The Dinette Set has something for everyone in celebration of Hallowe'en.
For some, an hilarious treat in which Burl comes face-to-face with his own mortality, though obviously this is one of his friends playing a joke. Fans can flood the Dinette Set forums with speculation about which of Burl's prankster friends is under the sheet.
For others, a frightful trick in which Burl comes face-to-face with his own true mortality. This is a harbinger of the future, come to offer Burl one last chance to amend his ways before the grim specter of death calls him home.
For the remainder, an impossible dream in which the artist announces her intention to kill off Burl, and with him the comic strip, and then retire. Dare we dream?
Smell my marginalia:
- Joy is so startled by this apparition that she has 4 separate indications of her fear: a pair of head bobble lines, a hand bobble line, and candy falling like sand in an hourglass.
- Interestingly, the pumpkin face that was on their front door just yesterday is gone.
- The artist aims one at commenter Pinball, for whom Joy's pants must be a nightmare.
3 comments:
Agh! Yes, she must have read my comment and decided to give the window-screen pants an especially prominent place for the occasion of Halloween. The horror, though, is definitely mitigated by the pleasant thought of Burl's demise. Imagine the improvement in the strip if Burl and Joy became ghosts and spent each day warning others of the dangers of a life spent as humorless, idiotic misers... it could be called A Crustwood Carol.
I think everyone's gotten it wrong so far. Joy's head bobble action indicates her fear- fear that this menacing creature knows of her plans to poison Burl so she can collect his life insurance and run off with Jerry, or whatever the guy with the moustache and crewcut goes by. Perhaps the writer could have conveyed this message better if the ghost's dialogue balloon were to read "Beware, Burl! Beware the ides of March!" a la Julius Caesar. However, such a literary homage would have required the strip's readership to have at least some semblance of a nodding accquaintance with the works of William Shakespeare. Sadly, a study done in 2003 revealed that the average "Dinette Set" fan reads on the level of a slightly brain damaged wood duck.
what doors open like that?
Post a Comment