2010-09-04
Explanation
This comic satirizes the phenomenon of religious pareidolia -- seeing sacred images in random objects -- and takes it to an absurd extreme. A man examines a piece of wood and progressively discovers nested religious imagery: first Jesus' face in the wood grain, then the Virgin Mary on Jesus' nose, then a crucifix on the Virgin Mary on Jesus' nose, then Pope Clement VIII on the crucifix on the Virgin Mary on Jesus' nose. Each discovery is met with increasing excitement, creating an escalating fractal of religious pareidolia.
The final panel, labeled "Earlier...," reveals the true setup: a man in a suit says, "Tomorrow is voting day. I need a way to distract 10 million fundamentalists for 16 hours," while his companion ponders, "Hmm..." The implication is that someone deliberately planted this piece of wood as a distraction to keep religious fundamentalists so preoccupied examining the endlessly nested sacred images that they would miss Election Day entirely. The comic pokes fun both at the tendency to find religious significance in mundane objects and at the idea that such people could be so easily manipulated.