Many comics have, from time to time, delved into the realm of social commentary. This can take a variety of forms, such as the creation of new minorities to showcase prejudice and fear in our society, or rewriting current events in a fantasy setting to freely comment on politics and government under the guise of fiction. However, few comics come straight out and poke holes in our personal illusions, often operating under the veil of fiction to get their point across.

Friday’s xkcd, “Friends,” took a different approach and went straight to the jugular in ridiculing a classic belief among passive-aggressive men. The comic shows a classic passive-aggressive man who tries to gain the love of a woman through a false friendship. He bluntly tells her he’ll work to destroy her romantic relationships while offering faked sympathy and understanding, all the while undermining her beliefs and dreams until she chooses the easy path (the passive-aggressive man) over the more difficult path of building an actual working romantic relationship. He even admits that she won’t truly love him and will struggle to find happiness after abandoning her dreams.

It is rare to see a comic take such a blunt and specific stance on a subject like this, but it works quite well (and reveals not only the hypocrisy of what’s being attempted, but why it’s doomed to failure). I suspect part of this lies with the venue of stick figures for artwork. Readers are still able to distance themselves from a potentially sensitive topic because it’s stick figures. Imagine, for a moment, if this had been drawn in a more realistic art style, with characters that look and seem real. For all its bluntness, xkcd succeeds in its social commentary mostly because readers can divorce themselves from it and view its commentary objectively. After all, they’re just stick figures illustrating a concept, and that’s the most elemental of all illustrations.