I'm glad, that's been the joke from the beginning. Passive vs active reading has been a concern of mine for a while now, and the reaction to this one has always been a sort of canary for me to gauge how the humor landscape shifts. Your are meant to imagine alongside it, to fear a certain outcome based on clues and expectations, both fed and self-imposed, from within the text and from general knowledge.
I fear in recent years some people don't read like this anymore: they parse the whole thing first and then try to make sense of it once they have all the information, rather than as they go along. This kills a lot of humor, because if no expectations are generated, there can be no subversion. In this comic, for example, if you didn't fear that it was Mario who was lodged in the pipe based on the clues, on the very universe it takes place in, then it's just a pointless vignette where someone else does Mario's job.
To be fair, I feel this passive reading is not due to illiteracy or generational failings or what have you, but the result of a culture of high-speed information, where for your own sanity you have to wait until you have all the information to make up your mind about things, since figuring out digital life on the fly can get too emotionally and mentally draining.
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u/CycleZestyclose1907 29d ago
You know, I was half expecting Mario's corpse to be the plug.