Comic 859: Parentethical

[I ordered a package from ebay and instead of the Megan real doll I ordered, it contained a bobcat called "Bobcat" with the following guest review in its mouth. Weird, right? -Ed.]

So. I’ve been watching this blog for months now, and I’ve never felt the need to do a guest review.

Guess what? THERE IS A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING.

Now, when I checked the comic, at first I thought something had gone horribly wrong (or perhaps, given that I couldn’t see a comic, horribly right). Horror dawned upon me as I realized that this was no glitch. I was seeing exactly what Randall wanted me to see.

There is no art. Complain as much as you like about the charts and graphs, but they at least take time. Complain about badly delivered jokes told by interchangeable stick figures, but at least they function as a semblance of a comic. As much as we complain that he obviously drew something in a five minute panic before midnight, at least when he has five minutes he DRAWS SOMETHING. Since XKCD is a COMIC. I can’t say that the writing is worse than usual, but the complete lack of a stick figure or a graph is just plain INSULTING. This took 30 seconds to conceive and produce.

Randall clearly has no respect for his audience. You know, the audience whose dollars keep him fed, clothed and with night vision goggles with which to view Megan from outside the 500 yards of the restraining order (obligatory Megan joke, check). I think he did, once, but that’s debatable. And why should he? No matter what he churns out, no matter how banal, how humorless, how elitist, how lazy, his fans will sing his praises.

"GOOMH, Randall! I too am a loser who feels deeply unsettled by incomplete punctuation! How did you know that?"

Because YOU GOOMH ABOUT EVERYTHING. He could write a comic about medieval Occitan romantic poetry (not that he would, since it’s the evil LIBERAL ARTS) and the audience would say, "Hey, I’ve heard of Poetry! GOOMH, RANDALL!"

After this, I’m not even sure I’ll want to keep checking this blog. Folks, I keep thinking we’ve hit the bottom of the barrel, and then I realize that we left the barrel somewhere back at comic 400. We are now burrowing through the ground beneath the barrel. We have pierced the septic tank, kept digging through, and are now beneath the septic tank.

And yet, Randall keeps digging, even as gravity has its way with the contents of the septic tank right over his head. Do we REALLY want to keep following him? Can it GET worse than a comic told via the complete ABSENSE of a comic?

Also, in case Randall or anyone who is OCD enough to go "OMG, GOOMH, RANDALL" reads what I have to say . . . I close with this.

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Choke on it.