2013-08-07
Explanation
In this comic, a child runs to his father'''s room at night with the classic childhood fear: "Daaad! Daaad! There'''s a monster under my bed!" The father, rather than offering comfort or checking under the bed, takes a coldly logical approach. He lays out the situation: "Let me get this straight. Some creature lives under your bed 24 hours a day, every night, in darkness. You jump onto its roof and start yelling. Then you demand someone come and eradicate it." He then asks the pointed question: "Who'''s the creature under the bed? Who'''s the monster, boy?"
The child, now lying in bed, asks "You?" but the father firmly points at the child and declares "YOU." The father has reframed the entire scenario from the monster'''s perspective -- the child is actually the terrifying intruder who crashes onto the creature'''s home every night and then tries to have it killed. This is a clever perspective reversal that forces the child (and the reader) to consider that the "monster" under the bed might have far more reason to be afraid of the child than vice versa.
In the final panels, we see the child lying in bed looking troubled, and two adults (presumably the parents) discussing the approach. One says "So you basically replaced fear with guilt," and the other responds "It was the quietest emotion I could think of." This reveals the father'''s true motivation -- he was not trying to teach a philosophical lesson, he just wanted the kid to stop screaming and go to sleep, and guilt is quieter than fear. The votey panel shows the father in bed thinking "Oh damn, it'''s contagious" -- suggesting the guilt trip worked too well and now even the father feels guilty, unable to sleep.