There’s a line between charmingly bad (Hyperbole & a Half, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Cyanide & Happiness) and just plain shitty. This comic isn’t on the good side of that line.
You seem to be confusing “simple” with “bad”. XKCD has simple art: Just a few lines to define a person. But the lines all go where Munroe wants them, and they effectively convey the emotions and personalities of the people depicted, so it’s nonetheless good art. Similarly for, say, South Park.
But that’s not what this art is. The artwork in Reply All isn’t simple-- The characters have eyelashes, for crying out loud, and five-fingered hands, both of which are extremely rare for comic strips. But even with all that detail, the artist still fails to convey any emotion or personality, and it looks like she just can’t control the pen (or more likely, mouse). Thus, this art is bad.
My first thought was “MS Paint” as well. Christ, that strip is bad: unfunny with the most amateurish art possible.
How does someone that bad manage to get published???
She’s a lawyer at the DHS. The editor was probably given the choice: publish this crap or never fly again.
Never heard of this strip before this post. On her website http://www.replyallcomic.com/ she comes across as a likeable enough person to me in the blog posts. I just don’t really think that comics are the right medium for her style of writing/humor.
There are also some examples at the bottom of the main page of her male artist friend’s “bootified” drawings of her characters. I have to say that I think the guy’s take on the comic art is better even though as a straight gal I am not into cheesecake drawings. 
The first time I saw sex depicted in XKCD (this one, to be exact), I was astounded that the stick figures depicted exactly what Munroe wanted them to and that they actually played into the joke of the strip.
Reply All wishes it were that funny and well drawn.
Up to now I thought the comic in the Metro called Buckles was bad (a dog, seemingly from Canada, with no discernable sense of humour). But Reply All is truly dreadful.
If she did it for her own personal enjoyment, well, fine. OK.
But she accidentally hit the “Reply All” button and now everyone has to suffer. She must be so embarrassed.
UPDATE
The voting started a couple days ago, and runs through December 17. Dogs of C Kennel is beating Reply All 94% to 6%!
Interesting insight, since apparently it’s drawn by the same guy that currently draws B.C.
McKay must’ve had a cyborg hand to draw all those Nemos and the other strips not to mention every frame of Gertie. Contrast it to Davis, who has a factory to turn out 3 daily panels of Garfield.
I see the humor. It’s not shockingly funny, or particularly amusing. Nor is it really that original. It’s the kind of thing you observe and comment in your daily life. Maybe lament about to your friends. “Geez, my mom is so neurotic, she makes a list of ways to improve her life, and they’re all things for me to do.” Isn’t that half of Seinfeld?
That said, the artwork is truly dreadful - worse than early Dilbert.
The joke is that mom is calling while on the toilet. The moments of incoherence are when she’s grunting out a log. Thus the “fiber” comment.
My theory is that some editor believes that a certain demographic will find the strip funny, even if they do not. Since they believe that, say, 25-35-year-old single women will identify with the strip and find it Hi-larious, they don’t worry too much that they think it’s terrible.
One hopes that nobody thinks Mallard Filmore is funny, but lots of editors probably believe that Fox News addicts literally roll out of their chairs laughing at his subtle digs and wry observations on the state of the country.
I don’t think so. I think it just means that she’s constipated sometimes.
Whiny remark.
Whiny retort.
Whiny remark.
Wry punch line.
I don’t believe merely being constipated leads one to be “clueless and slow and slightly confused”, whereas if you’re trying to squeeze out a log, it’s more difficult to process what you’re being told, and you have to pause and hold your breath, and the person on the other end of the line might think you were slightly distressed. At the very least, it’s difficult to carry on a smooth conversation.
I think I can tell what she’s going for in that second one. My sister has a tendency to blab the ending of/plot twists to work of fiction. If you say something like “Oh, I’ve been meaning to see/read that, how is it?” she’s likely to answer with something like “Pretty good, it turns out the husband was the killer all along.” So I’d be the perfect person to find this particular strip an at least mildly amusing “funny because it’s true” observation…but I didn’t, because it was executed in such an incompetent manner.
Aside from the art, which is so bad it looks almost like a parody of bad art, the joke just isn’t well written. The ending the mother gives away is so obvious that the main character’s annoyance about the “spoiler” doesn’t make sense. If the joke was supposed to be that the main character was sarcastically complaining about the mother giving away the ending of a totally predictable potboiler then that doesn’t really come across either. It doesn’t help that the character is drawn with so little expression (is she supposed to be surprised in panel 3?) or that her face is mostly blocked by her coffee cup in the final panel.
I don’t think she’s on the toilet either. The cartoonist is too incompetent to rise even to the level of potty humor.
FINAL UPDATE: Dogs of C Kennel wins with 5786 votes vs. Reply All’s 360, a 94% to 6% spread that stayed consistent for pretty much the entire two-week voting period. *Tribune *readers can kiss Reply All’s sorry ass goodbye after December 30 when a new competition begins. Dogs of C Kennel will become a permanent part of the comics page and won’t have to defend itself again.
After decades of mildly amusing banality, Family Circus redeemed itself with this strip. Forward, for The Emperor!