camwyn | (no subject)

Quite a few months ago- heck, more than a year ago, really, now that I think about it- I gave up on reading the comic strip GPF. When I had started with it, it had been funny. It reminded me of Dilbert without the same level of poisonous cynicism that fuels the Dilbert comic engine. Somewhere along the way, though, the cartoonist decided it was time to do Big Story Arcs, and I started to lose interest. He started doing things with the strip's Designated Evil Character that were probably meant to make her Interesting and Complex, but instead came out Unnecessarily Overdone and Annoying. Eventually, he started putting up notes on his site to the effect of 'if you don't like this storyline come back in three weeks and we'll be back to the usual'.

I left. Strike one.

Oh, I checked on it every so often just to see if it was getting funny again. And sometimes it would be, and other times I'd open the page and he'd be doing Complicated Story again, and I'd go away. Then he started trying to get Socially Relevant and do a Prejudice Is Bad storyline with the main character's girlfriend's father. Social relevance is one thing and can occasionally be used to devastating effect by cartoonists, but his use of it had all the subtlety of a bag of hammers. I pulled my turtleneck up over my face and left. Strike two.

I poked my head in a few days ago. He's doing backstory, and it involves the main character's girlfriend explaining why she's had a 'no nookie before marriage' policy. Which is fine... except that when I went through the past two weeks in the archives, he seems to have spent three days on an attempted rape scene and explaining it.

We have gone beyond strike three and are now into the territory of whatever it is that causes a team to relinquish the ability to score in cricket, okay? Even Funky "Did I mention we're going to do an entire month of comics on land mines in Afghanistan now?" Winkerbean left the entire thing up to an unfinished, implication-laden sentence in the last panel of one strip, then jumped to the consequences in the next day's strip. I was willing to give GPF another chance because it had been funny for a time, but... no more. As far as I'm concerned it's just one more Keenspot strip that isn't worth looking at.

(Not that I object to dramatic comics or serious comics in general, but that's what Clan of the Cats is for. And not that all of Keenspot isn't worth looking at, but I'm there for Adventurers, Bruno, Dominic Deegan, Queen of Wands, and Two Lumps for the most part.)