2010-12-15
Explanation
This comic plays on the culture war over car emblems related to religion and evolution. It shows a sequence where a man has a "Truth" fish (the Christian ichthys/Jesus fish with "Truth" inside it) on his car, and a woman responds by placing a "Darwin" or "Evolution" fish emblem (the fish-with-legs symbol) that appears to eat the truth fish. The man then one-ups her with a new emblem: "Gulpo, The Fish Who Eats Concepts," a giant fish eating the evolution fish. The woman's response is simply: "You're a dick."
The comic satirizes the escalating one-upmanship of car-bumper religious and philosophical debates. The Christian fish, the Darwin fish eating the Christian fish, and similar emblems represent a real phenomenon where people use car decorations to make ideological statements. Weinersmith takes this to its absurd logical conclusion with a fictional mega-fish that "eats concepts" themselves, rendering the entire debate moot. The woman's blunt response punctures the smugness of the whole exercise, suggesting that at some point this kind of escalation stops being clever and just becomes obnoxious.