Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Geek humor

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Mike Peterson Published: May 5, 2010 1 minute 2 comments

xkcd is that phenomenon we've been hearing about: The niche cartoon that can become incredibly popular without having mass appeal because it's on the web where the true believers can find it. A syndicated cartoon has to be able to get good numbers within each newspaper's geographic distribution level. A web comic can pick up a couple of readers here and a couple of readers there and end up with a solid audience that's economically viable but too scattered to find in daily print.

(Or a web comic can fail to find any audience at all. People who talk about the success of web comics never seem to acknowledge the incredibly low ratio of home runs to strike-outs. Imagine if newspapers tried to publish every submission that came in to the syndicates, no matter how lame or amateurish. Well, the web publishes everything and I think it's a miracle that the good stuff like xkcd is able to claw its way out of the pile.)

For my part, I find a lot of this "web comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language" a little beyond my geek skills. This particular episode is extremely non-geeky, some others you have to be able to speak programming languages to understand. Fortunately, and a major reason the strip works, most are somewhere in the middle. There is also a particular appeal when you stretch your brain and get a geeky joke that wasn't obvious on first reading, a sense of being in on the gag.

Meanwhile, anyone can enjoy the fact that, if you mouse over the cartoon (not here, silly — on the site) you get a second punchline. That's putting geekiness to good use!