vampire
Explanation
The Joke
The comic shows a vampire confronting a human who has apparently come to kill him. The vampire delivers an impassioned monologue pointing out the hypocrisy of the situation: "I never kill anything. I just take a blood meal once in a while, which by the way grants immortality. You guys have domesticated entire species of thinking creatures so you could kill them at will and eat their flesh! And now you're here to kill me in my sleep? You're the monster van Helsing. You."
The vampire makes a compelling moral argument — he is essentially a parasite who takes small blood meals and grants immortality as a side effect, while humans industrially farm and slaughter billions of sentient animals. By any utilitarian moral calculus, the vampire's behavior is far less destructive than humanity's.
The Humor
The comedy comes from the moral inversion: the vampire, traditionally cast as the monster in horror fiction, turns out to have a much stronger ethical position than the humans who hunt him. By reframing vampirism as merely taking "a blood meal" (a term used in biology for mosquitoes and other blood-feeding organisms) and pointing out that it comes with the bonus of immortality, the vampire makes his lifestyle sound downright benign compared to industrial animal agriculture. The reference to "van Helsing" — the iconic vampire hunter from Bram Stoker's Dracula — grounds this in the classic horror tradition while subverting it. It is a classic SMBC move of taking a familiar fictional premise and applying rigorous moral reasoning that completely inverts the expected conclusion.
References
Van Helsing is the vampire hunter from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula," who has become an archetypal monster hunter in popular culture. The comic's argument about the morality of blood-feeding versus animal agriculture echoes real ethical debates in philosophy about the moral status of animals and the ethics of meat consumption.