So you know it’s gonna be pretty wild.  Go check it out. The great thing about Randy is that he always makes sure to first get permission from other artists to do these things.  Me?  I’m usually in the “better to ask forgiveness” camp, and like to surprise other creators with my theft of their intellectual property.  He’s an angel.  A gentleman.  And yet, his webcomic’s way meaner than mine. I’ll be seeing Randy and several of my other most favorite webcomic people December 10 and 11 in Austin, Texas, for Webcomic Rampage.  If you’re in that quadrant of Texas, you totally need to come.  Hopefully I won’t get stuck with half a blender this time.

Wizard World Chicago (an amazing convention) drained me of freebie Dumbing of Age bookmarks, so it’s time to stock up before the next convention.  (Mid-Ohio-Con in my hometown of Columbus from October 22 through 23!)  But rather than go with the old bookmarks, I decided to experiment with double-sided postcards for freebies.  This way I can get more comics on there.  This is good, because I don’t have many stand-alone comics anyway.  Choosing two consecutive or similarly-themed comics is much easier than trying to find a solitary strip that would appeal to a random stranger.

I’ve ordered about 500 of them.  Let’s see how they perform at Mid-Ohio-Con…

This required some digging, but here’s my first drawing of both Dumbing of Age Robin and Leslie, which I believe I drew while at Animefest in Dallas last year, the week or so before Dumbing of Age premiered.  So this drawing’s almost exactly one year old! I finally get to, you know, show it, now that somebody’s out of the bag. Congresswoman Robin DeSanto in today’s strip is drawn from my memory of this sketch, and so I’d forgotten that I’d drawn her with her hair down and had given her a dress shirt and tie.  Eh, no big.  I like what I ended up with.

Ever wondered what cartoonists look like in good lighting? The answer is surprisingly not horrifying. Way to raise the bar on how classy I gotta look, guys. Thanks a lot. Anyway, this is “Stripped,” a documentary about the craft of comics and the crumbling of the infrastructure that’s long supported it. Dave “Handsome” Kellett of Sheldon and Drive is behind it, and that’s all you really need to know to understand that this will be fantastic.

Here’s the Joyce statue design I’d settled on.  The striped shirt won the poll, but I asked and it wasn’t cost effective to have something like that be handpainted on buttloads of statues.  Thankfully, the nearly-equally-popular second choice was something with solid colors.  So that decided that.  (Likewise, I can’t guarantee the book will actually say “Gender Studies” on it on the final statue.   That’d be a pain to hand paint at such a small size.)

She is not intended to be compatible with the Shortpacked! statues.  Why?  Well, something I kind of dropped the ball on back when I started the old statues was not thinking to make them 6″ scale.  It’s a popular scale.  Who wouldn’t want their statue to be able to plausibly hang out with Batman or Spider-man or the Ghostbusters?  And I was locked in it for the original statues once Amber was made, but since this is a new series and a new continuity, I let myself make Joyce (and possible later DoA characters) this preferred scale.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Patch Together statue process, here’s how it works.  Right now, the Joyce statue is starting the voting stage.  If it receives enough votes, it will get produced!  If it gets produced, then preorders will go up, a statue will get prototyped, I’ll help the Patch Together guys refine the statue until I think it’s perfect, and then after the preorder period is over, everyone’s cards get charged and Patch Together mails you your statue.  The number of statues produced depends strongly on how many are preordered.  PT tends to make ten or so beyond the number of statues preordered, but the best way to guarantee you get one (or that they’ll be produced to begin with) is to preorder one.

But that’s not exactly pertinent yet.  Right now, all you have to do is vote.