xkcd: volume 0 (Review)

The following are the personal opinions of one Fizzzard. Sir Benjamin personally has no idea what to make of these things because he doesn’t own the book, and quite frankly probably won’t anytime soon.

As you know or will know by the end of this sentence xkcd released its first book on Tuesday, entitled xkcd: volume 0. Personally I ordered my copy as fast as I could. I did not however pay $17 extra, almost the same amount as the book itself, to get it signed. They said to allow 1-2 weeks for shipping so I was quite happy when it arrived only 4 days after I ordered it.

However, once I opened the box I noticed an immediate problem. Though it had been shipped with some packing paper as protection against harm the paper was all crammed to one end of the box, not protecting the book. Dented books are not cool, at least not when they’re dented before I get them. The book also appears to be somewhat warped, I don’t know why, it just is.

The choice in strips to include is a bit weird. The first to entries of the journal series are included but none of the ones after Megan takes his hat are. On the other hand some of the not so good comics are included, including the ferret in a plane, Donner party of four, and the Penny Arcade parody.

In the blag post announcing the book’s release it was said that there was going to be extra comments in the margins of the book. Well there are, but only on about a third of the pages, and some of the ones that are there are in some sort of code or other that makes no sense to me.

Oh and to top it off there are several misprints through out the book. There’s a red dot in the middle of one of the comics. There a some small red lines across some white space the probably shouldn’t be there. Oh and one of the scroll-over comments has the lower half of its text to the left of the upper half of the text.

I’ll probably buy volume 1 if it’s released but mostly only because it exists. Unless you have money to spare don’t bother buying the book, just read the comics online.

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