Well, cashew?
The Friendly Ghost Casper #183 (January 1976)
1. That’s some fine tangibility control Casper has over his ghostly body.
2. …And those are some tortured puns in that bottom blurb. “Without pecan,” indeed.
3. Casper’s expression is, I realize, borne of his response to nuts being tossed through his head, but still, that look makes it appear as if he has some nefarious plans in the works. (“Once I get all the squirrels’ nuts, they’ll starve, starve!”)
4. Where I come from, being called a “nut basket” is fightin’ words.
5. The fact that there are two different series, one named Casper the Friendly Ghost and one named The Friendly Ghost Casper, irritates me far out of proportion to its importance.
6. Is there a lot of competition for “World’s Most Famous Ghost?” Um…Hamlet’s dad, maybe? Or Slimer? Great, and now I’m picturing Slimer in the role of Hamlet’s dad:
HAMLET: “Ghostbusters and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or slime from hell….”
Er, yeah. Never mind.*
7. If one were to accept the oft-posited theory of Casper being the spirit of the departed Richie Rich, condemned to walk the earth for his sins of avarice, can the multiple times the two characters have met be seen as a literal expression of the philosophical concept of the duality of body and spirit? Or perhaps it’s Harvey Comics making explicit its support in the belief of out-of-body experiences? Or maybe, once freed of its mortal bonds, Richie’s spirit, in the form of Casper, is also freed of the progression of linear time, and is able to double-back into his own timeline and team up with himself?
Or maybe Richie and Casper are simply two different entities…but what fun is that?
