aristotle

A four-panel SMBC comic. Panel 1: A bearded man in a toga (Aristotle) startles as a figure in gold-and-purple futuristic armor appears, saying "Aristotle! I'm a traveler from the future! I need to talk to you!" Panel 2: The time traveler tells him, "Listen, Europeans are gonna spend the next two thousand years believing basically whatever you say!" Panel 3: Aristotle replies "So..." and the traveler answers, "So MAKE IT COUNT." Panel 4, captioned "SUBSEQUENTLY": Aristotle, holding a scroll, says "And then I'll say eels don't reproduce, they just spontaneously appear in mud," and the delighted time traveler exclaims "AHAHAHAHA! GENIUS!" The joke is that the traveler eggs Aristotle on to plant deliberately absurd false ideas (spontaneous generation of eels) that Europe will believe for millennia. Votey: A hand-drawn, gleefully grinning face fills the panel with a speech bubble reading "Wait till they get a load of my physics!" — extending the gag to Aristotle's long-debunked physics.