cheetos
Explanation
This is a single-panel comic depicting a post-apocalyptic landscape with ruined buildings and rubble. A giant disembodied hand -- literally the "invisible hand of the market" made visible -- walks through the wasteland on its fingers, reciting economic data: "Cheetos are seven dollars. The mortgage rate is 1% higher now. The S&P 500 is down 476.23..."
The caption reads: "After humanity self-annihilated, the invisible hand of the market still roamed the planet, sorrowfully adjusting prices."
The humor comes from literalizing Adam Smith's famous metaphor of the "invisible hand" -- the idea that free markets self-regulate through the aggregate of individual self-interested decisions. By making the hand a physical entity that persists after humanity's extinction, the comic suggests that we have built economic systems so autonomous and self-sustaining that they would continue operating even without any humans to participate in them. The hand is "sorrowfully" adjusting prices, anthropomorphizing market forces with an emotion that highlights the absurdity: the market keeps functioning out of sheer inertia, pointlessly updating the price of Cheetos for no one.
The choice of Cheetos as the opening data point is a perfect comedic detail -- it grounds the apocalyptic scenario in something mundane and undignified. The comic also works as a critique of how modern economies can feel detached from human welfare, treating market metrics as ends in themselves rather than tools for human flourishing.