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After a long career as the gadfly-hero of his own Ayn Rand story, Black Hat Guy finally meets his match in the person of a pet store cashier. The encounter continues through several stages, with White Hat Guy (WHG) offering the intrusive Black Hat Guy (BHG) everything that he requests before finally rejecting him and casting him out, and we realize that what we have witnessed is a recurrence of the ancient confrontation between the Buddha and Mara. WHG's enlightenment is revealed for us by stages, the better to help us appreciate its depth.

Note that WHG at first meets BHG's provocations with gentle correction, even prefacing his declaration about the true nature of the world with the honorific address of "Sir". BHG counters by revealing that the nature of the world-shop is already known to him, before stating that he seeks precisely the sort of good (in the narrow, material sense) on offer. WHG, encouraged by BHG's apparent recognition of the truth of the world, attempts to help him come to small measure of enlightenment in his own right, stating simply that drones cannot be trained. When BHG rejects this invitation, WHG wisely does not attempt to force enlightenment upon him, instead giving him the good he believes himself to seek-- secure in the knowledge that BHG's path to enlightenment will advance itself further in its own good time. It is only when BHG becomes still more importunate and violent in his demands that WHG rebukes him, casting him out from the shop-world entirely.

The deeply layered symbolism of the characters' appearances and poses should not escape us. On the surface, this is a parable about resistance to trolling: WHG is successful in that he does not actively strive against BHG but rather acquiesces in a semi-Taoist fashion as far as possible. But WHG and BHG do not simply have opposite-colored hats; their very stances are perfect mirror images. In this, Randall is clearly struggling to drive home the point that this same struggle between yin-enlightenment and yang-belligerent ignorance runs through every human soul, and suggesting that the tension between these concepts is the very essence of the human experience. I cannot but commend the deep spiritual insight underpinning this comic.