Comic 931: Quite the Turnoff

Title: Lanes; alt-text: Each quarter of the lanes from left to right corresponds roughly to breast cancer stages one through four (at diagnosis).

Man. Now I remember why we normally leave it up to Gamer's neckbeard to review these. Briefly: if Randall is trying to share with us his amazing insights into what cancer is like, the metaphor is clunky and useless and unhelpful; if he's trying to evoke emotion in us, the dullness of the art and writing poleaxes that; and if he's trying to make a joke he forgot to put one in. Unbriefly: read the above but pronounce all the 'a's as 'aaaaaa'.

Comic 930: Like Sand Through the Hourglass

Title: Days of the Week; alt-text: Not pictured: the elongated Halley's-Comet-like orbit of every Rebecca Black lyric.

Like all of the Google comics, this one can't be said to be lazy; like all of the Google comics, it can't be said to be particularly funny or insightful either. Since Gamer_2k4 will inevitably edit this post to add some actual criticism I shall merely point out that one of the lines is "Got my period _day" and ask, why.

I suspect the results for "Wanted to kill the internet _day" would look like this:

Comic 929: It's Impossible to Speculate at This Time

Evening chumps.


Title: Speculations; alt-text: 'I was pretty good at skeet shooting, but was eventually kicked off the range for catching the clay pigeons in a net and dispatching them execution-style.'

Well, I'll say one thing for Munroe's craft - I initially thought the subject matter of the conversation had anything at all to do with the joke. More fool me, however; it is just chat to fill time and establish that they're playing catch. Which is good because if it was actually important, the fact that the guy facing right suddenly becomes the guy facing left would wrong-foot us (are some motion lines to show him turning too much to ask? Oh well).

But that's not the joke. What is the joke is that instead of catching the ball as one would be expected to do in his situation, Mr. Hat takes 'catch' to mean 'hunt, obtain' and shoots it with a crossbow (because crossbows, like Google+, are nerdy and cool)*. This is an idea which is extended in the alt-text. It isn't a particularly funny idea, but you can't have everything.

He shot the ball. So what? He's Mr. Hat, he's not the 'catch' type, he's a classy asshole, remember? This is assholish and it's, er, classy? (because it's a crossbow?) so it's in character so it must be funny. No. The alt-text is a more amusing situation - in clay pigeon shooting you are actually expected to shoot them, so his finding a circuitous way of shooting them is more amusing than completely misinterpreting the meaning of the word 'catch' - but it's not very well written (it's the juxtaposition of 'skeet shooting' and 'the clay pigeons' I don't like - think for instance of the sentence "He threw the ball at me, and I caught the orb." Orb and ball do mean the same thing, true, but the use of synonyms means the two halves of the sentence don't seem connected. So yeah I'd rewrite the alt as 'clay pigeon shooting' and 'catching the targets in a net') and in any case it comes attached to a comic that might fool you with its 'nerdy' conversation but is, in fact, incredibly slight and, incredibly, not funny.

But never mind. jpk rides to the rescue:

Maybe he just couldn't come up with a punchline. Cancer's a bitch, he's got stuff on his mind. Happens.

Sigh. Goodbye now.

*And he does it without looking, too! That's like so megacool crowning moment of awesome Mr. Hat is a BadassNormal etc etc aaaaargh killllll meeeee

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Ed. Note:
I know I'm pushing this in every medium I can find (xkcdsucks, the xkcd forums, and now here), but we can't let the second panel off easy with just "the character positioning is wrong" as the criticism (though it is). The thing that gets me, as it's possibly the worst part of the comic (except the total lack of relevance between the setup and punchline), is that Randall's making an awful analogy while being completely oblivious of the fact that he just admitted to having no social life in the real world. That's our Randall!