2013-08-20
Explanation
In this comic, a parent offers their child a Batman comic to read, and the child eagerly agrees. A time skip of six months later reveals the twist: the "Batman comic" was actually a speech bubble wrapped around a nine-hundred-page calculus textbook. The parent tricked the child into reading and learning calculus by disguising it as a comic book. The child, now realizing the deception, exclaims "You tricked me! But it won't work. I refuse to be educated against my will!"
The parent then delivers the punchline by asking a calculus question: "Would you say it was a local maximum of trickery?" The child, unable to resist, automatically responds with the correct mathematical approach -- "Well to find out you'd just take the derivative and set it equal to -- DAMMIT DAMMIT DAMMIT!" -- proving that the trick actually worked perfectly. Despite claiming to refuse the education, the child has internalized the calculus concepts so thoroughly that they respond reflexively with the correct methodology.
The votey panel shows the child declaring "At that moment, I was no longer Bobby... I was NERDFACE" -- presented in a dramatic comic-book style origin story format, complete with a trademark symbol. This parodies superhero origin stories, suggesting that being tricked into learning calculus was the transformative moment that turned an ordinary kid into a math nerd. The comic plays on the common parental fantasy of finding clever ways to get children to learn, taken to an absurd extreme.