a-monster

A four-panel comic. A small child stands in a dark bedroom doorway and declares to a parent, 'There's a monster in the dark!' The parent asks, 'Are you sure?' The child launches into an over-intellectualized argument: it's impossible to know what happens in pure darkness, because to be sure you'd have to use light to see, but you need light for that. The parent reasons back that if you could see there's no monster under the bed, it's only because you're not looking into the darkest darkness. A second adult interjects, 'Honey! Don't scare him!' The child calmly replies, 'They can smell fear,' as the parent says, 'Come on!' The joke: the kid out-philosophizes the parents about the unknowability of monsters in the dark. Votey: a pitch-black panel with a tiny round face peeking up from the bottom-right corner, faintly lit against the darkness, implying a monster really is lurking there.