Red and Rover: Rover, look. I'm inivisible!

The way cartoonists use words and pictures plays a large role in the quality of any given comic. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud labels comics in which the words and drawing do exactly the same job as "duo-dependent." They're generally the worst kind of comics because they indicate on the part of the cartoonist a lack of confidence in both his own ability to make himself understood and the ability of his readers to understand.

This Red and Rover doesn't quite meet that criterion, but it's far too close for comfort. Red's dialog isn't so much complementary as it is redundant. It exists mostly because Brian Bassett didn't trust his audience to see Red in the tree. But the whole point of the comic is that Red is hard to see! Putting the word bubble there makes Red easy to see, and makes Rover the butt of the joke instead of all of us.