2013-03-19
Explanation
A time traveler triumphantly announces that he went back in time and assassinated "Hartler" before he came to power. His companion asks, "You mean Hitler?" The time traveler responds, "No. Who's Hitler?" He then explains that Hartler came to power in 1930s Germany and stabilized the currency by pegging the Reichsmark to the dollar, which caused the Depression to continue until the early 1940s. His companion, confused, asks "Why, what happened?"
The comic plays with the classic time-travel trope of going back to kill Hitler, but with a clever twist: in the original timeline (before the time traveler's interference), there was apparently no Hitler at all -- instead there was a "Hartler" who caused different but still significant historical damage. The time traveler has "fixed" a problem that didn't originally exist in our timeline, and his companion's bewildered "Why, what happened?" implies that our actual history -- with Hitler and World War II -- may in fact be the result of this time traveler's meddling. The joke satirizes the naive assumption that time travel interventions would necessarily improve things, suggesting instead that every "fix" might just create a different set of problems. It also plays on the idea that our current terrible history might actually be the better timeline created by a well-meaning but bumbling time traveler.