About

Dumbing of Age is a webcomic about college freshmen in the girls wing within a co-ed dorm at Indiana University, learning everything about life and themselves usually in the most difficult ways.  It stars a Christian homeschooled girl and her atheist best friend, and also a disgraced cheerleader, a misanthrope, a rebel, and a caped vigilante. It started in 2010 and has been running nonstop since.

Dumbing of Age currently updates all seven days of the week, Monday through Sunday.

FAQ About the Comic:

Any content warnings I should know about?
Dumbing of Age incorporates themes of depression and parental abuse, some utterances of racism, homophobia, and transphobia, and an instance of attempted sexual assault and a depiction of attempted suicide, so please be mindful.

I can’t help but notice there’s a lot of this comic. Where do I start reading?
The beginning is a pretty good place to start, but if that’s too daunting for you, I ran a storyline reintroducing all the characters and their dynamics in September 2020, so you could also start there.

What year is Dumbing of Age set? You said it started in 2010, and as of 2026 only a few months have passed, so…
Dumbing of Age is not set in any particular year.  Often, when some pop culture reference shows up, someone is all “OH HEY HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE AREN’T WE STILL IN 2010???”  Nope, sorry, but we ain’t!  The comic moves slow, but it operates on comic book time.  This webcomic is not gradually going to become a period piece.  Just assume the strip is always set in whatever year it is right now.

Why is Joyce written Like That?
Joyce is autobiographical.  Like Joyce, I believed in the complete inerrancy of the Bible — Earth is 6000 years old, Noah’s Ark, gay folks are evil, everything — and our family attended multiple churches of various persuasions, from Methodist to Baptist to Evangelical Free.  But not shallowly, no.  We spent years climbing up the social hierarchies of those mofos until we uncovered assholes and/or corruption and had to move on.  I went to youth group every week, attended every sermon (because there was more than one) every weekend, and went to church summer camp (at Anderson University).  My dad was routinely a Deacon.   At one point he even tried starting his own church.  Consider this information before goin’ off on me about how I don’t know anything about Christians or whatever.  

Why don’t I ever see Joyce talking about the Pope or whatever?
I was raised as a nondenominational fundamentalist (nonaligned Protestant), which means Joyce’s not Catholic.  She doesn’t own a crucifix, she doesn’t believe in saints or have pictures of Jesus anywhere, and she thinks the Pope is more likely to be the Anti-Christ than someone she should listen to.  I say this only because folks really like to yell at her for all sorts of Catholic stuff she wouldn’t do.  Get your kinds of Christians sorted out!

This one comic I read seemed pretty on-the-nose about recent complaints.  Are you changing the direction of the comic based on feedback?
For a long time, the answer to this question was a pretty straightforward “no!” Dumbing of Age comics get written pretty far in advance–I had a three-month buffer when the comic launched in 2010, and since then it’s expanded to approximately eight to nine months.  That means if you’re reading in, say, January, the most recent comic I’ve written and uploaded will arrive in August or September.  There’s a little counter on the side of the website indicating how far out I’ve written the latest comic.

In summer of 2025, I got some pretty significant and meaningful feedback about how I was handling certain elements of the comic.  So from 2025-2026, for basically the first time ever, I made pretty huge, sweeping changes to stuff that hadn’t been published yet.  So now the answer is a slightly murkier “maybe” that becomes more of a “yes” the closer to Book 16 you are.  

How do you pronounce Dina’s name?
It’s pronounced “dee-na.”

FAQ About the the Website:

Hi, reader in 2026 here.  It seems kind of like everything is broken all the time now.  What’s with that?
DumbingOfAge.com was originally created and maintained using a WordPress plugin called ComicPress.  Unfortunately, ComicPress stopped receiving updates in 2015, which meant the site was slowly deteriorating.  To the outside observer, this meant increasingly slow loadtimes and huge delays in the comic publishing as the internal clock slowly stopped working.  Due to inertia, fear of change, and a lack of out of the box solutions that would allow me to hide my buffer from the general public, I resisted updating the site basically until the problems got impossible to ignore.  The comic switched from ComicPress to Toocheke Premium in 2026.  This has unfortunately caused some exciting new problems.  We’re working on it.  

I have some ideas about cool new features for the site, or ways to make the CSS more friendly. 
That’s great!  I’d love to hear them.  Keep in mind though that right now we’re having some trouble making sure the features we already have operate correctly, so I can’t really guarantee a timeline on if or when those’ll be implemented.  

I’ve noticed some comics have transcripts and location tags, and others don’t. 
Those are implemented by my comments moderator, Wack’d, on a purely volunteer basis.  Her goal is to eventually push those updates for all ~5,000 comics.  It’s probably gonna take her a bit.  

FAQ About the Comments Section:

So, who’s in charge here?
My comments moderator is Wack’d (they/she).  They run moderation rules and regulations by me, and I trust her to do her thing.  

Since there’s comment moderation, I assume there’s some sort of code of conduct I should know about.
Got it in one.  There’s the basic stuff, of course.  Don’t post stuff that’s hateful or incendiary towards ourselves, towards other commenters, or towards a group of marginalized people.  If you’re not a member of a marginalized group, don’t make comments about how you think members of said group should behave or what they should do.  Don’t post for the sole purpose of getting a rise out of people or starting fights, even if you think we’d agree with you about them.  Just sort of in general, be kind?  

We’ve also been working through how to deal with certain recurring discussions in the space that are, to be blunt, fairly repetitive in their negativity.  It’s fine to not like the content of the comic, or to think my characters are assholes, but a substantial volume of people were coming back day after day just to tell me that they don’t like the content of the comic, or that they think my characters are assholes.  It made a lot of people uncomfortable, so we’ve been trying to cut down on that kind of content.  

Enforcement around that has been in flux a bit.  Previous versions of the rules singled out specific words or phrases associated with those comments that would lead a comment to be targeted for immediate deletion.  As it is now, we’re trying to ease up a little.  That said, we’d really appreciate it if folks didn’t treat the comic as some sort of battle for who’s the most morally pure.  This is a comic about messy, stupid teenagers, and they’re gonna do messy, stupid things.  When writing comments, please try to consider that characters are not just indistinct piles of awful words and deeds, that not every conflict in the comic needs a moral victor, and that there’s more to say about the comic than who should be ostracizing each other or treating each other more kindly.  

None of this is to say that negative feedback is unwelcome.  It was negative feedback in 2025 that led me to reevaluate how I was handling Muslim characters and hire a sensitivity reader.  I’m a white person!  I have blind spots!  Sometimes those need to be pointed out.  Any issue I’ve gotten better on since this comic started in 2010 is because someone smarter than me talked to me about it, and the absolute last thing I want is for people to feel they can’t come to me with that kinda feedback.  

And if you don’t like the way I draw, or the way I write dialogue, or the pacing, all that’s fine too.  It’s really more of a frequency thing–if you’ve been posting every day for the past week about how bored you are of a plotline or a character, maybe take a weekend off.  

One last thing: we really don’t want the comments to become about the comments.  That covers stuff like personally attacking your fellow commenters, as mentioned, but it also covers stuff like excessive debate about moderation choices, or handwringing about how the place is too positive or too negative, or long essays about how your preferred style of comment is necessary for a healthy discourse.  It’s one thing to try and alert Wack’d to someone causing problems (and there is a Report button for that we’d prefer you use instead), but the conduct of any one person or group of people shouldn’t subsume conversations about the comic.  If you have an issue with a moderation decision, we have a form you can fill out.  Use that instead.  

At the end of the day, you wouldn’t expect to see complaints about the food on a restaurant’s website, no museum is hanging plaques about how much the art sucks, and no realtor is gonna tell you not to buy their client’s house.  This is the official website for Dumbing of Age, and the guiding ethos of it is going to be that Dumbing of Age is good.  If you really feel the need to make a daily practice of saying you don’t like the comic, other outlets exist, and you can make your posts about that there.  It’s cool, I understand, I have the same toxic relationship with 9 Chickweed Lane.

My comment’s not appearing on the website.  Why is that?
There’s a multitude of reasons that might’ve happened.  

1) If you’ve never commented on the comic before, the website automatically withholds your comment until either myself or Wack’d manually approve it.  This’ll happen for every comment you make until you make one that gets approved, after which all your comments are approved automatically.  If your comment doesn’t get approved, it’s not necessarily because we don’t like it or disagree with it.  Sometimes stuff gets missed.  

2) It might’ve gotten reported by other commenters.  When the “Report comment” button on a comment is pressed a certain number of times, the website automatically yanks that comment off of the website.  To prevent abuse, we’re keeping that number a secret.  Wack’d and I have the option to restore that comment, and if we don’t it’s not necessarily an indictment of you or your thoughts–again, sometimes stuff gets missed.  

3) Wack’d or I mighta deleted your comment.  Read on for more about what to do in that situation.  

4) Your comment might be a reply to a comment that got reported or deleted.  When a comment gets removed by any means, the entire reply thread goes with it!  This means that you can do absolutely nothing wrong and your stuff will still go missing, so, y’know, if you’re really proud of a comment, make sure you back it up somewhere.  

5) Maybe you just added too many hyperlinks!  It makes the site think you’re a spambot.  Which is inconvenient for folks who want to link to a buncha old comics in their comments. Maybe try splitting that one into multiple comments with less than three links apiece. 

6) maybe the website’s just bad. it’s been bad lately

You guys delete comments?  I don’t want my comment to be deleted!  I worked really hard on it!
Yeah, that’s understandable.  

Obviously, comments containing personal attacks, or attacks against a whole group of people, are getting obliterated on sight.  We’re going to be less trigger-happy about deleting comments for other reasons, but it’ll likely still happen if we’re seeing a lot of the same problems in discussion over and over again.  Sometimes you gotta trim some branches for the tree to be healthy.  The first comment about how Joyce is being a butt might not disappear, but the fiftieth almost definitely will.

If you feel like we acted unjustly, there’s now a form you can fill out about it, in order to get an email back about why your comment was deleted and whether we’re persuaded to reinstate it. Again, we recommend you back your comments up.

FAQ About the Slipshine and Other Patreon:

Slip what now? 
In 2014, the website Slipshine started commissioning comics from me depicting characters from Dumbing of Age getting it on in graphic detail.  Those comics have comic-book-sized pages and are 100% canon to the events of the strip!  

Oh, cool.  Where can I buy those?
You can buy a subscription to Slipshine, but you can’t buy a Slipshine comic individually, either digitally or in print.  They run as a subscription service, so if you wanna see the Slipshine comics, you gotta buy a subscription.  That could change in the future, but as of 2026 it hasn’t and probably won’t.

But they’re canon, right?  Aren’t I missing important story context?
Not particularly!  Mostly they’re just for fun.  When you need to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that two characters banged, it’ll get mentioned in the main comic.  

I wanna see you draw your characters in sexy situations, but I’m not necessarily interested in porn by other folks. 
Good news!  I now have a second Patreon that’s just me drawing my characters in sexy situations.  It’s a lot more pinup-y and a lot less narrative-y, though, I dunno if that’s a dealbreaker.