Problem solving too
Art - For the most part Scott continues his excellence with his drawing. He only really has to worry about drawing Francis and Brent without any other details and he does it well.
However, I have two problems. First, that the background drops of the 4th panel, and while it my have been done for effect for what Francis was saying, it just looks stark compared to the other frames with grayscale backgrounds.
My second problem is mostly more of a character design problem I have with Francis since his change. I know the circle around his wrist is supposed to be the cuff of his undershirt, but half the time it looks like a glove, ala Mickey and other characters from the Tex Avery/Disney era. (while old school characters wore gloves I don't know). The drawing of his cuff varies in this strip 3 times from muddled in the first panel to looking like a glove in the fourth panel to clearly his cuff in the last panel
Story - This strip continues a solid week of strips continuing the bike cop arc. This is an example of Scott using the strengths of his "pop culture" strip as the younger person obsessed with pop culture (Francis) deals with real life situations in the only way he's seen them dealt with, television. I liked the reaction of Brent being the older, grounded, and more mature (depending on the day) person with the reaction he had.
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9 comments:
Oh, man, I totally didn't get that the guy behind the desk was a "little person" - thought it was a character from a previous PVP and there must have been some in-joke.
And now that I look at again, he isn't even behind a desk...need more sleep, yeah, that's it...sleep.
Unless he's going to start putting more effort into it, I think Kurtz would be wise to desist with his relatively new practice of giving each strip a title. It serves no purpose, and the titles are frequently bad. A lot of the time ("Problem Solving," "problem solving too," "More Problem Solving") it looks like he couldn't think of anything good and just inserted something pointless so that he could get the strip up.
Compare this to Bruno the Bandit. It may be a fairly cheesy strip a lot of the time, but Ian is able to get an extra pun into each title (or subtitle, or caption, or whatever they are.) Their addition actually feels worthwhile. It's a similar situation for the rollover text used in such comics as Overcompensating and Dinosaur Comics.
With PVP, however, I just look at the title and think "why?"
That's being a little cruel. It's a title. It doesn't have to be a pun, it doesn't have to add any more entertainment value. It helps you reference strips by something other than date.
Also, problem solving too is a pun, if a little overused.
If I was going to be cruel I would say that no matter how hard he tries his art remains rigid, the writing is almost invariably tepid, and he finds it virtually impossible to make a likable character. But I'm not going to. I have no qualification and certainly no right to make such claims.
I do however think that the titles are a pointless waste of the author's time. Even as names to reference the strips by they're useful for maybe one week, after which point you're going to have to link to the specific date or describe the events because there's no way that anybody is going to remember the strip by the names. Maybe he just likes having them for some reason, it doesn't really make a difference, I'm just saying that I don't think they add anything wortwhile.
The only time they get on my wick, really, is when they signpost the joke.
I'm going to agree with A Nonny Mouse here. I never even read the title, and more importantly if you are going to give each strip a name should it not be above the strip? Placing it below only makes it even more useless. Not only that but shouldn't titles have all capitalized words? One day they will and the next they won't. Furthermore indicating that he is rushing them.
Old school cartoon characters wore gloves because they were much easier to draw/animate than hands.
If he were going to use a title to emphasis the strip he could have used something like "Two and a half men" which would get the point across that one of the characters is half a man. The only down side is you'd be referencing the worst show on television.
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