I wish it would just END. My 2nd-most despised webcomic behind User Friendly.
I read the most recent 10 pages of this thing. It sucks!
I thought Tim Buckley was dead.
Was that the webcomic with the miscarriage? If so, my only exposure is from people linking to that one horrible comic and laughing at it. Based upon that, for me at least, it has generated a modicum of joy.
Link for those that want to see the end. http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20121123
And, yes. This comic sucks.
CAD is a great internet train wreck to watch. But as a comic it doesn’t have much to recommend it.
Mmm whatcha say
Why all the hate? Is the writing especially bad? Or is the creator a dick? Art-wise, it looks fine…
Eh. In terms of humor it doesn’t compare particularly well against its peers. The most-often cited example is this CAD comic, compared to this Penny Arcade comic published over three months beforehand. As that example illustrates, CAD tend to need a large amount of dialog to set up a joke… which in a four-panel format is not optimal.
Art-wise, Buckley has been criticized for having basically only one facial expression on all his characters, as well as excessive cutting-and-pasting. He’s gotten away from that as the comic has aged.
The main complaint about the comic was its shifting tone. One day you’d have a hyper-violent strip whimsically making fun of some game mechanic, the next you’d find Ziggy-like treacle, and the next you’d get a soap opera with serious real-world subjects (like the infamous miscarriage strip). And it’s not that you can’t do sifting tones – Scot Kurtz manages it fairly well in PVP – it’s that the execution was poor.
As to Buckley being a jerk, he’s apparently taken part in a lot of web-drama. Penny Arcade’s occasionally-recurring character Franzibald is a jab at Buckley.
Yeah, Tin Wisdom’s summary is pretty good. The big problem is that it started out as a second tier jokes-about-gaming webcomic. Then, it tried to evolve beyond that, but did so very, very poorly. The art and writing weren’t ever up to the ambitions of the creator, which isn’t a terrible thing in and of itself, but it leads to some hilarious results for a bystander.
Additionally, like many artists, Buckley doesn’t have much capacity for criticism. Unfortunately, he also has a penchant for internet drama, and since he rules over Ctrl-Alt-Del’s forums as his own little fiefdom, it gets expressed there with some regularity.
There have been some threads previously:
and some non-QT3 links rounding up some bad behavior, linked in one of those threads:
http://ohinternet.com/Tim_Buckley
I always thought this crappy comic was the predecessor to penny arcade… It was some unfunny pc crap, now it looks like it’s all edgy and stuff.
That gif is beyond hilarious. I can definitely understand the art-related criticism now after having seen it. I guess it also is pretty damning that I never viewed the comic as a work of comedy before. I just thought it was supposed to be a “day in the life of” type comic with some rather odd settings and mildly amusing plots.
As for the internet drama, I’m not going to take the time to read through it all, but it does appear from a glance that he’s less than an angel.
Reading the Metafilter comments about this made me remember about the third webcomic strip I hated the most–MegaTokyo. I hadn’t thought about it for at least 5 years. So much for that streak.
I honestly liked early CAD, but I stopped reading at about the time of the miscarriage storyline. I don’t have the hate that some do, but good God are those ending strips asinine. If I had kept reading it, I think I’d be outraged.
I enjoy the main story well enough, it’s one of my book marked comics I check weekly, though not my favorite by far. I’ve enjoyed the characters on and off, but when I found out this was the end of the comic and it was rebooting (just this morning) I was pretty pissed. It’s a stupid fucking thing to do, but I read about why he’s doing it and the fact it’s rebooting became the thing I disliked the least.
He’s making the players (those four colored character who always end up murdering each other in some stupid way) the main characters. Those guys are the worst, and I skip every comic that features them. So I guess my time with CAD is done, seems like, and the worst of it is the depressing fucking ending he gave us. Fuck that guy.
That pretty much mirrors my experience. CAD was never my favorite comic, but it was blandly amusing enough to rate inclusion in my MWF before-work webcomic review. Probably more out of momentum than any real fondness, but I managed to find a chuckle or two now and again.
But yeah, giving the color-coded murder-cyphers top billing is just not something I’ll bother with. As luck would have it, I upgraded my computer this past weekend and will be taking the opportunity to clean out my old bookmarks. CAD will not be one that migrates to the new box.
Thanks for posting these again. I’d seen this comparison, but that was before I got a job trying to teach this stuff to aspiring screenwriters. You’ve given me some good material for my classes this week.
The strips really do serve as excellent, hyper-condensed examples of How To Do It and How Not To Do It. Most egregiously, as you say, the characters in CAD are “talking the plot” instead of letting us experience story through action (and then hilarious inaction) as you do in PA, where the dialogue gives you character (Drink Deep! and SKREEE!) not story. Plus the visual design, and the way CAD blows the punchline much too early and then sags flabbily across the finish line. Omit Needless Words indeed.
Wow, until today, I never knew anything about this stuff around CAD. There were a number of webcomics that I used to follow (CAD, User Friendly, Action Trip, Angst Technology, Mega Tokyo, WTF Comics) but they all fell by the wayside due to the current ones I am enjoying (Looking For Group, Penny Arcade, PVP, Sinfest) due to better everything in those comics. Finding out that CAD stuff was… sad to me. And I kind of wished I never knew it now.
I was drilling down to the very bottom of the front page, where there is a small post linking to a “here is for those who wanted more closure” comic. I have no idea why it’s not part of the regular strip rotation so everyone can find it by clicking “next” (even after reading his reasoning) but I’ll post it here for everyone who might be interested.
http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20121124
I actually feel like this is enough closure to just delete this web comic from my Favorites now and move on. I should really look into some new ones, such as the ones Derek listed, perhaps. I recently discovered a few really good ones I’m enjoying now (Goblins, Gunnerkrig Court, for example) so this isn’t a big loss.
I was never a big fan, but then I don’t follow webcomics at all really, just the occasional stop by PA to leaf through the most recent dozen or so strips every so often.
That said, I am amazed Buckley was able to make a living off only CAD. It just doesn’t seem like it would have the broad appeal and industry relevance that a strip like Penny Arcade has, and without that I would think it would be hard to generate the numbers needed for ad revenue large enough to support oneself.