Checkerboard Nightmare for Wedneday, Aug 17.
Checkerboard Nightmare's whole gimmick -- one that's sustained the M-W-F strip through four and a half years -- is that its eponymous main character tries all sorts of get-rich-quick gimmicky ways to become a popular webcomic. That'd be funny enough it the comic itself was niche and was read by a couple hundred people and published biweekly, but it's hilarious because it worked. CN is, in the ever-so-unimportant dominance hierarchy of 'western' webcomics, a B-lister, with enough readership that the comic is its creator's day job. And today's comic is the perfect example of what CN's all about -- a witty premise wrapped in self-reference wrapped in an egoism so pure it's actually endearing. A prime example of a metacomic.
I'm sure Pharaoh could chime in here with some juicy postmodern literary criticism here on the topic of the discernability of the true meanings of texts that are their own topics, but I'll leave that in his capable hands. I just think meta- is an intrinsically interesting -- and frequently amusing -- prefix.
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That comic was laugh-out-loud hilarious. I'd go through the Checkerboard Nightmare archives right now to link to a few more highlights, but... well, I'm lazy too. Instead, I'll sign off with a variation of a poem I wrote a few months ago:
I've never even
ever meta
single thing
that acts as Fraxas.
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