prog: (Default)
prog ([personal profile] prog) wrote2007-04-12 12:46 pm
Entry tags:

Hard Read

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.)

[identity profile] cortezopossum.livejournal.com 2007-04-12 05:25 pm (UTC)(link)
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.