Joyce and Walky!

This is where it starts getting super real for me.  In case you haven’t been following along too closely all these years, let me tell you that I was, like, supernaturally repressed.  The shame I had for my own sexual urges was incredible.  I was a prisoner in my own sinful brain.  The very concept of taking all those nasty terrible thoughts and shunting them into a separate person who would no longer be me was amazingly seductive.  I didn’t think about boobies, it wasn’t me.  It was…. …. Joe who was thinking about boobies.  Let’s shame Joe for thinking about boobies.  What a nasty, nasty man he is who is definitely not a legitimate expression of myself!  In a way, drawing comics for me has always been like an exorcism.  Just… just write out the bad thoughts. Put them on paper.  Expunge them.

Over a decade later, the idea of compartmentalizing to protect oneself is still harmonious with the way my brain hums.  You can see echoes of it in Amber and Amazi-Girl in Dumbing of Age.  They, however, can’t sort things out by getting zapped with a Dup-O-Matic.