Wallace White has a large penis.

This is canon. It has been referenced both in the strip itself and in supplemental artwork. It isn't quite a clown penis*, but it is noticeably larger than average.

I've caught some flak for that fact, and perhaps rightly so. The whole black-guy-with-big-dick stereotype is crude and dehumanizing, it is othering in the highest degree, especially in (ugh) mainstream porn. As with the satyrs of old, the large penis is generally presented as something bestial, something indicative of animal urges and unthinking carnal excess.

But of course, we don't live in ancient Greece. In modern Western culture, large penises are lauded and sought-after, connoting bravery and strength. In the aforementioned porn, this leads to a strange dichotomy, in which well-hung black men are somehow simultaneously brutal savages and superior Ubermenschen. Better thinkers than I have written thinkpieces about the phenomenon, and I'm not going to comment on it further because Wallace doesn't have a big dick because he's black.

This is something I've only come to realize fairly recently. In my ongoing retroactive Freudian analysis of my own work (webcomics: cheaper than therapy), I've realized that I don't write Wallace as other. The Wallace White character is yet another fragment of myself.

Wallace White is the perfected me.

He is not a Pan or a Priapus, but rather an Adonis. Wallace White - blackness and gayness and left-handedness notwithstanding - is what I want to be when I grow up. Or, rather, he's what I'd like to have been, had I grown up the way I should have.

He's attractive. He's professional. He dresses well. He's musical. He's athletic. He's a giving lover. He's a supportive partner. He has abs you could grate cheese on.

And perhaps most notably, he's an artist, a freelance independent graphic designer. Almost all of the major Leftover Soup characters have jobs - careers - in their chosen field, doing something they enjoy and are good at... unrealistically so, really... but only Wallace and Lily are their own bosses, and only Wallace can do his job without employees. Wallace does commission work of all sorts for both private and corporate clients, can choose which projects to take on and which to ignore, and makes enough steady money at it to support both himself and his boyfriend (Simon is a student, his income is negligible).

At this point in my artistic career, I'm pulling in enough from the comic that I've been able to drop to part-time hours at the call-center (my undying thanks both to Patreon and to all my patrons), but I'm still a ways off from that. I'm also shorter and fatter and weaker and paler than Wallace is.

But hey, at least we share the same hairstyle.

*As we all know, the size of a man's manhood is generally in proportion to his shoe size, and inversely proportional to the size of his vehicle. Clowns have riduculously large shoes and ridiculously tiny cars, hence the need for baggy pants.

"Ridiculously" is the key word, though. Clown shoes and clown cars are not practical. A "clown penis", therefore, is a penis that may be esthetically pleasing, but is too large or unwieldy to be of any practical use.

Now you know.