Longtime readers will know about "Could Be A Tweet", my tag for comics that... could have been a tweet. In these comics, the art adds nothing to the joke and the text is a short one liner type thing. Longtime readers will also know that I kinda wish I'd come up with a better name for it, something like "pointless visuals" or "text-driven" but also something better than those. "Could Be A Tweet" implies shortness, which this comic obviously doesn't have, but it does feature no real visuals.
Some guy whose name I can't remember once said something like "comics are where visuals and text become interdependent". The implication of this is that a comic generally shouldn't make sense if all the text is removed or if it's boiled down to just the dialogue. TV/Film is the same way; there are exceptions, but generally you're going to need a steady interplay between audio and visuals. You don't have a guy say "this is a bomb!" before he presses the detonator, you have him hold it up and then when the explosion goes off we understand that he caused it.
The point of this is that while this comic couldn't be a tweet, the visuals still don't matter. Yes, there's formatting that helps us understand that this comic takes place on Wikipedia, but we can also understand that from the caption and the fact that every new line has a number in front of it.
So, while "why is this town so bad at mining" is a chuckle-worthy line, it's robbed of additional impact it could have if we saw a character saying it out loud, seeing their exasperation through their body language and stuff.
Those last two paragraphs connected better when I was thinking over how I'd write this review in the shower.
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