Hooya said:
It seems like you read his blog but just chose not to believe anything he said there, and if you didn't believe him, nothing I can say will change your opinion. Not that your opinion matters at all anyway.
Well, if I refuse to believe his wall of lame and mutually exclusive excuses for his moment of bad judgement, CAD is still a relatively good comic.
If I am to
believe what he said, and if his rantings are actually true, then CAD is a poorly written, self-important, pretentious piece of
crap.
I've given it some thought, though, and have arrived at a third answer: CAD is actually
two comics.
One is a random, quirky, light-hearted gaming comic. It is entirely gag-driven; all other features are subject to delivering the punchline. Apart form the mini-story arcs, there is no continuity. This lets every mini arc go its own way, and allows them to be based on mutually contradictory premises. The world the whole comic is set into is surreal, allowing for much more situations and twists than the real world might, and also intentionally left vague, lest some pesky previously mentioned rule stops a gag from taking a particular course.
Characters are no more than stock characters with one or two defining features, while the rest of them are intentionaly left vague and random, meaning they can act out of character all the time. Unencumbered with motivation, aside from their one defining characteristic, characters can act in a way that best serves the purpose of setting up the gag and delivering a punchline.
An example of such a comic (although not a gaming one) would be Garfield. Waving aside contradictions in character and setup like flies, the comic can base its punchline on "Garfield reading the papers" one day, and "Garfield not knowing how to read 'cuz he's a cat" the next. Humour is the main point, and everything else can be bent to it.
The
other comic is a character-driven, story-based comic, depicting the lives of five friends, and the problems they face. This comic takes place in the real world. There's continuity, of course, and there's an overarching storyline that has been planned ahead; the characters are defined, and their actions are consistent with their motivations in life. There are humorous elements, but it's not a comic aimed at making people laugh. The story is evenly paced, and, while the comic has its minor flaws, and due to its nature certainly won't appeal to everyone, one must admit that nobody's forcing you to read it, it's just something the author does in his free time, and he can do whatever he wants with it.
What confuses the readers is that both comics have the same characters, and are posted (alternating at random) in the same place at the same time, leading people to believe it's actually one comic. Which is of course impossible, because one is a silly, quirky, surreal, "causality be damned" gaming comic, while the other is a drama, and the two go together like chalk and cheese. They are of a contradicting and mutually exclusive nature. Such elements can not coexist in the same comic. Any single comic sontaining all these elements simultaneously would be wildly schizophrenic, to say the least. It would be a badly written, badly paced, inconsistent wreck, flailing wildly at random, jumping from humorous surrealism to "real life", in a world with no rules whatsoever, with gaping plot holes, self-contradicting storylines, undefined (and possibly dangerously deranged) characters, nonexistant flow, and no direction whatsoever, and any author claiming he created such a patchwork monstruosity intentionally, and actually taking pride in his work, would also have to be a master of Yoga, because he would have his head stuck up his own ass while at the same time swallowing his own foot.
Viewed as two separate comics, on the other hand, and judging them separately, each comic for itself is quite alright, actually. And seeing that Tim Buckley is doing a
third comic now (again with the same characters), this theory is quite plausible.
