A large orange cone in the middle of the Internet

I read several web comics. I've even been adding some newspaper comics to that stack, but I only read them using the carefully selected ironic filter provided by a guy in Baltimore: Josh Reads The Comics So You Don't Have To. More zippers, mule!

Questionable Content has a guest strip today, so I followed the link to that artist's comic. Oh man, it chunked.

I'm a frighteningly patient man when it comes to cartoons. I have read the entire archives of a couple hundred comics. I enjoy watching an artist's skill evolve over the course of a comic or watching a long story arc spin strange offshoots. I kept all of this in mind as I gave up on the archives for this comic within seven posts. I want to warn you before you fall prey.

The comic has three major flaws: art, plot and narration:

• The artist has a hard time getting perspective right: even if the point of view is from above, everyone looks the same but has more hair in view. Bodies look contorted and heads never show a clear facial expression.
  
  
• The premise is intolerably paranoid. This girl thinks she's being spied on by the Feds, so she looks online to find it's true. I haven't even given the story a chance to assert where there is a magical web site that would list that kind of information but I guess it would slow down the bad storyline if she had to find out the old-fashioned way. Eventually she hooks up with her specially selected observer and hilarity is meant to ensue. Plot holes much like these are the reason I do not mourn the end of the Star Trek realm.
  
  
• The dialogue isn't merely preachy and stilted -- it's inane! It's a plot point that the government plants a chip in a Fed's head that makes him look like he's talking to himself when he's actually having a computer session. Oh lordy that's barely got a promise which it cannot deliver. We've gone from bad TNG style to bad comedy of errors style in the 1970s Disney vein.

So yeah, it's intolerable. I'll admit that writing about the lousiness makes me want to read it a little more because I hope I'll be proven wrong about the plot. Naw... I shouldn't.

-catty words, Ps/d

P.S.: I tried again and got maybe two more days of stuff. I couldn't take the lack of parsable faces.