pumpkin
Explanation
This comic reimagines the Cinderella fairy tale with a focus on the practical logistics of pumpkin-based magic.
In the first panel, a fairy godmother figure tells Cinderella about the classic enchantment: a magic pumpkin will turn into a carriage when she goes to the ball. But then comes the twist — "Tonight, that pumpkin suddenly becomes sick and dies, just like pumpkins sometimes do. It's a regular old pumpkin sometimes." The fairy godmother explains that at midnight, it reverts to a regular old pumpkin, and asks what people would say — they'd say "That's just what pumpkins do."
In the final panel, we see what appears to be a therapy or planning session, where someone asks about getting "more root squash" and whether they "maybe have one more" — implying that the pumpkin-carriage operation requires a steady supply chain of pumpkins, since they keep dying or reverting.
The humor comes from applying mundane, real-world logistics to a fairy tale. The Cinderella story treats the pumpkin-to-carriage transformation as a one-off magical event, but this comic asks: what if you had to run this operation repeatedly? Pumpkins are perishable vegetables that rot, get sick, and die. Running a carriage service based on enchanted pumpkins would be a logistical nightmare requiring constant resupply, quality control, and contingency planning.
The joke also plays on the idea of treating magic like a business operation — the fairy godmother sounds less like a magical benefactor and more like a supply chain manager dealing with unreliable inventory. This is a common SMBC approach: taking a fantastical premise and examining it through the lens of boring, practical reality.