2008-09-08
Original: 2008-09-08 on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1 (single panel):
Setting: A library. A red-haired woman wearing glasses and a green top stands at a desk on the left, seen from behind. A blonde woman wearing glasses and a purple top stands on the right, smiling and holding a stack of orange stickers.
Blonde woman: "We're tired of this library keeping smutty romance novels, but we also oppose the banning of books, so as a compromise we're passing out these stickers that can be used to cover offensive words."
Below the panel, a passage of text from a romance novel is shown, with several words covered by round orange stickers (each sticker bears a smiling cartoon face):
"He removed his breeches, displaying his enormous [sticker]. Helen loosened her bodice to reveal her heaving [sticker]. She suddenly found her [sticker] in his powerful grip, and before she could [sticker] he placed his [sticker] on her [sticker] of [sticker] soft [sticker]."
Votey:
A hand-drawn book stands upright. Its cover reads "SMBC: VOLUME 1". The spine and edges of the book are decorated with the same round smiley-face stickers used to cover the offensive words.
Setting: A library. A red-haired woman wearing glasses and a green top stands at a desk on the left, seen from behind. A blonde woman wearing glasses and a purple top stands on the right, smiling and holding a stack of orange stickers.
Blonde woman: "We're tired of this library keeping smutty romance novels, but we also oppose the banning of books, so as a compromise we're passing out these stickers that can be used to cover offensive words."
Below the panel, a passage of text from a romance novel is shown, with several words covered by round orange stickers (each sticker bears a smiling cartoon face):
"He removed his breeches, displaying his enormous [sticker]. Helen loosened her bodice to reveal her heaving [sticker]. She suddenly found her [sticker] in his powerful grip, and before she could [sticker] he placed his [sticker] on her [sticker] of [sticker] soft [sticker]."
Votey:
A hand-drawn book stands upright. Its cover reads "SMBC: VOLUME 1". The spine and edges of the book are decorated with the same round smiley-face stickers used to cover the offensive words.
Alt text
A single-panel SMBC comic set in a library. A red-haired woman in glasses (seen from behind) stands at a desk while a smiling blonde woman in glasses and a purple top holds a stack of round orange stickers, each printed with a little smiley face. The blonde woman says: "We're tired of this library keeping smutty romance novels, but we also oppose the banning of books, so as a compromise we're passing out these stickers that can be used to cover offensive words." Below the panel is a steamy romance-novel excerpt with every suggestive word covered by one of the smiley-face stickers, so the explicit nouns and verbs are hidden: "He removed his breeches, displaying his enormous [sticker]. Helen loosened her bodice to reveal her heaving [sticker]..." and so on. The joke is that censoring just the key words leaves an obviously dirty, sticker-riddled mess. Votey (aftercomic): a hand-drawn book standing upright with a cover reading "SMBC: VOLUME 1," its spine and edges plastered with the same smiley-face censorship stickers, implying the comic itself would be heavily censored.
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.