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Original: forward on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1 (Young woman, to her mother): Mom, why are all adults crazy? Why can't they just relax and can't they just enjoy anything? Why are they obsessed with what everyone thinks about them?
Panel 1 (Mother): Think of people like cars. When you're driving off the assembly line, as you cruise along, you get bumped and scraped, and even a few minor things.
Panel 2 (Mother): The more time passes, the more mottled and off-center the vehicle becomes. Eventually you have a corner or two of these things break. You trundle break them but every time, somehow as if out of spite, the engine sputters and lollops and pushes forward.
Panel 3 (Mother): It pushes forward even as the air and fuel, the wheels and the windows are battered, and the gas is in pieces, and the gutterings of the dashboard melt, the spurring noises grin never expiring anew. And then somehow it goes to grip factory-fresh away. Right comes along and asks why exactly you couldn't have kept the corners of cleverly bumped a day or two to hang on?
Panel 4 (Young woman, dramatically, arms raised): Look at me, boy! I am the darkness! I have built a thousand things but never broken! The world has worried this body once toward but the animal used to survive remains, and I still got up put on my clothes and my hair, made the damned oatmeal and PUSHED FORWARD!
Panel 5 (Young woman): Forward, by God! Forward we lurch into the dim horizon! We all so together where we all go alone!
Panel 6 (Young woman, calmer, to her mother): Thank you for the oatmeal, mom.
Panel 6 (Mother, silhouette): You're welcome, sugarlump.
Votey:
(A mother figure, drawn in silhouette/sketch, speaking up to a speech bubble): It's not your best, but it's okay.
Panel 1 (Mother): Think of people like cars. When you're driving off the assembly line, as you cruise along, you get bumped and scraped, and even a few minor things.
Panel 2 (Mother): The more time passes, the more mottled and off-center the vehicle becomes. Eventually you have a corner or two of these things break. You trundle break them but every time, somehow as if out of spite, the engine sputters and lollops and pushes forward.
Panel 3 (Mother): It pushes forward even as the air and fuel, the wheels and the windows are battered, and the gas is in pieces, and the gutterings of the dashboard melt, the spurring noises grin never expiring anew. And then somehow it goes to grip factory-fresh away. Right comes along and asks why exactly you couldn't have kept the corners of cleverly bumped a day or two to hang on?
Panel 4 (Young woman, dramatically, arms raised): Look at me, boy! I am the darkness! I have built a thousand things but never broken! The world has worried this body once toward but the animal used to survive remains, and I still got up put on my clothes and my hair, made the damned oatmeal and PUSHED FORWARD!
Panel 5 (Young woman): Forward, by God! Forward we lurch into the dim horizon! We all so together where we all go alone!
Panel 6 (Young woman, calmer, to her mother): Thank you for the oatmeal, mom.
Panel 6 (Mother, silhouette): You're welcome, sugarlump.
Votey:
(A mother figure, drawn in silhouette/sketch, speaking up to a speech bubble): It's not your best, but it's okay.
Alt text
A six-panel SMBC comic. A young woman with short dark hair asks her mother why all adults are crazy, can't relax, and are obsessed with what everyone thinks of them. The mother, shown in panels with calm expressions, answers with an extended metaphor: people are like cars rolling off the assembly line that get bumped, scraped, and battered over time, yet the engine keeps sputtering and pushing forward against all the damage. As the metaphor builds, the daughter gets swept up in it, and by the middle panels she rises with her arms thrown dramatically overhead, eyes wide, delivering an over-the-top monologue: 'Look at me! I am the darkness! ... I still got up, put on my clothes, made the damned OATMEAL and PUSHED FORWARD! Forward, by God! ... We all go together where we all go alone!' In the final panel she deflates back to normal and simply says, 'Thank you for the oatmeal, mom,' to which the mother, now a dark silhouette, replies, 'You're welcome, sugarlump.' The joke is the whiplash between a child's casual question, the mother's grandiose existential metaphor, the daughter's theatrical embrace of it, and the mundane reality that it was all just about breakfast. Votey: a sketchy silhouette of the mother looking up at a speech bubble that reads, 'It's not your best, but it's okay.'
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.