dorm. They even eventually broke up later on pretty much due to the toxicity (scene starts here) . If Willis could pull off such an excellent depiction of a toxic relationship with side characters, he could definitely do it for the main characters.

Little did the fandom know how much that monkey’s paw would curl.

The Tear Gas Wedding Incident

We must now move to Volume 15, Chapter 4-The Only Exception. This chapter mainly revolves around an anti-genocide protest and encampment loosely based on the pro-Palestine protests at IU in 2024. Joyce’s sister, Jocelyne, who has come to participate in the protest, gets discovered on the news by their dad. Joyce decides to go find Jocelyne at the protest to warn her, and Dorothy comes with her so she won’t be alone. Once they arrive, they find out that the protest has been declared unlawful by the university, and their window of time to find Jocelyne quickly narrows. As they find Jocelyne and prepare to leave, Dorothy has an epiphany about how Institutions And Laws Can Be Bad Actually, and spurred on by how she feels she can never have Joyce, decides to join the protest and risk getting arrested so she has something to fight for. She is talked down from this by Joyce via…a kiss. And thus the two white girls that had partners already make out right in the middle of an anti-genocide protest for a brown country in the middle of a tear gas cloud.

Don’t worry, the optics get worse from here.

The Immediate Aftermath

Two things happen in quick succession from here, which I will list below:

1. Everybody starts acting unbelievably out of character.

When Dorothy and Joyce’s friend group learn about the cheating, barely anybody that has ties to their boyfriends is proportionally upset. Most people treat the pairing as obvious in hindsight and even call it sweet (Billie, one of the perpetual grumps of the comic, calling them adorkable feels wrong on so many levels). Most barely consider how their boyfriends feel at all, either being sarcastic or saying they will find someone else quickly enough. Not even their boyfriends are all that upset! While Walky is angry at Joyce at first, he quickly begins to gets over it once one of his former love interests gets pushed in front of him narratively. Joe, on the other hand…he goes from a reformed fuckboy with issues with cheating due to his dad’s cheating on his mom, to being totally okay with Joyce hooking up with Dorothy because he pushed for it to happen* and even suggests polyamory as a way to keep Joyce in his life. He is generally patient and kind to Joyce the entire time afterwards, even when she’s being especially cruel to him. It’s extremely jarring to see after the respectful conversations around consent and boundaries the both of them had.

>* I could be wrong, but I don’t consider this being a request for Dorothy to hook up with his girlfriend

On the other hand, the people who do have a problem with the cheating are portrayed as either being strawmen (the one instance of the bisexual cheaters trope being invoked with Joyce and Dorothy is done in a rather hamfisted way) or villainous in some way. Sarah, Joyce’s roommate, is a particularly egregious example of this. She is one of two people that immediately and directly calls out Joyce and Dorothy for their cheating, and even attempts to comfort Joe for being cheated on (despite them historically despising each other). While often abrasive and reclusive, she has repeatedly shown to be kind to the people she cares about and generally accepting of others for their sexuality and gender. So it is particularly interesting that after she calls them out, she is written as transphobic to Jocelyne upon their first encounter post her coming out , and then portrayed as overprotective and manipulative for being upset that Joyce cheated on Joe and Jocelyne is seemingly okay with it. Seeing such a drastic villianization of a Black character with traits she did not appear to hold before is…suspect at best.

Meanwhile, the people that are greatly affected by the cheating...have little to nothing to actually do with the affair. When Becky, Joyce’s childhood friend, finds out that the two of them got together, she gets extremely upset and depressed that her former crush had not in fact rejected her for being gay, but rejected her for being Becky. This, of all things, causes her to lose her faith (which she has held through being rejected by her entire fundie community for being gay, being kidnapped twice by her dad to bring her home and convert or kill her, and watching one of her friends and her own mother literally die in front of her) . It also causes her to lose her relationship with her long term girlfriend, Dina, as Dina finds out Becky's still not over Joyce and that she is essentially a rebound. And of course, this is what makes Joyce and Dorothy upset enough to apologize and try to make things right…by trying to get them to make up and get together again. Wonderful.

Not to mention that Dorothy and Joyce become very different after they become a couple as well. While both have displayed selfish tendencies before, this trait gets turned up to 11 after their coupling, to the point that Dorothy openly remarks that she’s worried she's bringing out the worst in Joyce. To her point, Dorothy's tendencies to criticize her partner's choices and try and fix her partners come out in full force, with her deciding what kind of jacket Joyce will wear, reminding Joyce to do daily tasks in a rather...motherly way, and trying to get her to take pills without soda by offering sex. This, combined with her previous trauma around protecting Joyce manifesting in increasingly concerning ways, has made some readers question if she is even attracted to Joyce or just trauma bonding to her. (I personally think both are possible at the same time.) However, Joyce is by far the worse of the two, acting rather childish and/or cruel in several strips and being suddenly very okay with talking about sex and having it frequently and publicly. It is rather jarring to see after we've witnessed so much character growth from her over the duration of this comic.

2. The sudden and poor introduction of a anti genocide protest arc

To be fair, DoA has had its share of controversial political arcs, but most of them have either been helmed by side characters or have little bearing on the actual plot. This storyline, however, is the first to reference a real life event that happened on IU's campus , and although the country affected by the genocide is named Bulmeria, the resemblances (Muslim students upset about the genocide, encampments, police tear gassing and beating the protestors, fencing the encampment) are uncanny. In the leftist communities that this arc revolves around (and the ones that Willis and much of DoA fandom are a part of), when you’re at a protest you generally want to give space to the issue at hand and the people who are affected by it. However, this is rather dramatically averted when Joyce and Dorothy’s kiss becomes the school newspaper headline about the protest rather than the, y’know, GENOCIDE that’s happening. For Christ’s sake, Dorothy’s teacher calls them a good example of leadership*. These two oblivious ass white girls become the face of a movement that neither of them actually cared about until they ended up at a protest for it. While Joyce doesn’t really care about the optics, pretty much saying so to a Muslim character’s face twice,** Dorothy does, and spends a good chunk of her time trying to either awkwardly absolve her white guilt or repeatedly insert herself into an activist movement, also out of guilt. It’s pretty gross, and while Willis has tried to make amends by elevating a Muslim side character, Asma, to main character status (never mind that her two defining traits as of now are being disciplined and gay…and I guess liking bowling), it will forever be a stain on the comic’s storyline…well, as long as Dorothy tries to make her activist era happen.

>* To be fair, Dorothy is uncomfortable with this realization, but her subsequent white guilt arc really do not endear me to her or the story's side.

>** According to the alt text in the strip "Shame", the narrative is siding with Raidah on this one, but considering that Raidah is a known villain in comic and the comments are turned off, I have my doubts about the seriousness of this claim. Also, she was the only Muslim character in the comic with more than a handful of speaking lines until Asma was introduced, so take that as you will.

The Fandom Reacts: Paladins Vs. Sickos

You may have noticed that I’ve been relatively quiet about the state of the fandom throughout this entire arc. And it’s because there is so much to unpack that I wanted to make sure I devoted an entire section to it after I explained the events of the comic in full. Buckle up, cause it’s gonna be an adventure.

The relationship between DoA’s fandom to DoA itself is like many other online indie comics communities-creative and diverse, but also deeply personal and sometimes parasocial. I've seen excellent character analyses, personal accounts giving context to storylines, and people genuinely building community with each other. Many of these fans have been following Willis‘s work since his previous webcomic, Shortpacked, with some having been around for even longer. And of course, they are quick to support Willis and DoA financially-the DoA print book Kickstarters are always fully funded, and Willis' Patreon currently makes about $5000 per month, with over 2,000 Patrons. At the same time, because the comic delves into intense issues at times, arguments are quick to break out. One such instance is with a storyline involving a dispute between two characters, Carla (a trans woman and prankster) and Mary (religious fanatic and general asshole-Joyce's evil twin essentially), which led to Mary misgendering Carla. Readers had intense debates about who was in the right to the point that the comments section was shut down. This sort of behavior is not uncommon in many webcomic circles, but in a fandom as big as DoA's, it is magnified and made visible to a wider degree. And this behavior would only increase during and after the tear gas wedding incident.

If you take a look at the page that Dorothy and Joyce first kissed on, you can see that there’s about 2000 comments below, far more than pretty much any other page has had before or since. This was probably bolstered by the fact that the day this page was released, Willis put up a poll on the website that asked people if they were sickos (people that like the ship because it is messy/don’t care about the mess), or paladins (people that disliked the cheating for any reason). I believe the poll was split relatively evenly but don’t quote me on it.

If you browse the comments, you can see this ratio reflected there, though most of the negative comments are at the bottom of the page.

Here is a sampling:

>[presses a button on my soundboard] “IT’S NOT CALLED SMARTING OF AGE NOW IS IT”

>I love how the pink tear gas creates sapphic shoujo bubbles. (Author’s note: Dear sweet Jesus)

>[the tear gas] also look like cherry blossoms blooming from the barren winter tree. its sending me insane let me tell you (Author’s note: never mind, this is worse)

>I feel bad for Joe and Walky. I feel like they’ve both been through enough, and they’re both trying so hard, and all that is just…not worth remembering. That gives me a shitty feeling. Like yeah I get the appeal and the chemistry here, but I just feel down right now.

>And then [Dorothy and Joyce] kiss again. So they realize what they are doing but they decide screw [it] and keep going anyway.

>I would say if anything this makes what they are doing even worse. This wasn’t just a momentary lapse of judgement, but they actually considered their actions, considered the people they are going to hurt, and decided to do it anyway. This is selfish behavior.

>Reply: God forbid women behave suboptimally

>as a muslim (relatively) this storyline has been balls but as a bisexual oh my god. sickos stay winning !!!

>Reply: I don’t care who tries to say ‘cheating sometimes happens, it’s exploratory, etc’ shut the fuck up. I’m a queer person (bi) and I’ve never cheated, nor felt compelled to cheat on my partners over the years.

>Cheating points to a character flaw in the cheater. Point blank.

>I’d be legitimately upset if everyone’s just kind of cool with this. What’s the point of over-the-top relationship drama if everyone’s a mature and understanding adult about it…I want every single relationship in the entire comic in flames

>this comic is so shit, i’m like a battered wife who keeps coming back even though it never gets any better. bye yall

>honestly as a queer person, i don’t agree with giving “special leeway” with what counts as cheating. I think some grace should be granted, especially for situations of “oh shit I just figured out what I’m feeling” but it IS still cheating. That said, I’m living for this development so I don’t even care. XD

And possibly my favorite comment of all:

>I think there can be a problem with writing flawed characters if you don’t have it presented as a flaw with real consequences.

>If you have a sexist character… that is a flaw. But if it isn’t critiqued then the story is just promoting sexism. And if that critique doesn’t have narrative consequences then it is just lampshading.

>Consider the Big Bang Theory. Frequently the main characters are very sexist. They often get called out for “being sexist” but without any narrative consequence.

>Will we see Joyce face repercussions for choosing to cheat? Probably to some extent but right now the visual framing of this seems to focus on the “romance” and “passion” rather than the dishonesty.

Oh my sweet summer child. You had no idea how right you were.

As time passed, and the demands of “paladins” for consequences in-comic were not addressed, the comments got more and more heated. To keep the criticism contained, a long time commentator called Dot created a “Hater Containment Thread” for people to vent their criticism in. These were often derided by “sickos” commenters for being too negative, and eventually these threads were discontinued when one night, it was the first comment that Willis saw on the newest page, and he publicly commented his displeasure at the sight.

This removal of the hater containment thread coincided nearly with commenters allegedly began to be shadowbanned or having their comments deleted. As a result, many moved to the r/dumbingofage subreddit to share their view points. The subreddit, which had been pretty quiet up until this arc, was now receiving thousands of visitors a week. Post range from deep analysis of the characters to revisions of comic pages affectionately called “Sickostrips” or “Paladinpanels”, to people trying to keep the positivity alive by making fanart and reminiscing about previous arcs that they liked. Occasionally, people from the comment section would butt in to criticize the behavior of the commenters on Reddit (though their comments were often downvoted so much that they would be hidden from view). This was not completely unjustified at times: DoA and Willis have become increasingly compared to another infamous webcomic, Sinfest, and its author, a literal Nazi and TERF, due to the latter’s comic jumping the shark after the first arc ended and the author reacting to criticism in a similar fashion to Willis (this will be explained more in the next section). Comparing somebody to a Nazi is a pretty bold statement and has some unfortunate implications, regardless of how you feel about Willis. And to be fair, the subreddit, while significantly less censorious than the comments section of the comic site, still has people actively correcting posters in the comments, warning against hyberbolic complaints or actively psychoanalyzing Willis. It's not a perfect system by any means, but it is a lot more open and honest than what has gone on in the DoA comments section so far.

(Continued in the comments, please read on below this post!)

EDIT 5/6/26: Fixed some of the introduction and bits of the DoA lore based on commenter's feedback. Thank you to u/milskidasith, u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS, u/michfreak, u/ElephantNo3139, and u/TupperwareLid for your feedback!