Comic 759: Destroy the Radical

I used to think Randall was lowering his standards to make high school kids appreciate his comic. Now I realize he's gone all the way down to second grade.

i'm guessing that the overlap between kids who like this comic and kids who like this is pretty huge. [link should be working now, if not, google "proof that girls are evil"]

I might write more about this comic later but quite frankly, i don't think i need to.

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update: Some relevant links: a PvP parody of this comic that is perhaps the first PvP i've ever enjoyed; and a good comment from Bill about having seen this idea before [I was actually thinking to myself that the one place I know of where the alt-text idea works really is trig identities, because the questions you'd get on a test are not What is the Answer To This Problem but How Can You Make This Thing Look Like That Thing]

Comic 758: Shrinking Comic Value

I think we all remember the Raptor scenes from Jurassic Park. I found them scarier than the T Rex scene, perhaps most people did. But as a lot of people are pointing out about this comic, raptors are actually already really small. Here's an illustration from wikipedia showing that they are perhaps the size of a medium-sized dog. So really, what this comic is doing is just making Jurassic Park accurate, and if you didn't know that it wasn't accurate before, then come on, what the hell did you think.

the raptor thing used to be funny, now it's just so laborious. Does Randall think anything he says about Raptors will be funny, because ha ha, "raptors!"

what's crazy is, this isn't even the first joke about jurassic park and genetically altering someone's DNA to better fit your needs.

But let's talk about something else. xkcd makes a point, fairly often, of getting mad at people who don't understand science, or choose to forgo the extra work needed to understand it. You see this in comics that lecture people on how numbers work, or the people who want to sensationalize the Gulf Coast oil spill, or make fun of twitterers who don't know how Swine Flu works, or mock a president's misstatement from five decades ago. All very nice and superior. And then he comes in with this comic that's all like "Just turn on the gene for dwarfism!" like that's a thing you can do! Come on, man! "Activate the gene for extreme dwarfism" is as bad as those movies where people demand that blurry photos be enhanced (or my favorite, "uncropped").

Now some silly people will probably say that the point of this comic is that such a thing is overly simplistic, and Randall isn't endorsing the idea. But I think that's wrong - I think Randall just doesn't care. The point of this comic is to recontextualize Jurassic Park in a way where a previously terrifying idea - raptors on the loose! - is shifted to a minor annoyance - ugh, stupid raptors are out again... . To say that the joke is that you can't do that is to undermine everything actually written in the comic. Clearly, there are only some types of science that Randall has any respect for.

Comic 757: The more you eat, the more you toot

the "BRAAAAP" sound should not be coming from Mr. Hat's head, it should be coming from the airhorn.

no one says "I don't mean to toot my own horn" for real anymore, it's like "a whale of a good time" in that regard. Yes, it's annoying, but luckily: it doesn't happen

pretend that the last panel is not in this comic. It is so much better that way! The last panel tells you nothing - yes, it's an air horn, but we knew that. Yes, he was happy to get to use it for that moment. But we knew that. As it is, it makes the comic look like some kind of weird advertisement for airhorns, and I just thing; What? Why? Why not just show us a funny scene? Why force it into a random context? In this way, it's a lot like comic 456.

I complain about the lack of context a lot in xkcd, but in this case the mere presence of Mr. Hat provides enough. We know what he's like just by seeing him - he's the only character this is true for (because he is the only character). That's enough, in this case.

the sudden shift to ad tagline strikes me as something thought of to make this comic more of a joke in the regular sense, almost like a sketch comedy ad. Like, I'm not confident with the joke I've written, I'm going to tag on an unrelated one just in case.

vuvuzela jokes were funny for 15 seconds, two weeks ago.

Book Review: "Never Learn Anything from History"

I wrote this about two months ago but wanted to wait a bit to post it. so: here it is.

I dearly love Kate Beaton's History Comics (or, as the comic is now known, "Hark! A Vagrant") and was more than happy to help support her comicking. She has a way of making little sketches off-handedly which nevertheless amuse me (and I assume amuse others, since she tends to post them often). For example. In any case, the point is that I eagerly awaited her book being released.

Alas, I was disappointed. First, by the sheer brevity of it - only 68 pages, most with only one comic. There's absolutely no new drawings in the book, and most of the short notes after the comics are the same as the ones on the website (some adapted for the book format rather than a web format). There's no introduction (besides a two sentence "about this book" and a three sentence "about the author") and no real context for the book. There isn't even a title page or a copyright page - the whole thing has the feel of something thrown together as fast as possible.

That's not to say it looks haphazard; the comics are printed fine and there is no real problem with what is there, only with how much is not there. I think for her next book, Ms. Beaton should print at least twice as many comics as in this one, so it can feel more substantial. I'd also love to see more commentary - including more on the history. Most readers aren't going to have more than a passing familiarity - at best - with her subject matter. I certainly don't. Telling us more about some of these people and events would be nice. Some extra sketches would be great - perhaps practices for certain comics, or experiments with different ways of doing certain panels.

I strongly believe that a book of webcomics needs to give the reader something more than what they can get online - otherwise why buy it, besides supporting the author? [Achewood has been setting the bar on this count, incidentally] I'd like to think of this book as a subpar first draft from a comic that can do better, and I hope Kate Beaton and TopatoCo learn from Never Learn Anything from History.

Comic 756: Ignorance

We already knew that Randall loathed the media. Just a few weeks ago he was complaining about coverage of the recent Gulf oil spill, and last year he complained so ineptly about coverage of some now-forgotten Wall Street scandal that I was forced to get very angry.

On the flip side, we've also been subjected to reminders that Randall is hep to the new media: he's dropped references to slashdot, the Daily Show, and, in one epic namedrop of a comic, BBC, BoingBoing, Reddit and Five Thirty Eight. As far as I know, he has never referred to any element of the MSM in a positive light (if i'm wrong, let me know, i'll post a correction). update: being a stupid person, I missed that he also included cnn.com in that list of websites he reads. Not particularly positive, but given the same context as the others he mentions. So, I'd say I was basically wrong.

That's fine, he can have opinions, and it's not like hating the media is all that unusual. But, like any political (broadly defined) cause, complaining too often tends to get annoying. I also find that in many cases, people who are very committed to a cause like this tend to have terrible senses of humor about this sort of thing (or occasionally they will have great senses of humor, but rarely in the middle). Alas, this comic seems to be a case of substituting an argument for a joke.

The character in this comic is pretty much the definition of a straw man: He represents the group that Randall doesn't like, and rather than quote them, he makes up a quote that is silly in the most obvious but perfect way. Yes, he's satirizing what he thinks is a common phenomenon, but he's doing it by just making the people involved act like they have the intelligence of wood.

Compare this to another, hypothetical comedy outlet, a daily show, if you will. On this daily show, a host would play video clips of members of the media saying silly things, perhaps contradictory ones. The difference between this comic and the daily show is that the daily show plays (ahem, would theoretically play) actual clips. As in, not putting words in anyone's mouths. That's what makes it funny - anyone can pretend that a person said something dumb. What's far better is seeing that person actually say it.

This is true for the first half of the comic as well: Unless "a leading politician" actually said what this comic claims he said, the whole thing is really just a manufactured story. Again, if he is referring to something specific, I will admit that I'm wrong, but the incredible vagueness of "a leading politician" makes me think otherwise.

Now, many of you might say, "man, he's making fun of a common thing, so he's making up an example but it could have easily been any number of actual examples." To which I say: Well, why not use an actual example? It will be funnier by virtue of being true, and it won't smack of "angry man making up a quote" the way this comic does.

And Last, the alt text's comparison is actually not that bad, if you live in a universe where the people on the Titanic were screaming with delight.