47: Counter-Red Spiders

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Counter-Red Spiders

LiveJournal title: Drawing: Counter-Red Spiders

Title text: I hope we can stop them LiveJournal caption: They must be stopped.

Explanation

This was the forty-forth comic originally posted to LiveJournal. The previous one was 46: Secrets, and the next one was 48: Found. It was among the last eleven comics posted both on LiveJournal and on xkcd.com after the new site was launched. This comic was published on the same day across both sites, but not all of them shared the same posting day.

In previous comics, red spiders are seen navigating similar landscapes. Here, humanoid stick figures are standing on top of each other to reach some place above the top of the comic, in a similar manner to how the red spiders navigate, in order to engage in a counter-offensive against the red spiders. These stick figures must be extremely light, or gravity must be really weak there, because it is extremely unlikely or even impossible to have a stack of humans that tall.

The title text indicates that Randall hopes the counter-offensive is able to prevent the red spiders' attack. However, the invasion in Red Spiders Cometh suggests that it may have been unsuccessful. In the original caption, he provides two links to the images of the previous comics. The links are now defunct, so here's the caption with the archived versions of the links: "They must be stopped."

The full series of Red Spiders comics:

• 8: Red Spiders, the first one.
• 43: Red Spiders 2, in which the spiders begin building.
• 47: Counter-Red Spiders, this one.
• 126: Red Spiders Cometh, in which the spiders attack a city.
• 427: Bad Timing, in which, in a style more typical to xkcd, the spiders attack a couple in the middle of a serious relationship discussion in a hot-air balloon.
• 442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel, in which it appears briefly in the 14th panel crawling over a cube.

Transcript

[A stack of stick figures, standing on each others shoulders, 11 stick figures shown in the comic, extends from the bottom of the frame to the top. Cuboids hang in the air.]

The counter-red-spider offensive begins...

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Discussion

Any reason there is a "th" in the date? --Quicksilver (talk) 15:29, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Oversight, getting everything polished right is hard. Davidy²²[talk] 16:16, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

I wish people where identical in mass to as they are in this comic but still the same size... climbing arround effortlessly would be awsome...--TheTimeBandit (talk) 21:24, 30 October 2017 (UTC)