I'm aware of Tim Buckley's ego, as well as some of the shenanigans he's pulled, but I always make a priority to judge the art, not the artist, and in this case, the work is simply sub par. Without going too much into it, the artwork always manages to look very lazy, even after Buckley finally reacted to the B^U meme by drawing more than 5 expressions. As far as the integration of a storyline, I'm all for it, if the author can pull it off. Buckley really can't, mainly because half the time, it's hard to tell if he's trying to make a strip comedic or dramatic, which brings me to my biggest gripe of all: the comic simply isn't funny about 80% of the time. Half the time, I literally can't tell if there was supposed to even be a punchline at all, and the rest of the time, the punchline might as well be a 2x4 across the face, for all the subtlety it has.
And usually, the joke ends up being either an over explained tie in to whatever game Buckley was playing at the time, or the hi-larious method of reiterating to the reader what is already very obvious: Ethan is dumb. And he's not dumb in a funny way. He's dumb in an "obnoxious moron who won't shut up" kind of way. I say obnoxious, because the most obnoxious way of showing that a person is dim witted is by not having them ever shut up, which Ethan hardly ever does.
All in all, there really isn't any one thing that makes the comic unbearable, but everything about it is just not that good. The artwork isn't that good, the story isn't that good, the occasional author filibusters are not good, and the jokes aren't that good, and when you have a work that has no real good qualities to it, there's really not much reason to read it.
Not horrible, but not good.
I'm aware of Tim Buckley's ego, as well as some of the shenanigans he's pulled, but I always make a priority to judge the art, not the artist, and in this case, the work is simply sub par. Without going too much into it, the artwork always manages to look very lazy, even after Buckley finally reacted to the B^U meme by drawing more than 5 expressions. As far as the integration of a storyline, I'm all for it, if the author can pull it off. Buckley really can't, mainly because half the time, it's hard to tell if he's trying to make a strip comedic or dramatic, which brings me to my biggest gripe of all: the comic simply isn't funny about 80% of the time. Half the time, I literally can't tell if there was supposed to even be a punchline at all, and the rest of the time, the punchline might as well be a 2x4 across the face, for all the subtlety it has.
And usually, the joke ends up being either an over explained tie in to whatever game Buckley was playing at the time, or the hi-larious method of reiterating to the reader what is already very obvious: Ethan is dumb. And he's not dumb in a funny way. He's dumb in an "obnoxious moron who won't shut up" kind of way. I say obnoxious, because the most obnoxious way of showing that a person is dim witted is by not having them ever shut up, which Ethan hardly ever does.
All in all, there really isn't any one thing that makes the comic unbearable, but everything about it is just not that good. The artwork isn't that good, the story isn't that good, the occasional author filibusters are not good, and the jokes aren't that good, and when you have a work that has no real good qualities to it, there's really not much reason to read it.