hemingway
Explanation
This comic takes place at the gates of Heaven. Saint Peter welcomes Ernest Hemingway and warns him: "I have to tell you, this will be the longest debrief in all of history, because of the John Donne connection."
Hemingway is confused: "Me? Fitzgerald? Joyce? Faulkner? Proust?" — listing other famous literary figures he might expect to see. Peter responds simply: "Me?" Then in the final panel, Hemingway's reaction is: "The fuck is a hobbit?"
The joke hinges on John Donne's famous line "No man is an island," from which Hemingway drew the title of his novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (the full Donne passage ends with "therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee"). But Saint Peter's "debrief" apparently connects Hemingway to an enormous chain of literary influence and cross-references — and somewhere in that chain, J.R.R. Tolkien (author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) appears. Hemingway, a hypermasculine author of spare, realistic prose about war and bullfighting, is baffled to learn he's somehow connected to high fantasy literature about hobbits. The comic plays on the idea that all of literature is interconnected in ways that would surprise (and horrify) individual authors, and that a comprehensive literary debrief in the afterlife would reveal deeply uncomfortable connections between writers who would never have associated with each other.