scholars
Original: scholars on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Woman with long hair (frustrated): Ugh! It drives me nuts the way these bad fantasy novels and idiotic thrillers sell millions while real art languishes!
Panel 2:
Woman: That's why you need us, Rachel. That's the way you need us.
Panel 3:
Rachel: Who...?
Woman: The literature scholars.
Panel 4:
Woman: We dwell in the darkness, scorned by society, silent, watching, collecting.
Panel 5:
Woman: Not just the great works of fiction and theater, no. ALL the leavings of all the other fields meant to learn psychology and enough of Freud and Cabri am off... we took his works. They are ours now. Nietzsche is ours now. Gibbon is ours now.
Panel 6:
Woman: Who among the scientists reads Newton any more? None. There is only us. The Twee and fundamental Francis Bacon is ours. Galileo is ours. Darwin even now we are swallowing Einstein and Godel.
Panel 7:
Rachel: These popular books? They depend for their survival on the fickle hand of the public. But the public only wants what is new. We detest the new.
Woman: Thus when, robbed forever from public interest, only we can save them. We live a bit. Only too late realizing it's this is in the trap, they will look at us with imploring fear and do impressive, hardened to the task.
Panel 8:
Woman: Our underworld is savage. Our underworld is just.
Rachel: I feel like you've gotten weird ever since you used to teach humanities to pre-meds.
Woman (small, in darkness): Rats in a trap! Rats! Rats!
Votey:
Woman (in speech bubble): Fortunately we aren't subject to fads of any kind.
(She is shown with stylized, dramatic shading on her face.)
Woman with long hair (frustrated): Ugh! It drives me nuts the way these bad fantasy novels and idiotic thrillers sell millions while real art languishes!
Panel 2:
Woman: That's why you need us, Rachel. That's the way you need us.
Panel 3:
Rachel: Who...?
Woman: The literature scholars.
Panel 4:
Woman: We dwell in the darkness, scorned by society, silent, watching, collecting.
Panel 5:
Woman: Not just the great works of fiction and theater, no. ALL the leavings of all the other fields meant to learn psychology and enough of Freud and Cabri am off... we took his works. They are ours now. Nietzsche is ours now. Gibbon is ours now.
Panel 6:
Woman: Who among the scientists reads Newton any more? None. There is only us. The Twee and fundamental Francis Bacon is ours. Galileo is ours. Darwin even now we are swallowing Einstein and Godel.
Panel 7:
Rachel: These popular books? They depend for their survival on the fickle hand of the public. But the public only wants what is new. We detest the new.
Woman: Thus when, robbed forever from public interest, only we can save them. We live a bit. Only too late realizing it's this is in the trap, they will look at us with imploring fear and do impressive, hardened to the task.
Panel 8:
Woman: Our underworld is savage. Our underworld is just.
Rachel: I feel like you've gotten weird ever since you used to teach humanities to pre-meds.
Woman (small, in darkness): Rats in a trap! Rats! Rats!
Votey:
Woman (in speech bubble): Fortunately we aren't subject to fads of any kind.
(She is shown with stylized, dramatic shading on her face.)
Alt text
An eight-panel black-and-white SMBC comic. A woman with long hair rants to another woman named Rachel: she's furious that bad fantasy novels and idiotic thrillers sell millions while real art languishes. She declares 'That's why you need us, Rachel' — the literature scholars, who 'dwell in the darkness, scorned by society, silent, watching, collecting.' Her face grows increasingly shadowed and ominous as she explains they have claimed not just great fiction but all the leavings of other fields — Freud, Nietzsche, Gibbon, and the works of scientists like Newton, Bacon, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein and Godel ('even now we are swallowing them'). She frames popular books as doomed by a fickle public that only wants the new, while the scholars 'detest the new' and alone can save the forgotten. In the final panel her face is nearly black with dramatic shading as she mutters 'Rats in a trap! Rats! Rats!'; Rachel, deadpan, says 'I feel like you've gotten weird ever since you used to teach humanities to pre-meds.' Votey (aftercomic): a close-up of the scholar's heavily shaded, intense face declaring in a speech bubble, 'Fortunately we aren't subject to fads of any kind' — an ironic punchline given the snobbery she just displayed.
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.