Poorly Drawn Lines S1E5: "Exercise Day"

This review was commissioned by @firefossil


"Poorly Drawn Lines" is a generally low-investment, generally gag-a-day, 2010's webcomic by Reza Farazmand that managed to gradually stumble its way into major circulation. It's received multiple partial adaptations into animation over the years, and a more extended treatment in 2022. I'll be looking at the fifth episode of that series today.

It's an oddly retro experience.

The PDL comic first ran in the early 2010's, and the self-parodying simplistic art style (reflected in the title itself) definitely brings to mind XKCD, Cyanide & Happiness, and other webcomics from that era. The style of humor, though, really makes me think more of the Sunday Funnies I read as a kid back in the nineties and early aughts. Something about the way it's put together and paced even reminds me specifically of the animated adaptations of those old newspaper comics. If any of you have seen the animated "Peanuts" or "Garfield" cartoons, it kind of has that sort of vibe.

I don't think it's deliberately going for nostalgia-bait, though. More like the author just happened to grow up on the same Sunday Funnies that I did, and adapting that kind of humor into video will always produce similar-ish results.

The story is simple and the characters archetypical enough that they don't require much dissection. We have an impressionable, bullheaded green bear named Ernesto, his longsuffering human friend Tanya who tries to be the voice of reason, Kevin the unlucky stoner pigeon who sort of has a Snoopy-type sideshow thing going on, and their even more unlucky high-strung cat roommate/landlord who is just named Cat. The plot gets kicked off when Tanya and Ernesto run into a charismatic, inspirational, and shockingly stupid old college friend who became a health nut after barely surviving getting hit by a car.

And then doubled down on it after being hit by a car a second time. And then a third. Unrelated to his being a health nut is the fact that he is ideologically opposed to looking both ways before crossing the street.

He is, as Tanya tries to remind Ernesto when he's getting dangerously inspired by this, a very stupid man. However, Ernesto is inspired regardless. Resulting in a series of events that get Ernesto's foot broken and their faultless Cat token responsible adult getting sucked down a stormdrain and needing to be rescued from a polluted river below the outflow pipe.

The episode ends with them all at the hospital, Ernesto getting a foot cast and everyone getting their stomachs pumped after rescuing Cat from the sewer water. They even have a final meeting with the idiot friend in the wake of his latest car accident, who seems to have finally learned an important lesson about the path forward sometimes being less important than what exists on the peripheries.

Most memorable exchange of the episode? Ernesto saying "You know, at any time you could get hit by a car four times. That's life." And Kevin replying "No, that is one very specific man's life."

And I guess they all learned an important lesson about respecting your own limits or whatever.

I like the balance of humor types that this episode strikes. The first half or so of it is almost all dialogue, and while the snappy writing is pretty funny it really doesn't seem like it uses the animated medium very well. But then Ernesto breaks his foot trying to do indoor mountain-biking, and then Cat inexplicably gets washed down a stormdrain that he's visibly too big to fit inside of, and we're at peak surreal physical comedy. The hospital scene at the end sort of reconciles both, with snappy dialogue surrounding dumb muscle-friend's surprise reappearance. And ending with him visibly struggling with himself and fighting the urges as he waits at the crosswalk until the vehicles have all gone passed this time.


It works. There's not much to say about it, except that it's a decently good gag show that knows when to switch gears to keep things fresh and that will scratch a nostalgic itch if you were reading newspaper funnies in 1995 and reading webcomics in 2010.