What a way to kick off the new year…
by Professional Mole
…And humorless irony is, as we all know, very unfunny
I’ll tell you, I’m starting to think I have a sort of quota of how many times I can get outraged at some comic. Past this point I start wondering if I should still keep reading it at all. Sometimes I do, because it’s not aggravating enough, and sometimes I abandon it because it’s pretty much making my day worse by reading it. You know, like Sinfest.
Now, while daily gag-a-day comics have a big numerical advantage over less frequent comics — because, as I said before, they can recover from a shitty joke really fast — this will usually happen when such a comic is going through what I can only call a shit slump. When, for a good period of time, the best comics are underwhelming at most, and the rest make me cringe.
I believe what’s pulling SMBC down to me is that the setups are way too long and the punchlines are at best mediocre. The short single-panel comics, on the other hand, make almost no sense (for example this visual metaphor for a trollbait doesn’t quite work) In other words, SMBC is a shaggy dog strip, and the problem is that it seems not to be aiming for that. It seems like it’s actually trying to be funny and/or witty and failing.
On the other hand, it’s been a while since we’ve seen any sesquipedalian hellspawns, so maybe there’s a way back.
4 comments
SMBC used to be quite good a long time ago… I’m thinking about dropping it as it is basically XKCD tier now. Hell, recent XKCD manages to be more enjoyable than current era SMBC.
A few times recently, I’ve been SO close to deleting it from my RSS. It’s been a long time since SMBC it amused me.
Which is not a big deal if the comic takes 3 seconds to read, “Eh”, scroll drown.
But WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS. Reading da strip in da OP is somewhat of a commitment, with no payoff.
I think Zack has burned out. The whole “gigantic comic every day” schedule hardly seems healthy, and it shows in just how ofter terrible or repeated concepts appear. Scaling down to single-panels or alternate days would probably be for the best. I am keeping it on my RSS, but I do little more than skim through the large ones nowadays.
I don’t think SMBC is a comic that you can keep reading forever. I could imagine a new reader laughing at the occasional current strip, not having seen it all before.
Even so, that bait one was the second ‘your/you’re’ joke in 3 strips. Maybe the exhaustion is seeping through.
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