Bad writing bums me out. Makes me want to run and hide when it’s mine, and turns me off real quick when it’s someone else’s. The art can be a fantastical, amazing mass of the awesomeness, but if I don’t like the writing, I’m done.

So what’s new, right? True for most of us probably.

Conversely (and again, something that I think is true for most of us) I’d hang around to read a comic with good writing even if it had stick figures.

Anyway I found a comic called Banished that I thought filled a third category: it was “good enough” to keep me reading once I started. And I don’t mean good enough in a condescending way. As a reader, it was just one of those comics I visited by chance, checked the first one and thought, “Hm. I’ll read another.” The art was simple but consistent-with-a-purposefulness; like that was their style and they were stickin’ to it. The writing, while sometimes sophomoric, had moments of undeniable hilarity and promise. It kept getting better. The storyline threw some hooks in me. Then, one day as I continued on with my sally through the archive, it blew me away with a dramatic change: a substitution in the art department. Even got a colorist. And all of a sudden a grace fell over the comic as a whole. The writing appeared to instantly improve within the new context even though I knew it was the same improving writer. Interesting phenomenon. Good comic.