2012-01-07

A six-panel comic, drawn as a tall vertical strip, shows a couple lying together at night talking. A woman with red hair and a man with dark hair are stargazing/lying in the dark. The woman muses about aliens: "If life is elsewhere in the universe, how come we never hear from aliens?" She compares it to her absent father, who is "elsewhere in the universe" and whom she hasn't heard from. She notes that occasionally we get asteroids carrying the "components of life," just as her dad sometimes sends her a ten dollar bill with no return address. The man asks why she thinks her dad won't visit, and she answers, "Shame." In the final panel her face fills the frame as she realizes: "Huh... I think I just solved the Fermi Paradox" -- the joke being that aliens, like her shamed father, stay away out of embarrassment. Votey (a small bonus panel labeled "65 million years ago"): The man asks, "How did the dinosaurs like the giant book collection?" and the woman replies, "About that." A cartoon dinosaur holding a stone book glares and declares, "THESE SUCK."