Yeah, there is terrible animation in some anime, especially with some of the early trends towards moving to CG, and they render everything at 12 FPS and it just looks stilted and awful. But there is alot of extremely beautifully animated anime out there, definitely wouldn’t write off the whole genre.
But I don’t see that being any worse than the large crop of imitators the guy has, with every character having no basic shape and simplistic squiggling arms for animation, with like you hinted at Matt, a large tendency to go for the lowest common denominator shock factor.
Strip #1 would be a lot better if the dialog ended with “of course, daddy.” Every line after that dilutes what little punch the strip has, and the “sudo make me a sandwich” particularly hurts it because it’s the last line we read and obscure and unfunny.
Technically, the art’s better than PA’s usual, but despite that I hate the style. The too-large hands on the little girl and her mouth when she’s eating ice cream in particular. It’s not that it’s wrong in the way that square crotches, orange noses, and wormfingers are, but I just don’t care for it.
Strip #2’s art is fine. Oh, I don’t like the lips on Humpty Dumpty, and I definitely don’t want to see egg nipple, but overall it’s competent. What’s wrong is that the joke isn’t remotely funny. However, PA has had lots of strips where the joke was completely flat. I’m reserving judgement on the authors, even if I don’t like this particular strip.
I didn’t initially remember the xkcd strip so assumed “sudo make me a sandwich” indicated she had mastered a combination of sumo and judo and was capable of maiming, possibly even killing, her father (legendary scifi author John Scalzi) if he did not immediately craft for her a sandwich. Then someone here mentioned xkcd and the fact that it’s a hilarious linux joke, right out of User Friendly, finally came to me.
My version was better. Also, more than a little chilling.
I assumed Mike was being sarcastic. I’m genuinely surprised that he wasn’t, since the strip seemed pretty straightforward to me.
That particular strip, taken out of the context, isn’t all that funny. It’s one of their few flirtations with continuity, and it really requires the other three panels of the Fruit Saga to work.
I needn’t have dug around to find Fruit Fucker dialog, actually. While the Fucker is frequently silent, he (and it’s definitely “he”) has dialog in his very first strip, just as JM remembered.
Man. I know appreciation of art is subjective, but this is such a strange opinion I can’t see how anyone would hold it. Even ceding the whole square crotch and worm fingers thing, Gabe’s art is WAY more vibrant, visually interesting, better composed, better colored, expressive, and funnier.
You’re confusing “I like it” with “better technically.” I like PA’s art better in general, because I prefer Gabe’s style, but that doesn’t prevent me from seeing that Jeff Zugale (who drew the strip) has a much better understanding of anatomy than Gabe. There’s casual skill in the shapes of the bodies, arms, and heads that Gabe has never matched even when he was trying for realism. What I don’t like about Zugale’s art has nothing at all to do with his technical abilities, it’s his deliberate stylistic choices like the eyes, mouths, and oversized hands that I don’t like. Gabe’s limitations are largely limitations of what he’s capable of doing, not what he’s chosen to do.
As for “better composed” and “funnier,” it’s a fairly simple strip. Gabe has done lots of strips that have been just as limited as this one. It’s a “two people talking” strip, which is a staple of PA.
No question about it, that strip sucked. Mainly because the only thing that remotely resembled a joke in it was Humpty Dumpty as the Gimp, and that was much more repulsive than funny.
Gus, I know what you mean when you say that the art in the earlier strip is technically better than what Gabe does, but you still can’t present is as an objective fact. Gabe couldn’t do what he does, but I’m actually not sure that HE could do what Gabe does. The art styles and preferences of the two artists are too different and the requirements of the medium (web comic) are too flexible for any kind of objective analysis to make sense in their case.
(Which leads me to the larger matter that I think this whole thread is silly and there’s nothing wrong with red noses or square hips because they’re part of the style, but I better stop talking now before this gets out of hand. I have pretty much only insults left, and I don’t want to resort to those over subjective opinions on an internet gaming strip. :P )
