2012-01-28
Explanation
A nervous man works up the courage to ask a woman at a bar if he can buy her a drink. She politely declines, saying she's already there with someone. He walks away and tries to reassure himself that the interaction was perfectly fine and there were no hard feelings -- but then his hands begin to horrifically deteriorate. A doctor diagnoses him with "rejection bacteria" and scolds him for asking the woman out, saying "people lied" when they told him it would be fine. The doctor further berates him for not sticking with his manga collection and video games, and the man despairs that he "sold his perfect life for the hope of carnal pleasure," while a skull screams in agony.
The final panel reveals the twist: another person asks the man why he doesn't just ask the woman out, and he replies "she's not my type." Everything we just witnessed was his catastrophic internal fantasy of what could happen if he tried. The comic satirizes the irrational anxiety many socially awkward people feel about romantic rejection, blowing a perfectly mundane interaction up into a grotesque nightmare scenario. It's a commentary on how fear of rejection can be so paralyzing that people invent absurd worst-case scenarios to justify never taking the risk at all.