Digitally Speaking...43 "Dumbing of Age"

via Goodreads

Dumbing of Age Vol. 1: This Campus is a Friggin' Escher Print

From 2013.

When you're not a fan of a comic strip, or at least previously familiar with it, reading a whole collection can be something of a chore.  And Dumbing of Age isn't even a regular comic strip, but a web comic.  Dun dun duuuun!

What are web comics, you ask?  They're the Internet alternative to those things some people buy newspapers to read, or perhaps even read online, because so many newspapers don't have the good ones (or devote a decent amount of space to reprints of comic strips that aren't even being made anymore.  Some web comics have even gone on to have significant mainstream awareness.  None to the level of comic strips proper, mind you, but Internet famous is still famous (so says an age where YouTube stars boast millions of hits and...no name recognition).  As such, web comics are sometimes collected, and those collections might end up with the same little bits of commentary you'll find in collections for comic strips you, ah, actually heard of.

Anyway, so that's what this is.  It's not even the first iteration of the cartoon's creations as featured therein.  New readers will be completely lost about everyone that devoted fans will take for granted.  And hey, I used to read a bunch of web comics, too, but these things operate like illustrated sitcoms.  Not cartoons.  Not comic books.  Illustrated sitcoms.  Or a whole series of movies like SuperBad, or, basically, the American Pie films.

Dumbing of Age is great fun, until you realize it's not done yet, and it's still being created even as you're realizing it's not done yet just in the collection you're reading.  David Willis jokes about how the previous incarnation compressed so much of the early college experience.  Well, this version's massively decompressed indeed.  It's not bad, but it's a whole commitment.  Are you ready, punk?  Well, are you?

That's the only real obstacle here.  Imagine Scott Pilgrim but with a lot fewer video game references.  Or evil exes.  And no sweet garage bands.  Alas.

And yes, the reference to M.C. Escher in the title is something you would totally have gotten while you were still in school.