2010-11-03
Explanation
This comic is a graph-based joke titled "Relationships: A Guide." It plots different types of relationships on two axes: the x-axis runs from "Hate" to "Love," and the y-axis represents "Amount of Sex." Different regions of the graph are color-coded as Boring (gray), Good (pink), Bad (blue), and Island of Awesome (red), with various relationship types plotted at specific coordinates.
The graph places the "Ideal Relationship" in the upper-right corner (high love, high sex). "Friends with Benefits" sits near the top center (high sex, moderate love), while "Most Couples You Will Ever Meet" occupies a mediocre middle zone. "Platonic Love" is in the lower-right (high love, no sex), and "Platonic Love, But Then We Got Drunk" sits slightly above it. "Friends with Shitty Benefits" occupies a low-sex, moderate position. On the hate side, "Thank You, Daddy Issues" appears with moderate sex and high hate, and "Platonic Hate" sits at the extreme lower-left. "Imaginary Girlfriend" is plotted at the very bottom center. The red "Island of Awesome" in the upper-left corner is labeled "You Can't Put That There -- Oh My God Put That There," representing a high-sex, high-hate scenario.
The humor comes from the pseudo-scientific presentation of deeply subjective relationship dynamics, complete with precisely plotted data points for situations that are inherently messy. The votey panel shows a distraught-looking Zach Weinersmith (the cartoonist) with the caption "Zach, about 3 hours into SMBC being down" and the text "I have no purpose" -- a self-deprecating joke about how dependent the artist is on his comic strip for his sense of identity, unrelated to the main comic but characteristically self-aware.