by JLRoberson

Created on: November 21, 2007   Last Updated: November 22, 2007

Kansas O'Flaherty, Secret Agent: a review

Carol Lay's excellent WAYLAY strip has been a mainstay at Salon for a very, very long time, and has a sizeable number of fans. Unlike most of its strips, hers is not strictly political, or humorous(at least not always). This would probably explain why Salon chose it to be removed from its slot on Tuesdays(moved to the death slot of Fridays) and replaced with a so-called "spy adventure" strip by a journalist named Toni Schlesinger and a New York Times caricaturist named Tom Bachtell. Nothing like replacing something by an accomplished practitioner of the comics medium with an abortion dashed off by two people who know nothing whatsoever about said medium. Judging by the almost complete firestorm of hatred of this strip expressed by Salon's readers, I'm not alone in being appalled.

As a cartoonist myself I find this strip offensive to the eye to begin with. This is the work of dilettantes with a tin eye who think that a cartoon is nothing more than illustrated text. Reinforced by the sloppy font, for one thing. Do you think a comic strip should be lettered with the most generic serif font possible, that would even be considered lame in a corporate presentation? Then this is the strip for you. Did you know that using a tiny font, which they do to crowd an unholy amount of already-unreadable expository dialogue into the first panel of the second installment, reads as whispering? They don't. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's done in MS Paint, as many of the strip's haters have remarked. This looks like it's done in Powerpoint.

Carol Lay is a CARTOONIST. This, however, is a journalist and an illustrator, probably both excellent in their usual fields, who thought to themselves, "Ah, this couldn't be that hard." As these are the sort who'd think that comics are just easier writing for illiterates, one wonders why they'd bother. But judging from its dashed-off, sloppy, and lazy look(how many times will Bachtell paste in the same identical faces? At least Tom Tomorrow doesn't pretend he's not using clip art), I guess they didn't.

And did I mention nothing in the INTRODUCTORY STRIPS has happened that could possibly grip a new reader? At first I thought this was a parody, if a weak one. But it's not. It's not ironic, it's just bad. Two weeks in, this thing only gets worse. As one commenter said there, it might just manage to qualify as bad in a few years, but one hopes it won't last that long.

And who exactly is this executive's daydream

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