Mad

A four-panel SMBC comic set in a lush, towering forest. In panel one, a young woman asks her gray-haired mother, "Mom, how do you stay so calm?" The mother replies, "Whenever I get mad... instead of acting out, I plant a tree." In panel two, a close-up of the smiling mother: "I started doing that 30 years ago, and never stopped." In panel three, the two appear as tiny figures in the middle of an enormous dense forest as the mother says, "Now, whenever I walk outside, it's like I'm princess of the forest of hatred!" In panel four, by a large lake, the daughter begins, "Wow, so when Dad ran away with your friend—" and the mother cheerfully interrupts, arms spread wide, "Did you know I dug this enchanted lake with a shovel?" The joke: the mother's vast, beautiful forest and lake are monuments to decades of suppressed rage she refuses to discuss. In the votey (aftercomic), a roughly-drawn close-up of the mother's manic, wide-eyed grinning face declares, "Made from an oak I felled with my teeth!"