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Doris Doodle Review: A Hidden Gem You Need to Read (Comission for WeirdKev27)

Hello all you happy people! I’m Jake, I review comics and cartoons and I have a question...

Because today we’re diving into a heartbreaking masterpiece released over 2020 and 2021 that I hadn’t heard of till kev asked it to be reviewed.

For those of you, especially those who are fans of minnie and betty brought here, Doris Doodle is a webcomic created by hasini walker. It’s hard to classify as at it’s core it’s an original idea; in a world where toons and humans live side by side and toons are largely actors, Doris Doodle is a washed up 1940′s toon who tries to make a second stab at a career and soon finds herself mentoring a sardonic younger retool of herself. It’s full of clever ideas about how a world like this would work, meta commentary on reboots and how fans react to them, and scathing if well trod comendation of hollywood’s history of sexual abuse. Speaking of which

CONTENT WARNING: this review discusses sexual abuse, assault and attempted date rape. If these are triggers for you, please stay away for your own mental health or if you procede, do so with caution. Thank you

The thing that makes it hard to know what to say about it is ... it’s part fancomic. Several toons of various eras make cameos, Betty Boop is a member of the main cast, and both Minnie and Red from the Tex Avery shorts have small but still massively important scenes. Not only that it’s toon town.. is the same one from Roger Rabit as Marvin Acme, the same murder victim from that film makes a crucial cameo late in the story. And while I strongly feel this story can and should be adapted as it’s own work, with the important liscened characters retooled into legally distinct copies, part of the power of this original version comes from the use of these characters. So it’s very much i’ts own animal while still needing to be a fan work for it’s max power.

If all that sounds intriguging, then come on down to toon town with me as I tell ya the sad story of doris doodle.

To make this easier on myself i’ll be doing the flashbacks first.. minus the last one as it’s a big, climactic moment in the story and answers it’s driving question: what caused the end of Doris’ Career, and I feel it’s best to save for when it’s narratively right. But for the most part while some flashbacks do have a meaningful connection to the main story as it goes on, most just sorta happen because there happens to be enough of a break in the action to put in the next segment. It feels like they constructed most of the present day story first, and while they had a clear place for the final flashback, the rest just sorta show up when needed and ocasionally synch up really well with the story. This feels like it would’ve been better as 2 or three parts instead of just scattered about.

Anyways Doris Story beings, chnologically with her as a bright young toon, introducing other toons for a kids show. She has a loyal agent named Roy who seems nice enough, and a bright career. The only speed bump and the first sign of things to come.. is when Doris refuses to pose for some racy model shots, and Roy gets in trouble, and with her career in danger Doris buckles and does whatever it takes. Where it takes her.. we’ll see much later. The one other scene of note out of all of this I liked was Doris meeting Minnie. Not only is minnie happy to help the starstruck new toon but in a bit that had my heart squee, Minnie reveals she’s married; she and mickey simply keep it to boyfriend and girlfriend in the pictures because that’s what disney wants. It does mean no children.. but Minnie’s made peace with that. It’s a small scene but i’ts just so engaging and gets the character so right i’d love to see more of this in an adaptation.. obviously with a stand in for minnie but still, having to live knowoing you can’t be married to your partner on screen or ever have kids ... it’s gotta suck and i’td be intresting to see how she was impacted decades down the line.

In present day though Doris is a depressed, reclusive woman, no longer living in Toon Town proper and having become essentially a ghost to most people. She runs into Betty Boop who uninetonally rubs how bad things have gone for doris in by pointing out that while she has no reboots or anything.. Betty still has TONS of merchandising sales to keep her. Betty is essentially the Mr Peanutbutter to Doris bojack, though Doris honestly feels like an inversion of the horse from horsing around: both were chewed up by the system but while Doris left early, and unfairly thanks to jackassery that we’ll get to in a while, Bojack stayed but slowly became more and more corrupted before becoming a washed out husk.

After the encounter Doris goes to the agency and gets a new agent Harold whose genuinely kind but admits he can’t get her much. It’s understandable: Doris had barely a career and thus not much for any prospective network or streamer to go off.

Since a social media presence would help and Doris has all the computer literacy of one Sensei Johnny Lawrence, Harold has her get a computer. Doris struggles with the magic compubox and gets help from a kindly anthro saleslady.. whose boss is creepily hands on in both sense of the word and whose intrusions put Doris on high alert.

Her creeper senses are not wrong as she notices him get even more handsy when he prepares to leave and properly reminded of her own traumas, goes over and publicly confronts the asshole before giving him a good old glove slap.. with an anvil inside.

As is internet law, bitch slapping a belivgerent asshole makes Delores viral. And what happens to the person she defended? Does the girl get fired? does she seek doris out? what happens to her after all of this?

Yeah for some reason the story just.. drops this character. They didn’t even have to make her a lead: just have her show up grateful for what Doris did later. It feels weird to have the story just.. blow up this girls life with one brave act Doris does for her and then never address what happened to her or the fucker Doris bitchslapped in front of the internet.

So with that Doris gets a guest spot... on Ellen

Yeah this aged about as well as Harry Osborn’s “fu Man chu face fuzz”. In the span of a year. In the writer’s defense they wrote this cameo before it came out she was an abusive monster, and Ellen would’ve been a good choice ANY TIME in the past decade. I would’ve done the same in their shoes. Doesn't make it less awkward but sometimes awkard shit just happens when someone turns out to have been an asshole this whole time. Can’ tbe helped.

So the interview goes horribly wrong as not only did Ellen book Betty Boop, who Doris had an awkward encounter with earlier but in this work betty is kind of an ass without meaning too, framing Doris disappearing as “without explination”.. even though Doris resulting freakout and rage at her shows yeah clearly SOMETHING bad pushed her out. Ellen tries to coax it out of her because getting people to do stuff they don’t want to even when it’s none of her business is her thing, but Doris is just too shellshocked

Somehow this hurts her.. I didn’t belivie it at first but then I remember people suck and will sometime belivie the worst version of say a panic attack like this instead of spotting it as “well clearly she has trauma”.

Harold’s suggestion is an image change, bringing us to one of the book’s best concepts. See in this universe, reboots and redesigns.. are done to the character themselves, using something similar to cosmetic surgery. Except it can also alter personality and other important stuff. It explains how say the Teen Titans became the teen titans go, with starfire later cameoing in her go design. This raises a LOT of intresting questions: how much of the previous versions memory is kept? how do they do crossovers with previous versions? do they clone them or do they make temporary copies? can toons just do this like they would cosemtic sugery or is it stuido mandate only? And I don’t mind them not answering them either: It makes the dread later when one character is faced with the prosppect of being heavily altered personality and all that much more terrifying that we DON’T have clear answers.

Doris ends up barely changing only going with a red nose, which limits her prospects.. but what I like, and what ends up contrasting Roy.. is that Harold never seems to NOT be in Doris’ corner. He warns her that certain decisions will make things harder on her, sure. But he never once tells her not to do something or tries to push her into something harmful just for the sake of it. He’s a good guy, if a bit creepily drawn. But that’s not his fault.. the humans in this comic.. just don’t look great. Like I get their trying to make a clear line between toon and human, that’s fine, but there’s so many lines it haunts me. SO.. MANY.

Eventaully though Doris does get a break.. with a catch. She’ll be in a tiny toons style reboot, mentoring a younger versoin/reboot of herself that she’ll show the ropes. She ends up agreeing to it both because she dosen’t have other options, and because after watching Tiny Tunes and seeing Bugs great mentor relationship with Buster, she warms to the idea. And frankly I love that scene: her not being on board at first seeing daffy play the fool.. only to see the genuine good she could do for another toon.

So naturally this lasts all of five minutes before she actually meets her younger counterpart: Dawn, a snarky teen who mostly plays on her phone and when she does ask questions.. Doris dodges them because their massively uncomfortable. So yeah not a great day one though i’ve seen far worse. Doris also agrees to drive Dawn herself after seeing Dawn get an uber as she dosen’t trust them.. which.. fair. Doris was nearly sexually assaulted, again we’ll get to the details, and comes from a diffrent time. And even being told i’ts like a taxi I can see how someone coming from decades ago with only exposure up to say the late 80′s judging by bits and pieces we get later to the wider culture would find the entire idea of Uber or Lyft exestintally dreadful. I find the idea useful.. and I still find it exestially dreadful.

So Doris takes Dawn driving on Errands.. aka “drive around in circles while trying to desperatley avoid talking about your traumatic past and hope the cyncial teenager dosen’t notice”. Not suprisingly, Dawn notices and Doris agrees to go to one place and if Dawn hates it, she can leave. So Doris takes her to the old soda shope she used to go to, ran by the same guy. Things go well at first, Doris catches up with an old sorta uncle figure, Dawn finds a new friend thigns are fine.. till Doris goes to the bathroom and along the way notices a bunch of pinups of herself.. and the guy putting his hand on dawn.

Doris yanks her out of there and Dawn naturally notices things flipped from nostalgic memory trip to “i’m taking dawn bye!” really quick, but dosen’t pry, letting Doris have an out and agreeing to see a movie with her, the two finally bonding. The two’s relationship.. is really what makes this comic special. While “snarky character defrosts” isn’t NEW, having it be because she starts to see Doris less as a relic to contrast as she was clearly built to and more as a troubled but sweet woman as she is, is really charming. It helps the comic really get going as while the first fourth of it or so before dawn isn’t bad.. it is REALLY depressing. By design and it works better once yo’uve read the whole thing, but it can be hard to read. And i’m not knocking the work for being depressing: being dark and gloomy with a POINT I can respect like with Bojack Horseman’s darker moments. Same with say F is For Family or in comics term stuff like Watchmen. It’s not stuff i tend to gravitate towards, Bojack again being the exception, but it has a place and comics and animation, something this shares dna of both with, should be allowed to go there. It’s when it goes into grossout or edgelord nonsense to try and APPEAR adult that’s the problem.

Harold is happy at their progress and the twos next adventure has them running into betty, who dawn invites along just to torment Doris whose too polite to simply say “fuck off”. The two get Doris to actually try on outfits and while most of it dosen’t work, she does take on a gold accented necklace after Dawn tries a used place.

So things are going pretty well.. so naturally even with the comic slowly getting more optimstic.. the other shoe has to drop: They annoucned the reboot.. and this being the internet the redesign was met with mass scorn. The good news as Harold points out is it means Doris already has fans willing to defend her. The bad.. is that they have to change Dawn, something Doris objects to both due to her own past and due to having grown fond of her. Dawn seems fine with it. .but is fidgity all the next day. After all whatever happens .. it’ll change her. While the kid puts up a brave front.. it’s only because she knows she has no choice and only has so many hours left as herself.

Doris isn’t happy about any of this and when trying to pull out of the reboot fails, as Harold points out they still have the rights so this won’t save dawn and Harold KNOWS this is why she’s doing it and feels bad about the situation but hands are tied etc, tries appealing to Dawn , trying to get her to take a united front with Doris. Dawn harshly rejects this... she knows even togehter they can’t CHANGE this and she’s stuck. It’s a ncie, harsh take on how fans tend to treat reboots; by using dawn as a metaphor for the creatie process; instead of being given a chance to be what she’s meant to, Dawn is changed and ripped apart simply because people got up and arms. And don’t get me wrong sometimes it’s necessary to do so: some reboots geninely suck and somne redeigns are terrible. The backlash the Snow White Live Action film is getting for first still using dwarves as peopl ein caves and now for having them as magical creatures, not fixing the problem EITHER WAY, either playing into sterotypes about people with dwarfisim or erasing them from their own story, is warranted. But a lot of the time people spin out simply off a design without getting to know it: a lot of assholes complained about she ra, not getting the redeisgns were to go with the times and to you know, not sexualize a character, especially one who would be a minor. And rise of the tmnt got WAY more backlash than it deserved in hindsight. If you don’t like it on merit fine but many just hated changing up the turtle’s style and who was in charge.. in a franchise that has gone to far dumber places for far less reason so maybe wait to see if i’ts bad first. And spoilers it was not.

That’s more what Dawn represents: changing something to appease people barking at something they know nothing about. Or just complnaing because somethin’gs “too woke” or diverse” and on those last ones I offer a hardy go screw yourself. Having more diversity in a work is what people should strive for, not something to be hissed at and constnatly deridded.

So Dawn takes off in the rain.. and Doris soon finds out she just ran off. She thankfully finds a way around though, using Dawn’s social to track her to a club for teen toons and yelling the bouncer into letting her inside like a good mom should.

From here we get a FLOOD of great cameos: We see Starfire (in TTGO form which while it hurts to see, is a nice nod to the way reboots work here) on the dance floor, Heather from Total Drama talking with Pacifica Northwest (which begs the question of how age works here.. .questions for later) and see Jonsey side eyeing them. It’s a neat scene showing the teens here, who may not even be teens anymore thanks to how time works, letting off steam.

The one cameo I take exception to is Duncan from Duncanville, a recent fox show that i’ve tried but just can’t get into mostly for Duncan himself who, as the shows OWN DESCRIPTION put it is an agressively average teen.. and as such dosen’t really have much of a character in most episodes i’ve watched. He’s just a dumbass teenage son. I’ve seen it so many times in adult animation and sitcoms it physically hurts me.

And weird enough while the character is indeed one I clearly do not like, they get him wrong as he’s smugly taking a look at one of the characters from Splatoon’s ass. The creepy peak fits, he’s a teenage boy but the smug expressoin dosen’t as he’s more of a vauge dum dum than a horny guy and there are PLENTy of other teen characters, including again Jonsey who could’ve fit in that spot.

We get some more as Doris passes Velma and Hot Dog Water, awww, and bumps into Gwen from Total Drama, a faviorite of mine and one of the first boys of mine a show massacred, and also a show I should cover at some point, maybe when the reboot comes round. And also Rouge the bat. Which raises MORE questions as to how video game actors work in this universe and makes me want more of this universe to get the answers to that.

Doris finds Dawn who depsite having a soda is drunk.. and unsuprisingly someone dosed her drink. Who?

No not him. Though Benson from Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts makes a cameo trying to help.

In a clever twist turns out it was dosed with paint thinner, not enough to actually harm her but enough to attempted date rape her. So Dawn recovers and has to charge her phone. With seemingly only hours left together before the big reboot and their relationship reconciled, Doris takes dawn somewhere special and to one of my faviorite scenes of the work.

She takes her to a house.. that turns out to be a small safe haven/support group where female toons talk it out, ran by Red from the tex avery cartoons, an excellent choice. We also see a cameo by Alex from Totally spies and erin from the progressive comercials, and some more I honestly forgot.

But the point isn’t cameos.. but for Doris to FINALLY tell her story.. and finally tell us, and dawn, what drove her there. It’s why, while the flashbacks needed better pacing, I do feel this element works: while what drove her form it is a driving question, the way i’ts revealed, not in some big emotional breakdown but in doris deciding to take agency and share the story with dawn so she feels less alone as she faces something awful, gives her the power back.

As for what happened.. it’s thorughly unsettling. As you’d probably guess by Dori’s behavior.. we get into some sexual creepiness as Roy takes her to a party.. where TONS of classic cartoons are wrapped around creepy older men, clearly forced by their managers and circumstance to sleep with these creepy old dudes. What makes it unsettling is who their using: Characters like Toodles from ton and Jerry or Penelope from the pepe le pew cartoons. Pieces of my childhood forced to be pieces of meat for creepy men just to get by. It shows how even powerful women, huge monmentous sex symbols.. were forced to play powerless playthings just to suprise and it’s just.. horrific and uncomfortable.

So naturally Doris is forced into this with Marvin Acme.. yes the guy who died in roger rabbit. Yes.. REALLY. I’m not sure I agree with this.. I don’t doubt a 50′s toon tycoon would’ve been this creepy, that makes sense, I just feel making someone else’s character a sex monster crosses a line. If they already were close to one, fairs fair. But while Marvin’s a bit character, it feels weird to just not only plop him in here but have him nearly rape the pprotaganist, trying to put his finger inbetween her thighs.

Roy when Doris runs out. .is unhelpful, berating her for everything and being an abusive prick, with Doris running like hell and planning to quit, and not wanting ot make it this way... while Roy blames it on her. “if you were drawn like that why won’t you” is basically his logic

Doris is basicall blacklisted as a result and her final flashback is a heartbreaking one, not only seeing herself replaced on her gig.. but running into Minnie whose been redeisgned but still remembers her. So some memories remain , I just wonder if personality changes effect that and.. okay not the point. And Minnie gets another powerful moment as after hearing from Doris.. she hugs the poor girl, telling her to hang in there and this is not the end. That she should stand firm and keep going.. and i’ts heartbreaking because Doris tried but eventually just.. gave up, figuring her story was over.

But Dawn points out it’s not.. she has another chance and while she dosen’t say it it shows the one beauty of being a toon.. and of properties like this: there’s ALWAYS a chance something you love can come back and be done well. And ther’es always a chance for your dreams no matter how badly the world treats or tries to abuse you.

Dawn is inspired by this to try another approach and not give up herself on the ride.. and as such the next day, after the surgery.. the only changes are dawn looks slightly more like doris, having the gold necklace and bigger hands, but otherwise is the same. In a brilliant and heartwarming twist Dawn had filmed her interactions with Doris.. and since Doris didn’t open up to the world this gave Dawn a chance to show the world Doris. As such the show is retooled in a way that saves dawn and puts Doris from mentor supporting character to lead again: her teaching dawn, filiming their life and Dawn moving in with her. After so much suffering and heartbreak.. there’s a truly happy ending. Doris gets her daughter saved, Dawn finds hre place in the world and the two live happily ever after ending on watching one of Doris’ old commericals. Ther’es also a heartwarming bonus strip where Dawn tells her happy mothers daw. Awww

Final Thoughts: This comic is excellent and you can check out the whole run starting HERE and I highly recommend it. IT’s heartflet, engaging, well built and deserves a sequel, spinoff or adaptation asap. Not much else to say really I said what I needed to so thanks for reading and if you liked this review join my patreon

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A dollar a month at the least helps me pay for bills and helps me hit stretch goals. The owl house season 1 is next wink wink! Just one more patron joining and 5 dollar backers get a guarnateed reviw a month. So sign up today and i’ll see ya real soon.

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