| David Willis | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | web cartoonist |
| Known for | Roomies! It's Walky! Shortpacked! Joyce & Walky! |
David Willis is a web cartoonist currently living in Columbus, Ohio.[1] He is known online in chatrooms and forums as "ItsWalky". KUTV in Salt Lake City calls him a satirist who is "a little bit edgy."[2]
The shape-shifting robot franchise Transformers appears frequently in Willis's work. He was an administrator on Teletraan I, the Transformers Wiki from 2006 to 2008, when he facilitated a move from Wikia to its own site at tfwiki.net.[3] Willis eventually became involved in official licensed Transformers artwork for Fun Publications' Transformers Collector's Club.[4]
Previously featured at Keenspot with the comic of It's Walky! and the first months of Shortpacked!, Willis left to co-found Blank Label Comics in 2005 where all his comics now are featured.
On 2008-09-19, Willis proposed to his girlfriend of four years, Maggie Weidner, in that day's episode of Shortpacked!. She accepted with a cartoon posted in the Shortpacked! blog.[5]
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Roomies! was a webcomic by David Willis starring the college adventures of two roommates, Danny and Joe. It ran from 1997-09-08 to 1999-12-20. Originally a daily comic published in the Indiana University student newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student, it was turned into a web comic in early 1999. It is a mix of daily gag strips and short stories, with the stories drifting towards more serious topics as the comic progressed.
Roomies! was succeeded by It's Walky!, a science fiction adventure comedy comic set in the same universe. The main cast of It's Walky! included some continuing characters from Roomies!—in particular Joyce, Danny's former stalker—and by the end most of the major characters from Roomies! had made appearances.
More recently, after he finished It's Walky!, David Willis restarted Roomies! as a daily gag strip, appearing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was also published as part of the Keenspot comic page in the Turlock, California newspaper, the Turlock Journal. Roomies! ended again on May 19, 2005, when David Willis left Keenspot to found Blank Label Comics.
As of this writing the aforementioned character Joyce from Roomies! currently features in Willis' current comic "Joyce and Walky" at the same website, along with Walky of It's Walky!. Further characters from It's Walky! feature in Willis' comic Shortpacked!.
It's Walky! was a daily webcomic by David Willis. It concerned the adventures of the fictional alien-fighting organization SEMME, and in particular current and previous members of Squad 128. The comic's genre is fairly difficult to pin down – the most important part was the character-driven story, which had a very strong continuity, but comedy was featured whenever the drama didn't block it out. Though set in the present day, the alien elements and advanced technology involved brought sci-fi elements. Angst was a regular visitor, but so was goofiness. The comic strip could (and often did) go from theological discussion to toilet humor within the same week.
It's Walky! was the direct continuation of Roomies!, a previous webcomic about a group of college students by the same artist. The debut of It's Walky! is considered to have happened on December 25, 1999, but the switch between the two wasn't instantaneous; sci-fi elements had crept into the college environment of Roomies long before, and the comic featured storylines from both for a while. A few characters from Roomies became main characters in It's Walky!, and the remaining protagonists later made it into the cast as secondary characters.
It's Walky was followed by Shortpacked!, which was part of the same continuity but with an entirely different focus: the daily lives of a toy store's employees, including (oddly) SEMME veterans Mike and Robin. Donation-based It's Walky! epilogue strips ($100 for each strip) run by popular demand eventually led into and were replaced by a direct sequel called Joyce & Walky!, which started on 2005-08-01, and is subscription only. In the meantime, Willis had left Keenspot on May 19, 2005, to found Blank Label Comics.
The associated fanbase was extremely active, and notable for producing vast quantities of fan art, much of which would be invalidated within days at the worst stages of the finale. An inexplicably large amount of it was pornographic, though clearly marked as such.
Shortpacked! is a webcomic by David Willis set in a toy store. It is part of the Blank Label Comics family. After putting an end to his successful webcomic It's Walky!, Willis decided to turn Shortpacked!, his autobiographical comic, into a new title. The strip is based in the same universe as It's Walky! and Roomies!, and features two side characters from the previous comic, Robin and Mike. It is more R-rated than most comic strips that appear in mainstream newspapers, using profanity and sexual innuendos not found in those newspapers. The primary inspiration behind Shortpacked was Willis' own experiences working retail at Toys "R" Us.[6]
While Shortpacked! started off as primarily a gag strip, with little overarching plot, in recent months plot driven storylines have alternated with the gag strips. The comic also often includes strips that take place outside of the regular setting and continuity, in particular one-shots lampooning pop-culture and comic figures such as Batman or Transformers.
Shortpacked! has also lampooned mainstream comic strips such as Luann and Funky Winkerbean. Shortpacked! showed 16-year-old Luann bragging about having large breasts and even depicted Luann giving the middle finger to Blondie.[7] The parody of Funky Winkerbean showed Les Moore and his girlfriend Cayla Williams (the two got married in Willis' strip) having sex while a ghostly Lisa Moore (Les' late wife, who passed away in 2007 from cancer) watched over them in approval, and in another panel, the resulting baby, who looked like Lisa, was ghostly in appearance.[8]
A Shortpacked! strip also appeared weekly on Toy News International, for 250 installments from August 20, 2006 until July 31, 2011.
David Willis announced at AnimeFest 2010 that his newest project is titled Dumbing of Age, a return to the setting of the original Roomies! comic, Indiana University, with a melange of characters from Roomies!, It's Walky!, and Shortpacked!.[9][10] The strip debuted September 10, 2010, and updates weekdays.
A sample of Willis's other projects include:
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