2012-09-28
Explanation
This comic is formatted as a series of newspaper headlines and articles tracing the rise and fall of a man who claims to have discovered evidence of ghosts. First: "Man Presents First Evidence of Ghosts -- Acclaimed as greatest scientist of century." Then: "Man Receives Nobel for Ghostly Discovery -- Thanks his son for telling him." Then the trouble begins: "Man's Research Called Into Question" -- his evidence turns out to be that "My boy said he heard a noise or something and that is ironclad proof of ghosts." Next: "Man's Research Not Reproducible -- Noise was probably just house creaking." Finally: "Man Dies in Gutter, Both Forgotten and Despised," with an autopsy indicating "profound disappointment in child's analytical powers."
The final panel reveals the context: a father is telling his son, "Okay! Okay! There's probably not a ghost in my closet! Jeez!" and the father replies, "Goodnight, son." The comic satirizes both a child's irrational fear of ghosts and the scientific process by imagining a world where a parent takes a child's claim of hearing a scary noise to its logical extreme -- publishing it as scientific research. The elaborate rise-and-fall narrative is the father's way of scaring his son into critical thinking by showing the catastrophic consequences of claiming something is a ghost without proper evidence. It is an absurdly disproportionate bedtime response to a child's fear of monsters in the closet.