2011-01-31
Explanation
This comic imagines what would happen if the high-pitched screaming of teenage girls at pop concerts were weaponized for military interrogation. In the opening panels, a captured prisoner defiantly tells his interrogator, "I'''ll never tell you where the leader is!" The interrogator, a man in sunglasses and a suit, calmly says "Very well." The prisoner braces for traditional torture, asking "So what is it? Thumbscrews? Strappado? The rack?!" Instead, the interrogator reveals his weapon: "A recording of the sound 12-year-old girls emit upon seeing a pop singer." He presses play, and the resulting "EEEEEEEEEE" sound is so agonizing that the prisoner'''s face melts in pain and he immediately capitulates: "Okay! Okay! Okay! You win..."
The final panel, labeled "Before every war since WWII," shows a president solemnly telling a general, "General... we'''re going to war. I'''m... going to need a new teenage pop star." The general replies, "Yes, Mr. President. And, may God have mercy on our souls." This reframes the entire teen pop star industrial complex as a secret military weapons program -- every generation'''s pop phenomenon (Elvis, the Beatles, the Backstreet Boys, Justin Bieber) was actually engineered by the government as an interrogation tool.
The votey panel completes the joke with someone ominously saying "Release Bieber" -- depicting a large dark spherical object (like a bomb) being dropped, equating the deployment of Justin Bieber'''s music with dropping a weapon of mass destruction. The comic was published in early 2011, near the height of Bieber-mania, when the cultural phenomenon of screaming teenage fans was especially prominent.