2010-12-11
Explanation
This comic introduces "The Graphvella," a concept that any story can be told in three charts or fewer. It proceeds to demonstrate this with three movie genres: zombie movies, romantic comedies, and zombie romantic comedies. The humor lies in reducing complex narratives to dry, clinical data visualizations.
For zombie movies, the three figures include pie charts showing the infected vs. uninfected population shifting from March to April, a decision-tree flowchart for surviving a zombie scenario (which mostly leads to "DEATH"), and a graph of "biomass of human brains" increasing over human history. For romantic comedies, we see bar charts comparing skills possessed by male and female leads (where the male inexplicably has "hostage negotiation" skills), a line graph showing relationship integrity dipping at a "contrived miscommunication" before recovering when the "man humiliates self in charming and expensive manner." The final genre, zombie romantic comedy, combines both formulas -- the relationship follows the rom-com pattern but ends abruptly when "man eats woman's face."
The comic satirizes both the formulaic nature of Hollywood genre films and the modern tendency to reduce everything to data visualizations and infographics. By presenting familiar plot structures as charts, Weinersmith highlights how predictable these stories really are.