Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The Green Goblin presents Spider-Man with a classic supervillain dilemma: "Choose, Spiderman! You can either save your girlfriend from plummeting to her death... or save your credit rating from being put in the bottom quintile!" Spider-Man calls him a monster. In the next panel, a child reading this comic (labeled "Dad Comics") asks her father: "Why wouldn't he just pick the girlfriend?" The father responds: "Did it take SEVEN YEARS to get a good girlfriend?"

The Humor

The joke works on multiple levels. First, it parodies the classic Spider-Man storyline (the death of Gwen Stacy) where the Green Goblin forces Spider-Man to make an impossible choice. Here, the supposedly agonizing dilemma is between saving a loved one and saving a credit score -- which should be an obvious choice. The child reader immediately sees through the absurdity: of course you would save the girlfriend. But the father's response reveals the real punchline -- from the perspective of a middle-aged adult, a good credit rating (which takes seven years of negative marks to clear) might actually be harder to replace than a romantic partner. The comic satirizes how adult priorities become warped by financial anxieties to the point where a credit score could genuinely rival a human life in perceived value. The framing device of "Dad Comics" adds another layer, suggesting this is the kind of superhero story that would appeal to financially stressed parents rather than children.

References

• The Death of Gwen Stacy (The Amazing Spider-Man #121-122, 1973) is one of the most famous storylines in comic book history, in which the Green Goblin kidnaps Spider-Man's girlfriend Gwen Stacy and throws her off the George Washington Bridge, resulting in her death.
• Credit rating quintiles -- A credit score in the bottom quintile (bottom 20%) makes it extremely difficult to obtain loans, mortgages, or favorable interest rates. Negative marks on a credit report can take up to seven years to clear under U.S. law (the Fair Credit Reporting Act).