Chapter 16 | Page 18a: The Horns of Fate

Angus is cast into a world where death is a performance, survival is fleeting, and the true battle is spiritual.

Angus has been through a lot during his time as a hench… but nothing quite like this. In today’s comic, he finds himself in a place where brute strength and bravado aren’t enough to survive — and where the rules are written in blood. It’s one of our most haunting, literary turns yet, complete with some words that cut deeper than any sword. Strap in for a surreal, atmospheric tale that puts our favorite minotaur face-to-face with something he can’t punch his way out of.

Transcript

"He [the matador] must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you aesthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. Because the other part, which does not enjoy killing, has always been the more articulate and has furnished most of the good writers we have had a very few statements of the true enjoyment of killing. One of its greatest pleasures, aside from the purely aesthetic ones, such as wing shooting, and the ones of pride, such as difficult game stalking, where it is the disproportionately increased importance of the fraction of a moment that it takes for the shot that furnishes the emotion, is the feeling of rebellion against death which comes from its administering. Once you accept the rule of death thou shalt not kill is an easily and a naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes; that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. These things are done in pride and pride, of course, is a Christian sin, and a pagan virtue. But it is pride which makes the bullfight and true enjoyment of killing which makes the great matador."

— Ernest Hemingway, "Death in the Afternoon"

Parting shot