The Secret Knots is a collection of self-contained comics published online by Juan Santapau
since late 2006. The comics often explore the relationship between art, artist, and viewer, themes of subtle horror, and often take place in Mundane Fantastic or New Weird settings.
The comics often leave their ultimate message ambiguous, with their characters either failing to find answers to all the questions they have or having their conclusions left unrevealed to the reader.
The series updates irregularly, and can be read on its website here.
Tropes in this comic include:
- Adaptation Decay: "The Day of the Blue Gods" is a recounting of how this has happened to a fictional movie over the course of several decades. The original film was a 1964 Spanish B-Movie about blue aliens from Sirius declaring war on Earth because of "subterranean vibrations" that were destroying their world. After multiple alterations from its various rereleases and redubbings, the film was reduced to 8 minutes of the original film (mostly an unimportant romance subplot), with the rest of it being new material added at various points.
- In 1966, it was dubbed into Russian and named Colonizers From Planet U when it was distributed in the USSR, which added a subplot about the aliens wanting to kidnap workers to be their slaves.
- In 1968 it was released in Czechoslovakia, where it was retitled Dream from Planet U and added a subplot about a teenage girl whose singing could rob the aliens of their psychic powers.
- In 1969 it was released in Japan, where it was retitled U Against Earth! and the aliens turned into giants to fight a Kaiju. The US version then inserted new footage of an American officer but otherwise left it unchanged.
- After the End: The last part of "Memory Weaver" takes place in 2260, after humanity has gone extinct for undisclosed reasons. Robotic/insectoid lifeforms are now the dominant species, and have a museum dedicated to human culture.
- Alien Arts Are Appreciated: In "Memory Weaver", Emiry, the robot-flea creature who works in a recycling plant on Earth after the extinction of humanity, goes to the human culture museum every day after her shift to read human fiction. She's especially entranced by the Memory Weaver Sabine series, due to its themes of self-determination and self-sacrifice, shutting off her body's audio-receivers so she can reread it ten more times without distraction.
- Alternate Identity Amnesia: In "11 signs you are not getting enough sleep", the werewolf protagonist doesn't remember any of things they did or the people they killed (and ate) while transformed.
- Ambiguously Evil:
- Several from "In the Mirror":
- The 'baby' in the oil painting. It's heavily implied by the reactions of the audience that there's something profoundly wrong about its appearance, with a historian remarking that the painting's existence at all was meant as a coded warning from the Florentine secret society Phantasma Veritas. While the comic ends with on the ominous note of 'The message is clear. We all received it. God help us,' the viewer isn't told what the message was. Is the baby malicious and delivering a threat, or trying to help by giving a warning?
- The mysterious mirror-masked person. While their appearance and speech is certainly unnerving, it's left ambiguous if they bought the painting for nefarious purposes, or if they are one of the 'initiated' by Phantasma Veritas who saw and heeded the warning.
- The titular creatures in "The Silentii" are massively tall, faceless humanoid beings who speak in Word-Salad Horror and acted as NPCs in the fictional video game Silentii. Years after the game was mysteriously shut down, names in their language began appearing in real life graffitied on walls around the world, and former players started dreaming of the Silentii every night waiting at the bottom of a long staircase, the names of real people covering the walls. Despite how unnerving they are, it's unclear if they're actively malicious, or simply the messengers of something yet to come.
- Several from "In the Mirror":
- Ambiguous Gender: Nin Shieh, the new prince ('prince' being a ceremonial title for a sacrificial victim) in "The Tower", an androgynous child that the narrator isn't sure of the gender of.
- Altar Diplomacy: Parodied in "How to make the best of your time in airports". After forming a theocratic nation in an airport and waging a holy war on people wearing neck pillows, peace is restored in the airport via an arranged marriage between one of the airport-cult and one of the neck pillow-wearers. All is quickly forgotten when everyone boards the plane.
- Bookends:
- "Quinton Page Eats a Sandwich" begins with a tabloid photo showing "A lonely Quinton Page eats his sandwich in the park", and ends with the same thing being shown of his supposed reincarnation, Mikkel Kvint.
- "11 signs you are not getting enough sleep" begins and ends with the statement "1. Your memory fails" as the protagonist wakes up after a rampage as a werewolf.
- Cult: Parodied in "How to make the best of your time in airports", which advocates for forming a cult based on the interpretations of flight numbers and their meanings with the other passengers while waiting in an airport, with neck pillows being declared heretical.
- Cult Classic: "Memory Weaver" centers around a series of stories written in 1996 based on the fictional videogame Silo. While these stories were never a hit, they maintained a dedicated fanbase on Usenet groups. When the books went out of print the stories were passed around the internet as pdfs, then when those got taken down they were passed around by dedicated collectors using Transferable Memory... until the neutrointerfaces everyone uses was no longer able to read the filetype. Eventually, after humanity has gone extinct, one of the robotic creatures that now inhabits the Earth discovers them and becomes a huge fan.
- Dyeing for Your Art: The actor Quinton Page in "Quinton Page Eats a Sandwich" is known in-universe for radically altering his appearance in order to better suit his roles, gaining sixty pounds to play the villain in a Mission Impossible film and then becoming nearly skeletal for a role in an art-house film. This is implied to be the reason for his sudden death.
- Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: In "In the Mirror", in-universe art scholars and historians come up with a myriad of possible interpretations for the fantasy creatures that were shown in the mirror's reflection in the original sketches for "The Maid in the Mirror", ranging from symbolizing the daydreams of the maid to being an encoded message from a secret society that the artist was part of.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: In "The Silentii", the titular creatures are ominous, sometimes antagonistic NPCs in a video game that was shut down. Years later, it's heavily implied that they're somehow becoming able to break into reality, with their names appearing scrawled on walls around the world and former players all dreaming of speaking with them every night for a week.
- Last Request: In "New Works of Basil Hallward", one of the last things Milton Barnes asks of Basil before he dies in the Battle of the Somme is for Basil to take care of his wife and children for him.
- Meaningful Appearance: In-universe in "Glitches". Xeni can make herself look like anything she wants inside the virtual reality memorial that she spends most of her time in, and gives herself a jarringly ugly, expressionless mask that covers her entire head, saying that she wants to look the way she feels after the death of her friend.
- Mundane Afterlife: Downplayed in "Erwin and the Method Demons". While demons are just as grotesque as they're depicted in classical works and have armless human slaves hauling carts, demonic society is pretty similar to that of humans: Erwin is shown living in an ordinary house, going to night clubs, studying finance, teaching acting classes, and going on demonic talk shows.
- Never the Selves Shall Meet: Discussed and averted in "Another Lydia". When Lydia meets an alternate version of herself, they hit it off well and have a pleasant afternoon together. When they part, Lydia says that she's glad that she met her, and also that them meeting didn't cause the multiverse to blow up or anything.
- No Immortal Inertia: When Basil finally dies in "New Works of Basil Hallward", he ages rapidly to reflect his real age of over 70, after having been being frozen in the appearance of early 30's since his first 'death'.
- Our Ghosts Are Different:
- In "Dark Pursuits", the ghosts of the original inhabitants of the castle visit the narrator in his dreams and will (according to an old fortune teller) only be put to rest if he paints a portrait of each of them.
- In "Quinton Page Eats a Sandwich", Quinton is so dedicated to acting that he contacts the producers of a film via a medium in order to arrange for himself to play a ghost in it, though he's invisible and inaudible- his acting is conveyed entirely by him affecting objects on the stage... and its apparently so good that he wins 'Best Actor' for it.
- Prefers the Illusion: "Glitches" is about a girl who prefers to live in a virtual-reality version of the world where her dead friend is still alive. While she's completely aware of the truth of the situation, she still spends most of her time in there, much to her mother's discomfort.
- Public Domain Character: "New Works of Basil Hallward" centers around... Basil Hallward, the painter who created The Picture of Dorian Gray, having survived his murder due to the same supernatural abilities that caused Dorian's picture to age for him.
- Reincarnation: In "Quinton Page Eats a Sandwich", a young Danish boy claims to be the reincarnation of Quinton. As Quinton had already proven that he had lingered as a ghost (and continued to star in movies as a ghost), the press takes this claim in stride, as its no more unbelievable than anything else regarding him.
- Robotic Reveal: In "Glitches", Nel is shocked to realize that Xeni's mother, who she'd been talking on the phone with over the course of the comic, was essentially a chat-bot that Xeni used to try and avoid talking with Nel. The bot is advanced enough that Nel only realizes what it is when it repeats a sentence it'd already said earlier in their conversation.
- Roofhopping: #6 in "11 signs you are not getting enough sleep": "Cinematic chases on rooftops", with the art showing the protagonist jumping between rooftops while pursued by a villager armed with a crossbow.
- Shrine to the Fallen: "Glitches" centers around a high-tech version of one. At some point in the future people began to make 'meta-memorials', virtual reality worlds filled with things important to the deceased and the person who made the memorial, as well as a bot that acts as representation of the deceased. They were later discontinued, not out of ethical or philosophical quandaries, but because companies realized people were putting images of copyrighted characters and versions of games inside them, but the memorials continued to be maintained on hacked servers. Xeni, the main character of the comic, spends more time in her memorial to her friend to than she does in the real world; her mom calls it a virtual tomb that she's locked herself inside of.
- This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Parodied in "The very brief adventures of the Circle of the Salamander", where the French government recruits a group of surrealist artists to combat the 'surrealist vortex' that is threatening to destroy the world.
- Torches and Pitchforks: This is #5 in "11 signs you are not getting enough sleep": "The villagers with torches at sunset", with the art showing an angry mob outside the protagonist's apartment building, including one person holding a pitchfork. They're doing so because the werewolf protagonist has killed and eaten at least one person while transformed.
- To Serve Man: In "11 signs you are not getting enough sleep", it's heavily implied that the werewolf protagonist has killed and eaten people on their rampages, which ends up spurring the townsfolk into an angry mob against them.
- Values Resonance: In "The Day of the Blue Gods", the film was so radically changed over the years of adaptations and original copies became so hard to find that what it was originally actually about became mostly lost to urban legend, with it being claimed that it contained "disturbingly prescient concepts" for the 60s, like the aliens wanting to forcibly feed their human captives into their neutral network.
- Villain Protagonist: The protagonist in "11 signs you are not getting enough sleep" turns out to be a murderous werewolf, who doesn't remember anything they've done while transformed.
