scholars
Explanation
This comic is an extended riff on the perpetual anxiety of humanities scholars about the perceived cultural dominance of genre fiction and popular entertainment over literary fiction and the humanities.
In the opening panels, a character complains that "bad fantasy novels and sci-fi thrillers sell millions while real art languishes." A literary scholar (with dark hair and glasses) responds: "That's why you need us... the literary scholars."
The scholar launches into a grandiose pitch, declaring that literary scholars "dwell in the darkness, growing in secrets, always watching, collecting." She claims ownership of knowledge across fields: "Not just the great works of fiction and theatre, no, all the learnings of all the other fields want to be ours. We learn psychology and gender and enough of Freud and Camus and... we took them all. Newton is ours now. Gibson is ours now."
She continues her pitch by explaining how popular books depend on public interest, and that the scholars can manipulate taste: "We on the other hand can tickle the public. Only the public wants to detect the new."
The conversation takes an ominous turn as she says: "Our underworld is grande. Our underworld..." before the other character interjects: "I feel like you've gotten weird ever since you had to teach humanities to pre-meds."
The final panel shows a silhouette gag: "It's a trap! Rats! Rats!" -- suggesting the scholars' grand scheme has been foiled.
The comic lampoons the way humanities academics sometimes cope with their field's declining cultural prestige by adopting increasingly grandiose rhetoric about their importance. The joke escalates the scholars' self-image from "keepers of literary tradition" to something resembling a secret society or criminal underworld. The punchline about teaching humanities to pre-meds grounds the absurdity in a real frustration: the experience of trying to convey the value of literature to students who view the course as an obstacle to their "real" education.