Douglas Hofstadter invented this kind of ending. Basically, the best way to hide a twist ending – which people would otherwise have a chance of expecting because it’s near the end of the book’s pages – it to add more pages. And they can’t just be blank because that’d risk giving it away, so they’d have to be filled with text that makes sense. So the best way to hide a surprise ending is to continue the story past it, leaving it up to the reader to stop reading. Of course, there’s issues with this; people have argued for years over whether the book the idea was discussed in, ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach’, is a case of this, and they will likely never, ever stop.
Comicsexpert over 10 years ago
too many panels
katina.cooper over 10 years ago
awkward.
BiggerJ over 10 years ago
Douglas Hofstadter invented this kind of ending. Basically, the best way to hide a twist ending – which people would otherwise have a chance of expecting because it’s near the end of the book’s pages – it to add more pages. And they can’t just be blank because that’d risk giving it away, so they’d have to be filled with text that makes sense. So the best way to hide a surprise ending is to continue the story past it, leaving it up to the reader to stop reading. Of course, there’s issues with this; people have argued for years over whether the book the idea was discussed in, ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach’, is a case of this, and they will likely never, ever stop.
Buzz Killington over 10 years ago
fields…
Buzz Killington over 10 years ago
comment
Buzz Killington over 10 years ago
many
Buzz Killington over 10 years ago
Too
Buzz Killington over 10 years ago
Sorry, that did not work the way I had thought it would! 8-P
bigplayray over 4 years ago
I love the randomness of this strip!