flux
Explanation
This comic is a parody of gritty film noir remakes, applied to an unexpected source: a physics textbook.
In the first panel, one character angrily confronts another: "How in the FLUX did you find out how much flux I was running?" The second panel shows a violent exchange with "BANG! BANG!" gunshots. The caption below reads: "My favorite gritty remake was the one for Griffith's Introduction to Electrodynamics, Third Edition."
The joke is the absurd idea of giving a "gritty reboot" treatment -- the kind Hollywood applies to comic book franchises and fairy tales -- to a dry undergraduate physics textbook. Griffiths' "Introduction to Electrodynamics" is one of the most widely used textbooks in university physics programs, known for being clear but decidedly un-cinematic. The word "flux" (a fundamental concept in electromagnetism referring to the flow of a field through a surface) is repurposed as a profanity in the noir dialogue, mimicking how gritty reboots add violence and swearing to previously tame source material. The humor lies in the total mismatch between the hard-boiled detective genre and the mundane world of textbook physics.