I have never read XKCD. I vaguely know of it, but like, I haven't sat down and gone to the website and read it. That changes today.
Here, on this website, since I truly have nothing better in the entire world that I could be doing, I am going to be reading XKCD from the beginning, pasting every strip in here, and reviewing it until I lose the vital energy in my fingers that allows me to continue typing, and then moving onto the next. It is 1:45 AM.
I will also be rating each one from one to ten in the categories of relatability, profundity, comprehensibility, and bias factor, since from what I've gathered, those are the things to look for.
Geromino.
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Right away, this is markedly different from the signature style of XKCD. One of the very few things I have gleaned about this comic is that it has a wildly minimalistic style; stick figures exclusively, nothing like this. Many things, like TV shows, go through a weird first few installments before settling on a regular way for their characters and format to be. It seems that, in this case, that has happened in a way tending towards the simpler, at least artistically. It brings to mind the fact that the author of Sweet Bro And Hella Jeff is a very accomplished artist who also made many, much more artistically impressive works previously.
As for the comic itself, there's not all that much to say. Wondering with cautious optimism where life will take you; ending up somewhere just the same, never once catching sight of a landmark or reference point with which to keep track of your journey. We truly do all. Eh.
RELATABILITY - 5
PROFUNDITY - 9
COMPREHENSIBILITY - 8
BIAS FACTOR - 8
OVERALL SCORE - 75%
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I don't get it.
It does seem like XKCD, at least in its early days, was very much a "whatever the hell" project, much like the Radiant Simulacrum Asylum. I'm worried I might get attached, and then be disappointed when it turns into what everyone else knows and loves.
The drawing on graph paper, with what seem to be little unmarked bar graphs on the left, brings me back to my school days when I would utterly deface every part of any paper they gave me except for the parts I was supposed to write answers in. If this paper was mine, though, there would be a lot more random, unplanned lines and curves, nothing so sophisticated as this. The globe with latitude and longitude lines in surrealistic environs puts me in mind of Frutiger Aero.
That said, I can't say this is much my style. Also, I've never heard of Le Petit Prince.
RELATABILITY - 2
PROFUNDITY - 2
COMPREHENSIBILITY - 2
BIAS FACTOR - 2
OVERALL SCORE - 20%
This piece emanates a certain quiet nostalgia which was present in the first "strip" but absent in the second. Nostalgia isn't quite right, it's one of those many feelings which cannot be expressed, but that's one of the closest words to it. The scraggly, erased lines above the ocean horizon greatly add to it. This emotion is one I have been feeling frequently lately, as I scroll through esoteric things in the Internet Archive, knowing I may be the only person to see or think about the thing I read in years and for years to come; or when I look through my closet or packed shelf and find an old everyday possession of a long-dead family member, and I look upon it strainedly before putting it back where it was. Standing alone in a grassy, gray field that stretches along the temporal dimension rather than two spatial ones. Cold gusts of wind moving through me. Goodbye, island.
RELATABILITY - 9
PROFUNDITY - 7
COMPREHENSIBILITY - 5
BIAS FACTOR - 5
OVERALL SCORE - 65%
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Here we fucking go. This is what I'm talking about, baby. Well, not as in what I expected from XKCD, of course, but you know what I mean. I love apocalypses and light spatiotemporal corruption and the esoteric and unexplainable. I love vibrant apocalypses, ones that teem with activity, just not any activity like there was before. Give me crumbling floating islands and city-sized grazing animals and green skies and rivers flowing through the ocean. That's what'd be described as just "Landscape" now. Just imagine being the last scientist of any fucking field alive during this.
RELATABILITY - 3
PROFUNDITY - 8
COMPREHENSIBILITY - 9
BIAS FACTOR - 10
OVERALL SCORE - 75%
This strip heralds a return to the digital medium, as well as the comic format. It also brings in the mathematics-related humor I've known was coming at some point. I hope it doesn't all turn into that so fast, at least. As much of a nerd as I am, I'm not a very good one; I was pretty sure there was a reason the 70 detonated into a 7, a 2, and a 5 specifically, and the prime factor idea did fly through my head, but I was always incredibly terrible at those, for some reason. I didn't know for sure until I read the alt text.
Also, I'm a decent distance away from my screen and I thought the package was a roped-together group of dynamite sticks at first, but then I saw the 70's speech bubble and I thought it was one of those with its horizontal sides disguised as a brown delivery package, before I craned closer and saw it was just a regular red gift-wrapped box. It makes less sense this way. But I suppose the Number Unabomber is as sobering a threat as any.
RELATABILITY - 1
PROFUNDITY - 1
COMPREHENSIBILITY - 8
BIAS FACTOR - 3
OVERALL SCORE - 32.5%
First proper stick figures. That's nice.
I also don't get this one. I'm not quite sure if the idea of irony as it was known in the early internet era corresponds precisely to anything we have today. Meta-humor and self-reference are still going strong, though. The only thing I can guess from this is that this is one of those "people in real life: hey man how you doing"-type points, where if you are in deep enough to the topic to be able to talk about it this much, you are far past anybody else ever caring. And I truly do hate to bring, like, discourse here, since it's commonly known that it can be a downer, but when it comes to recursivity as humor, I do agree. But I do think I am missing something, and that there is no way there is not a self-referential layer to this outside of my field of view. That is another beautiful sunset, though.
RELATABILITY - 3
PROFUNDITY - 4
COMPREHENSIBILITY - 1
BIAS FACTOR - 3
OVERALL SCORE - 27.5