1433: Lightsaber

Explanation

This comic references a scene from the third theatrically-released Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, wherein Darth Vader confronts his son, Luke Skywalker, who had recently surrendered to Imperial soldiers. In the movie, Vader notes that Luke has constructed a new lightsaber following the loss of his original during their duel on Cloud City (Luke Skywalker's original lightsaber actually having been Anakin Skywalker's second).

Lightsabers are often jokingly referred to as "laser swords" by fans, and this comic points out that a real laser would not have any way of stopping and would therefore continue forever, making this particular interpretation silly. (TheStar Wars writers cleverly fail to state what exactly a lightsaber's blade is made out of, although it is unlikely to be a laser because of this.) Because Vader slightly tilts the active super-lightsaber, the beam ends up slicing straight through the hull of a large section of the ship or station they are on (though in the movie they were actually in an observation tower of a planet-side landing pad) and presumably going on forever, causing much mayhem as it blazes through the stars. Hull breaches are a popular trope in science-fiction, despite curiously being almost entirely absent from the Star Wars films.

The title text refers to GRB 080319B, an unusual gamma ray burst in 2008, the afterglow of which was briefly visible to the human eye. It implies that the source of this burst was a light saber in the Star Wars story, which took place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" according to the Star Wars opening crawl.

Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader have had a similar conversation before in 1397: Luke.