On this page you will find information about the hidden clues, borrowings, meanings etc. which appear mainly to the expert's eye. I have to admit that I am very fond of small details, it is therefore no shame not to have spyed some of the understatements in the cartoon. I try not to have the principal message rely on those hints, and so the whole affair is actually of no further importance. It is only for my personal pleasure, and you are hereby invited to join it by reading the following commentary.

The scenery follows Ingmar Berman's The 7th Seal. The first two panels as well as the chess game are optically copied from the movie. The knight, of course, looks quite similar to Max von Sydow.

The plot: Death appears to the knight on the beach in order to take him, and since he doesn't want to die, the knight persuades Death to play a game of chess with him, his life at stake. So far so good. In the movie, thus, the game endures throughout days, until Death finally wins.
It is my own belief that Bergman allowed himself to interprete the facts in his own artistical way. In reality, it happened just the way you saw in the cartoon, of course!

Prologue 3:

Panel 5 ("Is it... Theodor?") is a quotation from Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow.

Admittedly, I contradict my own rules here for the sake of the gag. The girl doesn't look Death in the eyes, therefore she shouldn' t die.
Let's just say, I was at the beginning of my story and didn't quite know yet where I wanted to go with it!

Episode 5:

No hidden meanings, just a note on the intern rules: We cannot see anything that happens behind closed doors or outside the pictureframe - which doesn't necessarily mean that nothing happens at all!
In other words: Inside the car a conversation must have taken place between Death and the friendly driver. A fatal one, indeed. Since we could neither see nor hear a word of it, we simply have to assume it had been so.

Episode 6:

Take a look at the Beetle's license plate. D 810 is the number of Franz Schubert's string quartett in d-flat, titled "Death and the Maiden".

That little game with registration numbers continues in variations later on!

It's a Swiss Blade Scythe, he is using. One with many additional goodies - a parasol, for example.

Keep your eyes open, because there will be more tools revealed over the time.

Episode 9:

A nagging friend of mine told me that the design of the truck was technically incorrect. An articulated truck cannot have a two-wheeled cockpit. It must be either a four-wheeled truck with a rotating link or a two-wheeler with inflexible chassis. Thinking about it, he is right. So there, I drew a nonfactual truck!

Update:

It's not that bad after all! Look at the truck! Could LEGO ever be wrong??

Episode 10:

As mentioned above - we cannot SEE what happens beyond the panelframe! The girl has been talking and talking, paying no attention to what happens around her. Meanwhile, Death must have sneaked up on her neighbour and somehow managed to adress him.

Episode 24:

Whether he was right is still debated among art historians, but the theory itself is still extremely popular.

Be that as it may, the question of "How the Ancients pictured Death" is a little more complex than that. The main 'problem' is that they certainly didn't imagine Death the way we are used to see him, because our view is heavily influenced by Christianity. In a way, our image of Death is still the one that came up at the end of the 14th century, along with Ars moriendi, the story of The 3 living and the 3 dead and the Danse macabre (Dance of Death).

Ancient mythology doesn't have the one and only (powerful) image of Death. The idea is sort of 'split up', on one side we have Thanatos, who IS in fact Death incarnate. Yet, his importance among the Gods is nothing compared to Hades, God of the Underworld.

In case this young lady does not look familiar to you: It's Death from the comic series Sandman by Neil Gaiman (DC Vertigo Comics).

I actually liked the comic, but this oh-so-cute-and-lovely chick that happens to be the Grim Reaper... well... she's quite okay, I guess. Her brother Dream, on the other hand, can sometimes be a real blockhead.

Some of those who have known the comic before July 2005 will remember this part a little differently.

Originally, this author had a name, it was a reference to a living person. The agency of said author, however, was not pleased by the way I pictured him and therefore I had to anonymize the whole thing.

Just in case you wondered what this is all about, why I keep telling such a long winded story about some nameless author - he is not. Nameless.
Also, there used to be a lot of quotations from his short stories inside my story - they all had to go.

If you DO recognize who this person might be, you must either have know the comic for a long time, or you're a die-hard fan of his books and know everything by heart.