herd
Original: herd on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1
Young man (orange-haired): Grampa, how do I form my own identity? How do I not be part of the herd?
Panel 2 (grandfather, balding with glasses, standing at a distance)
Grampa: Get old.
Panel 3
Grampa: Just age and one day you'll wake up and you'll be unique. You'll have weirdly particular opinions on music and on food and on movies and books. You will possess genuinely angry feelings about the particular way your neighbor rakes leaves.
Panel 4
Grampa: Your generically upright symmetrical teenage body will have bent into forms undreamt by any branch of evolution!
Panel 5
Grampa: You'll wish you could just naturally fall in with a group, but you're so riddled with pointless hangups that trying to get along with ten contemporaries is like trying to fit ten porcupines in a suitcase!
Panel 6 (grampa grabbing the young man by the shoulders, intense)
Grampa: The herd was goddamned fantastic, boy! Conform to whatever it wants for as long as you can! Peer pressure was steering you toward happiness!
Panel 7
Grampa: Peer pressure says to drink and do drugs and have unprotected sex.
Young man (small, shaken): See how brilliant it is?
Votey:
A speech bubble from the grandfather (face shown, glasses, frowning): I wish I'd never been true to myself for a single second.
Young man (orange-haired): Grampa, how do I form my own identity? How do I not be part of the herd?
Panel 2 (grandfather, balding with glasses, standing at a distance)
Grampa: Get old.
Panel 3
Grampa: Just age and one day you'll wake up and you'll be unique. You'll have weirdly particular opinions on music and on food and on movies and books. You will possess genuinely angry feelings about the particular way your neighbor rakes leaves.
Panel 4
Grampa: Your generically upright symmetrical teenage body will have bent into forms undreamt by any branch of evolution!
Panel 5
Grampa: You'll wish you could just naturally fall in with a group, but you're so riddled with pointless hangups that trying to get along with ten contemporaries is like trying to fit ten porcupines in a suitcase!
Panel 6 (grampa grabbing the young man by the shoulders, intense)
Grampa: The herd was goddamned fantastic, boy! Conform to whatever it wants for as long as you can! Peer pressure was steering you toward happiness!
Panel 7
Grampa: Peer pressure says to drink and do drugs and have unprotected sex.
Young man (small, shaken): See how brilliant it is?
Votey:
A speech bubble from the grandfather (face shown, glasses, frowning): I wish I'd never been true to myself for a single second.
Alt text
An SMBC comic. A young orange-haired man asks his bespectacled, balding grandfather, "Grampa, how do I form my own identity? How do I not be part of the herd?" The grandfather, standing at a distance, answers flatly: "Get old." He explains that with age you'll wake up unique — weirdly particular opinions on music, food, movies and books, and genuine anger about how your neighbor rakes leaves. He says your symmetrical teenage body will bend into forms undreamt of by evolution, and that you'll wish you could fall in with a group, but you'll be so riddled with pointless hangups that fitting in with ten contemporaries is "like trying to fit ten porcupines in a suitcase." Growing agitated, he grabs the young man by the shoulders and shouts that the herd was goddamned fantastic, that he should conform as long as he can because peer pressure was steering him toward happiness. The young man notes that peer pressure says to drink, do drugs, and have unprotected sex; the grandfather, undeterred, replies, "See how brilliant it is?" In the votey aftercomic, the grandfather's face fills the panel as he says, "I wish I'd never been true to myself for a single second."
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.