humor came from the fact that his rosy "voice-over" captions usually contradicted what actually happened in the drawings. Analysis Some reviewers have called Betsy and Me "riotously funny," "utterly charming," and "quite original", describing it as "an insightful snapshot of 1950s America" that is "great fun to read." According to The Comic Treadmill, "one-third of the humor arises out of Farley's precociousness" while most comes from "Chet's blissful obliviousness to his insignificance." Rick Klaw of The Austin Chronicle felt that Cole was demonstrating "his artistic prowess" when he used "a sparse ultramodern abstract style," which blogger Josh Shalek considered "understated and well executed. "[T]here is more going on in the drawings than is shown," he wrote, adding that "there is great care invested in defining each character." But, while Rich Meyer considers the strip to be "a classic," others have not been so generous. "Betsy and Me is formulaic, conventional and drawn in a fad style of the day unworthy of Cole's talents," stated Allan Holtz before elaborating that it "rehashes the most overdone subject matter in comic strips" with "a cast of characters straight off the assembly line" while replacing actual humor with the narrator's commentary motif, which makes "the strip far too type-dense," resulting in a product that "is unattractive and uninviting." Blog to Comm's Christopher Stigliano described the strip as an "inspired misfire" that "ultimately tumbles into a chasm of boring respectibility with only a scant few guffaws to make anything redeeming." Even Noah Berlatsky considered this "entirely generic sit-com" to be "a triumph of form over content" in which "none of the dialogue is actually all that funny." In a three-star Amazon review, P. Ryan Anthony wrote, "It's uncertain if even the incomparable Cole could have sustained his creation if he'd lived." Speaking of Cole's life, some believe it can be glimpsed in his last work. Art Spiegelman went so far as to declare that Betsy and Me "reads like a suicide note delivered in daily installments!" Robert C. Harvey would seem to support this theory by suggesting that "the basic comedy of the strip" lay in "confront[ing] the laughable difference between appearance and reality," something the cartoonist had to do daily by presenting a happy fictional family while he and his wife had no children of their own. Ron Goulart cautioned that the strip can be seen as autobiographical "if you don't get too serious