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Friday, October 21, 2011

Comic 967: Making Stick Figures Look Even Worse


Title: Prairie; alt-text: Colorado is working to develop coherent amber waves, which would allow them to finally destroy Kansas and Nebraska with a devastating but majestic grain laser.

I was just playing this song on my piano today! GOOMHR!

(No really, I was. Weak.)

Okay, first of all, the observant of you will notice that I've applied the label "art failure" to this review. "Why?" you ask. "That prairie looks pretty good!"

It does. So why the heck do I say it's a failure? Well, just look at it! Because xkcd is a "stick figure webcomic," Randall has to cram his stick figures in there, just like he did with Comic 941. No! You made something nice, Randall! Why cover it up? Why make it ugly?

I know I stopped doing xkcd Sucks Less, but please, for this one comic, take a look at what could have been:


If not for that, this wouldn't be a bad comic! Randall (for once) assumes his readers are smart enough to get the reference, and the alt-text is good alt-text. The joke isn't especially funny, but it's nerdy for for the sake of being nerdy, which is what I'd expect from xkcd. I'd like it and I'd call it a good comic.

But Randall had to ruin the strip. Again.

6 comments:

  1. The joke sucks, but it looks nice. I do find myself wondering if he actually drew that himself or just used Photoshop filters on a picture, though. He's displayed some talent in the past, but I don't remember anything like this, and it looks like something that could be done in an image-editing program.

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  2. I thought the joke was pretty funny.

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  3. I think it's pretty cool. Th juxtaposition is nice.

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  4. This is basically another "lol, words mean different things in different contexts" joke... with the subtext that "waves of grain" are actually made up of individual stalks of gain waving. So, I'll give it a nominal nod of appreciation.

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  5. Finally managed to make my improvement: http://xkcdprime.blogspot.com/2011/10/follow-up-edit-for-xkcd-967-prairie.html

    Thanks for the "Blank"!

    captcha text is "flate"... don't you mean "flat"?

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  6. No see your version looks really lazy, like you just googled an image, stuck a caption under it, and called it a comic. It's not really any better.

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