The one that got a little dark – Chapter 8, Act 3, Strip 60

Oops, I guess this one turned out a little bit on the dark side…and even the punchline doesn’t make it much better, since using dead children as a puchline is a bit darkish as such.

But I really had written myself into a bit of a corner by making Gregory’s nemesis an existential crisis…sure, it fits the character, but I hadn’t really considered what I’d be supposed to be doing if I had to actually depict that confrontation. Fortunately, I have that meta-level of the fictional B-movie production on top of the story…so I could simply assume that the fictional scriptwriter had writtem themselves into that corner, and then plausibly blame the inevitable cheap cop-out on that. And it’s 100% in keeping with the historical track record for B-movie scriptwriters, who just don’t get paid enough to be able to afford the time for coming up with elegant cop-outs.

So, yeah, Gregory’s nemesis has been rewritten from “existential crisis” to “children with diabetes”. And that’s not really a big challenge if you’ve got a chainsaw. Of course there were times when you would have had to be careful with that sort of thing – at one point, massacring children would have been considered something of an iredeemable moral failure for one of the good guys. But the example of Anakin Skywalker has gone a long way toward making it an easily redeemable little slip of judgement, instead. And Gregory still was a zombie when he did it for the first time…and this repeat performance is merely hypothetical, plus squarely blamable on the scriptwriter, so Gregory’s hero appeal shouldn’t receive much of a dent from this.

And this should have been, if I counted correctly*, the last one of those hypothetical encounters…

More on Monday.

*It does happen.