The Webcomics Weekly is back in your life with a title that is simultaneously brilliant and pisses me off. I don’t know why the trend of censoring swearwords with one symbol makes me so mad. It’s silly! Yet it does. Whatever. That’s probably the only bad thing I have to say about “The D!ckheads.”
The D!ckheads and the Life Worth Livin’
‘Episode 1 – To New Beginnings’ – ‘Episode 25: You Are Loved’
Updates: Wednesdays
By Gummybunni
Line Art by Serpya (Eps. 21-24) & Lorific.arts (Ep. 25)
Reviewed by Elias Rosner
Friends, you know you’re no longer of a younger cohort when a high school series feels the need to specify the year it’s taking place in, and it is not “this year.” I know, on an intellectual level, that every generation (and every person) eventually has this happen but somehow, against all odds, I never expected it to happen to me. Somehow, I expect the comics I read to be in the nebulous now or in a past far enough removed from now as to be an exercise in historical fiction more than contemporary. And yet. Here comes “The D!ckheads” to remind me that 2013 is more than a decade past and that yes, my classmates did indeed have smartphones.
“The D!ckheads” is a modern romance centering on Eliana, a nervous girl who has moved to a new town with her abuelita after ~tragic backstory~ took her parents from her. Eschewing the usual paper thin tropes of this setup, Gummy places us in a real feeling school, imbued with the harsh realities of that teenage stew. Bringing the web of connections and locuses of drama to life is a cast of well-designed characters and fun backgrounds that are functional and not particularly elaborate.
The dialog is bouncy and I love the playful comic-sans-like font contained in vivacious color-coded balloons. I do feel that the phrasings feel somehow too… modern? That’s strange to say about a high school romance comic but it kept taking me out of it. The turns of phrases are more 2020s Same with the smartphones. Were they really that ubiquitous in 2013/2014? Was I truly that out of touch? (Yes. Yes I was.)
What struck me right away in the first few episodes was how goofy all of Gummy’s characters are. Not foolish, not clownish, but goofy. Awkward. Uncomfortable even as they project confidence. The dialog conveys this, yes, but more so it is in the expressions; in Gummy’s willingness to employ abstractions in faces – bug-eyes and “weh” mouths and gremlin cat smirks. In essence, a true cast of teens rather than a bunch of twenty-somethings written by a forty-something, bio-engineered and wound up for maximum drama.
Eliana is a bundle of nerves, one wrong look and a stiff wind and she’ll collapse, yet she masks it with exuberance and a warm spirit that is both true and false at the same time. Amy is caring yet insecure, playing up her social status and HBIC energy to compensate for a feeling of inadequacy, unable to let go when these things clash. Marco is lost, retreating into himself after harsh few years, using his natural gravity towards solitude to become solitary. Levi is shy and angry, an undercurrent of meanness tempered by gentleness he wants to cultivate, unable to trust instinctively anymore even as he yearns to be closer to people, particularly ones he has hurt in the past.
This is our principal cast. They each have their foibles; their failures and fuck-ups. They have their histoires and pain points, and they have new relationships that are redefining them, both for the better and for the worse. They have big emotions they don’t know what to do with, some justified, others not. They act and then think. Or think and think and think and think and are unable to act.
And then, briefly, it all comes together for someone, and it feels like the hardest fought victory in the world, heightened by the conventions of the comic’s influences – “Kimi ni Todoke,” a generation of tumblr webcomics, that one meme of a cat being yelled at.
“The D!ckheads” is not necessarily a bolt of lightning but it is, I think, on the vanguard of the next wave of webcomics, particularly in romance. A synthesis of influences that does not attempt to ape any one in particular, temporally fixed rather than forever sliding in time, and forging a strong cast of likable yet deeply flawed teens. Hats off to you, Gummy. May your characters be allowed to swear once more.
