Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.” (Christopher McDougall, Born to Run). So goes a quote included in a book about the Tarahumara, ultra-runners in the mountainous Mexican peninsula. The comic Slow Cheetah, named after a song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers that is as far as I can tell unrelated to running (give me a break! good titles are hard to think of but easy to pilfer), is about an anthropoid running. The anthropoid is training for a race, which is evidenced by a very heavy-handed metaphor about the Olympics that I’m not proud of, when suddenly he is chased down and eaten by a cheetah. In my mind there are too many references for this comic’s own good: the reference to Greeks and Mount Olympus, the not-so-well-known reference to an unrelated song, the common phrase ‘off to the races’, and the well-known-not-really-subtle reference to the tortoise and the hare parable. Yet for all the fluffy references at heart of this comic is the notion that we are nothing more than victims of our genetics. We can be whatever we want to be, so long as what we want to be is what are genetics dictate for us. For some of us that means being an easily plucked, nutritious meal for someone else. – Zachary