I tend to enjoy CAD the most when it makes one-off parodies of games, and find the main storyline incredibly bland at the best of times, and downright frustrating at the worst. Webcomic connoisseurs have had a go at his art style and methods, but those things fly under my radar as a non-issue to me, because I just want a good laugh and more often than not, CAD does not deliver. I read it out of habit because I know that once in a blue moon it can be pretty funny, but it gets very self-gratifying when it comes to things like Winter-een-mas and the Gaming Religion. The series he made with the Gaming Religion nursery rhyme was painful for me, but I read them to give benefit of the doubt, and not only did it not nearly compare to the excellent Twisp and Catsby nursery rhyme from around the same time period, but it just wasn't good by its own merits, either. I could vividly picture him patting himself on the back after drawing a strip where Lucas tells the other religious leaders to disprove the gaming religion's gods without disproving their own. As an amusing note, an anti-CAD enthusiast later re-edited the strip with the final panel containing the priest's valid response of "Your gods were created for the purpose of worshiping physical objects made by man."
Sometimes, CAD can be funny. At other times it really feels as though Tim Buckley's popularity is going to his head. How horrible, on so many levels, was the storyline of Lucas trying to get out of his date with a fat woman until he realizes that it was a costume and that she's actually hot, and that she dressed fat to make sure that men don't like her for being hot? How many times do the jokes in the main storyline rely on an essay of words to build up to what should have been a one-liner, and an insipid one at that? The only example of character humour I can really come up with is the penguin. I won't pick on Chef Brian too much, because he only pops up once in a long while, but everything about those strips define the very anti-thesis of humour. Honestly, that kind of humour was only funny to me 8 years ago, and even then I stopped after about a month because I realized that it was stupid and beneath me.
Lately, CAD has really been rubbing me the wrong way, even by its own merits, and gets utterly destroyed once I start comparing it to strips like Penny Arcade. In PA, some of my favourite strips don't actually have proper punchlines, but the humour is thick because they play off the established characters. Look at the Professor Layton strip. It's not funny for me to say that the "punchline" was Tycho shouting "FUCK YOU!" but when you read the strip and you know the character, it's absolutely hilarious. Look at the series where Gabe and Tycho "break up" and each make their own comic. Gabe's is well drawn with profoundly stupid writing. Tycho's strip, another one of my absolute favourites, again contained no actual punchline, but consisted of horrible MS Paint line scribbles featuring an obtusely complicated plot regarding the mechanics of grammar.
The hilarity of these strips are in what isn't being said, whereas CAD makes it a point to spell out every one of the jokes, while telling us how he spells it. Look at the recent CAD strip about Gears of War 2. The premise of the joke was solid, and took 4 gigantic panels to build a joke that would have taken PA 2 or 3, tops, and then he drops the ball on the joke by not giving us a satisfying pay-off to the build.
In fact, while I'm here, and since my NyQuil high is derailing any semblance of focus that I already lack on the best of days, let me particularly tear this strip apart.
http://www.cad-comic.com/comic.php?d=20080225
First off, the dialogue isn't concise enough. Look how much the characters have to talk in order to establish the premise. It would be one thing if this were a short film animation, but for a comic, it's a bit too verbose. One character sets up the topic, the second character initiates the conflict, the first character sets up the punchline, then the punchline takes place over two panels.
Far more effective would be for one of the characters to immediately establish the conflict to be resolved, and then the next character would immediately build to the punchline. Let's imagine the first panel being the character stressing over the pressure to make Gears of War 2, and saying "How the hell are we supposed to follow up Gears of War? We put a chainsaw on a machine gun! It doesn't GET more awesome than that!" We've already cut off about half the dialogue. Then the second panel can be pretty much the same.
Now note the last two panels. Spreading one punchline over two panels is tedious, especially when the final panel spells out in great detail everything that we don't need to have explained to us. He didn't need to tell me that he has a gun with a train on it. I can SEE that. Get rid of the third panel altogether, and go straight to the shot of him holding a train-gun, but use the text from the third panel instead. So, we have three panels: "Nothing can be more awesome than a chainsaw gun," "I've got ideas," and then, "Time to bring some ruckus to those locust assholes" as we see him dangling off his "gun."
But now that the strip has been condensed, we're now faced with the problem that the punchline doesn't pay off the build. A train on his gun ISN'T more awesome than a chainsaw gun. And as such, the punchline isn't funny, because it isn't true. What if, instead of a chainsaw, he now had a lawnmower on his gun? Or a T-Rex?
I mean, feel free to debate me on this if you feel that the strip is funnier as it is than with my suggested "improvements." Obviously, I'm not a funny enough person to accomplish being able to make a living off of it, and Tim Buckley's doing well for himself with the CAD site. But that strip was boring to me, and I can identify exactly what could have been done with it to make me laugh, but obviously Buckley's views of humour differ from mine.
Again, I'm too doped up to know how to finish this post appropriately, so I'll just stop typing now.
