It's the Day's Day of Days! Because sugar maple.
If there is an afterlife, a good portion of Muir's hell is going to be the simple realization that he was the bad guy.
Another portion will be the realization that he was tremendously untalented.
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ReplyDeleteI disagree that he's flatly "untalented." I believe he has a genuine gift for metaphor, allusion, wordplay and symbolism. His writing can be quite sophisticated in this respect. And he has a certain flair for dry, droll situational comedy.
ReplyDeleteHaving gotten that out of the way...
As a storyteller he is incompetent. His plotting is thin and disjointed, his pacing is staccato and zigzags between abrupt and painfully slow, his transitions are often poorly set up, and his staging is muddled and confusing to the point where half the time it's not even immediately clear what lines are being spoken by whom.
As a draftsman he was once serviceable in a workmanlike way, but remarkably in the sixteen years he's been at the daily grind, he's somehow managed to deteriorate instead of progress. Once he started leaning on filtered photos and garish shading methods, the underlying weaknesses showed through more than they ever had. And when he attempts to substitute traced photographs of random people for the characters' faces, the results range from awkward to downright grotesque. He does not posses the eye required for this technique at all and should not be attempting something this far outside his graphic skill set.
And let's not even get into his staggering incompetence as an observer and polemic, as he has become a incoherent lunatic with a worldview and voice to match that are more myopic than a flattened straw. Whatever satirical chops he once had have been subsumed by paranoid bitterness, feverish delusion, and misogyny so grotesque it makes Dave Sim look like Gloria Steinhem.
Which are the same reasons why any skill he once had at characterization have also completely dried up. So thoroughly has mind closed itself off from the world that he is no longer capable of writing from any point of view that is not a direct manifestation of his own, or setting up strawmen so laughably silly that they're downright embarrassing to behold.