Sluggy Freelance was once an awesomely funny webcomic, but lately it has caused my eyes to glaze over as Pete delves into very weird and nonsensical stories that don’t even involve the main cast. I thought he was getting back on track with the That Which Redeems storyline, but the ones since then have been a horribly unfunny attempt at comic relief, and have largely ignored an important development with Torg.
Just the other day, Sluggy had its 8th birthday. 8 years is a long damn time to run a daily strip without getting stale, and sadly I think the freshness is pretty far gone. Take a year off, Pete. Recharge your creative batteries. And for Pete’s sake don’t give us any more stories about hygenically challenged cloners or alien space caribou time pirates.
I don’t think it’s staleness so much as focusing on characters and (by extension) storylines that nobody gives a damn about.
Dimension of Pain? Are any of our characters there? No? I don’t give a damn.
Bun-Bun, Torg, Riff, Zoe, Gwynn, Kiki, and Sam not present? No? Does it involve Santa?
No?
Then why the hell is it on the site?
I agree. I tend to not read the site for a long time and then I’ll come in and catch up. I’ve tried to catch up on the latest stuff and…well, I don’t care.
In my own case, Bun-Bun is what made the strip for me. And he seems to have vanished forever. And he’s not even been replaced by the second-tier favorites.
IMO, this rant would have been more topical a couple weeks ago. Ocean’s Unmoving was boring, Living Conditions was worse and 28 Geeks Later was terrible. That week with Skippy and the Fate Spider, however, definitely piqued my interest. I really want to see where Pete’s going with that, although I do fear that he’s going to try and tie too many elements together and end up with a storyline that collapses under its own weight.
Did you miss the Ocean’s Unmoving storyline? Or have you just blocked all memory of it from your mind? (I certainly wouldn’t blame you)
Actually, I plow through the mediocrity of the pre-Oceans Unmoving storyline and can’t force myself through even the first week’s worth of Oceans Unmoving.
So, for me, Bun-Bun has been gone a long time.
Then again, some people must still have some fond memories because on BF2 I couldn’t register the name “Bun-Bun” or “Bun-BunTheLop”.
A few weeks ago, I went back and re-read roughly the first three years worth of comics. It was thoroughly depressing to see how much Abrams has slipped. I still read it every day, but it’s no longer something I file under “Daily Joys in Life” (like see my wife when I get home from work, or PvP).
That was almost interesting, but there was far too much blah blah blah going on. And now, of course, we have another lame Harry Potter parody. It’s not even timed well; the DVD for Prisoner of Azkaban came out neary a year ago. Get on with the main story, dammit.
Having once been active on their forums, I’ve not read Sluggy for over 2 years now because I felt Pete’s humour and stories were slipping considerably. I still have an email address over there, so when I check that once every two weeks or so, I usually take a quick peek at the comic. That Bun-Bun/pirate/weird-caribou-thing storyline looked absolutely dire! And now he’s back to Torg Potter, one of the main reasons I stopped reading in the first place.
:dubious: “It” in this case being your credibility as a comic writer, Pete?
Oceans Unmoving, enh. 28 Geeks Later, sure, okay. Another Torg Potter parody, well, hey, it’s your comic.
But I’m willing to give him one more chance, just one, because of this:
I no longer check Sluggy before going to bed as a matter of habit, but I’ll keep reading it semi-daily just to finally get back to Oasis and Aylee. More Torg and Zoe and Riff and Gwynn, fewer one-off storylines that end up with one or two filler strips of the gang before another inane plot develops.
To be fair, the Saturday Suicide Bikini strips are pretty old-school Sluggy.
Personally, I think the only thing Pete needs to do to fix Sluggy is to get back to short stories and forget about the high-falootin’ multi-month psuedo-literature arcs. There are still some good jokes buried in the daily strips, but the burden of carrying a plot just slows things down. Torg, Riff, and Stuff That Goes Boom™ is all you need…
The Saturday strips are done by Clay Yount these days, not Abrams. I agree tho, they’re good.
Perhaps thats a sign he needs to refocus the strip on the main characters and not go off on bizarre tangents where he introduces fifty new minor characters…I mean, read through the archives, and that’s where all the humour is.
I still shudder thinking about the horror of Meanwhile in the Dimension of Pain Saturdays. Bikini Suicide Frisbee Saturdays are much better - actually, I think it’s pretty sad that they’re usually better than the main strip these days.
I still enjoy it, but I think Sluggy has become one of those strips that’s a lot more fun to read in archives rather than once a day. At this point I have enough invested in the characters that it would take a lot to get me to give it up.
I think, too, that people are misremembering just how good it used to be. There’s some real genius in the archives, but there’s a bunch of stuff that isn’t all that good.
Does that mean the original Dimension of Pain (how appropriate) guy is gone or something? Because I’ll admit after the first month or two I just started skipping the Saturdays.
-Joe
Some people, maybe. I only started reading the strip a few years ago, so it’s not like I’m trying to remember back 8 years. I know there was some junk back then too (like the extended look at the intrigues of Christmas elves :rolleyes: ), but it wasn’t as common.
Yeah, he’s back to just doing his own comic these days. Bruno the Bandit is marginally better than his DoP stuff, but I don’t really care for it.
Yup. Clay Yount of Rob & Elliot is doing Bikini Suicide Frisbee Saturdays, or comics set back in that time - 1999 or so, with the gang still living in the apartment complex and Sam married to a non-vampiric Valerie. Here’s the most recent one, which is Rembrandt in comparison to the Meanwhile In The Dimension Of Who Gives A Damn.