2011-11-03
Explanation
This comic offers a darkly comedic reinterpretation of the Arthurian legend of the Sword in the Stone. A young person asks the king how pulling a sword from a stone could possibly make someone king, questioning why anyone would agree to such a system. The king explains that the story has "changed a bit over time" -- in actuality, he pulled the sword out of the stone and then accidentally plunged it into the chest of the head of Parliament.
When asked if he got in trouble, the king casually reveals that Parliament wanted his head, so he had to "pull the sword from the stone" a couple hundred more times -- meaning he kept killing members of Parliament by stabbing them with the sword and then pulling it out again. The phrase "pull the sword from the stone" becomes a darkly humorous euphemism for murder. When the young person asks why he didn'''t just stab them outright, the king menacingly replies, "Don'''t make me get my stone," implying the stone is used as a prop to maintain the fiction that each killing is just another demonstration of his divine right to rule.
The votey panel breaks the fourth wall with a meta-joke: it shows the cartoonist (Zach Weinersmith) halfway through drawing the comic, asking himself "Why did I give everyone hats?!" -- a humorous acknowledgment that the medieval setting required him to draw more elaborate headwear than his usual simple character designs.