Standing on the Corner, Watching All the Snark Go By

On April’s Real Blog today, for Howard the action was elsewhere. It was on April’s date with Gerald and then at Becky’s Sam Driver party. Howard was not involved in any of it. All I could do was to wait for the snark to come in from the participating players and make comments on it. It made me appreciate how well aprilp_katje does that and manages to sneak in her own funny April stuff to boot on a daily basis.

I liked the fact that the Becky celebrity comic strip party this time was Judge Parker, which has been one of my favorite strips for years, mainly due to the artistry of Harold LeDoux. His line work and composition are consistently superb. When I was growing up, there were many comic strips artists of that quality, but now very few are left. Lynn Johnston’s artwork has improved quite a bit since her earliest days of doing For Better or For Worse, but it still pales in comparison to LeDoux. Lynn has clearly farmed a lot of the art chores off to amateur artists, which is a pretty common practice (e.g. Garfield). The face and body shapes are not consistent from panel to panel, and the person who does the backgrounds using a ruler drives me nuts. I don’t know where Lynn got these people, but anyone with any kind of art training would not be making these kinds of mistakes. Why hire rank amateurs when there are plenty of good artists who would kill to get a regular art job? I don’t understand it.

Tomorrow Howard and Becky go to Gerald’s dad’s house for dinner. I will be absent from the computer for most of tomorrow, so I expect I will have the joy of filling in the empty spots that qnjones posting as Becky will leave me when I get back. It will be nice to once again have a piece of the action.