Some days you need snarky animals

Over the summer, I recommended some long-form narrative webcomics. However, my greatest comics love has always been stand-alone funny comics.

Reza Farazmand’s Poorly Drawn Lines regularly makes me laugh out loud.¹ There are some recurring characters, but no plot to speak of. There aren’t punch lines so much as perverse situations that escalate into absurdity.

To overthink it just a bit, there are at least two things Farazmand does especially well. First, the art is understated but effective. It’s funnier with animals than it’d be with stick-figure humans or the same lowres dinosaurs everyday.² Second, timing. Some cartoonists deliver the joke in the penultimate frame, so that the last frame is just characters grunting or looking exasperated.³

1. Not ROFLMAO, but genuine LOL.
2. To pick examples of less-effective art at random. 😉
3. In today’s comic, for example, the wombat could have asked their question all in one frame. The last frame would then cut back to agent cat saying No! It would not have been as funny.