Letters to the Editor
softdog
Published Letters: 186 Editor's Choice: 8
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All the action is in the letter column
[Read the article: Kansas O'Flaherty ... Secret Agent]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The visuals are insultingly bad (again there are many examples of ugly art as a stylistic choice, and this one fails) and the writing is worse and Salon should admit it's a failed experiment.
Which it won't as long as we keep clicking on it for the car wreck value, so it won't be until readers are bored as well as irritated before it gets dropped. Let me say right now that Salon would gain far more than it lost in pageviews if it showed some integrity and cancelled this strip.
The letters column, on the other hand, has a lot of fascinating short term potential:
1. How long will there be letters asking where Carol Lay went by people who haven't noticed she moved to friday? Will the responses to these letters be rude or witty?
2. How long with the hatefest continue in the letters column. Will it die out after three weeks as people give up entirely?Will it some sort of witty insiders club with a life of it's own? Will it transform into a troll fest? Will there be a backlash of Kansas defenders? Will the backlash be real or just knee-jerk contrarians?
3. Will the letters continue to provide recommendations of better comics? I hope so and I recommend SinFest http://www.sinfest.net/. Will debates break out over the quality of the recommendations, or will the sheer awfulness of Kansas trump make anything seem good by comparison?
These questions are fun, because they will actually be answered, unlike the central mystery of Kansas O'Flaherty: Why o why did Salon pick this crap?
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Some more recommendations
[Read the article: Kansas O'Flaherty ... Secret Agent]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thinking this is something "intricate" which will make sense when linked together is a delusion. It's a crappy webcomic with arrogant overuse of cut and paste and no plot beyond a set of running not quite gags and almost puns.
For an actual real adventure strip with characters, plot and satire, try Shooting War. http://shootingwar.com/ The comic is now out in expanded book form, but the original still holds up. Reading this, you get why Salon's anti-comic is an almost criminal waste of resources. Honestly, of all the possible things Toni and Tom could produce, nothing shows their contempt and privelege more than the crap they put up weekly.
I mean seriously - T&T? You two have to be at least partially aware of the reaction. What in the hell is your excuse for doing this? Low pay and minimal effort can't explain it - I've seen much better stuff done off the cuff. Do you not realize it demeans all of us?
Here's the address to the site I mentioned before, "Your Webcomic Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad": http://badwebcomics.blogspot.com/ Sometimes it was more purile than funny, but for sheer fury it was great - alas, it's on hiatus or this crap could be eviscerated.
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One Question Resolved
[Read the article: Kansas O'Flaherty ... Secret Agent]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Last week I wrote the real narrative was in the letters column, not the strip. One of the questions I posed was: "Will there be a backlash of Kansas defenders? Will the backlash be real or just knee-jerk contrarians?"
This plot point has been resolved - it's the knee-jerk contrarians: a. the "if you don't like it, don't read it" who cannot, of course, avoid reading the letters they don't like; and b) those so offended by people "wasting time" critiquing something trivial they waste their time denouncing this to prove their superiority. Now that I have mentioned them the snake eats its tail in the cycle of lulz-to-serious-business.
A knee jerk contrarian gets editors choice this week. Since last week was a harh put down, does this indicate Salon is being evenhanded or are they losing patience with the barrage of negative reactions? If it is the latter, then why don't they cancel the strip?
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So Joan, when are you going to address the Kansas O'Flaherty issue
[Read the article: The Clinton vs. Obama slugfest continues]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Honestly Joan, the art is at least half lazy cut and past of poorly done faces and incredibly bad writing which is neither funny nor exciting. There are many types of cartoons which are better, including ones crudely drawn on purpose.
It's a failure and at least 90% of the comments are against it. So how about getting rid of something which is tarnishing your brand? Or at least explain why you are running something of such obviously low quality?
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Too Little Too Late
[Read the article: Kansas O'Flaherty ... Secret Agent]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This strip is still a failure. It doesn't matter that Bachtell has picked up a few basic cartooning and decoded on one font, it's still shitty drawing and there no writing.
Scolding Toni for "info-dump" narrative style is pointless as there is no story. It's just a pastiche of spy cliches to hang jokes on. Which might be okay if there was any humor, be it "so inept it's funny" or "actual well written jokes". But there is naught but flailing.
There is no point in letting the strip develop, because it has no coherent basis to build upon. Real comic strips may change over time, but begin with a strong, coherent plan, design, story, etc. chosen before the first panel is published.
Kansas was just an ad hoc, lazy mess of scribbles and random spy "humor" sentences. It doesn't matter if they impose some vague sense on it later, it's still an amateurish failure. It's almost more insulting that they are making this half effort AFTER the strip began. Salon should have made them go through the draft phase and create a finished product before printing. I don't know why they didn't.