its about timing, mostly
someone else could probably explain it better than me, but basically timboy drags out his jokes too long and the punchline is never worth the effort put in to get to it
plus. its supposed to be a comic but theres no visual gags or storytelling to go along with the dialogue. cutting half the panels and getting rid of the text in the last panel takes out of ¾ of the dialogue, so youre left with a shorter joke and something visual to accompany it
Oh! I can explain.
Okay so to make a comic successful you’ve gotta have your “timing” correct, but since comics aren’t a time based media like film, timing isn’t really the right word. The word I’ve always seen people use is “beat”. A beat in a comic is just a moment really. So it can be an action, dialogue, or anything that happens in the comic. One of the many problems with CAD is that Buckley doesn’t have a good sense of where to place beats in his comics, and how to make a 4 panel format work. Either there aren’t enough beats like in this strip
or there are too many like in this one
That, on top of poor writing, makes it so that the information (or lack thereof) in panels 2 and 3 aren’t relevant or funny enough to make them worth keeping. And, with the strips that have too many beats, which for Buckley means too much dialogue, you just kind of skim over it because there’s just so much. A lot of the really wordy strips just need some of the irrelevant dialogue taken out to give a bit of breathing room. To go to the timing analogy, a panel with a lot of beats feels very rapid, while a panel with just 1 beat feels slower which is so essential because you need that variance in pacing to make the reader pay attention to what you want them to.
To illustrate what I’m saying, look at the original strip
and my edit
now it’s just not a good comic so this isn’t
Now, the original wasn’t very good to work with, but just taking out some speech bubbles and letting there be a silent moment in that 3rd panel makes it more readable.
thank you! i’m definitely not a professional when it comes to comics, this is a much better explanation than mine