Ultimate Enemy

My ultimate enemy? Statistics.

So basically, ever since the reveal last month, I wanted to do a strip about how I totally called the Reed Richards thing. Of course, I didn't really call it, of course, insofar as I'd said nothing to anyone prior to the reveal; I'd just seen it coming for the previous issue or two, which for me is light years in advance.

Anyway, I settled on another ripoff - ah, homage - to xkcd in the form of a Google-results chart. The comic seen here isn't so much the embodiment of my results as it is a dramatization of the research process. Figuring out a way to search specifically for fan predictions and guesses based on key words and/or phrases was hurdle number one; hurdle number two was that, even to the extent such information was findable, a lot of it was on message boards, where there's nothing stopping several guesses from appearing on a single page and thus obscuring their true frequencies.

Number three was the realization that no matter how many characters I thought to search for, a true results chart would involve a big useless "other" chunk - in fact, the figures included in the comic only represent about half of the 9000 or so total search results for the phrases "ultimate enemy" and "bad guy" on their own. Last but not least was the fact that "ultimate enemy" can and will be used in contexts wholly unrelated to the series in question, or even to comics at all.

All in all, the pie chart is nothing so much as a monument to my failure. You're welcome, internet.