Quick Review: Dumbing of Age

Between things being very busy at work, and lots of time working on the new Arisia website, I've been tending to procrastinate on reviews, with the result that they're not getting written. But it's worth taking a few minutes for this little gem. (With the result that this is going to run a bit long and unfocused, because editing is what takes all the time.)

I backed the Kickstarter for Volume 9 of Dumbing of Age largely on a lark: getting all nine volumes in PDF didn't cost that much more than one, so it looked like a good price. In fact, it was a great deal -- I've spent over a month enjoyably catching up on this story, and it's great.

On the surface, it's just a college webcomic, same as folks have been writing for decades. But it's beautifully well-done: a daily strip that is more carefully designed and paced than any I have seen before.

Let's talk about pace. Many webcomics are set in "eternal time" -- nothing ever changes, especially the calendar. OTOH, there are stories like Roomies, the first strip by Dumbing of Age's author, which ran in real-time, with the result that he got a few years of the story moving very fast, and then it was over.

Dumbing of Age takes a deliberately middle ground. Time is passing: the story starts the first day of freshman year, and you can watch it progress in its own bloody sweet time. In practice, it's been moving at about one week of story time per year -- after nine years of the story, we're somewhere in mid-October.

That time isn't wasted; instead, it gives enough room for the story and its cast to breathe. This is a big story, with a big cast, and pretty much all of them get fleshed out: everyone has backstory, motivations, their own life goals and story within the overall framework.

It's an impressively diverse cast, too, enough so that I'm left wondering whether Indiana University is actually that diverse. The main characters are maybe half white, and I think that more than half are queer of one sort or another. (Most of the main romances so far are lesbian or gay.) The tension between our mostly pretty progressive and diverse protagonists and the very conservative state they live in is a constant undercurrent.

The women that the story centers on (not entirely women, but it is focused on one of the womens' dorms) are of all sorts: the studious, the partiers, the political beasts, the geeks (there are a lot of geeks), the hoods (Sal looks like just a hood at first, but she turns out to be one of my very favorite characters), the ones who are just trying to figure out who they are. They're all delightful, and by the standards of webcomics they are more heartfelt and real than I'm used to.

And then there is Joyce. She's by no means the only protagonist, but she's explicitly the author's viewpoint character: the homeschooled fundamentalist girl who is very much attending Indiana U to get her Mrs degree. In clumsier hands, she would be unbearable, but she is saved by the fact that, much as she loves her Christian principles, she loves her friends a lot more. That forces her to almost immediately begin to question the assumptions she has grown up with, and defend her friends against the deep-red world around them. Everyone in the story is growing, but she's the one doing the most, trying to figure out how to balance faith against the reality around her, and she's a quirky, neurotic-but-brave delight.

(That quirkiness might come across as a bit of a parody at times, except that the author is very explicit that Joyce is based on himself, especially in the neuroticism -- he was that homeschooled fundie when he got to college, and all of Joyce's weirder tics are specifically the ones that drive his wife crazy.)

There are some moderate content warnings here: nothing terrible, but these are pretty real people. There is a lot of abuse in the backstory of some characters, both physical and emotional; the only real monsters in the story are a few of the parents who do show up on screen. There's one character with severe depression, and one with an objectively scary case of dissociative identity disorder. There's some serious alcohol abuse, and one near-rape. It's college, and that doesn't get sugar-coated.

That said, the story is heartfelt, mostly sweet and funny (although with dark turns here and there), and brilliantly written. These are mostly people I would like to know in real life, and getting to spend time with them in these books is time well-spent.

I'm eager for Volume 10, as we get deeper into the fall. Highly recommended -- check it out!