Joyce and Walky!

Here is the first — and for many, many, many years, the only —  time I’d drawn any of Joyce’s siblings.  In this universe, there are five of them, but for the Dumbiverse, I wanted to age Hank and Carol down a bit, and so I gave her only three.  This does beg the question of what happened to Dumbiverse Justin and Jared Brown, but, uh, I guess in this universe, Carol just wasn’t in the mood or something on two otherwise important nights.  WHOOPS.  Half of them are on some discarded tissue and the other half of them are on some OTHER discarded paraphernalia.  This is how babby is not formed.

Years later, when I decided to force myself to include one of Joyce’s siblings in a storyline, I didn’t look to the family portrait in this strip at all.  At the time, I considered Joyce’s Dumbiverse siblings to be entirely new entities, partly because I felt awkward about the missing two.  I started from scratch in my design for “Joshua Brown.”  However, “Joshua” would eventually reveal herself to both the readers and myself as Jocelyne, and she became very popular!  And so I ended up retconning her into the Walkyverse as well.  Thankfully, there’s only so many ways to draw “Joyce has a sibling,” and I went through basically all of them here, and so I was able to decide that the one in the middle left was Jocelyne.  It’s a good-enough match, so long as she later decides to wear glasses.

Obviously Jocelyne hadn’t come out yet, given Joyce’s second-panel declaration of “five brothers,” or maybe she just, you know, had her mind erased.  Either or.