In the Cold and Herpes column, Slug has a three-panel illustration.
What’s the deal with the third panel? What is that thing half-way in that guy’s butt? Looks like a T-bone steak to me, or maybe it’s the world’s most sadistic rectal thermometer.
Thoughts, anyone?
I’ve read the question and the column several times and I cannot figure out anything. I have to agree it looks like a steak. I have to wonder if the column was edited after the cartoon was already done. Maybe there was something that would have made sense. It is obviously a neaked butt eith something hanging out of it.
It looks to me like the right buttock has been detached and Cecil is pointing to the resulting cavity.
Nope. Methinks it’s pork. Probably a steak cut from a “butt roast.”
Yes.
Well, yes.
But what in the text refers to the buttocks? I find nothing there, so the mystery is still why Slug chose to illustrate a dissected buttocks.
Oh well, I guess we mortals just cannot understand genius when we see it …
It’s pretty obvious to me … Cecil says
“we’re dealing with the demon Virus here, which makes for strange bedfellows”
And what stranger bedfellow than one with a half-dissected butt?
Ya just gotta get into the mind of the Great Artist. 
Julie
The column discusses several things, including subclinical infections and tissue culturing, in a rather cursory fashion. The illustration might refer to a gross sort of biopsy, or it might suggest that subclinical infections (or the column itself) are “half-assed.”
The column looks to be a bit on the short side… Was this paired with some other question?
I think it has to do with the virus lying in its dormant state. Herpes lives in your body, typically the nervous tissue (i.e. the spinal column). Why he dissected the buttocks to represent the spinal column would be a mystery.