This is probably one of those comics I’ll look back on it a few months after this very forgettable movie has faded from my memory and think “What the hell is this even about? Why did I think this was funny?” but for the time being I wanted to capture my memory of the most tonally discordant scene in this movie involving Puritan Settler Dad standing around topless and flexing his fairly well developed starving-new-England-Pilgrm abs for a bit before going off to chop some wood in a time capsule to remind myself that this was a movie I watched.

I won’t say that the movie was completely unnecessary because the director was clearly very excited to use period-accurate language and build period accurate sets and make period-accurate clothing with period-accurate technique while they discuss period-accurate misinformed superstition about witchcraft, but it left me with the impression of consuming a piece of work written by someone who just learned about Witchcraft for the first time and was so excited to use it in a story he forgot the story part of the story and mostly just made an itemized list of “things people used to believe about witches”. When the credits to a movie lead with a little blurb that essentially reads “No really guys please appreciate how super accurate everything was” it feels like the movie is trying to apologize for itself and explain to a disappointed audience why they were supposed to like it. If that kind of historical accuracy is what you’re there for, you’d probably have more fun visiting a pioneer village attraction. It’ll inevitably feel much more immersive and you can buy yourself a nice little hand-dipped candle to bring home and remember how much fun you had.

If you aren’t completely sick of the done-to-death narrative device that teen girls going through puberty are scary and mysterious you might not feel like this movie dragged as much as I did. It may be I’m such an old dog in the horror rodeo it’s hard to trot out a unique device or twist things a way I haven’t seen yet, but the whole “girl’s gettin’ tiddies, must be the devil” thing is about as cutting and edgy as a cheese single at this point.

So here’s Puritan AbsDad, the most unique and memorable part of the story as far as I was concerned.

(I will concede that the Will in this comic is much more assertive than the Will in the movie and his and Katherine’s attitudes are more or less reversed here. I’m pretty sure she was the one who requested his shirt be removed in the movie, while I’m at it)

I just think the idea of chopping wood topless as a means of escapism to ignore your family being consumed by witches is funny.