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[V-Adore]

My two cents on this comics-snobbery tip:

Diesel Sweeties I read because (a) it is updated daily and I seem to have made a habit out of it and (b) it is very occasionally funny. I hate myself for reading it, though, because every single one of its characters needs to be pounded in the face with a shovel until they are dead. And I imagine (where "imagine"="infer based upon admittedly and happily limited experience") that the lion's share of Diesel Sweeties fans are shallow and insufferable in the exact same goddamned ways as those characters. OH HO, SEX PUNS AND INDIE ROCK! I WILL FORWARD THIS TO PEOPLE WHO MAKE ME FEEL COOL FOR KNOWING THEM

The only addendum I would make to this is that I don't particularly want to beat Clango to death with a shovel, and there are a few minor characters who I find similarly unobjectionable. Everything else is basically correct, though -- I'm frequently amused by DS, and I sort of read it out of habit, but were I suddenly to be thrust into a universe without it, I wouldn't exactly commit seppuku out of regret.

[St_Zartan]

The only addendum I would make to this is that I don't particularly want to beat Clango to death with a shovel...

That is the damndest thing: ostensibly Clango is the Mainest of Main Characters, a ro[size=0] [/size]bot no less, and yet the only one that seems to even occasionally move beyond kitschy, smarmy self-interest. (Although the RO[size=0] [/size]BOTS SURE CAN HAVE SEX FOR A LONG TIME jokes started to wear thin slightly before the first one was written. I mean, come on, people - even fuck*ng Salon Magazine has written feature-length articles on sex machines / vibrators / etc.)

[V-Adore]

(Self-split to keep things relatively on-topic. Anyway!)

Yeah, Clango is interesting in that regard; once RStevens finally got sick of the obligatory "sex machine" jokes, Clango sort of turned into a real character, with a level of genuine sympathetic emotion and concerns we can sort of understand. (I wouldn't compare him to Beef, or even to Teodor, but work with me here.) He really should be the center that the entire strip revolves around...

... instead, he disappears for whole arcs at a time, when RS randomly decides to make the strip about Indie Rock Pete or someone even more self-absorbed and one-note and things become self-consciously "indie" and "hip" again.

It can be sort of infuriating, because Clango (and a few other characters in some arcs in the strip's history) demonstrate that RS can write people who are sympathetic and have more than one character dimension. That he doesn't do so more consistently, and that the writing is so often spotty even when it isn't just fart jokes, is both confusing and maddening.

[Pedro Picasso]

I stopped reading the strip a while back.  These were the jokes:

1. *****s having sex with people is funny.
2. Pornography and the making of pornography are both funny.
3. *****s that want to kill everyone are funny.
4. Sentient toasters and old macs are funny.
5. Virgins, goth people, and indie rockers are funny.
6. Libido is funny.

Once I stopped laughing at these six jokes (about six strips in), the comic was no longer funny.  It's still mildly entertaining.  I like the look of it.  But it's not at all enduring, and I wouldn't call it 'good'.  I'd say it's somewhere between Beetle Bailey and Get Fuzzy.