What do you get when you combine your favorite Dumbing of Age character with your least favorite DoA character? Artistic goodness from David Willis, of course! If *anyone* in this comic deserves a pie in the pie (and MANY of them do) then Mary is definitely first in line!

Transformers: Mosaic - "Pretentious Title"

Originally posted on May 4th, 2009

Story - David Willis Art - David Willis Colours - David Willis Gradiant Overlay - David Willis

deviantART | Shortpacked!

wada sez: I’m running this archive, so if I want to put Walky’s evil little spoof in amongst all the actual real Mosaic strips, I can and I will, because this comic still crops up in conversations about the project. Rather than throwing shade at any specific strips (although I’d say that specific credit for a “Gradiant Overlay” comes REAL close), Walky instead opts to parody the ending of Spotlight: Jazz, the full-length official IDW comic written by Mosaic organisers Josh van Reyk and Shaun Knowler. If van Reyk’s deviantART comment on the strip is anything to go by, they took it in good humor. So far as I can tell, it was originally posted without any of the title dress (see below) as part of Walky’s webcomic, Shortpacked!, then shared to deviantART a year or so later. The text prefacing the title of this one is, of course, a riff on the blurb originally posted alongside every single Mosaic strip. The silhouettes in the last panel are identifiable by their details and because Walky helpfully tagged them all.

So David Willis has been doing character design progression banners for their 25th anniversary as a web cartoonist, like the one below:

So far, Willis has made 17 of these things, but I thought I would try to make a clean background image so I could create my own custom ones for characters who haven’t gotten one yet.  My first step was to try to combine the negative spaces surrounding the characters from each of these 17.  Preliminary results have been... interesting.

...Happy nightmares

Carla unabashedly having a degradation kink: a collection

Peach is tall

The isekai fanfic I will probably never write

(with its webnovel style title)

"I was a minor character in an early webcomic who inexplicably sacrificed my life to save the idiot protagonist from a truck and now I'm living the heroic life he could have had but the sages say I'm better at it than he would have been and the girls are great so it's all OK!"

Starring Ruth Lesse. Act with integrity, no regrets!

Of all the things I love about Dumbing of Age (and Willis’s work as a whole,) the Superheroic Action Sequence As Vehicle For Character Development is one of my favorites. I loved the kidnapping arc! Was it realistic? Eh. This comic had a superhero. Do I care? Of course not. My all-time favorite moment they’ve ever written is “I die because I’m fucking awesome. (You die because you’re a shitstain.)” My second-favorite, though the last Shortpacked wedding is a close runner-up in third, is probably when across continuities, Blaine finally realizes that Amber is everything, without him. (Second link’s the strip that the first link calls back to, there, if you’d rather have it in chronological order.) Realism can get fucked if it spurs a good action sequence/defiant reason you suck speech.

One of my OTHER favorite things about Dumbing of Age is how Willis can give us a moment where a character gets to be totally awesome, and the audience cheers, and then a few months or say, three years down the line he pulls that moment out again only this time we get to see how THAT EXACT MOMENT seriously traumatized the character doing it, because we didn’t get a key piece of their perspective at the time and THEY are not viewing it as the audience. The classic for me is, of course, “Amber punches her shitty abusive dad in the face (and then as commenters at the time pointed out, smartly gets the fuck out of there and puts a bunch of people who try to deescalate things between him and her) -> Amber is horrified by her capacity for violence and the fact that she ENJOYED punching her shitty abusive dad in the face.” There are others.

And today, it’s Dorothy’s turn as we take the “Future commander-in-chief” strip from earlier in that arc and explore the idea that over the timeskip, Dorothy tried to capitalize on it… when it’s also the moment she left a man to die, and now she’s having second thoughts. (To be clear, he had it coming and there was likely nothing she and her fellow hostages could have done to stop it. Also, he was literally holding her hostage. But do you really think traumatic reactions care about that shit?)

*Admiringly* Damn you, Willis.

That Starfire thing was a real lightening rod for pompous web comics writers, wasn't it? I remember Dave Willis (Shortpacked) put out a similar comic complaining about that same thing, and then a follow up comic crying about how everyone was being mean to him in the responses.

Ironically enough, said comic is what Dobson claimed to inspire him to make one of his own.

You can see said comic here:

Never saw Willis’s response comic, but it doesn’t surprise me that he did so.

It's Dorothy's horrifying blank state that makes this comic.

i just noticed the reference to garfield's first strip in the 9 chickweed lane parody by @itswalky

Dumbing of Age commission of Sal & Danny. Art by David Willis of @dumbingofage You may be cool, but are you making-out-on-a-motorcycle cool?

I just love their little greeting ritual.

Plus, look! Eye-contact AND a hand wave!

Didn’t have Willy and Pasta reviewing fashion trends on my 2024 bucket list, but I’m here for it 😂😂

David Bailey - Willy van Rooy Wearing a Outfit by Jean Muir (Vogue UK 1967)