Dumbing of Age is notable for its highly decompressed and regimented storytelling, with each chapter representing one full day of on-campus life. This timeline is intended to help readers keep track of how much time has elapsed, and what the strip's overall timescale looks like.
You may also be interested in the Dumbing of Age Class Schedule, or the dates of the fan-invented holiday Dumbing Day.
Book | Chapter | Day | Weekday |
---|---|---|---|
This Campus is a Friggin' Escher Print | Move-In Day | August 29 | Sunday |
Uphill From Here | August 30 | Monday | |
Men Are From Beck, Women Are From Clark | August 31 | Tuesday | |
The Bechdel Test | September 1 | Wednesday | |
Media Rumble | September 2 | Thursday | |
Yesterday Was Thursday | September 3 | Friday | |
I Beg You, Don't Cast Your Body Into The Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves | Pajama Jeans | September 4 | Saturday |
Choosing My Religion | September 5 | Sunday | |
The First Step Towards Recovery | September 6 | Monday | |
Time Keeps on Slippin' | September 10 | Friday | |
Saturday's All Right For Slighting | September 11 | Saturday | |
Strange Beerfellows | September 12 | Sunday | |
Your Stupid Overconfidence is Nostalgic | If The Shoe Splits | September 13 | Monday |
Guess Who's Coming To Galasso's | September 14 | Tuesday | |
Answers In Hennessy | September 15 | Wednesday | |
Just Hangin' Out With My Family | September 18 | Saturday | |
Amazi-Girl is Always Prepared for Anything | The Only Dope For Me Is You | September 19 | Sunday |
I Was A Teenage Churchmouse | September 20 | Monday | |
Up All Night To Get Vengeance | September 21 | Tuesday | |
The Whiteboard Dingdong Bandit | September 22 | Wednesday | |
Hey, Guess What, I'm a Lesbian! | When Somebody Loved Me | September 23 | Thursday |
Three's a Crowd | September 24 | Friday | |
The Butterflies Won't Fly Away | September 25 | Saturday | |
Walking with Dina | September 26 | Sunday | |
The Machinations of My Revenge Will Be Cold, Swift, and Absolutely Ridiculous | To Those Who'd Ground Me | September 27 | Monday |
That Perfect Girl | October 1 | Friday | |
When God Closes The Door | October 2 | Saturday | |
It All Returns | October 3 | Sunday | |
Just Put Down the Ukulele Only Then Can the Healing Begin | Glower Vacuum | October 4 | Monday |
Everything You've Ever Wanted Floats Above | October 5 | Tuesday | |
The Thing I Was Before | October 6 | Wednesday | |
The "Do" List | October 9 | Saturday | |
Up Here We Can Be Garbage | Face the Strange | October 10 | Sunday |
This Is The Way That We Love | October 11 | Monday | |
Faz Is Great | October 12 | Tuesday | |
Of Mike And Men | October 13 | Wednesday | |
Now Let's Go Commit Something Mildly Subversive Which, at Worst, Will Serve as a Humanizing Anecdote and Not as Anything Truly Threatening to the Power Structures at Hand | Flying To The Red | October 14 | Thursday |
But the Sun Still Shines | October 15 | Friday | |
Sometimes the Sky Was So Far Away | October 16 | Saturday | |
Vote for Robin | October 17 | Sunday | |
Renounce Magical Thinking and Embrace Empirical Evidence | Birthday Pursuit | October 18 | Monday |
To Remind You of My Love | October 19 | Tuesday | |
When It Crumbles | October 20 | Wednesday | |
Is a Song Forever? | October 21 | Thursday | |
I Excised All my Anxieties into Cartoon Characters Who Definitely Don't Have Feelings for Each Other | This Bright Millenium | January 9 | Sunday |
Look Straight Ahead | January 10 | Monday | |
See You in the Funny Page | January 11 | Tuesday | |
Hompk! | January 12 | Wednesday | |
As Long As It's Free | January 13 | Thursday | |
Her Hugs Are Traps | Sister, Christian | January 14 | Friday |
I'll Leave You A Phantom | January 15 | Saturday | |
Trial and Sarah | January 16 | Sunday | |
Don't Stop Billie-ving | January 17 | Monday | |
This Was Halloween | October 31 (Flashback) | Sunday | |
My Peer Group's Smoochy Chart Is Basically Now an Ouroboros | Bring Me to Life Drawing | January 18 | Tuesday |
Turning Saints Into the Sea | January 19 | Wednesday | |
Joementum | January 20 | Thursday | |
But Don't Give Yourself Away | January 21 | Friday | |
Book 14 | Everybody's Looking for Nothing | January 22 | Saturday |
It's the Love I Haven't Got | January 23 | Sunday | |
Trystin' in the Wind | January 24 | Monday | |
For Me It Was Tuesday | January 25 | Tuesday | |
Book 15 | Love Dares You To Change | January 26 | Wednesday |
The One Where Jocelyne Returns | January 27 | Thursday | |
Me And Who You Say I Was Yesterday | |||
The Only Exception | |||
Book 16 | Not-So-Smooth Criminals | ||
I'm the Problem, It's Me |
Notes[]
- It is worth noting that, because of its sliding timescale, the Dumbing of Age timeline does not necessarily match up to any particular year in the real world. Because of how long the comic has been running and Willis' penchant for pop culture references, characters tend to refer to things that are current to when a strip is released, when such a thing did not exist in 2010 when the series began.
- Thus, while the days of the week, and the number of days between particular storylines (at least within a single semester), are pretty firmly established by various bits of captions and in-story dialogue, the dates (aside from Halloween) are more speculative, as outlined below.
- The fall semester dates are based on this Tumblr post, which notes that Willis's commentary ("for Billie it's still August") below this strip places its events in August, while Ruth's dialogue in this strip ("Every October...") suggests that its storyline is in October. If those two facts are true, then the fact that there are exactly 30 timeline days between those two days indicates that those 30 days must all be in September -- placing the Billie strip on August 31 and the Ruth strip on October 1 -- and all the rest of the fall semester dates can be extrapolated from that. This logic rests on a few assumptions, such as (a) Ruth's comment must mean that it is already October and she is not merely musing upon the upcoming October, and (b) Willis would not be willing to contradict his own commentary for the sake of a storyline. In fact, due to his commitment to a sliding timescale, Willis indeed may be willing to contradict previously established dates or avoid anything that would establish dates in stone. Similarly, he may also be willing to contradict real-world conventions for similar reasons. For example, classes in DOA seem to have been held on every Monday in September, despite the fact that the first Monday in September would have been Labor Day, and real-life Indiana University (like most American universities) does not hold classes on Labor Day. Nevertheless, the fact that roctavian's Tumber post was reblogged on Willis's own DOA Tumblr would seem to imply a tacit endorsement of this timeline.
- The spring semester dates are more speculative (but see below). The assumption that Book 11 starts in early January, specifically the second week of January, is based upon real-life IU's history of starting its spring semester in the second week of January. The specific date of January 9 is based on the previously established dates of the fall semester and the reasoning that if those are correct, then the second Sunday of the following January would be on the 9th, because ... well, that's how dates work. This is of course assuming that the fictional world of DOA has the same number of days in October, November, and December as they do in real life (and that every week has all 7 days). It is also, again, assuming that Willis would not be willing to break continuity.
- Some commenters have argued otherwise, e.g. that the time skip between Books 10 and 11 amounts to a "soft reboot" and that we cannot assume that date continuity is preserved (see the discussion here, under Lingo's comment). Some have speculated that since the timeline of the fall semester is consistent with the calendar year 2010 -- when the strip started in real life -- the spring semester may be based on the calendar year 2021, because the first strips of Book 11 were published in late 2020 and Willis may have been looking ahead to 2021 to determine their dates. This would place every spring-semester date one day later than what's listed in the table above (e.g. "This Bright Millennium" would fall on January 10). Commenters have noted that this timeline would move Ruth's birthday in the "Hompk!" storyline from January 12 to the 13th, which would make it potentially consistent with the birthday established on Walkyverse Ruth's tombstone -- and Willis has notably seemed to be eager to keep birthdays consistent between the two universes. However, Willis's own commentary on that strip seems to indicate otherwise: "I purposefully didn’t care about Ruth’s Walkyverse birthday when I gave her one in the Dumbiverse, because that shouldn’t be beholden to trivial details like this if I want to tell a story in another universe, but her birthday here seems to definitely be July 13, not somewhere early in January" -- though he concedes that "maybe you can pretend it still says January but whoever carved the headstone is just really shitty at centering text."
- The bulletin board sign in this strip declaring "97 [d]ays since the [la]st kidnapping" (and Willis' hovertext saying "yeah I counted") narrows down the timeline quite a bit more firmly, because there are indeed 97 real-life days between October 20, the presumed date of the kidnapping storyline ("When It Crumbles"), and January 25, the hypothesized date of this strip ("For Me It Was Tuesday"). By establing a firm relative timeline between the two semesters, this at least confirms that IU's spring semester started in the 2nd week of January and probably confirms the hypothesized dates ... or at least within plus or minus one day, depending on the time of day Ruth (presumably) updates the billboard (this strip takes place early in the morning) and the regularity at which the updates occur.
- We may never know the precise dates for certain until a specific reference is made to a date-specific holiday, such as Valentine's Day, Leap Day (if the story takes place in a leap year), or St. Patrick's Day -- and in fact Willis may time-skip over those holidays in order to avoid specific dates (just as he skipped over Halloween, Christmas, and New Year's).