The Quick Brown Fox Challenge

CBR Live! Archive

by Brian Cronin
in General

Here's a neat little intellectual exercise (AKA fun way to waste time) - come up with a piece of comic criticism while using all the 26 letters of the alphabet in as little space as possible (a sentence that does this is apparently called a pangram). The most prominent example of a pangram is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," which uses a mere 35 letters. See how close you can get to 35!

Read the rest to see my personal opening example and some ground rules!

GROUND RULES

1. It has to be some critical thought about comics "I like ____/I do not like ____," etc.

2. It has to be an actual sentence, no making up stuff so as to use less letters.

3. Commas, apostrophes, etc. do not count against your total.

Here is my example:

Zatanna quickly became the most exciting Seven Soldiers book out of the whole project.

That is 72 letters, giving me a Quick Brown Fox score of 37 (the Quick Brown Fox score, of course, measures how many letters you are over the Quick Brown Fox example).

I know that score can be beaten, so go for it!!

Give it a shot, and next week, I'll post the top scores plus the five sentences that I found the most entertaining!

Have fun!

Posted on May 19, 2007 @ 10:20 PM

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Comments below

11 Comments

Michael G

May 19, 2007 at 10:46 pm

"I liked how Quislet, Vartox, and Mxyzptlk fought the Jacobian."

That's 50 letters, so 50-35 is a score of 15.

yo go re

May 19, 2007 at 11:03 pm

"How I've judged Frank Quitely's cramped, boxy art: 'zero.'"

43 - 35 = 8

Matt Bird

May 19, 2007 at 11:42 pm

The best I can do is 56 letters, for a score of 21:

"Vixen, Bloodwynd, and Luke Cage should perform with a jazz quintet."

Huh. Somehow my mind went right to lazy racial stereotyping. I guess we're all a little bit racist after 2 am.

Fun fact: if you play "Mxyzptlk" in the upper left or lower left corner of a Scrabble board, you get two triple word scores and a double letter on the Z, for a whopping total of 270 points.