No, it is most emphatically not a brute force attack in character space. A brute force attack (as I am sure you know) is exhaustively checking every combination; running through all combinations of characters is a way, way, way bigger search space. Restraining ourselves to looking at word combinations makes the search much more practical (just how practical depends on how much entropy is left).
Anyway, wikipedia says:
"In cryptanalysis and computer security, a dictionary attack is a technique for defeating a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase by trying likely possibilities, such as words in a dictionary."
What matters is not how the possibilities are stored/generated, but that you have a pool of possibilities that are substantially more likely, that you can guess first. But if you want to argue some technicality, fine. I don't care so much about the particular labels - what is clear is that, if someone generates their password correctly following the directions in the comic, updated appropriately, a dictionary attack of any form is not effective in reducing the search space below ((word list size)^(words in phrase)), which can be fairly secure.
Anyway, wikipedia says:
"In cryptanalysis and computer security, a dictionary attack is a technique for defeating a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase by trying likely possibilities, such as words in a dictionary."
What matters is not how the possibilities are stored/generated, but that you have a pool of possibilities that are substantially more likely, that you can guess first. But if you want to argue some technicality, fine. I don't care so much about the particular labels - what is clear is that, if someone generates their password correctly following the directions in the comic, updated appropriately, a dictionary attack of any form is not effective in reducing the search space below ((word list size)^(words in phrase)), which can be fairly secure.