waste
Explanation
This comic is a long-form strip depicting an arctic or extreme winter survival scenario.
The first panel sets the scene with a desolate, frozen landscape. A grizzled survivor narrates his ordeal. He describes the extreme hardship of the journey -- vehicles breaking down, people dying along the way, resources running out. He describes how he lost many companions trying to reach this remote location.
As the narration continues, the survivor explains that the headquarters put the destination portal "too close" to something dangerous, and that many people died trying to reach it. He emphasizes the terrible cost -- "no survivors" from multiple groups.
The punchline comes in the final panel, which reveals that the destination the survivor was struggling so desperately to reach is something absurdly mundane -- a "Muir Pack" restaurant or store (possibly a play on a fast food chain or retail outlet). The sign for the establishment is shown standing in the frozen wasteland.
The humor is in the epic anticlimax: the comic sets up a harrowing survival narrative that sounds like it could be from an Arctic expedition, a post-apocalyptic story, or a war film, only to reveal that all the suffering and death was just to get to some ordinary commercial establishment that was placed in an absurdly inconvenient location. This satirizes several things: poorly located businesses, the sometimes absurd lengths people go to for consumer goods, and the tendency of dramatic narration to make mundane situations sound epic. The joke about "headquarters" placing the location poorly also reads as a commentary on corporate decision-making that ignores practical human concerns.