Okay, I think I’ve finally figured out why I have trouble getting into this strip. I agree that the art is great. I have thought so for every strip so far. My problem is that the strip seems to be addressing issues that are old news or have been played out hundreds of times over. For instance, “Muggings” doesn’t present anything new. Government mugging the ordinary man has been done… again and again. It can be redone, but if so, something new needs to be added to make the idea original. I am missing what is original about “Muggings” aside from the artwork, which is true for pretty much all of the strips so far going back to the strips about Romney losing the election (though a reread of the Oscars dream strip made me appreciate it a bit more than my first read). You may be playing the long game and a payoff is coming related to the character being mugged. If a payoff happens, I will reevaluate, but this is where I am right now.

kclibby on February 27, 2013 at 12:46 PM

Yes, we are looking more towards the long game than the short game. There is an overall story we want to tell, and we’d like to use moments in that story to address the current state of things as well.

More importantly, we want to engage the culture more than we want to just crank out Ramirez-style riffs on issues of the day. We want to create some funny, quirky, hopefully interesting characters and an overall story arc that people, particularly younger and less engaged people, will follow so that we can sneak in the conservative messaging.

One of the problems is that the inciting incident for the main character happened in November and we weren’t able to get the strip out until a few months later. That made it feel a lot more redundant and “get over it already” than we wanted to begin with, and frankly we let the initial rant run on too long.

As Jett said, we’re still finding our sea legs, still figuring out the balance we want between pop culture, snark, current events, politics, and story. Just as you are learning about these characters, so are we. Keep in mind, we’re not posting daily here, so while it has been about a month and a half of real time, we’ve only got maybe 5 minutes worth of comics to read.

We’ve gotten lots of positive responses as well as criticisms, and we really appreciate the feedback, but like everything, it takes time, and it’s our free time so it’s much more limited than a paid gig would be. So hopefully you’ll be patient with us and enjoy the ride. (Or convince HotAir to pay our salaries so we can spend all day every day just working on the strip. )