So when I finished this strip originally, I hadn't visited Indiana University in almost 5 years -- that pandemic (and later repeated poorly-timed school-aged-children illnesses) really threw off my annual visiting schedule! I'd been surviving a bit off of Google Streetview, but, hey, guess what, Google Streetview doesn't go into fields!
And so I drew this strip with... my best memory of what that entry into Dunn Meadow looks like. There's trees. There's a river. There's some buildings behind everything that I can obscure with trees. The ol' college try.
This year I finally got back into Bloomington, and, oh, hey, uh, hrm. Lots of stuff is actually going on in this real-life location! There actually... is no other place to enter Dunn Meadow from that direction than across a bridge over the river. (The same bridge that Amber and Danny would appear on a few times a decade of strips ago.) Joyce and Dorothy can't just... materialize out of some fake woods!

And so when I got back home, I redrew the background to match reality. And... ended up retooling a lot of backgrounds in the coming sequence to massage better into realness. There shouldn't be any trees at all on this side of the bridge -- it's all meadow -- but I do break that a few times.
Hey, it's the same meadow that Dina clever-girled Ross inside of, and I made up a whole dang jungle in there. It happens.
Kimberly Herman
2025-06-25 14:42:25 +0000 UTCBBCC
2025-06-23 04:00:05 +0000 UTC