So, over a long and boring weekend, I've been binge-reading
9 Chickweed Lane and found it a bit of a revelation in terms of my experience with Questionable Content
9 Chickweed Lane is an
old webcomic - a quarter of a century of nearly-daily strips. Of webcomics of my experience, only David M Willis and Scott Adams have been continuously active for as close as long as Brooke McEldowney. However, in my reading of the story (not complete - there's no possible way I could have done that in 2 days, no matter how hard I tried), I noticed something that I've seen in
Dilbert and
Questionable Content and which Willis only avoided by soft rebooting his work into
Dumbing of Age about a decade or so back. 9CL ended about 2 years back and has been struggling to continue to exist ever since. All the plot threads (even minor ones like the protagonists' relationship with their former principal) were exhausted and we've been getting more and more random 'arty' strips, which are buffers between random characters getting together for no other reason than to try to rediscover the chemistry of Amos and Edda's relationship from middle school to married parents.
Similarly,
Dilbert has become more and more dully unimaginative and more about the many chips on Scott Adams' shoulders and less about the reality of the white-collar workplace.
In both cases, and increasingly with QC, the feeling is that the story is told, the show is over and there is nothing left to say or show. The time has come to turn off the lights, haul down the shutters and do something new.
The problem is that none of the creatives in question seem willing to do that. Maybe it's pride. Maybe they still want to make the strip or maybe it's just cold, hard economic cynicism (it still sells to enough people to cover costs, so why stop?). However, when you compare the best of these works (almost invariably a middle period) with where they are now, you can't help but feel sad. You compare the weird and sometimes arbitrary 'plot thrown at the wall to see if it sticks', randomly and arbitrarily reworked characters and spontaneous romances of today with the wonderful characterisations and long-term ongoing stories (or, in Adams' case, social insights) of yesteryear.
