Joyce and Walky!

SURPRISE.  Surprise?  Probably not, in 2014.  I mean, even in 2000, there were years of Walkerton computer games out there that frequently indicated Walky and Sal were brother and sister, and so it was a hairy few months for me in this webcomic as I prepared to spring this Shocking Twist that you could easily know about if you’d consumed anything else I’d done on the Internet.  It’s part of why Dumbing of Age starts out with stuff like that already known.  The surprises are surprises for everyone, hopefully.

Anyway, putting together this page was a challenge.  None of those monitor images are in the original line art, and so I had to go dig through everything and try to match them screen-for-screen from the strips they were originally grabbed from.  Some I couldn’t for various reasons, like the screens that were taken from Sly Sirs strips which don’t exist in anything larger than a tiny scratchy-lookin’ GIF.  Also there were a few panels I had used from scenes I rewrote for the redrawn strips which no longer fit the narrative.  And so I improvised on a few.

I considered briefly just repurposing the limited print based on this scene — y’know, just adding dialog — but I ultimately decided to go with the original art best I reasonably could.