Gothic thoughts

A part of your anatomy is *smokin'*

For a few years, I have been slowly working on ideas for an anthology comic of short silly-gothic stories (silly-gothic being a genre that I sure didn’t invent (Charles Addams, Edward Gorey!) but sure feel enthusiastic about). I have three stories so far that I’m absolutely happy with - I’d like to have about 15, as they are all only four to eight pages long. So perhaps I’ll be a while on this.

I love Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm and have attempted several comic homages to it - specifically to the line about Aunt Ada Doom having “seen something nasty in the woodshed” and having never being the same since. The two pages below are from a comic I made in 2017, Cold Comfort ANT Farm, ho ho… ho.

But here I thought I’d share (inflict upon you) a comic for the anthology which I spent time on, but couldn’t make work.

I always thought Aunt Ada must have seen something rude, so this comic was a riff on that. But I couldn’t make it funny - I was interested in the idea of a character being traumatised by something essentially silly - but perhaps given how subjective that idea is, it was too hard a row to hoe. Furrow to plough? Woodshed to chop? Some topical, rustic imagery to get us in the mood!

Whatever. Here’s the comic, it’s extremely silly, and the ending doesn’t work. I know what I meant the ending to mean, but suspect it’s actually nonsensical. But any interpretations are very welcome in the comments!

It’s called Pitfall House: