When I first looked at this comic, I gave it a pass. Maybe I
was just feeling lazy. Maybe I legitimately thought it was funny after a long
week. Maybe I thought xkcd-sucks, back from the dead, would take care of it. Either
way, I gave it a pass.
Then I read #1337.
Disregarding how it’s weird he didn’t make a leet-speak
joke, read it again. That was brilliant. The art was good where it needed to
be, even if it did skimp where it didn’t, the pacing and format were pleasing,
the punchline didn’t require prior knowledge, and it doesn’t make you go “wait…”
after thinking about it. Even the alt-text is short and sweet, instead of the
paragraph we’ve come to expect. #1337 deserves to be praised, even if only for
being the best xkcd in goddamn months.
However.
Look back at the comic that disgraces the top of this
review, the one this review is actually about.
The only good thing I’m going to say about it is that the trees are
drawn well, but that just highlights the horrifically rendered robots.
The most obvious problem to this strip to me is the pacing.
Bait-and-switches like this require little-to-no transition between the two.
Keep the first and last panels, ditch the middle two. Secondly, what panel four
is supposed to show is an example of metamorphosis (a.k.a.: something I learned
about in preschool). Transformation, in nature, is something a bit different;
replace the final panel with either a joke about that type of transformation or
one about electrical transformers and the joke would be so much better.
This comic is, in a way, the easiest kind to write about:
The kind where you make one or two simple changes to the joke and it’s
perfectly fine (ex: “Tap That Ass”). In another way, it’s annoying, because
once I’ve pointed out the two glaringly obvious flaws, there’s nothing else to
say.
Anyway, don’t worry, John Levi, I’ve got this one.
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