Every couple of months there’s a thread here which discusses enjoyable webcomics. I have a couple of those threads bookmarked, and I check out the suggestions when I have spare time. It seems as though the same comics get mentioned over and over again. Which is fine…there are a lot of good comics out there.
But man, there are a lot of bad ones out there too. Heck, I’ll admit it. I do not enjoy Questionable Content, even though nearly everyone else in the world seems to.
Here’s a blog dedicated to bad comics, and while I don’t always agree with him, he makes me laugh. On hiatus at the moment, unfortunately…hope he comes back.
So I’m kida curious - what webcomics do you find annoying, too clever for their own good, badly written or drawn, or whatever. Sacred cows or obscure, doesn’t matter.
I don’t understand the appeal of PVP at all. I occasionally get a milk chuckle out of it, but on the whole I find it to be incredibly bland, boring, and forgettable.
Sore Thumbs. I won’t dignify it by linking it. It features a faux-anime pink-haired girl with too-large vacant cow’s eyes, a too-thin body, and ridiculously too-large boobs. The art is mediocre at best, but because of the promise of boobs I read some of it, and the writing is simply terrible, with bad jokes and ridiculous straw-man swipes at conservatives that rival Mallard Fillmore for unfunny.
I used to love Sluggy Freelance. Then it just started to grind, there were various changes in the format, and I completely lost interest. I’ve tried once or twice or dip my toes back in but it’s a pale imitiation of what it used to be.
So I guess it’s a comic I once liked but don’t any more.
Yeah… Sluggy’s been in freefall for something like five years now. I read it religiously back in the day, but starting around 2003, began only checking it sporadically, before dropping it from my bookmarks entirely somewhere in the middle of the interminable “Bun-Bun the Time Traveling Space Pirate” story. A quick glance at the site now indicates that the quality has not improved measurably.
PvP also seriously sucks these days. Kurtz’s egotism and self-promotion was somewhat bearable when he was at least writing mildly funny jokes about Brent being eaten by pandas, but it has since swollen to enormous proportions while what little funny there was has completely vanished. What’s doubly unfortunate is that he seems to be taking Kris Straub along with him.
I like Questionable Content in small doses. It’s fun, slice of life, even if the main characters are pretentious hipsters (and therefore need to be fired out of cannons into the sun). I guess you could call that a love/hate relationship.
The dinosaurs are sort of clever, but the whole format is so hard on the eyes that I tend to avoid it.
I also have the same love/hate relationship with QC that I do with xkcd. The pretentiousness, it burns!
There are a few that I’ve gradually lost the habit of reading (Sluggy Freelance, PvP), but I don’t offhand recall any of the ones I looked at and just plain never liked.
There are many comics I didn’t like enough to read much of, but there are a few that enticed me enough to read all or most of them but in the end I regretted. I wasn’t impressed with Schlock Mercenary or Dinosaur Comics. I really disliked Achewood, but I plugged through a large chunk of it because of accolades from various sources.
Penny Arcade has just enough decent strips scattered through it that I don’t label it a disappointment, but lots of people are huge fans. There are lots of comics like this that I may think are overrated, but that’s very different from bad.
I used to read PvP and some others but I gradually lost interest. I think comics that have gone bad over time should be a separate category from ones that just aren’t that good to begin with. The unfortunate bits for me don’t really cast a pall if the comic has had its bright spots.
Really? I still find it entertaining. This recent page makes me giggle every time I look at it.
I follow a lot of webcomics daily, and sometimes I pause and look them over, and realize that some of them I follow simply out of habit and not because I enjoy them. Still, I can’t bring myself to drop them from the rotation. Sluggy Freelance and Herdthinners come to mind, particularly.
I love Dinosaur Comics and want to marry T-Rex. You have just fallen in my eyes.
As for me, I really dislike that doctor ninja comic. And the one with the blobby pink bunny. Also pretty much every Penny Arcade-esque comic out there.
And Start Wreck is probably the least funny thing ever.
I’ll join the given-up on Sluggy Freelance and PVP pile.
I’ve also recently stopped reading General Protection Fault. Problem is partly it’s been updating only once per week for a long time, and I find it hard to stick with a comic that updates that infrequently, and partly my impression of a lack of fresh ideas being presented.
The next Web comic I see that’s funny will be the first. Dozens have been linked to in the SDMB and in my honest and humble opinion they range from mediocre to atrocious.
Web comics are sort of the visual equivalent of open mike night at a comedy club. You might think the comedians you see on TV aren’t very funny until you go to amateur comedy night, and then you find out why some guys make it to TV and some don’t. Well, you might think the comics that make it to the newspapers aren’t very good, but Web comics demonstrate why some guys make it into the papers and some don’t.
I will never understand what on earth happened to Sluggy Freelance. The drop-off in quality following “That Which Redeems” is shocking. I still stubbornly read the comic every day, and there are still flashes of the strip’s old brilliance(the last Oasis chapter, the bits with Hereti-Corp), but for the most part the comic has just been awful.
Penny Arcade’s appeal eludes me. I’ve read a good number of the strips figuring it might grow on me but it never did.
Something Positive is borderline. I can enjoy it in small doses but I also find myself hating the characters so much it destroys any appreciation I have for the strip. It’s scary to think that these characters are based on real people.
I think that Pete Abrams has too much going on with the various untied-up storylines right now. We’ve got the “Truth About Oasis REVEALED!” plot, the Aylee plot, the Dr. Shlock plot, the Torg and Zoe plot, plus the random bits he throws in whenever he feels like it (Torg Potter can end now). PLUS he keeps interrupting the story for long tangents which completely interrupts the flow (I couldn’t remember what was going on with Gwynn the last couple of weeks because it’s been months since we’ve seen her.) He needs to do one thing at a time rather than do these huge sprawling decades-long plotlines. It really didn’t help when he admitted that last week’s strips were supposed to take place after this week’s.
I haven’t given up on it yet, but I’m rapidly losing patience. I may just give up entirely next time he does ANOTHER pointless Torg Potter. We get it Pete. You like the movies. So do lots of people. Finish the damn plots you have going already.
I really enjoyed the first few years of Schlock Mercenary, but lately I’ve found that the story is dragging just a little bit. Howard’s a decent writer, and he created a strong set of characters, but in the last year or so it feels as if the funny character traits have taken the center stage, and we’ve been bouncing through the same set of stories over and over. “Petey is plotting something! We need to rip someone off! Our crew is snarky and sociopathic!”
It may just be me, but the last six to seven months have really seemed to been strained.
