2013-09-18
Explanation
This comic tells the story of a time traveler who went back in time to stop Hitler. However, she did not have the nerve to kill him directly, so instead she arranged for an Ohio university to offer him an art scholarship before he became a politician. This references the well-known historical fact that Hitler was a failed artist who was rejected from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and it is widely speculated that this rejection helped set him on his path toward politics and eventual dictatorship.
The plan works far better than expected. The comic shows the time traveler watching news about 100 years of peace being celebrated, and the present is so wonderful that she vows never to tamper with the past again. She describes this as a great, noble, righteous, and magnanimous decision. However, in the final panel, she reflects that "in retrospect, I shouldn'''t have been quite so hasty" -- and we see her looking at what appears to be a birthday card or photo referencing Hitler, suggesting that by giving Hitler a successful art career instead of killing him, she inadvertently allowed him to live a long, happy life and perhaps become culturally celebrated, which is its own kind of disturbing outcome.
The votey shows someone saying "So THAT'''s why Grampa was always annexing Austria..." implying that in this alternate timeline, Hitler'''s descendants are still around and have inherited some of his territorial ambitions, just expressed in more mundane ways. The joke plays on the classic time travel paradox that changing history always has unintended consequences.