Five-Minute Comics Part 3
Five-Minute Comics: Part 3
Because of a family illness, instead of regular comics, this week I'll be sharing some strips that I drew as part of a game I played with friends. Each comic had to be written and drawn in five minutes.
--Randall
Comic #1 Pearl Harbor. November 7th, 1941. [There is a beach, with some ships floating in a crescent shaped harbor.]
[The same bay, again.]
[The boats continue to move about the harbor.]
[The boats do their thing. A title explains.] (We're going to be here a while, since the attack wasn't until December.)
Comic #2 [Cueball is sitting on a bus, Megan in front of him. Another person is sitting in front of Megan and another person is sitting behind Cueball.] I know it's natural and all, but I really wish women on the bus wouldn't try to breastfeed me. Megan: C'mon, have some milk. Right here. Cueball: I'm reading .
Comic #3 s/I think that/I saw a study once that said that/g Instant persuasiveness multiplier!
Comic #4 [A newspaper front page. Billy Joel is between two policemen.] Times Billy Joel Arrested for Arson
Comic #5 [One person has a cord leaving their mouth, the other is holding a handset on the end of it to their ear.] Handset: Hee hee hee... *giggle* I hear that if you drink coke and eat pop rocks, you vomit up a corded telephone handset on which you hear creepy little girls giggling.
Comic #6 [Three soldiers are holding a large integral sign, while a fourth points a gun at the Little Rock High School.] 1957: Eisenhower orders the military to integrate Little Rock High School.
Comic #7 [A smartphone is vibrating across a table, towards a person.] The smartphones got too smart... and developed a taste... for BLOOD! Fortunately, the only way they could move was by turning on their vibrate while on a sloped table.
Comic #8 [Cueball is reading to his child.] Cueball: And the wolf went to see the 38th little pig, who had built his house out of strontium. Cueball: And the wolf was all, "Ok, what is with this shit?" The 119 Little Pigs
Comic #9 [Cueball is holding up a gun.] Cueball: Fastest gun in the west!
[The gun is galloping across the desert.] gallop gallop
[There is a podium, with a gun in each position.] Winner!
Comic #10 [A picture of a centrifuge dominates the panel.] Centrifuges: They're what separate the men from the boys.
Comic #11 [A computer monitor is plugged in, and cables run into a wardrobe.] Lucy: Time passes differently in Narnia, so by putting the CPU and storage for my machine there, I was able to run through the [email protected] and [email protected] databases in about an hour. Peter: There are so many problems with that.
Comic #12 [Someone is talking to Alice.] Person: One of these days, Alice... Wham, zoom, sploosh, fwoom, splash, gurlle, wheeeee, fwoosh, aren't waterslides fun?!

This is the third of three "five-minute comics" Randall posted during a week in November 2010. The introduction to the comic explains everything you need to know about the circumstances behind it.
Randall obviously made more than three of these five minutes comics, and one of them was published later, for a short period of time by a mistake, but an android xkcd browser picked it up while it was on-line and saved it. Since then it has been added to explain xkcd. So here is a complete list of all four comics in the entire Five-minute comics series:
Here is a list with explanations for each of the small comics:
This may also be a joke on present-day levels of awareness of the event; as it fades out of living memory, people might indeed confuse the date with November (or October) 7, despite it being "a date which will live in infamy" .
Here, it's combined with elements of other common scary urban legends (phones ringing and creepy laughter) to form something bizarre.
However, integration also has a meaning in mathematics. This is indicated in the comic with the soldiers lifting up a giant integral sign to place beside the school, in order to (mathematically) integrate it. Normally, an integral only makes sense on functions; however, since this is the Little Rock Nine , if we take the integral of the constant function f ( x ) = 9, we do, in fact, get 9 x + C , as stated in the title text. The posture of the three soldiers with the integral sign echoes the iconic Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima photograph.
The 119 Little Pigs seems to be a variant where the pigs build their houses out of the 118 chemical elements (and bricks, presumably). The 38th little pig builds his house out of strontium , which is, of course, the 38th element on the Periodic Table. One wonders what happened to the pigs who are stuck making their houses out of elements that are gaseous or liquid at room temperature, or those whose houses would react with the air and/or undergo nuclear decay. In his book what if?, in the first comic, it shows the 92nd little pig, who built his house out of depleted Uranium, The wolf responded, "Dude". [1] Although given the water content in exhaled breath, it's easy to see how the wolf would huff, puff, and blow down the houses made of lithium , sodium , potassium , rubidium , caesium , and francium . Though making a houses out of hydrogen , helium , nitrogen , oxygen , fluorine , neon , chlorine and krypton would all be very difficult as they are gases at room temperature [ citation needed ] . Also, there would be issues such as death from the toxicity of the elements, e.g. fluorine would kill the pig and wolf. The piggies may have difficulty collecting enough metal, as they would have trouble collecting enough technetium (43), which only occurs in minute traces, and astatine , of which approximately 1 ounce exists on earth. It could be a coincidence, or possibly Randall's intent, that the wolf asks "What is this shit?" while referring to strontium while "stronzo" is an Italian (vulgar) word for "turd", pronounced almost the same (it is a common source of bad taste jokes) and stront is a Dutch word for shit.
See also: 1786: Trash
Here, Randall takes the pattern to a ridiculous and not-at-all threatening place.
Because of a family illness, instead of regular comics, this week I'll be sharing some strips that I drew as part of a game I played with friends. Each comic had to be written and drawn in five minutes.
--Randall
Comic #1 Pearl Harbor. November 7th, 1941. [There is a beach, with some ships floating in a crescent shaped harbor.]
[The same bay, again.]
[The boats continue to move about the harbor.]
[The boats do their thing. A title explains.] (We're going to be here a while, since the attack wasn't until December.)
Comic #2 [Cueball is sitting on a bus, Megan in front of him. Another person is sitting in front of Megan and another person is sitting behind Cueball.] I know it's natural and all, but I really wish women on the bus wouldn't try to breastfeed me. Megan: C'mon, have some milk. Right here. Cueball: I'm reading .
Comic #3 s/I think that/I saw a study once that said that/g Instant persuasiveness multiplier!
Comic #4 [A newspaper front page. Billy Joel is between two policemen.] Times Billy Joel Arrested for Arson
Comic #5 [One person has a cord leaving their mouth, the other is holding a handset on the end of it to their ear.] Handset: Hee hee hee... *giggle* I hear that if you drink coke and eat pop rocks, you vomit up a corded telephone handset on which you hear creepy little girls giggling.
Comic #6 [Three soldiers are holding a large integral sign, while a fourth points a gun at the Little Rock High School.] 1957: Eisenhower orders the military to integrate Little Rock High School.
Comic #7 [A smartphone is vibrating across a table, towards a person.] The smartphones got too smart... and developed a taste... for BLOOD! Fortunately, the only way they could move was by turning on their vibrate while on a sloped table.
Comic #8 [Cueball is reading to his child.] Cueball: And the wolf went to see the 38th little pig, who had built his house out of strontium. Cueball: And the wolf was all, "Ok, what is with this shit?" The 119 Little Pigs
Comic #9 [Cueball is holding up a gun.] Cueball: Fastest gun in the west!
[The gun is galloping across the desert.] gallop gallop
[There is a podium, with a gun in each position.] Winner!
Comic #10 [A picture of a centrifuge dominates the panel.] Centrifuges: They're what separate the men from the boys.
Comic #11 [A computer monitor is plugged in, and cables run into a wardrobe.] Lucy: Time passes differently in Narnia, so by putting the CPU and storage for my machine there, I was able to run through the [email protected] and [email protected] databases in about an hour. Peter: There are so many problems with that.
Comic #12 [Someone is talking to Alice.] Person: One of these days, Alice... Wham, zoom, sploosh, fwoom, splash, gurlle, wheeeee, fwoosh, aren't waterslides fun?!
