I feel like I should have something to say about this Dumbing of Age storyline, which has the most heated reaction of any storyline that Dumbing of Age (a comic that baits heated reactions a lot) has had in a while, to the point where Willis just closed the comment section entirely for this strip, but I don’t know if I have any particularly interesting takes on it.

In case you missed it though, the storyline is that Joyce realized she had romantic feelings for Dorothy, and kissed her at some random protest, but oh nooooo it ended up on the front page of the school newspaper and their boyfriends found out and drama drama drama.

But “some random protest” was a thinly-veiled stand-in for pro-Palestine protests, and a lot of comments got mad at Willis for using a real life tragedy as the unexamined backdrop for a storyline about white women kissing, so Willis has inserted a bunch of strips into his buffer where Raidah and Asma get mad at Joyce for kissing Dorothy and ending up on the front page of the school newspaper instead of the protests, in a meta response to the commentators.

This has led to discourse for the expected reasons, and also that none of the conversations really make sense without the metatextual comments.

The storyline is actually a great example of one of Dumbing of Age’s stylistic quirks, which is that it takes place in the modern day but is also heavily based in Willis’ own college history and thus the comic takes place in some weird modern-day 1996 where the internet exists but kind of not really. The crux of the in-storyline argument is that Joyce’s actions led to the protests not getting covered well in the school newspaper. It wasn’t even live coverage on the web site, it was the physical paper that came out the next day. (And was apparently the last issue, since the real life Indiana University stopped printing it while this storyline was running. Presumably for unrelated reasons).

And, yes, in the storyline as originally written being on the literal front page of a newspaper is a more dramatic way for the kiss to get out than for it to pop up on Joe’s bluesky feed ten minutes after it happened (and the paper has had a circulation of ~9,000 for a school of 110,000 students according to Wikipedia so it’s not completely unread) , but this kind of “Wait a second…” weirdness is all over the storyline because it has to be about the major characters and not Daisy the Newspaper Editor, whose actions do line up with what people are mad at Willis for in a way that Joyce and Dorothy’s just kind of don’t.

So….in conclusion, ice cream is a land of contrasts. If you were curious about this storyline, now you know.

Oh, and also this meta storyline requires the Muslim characters to be mad at Joyce and Dorothy for being publicly gay, which is a bit of a Bad Look (which Willis, to his credit, foresaw and had Asma revealed to also be gay in an attempt to get ahead of that discourse). Yesterday’s strip, where Raidah seemed to be leaning into this, got 1000+ comments and is probably the specific trigger for today’s comments being closed. The whole storyline’s a fucking mess.

Dumbing of Age