Here is Thursday’s episode of a comic strip called Adams’ Apples, which appears exclusively in my local paper, The Oregonian, and is not available online.
The artist, Jim Adams, is a local schoolteacher, and the strip is apparently autobiographical. It is also consistently amateurishly drawn, awkwardly worded, and unfunny.
In this example, he has used a joke that I distinctly remember reading a better-worded version of in a joke book I checked out of the library when I was 7.
But never mind that.
“DICIDED”??
When was the last time you saw a misspelled word in a comic strip? Maybe never? It is an exceedingly rare event, because syndicated comic strips have many layers of editors. Adams’ Apples does not, or at least not editors who care about such things. Adams once misspelled “CEMETERY” as “CEMETARY,” and I’ve seen him write “A LOT” as one word. Mistakes like that are common elsewhere, but like I said, the comics page is usually pretty tight.
He’s not very good with commas, either, as you see in this installment. The commas after “BUT” in the second panel and “SO” in the third panel are unnecessary, though allowable if you really want to indicate that the speaker pauses there. “But, pause, eventually, pause, the weather….” But the comma in “SUCH AS, ‘HUGO'” in the third panel is just wrong, period. Again, this is typical of Adams’ Apples.
I hate the strip so much that I read it every day, just so I can enjoy hating it and feel bad for the hundreds of talented cartoonists whose work is rejected by The Oregonian in favor of a homegrown but awful strip. So sad.
