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May 12, 2007
Luckily She Brought A Wheelbarrow To The Tattoo Parlor
Scott Stantis cashes in his Prickly City paycheck.
Does Stantis have somewhere else he needs to be? Because this week has been a case study in "phoning it in."
After wasting THREE days hammering home the exact same point (Harry Reid is a surrender monkey because he lives in the real world where 70% of us, including the former generals on the ground, realize that Iraq can't be won militarily) we get a stupid one-off where Winslow is wheeled home by Carmen after realizing needles are involved in getting a tattoo. Yeah, Winslow is apparently THAT stupid.
But what makes it worse is how poorly drawn the strip is today. We hear at the Ville o' the Shrub have always given Stantis a hard time about his drawing abilities, although we gave him a break after we heard about his shoulder surgery. When he returned things improved for a week or two, but ever since he's reverted even further back than when things looked like a 12-year-old scribbled the strip during fifth period study hall.
Things that show Stantis is as lazy as ever when drawing Prickly City:
- Carmen's hair. What's up with the pigtails today? They jut out of her neck like Frankenstein's bolts. And where's her infamous expanding part?
- Carmen's eyebrows. One is high up in the middle of her forehead, the other one three times bigger than her right eye. At first I thought the person who had colored it smudged the paper - nope. That's all Stantis.
- Carmen appears to have lost weight. Again. Winslow is fatter than ever. What is he feeding these two? For a guy who bitches and moans about kids being fat, he can't decide what his characters should look like from day to day.
- The less said about drunk/passed out Winslow, the better. I guess "scribbled" is the best way to draw "queasy." Then again, half the time everything in Prickly City is "scribbled," which makes anyone who reads this garbage queasy.
- Stantis actually puts his signature right by Carmen's foot on display for everyone to see. Like he's PROUD of the crap he drew today.
I don't think it can be said enough that Stantis gets paid for doing this. Is there another strip out there not only written as poorly as Prickly City but drawn this badly as well? Let me clarify: one that's in major newspapers across the country, and getting in more newspapers every month? How pathetic is that? There HAS to be a conservative comic strip artist out there itching to get his or her strip out there, and it has to be better than what Stantis has been serving up lately. Does Stantis use the excuse "well you only dislike it because it's conservative" with his editors too? And they buy it? Is that the only reason he still has a job? Or is the newspaper industry so desperate to fill up space it actually thinks people LIKE Prickly City?
Again the call goes out: if you're a fan of Prickly City, and you read Shrubville because you think we're idiots for criticizing it and should just "lighten up" and enjoy it because it's good, please - tell us why. For the love of god, please, somebody, tell me why Prickly City STILL exists after all this time. Because for the life of me I can't figure out why.
