2013-08-23
Explanation
In this comic, a woman returns home to find her husband in a feral, disheveled state. She is shocked and asks what happened. He explains that she indirectly trained him to play video games whenever she was away, and then she went on a two-month business trip. The implication is that without her presence to moderate his behavior, he descended into an obsessive gaming binge that left him looking like a wild animal. He also asks "Where are the cats?" -- ominously suggesting the cats may not have survived his neglect.
Below the main panel, there is a graph with the X-axis labeled "Length of time spouse is gone" and the Y-axis labeled "Things that qualify as food," showing an exponential curve. The joke is that the longer a spouse is away, the more the remaining partner's standards for what counts as food deteriorate dramatically. This plays on the common stereotype of one partner (often the husband) being completely unable to take care of themselves when left alone.
The votey panel extends the graph joke by labeling points on the curve: at the low end "sauce packets," in the middle "orange peels," and at the extreme high end "baby blood" -- showing an absurd and darkly comic progression of desperation. The humor escalates from relatable (eating random condiment packets) to completely unhinged, fitting SMBC's tendency to take a premise to its most extreme logical conclusion.