Quote Originally Posted by Wraith View Post
In short; Jeph has been a professional artist for over 15 years; at this point, "basic competence" shouldn't be impressive.
Yeah it's uh, not a great sign. The defensive reading would be that the comic has always been more dialogue focused than art focused, but it's not like the dialogue is pulling the weight much these days either.

Quote Originally Posted by Ionathus View Post
This is purely anecdotal, but every time I go back to QC comics from before 4000ish, the panel composition variety feels so much bigger. You can at least usually count on the background changing once, often twice, per comic. It really does a lot of work towards breaking up the visuals and keeping things feeling fresh.
I used to think there hadn't really been a dip in quality, because frankly I don't think the art in this comic has ever gone beyond 'sufficient to deliver the dialogue', but the sad thing is that going back it clearly has gotten worse and sloppier recently.