2013-10-12

A tall multi-panel comic. A young child with curly orange hair sits up in bed and calls out, "Dad! There's no monster under my bed?" Her balding, bespectacled father starts to reassure her, "Oh, sweetie, that's--" but the child interrupts, "Wait what?" The father, instead of comforting her, launches into a sprawling speech: he describes how the ancient Celts believed the wind was a banshee wailing the dead, and the medieval Japanese believed tengu walked through the night with eyes growing from his hands. He continues that he lives in the expert world of human knowledge, where dreams are just neuron firings, penumbrae are diffraction patterns, and there is nothing where a rainbow begins. Then he adds that right this second there is a mysterious powerful radio signal hitting Earth that astronomers call "the space roar." The wide-eyed child asks, "...What's roaring?" The father flatly replies, "Nobody knows." The child, now grinning and clearly unsettled, exclaims, "That's terrifying!" The father says "G'night sweetie" and switches off the light, leaving the room dark. In the votey (a black-and-white bonus panel), the father lies awake in bed thinking, "Please not entirely wrong. Please not entirely wrong" -- having scared himself with his own cosmic-mystery bedtime talk.