Comic 1308: So this is Christmas

Alt text: Merry Christmas from xkcd!

You ever played one of those dumb little maze games? You know, this sort of thing:

This is the comic equivalent of that. The challenge is easy. And the reward is not even worth considering. The only reward for the maze is the fact that both exists are now connected by an unbroken line of pencil (or pen, if you dare). The reward for this comic is that you know it's a picture of people sitting around a fire at Christmas.

As such, I'm going to give it a B for standalone value. You'd have to be very ignorant of the properties of electromagnetic radiation to not realise that they are the light spectra of a log fire and the lights on a Christmas tree (on the left and right respectively).

Not exactly revolutionary. I'd much rather this be a comic where Beret guy is having an good old fashioned Christmas argument with the two other people in the comic, who I presume are his parents. That would be entertaining at least. The only thing original about this comic is the way the message is obfuscated by some faux-nerdy scribbles.

But let's play devil's advocate for a second. The fact that you can see a Christmas scene even though there isn't one there is kind of neat, right? Right?? In the immortal words of Luggage: "Somehow, I feel that this is the strongest xkcd yet. It's in my head." And I must agree that there is value in art that requires a little bit of interpretation.

This is not that. This actually reminds me of something Randall said a while back...

"Communicating badly and acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness."

F* for hypocrisy. Please cut off your own arm before you think of writing another comic like that.

Thank you Anon 6:54 for requesting a review of this comic. I have decided I would like to do more of this, so here's how it's going to work in the future:

The first commenter (OMG FIRST!) gets to choose the comic for the next review. It can be any comic number, as long as I haven't reviewed it before. I cannot guarantee the review will be negative, nor can I guarantee any sort of schedule. Oh, and any further requests will be ignored until I post that review, lest the comments end up looking like the comments section on Epic Rap Battles.