Formal Logic
by Jeff
Image text: Note that this implies you should NOT honk solely because I stopped for a pedestrian and you're behind me.
The key part of this comic is "IFF", which in formal logic means "if and only if". "If and only if" represents a formal logic connector that the result is that the truth of either one of the connected statements requires the truth of the other, i.e., either both statements are true, or both are false. In the comic, if someone honks at this car, it means they like formal logic, there is not any other possible reason per this bumper sticker. (As we see in the image text.)
Have a great weekend everyone!
Keyed
by Jeff
Image text: I was sure he was just getting revenge, but then he did the same thing to Carrie Underwood. Then he mailed me a scone. I think I'm giving up dating.
This comic is a take on one of the typical revenge tactics in dating and in life, which is one person "keying" the car of another. To "key" a car is to drag a key across the side of the car, sometimes multiple times, ruining the paint job. Instead, our friend Beret Guy painted a really detailed key on the side of the car in his version of "keying" a car.
The image text is a reference to the song "Before He Cheats" by Carrie Underwood, which is a revenge song which details (via wikipedia) Carrie Underwood imagining her boyfriend hanging out and flirting with a "bleach-blonde" girl, shooting pool, buying her a drink, dancing, and hoping to "get lucky" with her. In retaliation, she commits several law-breaking actions including vandalizing his customized four-wheel drive vehicle by scratching its side with a key, carving her name into its leather seats, smashing the headlights with a Louisville Slugger baseball bat and slashing all four tires. She hopes that this will make him "think before he cheats" again.
I'm not sure what is up with the scone mailing. It is probably just random. Oh Beret Guy, never change.
Working
by Jeff
Image text: And if you drive a typical car more than a mile out of your way for each penny you save on the per-gallon price, it doesn't matter how worthless your time is to you--the gas to get you there and back costs more than you save.
Ok, let me see if I can iron this math out. In this comic, gas is 10 cents cheaper per gallon 5 minutes away. That's 1 dollar saved on a 10 gallon fill-up. (The car in the comic is small, so I'm going to assume a 10 gallon fill-up. Sorry to all our international friends, this is all in American measurements.)
$1 saved/earned for 5 minutes comes out to $12/hour which is more than the US Federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr.
$1 saved/earned for 9 minutes comes out to $6.66/hour which obviously comes below that threshold.
And then the image text adds on the double whammy of having to pay extra money in gas if you go more than a mile out of your way to get the cheaper gas.
Family Decals
by Jeff
Image text: My decal set has no adults, just a sea of hundreds of the little girl figures closing in around a single cat.
So, I don't know if this is the case in other countries, but a trend in the US for families, especially families with vans or pseudo-vans like the ones in this comic, is to put little stick figure decals on the back of the car with the composition of their family. I'm not sure the reason for this, but it is fairly common.
In this case, the second car, instead of children, it has lots of money. This is because children are expensive.
In the image text, I'm not sure if there is a reference in there, or if it is just trying to be a weird decals to freak out other drivers.
Flying Cars
by Jeff
Image text: It's hard to fit in the backseat of my flying car with my android Realdoll when we're both wearing jetpacks.
In this comic, Cueball is complaining to Megan over the phone about the lack of flying cars even though it is the year 2011. But, Megan counters that phone technology has taken off. No pun intended. I've always found it interesting that the consumer electronics field has changed dramatically over the past 10 years and cars still are roughly the same.
In the image text, the comic references Realdoll, which is known as "the world's finest lovedoll". You can probably figure it out from there.
Ahead Stop
by Jeff
Image text: They actually started the reversed-text practice in 1977 -- not for ease-of-reading reasons, but because too many people were driving backward down the highway blasting the Star Wars opening theme.
This comic is refers to how when words or instructions are written on the highway are always backwards from how you would read them. It seems that the "highway" engineers write the words as if you would read them as your car goes over them. Sometimes this approach works, other times (probably most of the time) it is terribly confusing. The sentence on the comic is: Highway Engineers Think I Read Backwards. I think adding the period is perfectly hilarious touch. Probably not too many periods on the highways.
The image text is referred to how the words at the beginning of Star Wars move from the bottom of the screen to the top so that it can be read by normal human being. However, the image text says the engineers initially reversed the text because people were driving BACKWARDS down the highway.
The title of the comic is also a reference to this phenomenon because the "Stop Ahead" instruction would be written on the highway as "Ahead" and then "Stop".
It is also kind of odd that there is a sidewalk next to the highway in this comic.
Sample
by Jeff
Image text: There are two or three songs out there with beeps in the chorus that sound exactly like the clock radio alarm I had in high school, and hearing it makes me think my life since junior year has been a dream I'm about to wake up from.
This one is pretty straightforward. There is nothing worse than the standard alarm clock sound unexpectedly in a commercial or song.
Asshole
by Mike
Asshole
Image Text: [Shortly thereafter, at a nearby bakery] ::CRASH:: ::RUMBLE:: ::VRRRRRR:: '... I don't know, officer. It just scooped up an entire rack of scones and drove away!'
People are haters.
Stephen and Me
by Jeff
Image text: Hey, let go! We were all thinking it! Someone had to speak truth to power!
This comic is a parody of the movie/documentary by filmmaker Michael Moore called "Roger and Me" in which he detailed the problems that General Motors created in his hometown of Flint, Michigan by moving the manufacturing to Mexico. Roger is reference to General Motors CEO Roger Smith.
Stephen Odell is the CEO of Volvo, so the parody becomes "Stephen and Me".
The image text in this case is a continuation of the comic and what the filmmaker with the beret would say when he was being taken by security.
Accident
by submission
Image text: As far as treachery-as-driving-music goes, Katamari music is matched only by Guitar Hero music.
This submission is from Aaron Hill. Aaron lives in the finger lakes region of NY, where he works as a web developer in higher ed. He has a blag (http://blog.amhill.net) and is on the twitter (@aaronmhill).
Cueball is driving his car and listening to some music. This music either already was, or suddenly became, the theme music from the game "Katamari Damacy". Katamari Damacy was a video game for Playstation where the protagonist, controlled by the player, rolls around a ball of increasing size that accumulates anything that it rolls over that is smaller than the mass of the ball. The goal is to pick up as much stuff as possible in the time alotted. (There has been some discussion about the game being reflective of hyper-consumerist culture)
In the last frame, we learn that Cueball drove his car into a mailbox after the Katamari Damacy theme music began playing. As he tells Megan "The mailbox was smaller than me, it was just instinct," implying that the music induced a Pavlovian response to start veering into anything smaller than him.
The image text also refers to Guitar Hero, a game where a player uses a guitar-shaped controller to loosely mimic playing a guitar along with the video game. Presumably, someone who has car collisions from driving when the Katamari Damacy theme plays would also have difficulty driving when a Guitar Hero song comes on, as their hands would attempt to mimic the Guitar Hero button sequences.