Some months back Penny and Aggie shifted its art style. It was that shift that resulted in my realizing something: I was no longer enjoying the comic. I didn’t dislike the strip… but at some point along the line the pleasure I actually gained in reading P&A vanished. At that point P&A joined a growing number of strips that I read for one reason alone: it was on my update schedule.

The thing is, I still enjoyed the comic’s art. Gisèle Lagacé remains on top of her game. Instead, it was the artistic shock that woke me up to the fact I’d grown disenchanted with T Campbell’s storytelling style, and the inconsistencies I’ve been noticing in the core characters of Penny and of Aggie. Penny, who up until then had been the more mature of the duo, started behaving in a downright childish manner. For that matter, Aggie herself stumbled down the slope of maturation and started behaving like an absolute spoiled brat, working her best to instigate the other girl for no real reason other than T Campbell’s whim.

Naturally enough, those damn wacky hijinks started to ensue, and I promptly stopped reading the comic until that storyline (Dinner for Six) concluded. And while I should read through that story and the occasional missed comic since… I have no real interest in doing so. There’s no point to reading this particular story, and I’ve not seen anything since that even hints back at that story or suggests it is in fact important.

It feels like at some point Campbell lost his way. P&A had started out with tremendous promise. It’s shifted to instead echo Campbell’s previous cry to fame, Faans, only without Rikk and the rest of the Science Fiction Fanclub. And while I read Faans briefly after its crossover with CRfH, I gave up as that comic spiraled out of control in the midst of its own time-travel story.

This is, I suppose, a good opening to talk about the P&A story that has just wrapped up. After an extra special episode of Buffy P&A where Penny finally loses her virginity (in celebration of former/renewed boyfriend Rich getting out of the hospital after being stabbed), things fall apart. Primarily because Rich can’t afford tuition for school (wait a sec… don’t they attend public school? I’ve never seen any hint that Penny and crew went to a private school!) after paying off his hospital bills. So he decides to jump on his motorcycle (wasn’t that a moped in previous comics?) and make his way into the world. Naturally enough he asks Penny to ride shotgun.

Penny’s decision feels like a flashback to Faans with twenty “possible future Penny’s” getting together to discuss Penny’s options and what their younger self should do. These twenty selves are thrown onto the screen with a bare minimum of explanation as to their backgrounds and serve no effective purpose except to show that most of the time, Penny chose the dull boring routine. Naturally enough, current Penny says “screw you” to her future selves and decides to romp off into the sunset with Rich’s horsepower rumbling beneath her and her hair getting into a mess from a lack of helmet or even hair scrunchy. Hell, even Rich is wearing a helmet… Rich, the “man” who originally broke up with Penny due to her insistence he wear a helmet when skateboarding.

Naturally enough I suspect Campbell’s readers were getting a bit antsy at this point. We have Penny acting in a manner quite out of character for herself. We have twenty future selves which come out of nowhere, serve no real purpose and half of whom are negated because Penny tells them to go to Hell. So Campbell turns to the best distracter known to cartoonist (or writer, in his case): fanservice. Yes, that’s right, we have P&A fanservice. But considering we already had Penny strip off her clothes to jump Rich’s bones in the past, what would possibly entice fans to stick around?

Lesbian fanservice. Yes, you heard me right. But this time it’s subtle, with one remaining future Penny talking to someone else about what had happened. Who should that other person happen to be? You guessed it in one: Aggie. Only this is a Nega-Aggie, who along with Nega-duck (from Darkwing Duck) is in a mad quest to rule the world in her business suit and talking in a very un-Aggie-like fashion, accusing future-Penny of sounding like a liberal with sardonic grin, massaging Penny’s feet while mentioning that Penny broke her out of her Hippie phase (and Penny wryly commenting about how that wasn’t all she broke), and finally saying that “if the lean times with Rich taught you to be more selective with your compassion… then things worked out for the best.”

Aggie, talking about needing to be selective about compassion? What apocalypse happened to cause this massive personality shift? How much drugs did she imbibe before burning out her personality centers in the mind to bring about this massive shift in who she is? So we get a bone tossed to the shippers that in at least one future Penny and Aggie become a couple (of course, it could be they’re just roommates and friends… but their dialogue strongly hints of them being lovers) and some foot-massaging to try and win back disturbed readers.

Are we even bothering to try and tell a decent story? How about realism? I mean, was not P&A based in reality at some point in the past? Sure, we had a few cutesy scenes sharing the thoughts of Penny’s cat, and I think some of Aggie’s rat’s antics were close to “sentient” as well, but for the most part the comic has been fiction, not science fantasy.

There are other bits that have disturbed me as well, such as the damn principal of the school saying “Hail Satan!” after gloating about students freaking over finals. There’s the fact Rich is kicked out of school for being unable to pay tuition even though tuition would still be paid for up ’til the end of the semester, even assuming it was a private school. There’s the personality shifts of our key characters, personality shifts that have no real justification. There’s contrived plot point after contrived plot point. And now we have Lesbidee and Lesbidum giving footrubs on the sofa to distract fans from the fact the Emperor has no clothes.

There are still a few elements of P&A that are worth reading. As I said earlier, Gisèle Lagacé’s art continues to improve, especially when compared to the work of early comics. I wish Lagacé would experiment on more camera angles as other cartoonists have of late (such as overhead shots and angled shots) rather than constantly focusing on a two-dimensional plane, but considering the large number of cartoonists who do the same thing, it’s a non-issue. And non-future Aggie has remained in character in the few instances we’ve seen her. I’ll continue reading, if only to see what Aggie’s reaction is to Penny dropping out of school and going off into the sunset with Rich. Hopefully the character will retain enough control to force the story back on track.

But at this point, outside of Aggie and her music-loving friend Lisa, there’s little in the story to keep me interested. Further, without Penny to counter Aggie’s tendency to go over the top, the comic could end up spiraling further out of control, risking a pileup on the interstate as Rich and Penny attempt to jump over the Faans shark.

Penny and Aggie needs to return to its roots. It isn’t supposed to be a time-travel comic or have its cast fight off alien invaders or government conspiracies. It’s a high school drama. There’s plenty of drama in everyday life without going into the surreal and insane. It’s these normal “mundane” dramas that are the heart and soul of P&A. It’s these that are what made P&A interesting. This is not Faans, and should not be treated as such.