packets
Explanation
This comic is set in a Star Trek-style universe and explores the classic teleportation philosophical problem -- whether a person who is disassembled and reassembled is still the same person, or whether they effectively die and a copy is created.
A crew member in a red shirt (a nod to the expendable "redshirts" in Star Trek) asks the transporter operator whether he dies when the teleporter explodes him and reassembles him elsewhere. The operator dismisses this concern but reveals something even more disturbing: the teleporter does not work at the atomic level. Instead, they physically cut the person into twelve to sixteen chunks small enough to fit in a cannonball, fire them to the surface, and reassemble them there. The head is kept intact, "or at most cut in thirds."
The operator cheerfully reasons that since the person is put back together immediately, they never technically "die." He concedes it gets "dicey -- philosophically and literally" with 100 or 200 chunks. The red-shirted crew member announces he is having an existential crisis, to which the operator offers the cold comfort that if he still has the crisis after his "headchunks" are stitched back up, that proves he is still himself.
The humor comes from the grotesque literalism of the teleportation process -- replacing the elegant sci-fi concept with something resembling a medieval butcher's approach to logistics. The word "packets" in the title is a play on network packet switching, where data is broken into chunks and reassembled at its destination, applied here to human bodies. The comic also parodies how Star Trek casually hand-waves the profound philosophical implications of teleportation, while making those implications impossible to ignore by making the process viscerally physical rather than abstractly quantum-mechanical.