Letters to the Editor
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Carol Lay waylaid?
Kindly divert Kansas O'Flaherty from her mission to save Shlomo and have her retrieve "Way Lay" instead.
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This is just terrible.
There's nothing redeeming about it. Digitized graphics. Bad computer lettering. No humor. Bad writing. This isn't a comic. It's just bits and bytes.
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Way Lay Mislaid?
Sooooooooooo..........are you going to tell us what happened to Miss Lay?
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Sure, maybe Miss Lay was slipping a little
...but if this is an indication of things to come, I'd still take my chances with her weekly offerings.
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Carol Lay, not political enough for Salon
Keef caved but Carol would not. The Politburo kicked her to Kolyma.
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Add me to the list...
...of those asking "where's Carol?"
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Holy Pretentiousness, Batman!
Contrary to norm, I applaud the introduction of this comic. It better reflects the true soul of Salon. Even more than Way Lay, which I found vastly inferior to Tom the Dancing Bug and even The K Chronicles, this comic reeks of elitism and comfort.
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um... is this a joke?
Is this an actual graphic serial adventure, or an early April Fool's joke?
What artist could introduce his lovely new heroine by literally cutting & pasting her entire head from frame 1 to frame 3?
Is the flat, unfunny, cramped font supposed to somehow make fun of comic artists that take the time to hand-letter? And is the tick-mark "dumb-quote" in the title part of the gag?
I can count several bits of overt humor on the page... but the text is dominated by what seem like inside jokes.
The final panel was the creators' last chance to let us in on the intent of this comic (is it making fun of anything? Does it has a quirky heart beneath the blathering text? Does it conceal a deep snarky self-hatred of liberals? A wink to a particular sub-culture?)... but instead we get an empty non-sequitur. And not only that, but the fact that we are told "To be continued..." implies that this is not literally a page from a multi-page story like a comic book (which assumes you are going to turn the page and doesn't need to tell you), but that this page is intended to stand on its own, at least for a while. In that case the loose pacing and lack of credible setup of a premise mark this page as either an attempt to make fun of me the audience, or perhaps a half-assed amateurish creative failure.
There are many legitimate comic artists out here trying to do good work. Yucky choice Salon.
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Intentionally bad?
Even if this was intentionally bad, it was a poor attempt to be intentionally bad. If a half-decent cartoonist worked really, really hard to make something lame, it probably wouldn't be this lame.
Nip it in the bud.
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I didn't think there was a comic more pointless and less funny...
than Waylay, but you've found it. Keep looking.
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You've got to be kidding
I was never a fan of Carol Lay, but at least amid her creepy weirdness there was occasional humor. This is badly drawn, hard to read, trite and boring. C'mon Salon, you can do much, much better. How about xkcd? OK, I'm a computer geek, but almost anything would be better than this drivel.
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Bring back WayLay!
I couldn't read this. It didn't make sense, the artwork was 1) sparse, 2) poor and 3) poorly laid out, the font was cramped and difficult to read, the dialogue nonsensical, and I've still got no idea what is going on and I have no inclination to try to figure out what's going on.
Bring back Carol!
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Ugh
WHERE did this sludge come from? I mean, too lazy to do their own lettering? If you're looking for something, how about Greg Fiering's Migraine Boy? This is easily the worst strip I've seen in years.
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Prefer WayLay
It's a pity this new serial is in place of, instead of in addition to, Carol Lay's Tuesday strip. It's probably too early to tell whether this new strip will pan out. But I will miss the sensitivity that often appeared in Lay's strip. It's a pity to lose it.
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You dump Carol Lay...and keep Tom Tomorrow? Is this sponsored by Xerox?
I don't know about Lay "slipping," but doing a badly-drawn, probably Xeroxed graphic novel - a parody of a comic book action heroine done by someone who knows damn near NOTHING about comic book action heroines - is a slap in the face.
Lay may be meandering and occasionally too cute, but damn it, she draws the whole strip without copying one panel six times. Perhaps, since you're keeping the egotistical jerk Tom Tomorrow who ALSO copies all his panels throughout his strip, this is a covert ad by Xerox.
This strip reads like something from Saturday Night Live or Dennis Miller Live. And that is NOT a compliment.
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Azerbaijam?
Perleeze! Or maybe I am missing some postmodern irony here?
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Punchline next week?
I can only assume that something so relentlessly terrible must be the setup for some kind of punchline.
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CAROL LAY.
Come on, people. If you're really going to do something like this, don't we get an explanation?
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I hate this already
I live in New York. I get enough obnoxious real estate and lifestyle porn from every quarter. I don't need it from the funny pages. This sucks cock.
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Losing our Way
I'm sure this comic will have its redeeming qualities, even if they aren't apparent yet. Salon isn't clueless, after all. But I really hate to think that Way Lay is gone. Her style was unique. Sure it disappointed at times (that whole Miss Treated series) but every Tuesday morning I never stopped looking forward to see what she would do next. I'll be searching for you Carol.
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Can't you run this new cartoon on Friday instead? And not replace Carol Way?
Love to give a new cartoon a chance - but you don't have to replace another good one to do it.
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It literally hurts my eyes to look at it.
And it hurts my good taste and intelligence to read it, and I'm exactly the target audience this sort of thing is trying to reach.
For both of these reasons (but primarily the first, because no matter if the writing vastly improved -- and it would have to -- it still physically hurts me to look at those drawings), I will never be reading this again.
Carol's work doesn't always work for me (whose does?), but she looks like an uber-genius next to this pretentious, meaningless, badly-executed tripe.
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Kansas O'Flaherty...Pretentious Name-Dropper
Well, that was a minute and a-half of my life I'll never get back again...
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this required the talents of TWO?
One person to write without focus and the other to draw with the proper amount of laziness?
I can only assume the writer was too good an artist to be allowed to draw, and vice versa.
I actually quite like Waylay- not that it's funny, but because the structure is usually poetically whole in some strange, engaging way- and the art is superb.
This is the worst thing I've ever seen on Salon.