Well, kids, what’d we learn today?

by David Willis on July 7, 2014 at 12:01 am
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The penultimate Roomies! strip!

See?  Cartoonist totally not interested anymore.  Let’s wrap this shit up.

Back on the original site, I wrote out a long newspost at the culmination of Roomies!, and a passage that leaped out at me was the following:

Even moreso recently, as I’ve admittedly gotten a little tired of the majority of the strip’s characters. They’d annoy me, or the innate preachiness of the strip’d annoy me, and I’d *want* to go back to just a simple happy-fun world, but I couldn’t, for want of a “good” story.

Well, they’re all gone now. Lord knows I’ll miss ’em, but they’ll pop up from time to time in the future. Hopefully then they and I’ll be on a little better terms.

In the fifteen years between writing it and finding this in an old HTML file buried in my hard drive, I’d forgotten exactly my mindset while writing Roomies!.  I remembered loving these characters and missing them and having an affection for them that would never end.  Certainly that affection is what drove the creation of Dumbing of Age.  But the least year or so of Roomies! was apparently a dark time for me that I later kind of blotted out.  After reading the old HTML, I suddenly remembered hating all these folks, and the concept seemed so alien to me, as if I were thinking of entirely another person’s feelings.  I guess that’s what depression does to you.  It makes you into someone else.

I mean, yeah, I rag on these strips a lot, but that’s because these characters I love are doing such awful things which the narrative structure thinks is pretty cool.  That’s part of why Dumbing of Age exists.  I want to write these characters while my brain has the capacity to love them and also now that I possess a greater wealth of knowledge to write them as better people.  They deserve it.