2011-10-08
Explanation
This comic is a fantasy scenario about the ultimate masculine power move: having a retractable beard. A man and woman are on a date at a restaurant when the woman suddenly exclaims, "Well, I think that -- oh no, bear attack!" A bear appears behind the man with its jaws open. In the next panels, the man is shown wrestling the bear, growling "RAA U UUGH!" with a massive, full beard that has spontaneously grown during the fight.
After dispatching the bear in the darkened middle panels, the man returns to the table clean-shaven and composed, casually asking "You were saying?" as if nothing happened. The beard appeared only for the duration of the bear fight and then retracted. The narrator closes with: "And for the rest of your life, you were sad that you didn'''t have a retractable beard."
The humor lies in the absurd wish-fulfillment fantasy of a beard that grows on command specifically for tough situations and then retracts for polite company. It plays on the cultural association between beards and rugged masculinity -- the beard is essentially a biological transformation sequence, like a werewolf but for manliness. The votey panel shows the man smiling with the caption "Let'''s do it," suggesting he is enthusiastically on board with pursuing retractable beard technology.