Smoke Avoidance

A weekly comic featuring the whimsical and far-too-innocent Push Button Heads characters, written and illustrated by Everett Wilson. Enjoy!

This week’s cartoon is loosely inspired by the audacious solution to smoke and smog portrayed in the opening of the Jetsons: The Movie (c. 1990), which for whatever reason became an indelible childhood memory.

I was probably too young to tell what part of the joke, if there was one, contained the punchline. But I’m still not clear about it now. Was it supposed to be a comment on our misguided hubris as a species? Or was the scene trying to comfort us?

Was it trying to reassure us that by the time we do scorch the planet (and we have!), surely by then we will have built enough sky palaces to take us further and further away from reality.

All I remember thinking at the time was “these things can’t keep going up indefinitely!”