Ok, so I use Em Carroll’s His Face All Redto begin the horror unit in my graphic narrative course and today I had a student provide my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE TAKE on the comic.
They were like, “This isn’t scary at all. It’s a perfectly logical set of events.”
And the class was like…what?
And they were like, “Clearly, the weaker younger brother didn’t actually kill the stronger older brother. He bashed him in the head with a rock and, head wounds bleed a ton, so he thought he’d killed him, but he’d only stunned him. Older brother wakes up, climbs out of the hole, notices his coat is missing a giant chunk, and has a pretty good idea of what younger brother is going to do. SO he orders himself a new coat, has it delivered to a nearby village, waits two days for Amazon prime to show up with it, and then walks back to his home village on day 3 having decided to drive his brother absolutely insane in revenge. And then for the next several days he plays along with his brother’s story and digs a hole next to his brother’s house, except he doesn’t stop there, he digs a tunnel that reaches back to the hole in the woods connecting the two. Because he knows that his brother is going to freak out at some point and go back to check if the body is still here. And when he sees his brother heading off into the woods one night, he hops into the farmhouse-hole and takes the short-cut tunnel to the forest-hole and puts on his old coat and rubs some sheep’s blood on his face so that when his brother shows up he can roll over and be like ‘whattup’ so he’ll lose his damn mind.”
And then multiple other people in the class were like, “actually, yeah, if my sibling tried to kill me that’s exactly how I’d handle it.”
In honor of Halloween, I’d like to bring back my favorite day of teaching Em Carrol’s His Face All Red.
the problem with reading and writing leading to a strong vocabulary is that you tend to know the vibe of words instead of their meanings.
if I used this word in a sentence, would it make sense? absolutely. if you asked me what it meant, could I tell you? absolutely not.
figure out what the word means from context clues while reading -> use the word in a sentence while writing -> realise you’re not actually certain what the word means -> panic about your sentence not making sense even though it hasn’t been pinged as grammatically incorrect -> look up the definition of the word because You Must Know -> it means exactly what you thought it meant -> oh, good! :) -> immediately forget the definition -> repeat forever
