Boo's Haunted House and the Geometry of a Two-Panel Gag

Boo! lives in a fibro cottage on a suburban street where the roof creaks, the pantry door swings on its own, and something heavy shifts in the Colorbond gutters at three in the morning. Readers of the strip never consciously think about the architecture of that house, which is exactly the point. Every wall in it is load-bearing comedy, and removing one wall would collapse three running gags.

Because the character returns to the same rooms every week, the floor plan has to exist long before any panel does. It sits pinned above the drawing desk like a tide chart, deciding who can overhear whom, how far a character must walk to reach a punchline, and which door a ghost should come through. This is how the layout of Boo's haunted house gets drawn, tested and kept consistent across years of strips.

Drawing the shell before the joke

The house begins as a rectangle on graph paper: front door, hallway, kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms, a laundry and a back door opening onto the verandah. Then the suburb gets added. A single-storey fibro cottage in Melbourne, a brick veneer with a double garage in Sydney, or a high-set Queenslander on stilts up north, each one hands you a different set of noises. Fibro walls hum in summer heat; timber floors announce every intruder; a Queenslander floor sits high enough that a ghost has to come down the stairs properly.

I keep one master drawing of the plan, updated whenever the house changes. Every line on it eventually becomes a barrier, a hiding place, an exit route or a place where somebody can stand and listen. Drawing it first means the gags get built to the building, rather than the building being retrofitted around a gag that has already been written. It is the same exercise I set in my cartooning workshops, where participants invent a haunted location and then discover what it can and cannot do.

Rooms as a running order

Each room collects a particular kind of joke and keeps it. The hallway belongs to encounters: two characters pass, a third appears at the far end, and the reader's eye travels the length of the corridor before the dialogue lands. The kitchen handles hunger and timing, the fridge at two in the morning, the kettle that switches itself on. The bathroom is where a haunting becomes private and embarrassing, with the mirror reporting things the character would rather not know. The pantry, the laundry, the garden shed, the trampoline in the back yard, each one waits its turn.

That running order matters because strips get read on phones, on a tram to work in Melbourne or on the early train out of Parramatta, often one panel at a time. A gag that needs the reader to remember what happened in the kitchen a fortnight ago is a gag that will not survive the format. The plan guarantees that a glance at the hallway tells you everything you need, since the geography never changes.

Distance, doors and the timing of a scare

Comedy in a two-panel strip is mostly about travel. How far does Boo! walk between the first panel and the second? If the answer is twenty paces, the second panel is a payoff. If it is a flight of stairs and a dark hallway, the reader has already done half the work before anything appears. Doorways act as punctuation: a closed door buys a beat, a door left ajar wastes one, and a door that opens onto nothing is worth a whole panel on its own.

The floor plan also fixes the reader's eye. An establishing shot down the hallway with the front door in the background tells you where the threat will enter from, and the scare lands because the architecture promised it. Sometimes the timing is not spatial at all: a ghost waiting behind the sofa while the Saturday footy plays on the telly has to sit through the quarter-time ads before it can make its move, and those ads are part of the layout of the joke.

Australian houses and the gags they hand you

Local reality is generous to a haunted house comic. The Hills hoist on the side of the house, the paling fence, the letterbox with a dog's name on it, the council bins waiting on the kerb, the ute in the driveway, the esky with beer in it and the barbecue missing a plate. A suburban Australian house is never genuinely silent. There is always a lawnmower on a Sunday, a leaf blower, a dog barking at a possum in the roof, or the clatter of a basketball hoop at dusk.

Tenancy law adds its own layer. In most Australian states a landlord must hand over a property fit for habitation, which raises an interesting question about whether a ghost constitutes a breach of the fit for habitation warranty, and whether the creature is a tenant or a trespasser. Heritage overlays offer similar material, since an old Queenslander may sit under a local council's protection and be expensive to knock down. A ghost that has to be conserved can be a better character than one that can simply be bricked up.

Selling the strip and the original art

Boo! appears in The Dandy, a weekly paper published in Dundee, so in Australia the strip arrives by subscription rather than from the corner milk bar. That means the audience is a mix: subscribers, readers who discovered the work at conventions such as Oz Comic-Con in Melbourne, and collectors who want the original art on paper. The local market rewards condition, and a clean, centred strip with a flat page is worth more to an Australian buyer than a beautiful one with a fold through it.

Selling original pages online adds another set of Australian specifics. The Australian Consumer Law treats what a seller promises about a product as a guarantee, so descriptions have to be exact: a smudge is a defect, a deliberate crease is a description, and a ghost appearing in the artwork is a feature rather than a fault. Postage across the country is part of the deal too, and a work going to Darwin needs a proper tube and a tracking number, which is a logistical plotline all by itself.

Keeping the plan honest, then inviting people in

The master drawing gets revisited constantly, mainly so the continuity holds. When a reader spots that the pantry door has moved, or that the bathroom window now faces the wrong way, the illusion leaks, and a haunted house needs a trustworthy geometry more than most places do. The plan is also how the house grows: a new neighbour, a building site next door, a sealed-off section at the back that nobody will explain.

Reference photographs are the quickest route to a believable suburban backyard, and I have leaned on JCHM photography for visual research that keeps the verandah posts, the fences and the trampoline looking right. If you would like to try building a haunted house of your own, there are details of the workshop sessions and commissions on the contact page. Original Boo! pages and printed collections of the strip are available through the same address, and the plan for the house is always open to suggestions from the people who live in it.