I don’t mind the joke here being heavily recycled, but art-wise you have two people who seem to be looking straight-ahead, and then the shopkeeper looking at something down the street in a 90° direction. These things seem to combine to make the cats look like they could be hovering roughly in front of the shops, but also further away, over the street intersection.
Still, there’s the rub-- is it yet another ‘meta’ joke about this scene being some kind of Escher-variant, or is it just lazy work on the artist’s part?
Conclusion: when a reader has to think this much in order to make a cartoon interesting or funny, then odds are it’s probably not very interesting or funny. That, and maybe you can only coast so much on your ‘meta’ rep. Maybe if he’d put more work in to this one to play up an Escher-like angle, it might have even been a great strip, but no.
In fact, I’d be really curious to hear what the writers at Solrad have to say about the strip nowadays. A few years ago they published a series of articles praising it to the heavens, and I feel they were right on the money, at the time.
Euclidean geometry is not a strong point with NAPG. I am constantly finding errors when I remove Heathcliff. Let’s look at this one from the other day. The corner of the wall doesn’t work. Once I removed the orange boi it became really clear that that corner can’t exist if we assume the walls are straight.
The size of Heathcliff is very variable. Here is an example of him being maybe a foot tall and one with him being two and a half feet tall.
Here’s the rub, it doesn’t matter. People spend maybe 7 seconds tops reading the original comics. They don’t notice that foreshortening is all messed up. As long as there are three elements that connect. Text, cat, speaker of text, then it works. The spatial relationships between them don’t matter much.
In fact if you look at most single panel comics it’s amazing how much detail and work NAPG puts in the background. Most comics these days are slrei characters with a hint of background, maybe not even that much.
In this particular comic the building would need to be distant and small, the cats giant, or the building at an odd angle that doesn’t work in comics in order to get the geometry right. Most people see floating cats, person yelling, people talking and the text they are saying. That’s four elements. More than usual. At that point scale doesn’t matter much.
In my edit I’ve removed one of those elements and brought it back down to the normal three. In my reading of it these two humans are talking about how mental illness is frequently hereditary as an old man yells at clouds. It’s much harder to parse than the original but it is visually easier.
I’m reminded of the word of the prophets in situations like this.
"Just repeat to yourself “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”
Oops attached the just the single instead of the triple.
Oh man, let me make no bones upon this, but I *love* your work on this project, and HARK!
Euclidean geometry is not a strong point with NAPG.
Oh, piss off, FP-- I don’t answer to no “National Association of Gerontology Professionals,” and I never will!!
(oh, rabbits, might you mean “new-age Peter Gallagher??”)
Let’s look at this one from the other day. The corner of the wall doesn’t work. Once I removed the orange boi it became really clear that that corner can’t exist if we assume the walls are straight.
Okay, cool!
Yet which is seemingly a common occurrence these days, is it nawt? I mean (and we’ve talked about this before in previous months)-- I believe we both greatly admire Gallagher’s gonzo LEAP upon taking the strip in wonderful new directions, such as to… almost being a Krazy Kat-like jump, and that’s… holy hell… yeah!BUT! These days, more and more in HC, it seems to me like there’s been a creeping, sad erosion of comics skills upon his part in too many ways, and yes, fading inventiveness… and yes, I also think I understand how ridoinkulous it must be to shoulder that kind of burden, day-after-day, year-after-bloody-year, being a successful strip artist.
So there’s THAT, also.
I wouldn’t say the geometry errors are common but If these were trading cards they would be ranked as uncommon instead of rare.
NAPG - Non-Actor Peter Gallagher. So that he isn’t confused with the actual actor Peter Gallagher.
I don’t know that the rates are increasing. I’d have to go back and look at some of the early years of his work.
I wouldn’t say the geometry errors are common but If these were trading cards they would be ranked as uncommon instead of rare.
Oh rabbits, now would that be… GOOD?
LOL… I still have this box of 1978 mint, TOPPS baseball cards. I think I waited too long, after the bust, to sell, but whatever. Some things become just that much part of yon life, is it not…?
I have boxes of comics that are part of my life. Won’t read most of them again but can’t get rid of them
