I know you're probably excited about all the spooky costumes in today's strip, but we've got one more Halloween surprise for you. This year, we decided to take part in Fright Night, which is sort of a secret Santa type thing, but for webcomics, and on Halloween. And not gift-related.

Here's our spooky remix of Fragile Gravity, and here's their spooky remix of Terror Island.

I'm very pleased with how Fright Night turned out. Lewis did all the work for our end, and we got a cool reinterpretation from another webcomician. And we both ended up with a zombie theme! That probably means something.

First off, let me explain some pre-Socratic philosophy at you, in case panel four was confusing. Heraclitus and Parmenides were both philosophers from before Socrates. Heraclitus belongs to a group I call "The Captain Planet Cosmologists." A cosmology is a theory about what the universe is fundamentally made of. So, this is a mildly amusing joke, if you are familiar with Captain Planet. Heraclitus thought everything was made of fire. This other guy Thales thought everything was made of water, and there was one for air and one for earth. I don't know if there was one for "heart" per se, but we can worry about that later. Parmenides was above all that jazz (sort of). Parmenides thought that change was impossible (I think because there can't be void). If change is impossible, than all perceived change is illusory. The view that there is only one eternal unchanging thing is called "Eleatic Monism", I think, largely, because Parmenides was from Elea.

If you found the punchline unsatisfying today, I highly recommend the title text, which I think is a bit punchier, but not really conducive to being presented as dialogue, and maybe too silly for canon.

As a special super bonus treat, I am going to share with you guys an idea I had then Ben did not go for. It went (roughly) like this:

Lewis: Ben, what do you think of the phrase "Trick or Treaty?"
Ben: I don't like it.
Lewis: I was thinking someone could say it to Stephen, and Stephen would reply, "Well, I guess I don't like tricks." And then, the other person could say, "Perfect, then as Czar you agree to commit the resources of Geography City to protect Target City whenever it is attacked."
Ben: [silence]
Lewis: Then Stephen could reply, "Darnit, I've been tricked!"
Ben: [more silence]
Lewis: And then the other person could reply, "It was the inclusive 'or'."

Ben didn't warm to the idea, and so you get it as a bonus in my commentary. I think Ben was worried that we'd be violating that rule of fiction writing put forward by George Washington, "Don't create entangling alliances with cities outside the scope of the lives of your main characters, unless you really want intermunicipal politics to be the dominant theme for at least one major story arc."

That Washington sure knew how to "spin a yarn."