Comic Book Critique-- "Common Scents" by Lynda Barry

The most striking think I noticed about "Common Scents" was that the words in Lynda Barry's comic srip seem to dominate over the illustrations that accompany them.  In most comics I have grown up reading, the opposite was the case.  In this comic though, the whole top half of her boxes are dialogue and within the pictures there are text bubbles.  The illustrations are brightly illustrated, which helps to off-set the black and white text portions.  The illustrations seem to show the scenes in the way that the author saw them as a child, over-dramatizing and simplifying them.  This comic is far from the best I have ever read.  My favorite comic stip by far is "Calvin and Hobbes".  I love the way that Bill Watterson combines a few simple scentances and pictures into a story that would make my friends and I laugh out loud for hours on end (and, admittedly, still does at times).  To me, Lynda Barry's strip is almost the antithesis to his style.  It's still about a child's world from their own perspective but the wordiness was a little too much for me.  I found myself almost forgetting to even look at the illustrations, and even after looking at them I didn't feel like they added that much to the strip.  To me, this comic strip could've achieved almost the same effect without the illustrations as it did with them.  Altogether, I was not very impressed at all with "Common Scents".