four-legs
Explanation
The Joke
The comic opens with a scene at the shore where early land animals are emerging from the ocean. One creature on the beach says "Look at four-legs over there!" while another yells "Get out of the ocean, dork!" -- they are taunting a sea creature for still living in the water. The scene then cuts to a title card reading "400 MILLION YEARS LATER" and shows a news anchor reporting that marine biologists and oceanographers "continue to bully sea life, pressing vengeance against the ocean." The report notes this "continues with great success," accompanied by an image showing "Pouring Concrete, Making Garbage, Global Warming."
The comic imagines that the evolutionary transition from sea to land was not a gradual biological process but a social one driven by bullying. The animals that first crawled onto land were the "cool kids," and they have been taunting ocean-dwellers ever since. Modern environmental destruction -- pollution, habitat destruction, climate change -- is reframed as the continuation of a 400-million-year grudge match.
The Humor
The comedy lies in reframing the entire history of land-based life as an ongoing campaign of bullying against the sea. The schoolyard language ("dork," "four-legs") applied to evolutionary biology is inherently funny, and the escalation from childhood taunting to systematic environmental destruction played for laughs as "vengeance" is absurdly dark. The comic also sneaks in genuine environmental commentary: humans really are devastating ocean ecosystems through pollution, concrete runoff, and global warming. By presenting this as intentional bullying rather than negligence, the comic highlights how thoroughly destructive our species' relationship with the ocean has become.