Letters to the Editor
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All the action is in the letter column
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?