April 19, 2008
At, Not With
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!
I'm not laughing with Scott Stantis. Nope, definitely laughing at him.
The reason: can you imagine someone who didn't read yesterday's strip trying to make sense of this? For starters, Mr. Laziness devotes the first three panels to a bunch of scribbles that are supposed to be a big rock or a cliff or something (and a cactus tossed in as an afterthought).
Then we get to the masterpiece: the fourth panel. Since I've been reading PC for several years now I know what Stantis was attempting to portray: Carmen is attempting to videotape Winslow trying to fly. But Stantis, who's a terrible artist to begin with, decided that he was going to try and cram all of that into a single panel. So that leaves us with Carmen holding something square - maybe it's a box of donuts, or maybe she's carrying some groceries. We only get half of Winslow's head along with what I think is supposed to be a banner - it's hard to tell because it could also be a tube of toothpaste squirting out half of Winslow's head.
I feel bad for the people who didn't read PC yesterday so they have no idea what's happening. Why is Carmen carrying a box? Why is Winslow smooshed into the desert? Was he up on the rock and jumped off? What is Carmen trying to run? So many questions, so little to laugh about.
Instead, we here at Shrubville can finally have a good chuckle. We can laugh at how poorly Stantis draws. Crack up at how, like your average fifth grader, he thought he'd cheat and eat up the first three panels with scribbles so the teacher would think he did a lot of work. We can even guffaw at the idea that Stantis thinks a video camera these days looks like a shoe box with a ball at the end.
But Stantis does get the last laugh - he gets paid for this crap, and no matter how little work he does or how unfunny he is, he'll always get paid because he's a conservative comic strip artist and papers are afraid to drop him for fear of being painted as biased by Republican blowhards. Congrats, Scotty - he who laughs last, does last best. Too bad you're the only one laughing because you think Prickly City is actually funny.
