My Most Specific and Yet Most Meaningless Post EVER

Oh dear god, it’s a post about comic strips.  Run for your miserable lives.

(Please note that you may not understand some of this comic-related terminology, and you will certainly not have heard of some of the strips I reference; I will not be explaining anything because I like to imagine you getting frustrated and shouting “Damn you, Hats!” at your computer.)

(Also note that this will be long, partly personal and/or biographical, and incredibly boring to 87.3% of all of my readers.  It will also be quite possibly the geekiest thing I ever write, with the exception of my efforts to translate Dune into Latin.)

(I’m not kidding about the translation project.  But, as usual, that’s a tale for a different time.)

Way back in my halcyon youth, I was the biggest Garfield fan in the whole elementary school.  My friends and I would pore over the books during lunch (and sometimes in class) and try to draw the characters.  Eventually, I started reading other comics on the Funny Pages (and please kill me if I ever use that phrase in this context again) and began finding new favorites: Foxtrot, Dilbert, and (for the few months our paper printed it) The Big Picture.  More recently, Lio and Bliss have been added to the ones I look forward to every day, as well as Get Fuzzy and Pearls Before Swine.

My first foray into the enormous world of online comic strips was Press Start To Play, one of the earlier “two gamer” comics on the web.  In retrospect, it wasn’t all that great, but it did have one of the most memorable strips I can think of, and if you don’t get it you need to play more vidjeo games.

These few priceless comic gems are swamped, like everything else in life, with a nearly endless ocean of crap.  For every Calvin and Hobbes there are a dozen Family Circuses and Marmadukes, neither of which has had a fresh idea in god knows how long.  Or all of the “serious” strips who apparently were never taught how to end a sentence with a period, and instead only use exclamation points!  Or the insane number of terrible gaming comics on the web, almost all of which consist of stolen vidjeo game sprites and incredibly weak gags.

Consider Secret Asian Man.  To put it plainly: it’s not funny.  Nor is it groundbreaking, or enlightening, or much of anything else.  I can understand the idea behind it, and I know that racism still exists in many forms today, but the strips all blend together into one huge tirade.  The politically-correct nature of the strip gets rather obnoxious in large doses - our Japanese-American hero has three friends (one black, one white, and one East-Asian-American) and is married to an Italian woman.  Too bad there isn’t anyone in a wheelchair; the disabled are often underrepresented in the comic industry.

Or, as a randomly chosen webcomic example, look at Cheshire Crossing.  Now, while I admit that a comic about a trio of well-known girls capable of otherworldly travel is a decent idea, the sheer amount of copy-paste in each page is staggering.  It doesn’t help that there are… let’s see… maybe two original characters?  And the personalities are even more stereotypical than those in most comics.

I can go on forever.  Curtis reuses the same fifteen scenes in an endless cycle of poor storytelling, A Softer World consistently fails to elicit any emotion whatsoever from me, Mallard Fillmore is best described by its parody in the Daily Show “America” book (“Ooops! I forgot to tell a joke!”)…

“Why,” you ask, “are you telling us this?  What makes you think we care about anything you have to say, especially when it comes to poorly-researched reviews of practically unknown comic strips?”

And my detailed and complex response to your intriguing question is this:

¯\(°_o)/¯