A Bone to Pick with PAWS, Inc.

What's cooking folks, it's been awhile. The PSA up in this piece, repping for uptight curmudgeons from Maine to Miami with the east coast take on the SF 'Mix. i'd like to give a special shoutout to the young lady in whose name this blog began, home from her trek eastward--- here's hoping some righteous "ganja" was smoked on that mystical subcontinent, preferably out of one of those delightful hookahs that have become so popular in our western society of late.

this post will basically be an addendum to my post on Garfield's unfortunate "coffee shop" series of a few weeks ago. recently i decided to go check out the rest of the strips from that week-- they are not online anymore, but trust me when i say they were a bona fide embarassment. while i was glad to see that "xan" himself didn't reappear, every subsequent strip was plagued by amaturish, almost worrisomely bad writing. easy, lame subject matter aside, what i found most glaring was that every one of those strips could have been 2 panels--- would have been better as 2 panels, in fact--- and had that agonizing first-panel-to-second-panel reiteration that is the mark of a really low-quality 'mixual endeavor. like: if you are going to do that, at least do it the Bill Amend way, where the first panel just shows one character going "so..." and then in the next panel they are all "here's the setup for the joke we are gonna tell in the last panel". (or take another page from Amend's book that i have actual respect for: his willingness to tailor the number of panels per strip to the pacing of the joke--- sometimes 2, sometimes 6, always innovative for whatever baseball-hat wearing drudgery those Foxes were getting up to) but in these Garfields, they basically have two identical panels leading it off! like, jon would be like "This is a great coffee shop!" and Garfield would go "I like caffeine" or whatever. and then in the next panel, Jon: "I think we should come here more often! I love this place!" Garfield looks at the coffee cup and is like "I want to put my tiny pink cone of a cat penis in here" or something (that one is on me, PAWS Inc-- thanks in advance). then in the last panel there is a joke about caffeine making you jittery. like: WHAT THE FUCK. you are hiring a team of people to make this comic the best it can possibly be and this is what we, the readers, are expected to choke down on a daily basis? Because that basically was every strip the entire week and that to me is just unacceptable. Like-- i can deal with every strip in a 5 day cycle being the same if it deals with killing spiders, kicking odie off the table, "spluts" if that sort of thing still goes on, as classic as Dagwood napping in his chair or whatever fucking thing he naps in, if he even naps, i have read Blondie about 15 times total in my life but you get what I'm saying. When you are trying some radical branching out into very uncharted waters, PAWS Inc, at least make it engaging. Do not treat us like morons, morons that have recently discovered the popularity of coffee emporia. I feel I am not alone in our writer- and readership in the fact that I've given a frightening percentage of my life to reading, drawing, tracing, and thinking about Garfield. It hurts to watch "Jim Davis" floundering to court some imaginary demographic.

I'm not even gonna start about today's camera phone reference. I've made my point.

It wouldn't really be a post from me without a little FBFW dishing too, so to end on a positive note, i really like the possibilities set in motion by Saturday's cliffhanger. There has been enough dicking around lately with all this dying grandpa Jim and wedding prep, cursed trees falling on the house and what have you. Time for some romantic intrigue! And give Liz a break Lynn-- her life is so uneventful lately that I found myself wondering if you were setting her up to be a lesbian. I'd like to see her affections vied for at this wedding by this dashing best man and a comically bad-dated Anthony. I am in Anthony's corner all the way, but you never know where Lynn J is gonna take things.