The last several years of this comic can be summed up in a single word: Lazy. Lazy, lazy, lazy.
The writer doesn't bother to make the characters interesting, likable or entertaining in their own right, instead slapping a bunch of tits and ass on anyone with a pussy and bodybuilder abs on anyone with a penis and calls it a day. He focuses all his energy on setting up and executing gags in the moment with the gags in question being really dumb, relying heavily on the alleged innate hilarity of ginormous boobs, having sex, sexuality being switched up and men getting Mr. Happys in their backdoors. Potentially interesting ideas are introduced, only to disappear for vast stretches and either not be touched on again or come back with arbitrary wrap-ups that suggest the writer just shrugged and gave up halfway through. Its genre has a reputation for being formulaic, by-the-numbers and cliché, yet somehow it still manages to get the fundamentals of that genre wrong because it faffs around not servicing the supposedly develop(ing/ed) relationships between its characters, then pulls something like this and expects us to treat the supposedly big moment with a completely unearned gravitas. But that's not the worst part; oh no, folks, I've saved the worst part for last.
I could go on another tear about that abominable preview button and the strip's lack of mention in the social media feed and the implications thereof, but I'd rather go back to
this strip.
That's emblematic of the strip's worst qualities these days. And by that I mean this: it's bad enough that the plot is meandering, the characters are a bunch of degenerate assholes and the rules of how the world works are just made up as we go along, but what's really galling is that anytime the characters begin to reconsider their current course, have internal debates about what kind of people they are or come close to moving the plot along in a positive way, the writer completely chickens out and backs away from it, with lame excuses and gratuitous, unsexy boob and ass shots. Like that stripper who OD'd and got resuscitated by Teddi in a way that suggests the writer doesn't know anything about CPR. What's that, reviving people who are supposed to be dead sets off a chain of disaster dominoes and gets Al put on a watchlist for failing to reap her? Well, let's not follow up on that at all; far better to just bring her back for a single strip after like 20 or so in-betweeners and mention her revival as proof of Teddy's innate decency! Moreover, by rights there is no reason for the "get Teddy a girlfriend" plot to have taken this long to resolve, and even less reason for it to have needed Teddy to turn back into a girl and become two separate people with the one mind, but here we are, and the writer expects the totally undeveloped relationship between Teddy and Chloe, which he could have properly developed to make this would-be tragic moment feel earned in HALF the time he squandered on Pandora's ridiculous "prank", to mean something to us. You can't spend a minuscule amount of time setting up a relationship, have the characters barely interact for a LOT of the project, and then expect us to just accept a big development in that relationship towards the home stretch. That's not how it works.