The Two Hundred Forty-Eighth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

I like the crazy technology far too much to be concerned with the casual racism.

The Two Hundred Forty-Seventh Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

No comment needed here. Although I do need a question - did they have head-shrinking tribes in South America? I honestly don't know.

The Two Hundred Forty-Sixth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Oh, Manhunter. This may be a new low in keeping your identity secret. It's bad enough you're a cop with a dog who becomes a superhero with the same dog - at least don't brag about your love of quick-changing.

Come on, Clickbait, are you even trying?

So I was browsing the Internet, you know, as normal people in the year 2016 do, and I came across another bizarre example of the Clickbait craft-



Great pitch, right? People love celebrities, and there's a compelling melancholy that comes from seeing beloved celebrities in the hours before their deaths, so vital, so unaware of the fate that's about to befall them... it's chilling and can be upsetting, but I understand why people would click on it. Provided the clickbait professionals choose the correct celebrity and photograph. So let's see the one they picked!

Click for Embiggination!

That's the whole ad, as originally served up to my browser. No, you're not seeing things, that's Kim Jong Il. A hundred years of photographs of dead 'celebrities' (in the modern sense) to draw from, and they went with Kim Jong Il, North Korea's Dear Leader.

Just in case you're unsure of my interpretation, here's a closeup of the image, in which you can see Kim Jong Un at the top-right of the frame.



I'm baffled, Clickbait professionals - was this an attempt at a joke? A protest against your own industry? If someone were to actually click on it, would it take them to a page berating them for participating in a corrupt practice?

Sadly, because of their choice of image, no one will ever know.

The Two Hundred Forty-Fifth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

There's onomatapoeia, and then there's onomatapoeiest. This is the latter.

Oh, Clickbait, you don't know how English works, do you?

Clickbait - the art of combing an interesting bit of art with a catchy headline in the hopes of tricking the curious into heading over to some kind of an bloated content farm. Whether or not you acknowledge the crafting of clickbait as an art form in and of itself, clearly some effort is required to craft the perfect combination of grabby pic and tantalizing topic sentence. So if there are craftspeople out there, working day and night to craft clickbait, how do things like this happen?



What did the writer/artist/craftsperson think they were doing? What do they imagine that brackets mean?

I can tell them what they actually mean - they connote an aside/explanatory note/clarification designed to reveal a piece of information to the reader without needlessly complicating the sentence. In this case, however, the brackets exist only to negate the entire point of the sentence. If you were reading this title aloud, you would leave out any bracketed word, and wind up with the phrase '15 of the most family photos ever'.

Does 'most family' work as a description? Has anyone ever said 'That's the most family photo I've ever seen?'

I don't think so.

Take out the brackets, and you've got a clear sentence describing the series of pages designed to serve up the largest number of ads in the tiniest number of clicks possible. So why were they included?

Perhaps paying non-English speaking people minimum wage isn't the best way of  generating tempting internet content?