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Explanation
The Joke
This comic is one of a series of promotional strips for the Weinersmith book "Soonish." It tells the story of a woman who realizes that if her life were exponentially growing in boringness, her subjective perception of time would stretch toward infinity. She consults science, which reveals that people perceive time as slower when enduring novel forms of pain. She invents a device that produces novel pain, giving her a near-infinite perceptual life -- effectively making her like the Flash, except she hates everyone and everything.
The consequences spiral out of control: she becomes a supervillain ("ANGRY FAST LADY STEALS WORLD'S DIAMONDS, DEMANDS POWER"), conquers the world, and rules through suffering. When someone laments being ruled by "an insane person obsessed with their own suffering," a man responds, "Sir, I am a Christian, thank you very much," conflating the villain's pain-obsession with religious devotion. Eventually, her subjective experience of time is so distorted that a single vote takes a million subjective years due to a news cycle.
The comic is a darkly absurd thought experiment about time perception: what would happen if you could genuinely slow down your experience of time, and would that actually be desirable?
The Humor
The humor operates on multiple levels. The central joke inverts the typical superhero origin story -- instead of gaining powers through something noble, the protagonist gains effective super-speed by making herself miserable, leading to the ironic conclusion that subjective immortality is indistinguishable from eternal torment. The escalation from "bored woman" to "world-conquering supervillain" is played for laughs through its absurd inevitability.
There are also sharp satirical jabs woven throughout, particularly the Christian joke (equating religious devotion to suffering with the villain's literal pain obsession) and the political joke about voting feeling like a million-year slog because of the news cycle. The strip is also self-aware as a promotional comic for "Soonish," with the final panel breaking the fourth wall to thank readers who preordered the book.
References
The comic references the psychological phenomenon of time perception distortion, where subjective experience of time slows during painful or novel experiences. This is a well-documented effect in psychology -- for example, people often report that traumatic events seemed to happen "in slow motion." The comic takes this real phenomenon to an absurd logical extreme, imagining someone who weaponizes it for effective super-speed. The reference to "the Flash" is to the DC Comics superhero known for his super-speed. The comic was part of a promotional series for "Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything" (2017) by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith.