Comic 750: Kindling

This may be the first comic in a long time where my own personal experience has completely muddled my sense of the comic. Namely, a few months ago, a friend of mine was railing about how terrible e-books are, and after some talk, we decided to try to hold an e-book burning. We came up with the "Kindling" pun and all. Alas, it turns out kindles do not actually burn very well. I don't know how I can prove this story is true (but it is). That said, it's not like those xkcds where I read the joke a few weeks earlier in a comic, because of course there is no way Randall would have been basing his comic on our conversation. So I'm left with this feeling of bitterness about the comic and a sense that it is lame and old, even though I know that this is unfair.

Not unfair is drawing attention to this very recent A Softer World comic about....e book burnings!

That said, I think I can still safely say the comic is, at best, a poorly executed thing regardless of my own personal stuff. In panel 1, Randall seems determined to set up the situation in as few words as possible, normal-human dialog be damned (unless you imagine all those Harry Potter hating religious types actually holding up a copy of the book next to their friends and saying "this book is full of heresy! let's hold a book burning!" and having no other discussion of the matter).

Then there is the matter of panel 2, where the Very Stupid People decide that they need to buy more copies of the book to burn. Stupid people! that is not how you hold a book burning! The point is to get rid of copies that people have, so that they do not have them anymore. It is not to buy extra copies and burn them! If you wanted that result, you could have just not bought the books in the first place. the added advantage being that you won't prop up the profits of the book, thereby encouraging the publisher.

Now some people who are wrong might argue that the stupidity of the people here is the joke. The problem is that - at least in panel 2 - their stupidity is not emphasized at all. There's not even a pause anywhere, the panel is just being used to advance the story line. In other words, yes, the punchline is "these people are stupid," but it's "because they tried to burn a kindle and they died" rather than "because they tried to buy new books to burn."

Anyway, then there is the extra stupidity in panel 3 where they realize that the kindle book is "cheaper" because once you have the several hundred dollar machine, you have to pay less for the meaningless digital copy. And they think that this is the cheaper option for some reason. Again, the joke could have been this - but it's not. The joke is that they burn it and die. Which is the worst joke of the three.

ALSO APPRECIATED: the little trick where you make more characters not by drawing them, but by merely declaring in the text of your newspaper headline that there were eight of them!

ALSO: Don't be all silly and show people that your characters have set something on fire and then dying, because that is hard. Instead, scribble a tiny graphic and write in big letters over it what is happening! That is so much easier! You can take the rest of the day off that way, and the only consequence will be the quality of your comic.

i'm starting a new post tag called "show don't tell" for when he does this.