Fire kills, even if you're a Foob.

It occurs to me that we should not have spent the last four months worrying about where Mike and his family were going to live because they'd already have a permanent address three days after the fact: the cemetary. Their panicky reaction to the blaze calls to mind the British equivalent to the Public Serivce Announcement: the Public Information Film. In the early 1950's the British Government created something called the Central Office for Information and charged it with the responsibility of frightening the populace into behaving safely. Their favorite tactic is placing the most harrowing material they can in betwwen children's shows. A child would be waiting for some bit of kid-friendly fluff and be bombarded with images of violent and needless death because the government thought they had to scare common sense into children. The COI would use this as a basis for its "Fire Kills" fire safety campaign. It would start pretty much as it had done but instead of getting out alive, a fireman would be saying something like "What a tragic waste of human life" over their charred corpses. The message the government wishes to convey is, of course, "Dear stupid people, don't act like this and you won't die pointlessly either." If this were a PIF, we'd see the "File Kills" logo (an outline of a burning house with the words Fire Kills in block caps on the side) and the contnuity announcer would tell the ten-year-old about to watch Winx Club that that was a Public Information Film. In the strip, we'd be dealing with the after effects.