I read an interesting strip of
Joyce and Walky!, the sequel of DMW's sci-fi epic
It's Walky!, the other day. The now-married Joyce and Walky are lying on their bed and pondering the utterly surreal five to ten years of war, horror, struggle and casual violation of their minds that had led them to the point in their lives where now on the verge of 'happily ever after'. Joyce wondered if, if things had been different, would they have still ended up in the same place? Would have they been together and been happy? DMW then put an advert for
Dumbing of Age at the bottom.
I'm thinking that this is exactly what this story sets out to do.
Dumbing of Age starts at the same point, with the same room assignments and most of the same relationship arcs as his original strip,
Roomies! All of those things were sent tumbling into madness and surreality when Joyce is kidnapped by a shadowy federal agency, brainwashed and forced to join Walky, Sal, Joe, Mike, Jason and Dina (as well as many others, most of whom die horribly before the end) fighting a covert alien invasion.
But the DoA-verse is totally different. There are no aliens, evidently no super-powers and no shadowy Federal agency that redefines the term 'rogue agency'.
- The bad guys are cartoon characters (beloved by Walky and Joyce, by the way);
- The Dragon of the Big Bad is the student-seducing TA that so vexes Jason;
- Sal was never taken from her family as a baby and raised to be an amoral and supposedly-indoctrinated super-powered killer;
- Consequently, Danny has only met her now rather than her being his childhood sweetheart, massively altering the dynamic of their friendship;
- Walky was never kidnapped and converted into another super-soldier whilst still at High School and Dorothy was never brainwashed into thinking she'd dumped him;
- Outside of the pressure-cooker of the war, Joyce and Walky can barely even tolerate each other!
The list of changes and consequences is enormous. I find it implausible that any of the Walkyverse relationships and end outcomes will be mirrored in DoA.
It looks like Amber is going to come to a final and decisive conclusion with her father long before his death. It looks like Joyce is going to have to confront the contradictions between her beliefs and her kind nature outside the fires of war and will likely have to confront her own sensuality and sexuality without it being rubbed in her face in the form of a defective clone. It is very likely that Danny and Sal will never be more than friends rather than the obsession that poisons his relationship with Billie. It seems likely that Walky and Dorothy's relationship may last (for it does appear that they fill a real need in each other's lives). It seems that Dina will develop confidence in herself without being in abusive relationships (with her being the abuser sometimes) or having to face a terrible and futile death. Heck, it is even possible that Mike may act on the admiration and protectiveness he feels towards Joyce without fear of Walky's murderous jealousy.
In very many ways, it seems that
Dumbing of Age is the strip DMW originally intended to write before the creative bug that led to the epic that is
It's Walky! struck him.
