EARLY on in the new two-volume set MEGATOKYO (Dark Horse Books, paper, $9.95 each), a collection of work from the popular online comic strip of the same name, the writer and artist Fred Gallagher notes that he and his co-creator, Rodney Caston, ''didn't want the humor in 'Megatokyo' to rely too heavily on what might be considered 'obscure knowledge.' ''
But soon after, our heroes, a pair of video game and Japanese ''manga'' comics obsessives named Piro and Largo, are on a plane to Tokyo, where they will remain in giddy culture shock for the remainder of the story. Suddenly, a fellow passenger leaps up, grabbing his chest. ''3Y3 /33> h3[P!'' he screams. The flight attendant does not know what to do. Anxiously, she asks, ''Does anyone here speak L33T?''
This is the oldest gag in the book, of course. But if you didn't happen to know that L33T refers to a typed shorthand used by hackers and gamers, you might reasonably conclude this knowledge to be moderately obscure. This is partly the point: reverse the 3's into approximate E's, and you get LEET, short for ''elite'' -- a coded world to which I am not supposed to belong.
Poor Gallagher doesn't mean to be exclusive, and he graciously offers translation of the strip's later occasional lapses into L33T; he also explains why the characters are occasionally dressed in knickers or as rabbits. (It's called cosplay -- where one dresses up as one's favorite manga character.)
But Gallagher and Caston, who publish new ''Megatokyo'' adventures three times a week on the Web, just can't help it. Their work sits at the intersection of several streams of obscure knowledge: gaming and hacking; manga, from which Gallagher lovingly and virtuosically cribs the black-and-white manga style (large, dewy eyes, long soap-operatic story lines that entwine science fiction and teenage romance, and hairstyles of unlikely heft and spikiness); the boom in Web comics over the past few years; and comics themselves.
While the term ''graphic novel'' has rightly lent some respectability to comics in the past three or four decades, most comics were and still are periodicals -- the closest thing we have to contemporary serial fiction -- and most published volumes are collections of stories that have been going on for years. The pleasure of a story like ''Megatokyo'' comes not in its novelistic coherence, but in its loose ranginess.
John Hodgman is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His first book, ''The Areas of My Expertise,'' will be published next year.