Comics 900 and 901: Cuddlefish! You're My Best Fans, In A Comic You Must Defend

Ugh. Let's get this over with, shall we? I'd apologize for my tardiness, but I'm not sorry.

900. First, observe that Randy's idea of a conversation with Megan (alas, she has returned) involves her fleeing him. This is not commented on in the world of the comic--as far as Randy is concerned, he has many conversations with Megan in this way, leaping into her path, talking to her, and her moving swiftly past him. He has never paused to consider why this might be.

But apart from that: internet atheists! How did you like your pandering? Was it good? Was it tasty? It seems to me that, as far as internet atheist mocking of religion goes, it's pretty weak. Randy often does this, where he tries to pander to multiple largely unrelated groups at once--in this case, people who know what error bars are and internet atheists. Boring.

And notice how he's trying the shotgun joke effect here by working, by my count, four jokes and/or references into three panels--usually something reserved for his list comics. I guess he couldn't find a way to make these jokes into a list so he just threw them into a drive-by conversation.

901. Given Randy's oral fixation, I don't think this is actually meant as a joke, but as wish-fulfillment fantasy.

There's really nothing to be said for this one, except that some people are praising it for some reason--I think people are so used to Randy's godawful walls of text that when he produces a comic without words they feel such a wave of relief they mistake that for a well-made comic. It's not.

I think the mistake you're making is assuming that each hideous comic Randy shits out thrice-weekly is equal to the sum of its parts. That is, that Wall of Text + Floating Heads + Pandering + White-Knighting all add up to a specific level of badness, and that if you take away the wall of text or the pandering then it's slightly less bad. But it's less arithmetic and more cooking with hideous poisons. You can take the arsenic out of your arsenic/cyanide/chlorine gas cocktail and it will still kill you just as bad.

Oh, sure, you can damn this one with faint praise, but people seem to forget that the point of damning things with faint praise is the damnation part. These things are not good enough. They fall short. These little good bits are not good. They are crap.

This one is boring. In order for something to be good, it has to rise above completely failing to invoke any sort of reaction at all. It has to actually, at the very least, make me go 'if I weren't so hideously bloated with hatred I might have smiled at that once, in innocent times.'