Hard Read

[prog]

I finally just got the joke in this PBF comic after encountering it for the third time. It's pretty funny, but it should have emphasized more that the book-people aren't looking at each other in the middle panel. In fairness, I suppose this is tricky to do if your characters lack faces.

(At first I thought maybe the man-book was apologizing for impotence or something, but that didn't really explain why they're books in the first place. I found myself feeling a whisper of 6th-grade anxiety that here was a dirty joke that all my friends were laughing at while it only perplexed me.)

Comments

[queue.livejournal.com]

On a first read, it didn't even register with me that there was even a CliffsNotes book there. I agree that something more should have been done to point at it.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

I had the same reaction. One simple way would be to add a ! above the woman-book with a dotted line from her 'eye' to the cliff notes but that's an old old method which probably would have been common in the 1930s. Zip-a-tone to shade everything but the area around the cliff notes would also work but would also be more of a 1960s-1970s style.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Likewise. I went back and forth between panels 2 and 3 for a while before I picked up that detail - and then dredged up what CliffsNotes were. I never used them.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

I LOVED that it wasn't telegraphed from a mile away. That's what makes some of the funniest PBF comics--it takes you a moment to get them, so the payoff is that much funnier.

[prog.livejournal.com]

The problem is that following characters' gazes is a tried-and-true way to highlight something with a dash of subtlety, so the cartoonist chose to emloy that here - overlooking the fact that it's rather difficult to tell what a person with a book for a head is looking at.