Comics.Com Builds Community Around Comic Strips

United Feature Syndicate offers a bunch of social features with the comic strips on Comics.Com. There's support for comments, tags, embedding strips in blogs, and sharing them on Reddit, Facebook, Digg and elsewhere.

The site has managed to find an audience, judging by the number of comments posted each day by readers of Greg Evans' Luann. In the strip above, Toni has fallen off a wet ladder and is being caught by Brad, the title character's brother, a former slacker who became a firefighter after 9/11.

One commenter, HalfWreck, analyzed the physics of the fall:

The higher Toni begins her fall, the more time she accelerates, increasing speed, thus momentum. If Toni is 3 meters up (the height of a one story roof), she will be going around 5 m/s when she hits Brad. If she and her fire fighter gear has a mass of 60 kilos (a low end estimate), she has developed 300 kg-m/s of momentum. If it takes Brad 0.1 second to stop her, the resulting impulse is 3000 kg-m/sec ^2. Apply this force to the small area of her air tank, say .03 m^2, and Brad feels the same as if a narrow, 300 kg (660 lb) anvil is at rest on his chest, if he falls on his back. If he somehow stays on his feet, I pity the fibia/tibia that takes the stress. If Toni was up two stories, double the effect. This is way I could never watch the $6 Million Man without wondering what kept his "original equipment" spine from snapping.

Ignoring that gratuitous slam against the Six Million Dollar Man -- Oscar Goldman had mad engineering skills, dude -- HalfWreck was on the right track. Brad was knocked out and rushed to the hospital.

Comic Strips · 2009/05/02 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Oscar Goldman was the bureaucrat. You're thinking of Dr. Rudy Wells. I had to look it up, didn't remember the doctor's name at all. en.wikipedia.org

#1 · Patrick Mueller · 2009/05/02

Maybe I shouldn't give Oscar so much credit, but he was so cool he rated his own action figure, complete with an exploding briefcase. He surely had the OSI augment Steve Austin's original spine with some kind of shock absorbers.

#2 · Rogers Cadenhead · 2009/05/02

Give Goldman his due - he bankrolled the $6 million.

#3 · anon · 2009/05/03