damsel
Explanation
The Joke
A classic "damsel in distress" scenario is set up: a villain has tied a woman to train tracks and is cackling. The woman declares she does not care about dying because "Bruce has forsaken me" and she welcomes her "speedy demise." The villain then asks if by "speedy" she means from the train, and delivers the punchline: this is an American cross-country passenger route, so she will starve to death or be eaten by ants long before a train ever comes.
The woman laments that she wishes she had been kidnapped by a European villain instead, and the villain is offended, demanding to know where her sense of civic pride is. The joke pivots from the melodrama of the classic tied-to-the-tracks trope to a mundane critique of the American passenger rail system.
The Humor
The humor comes from deflating a classic melodramatic scenario with a very modern, mundane complaint: American passenger rail service is notoriously infrequent and unreliable compared to European rail systems. The damsel-on-the-tracks trope depends on the imminent threat of a fast-approaching train, but the villain has inadvertently chosen the least threatening method of execution possible. The woman wishing for a European villain is a further jab, implying that even kidnapping and murder would be done more competently in countries with functional rail infrastructure. The villain getting offended about national pride rather than the accusation of villainy adds another layer of absurdity.
References
The comic is a commentary on the state of American passenger rail, particularly Amtrak, which covers vast cross-country distances but is known for delays and infrequent service compared to European rail networks like those in France (TGV), Germany (Deutsche Bahn), or Japan (Shinkansen). The "damsel tied to the railroad tracks" is a classic melodrama trope from early 20th-century stage plays and silent films.
This comic was a bonus comic promoting Zach Weinersmith's science/tech/humor book "Soonish" (2017), co-authored with Kelly Weinersmith.