My opinion of Chris had lightened up a bit, prior to the last Facebook mega-leak, largely in part to Marvin's insight and qualified opinions... And even then, I couldn't think of a genuinely positive trait, I'd be willing to pin on him. The best I could come up with were neutral, or an absence of certain negative traits. For instance, he likes animals, but I see this as neutral as a fair majority of folks do as well. An example of an absence of negative traits, he doesn't smoke. Still, I don't see that as a karmic +1, but a 0 instead of a -1. I also believe he'd light up in a second, if he thought he would gain from it.
In the past I mentioned he has a slightly above-average sense of combining colors that complement each other, but - after a few folks pointed it out - I think he's just copying a color scheme from something else. For every one of this character recolors - the hogs, the chus, the bots, etc. - it turned out he's stealing a palette from some other existing work. As well, Crayola's marker packs are configured to rarely clash, so he's also floating on that.
I've gone back and forth on his creativity, before we were able to catalog just about every single element is clearly stolen from another work that we confirmed Chris was exposed to. Just about no scenerio or character from his comics isn't a direct lift of some other work of fiction, or an event in his life. Only the outcomes changes, but only by applying self-serving general tropes that most mainstream children's' program uses ad nauseum. The few we can't link, I suspect are only due to Chris stealing from a more obscure work. I accept, there's still some creativity involved in how he stitched it together. A collage can be a creative work, if the individual pieces are divided enough so as they create a new narrative. Personally, I think Chris' pieces are way to large for me to give him credit for being creative. But, that's totally subjective, and I wouldn't fault anyone for seeing otherwise.
I'm reaching here... I think I want to commend him on his boldness to go Tomgirl. That seemed like a genuinely gutsy step, especially in light of Bob and Barb's objections. But, even then, I have my suspicions there was some other yet-unknown sinister motive for it. If he ever takes another uncharacteristically bold step out, like Tomgirl, I'll probably give that rare flash of courage to him. As is, I'm on the fence here.
