I’ll be honest, I don’t read this for the story.

Oddly enough, Menage a 3 is probably one of the few comics I’ve been following since the review write-up (can’t help it… a webcomic message board thread I frequent seems to post MA3 strips the moment they’re posted). I still don’t think the characters are still developed at all. They’re mainly a means to the end of Ms. Lagace’s hi-jinks.

Example exchange: Gary accidentally feels up a girl, girl threatens to call the cops, girl finds Gary’s artwork and decides that she’s not going to call him on rape/sexual harassment, she wants him to be an artist! OK, first, not very realistic, granted. Signs of any character qualities beyond Gary is a horny virgin, girl is manipulative? Not really. Additionally, the joke wasn’t that funny, really, so once again MA3 is a miss with me.

If, however, that’s the kind of humor that works for you, than good for you! I certainly won’t stop you from enjoying something you like. Yet the peril of being a reviewer is having an opinion, and if my opinion of MA3 is that the characters are flat and the joke aren’t that funny, then that’s what I’m writin’ down.

Plus, I like it because the characters actually have personalities, including the one with the big boobs. She’s, ah, not a flat character in *any* sense of the word – although at first it seemed she would be (and I even stopped reading for a while because of that before randomly checking again, and noting that this was slowly but surely changing.)

I think you need to read it again if you think either that the only character we are meant to identify with is Gary (if anything, while Gary is the centre of the story, Zii is a better candidate to identify with), or that the main female characters are either flat or undesirable… (and the fact that you put that last part into the review at all really confused me. O_o)

Also, Gary is definitely *not* meant to be an average guy for everyone to identify with, from his extremely religious upbringing that led to him being sexually immature, onwards.

Anyway, I also like the comic because while being about sex, it is neither sexist nor heterosexist; the gay characters are as positive (and negative) as the straight ones, and even if a female character is objectified in one strip, in the next she’ll start her own storyline that develops her as a person. And then she’ll go and objectify a guy. It’s a fun, enjoyable read.

Mind you, the comic has stupid parts too, and sometimes it relies a bit too heavily on stereotypes (though it breaks them more than often enough to make up for it). But seriously, this review sounds like you assumed you already knew exactly what the comic is as soon as you heard “nerdy guy lives with hot girls,” and then based the whole review on that assumption, rather than the comic itself.

I think that fact that i have never even looked at a Penny & Aggie strip is important. It lets me enjoy this strip without comparing it to the irrelevant other works by the same author.

~Ocho

I do wish she wouldn’t waste time on crap like this, though. A daily Penny & Aggie would benefit the world so much more.