1084: What is this I don't even

Hey everyone! Sexy Online Retcon Critiquing Funnies Sometimes (SoRCFS) here after a long absence/silent lurking to pop back into my favorite stick-figure-based-webcomic criticism community hosted on Google Blogger.

Since I'm not yet over to criticizing the most recent Xkcd, I think I should also take up some space thanking the other authors of this blog for posting far more frequently than I have. Props especially to T-Jack for finding things to say about comics that are hard to criticize because they're more Garfield-level bland than actually bad. Regarding my own lack of posts: while I want to blame it on some things (including getting my own comics published semi-professionally). Really, though, I can always find time to complain about things. I think it's that aforementioned blandness that's kept me from really trying to write anything. No strips really riled me up the way I reacted to, say, 972 or 980.

UNTIL NOW.

So now I'm going to write something obscenely long in an attempt to A) make up for almost 90 strips (30 weeks!) since my last post, and B) clarify the things that I as a published cartoonist think are wrong with this strip.

So! After that long and tedious header that 50% of all you Hypenators (which is to say, 3 people) skipped, here we go:

Title: Server Identity; Alt: Protip: Annoy Ray Kurzweil by always referring to it as the 'Cybersingularity'.

I think humor's a weird thing. What is funny varies between contexts, cultures, and levels of dignity. On the other hand, there's still some sort of science, system or what have you about how funny things are delivered. Stand-up comedians, for example, probably that it's plain out dumb to try getting your joke out while the audience is still in the middle of their pretty consistently-timed laughter. In most cases, it's better to wait for the audience to calm down instead of fighting them while trying to deliver the next part of the routine. I'm pretty sure there are conventions that dominate good joke delivery, the unsurprisingly simple explanation for that being that said conventions work.

One thing I've observed with great interest in this entire system is the role of referential humor. You know the type: you crack a joke to your friends and it's only funny because of how Fluttershy ate Edward Cullen in the season 8 finale of Smallville. Or something like that. Basically, the kind of joke where the receivers need to know some pop culture (or, even worse, the in-jokes of a social group,) to actually find it funny. Failure to understand referential jokes followed by puzzlement and, occasionally an understanding party's attempt to explain the joke.

And then you turn purple and lose the ability to hold newspapers.

Generally speaking, I think these jokes are less humorous. While I'm pretty sure there's no serious metric out there for measuring how funny things are, but it's an objective fact that parts of pop culture fall in and out of the public eye pretty quickly. This effect has only gotten more pronounced in the age where computers are connected by a series of tubes. As such, people looking at a joke based on referential humor from the past will often throw a proverbial nullPointerException and fail to understand the joke. Cue the lack of humor.

A textbook example (if you could cram this stuff in credited college courses) would be the Disney movies Treasure Planet and Chicken Little. I'm pretty sure that Chicken Little totally trumped the spacified Stevenson story in raw box office numbers. On the other hand, Chicken Little was basically Disney trying to be Dreamworks and cramming their movies full of pop culture=based referential jokes. As such, it hasn't aged nearly as well as Treasure Planet or any other film in the Disney Animated Canon.

So, where have I been going with these last 4 paragraphs and single caption? Basically, 1084 relies pretty heavily on referential humor. In fact, it's so heavy that it not only kills the humor, it is capable of yanking out of the comic any person who is not privvy to the three or so different things that were running through Randall's mind at the time. Which, as I have so cleverly determined from my totally unbiased test population of me, me, and the first few people to post on the forums, is most people.

Here's my list of referential jokes or parts that lead up to jokes, in order of increasing severity. Surprisingly, (or maybe not) they ascend with the panel number and the intended humor.

• Panel 2- "~#ls": I'm going to assume that's a server command or some Linux thing that falls outside the purview of my personal nerdiness. Since Xkcd panders to a tech-savvy crowd I think the audience would come to basically the same conclusion I did, which is that whatever the long haired character is doing probably leads to the stuff in panel 3. This is only a problem for those of an over-curious mind.
• Panel 3- all that crap: As far as I can tell, the joke of this comic is that the guy was trying to do something ridiculously convoluted on mutually exclusive platforms (Adobe and Android don't like each other, from what I hear). While the specifics of the joke are somewhat esoteric, I think that the intended audience and increasingly tech-savvy world should contribute a little to a better understanding of it. Failing that, there's a much simpler joke of "holy crap this is so idiotically complex" which most people should get
• Tooltip- Ray Kurzweil: I'm not sure exactly how obscure the singularity mentioned below is, but I know about it and not this guy (who is apparently a futurist). Somehow I doubt that referencing an obscure author involved with this obscure theory is a great way to make something funny.
• Panel 4- the singularity: The technological singularity is some obscure futurist theory about how technology will become infintely complex or something at some point in time (if you actually know the theory proper and bother trying to correct me, I'm totally going to laugh at you and not correct this post). Anyway, the theoretical comical payoff (the second one, really,) comes from the idea that this guy is so bad at computers that he would be better off waiting til computers are smart enough to correct his idiocy. This is pretty bad, because if you have to look up what the singularity is then you've just been pulled out of the comic and been distracted from the already confusing humor of panel 3. If you do manage to get the joke, then it still feels like post punchline dialog because of how it goes on longer than any witty retort really should.

So yeah. That's my bit on the problems with referential humor and analysis of how it detracts from the comic. While I feel that pop culture references can be put to good use as background easter eggs (check out what Disney's up to right now), what Randall did with this strip was rely far too heavily on them and have inappropriate faith that his readers would know what the hell was going on. What we're left with is an ineffective comic that makes sub-savvy readers stop reading it to understand what's going on.

Long story short: Randall's inability to actually bother with the flow of reading the comic is something that makes me want to write long rants and after I'm done with that, drop the name of this blog as a simple statement: Xkcd sucks.
 

That post was depressingly long. Here's a kitten to cheer you up!

Comic 993: Randall offers his services as a retailer

Title: Brand Identity (Formerly Brand Awareness) alt: Legally-mandated information would be printed on the back or discreetly along the bottom. In small letters under the nutrition information it would say "Like our products? Visit our website!" There would be no URL.

Hey everyone, this is the Society of Russell Crowe Film Supporters (SoRCFS) back again with a review.

So....I really have no idea what the hell Randall is going for here. For that matter, not a lot of people on the forums do, either. A lot of the posts I've read across the first couple of pages have gone something like this:

"PretentiousGuy wrote: Mkay it's not really that funny but I laughed at the alt text. But hey, here's [some example of a white label product]

It really is beyond me how they've managed to turn out 4 pages of posts mostly like this (or, failing that, just the second part).

Is there much to say about this comic? No, not really. The only thing I really laughed at was the fact that Randall has apparently put his everything on one supermarket shelf. This including milk, which is generally supposed to be refrigerated. Also, second row down, a bit left of center: cervical caps. Because, you know, you absolutely have to put those in. It's totally not bad taste/irrelevant to the joke/more pointless seXKCD.

I'm going to do that thing where I criticize trivial parts of the comic composition now. If you really don't feel like reading this kind of stuff, then just know my general attitude towards this comic is that it's bland, and otherwise just plain out boring.

It took me a while to figure out that the comic was in color for a reason. Maybe it's just because I'm stupid, maybe because using white to contrast color here is a piss-poor decision. I mean, sure, I noticed the white label things right away (I'm not that stupid, apparently). But I cared a lot less because there were so many things to look at that the white label's uniqueness didn't hit me at first. If I was trying to tell this (admittedly bad) joke myself, I would sacrifice the bunches of objects for greater clarity. Here's some things I'd consider to achieve this goal:

1. White stands out better against dark colors. Avoid light shades of grey.
2. My audience reads left to right.
3. I should try to place important things based on the rule of thirds or in the center.

That said, here's a five ten minute mockup of what I said above:

Clearer? I'd like to think so. Does it improve the joke any? No. Hopefully it does make it a bit clearer, though.

Eh, I'm done for now. There' not much to say and I feel like I'm forcing myself to blabber on pointlessly. Whatever.

Watch Man of Steel in 2013,

SoRCFS

Comic 985: That's a looooot of alt-text.

Hey everyone, this is SoRCFs (on Randall's Comic Forums: Schadenfreude) (SoRCFS) here with some more reviewage and whatnot. Since Gamer_2k4 has decided to bugger off to parts unknown and leave miscreants such as myself in charge here, I'm mourning his passing by doing a somewhat timely post. Don't count on this being a regular occurrence. At all.



title: Percentage Points;alt text: Grayton also proposed making college scholarships available exclusively to sexually active teens, amnesty for illegal immigrants who create room for themselves by killing a citizen, and a graduated income tax based on penis size. He has been endorsed by Tracy Morgan, John Wilkes Booth's ghost, and the Time Cube guy.

You know what I occasionally enjoy doing? Pretending I'm Robin (the Burt Ward one) from the old campy Batman series. And by saying that, I mean I enjoy imitating his overused "Holy [something fancy], Batman!" catchphrase. That said, don't look at me strangely when I say this:

Holy four lines of alt-text, Batman!

I did something weird a few days ago: I reread the early archives of Xkcd. Okay, so there's not too much to say about it. It was way back before Randall had a huge fanbase to pander to and otherwise appear nerdy at. I've alluded to reading a lot of webcomics before, so what I saw was nothing unexpected for a fledgling artist--a little less consistent art, less of a feel for what the comic is about, that kind of thing. But you know what struck me most? Brevity. The first comic's alt-text is three words long. Tiny. It added a little something meaningful to the comic, but didn't distract the reader from what they had just read.Compare that to today's. Ew. 985 shows up as a whopping 4-line, 50 word, 317 character (268 excluding spaces) monster.

The joke isn't one I find funny, but humor's subjective so I'll let that one slide (in this case). Even if I found this joke humorous, I still wouldn't laugh. Why? Because I had no clue where the comic was going. My eyes followed, in order, the title, text in panel, the caption under it, and finally the monstrous tooltip.

Here's a brief view of what's going on in my head at that point:
Title: "Percentage points" Okay, so it's all about--
Panel: um--drunk drivers? Drone strikes on Christmas? I what is going on--
Caption: Wait polls now?
Tooltip: What is going on??!?!?!
Afterwards: Okay, I need to reread this. Dammit.

The Alt-text is busy. So is the panel. In fact, it's so busy that I forgot about the title (which foreshadowed the allegedly funny caption) on the way down. It's not that I have ADD or something--I just couldn't see how it was funny through the thicket of other jokes. When the focus of the comic--"Percentage points" as the now-forgotten title had told me about--hit, I was just confused because it seemed like the joke hadn't been set up everywhere.

One thing I sincerely hope Randall will learn is that you can't always fit more than one joke into a comic. Of course it's possible: see this Brawl in the Family (and commentary!) for an example of a secondary joke in the background that doesn't detract from the what the author's been building up the whole strip. But in this Xkcd? The extras distract from the joke that the title indicates he wants to make fun of or complain about or something. As a result, the actual joke feels underdeveloped or, in my case, not there at all.

Here's a "Sucks (not that much) Less" from me:


title: Percentage Points;alt text: Don't we all.

Okay, Still not funny. But it's clear on what joke it's trying to get through. That's at least a step in the right direction.

tl;dr: the alleged joke is buried inside a mountain of other jokes. The two parts are bad for each other.

Addendum: The sharper-eyed members of the audience will notice that I reused the til-now solitary "list comic" tag. Well, to be fair, the list isn't exclusively on the comic. It extends through the tooltip as well.

And another thing: The tooltip! I just realized I started talking about the tooltip and didn't really go back to it. Uhm, that's totally intentional. See what happens when you start with one thing, distract the audience with something else, then go back where you started? They're confused as hell! This was totally a self-demonstrating article! Right, guys?

....

Guys?

Comic 980: "Money." It's what Randall wants.

UPDATE: xkcd forumite JiminP was kind enough to host a full-size version of the image. Clicking the thumbnail below will take you there.


Title: Money; alt-text: There, I showed you it.

Good [morning/evening/whatever time of day you're reading this], everyone. The Somewhat Organic Robots Campaigning For Sobriety (SORCFS) is back to write yet another review.

But before that, I should rant at you a bit about Garfield. Why am I starting with Garfield? Because I am, that's why.

As I've alluded to in previous posts, I'm actually a pretty big fan of newspaper comics. Some of them, anyway. Hell, throw me any story told in sequential art and I'll probably read it. Webcomics, comics books ("graphic novels" if you're a snob and in denial), newspaper strips, whatever. And as someone who's tried my hand at many variations of the art myself, I can tell you personally that it's not something easy to do. So I try to not judge too harshly when it comes down to what qualifies as "good" to me. At the end of the day, there are only two or three things that really matter to me when I try to say if a comic is objectively "good" or not. And the biggest thing to me is one simple question: why does the author draw his (or her) story?

To me, the "right" answer to the first question should really be that the author enjoys doing it (even if they work at Marvel or some other big company. They should be there because they enjoy their job. Hating editors and current storylines is permissible, I guess). For example: love me, hate me, curse me out in the comments for deigning to mention it, but I think Dominic Deegan is actually a decent comic.Okay, so the storylines are shaky and the characters aren't the best fictional people ever. I'll give you that. But you know what? I can tell that Mookie, the author enjoys drawing it. That, to me, is the most important thing in the cartooning profession.

Which brings me to Garfield. You know why I don't love Garfield? Because Jim Davis (AKA the guy who draws him) doesn't. Jim Davis freely admits that he created Garfield to be a "good, marketable character." And so Garfield has shambled along since the late 1970s being a perfectly boring character in a perfectly boring strip. But hey, the merchandise sells. To contrast this with some of my favorite strips: Calvin and Hobbes author Bill Watterson slowly turned against merchandising because it seemed "against the spirit of the strip." And Berkeley Breathed bowed out of drawing his newspaper strips because he felt like he'd prefer end his characters' story on a lighter note.

If you haven't already guessed, I'd feel justified calling Xkcd (I refuse to capitalize it properly) the Garfield of the webcomics world. High-profile, boring art, sells well. I'm not the only one who realizes this--according to the forums, the poster of today's comic was up in the stores before the actual comic was. That tells me a lot about the motivations of one Randall Munroe. And, if you ask me, it's a cardinal sin of cartooning.

Yes, I recognize that he needs money to survive. But that doesn't make Xkcd a good comic.

Okay, now that I'm done calling out the comic in general, here's some specific complaints about comic 980:

• It's a chart comic without a joke. Need I say more?


• Randall missed his normal deadline by something like 10 hours. Which, if he actually had a syndicated strip or something, would make him worthless as a cartoonist. Hell, it'd even be that way with his now-regular delay of a few hours past 12. I could have sworn that the "about" page of Xkcd used to say it updated at 12PM EST... (ed. note - I could've sworn that, too...odd.)


• In a few years this will be inaccurate or otherwise irrelevant. It's boring now and it'll be boring & wrong later.


• GOOMHR-Bait: Okay, maybe this really applies to any given Xkcd strip. but I'm betting that merely mentioning the fact that something is wrong fiscally with the country and world will set off this huge discussion by fans in the forum who think they're smart because they were already aware of this fact and can quote wikipedia. Here's to betting that at least one will claim there's a simple solution.


• typos: Well, apparently. I can't find them yet and they're sure to disappear, but the forumites are noticing. (ed. note - I didn't look at the entire image myself, but I did notice a discrepancy between EU's GDP and Europe's GDP. The forums say there are a lot more like it.)


• Size. This is too big and unfocused to be actually interesting in terms of content. To crib a post from the generally vitriolic but accurate Xkcd forum poster SirMustapha:
  Reaction of xkcd fan:"Wow! This must have taken so much time, it's no wonder the comic is late!"
  Reaction of xkcd hater: "This comic is so completely worthless, it's amazing that Randall should spend so much time in it!"
  Reaction of both: tl;dr"

Alright I'm done here. To sum things up: 980 is a big boring chart that seems like it was created mostly for the purpose of money. As a comics purist, I find this to be a bad motivation. As an artist, I fing the comic to be poorly executed. I therefore feel like I am correct to repeat the title of this blog: Xkcd sucks.

Stay Sober,
~SORCFS

Comic 972: Introducing the "Stolen Joke" Tag!

Got another review from "sorcfs" again (the acronym's meaning keeps changing with every submission!), so here you guys go. He said everything I felt when I read the strip, and he's done it in a much more timely manner than I would have. Enjoy.


Title: November; alt-text: November marks the birthday of Charles Schulz, pioneer of tongue awareness.

Hey everyone, this is the Society Of Ridiculously Cruel Flatworm Stompers (SORCFS) returning to write another review.

Ridiculous acronyms aside, this comic had two problems. The first is fairly common among xkcd strips, so it only gets short shrift from me.

Basically, a stick figure comic is a terrible vehicle for expressing the joke here. As a comics connoisseur, I do have to give props to Randall for proper use of beat panels (read: the two in the middle) to slow the reader's perceived passage of time. But that's not why this joke should be funny. Part (and by part I mean all) of the humor derives from the terror that slowly consumes the not-hat-guy as he becomes increasingly aware of his tongue. The terror which would be best be expressed by, you know, expressions. Expressions which Randall's stick figures don't have.

Seriously. I have no clues as to what the guy is feeling. He's just there, frozen. I can imagine that Mr. Not-Hat is sitting there stoned or wishing he had coffee [or both]. And that takes away from what I'm supposed to laugh at.

Wait wait wait. I'm being pretentious. Just because I like to say I know my comics doesn't mean I should know what Randall should have done with this joke.

Unless...it's already been done before?

This brings us to the second problem. This has been done before.

Read this, please. Look familiar?

That's a "Peanuts" ("Charlie Brown" to the unwashed masses) strip from an absurdly long time ago. It's a personal favorite of mine, actually, which has now been somewhat ruined by xkcd. (Not the first time this has happened) My personal feelings about this aside, the original is superior in pretty much every way--unlike xkcd, Schulz's dialogue feels natural and the wordiness of the strip helps build up Linus' sort of nervous and panicky state. And remember what I was saying about the terror selling the comic? yeah, look at Lucy in those last few panels. That growing horror is really where the joke is.

I can just bet that this kind of discussion will transpire on the oh-so-pretentious xkcd forums:

fans: OMG I read comics too GOOMHR
haters: STOLEN
fans: GTFO TROLOLoll

As an extra "fuck you" to people like me who realize that this xkcd's comic is stolen from Charles Schulz, we have the alt text. Generally, when you steal something you don't tell everyone you did it. I can just bet Randall's fans will defend him on this one, calling it a "tribute" or some other bullshit. It's not. Randall's done homages to other comics before. But this is just copy-pasting a joke into his own style. Slapping a legendary cartoonist's name afterwards doesn't change that.

Post Script: Huh. Reading over this review I appear to have gone from sarcastic in the first point to downright hostile in the second. RIP Charles Schulz.

--

P.S. from Gamer_2k4:

I'm a pretty big Peanuts fan myself, so here's the original strip in color:


Since we're looking at a real comic by a real cartoonist, notice how there are RECURRING CHARACTERS with ACTUAL PERSONALITIES and that's what helps make the joke? Notice how xkcd doesn't have that? (And before you mention Mr. Hat, he's just the everydick in this strip. He's not doing anything particularly Hat-like.)

You know, for what it's worth, maybe I could've excused Randall for ignorance here. Peanuts is an old strip, and not everyone keeps up with every joke. But the fact that YOU KNOW YOU'RE STEALING MATERIAL AND THAT'S YOUR STRIP is what makes this so bad!

Honestly, it's garbage like that that's made me stop reading other webcomics.

Comic 965: A New Guest Poster Appears!

If it wasn't apparent from the title, today's review is not my own work. It comes from a fellow (a group?) called "sorcfs," which I'm told is an acronym for something horrifying and unnatural. Just kidding!

Maybe.

Anyway, I get a day off, and you get a review that's timely! Everyone wins!


Title: Elements; alt-text: Of all the nations, the armies of the ununoctium-benders are probably the least intimidating. The xenon-benders come close, but their flickery signs are at least effective for propoganda.

Ooh, color. You know what that means: the forumites will be raving over how "beautiful" it is, as is bound to crop up every once in a while. Nevermind all the other comics that use color all the time and have several metric buttloads better art and jokes and aren't goddam scripts with oversized margin doodles.

But hey, pop culture references! yeah! I mean, that makes everything better, right?

No. No it doesn't.

Okay, first off, this joke has been done to death. I’ve seen plenty of things making fun of the fact that ancient cultures thought that nature was made up of 4 or 5 or whatever number of primitive elements as compared to our modern-day periodic table. Just after ten seconds of thinking, I was able to come up with this example from Order of the Stick (a not-terrible stick figure comic). I'm sure there are other places it's been done. But, to give Randall some measure of credit, it's a fairly common sense joke. It's the kind of joke that people make independent of each other over and over again, just like jokes about erections and the underwear of every superhero ever.

So, let's give him the benefit of the doubt on that. And while we're here, let's also say some positive things. The art is at least workable in this comic. It's properly minimalist, with the characters being recognizable to those who can recognize them. So that's an improvement over it just looking lazy.

My beef with this comic is the alt-text. I probably would have just turned my computer off and gone to sleep instead of spending an extra few minutes banging out this review had I not seen the alt-text.No, it's shockingly not Post-Punchline Dialogue this time. Well, maybe PPD. But more importantly, Post Punchline Contradiction. Is there a thing for that yet? Or is it just a subcategory of PPD? Screw it. To get to the point:

Those who want to bother with all those superfluous extra lines of alt-text will notice that the premise of the extra joke is about the scarcity of certain elements. Now, in the Avatar universe, you need some of the element you want to bend before you can actually, you know, bend it (except firebenders. But they were villains, so screw them.) Apply this to the real world, and yeah,it would suck to be a bender. Scarce like, you know, polonium. a quick jump down to Wikipedia (obviously chosen for being an XKCD favorite) shows that polonium is pretty damn rare. As in, poke around in a metric ton of uranium and you'll get something like a hundred micrograms of polonium. Pro fact: uranium ain't that easy to find either. So unless there was randomly a lot of polonium lying around because, I dunno, a zombie ate the guy carrying it, polonium is not a very sensible element to attack the avatar with. And if you're going to make an alt-text joke, make sure it doesn't mess up the joke you set up earlier.

And no, I'm not the only one who saw this. Halfway through writing this I decided to check if any forumites had made the same observation. Lo and behold, 5 posts down we have this.

Oh, wait. The forumites say there was an Avatar marathon on TV yesterday? That's suddenly...unsurprising.

--

P.S. from Gamer_2k4: The tag "factually wrong" isn't QUITE accurate, but I wanted something besides the new guy's name marking this post. Besides, it's more reusable than "contradictory in a way that shows ignorance of facts."