« | Main | I'd Say We Wish That We Knew What We Know Now When We Were Younger, But 1. We Were Never Younger, Just Less Handsome and 2. We Did Know, Kinda Like The News About A Middle Eastern Country & Their Nuclear Weapons Capabilities »
December 04, 2007
What's Zero Times Anything?
Has Toby been laid off or something? Did he do half the work on Prickly City and Stantis never told us?
Carmen/Stantis is once again bitching about newspapers being forced to scale back their staffs in a cost-cutting measure, so settle in for a week of this. Winslow is still gone, which means that Carmen is going to have to "work twice as hard for the same amount of money and be pithy and funny."
From the American Heritage Dictionary:
pith-y (adj): Precisely meaningful; forceful and brief: a pithy comment.
Has Stantis EVER been pithy? We know he's never been funny. Is he suggesting that Winston was the funny one and she was the pithy one?* If that's the case, mission not accomplished. So no amount of "hard work" as our President says is going to salvage this wasteland of neo-con blather.
(*This statement by Carmen would have been much easier to decipher if Stantis had simply underlined the word "and" between pithy and funny. But nope - guess we'll never know what he really meant. Probably because he was once again afraid to take a stand on something and admit that Carmen isn't ever really funny. But then again, neither is Wilson.)
As was pointed out in the comments yesterday, this is pretty much ground already covered by Stantis. Several times. Back in June he had their jobs outsourced to India. And in October he talked about Rupert Murdoch buying out the newspaper that they "work" at. I still don't understand the concept Stantis is going with here - that somehow Carmen and Winslow are employed by the local Prickly City newspaper, and that's why they're in the strip. Are they characters working locally, or for Stantis? Doesn't matter. Prickly City has never been pithy and it's never been funny. It's just been a waste of space. And he can work twice as hard as he already does, there's no way Stantis is going to make something out of this nothing.
Comments
Furnace,
I agree. However, I am personally very disappointed by this week's series so far. Maybe it's because it's a non-political issue I'm interested in and that I can side with Stantis on, or maybe it's because I figured that Stantis can't possibly botch something he has a personal stake in (he works for a newspaper). Either way, I didn't really care that it was a re-run premise (Winslow leaving the strip), I was just expecting some good material.
The most frustrating thing about today's strip is not that it isn't funny -- it's that he doesn't even bother to make a decent point about the decline of the newspaper (no, I refuse to say "demise"). Instead, he just wastes it on a lame punchline.
"Bloom County" characters on strike when the papers want to print the comics smaller, anyone?
Posted by: Chris at December 4, 2007 05:40 PM
"Has Toby been laid off or something?"
That would explain the end of the podcasts. Days since last PC Podcast: 138.
Posted by: Snowman at December 4, 2007 07:29 PM
