Comic 925: Carcinogenic Comic Comments

Good Evening this is Ravenzomg with another exciting review about Randall's research regarding radioactive phones!

Title: Cell Phones. Tooltip: He holds the laptop like that on purpose, to make you cringe.



So anyways, this guy named Randall Munroe made a cute joke about Causality.

Here it is:

That was back around comic 550. I'll admit to liking that one. I'll admit to being that idiot who actually repeats it sometimes. It's simple, cute, and geeky. The old school XKCD. Now, let's look at these two comics and compare. Comic 552 is a 2.7 on the Ravenzomg scale of Wordiness™, while comic 925 is an insipid 3.5, which is a full 29% wordier per pixel.

Let me stop right here and put a milk chocolate centre of praise inside this insipid dish of flavourless grule that I like to call a "Raview". I thought this comic was pretty okay. I smiled. I did not laugh, or snicker, but I smirked.

This is good. It means that there's a cute sort of idea in here, and it's just buried beneath mounds of insipid commentary!

And that's why we're all here: Not to Destroy, but to Recover. We want the XKCD of yore back, that old gem we used to love more than anything before it was tarnished by the filthy plebeian insipid concept of humour that we shall simply call "Mediocrity". ...Well, that's why most of us are here. Some of you have serious issues that I cannot explain.

Without going into detail, yes the XKCD graph is half-accurate in that cancer incidence has been on the rise, but really that misses the point. As this shocking graph below indicates, despite cancer incidence rising, cancer deaths are actually declining. It's a USA-centric graph, but (a) look at other first world graphs and you'll see the same trends and (b)Randall lives in the insipid USA, so only deals with insipid USA issues, obviously. And that's not the point, the point is Cancer INCIDENCE. Also third world countries without access to advanced medical treatment, but please see point B regarding that one. But all the same, these cancer comics are pretty odd.

Now, I won't question his judgment regarding the high incidence of cancer-related comics lately, so I'll just assume he's as excited as we all are about this magical time of year, and he's cramming them all in before we're forced to start making Lion comics like morons. And don't even get me started on August. UGH.

Anyways, bottom line: the punchline is "lol, cancer causes cell phones". The alternative is circle-jerking retorts of, "I always knew cell phones were only marginally responsible for cancer deaths, my statistics professor high school teacher told me so after he told me to stop interrupting class with my so-totally relevant anecdotes!

So, there's thing called "Hanging a Lantern", and if I were Jon Levi I'd link to it on TV Tropes (I'm not checking but I'm sure they have an article on it), but rather than do that I'll respect your ability to either understand the term or be able to look it up. Anyways, the tooltip declares quite cheerily, "That awful design in panel 2? Intentionally awful!" to which I reply, "That's awful."

Combined with Comic 919, it's like he's purposely trolling his fan base. What's the deal with that, eh? I.... I just don't get it.

I'd like to say right now that I feel as if Randall's going to go out with a big bang, and this is just the first signs of it coming. These insipid little quirks he's shoving out are just the forerunners of a greater catastrophe (lol), namely him ending XKCD probably at comic 1000 or 1024. That's my bet anyway. We'll just have to wait and see.

Tl;Dr: Comic has a cute idea in it, but it's clunky, wordy, and insults the reader for gods-know-what reason.

I dated a Cancer once -- they're emotionally fucked up and it's impossible to get through to them in any meaningful way beyond the physical. I think this is the frustration we're supposed to take out of this comic, really.