Designed to be confoundingly confusing, Goldman Sachs structured these “debt instruments” so that if they made a profit, most of it would be skimmed off by Goldman Sachs. If they lost money, the buyer would take most of the loss. That’s why they were so confusing-to hide this structure.
I’ve been reading some Chester Gould DT collected reprints for comparison, and I find that as bad as Locher’s DT is, Gould’s work is not that much better.
He doesn’t recap nearly as much as Locher, and his plots are tighter and less tedious, but they still have holes and unreasonable plot twists, and continuity slip-ups.
For some reason, Gould enjoyed drawing grotesque characters. For him, a bad person should look different from other people. In spite of their efforts to conceal their character, it should always pop out as some neurotic tendency, or strange physical feature.
This is what Gould emphasized, and his storys seem to be mostly only vehicles for utilizing his love of drawing grotesque faces. Kind of what Pablo Picasso would create if he had to make his money making cartoons, instead of single paintings. His talent was in painting, not in story-telling. Gould is like that, too.
A well-written comic strip doesn’t need constant recaps. It shows great lack of confidence in writing ability. Maybe it’s Locher’s way of compensating for his lack of plot, this constant recapping.
It’s almost as though Locher has has morphed himself into his own Dick Tracy character: Recap Man. Recap Man’s grotesque feature is that he always re-explains himself, exasperatingly moving two steps forward and one step back.
Designed to be confoundingly confusing, Goldman Sachs structured these “debt instruments” so that if they made a profit, most of it would be skimmed off by Goldman Sachs. If they lost money, the buyer would take most of the loss. That’s why they were so confusing-to hide this structure.