Just Regular Skeleton Stuff ☠️

Can’t do skeleton stuff until you’re a skeleton

Can’t do skeleton shit until you’re a skeleton. ☠️

This comic is inspired by an illustration of a young man and death from a copy of the Book of Hours/Life of St Margaret (Paris, Bibl. Mazarine, ms. 0507, f.113) c. 1490:

Lots of medieval art is supposed to remind you of your own mortality, and this one is no different. Death comes for us all. (Even you, Brent). They often drew and painted skeletons alongside living people—sometimes dancing, sometimes popping up out of graves, sometimes snatching a person by the wrist to symbolize that death has actually come for them in that moment. Here are a few of my favorites in that genre (you might even recognize some of these from other comics I’ve done!)

From Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death (1523ish):

Oh you think you’re gonna sell some wares? Nah, you’re actually dead.

Or these, from an unknown artist in 1488:

Toot toot! Bishops can be dead

We’re all just going to be dead, doing skeleton shit while worms eat us.

Dancing corpses appear for several hundred years in European art—most art historians believe it was done to depict the dance with death that we all experience—our mortality is always with us, and so is the reality that other people have died before us.

Here’s some, from Wilhelm Werner von Zimmer’s ‘Dance of Death’ from 1540:

Some of these guys are just poppin up out of the ground. So badass.

noooo

Here’s another one from France in the 1530s:

“Damn, guess I’m dead”

And this one, Heidelberger Bilderkatechismus, from 1455:

The bishop guy is like, very chill with being dead.

So, remember: death comes for us all.

(And then we get to do skeleton shit).

Before I go, here’s a skeleton-related question for you: if you could be just a skeleton for an entire year, would you do it? My sister (@heidielizabethart) asked me this recently and I think it’s the most delightful question.

Here are the rules of skeleton year. Everything in your life is the same, except you’re a skeleton for an entire year. We decided that cartoon rules apply—so like, if you eat food or drink something it just falls through your bones to the ground. And if you’re doing a bit, you can take off your skull and still talk with it, and just re-attach it with a little “click.” Or if something big and heavy comes rolling towards you, you knock down like a bunch of bowling pins, but then you just click yourself back together and do a little jig or something.

You can still see and move and everything, but you’re just a skeleton. For one year.

What do you think, would you do skeleton year? And if so, when would you do it?

I like to imagine skeleton year as this brilliant rite of passage—maybe you take a year off college and do skeleton year in Europe with your friends, or maybe you wait and do skeleton year with your romantic partner, or you do skeleton year with your kids when they’re old enough to remember.

I also imagine an entire industry built on people who take up acting or dancing or singing during their skeleton year, and like that’s part of their appeal—you go to their concert or see them in a movie and they’re fully a skeleton person the whole time.

So what do you think? Would you?

— Becca Lee, the Haunted Librarian ☠️