"Owen" by Joshua Moor

Victor: This web comic was submitted to us by the previously mentioned ex-girlfriend who was obsessed with James Kochalka.  Her name is Kathy MacLeod and I would've linked to her website but it seems to be down right now.  She makes comics and is one of two confirmed readers of this blog (the other is Bob Weisz, who has a Google alert on his name).  Owen, does this web comic accurately depict your life?

Owen: No.  Fuck this dude for naming a comic after me that sucks.  I graduated from college and I don't even fuck with Art.

Victor: I recall you fucking with art in college a little bit.

Owen: Nah man.  This comic is fucking terrible.

Victor: This is the worst comic I've ever seen.  It's so bad that I actually love it. I can't stop looking at it.  The stupid fonts, the retarded figuration, the boring bullshit ass nonsense dialogue.  It's perfect.  wehatethiswebcomic.blogspot.com could not ask for better content.

Owen: This is like something I would have made for computer camp class when I was seven.  Except if I was way stupider.

Victor: Why does every dorm hallway look exactly the same? I give him points for using mixed media.  God, this comic is so bad. Oh, sorry, I mean this *cartoon* is so bad.  We should review a Scott McCloud comic.  I think we discussed it before.  Jesus, I can't get over "OWEN."  Even the speech bubbles are retarded.

Owen: Yeah, I guess this doesn't even qualify as "sequential art" or whatever Scott McCloud talks about.  It's just two terribly drawn people some crappy bubbles slapped on them.  I don't think the second guy has legs.  And it looks like he's wearing a leotard.  But I think we need to build up to Scott McCloud since he's like an authority or something.

Victor: It looks like he's kneeling with his feet behind the title box, actually.  But yeah, he's definitely wearing some sort of 'tard. I think it's a unitard.  OK, but like can't it be argued that the fact that there are multiple speech bubbles means that time is passing within the one panel? And since you read the speech bubbles in "sequence" it's, to some extent, "sequential?"  I don't know, he probably touches on that, I haven't read that book in years... It just seems like a silly distinction to make.

Owen: Shit.  I guess your right.  Fuck.  You know what I just realized?  This guy is actually a genius, because the comic is meta, because he's in it.  I think he's the dude who failed art, and the comic illustrates how bad at art he is, and that's why he's going to fail college.  And he tricked us, because we just think it was actually the shittiest comic we have ever seen.  It's kind of like a trompe l'eoil, you know that painting that looks so real that you can't tell it's a painting, and then when you reach out to eat the grapes or whatever, it's actually just a painting.  I guess maybe we should read some more of his comics and see if that theory holds up.

Victor: I don't know if I want to look at the rest of them.  Let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Special guest blogger Kathy MacLeod of kathyspotsafatbitch.blogspot.com says: "It had me from the tagline: 'College doesn't suck, but sometimes it does.' ...I imagine the creator as a corny fat bitch and I want to tickle him."  I just had another idea.  Maybe, in addition to being a trompe l'eoil, the cartoon/comic is an attempt at deconstructing the pedagogy of respected sequential art theorist Scott McCloud...

Owen: Yeah.  So I guess this guy is a genius.  We need to stop giving positive reviews to shitty comics.  But, even if it's not supposed to be really smart, the dude is still in college, and this comic makes me want to kill myself a lot less than the shit that was published in the Argus (Boy with Fish for a Head not included in that category), so I guess that's something.

Victor: As a former editor of the Wesleyan Argus comics page, I can attest that this is exactly as shitty as every other comic we published.

Owen: Fair enough.