This entry was posted on August 17, 2012 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Sentient Food with tags fairy tale, gingerbread, gingerbread man, runaway food, sentient food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed
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August 17, 2012 at 3:10 pm
True story: the first book I ever read was The Gingerbread Man, and I hated it. This comic is an attempt to correct that awful experience by giving the Gingerbread Man the triumph he deserved, and to give my four-year-old self a sense of closure.
August 17, 2012 at 8:43 pm
The first few panels give me a deja vu feeling . . . particularly the baker waving the rolling pin.
Assuming they were inspired by your first read, I wonder if I saw the same book when I was a wee sprat.
August 17, 2012 at 9:13 pm
The edition I read was this one:
Imagine you’re four years old, and you see this book cover, and you immediately take a liking to the smiling Gingerbread child (yeah I know, he’s the Gingerbread “Man,” but in this illustration he’s most definitely presenting as a child) and then you read the book to discover he dies a gruesome, treacherous death — and the author actually expects you to find this death of another child somehow *hilarious.*
I also hated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for similar reasons. Watching other children get tortured and mutilated just wasn’t my idea of entertainment.
August 17, 2012 at 11:44 pm
Ha! That’s great. I love the gingerbread chest-burster. I think I missed this particular story as a child, but I like this version.
August 20, 2012 at 9:35 pm
Ah, Aarne-Thompson type 2025. Apparently this is a very old story, although the moral isn’t entirely clear. I suspect it is, as you say, obedience (especially given its likely mediaeval origins).
Here are some other versions: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type2025.html
You spin a good alternative, however.
August 20, 2012 at 9:50 pm
Wow. How have I made it this far in life without knowing there was an ancient European folktale called “The Runaway Pancake?”
August 20, 2012 at 10:14 pm
Perhaps, a century from now, the list will include the story of the Little Debbie Zebra Cake That Fled Wal-Mart.