2011-11-30
Explanation
This comic depicts a group of anthropomorphized books sitting around a campfire in the woods, as if at summer camp or on a camping trip. One book, positioned behind the fire like a campfire storyteller, is telling a horror story to the others: "And then... after they had ripped out half of her pages... they turned her... into a movie!" The other books gasp in terror.
The joke works by imagining what would be truly horrifying from a book's perspective. For books, the scariest fate is not being burned or forgotten, but being adapted into a movie -- and a bad adaptation at that, since "they ripped out half of her pages" first. This is a common complaint among readers: that film adaptations of beloved books cut out huge amounts of content and fail to capture what made the original special. From the books' point of view, this is essentially a tale of mutilation followed by a grotesque transformation.
The campfire horror story format perfectly mirrors how humans tell scary stories, but the content is tailored to what books would find frightening. The other books gasping "Gasp!" reinforces the idea that this is the most terrifying thing they can imagine. It is a clever bit of perspective-flipping humor that takes a mundane human complaint ("the movie wasn't as good as the book") and reframes it as body horror.
The votey shows a book-film hybrid creature -- a book with film strips for arms and legs -- screaming "Maaah!" This represents the monstrous offspring of the book-to-movie adaptation: a grotesque chimera that is neither fully book nor fully film, crying out in existential anguish at its own unnatural existence.