XKCD Reviewed - #1868 - Eclipse Flights

Credit where credit is due, this is a good comic!

The dialogue avoids the worst of the usual XKCD problem where it's too stiff. Instead of "I'm calculating how many flights will intersect the eclipse...", we just get "Flight plans.". Much better! We can infer the other information from the context, which is what functional dialogue is supposed to do.

And the joke is good too. That overdramatic "end times" line just SELLS it for me. I just love the idea of a pilot going about their regular business when suddenly the apocalypse is happening except HA JK its not. It reminds me of those prank videos on youtube. No! Not those ones! The ones that DON'T suck!!!

I do have a few tiny quibbles. Panel two having no dialogue gives the comic a bit of a weird pacing, it's like a beat panel, but the panel after it doesn't have anything that would require a beat panel. Maybe instead panels two and three could be combined, with the dialogue from three superimposed over the image from two.

And yknow how English is read left to right, right? Because of that, we also 'read' art as going from left to right. Consider how we almost always see the 8-Bit Theater gang walking toward the right side of the panel, ditto for a lot of XKCDs. So the image for panel four should really be flipped vertically. That could be an intentional choice that I'm just not picking up on the ideas of, though.

I'd also like to point out that this is just a liiiiittle bit similar to #1391, which was almost five hundred comics ago, holy crap. And that on its own is not bad. This comic improves upon that one in pretty much every way, and if you're going to rip something off, you might as well improve it while you do. But if there's a third comic about people being confused about darkness, I will be very disappointed in Randall Munroe.

Questionable Content - #3532 - Now Light The Other One

This is not a bad gag, but it is not a good joke. This is an almost perfect low-level side gag to be included alongside a fuller joke or an emotional conversation. Even if you LOVE "an unusual candle smell" as a joke, you have to admit that it doesn't deserve three panels of setup. Especially when we've already heard what it smells like in a previous comic. And that other comic had two candle smells, not just the one! So it's not just redundant, it's also distilled. 

The structure of the comic, with the long setup to learning something we already know, makes it seem like the real joke is supposed to be Faye and Bubbles's reaction to the smell. But that doesn't work either, since they're completely deadpan in how they respond. It's just boring! And I'm not asking for Jeph to suddenly start writing his characters to be super over the top, but a comic needs to have *stuff* in it. 'Mild surprise that a strange label is accurate' is not *stuff*. 

Credit where it's due: Jeph did do the not-lazy thing, he did have Faye doing a thing in the background. That's nifty. It's no where near enough to make this comic good, though. 

Questionable Content Isn't Funny - #3526 - Stay Chocolate Frosty

So, my first reaction to this comic was that Bubbles was saying "trademark" after "Wendy's", but then a Webcomics Review post convinced me that Jeph just didn't know how to put in the little "ᵀᴹ".

BUT THEN

On his twitter, Jeph posted a reaction, saying that Bubbles WAS saying it out loud, because she thought she was supposed to. (also he thinks it makes more sense than looking up the trademark symbol?)  And that begs the question: Why isn't Clinton reacting to it? Check out him being sassy to Faye mere moments later, he's not the super shy guy anymore, so he's not just being polite. There's no way he wouldn't have noticed, and there's no way that he wouldn't have questioned it.

It just doesn't make sense for Bubbles to have a speech thing that doesn't get reacted to. Even Faye's old speech thing got reacted to back in the day!

The joke itself comes across as too abstract to be funny. If we saw a stamp with a weird off-yellow goo, and then the goop squirms on his robo-hand into the shape of the Wendy's girl, that's funny. Just hearing about a weird Wendy's promo... isn't.

Fun fact about me: I was only just finishing up this review when I realized I was picturing the McDonald's logo in my head instead of the Wendy's logo.

In conclusion, Bubbles and Faye are gonna fuck.