9 Chickweed Lane

1-24-2023

There's a lot wrong with this strip.

There's a great deal wrong with this strip.

One of the biggest remains the unseen visual gag about his underpants.

It fails because there's two ways you can spin something like this:

1) Show it, but don't describe it... at least not immediately. A depiction of underpants with Wagner's face, or a bunch of his faces as a pattern, and then an explanation would work. "What? Oh, yeah. These are my Wagnerian pants. I always wear them on Wednesday."

2) Describe it and only describe it, but describe it in detail. We don't get detail (it isn't until day 2 that we find out what the decoration is, that it's a face on his butt cheek, and that there's a second face on his other butt cheek but he only refers to his underpants by the name of the first butt cheek guy) and we also see the front of his underpants, which are white.

Now for the overclothes... where to start?

McEldowney dressed Amos in a turtleneck sweater and a pea coat or a blazer. Yesterday Amos ripped his turtleneck sweater in half down the center to quickly bare his chest. He didn't pull it off and whip it away. Nor did he yank it open, buttons flying, as one would a button down shirt. He shredded that fucker. And yet today he's fully dressed. If he'd torn off and thrown his sweater he could simply put it back on. If he'd ripped open his button down shirt he could hold it closed, even if the buttons are long gone. But apparently his turtleneck sweater just... reformed? Did McEldowney forget that Amos had shredded the turtleneck sweater? Does he just not care? Does it not matter to him as long as Amos has gotten nude in public?

Out there in the outside world. Where other people are. Where it's cold enough to need outerwear. Possibly in a place where people called the police on them as Amos licked Edda's feet on the sidewalk.

All that matters is Amos has nipples hard enough to cut glass.