That teenage feeling

You know those sketches withheld two days ago? The ones I thought had the potential to destroy ones faith in a just and loving universe? Well, I redrew them... and I'm still rather uncomfortable with the concept. BUT, this is one of those cliches. If you have a comic with kids, you have to draw them all grown up. So, I present to you... PROM-AGED GENIUSES!

This is all TOTALLY non-canon, of course...



So here we have our heroes... fairly unravaged by age. It's not like I could augment Autumn much, since the joke is that she'll grow up to look EXACTLY like her mother. Autumn's distinguishing characteristic in her family is her strong "bends like copper wire" hair. At 18, she likely wants to restrain that a bit - resulting in a bulky Tiffany-esque braid.

Bud's sketch here isn't as good as the first one I did. But that one wasn't as large, so I had to go with this. The premise here is that, although he's identified as the independent character formed by an absence of parental supervision, he cannot escape genetics. He's hit a growth spurt, making him the tallest of the six pictured here, and he might just end up closer to his daddy's size than anyone could expect. (At this point, my 5'11" self would like to give those doctors, who said I'd never top 5'7" because I was too tiny as a kid, a hearty IN YOUR FACE!) The earlier aged Bud sketch gave him a more teen-friendly hairstyle and it had more of the "maturing male cat" feel to it. (In a non-creepy fashion.) It was already obvious Bud's hair and ears come from his mommy, but the secret specter that haunts him now is her love of video games! Bud fought against it all his life, but that's her old DS he's playing! Mwa ha ha!



Now things get slightly odd. Roddy's no surprise, since he appears to have just grown in size and not matured in personal style at all. How, uh, creative of me. No, his distinguishing look here is his football uniform and clipboard in hand. Anyone who knows the game knows what that means: Backup quarterback! On a likely-weak high school team! Oh, destiny!

Jacob. Oh my. The poor child has finally snapped and gone... emo? There was a time when "I live in a spiritual vacuum" was a punchline and not a tedious and oft-repeated conversation filler/killer. His outfit is meant to look like a hybrid between militant religious garb... and a fast food restaurant uniform. Is there no better symbol for high school "philosophers"?



And here I am both amused and disturbed. I enjoy the neckline reversal on display here. Dionne now wears the bell collar and Suzette sports the heart on her... uh... suddenly ample chest. (You are allowed to shudder here.) Yes, the joke here is that Suzette grew up to be tall, shapely and sexy... SO FUCK FEMINISM! Everyone pays attention to her now! The joke is funny enough to me that I went ahead and drew cleavage on a character normally drawn as a 9-year-old. Oh yeah, she's only 17 here; so if you like the sketch for any reason other than humor, that's one more personal problem you can add to the list.

On the other side, Dionne hasn't taken up the militant mantle. I think she wears the bell just to point out the Suzettian Hypocrisy. Otherwise, I gotta admit the 18-year-old Dionne turned out to be extremely adorable. This is the sketch that made me toss aside a loss of youthful magic and go ahead with the sharing.

So where are Tiffany and Max? For Max, I ran out of sketchbook space. (Unfortunately, drawing older Suzette took multiple tries.) Also, Max isn't a character likely to change over time. He'd still be bigger than the rest, just with more adult proportions. Ooh! For Tiffany, I know her future fate in this decidedly non-canon world... and I'm not telling! It's something so funny that I won't let myself treat this post as a purge... instead there's a VERY SMALL PERCENTAGE this could just be a staging area. (If my strip has a long run, I've debated having "non-canon weeks" when I could toss out all my normal discretion and brutally drop the fourth wall on top of my unsuspecting cast.)