Letters to the Editor
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Am I plebian for not getting it?
You know, I gave it the benefit of the doubt for one more week than that awful premier. I have apparently wasted that benefit of a doubt.
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Please stop running this comic
Don't get me wrong, i'd love an extra comic every week, but choose something else. Maybe you could lure Ward Sutton back to the comics business, or just give Chris Onstad some more money.
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Normally I wouldn't care
Because it's not that interesting. But coming from Salon, there never anything benign about anything that includes "Mossad". I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. And I won't be shocked.
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Last week...
...she mentioned St. Barts; this week, it's St. Barths. Note to the writer: if you're going to name-drop, at least be consistent-- other than being consistently awful, I mean.
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Still awful...
But incrementally, almost imperceptibly, less awful than last week's. At this rate it will be up to bad in just a few decades. Maybe they could get Piglia to do the writing? At least then it would be obnoxious instead of just stupid.
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hmmmm....
...Secret Agent is almost like dropping into the middle of a long-running soap opera. One that has no apparent point or drive, but long-running none the less. Obviously Salon vetted the first run (right??), so this will go somewhere, sometime, somehow.
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Disaster is Schlo-motion
This is so dreadfully bad it defies description. Salon has jumped the shark.....
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Dear Kansas O'Flaherty...Secret Agent,
Stop it. You're embarrassing yourself. You're just embarrassing yourself in front of the whole class. Go home and think about what you've done.
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Okay, why not go with a GOOD comic that isn't universally hated by your readership?
You could make a deal to get Order of the Stick
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0506.html
Or Goblins
http://www.goblinscomic.com/
Or any number of comics which do not actually outright insult your readership and make their eyes bleed.
Seriously this post ironic crap (And yes I do get that the joke is in how bad and hackneyed it is) is not funny it is just downright terrible.
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I 10th
Yes this is embarrasingly bad, ill considered, badly elaborated, hastily drawn, poorly written, and just plain wtf. For a minute there I thought Camille Paglia was behind this, but even she isn't this bad. Ok, yes she is this bad. Get it together Salon, there's about a billion cartoonists out there with talent.
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Awfulness is one thing....
... but bad spelling is beyond the pale! What is worse; it's just so inconsequential.
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Maybe...
Someone at Salon is being blackmailed into doing this. Is there a blue dress we should know about or something?
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Nomination
I'd like to add these to the nominations list for replacement strips:
Get Your War On by David Rees
http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war69.html
Bad Reporter by Don Asmussen
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/11/14/DDASMUSSENBR.DTL
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Speaking of secret agents....
Thank you for supporting comic artists, but this one, so far, I'd just as soon be watching Erin in one of those insurance commercials.
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Wait.
Sorry. I missed the elite party at which one had to be in order to get all these inside jokes. There ARE jokes, right? Because it's not really self-evident. I'm going on inference, since it's some kind of comic.
Maybe you could include a FAQ answering such helpful questions as "what the fuck is this?" and "are you high?"
And what happened to Carol Lay?
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@Neimon
1) LOL!!
2) "Way Lay" runs on Thursday or Wednesday these days, IIRC.
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It's usually not the smart play...
...to toss an audience into a strip without a least a little background/context. The movie THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION was the last (and only) time it was done fairly well--and even still it was kinda hard to catch up on some of the backstory.
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Come come, people
Granted that nothing has happened yet ... and we've been dropped into the middle of a story that is not inherently interesting (but for that code-word "Mossad") ... and it doesn't even have the reaction dog in "Blondie" ....
there ARE points in its favor. It has the potential to go somewhere (anywhere, any somewhere, some anywhere), and it is laid out in computer screen-friendly format, unlike that Opus 'toon, which is annoyingly horizontal.
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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?
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P. U.
I see that Schlesinger and Bachtell both have busy little bios. Perhaps, then, it won't be so painful for them to hold onto their day jobs.
There is a creeping cuteness threatening Salon--like those unbearably self-regarding little human-interest pieces on NPR (you know the ones)--but this strip isn't a creeper; it's a full-on mistake.
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Not only is it bad,
it's apparently being drawn in MS paint of something. Couldn't find someone to letter the strip? That awful font makes it look like a high school english project with nowhere to go.