What kind of insane irony is it, that just days after I carefully copy pasted Batton’s head onto George Keesterman’s body so he could sit in a booth at Dale Evans, we’re treated to Batton being served by Angie the waitress in the same guacamole shit green booth?
I can’t even call Batiuk and Davis evil stalking hacks for this. Because knowing both their work cycles, this obnoxiously autobiographical arc was written over a year ago and pasted together weeks if not months ago.
Instead I can only attribute this to some sort of terrifying Nietzschean ‘He Who Fights Monsters’ scenario where I’ve stared into the abyss for so long I’m being sucked into the very mindset of the monster I have come to slay.
Strange as it may seem, I do believe that Dan Davis, the copy pasta master, does put more effort into Crankshaft than the other strip he supposedly ‘draws’. This is out of pure necessity. Look at today’s strip, he had to find all those backgrounds to trace and paste together. He had to attempt to smoosh Batton and Skip into a panel with Angie that was originally drawn for the normal Dale Evans trio.
The two tone voids of Garfield these days can be generated like a sticker book with ‘fill in the blank’ word bubbles, and no one will ever bat an eye if the exact same dog drawing is used three panels in a row.
Heck, are people even going to notice if he doesn’t change a thing from panel to panel? It’s for comedic effect, not laziness. Promise.
But you know what? It could be worse. It could be so much worse. At least this copy pasted line art is coherent enough.
Of course we all know 9 Chickweed Lane has become nothing but a badly scribbled humiliation fetish, with cheap computer gradient backgrounds. But today it seems the first panel was so graphic that a giant misshapen blob of a digitally painted grand piano lid was necessary to conceal the depravity.
We could also be poor georgekatkins commenting over at The Daily Trail, where the lovingly traced beauty of The Lost Forest of Mark Trail has been taken over by gaping maws, jagged black lines, and insufferable hipster hair.
Makes you long for the days of badly proportioned 60 year old panels clumsily traced by the similarly artistically inept ‘artist’ from the opposite side of the political horseshoe.
And really nothing these days compares to the drunkenly scribbled nightmare of Gil Thorp. The ‘artistic’ team behind that strip, having tired of trying to shock their readers with abortions, lesbians, non-binary bulimics, and hijabs, has taken to horrifying their hatedom with some of the most hideous and nonsensical art I’ve ever seen.
How the commenting team over at This Week in Milford manages to even understand what is supposed to be happening is beyond me. We thought trying to tell the endless army of bland Batiuk blondes apart was bad? Try imagining a human name to go with these eldritch abominations!
Maybe they should all take a page out of Mopped up Thorp and simply rewrite the strip entirely.
Infinitely funnier. Great job MopMan!
Son of Stuck Funky 