Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

Written by Zach Weinersmith and illustrated by Abby Howard, this comic features a man named Steve who reacts to a power outage by immediately going full post-apocalyptic: donning spiked armor, lighting things on fire, and declaring "The apocalypse is finally here! Rule of law is dead! Man is law! Steel is law! And I have the weapons to--" His roommate interrupts to tell him it was just a temporary power outage, not the end times, and laments that "if the apocalypse happens it's people like you who are gonna ruin it."

The roommate then explains that in a real apocalypse, people would probably just work together to rebuild, but "people who play apocalypse video games are gonna run around starting weird cults, or empires, or whatever." Steve, undeterred, announces he was thinking of starting "a society of mysterious cannibals called 'The Dark Monks.'" His roommate sets a ground rule: "No cannibalism til you're out of beans, mister!" -- pointing out that Steve has three years of food in the basement. Steve petulantly responds "I hate you!!"

The Humor

The comic satirizes the subset of people who seem a little too eager for civilization to collapse, having clearly spent more time fantasizing about their post-apocalyptic persona than actually preparing to survive. Steve has the spiked armor ready to go for a power outage, which perfectly captures the absurd disconnect. The roommate serves as the voice of reason, puncturing every fantasy with practical reality. The funniest beat is the "no cannibalism til you're out of beans" rule, which treats Steve's desire to become a cannibal warlord with the same exasperated tone a parent might use to say "no dessert until you finish your vegetables." The comic skewers both survivalist culture and the influence of post-apocalyptic media on people's expectations of how they would behave in a crisis.