2013-01-18
Explanation
This comic explores why movie villains almost always use robot henchmen rather than human soldiers. A child asks his father why this is the case, and the father launches into an elaborate philosophical explanation. He argues that modern civilization is no longer comfortable with killing soldiers based on their nationality, which was once an accepted premise of action storytelling. However, we have not abandoned the Manichaean (black-and-white, good-versus-evil) framework of dramatic conflict.
To resolve this contradiction, the father explains, we psychologically insist that evil is exceptional and localized in a small number of humans, rather than acknowledging it as a facet of all human minds. Robot henchmen serve as the dramatic avatar of this cognitive coping mechanism: a lone villain commands an army of automata, allowing the heroes to destroy enemies guilt-free while maintaining the fiction that the heroes could never become like those mindless machines themselves.
The punchline deflates the philosophical monologue when the child, having originally just wanted to ask for a toy robot for his birthday, rephrases the question more simply. The father, still unable to separate his over-analytical tendencies from a basic parenting moment, agrees to the toy only if the child "accepts the ethical implications." The votey shows the child calling the father a "Monster!" -- a funny inversion where the child applies the father'''s own moral framework back at him for being so insufferable about a simple toy request.