Bad webcomics -

[Aquinas]

The whole "have the poors risk their lives for pennies to brave the Black Coof".

i feel like preachy requires being on a higher moral standpoint, also, i feel like that sort of dismissive morallity in lue of comedy has been in webcomics and even other media, have been a thing

 

[Rainbow Frog Army]

Greg Dean / Mae Dean, creator of Real Life Comics, made fun of Comic Sans in a comic last week, then received backlash from the community because "DYSLEXICS USE COMIC SANS. REEE!" , then doubled down and posted a 13-tweet thread full of autism about fonts, which he has since deleted.

Spoiler: The thread, preserved for posterity

View attachment 2116329

I still fucking hate the way Twitter makes you read things in reverse order. This was the only thing I could procure from the Google cache without photoshopping it to make the tweets appear in the right order.

When he finally did realise he'd done something bad and Problematic, he took the thread down and posted this comic in lieu of an apology with a series of non-jokes about other fonts.

The wall of text in the first panel is so long, it actually made the whitespace above the comic 99px taller.

View attachment 2116357

Aside from one good take about Haettenshweiler, the rest were garbage. And I don't get the one about Lucida Console either. Ampersands in Lucida Console just look ordinary. Or is that the joke?

View attachment 2116409

Oh and in case you haven't heard it yet, Greg Dean is trans now.

View attachment 2116396

Quoting myself from the Assigned Male thread, but if this story is new to you, it bears repeating.

Spoiler: How the trans journey was handled in-comic

Immediately after that page, we have a 57-panel dream sequence where Greg meets his female self in a library (never would have guessed the inside of his head would look like that), who explains that she has been dormant for 38 years, introducing herself as 'our "id". Our core self.'

View attachment 2116423

There are walls of text. Over the next few weeks of daily comics, it is explained that "Greg" is the person's ego. Quote: 'you [Ego-Greg] exist to get us what I want in a way that doesn't put us in any danger.'

Id-Mae explains that she's been trying to send signals to Greg for years by way of thoughts in the back of his mind, reminding the ego that he's wanted to be a girl since he was 7-8 years old. Shapeshifting was apparently the superpower young Greg most wanted to have. He also now plays female characters in video games. Then we get the line about how Greg never gives his female id the tiniest bit of consideration.

The superego is introduced as a toxic male in a 'TREK4LYFE' hat. Quote: 'the embodiment of parental influence, societal rules and peer pressue, all rolled into one massive douchey dudebro.' This is offered as the explanation for why Greg conformed to masculinity for so long. She cites the villain reveal in Ace Ventura (1994) as one of the things that emboldened Superego, causing Greg to repress his true nature.

They talk about anime sex changes and Greg's female screen name of Mae that he's used since the late 1990s. Id-Mae once again nags Ego-Greg to listen to her. Greg says they used to say mean stuff about the comic on Reddit (4th wall breaks are a regular thing, but Greg here isn't literally supposed to be the comic's author). The wife and kid are briefly addressed, and then Ego-Greg agrees to let Id-Mae take control.

Spoiler: Greg dies

Which is portrayed in the comic as Ego-Greg getting Thanos'd out of existence.

View attachment 2116426

Greg wakes up in the next page with a new perspective on reality, comes out to his wife (off-screen), and begins transitioning after they have their second child. In-comic these things occur during the pandemic, but they are largely based on events that happened 2 years ago. Thee video game references continue as before, and Greg is largely the same character as before, except that now there's also the occasional strip about transitioning, buying new clothes, and her being super-excited to grow boobs.

View attachment 2116427

Because, to quote one reader of the comic, 'sore tiddy is more tiddy'.

Oh and for what it's worth, someone did say mean things about the comic on Reddit (I guarantee this is not the only person who thought of CAD) and Mae responds while a group of sycophants jumps to her defence. I think she may (ha) have tweeted about that comment too, but it would take me too long to dig up the tweet.

Edit: Can't believe I almost missed this, but there was a Twitter thread documenting instances of 'Egg-like behavior' in the Comic.

One of them is a page from 2010 where Greg is annoyed that he can't give his video game character enormous anime tiddies.

Spoiler: big trans girl energy

View attachment 2116428

Fun fact! Transalamander--the person who's tweet kicks this off--is not only a real person, but someone who has a thread on here.

The troons being more than a bit misogynist and homophobic towards lesbians thing? That's more than a bit of an ongoing problem with troons. It's like they don't realize that the reason girls they hit on (read: are sex pests at) are lesbians is because it's not socially acceptable to tell somebody that you'd get more sexual pleasure out of a broken small vibrator, or strangling them with their own intestines.

But hey, I guess it isn't a bad webcomic if we don't have fetishization of troons and women. Is there some sort of checklist here? A contractual obligation?

 

[DoubleD]

"Rando" is an interesting term. When someone you don't know hits on you at a bar or slides into your Twitter DMs, they are, to you, a randomly selected member of the human race, generated from the ether by a series of inscrutable dice rolls. But, of course, from the rando's perspective, they are quite specific and intentional, and have reached out to you for intentionally specific reasons that relate to their own wants and needs and emotional journey. We are all, presumably, randos to someone else - indeed, we are all randos to the vast, vast majority of billions of people.

But that's not quite how the term is used, is it? Like many neologisms ("troll", "Karen", etc), the word isn't just what it says on the tin, but also carries signifiers of race, gender, age, and class. A "rando" is far more likely to be a straight white cismale, which, I would argue, is quite unlikely to be what you'd get if you randomly selected a human being from our diverse planet.

...but, then, a "rando" is not usually someone that you select, is it? A "rando" is generally a person who takes the initiative and approaches you (generally, initiating an interaction that you neither want nor need) and perhaps being straight, white, and cismale renders one more likely to be thusly proactive with one's unwanted advances - or for said advances not to be wanted. The term is never a compliment, and almost always carries the implication that this random person is yet another chore or obstacle or irritation to be avoided, blocked, or tolerated, an insignificant blip in an otherwise rando-less day. It says "your own beliefs and motivations and emotional journey that have led you to contact me are unimportant. I don't know them, and I don't want to know them. You are a bug on the windshield of my life."

Have you been called a "rando"? Did you feel insulted? Did you feel that it was justified? Were you able to change the person's mind, and show them that your motivations and thoughts and emotional journey were important, and that the thing you brought to them was worthy of consideration? If a friend changed their account before contacting you, and you accidentally called them a rando, then they revealed that they were, actually, someone you knew, would you feel you owed them an apology?

If a randomly-selected member of the human race is someone that you consider unworthy of consideration, what does that say about you? What does that say about our species?

It almost sounds like he’s saying “rando” is a slur against cishet whitemen? I had to read it several times to be sure because it has so many elements of a woke lecture but the bones of the argument are a completely different animal.

In other words, Tailsteak is his usual preachy self, but he’ll generally only argue something if it’s a brand-new take that he thought of himself. Because he prefers showing off his intellect over toeing the party line, and I can respect that.

On that note, I actually started reading the new Forward comic, and it’s… everything I just described. There are plenty of woke elements such as they/them non-binaries being the majority of the population. But at the same time, our protagonist is shown to be a troon who is unhappy with their body, despite having had over a dozen surgeries in 5 years (perhaps a common occurrence at the time this is set).

When the robot who’s introduced as a foil for this character correctly guesses she has a penis, this observation is not wholeheartedly condemned by the story in the way that woke writers would do, but played off more as exposition for the audience.

And the potential woke takes about gender are for the most part overshadowed by his more original ideas like how, by 2167, people will no longer feel they are living in “the future” in the way they do today.

In other words, it’s very Tailsteak.

I’ll let you know how the rest of the comic goes. So far it’s been promising, but these would have been part of his backlog for ages, so they are probably more polished script-wise than whatever comes afterwards.

I almost regret not getting into it sooner, but then I remembered webcomics are better when you don’t have to wait 2-3 days for the next few lines of a conversation.

Also, the weeb text in the intro scene is apparently based on Japanese translated back and forth into German a couple of times. So… Axis Powers reunion in this timeline? Based.

 

[Ghostse]

It almost sounds like he’s saying “rando” is a slur against cishet whitemen? I had to read it several times to be sure because it has so many elements of a woke lecture but the bones of the argument are a completely different animal.

In other words, Tailsteak is his usual preachy self, but he’ll generally only argue something if it’s a brand-new take that he thought of himself. Because he prefers showing off his intellect over toeing the party line, and I can respect that.

On that note, I actually started reading the new Forward comic, and it’s… everything I just described. There are plenty of woke elements such as they/them non-binaries being the majority of the population. But at the same time, our protagonist is shown to be a troon who is unhappy with their body, despite having had over a dozen surgeries in 5 years (perhaps a common occurrence at the time this is set).

When the robot who’s introduced as a foil for this character correctly guesses she has a penis, this observation is not wholeheartedly condemned by the story in the way that woke writers would do, but played off more as exposition for the audience.

And the potential woke takes about gender are for the most part overshadowed by his more original ideas like how, by 2167, people will no longer feel they are living in “the future” in the way they do today.

In other words, it’s very Tailsteak.

I’ll let you know how the rest of the comic goes. So far it’s been promising, but these would have been part of his backlog for ages, so they are probably more polished script-wise than whatever comes afterwards.

I almost regret not getting into it sooner, but then I remembered webcomics are better when you don’t have to wait 2-3 days for the next few lines of a conversation.

Also, the weeb text in the intro scene is apparently based on Japanese translated back and forth into German a couple of times. So… Axis Powers reunion in this timeline? Based.

Ok fine since youre doing a read and review I'll break kayfabe.

That 3.5 pages single spaced shit on Rando is less SJW and more inline with classic liberal thought of "why do we have to be such dicks to each other all the time? Can't we show some compassion? PS My farts smell AMAZING today." Regardless, I did not need an archive of the "laughing my ass off bottom text"; 1/0 was bad enough, his Poly & queer follow up was gratingly pretentious, I didn't see any need to go along for the ride of his transition journal.

And while I look forward to your summaries, the art isn't eye-gouging and the script is too weighty to be "bad" in the traditional sense, so I'm not sure if it really qualifies as a bad web comic... at least not while Moon over June still exists.

 

[gangweedfan]

Greg Dean / Mae Dean, creator of Real Life Comics, made fun of Comic Sans in a comic last week, then received backlash from the community because "DYSLEXICS USE COMIC SANS. REEE!" , then doubled down and posted a 13-tweet thread full of autism about fonts, which he has since deleted.

Spoiler: The thread, preserved for posterity

View attachment 2116329

I still fucking hate the way Twitter makes you read things in reverse order. This was the only thing I could procure from the Google cache without photoshopping it to make the tweets appear in the right order.

When he finally did realise he'd done something bad and Problematic, he took the thread down and posted this comic in lieu of an apology with a series of non-jokes about other fonts.

The wall of text in the first panel is so long, it actually made the whitespace above the comic 99px taller.

View attachment 2116357

Aside from one good take about Haettenshweiler, the rest were garbage. And I don't get the one about Lucida Console either. Ampersands in Lucida Console just look ordinary. Or is that the joke?

View attachment 2116409

Oh and in case you haven't heard it yet, Greg Dean is trans now.

View attachment 2116396

Quoting myself from the Assigned Male thread, but if this story is new to you, it bears repeating.

Spoiler: How the trans journey was handled in-comic

Immediately after that page, we have a 57-panel dream sequence where Greg meets his female self in a library (never would have guessed the inside of his head would look like that), who explains that she has been dormant for 38 years, introducing herself as 'our "id". Our core self.'

View attachment 2116423

There are walls of text. Over the next few weeks of daily comics, it is explained that "Greg" is the person's ego. Quote: 'you [Ego-Greg] exist to get us what I want in a way that doesn't put us in any danger.'

Id-Mae explains that she's been trying to send signals to Greg for years by way of thoughts in the back of his mind, reminding the ego that he's wanted to be a girl since he was 7-8 years old. Shapeshifting was apparently the superpower young Greg most wanted to have. He also now plays female characters in video games. Then we get the line about how Greg never gives his female id the tiniest bit of consideration.

The superego is introduced as a toxic male in a 'TREK4LYFE' hat. Quote: 'the embodiment of parental influence, societal rules and peer pressue, all rolled into one massive douchey dudebro.' This is offered as the explanation for why Greg conformed to masculinity for so long. She cites the villain reveal in Ace Ventura (1994) as one of the things that emboldened Superego, causing Greg to repress his true nature.

They talk about anime sex changes and Greg's female screen name of Mae that he's used since the late 1990s. Id-Mae once again nags Ego-Greg to listen to her. Greg says they used to say mean stuff about the comic on Reddit (4th wall breaks are a regular thing, but Greg here isn't literally supposed to be the comic's author). The wife and kid are briefly addressed, and then Ego-Greg agrees to let Id-Mae take control.

Spoiler: Greg dies

Which is portrayed in the comic as Ego-Greg getting Thanos'd out of existence.

View attachment 2116426

Greg wakes up in the next page with a new perspective on reality, comes out to his wife (off-screen), and begins transitioning after they have their second child. In-comic these things occur during the pandemic, but they are largely based on events that happened 2 years ago. Thee video game references continue as before, and Greg is largely the same character as before, except that now there's also the occasional strip about transitioning, buying new clothes, and her being super-excited to grow boobs.

View attachment 2116427

Because, to quote one reader of the comic, 'sore tiddy is more tiddy'.

Oh and for what it's worth, someone did say mean things about the comic on Reddit (I guarantee this is not the only person who thought of CAD) and Mae responds while a group of sycophants jumps to her defence. I think she may (ha) have tweeted about that comment too, but it would take me too long to dig up the tweet.

Edit: Can't believe I almost missed this, but there was a Twitter thread documenting instances of 'Egg-like behavior' in the Comic.

One of them is a page from 2010 where Greg is annoyed that he can't give his video game character enormous anime tiddies.

Spoiler: big trans girl energy

View attachment 2116428

If his comics are in real life does that mean he was really visited by his tranny alter ego who took control of his body xenogears style? Neat trick.

 

[DoubleD]

If his comics are in real life does that mean he was really visited by his tranny alter ego who took control of his body xenogears style? Neat trick.

Nonono - it’s even better than that. Maelyn has always been a part of him - she was his id. But now that the body is hers, Greg Dean has become a being of pure id.

 

[Maurice Caine]

 

[0 1]

View attachment 2125418

Or, and work with me on this, the rates of left-handedness was reported at increasing frequency because methods of research and acquiring volunteers improved. The only tangible citation this has, and it's dubious as hell. You can't hope to "educate" people skeptical of yourself when you use flowery language without a sliver of credibility.

Here's an actual citation. Nobody is surprised that Sweden is significantly more open and accepting of LGBT-related issues. Yet, for some reason, then rates of suicide in transgender populations is almost identical to America. So if all we need to do is be more encouraging of the trans population, why aren't the rates lowered in Sweden?

The left handedness comparison is also atrocious as an analogy because if a person forced to use their right hand their whole life wants to use their left hand, they just use their left hand. Even in the worst possible examples, they're not going to be hurting themselves any time soon. Comparatively, if a people who was male their whole life decides to be female, it requires a concoction of hormones and surgeries which cannot be described as anything but destructive. I understand there's a certain suspension of belief for an analogy to work, but there's a difference between skipping logical hurdles for a clearer comprehension and a completely awful analogy.

 

[Ghostse]

If being left handed allowed you be free from all criticism, and simply identifying as left handed granted you those protections, you'd see a ton of malignant narcissists suddenly become left handed and gofundmes for $12,000 so they can buy left handed scissors

 

[Amber the Hedgehog]

View attachment 2125532

Or, and work with me on this, the rates of left-handedness was reported at increasing frequency because methods of research and acquiring volunteers improved. The only tangible citation this has, and it's dubious as hell. You can't hope to "educate" people skeptical of yourself when you use flowery language without a sliver of credibility.

Here's an actual citation. Nobody is surprised that Sweden is significantly more open and accepting of LGBT-related issues. Yet, for some reason, then rates of suicide in transgender populations is almost identical to America. So if all we need to do is be more encouraging of the trans population, why aren't the rates lowered in Sweden?

The left handedness comparison is also atrocious as an analogy because if a person forced to use their right hand their whole life wants to use their left hand, they just use their left hand. Even in the worst possible examples, they're not going to be hurting themselves any time soon. Comparatively, if a people who was male their whole life decides to be female, it requires a concoction of hormones and surgeries which cannot be described as anything but destructive. I understand there's a certain suspension of belief for an analogy to work, but there's a difference between skipping logical hurdles for a clearer comprehension and a completely awful analogy.

My grandfather was left handed when schools still did right hand only thing. While I'm sure it wasn't exactly pleasant or intuitive, it didn't cause dyslexia, learning disabilities or extreme anything. Actually it mostly just trained him to be able use both hands almost equally good. For example he would pick berries faster than anyone because he could pick with both hands same rate. Sure there were activities that he preferred one hand over the other, like writing with his righ hand and eating with leaf hand, but in general he had little issues doing stuff with whatever and this served him fine in life.

So yeah... I don't think this is the comparison they are looking for.

 

[Koby_Fish]

My grandfather was left handed when schools still did right hand only thing. While I'm sure it wasn't exactly pleasant or intuitive, it didn't cause dyslexia, learning disabilities or extreme anything. Actually it mostly just trained him to be able use both hands almost equally good. For example he would pick berries faster than anyone because he could pick with both hands same rate. Sure there were activities that he preferred one hand over the other, like writing with his righ hand and eating with leaf hand, but in general he had little issues doing stuff with whatever and this served him fine in life.

So yeah... I don't think this is the comparison they are looking for.

my Grandfather was lefthanded, and he lost that hand in a sawmill accident as a young adult. (Also they probably punished lefthandedness at school sooooo). So he was pretty much forced to write with his right hand from then on out.

I guess if we were to follow the tortured analogy of the comic in question, this would be akin to that Jazz kid who can't get a hatchet vaj because of the hormone blockers taken too soon, lol.

 

[fishercat]

My grandfather was left handed when schools still did right hand only thing. While I'm sure it wasn't exactly pleasant or intuitive, it didn't cause dyslexia, learning disabilities or extreme anything. Actually it mostly just trained him to be able use both hands almost equally good. For example he would pick berries faster than anyone because he could pick with both hands same rate. Sure there were activities that he preferred one hand over the other, like writing with his righ hand and eating with leaf hand, but in general he had little issues doing stuff with whatever and this served him fine in life.

So yeah... I don't think this is the comparison they are looking for.

My grandfather was ambidextrous after the same experience. He just got used to using both hands. Honestly, it could be used as a shitty allegory for conversion therapy working, since all you gotta do is use your non-dominant hand over and over and it'll feel natural!

 

[friends o' niall]

Greg Dean / Mae Dean, creator of Real Life Comics, made fun of Comic Sans in a comic last week, then received backlash from the community because "DYSLEXICS USE COMIC SANS. REEE!" , then doubled down and posted a 13-tweet thread full of autism about fonts, which he has since deleted.

View attachment 2116329

Late af, but this twat's self-important idiocy is making me MATI and I feel compelled to weigh in. Spoilered on account of the terminal levels of spergery about shit no one with a fulfilling life cares about.

Spoiler: Severe font autism ahead

In spite of all the 'graphic design is my passion' memes, no serious type designer (not any graphic designer, mind, someone who actually has proven their autistic resolve by designing a typeface and thus knows the amount of obnoxiously anal and ungrateful work it entails) will dare shit on Comic Sans because, atrociously overused and puerile as it is, the guy who designed it sure as fuck knew what he was doing.

To put it on terms of his half-arsed chef analogy, imagine Comic Sans is treacle. It makes sense only in the very specific context of a pudding. If you, as a chef, marinate your steak in only treacle, chances are it's gonna taste like shit unless you're really gifted, and treacle is not gonna be the one to blame for your incompetence.

Picture a sign in the motorway. The font may not look nice in the a e s t h e t i c dribbble shots you use to pad your portfolio. Brilliant, guess what, it's not supposed to. You were able to read the sign easily, at a distance, while in motion; it had one job and it delivered, therefore well designed: now shut up.

Bonus autism round: this nonce's witticisms on Gill Sans are a hell of a wasted opportunity.

 

[RazorBackBacon]

View attachment 2125418

You can't induce dyslexia you malignant quim, just like you can't cure it. It's neurological, not developmental. If you want me to follow your analogy, you need to not be a drooling retard.

 

[DoubleD]

Ok fine since youre doing a read and review I'll break kayfabe.

That 3.5 pages single spaced shit on Rando is less SJW and more inline with classic liberal thought of "why do we have to be such dicks to each other all the time? Can't we show some compassion? PS My farts smell AMAZING today." Regardless, I did not need an archive of the "laughing my ass off bottom text"; 1/0 was bad enough, his Poly & queer follow up was gratingly pretentious, I didn't see any need to go along for the ride of his transition journal.

And while I look forward to your summaries, the art isn't eye-gouging and the script is too weighty to be "bad" in the traditional sense, so I'm not sure if it really qualifies as a bad web comic... at least not while Moon over June still exists.

Okay, so I just finished reading the next 50 or so comics in Forward. And I actually felt kinda bad bringing it up on the bad webcomics thread because I've started to like it, but I'll do this one more time here, specifically to highlight something it does rather well and something that Questionable Content does badly:

Robots.

Tailsteak actually made a QC comparison himself at one point, which was to point out how unrealistic it was that even though QC takes place in a world where futuristic robots and body modifications exist, it's still not possible for trans women to get a functioning vagina. It was only done that way in the comic because Jeff Jacks wanted to write about a trans woman, internal consistency in the setting be damned!

Of course, Tailsteak goes on to say that his comic does take place in the futuristic world that trans people only wish that they lived in. I beg to differ. While I'm sure a great many of them would prefer it this way, the ones who proudly define the movement's goals would hate it almost as much as they hate the real world.

For one, there would be no social norms to enjoy breaking, In a world where everyone uses the same pronoun, there'd be no fun to be had from changing it. After all, the people using non-standard pronouns typically only do so amongst their own little community and no one else. They enjoy how insular their community is, and deep down wish it could stay that way. Because when everyone is trans, no one will be.

Anyway, that was a tangent.

QC's robots live amongst humans in a modern setting as their theoretical equals. That last part is important. While early QC saw 'AnthroPCs' as more or less equivalent to household pets, the recent strips show them as a thinly veiled metaphor for some as-of-yet unspecified group of Oppressed People.

This of course, is rife with the assumption that a robot (essentially a collection of tiny switches) can be alive and have consciousness, which I think is some bullshit

Ever since the QC robots got upgraded to human-sized bodies (which the wiki says happened in strip 2001. Insert HAL 9000 joke here), Jeff Jacks has been going out his way to confer personhood on these machines. Often they are only visually distinguished from humans by their unusual skintones, square-cornered speech bubbles, and one or two lines on their bodies.

And then we get strips like 4433, which pretty much shouts the subtext in your face.

Spoiler: ROBOTS HAVE FEELINGS TOO. CHECK YOUR HUMAN PRIVILEGE.

Whereas Tailsteak, on the other hand, actually shows robots as mere creations of man, with a one-track mind set on achieving their intended purpose. Despite having near-human intelligence and being able to imitate emotions, they are correctly regarded as things. His robots are also more mechanical looking. And while every human we've seen so far is referred to using they/them pronouns, the robots are invariably described as 'it'.

I'd show you a page, but I can't find just one that exemplifies it best. But just start at page 1 and work your way forward. There is also this brilliant quote from one of his after-comic bits (the ones that often take longer to read than the comic itself).

Zoa, like Doc, does not have emotions or an ego. It is an AI. If it displays a facial expression, it is doing so on purpose, for a purpose.

This, my friend, is the right was to do robots in a sci-fi. A human society that treats robots anything like the way they're depicted in QC... probably won't be a human society for very much longer.

 

[Ghostse]

Okay, so I just finished reading the next 50 or so comics in Forward. And I actually felt kinda bad bringing it up on the bad webcomics thread because I've started to like it, but I'll do this one more time here, specifically to highlight something it does rather well and something that Questionable Content does badly:

Robots.

Tailsteak actually made a QC comparison himself at one point, which was to point out how unrealistic it was that QC takes place in a world where futuristic robots and body modifications exist, it's still not possible for trans women to get a functioning vagina. And it was done that way in the comic because Jeff Jacks really wanted to write about a trans woman, internal consistency in the setting be damned!

Of course, Tailsteak goes on to say that his comic takes place in the futuristic world that trans people can only wish they lived in. I beg to differ. While I'm sure a lot of them would prefer it, the ones who proudly define the movement's goals would hate it as much as the real world.

For one, there would be no social norms to enjoy breaking, In a world where everyone uses the same pronoun, there'd be fun to be had from changing it. After all, the people using non-standard pronouns typically only do so amongst their own community and no one else. They enjoy how insular their community is, and deep down wish it could stay that way. Because when everyone is trans, no one will be.

Anyway, that was a tangent.

QC's robots live amongst humans in a modern setting as their theoretical equals. That last part is important. While early QC saw 'AnthroPCs' as more or less equivalent to household pets, the recent strips show them as a thinly veiled metaphor for some as-of-yet unspecified group of Oppressed People.

This of course, is rife with the assumption that a robot (essentially a collection of tiny switches) can be alive and have consciousness, which I think is some bullshit

Ever since the QC robots got upgraded to human-sized bodies (which the wiki says happened in strip 2001. Insert HAL 9000 joke here), Jeff Jacks has been going out his way to confer personhood on these machines. Often they are only visually distinguished from humans by their unusual skintones, square-cornered speech bubbles, and one or two lines on their bodies.

And then we get strips like 4433, which pretty much shouts the subtext in your face.

Spoiler: ROBOTS HAVE FEELINGS TOO. CHECK YOUR HUMAN PRIVILEGE.

View attachment 2129823

Whereas Tailsteak, on the other hand, actually shows robots as mere creations of man, with a one-track mind set on achieving their intended purpose, Despite having near-human intelligence, they are correctly regarded as things. And while every human we've seen so far is referred to using they/them pronouns, the robots are invariably described as 'it'.

I'd show you a page, but I can't find just one that exemplifies it best. But just start at page 1 and work your way forward. There is also this brilliant quote from one of his after-comic bits (the ones that often take longer to read than the comic itself).


This, my friend, is the right was to do robots in a sci-fi. A human society that treats robots anything like the way they're depicted in QC... probably won't be a human society for very much longer.

I really want to give you some shit enjoying War and Neoginas, but tbph that craving is really more about it been having been over a decade since I've been able to give anyone shit about liking 1/0.

so instead I'll focus on the only important part of your post:

ROBOTS HAVE FEELINGS TOO. CHECK YOUR HUMAN PRIVILEGE.
View attachment 2129823

Is it just me or has Handstab actually gotten worse at art?

 

[AnOminous]

The left handedness comparison is also atrocious as an analogy because if a person forced to use their right hand their whole life wants to use their left hand, they just use their left hand.

I've known a couple people who said nuns would hit their knuckles with a ruler when they tried to write with their left hand, but they were really old. This isn't a thing anyone still alive is likely to have experienced. There was some weird Catholic bullshit about it supposedly being your evil hand.

 

[Ghostse]

I've known a couple people who said nuns would hit their knuckles with a ruler when they tried to write with their left hand, but they were really old. This isn't a thing anyone still alive is likely to have experienced. There was some weird Catholic bullshit about it supposedly being your evil hand.

"Sinister" literally means 'left'

 

[DoubleD]

I really want to give you some shit enjoying War and Neoginas, but tbph that craving is really more about it been having been over a decade since I've been able to give anyone shit about liking 1/0.

What can I say? I am but a sucker for the worldbuilding.

Handstab

gotten worse at art?

You just answered your own question.

 

[RazorBackBacon]

Is it just me or has Handstab actually gotten worse at art?

Yes and no. He no longer uses a standard set of stock figures, so points for actually drawing each panel now. But it turns out that he never bothered to actually improve; his stock figures only looked good because he could afford to actually take his time making them, then make up for that extra time by making pages extra quick.

Slightly off-topic, but making a page a day is actually a pretty demanding schedule. There's a reason why old newspaper comics stuck to just three panel joke strips, and it's the same reason why professional comics require a team of people to make a ~20-page issue each month. In Jeph's case, he could manage a page a day because assembling what is effectively your own digital paper dolls is pretty easy. Now that he's dropped that method, he's stuck with an upload schedule he started years ago, and so has to sacrifice what little quality he might actually have managed.

Or the stupid nigger can't draw. One or the other.