Is there consistency from one panel to another about the apparent kind of malfunction?
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If you look out the windows as DH is clicking, you’ll notice it’s a universal remote! He wanted a TV remote.
@Berber has it. The clicker is changing the world outside the windows (or simply the window “display”?) and not the TV. I like the “universal remote” idea.
Second panel from the end, the outside is just static. That’s why he’s hitting the TV.
He doesn’t seem to be noticing what’s happening outside, so I think the “static” outside is happening because he’s hitting the TV.
Targuman says: The clicker is changing the world outside the windows (or simply the window “display”?)
Two quite different matters. Or three!
Panels 1, 3, and 9 could be manipulating the weather conditions at his actual (original, single) location.
Panels 5 (green screen) and 8 (electronic spritzing) are not possible external reality scenes, and can only happen if the window is acting as a display screen. Possibly a redirection of what “should” be showing on the TV screen, or possibly independent.
Panels 4, 6, and 7 are possible external reality scenes, but not from his actual location. So either his room is being transported to other earthly or interplanetary locations; or elements of those locations are being transported to outside his window; or those scenes are being displayed on the window acting as a display screen.
I said three different situations, but then had to allow for subcases. So you’ll forgive me for getting rejectful towards any claims that it can be understood as simply this-or-that.
I was such a long time writing that I hadn’t seen the comments by beckoningchasm and CaroZ. (BTW, when are we going to get the long-contemplated return of numbered comments?) Both are looking at panel 8, and I agree it shows that the TV is part of the story, and the window is at least sometimes linked with the tv (not just with the remote). Between your explanations, I tend toward the CaroZ explanation that his hitting the TV is probably causing the waveform static showing on the window.
The TV appears to be a black screen in every panel except the last. He’s trying different buttons to get it to turn on, perhaps, and only hitting it works.
“Panels 5 (green screen) and 8 (electronic spritzing) are not possible external reality scenes, and can only happen if the window is acting as a display screen. Possibly a redirection of what “should” be showing on the TV screen, or possibly independent.”
Why not? This is Dark Side of the Horse universe. why can’t a place of blank green screen and static exist?
Anyway…. In panel 1 before he turns the TV on his homeworld is the space with blue sky and white clouds. For panels 3 to 8 the remote has no effect on the tv but either controls his outside reality or the display window (both work but the former is funnier; especially if we consider a physical world of static). Horace hits the TV (does hitting modern flat screen tvs with digital receivers work?) and afterwords the remote works on the TV and not reality/window. In panel 9 the TV is on, and the reality/window have return to homeworld.
The sky and clouds outside are the same (though not identical) in the first and last panels. The TV is off at the start. When the horse tries to get it going, the remote affects the outside world, not the TV, which remains stubbornly black. Finally he bashes the TV, which resets the entire system so that finally the TV goes on and the outside world is returned to NormaliTV.
This reflects the suspicion of many of us, from even way before The Truman Show or readin any Philip K Dick novels, that the “real” world is somehow a construct. I had some idea of that when I was about 7 or 8, which was 1965-66 – the idea that the world as I saw it was presented to me in some way and was the only reality, and things I couldn’t see weren’t really happening.
Of course, we spend our adult lives thinking much the same – if we had a visceral experience of how many people were dying (1.8 per second) or being tortured or going through horrible experiences at any one moment we would soon go MAD.
My younger brother back then asserted he originally came from a plant call Astron. I was inclined to believe him, except that Astron was the name of a space board game with a moving surface in which you had to fly through the solar system and avoid running into asteroids etc. So I suspected it was made up.
The idea that the world we see is only a construct goes all the way back to Plato and the Allegory of the Cave.
Writers of the 1920’s said that Plato predicted the cinema; of the 1950’s said that he predicted TV.
But I know people who spend a lot of time living in virtual reality and even building their own constructs to live in.
I don’t see how a remote that controls the outside universe implies it is a construct. It just means a person with a remote can shift it around.
DSOtH uses visual puns and slapstick humor. I don’t think Samson is going for deep commentary regarding the world being a construct. The idea of a TV remote effecting only the outside world or perhaps ojbects/pets within the room rather than the TV is an old one. I used to point the remote at the longtime family cat, hoping to change her to a more mellow and cuddlier one.
narmitaj – Normally it is the one child claiming that the other child is from another planet, not a child (your brother) claiming that the child himself is from another planet.
As in “I don’t care what my parents say, my brother has to be another planet” or “Meryl sure acts like she is from another planet – how can she be my sister?”
Comics I Don't Understand 
If you look out the windows as DH is clicking, you’ll notice it’s a universal remote! He wanted a TV remote.
@Berber has it. The clicker is changing the world outside the windows (or simply the window “display”?) and not the TV. I like the “universal remote” idea.
Second panel from the end, the outside is just static. That’s why he’s hitting the TV.
He doesn’t seem to be noticing what’s happening outside, so I think the “static” outside is happening because he’s hitting the TV.
Targuman says:
The clicker is changing the world outside the windows (or simply the window “display”?)Two quite different matters. Or three!
Panels 1, 3, and 9 could be manipulating the weather conditions at his actual (original, single) location.
Panels 5 (green screen) and 8 (electronic spritzing) are not possible external reality scenes, and can only happen if the window is acting as a display screen. Possibly a redirection of what “should” be showing on the TV screen, or possibly independent.
Panels 4, 6, and 7 are possible external reality scenes, but not from his actual location. So either his room is being transported to other earthly or interplanetary locations; or elements of those locations are being transported to outside his window; or those scenes are being displayed on the window acting as a display screen.
I said three different situations, but then had to allow for subcases. So you’ll forgive me for getting rejectful towards any claims that it can be understood as simply this-or-that.
I was such a long time writing that I hadn’t seen the comments by beckoningchasm and CaroZ. (BTW, when are we going to get the long-contemplated return of numbered comments?) Both are looking at panel 8, and I agree it shows that the TV is part of the story, and the window is at least sometimes linked with the tv (not just with the remote). Between your explanations, I tend toward the CaroZ explanation that his hitting the TV is probably causing the waveform static showing on the window.
The TV appears to be a black screen in every panel except the last. He’s trying different buttons to get it to turn on, perhaps, and only hitting it works.
“Panels 5 (green screen) and 8 (electronic spritzing) are not possible external reality scenes, and can only happen if the window is acting as a display screen. Possibly a redirection of what “should” be showing on the TV screen, or possibly independent.”
Why not? This is Dark Side of the Horse universe. why can’t a place of blank green screen and static exist?
Anyway…. In panel 1 before he turns the TV on his homeworld is the space with blue sky and white clouds. For panels 3 to 8 the remote has no effect on the tv but either controls his outside reality or the display window (both work but the former is funnier; especially if we consider a physical world of static). Horace hits the TV (does hitting modern flat screen tvs with digital receivers work?) and afterwords the remote works on the TV and not reality/window. In panel 9 the TV is on, and the reality/window have return to homeworld.
The sky and clouds outside are the same (though not identical) in the first and last panels. The TV is off at the start. When the horse tries to get it going, the remote affects the outside world, not the TV, which remains stubbornly black. Finally he bashes the TV, which resets the entire system so that finally the TV goes on and the outside world is returned to NormaliTV.
This reflects the suspicion of many of us, from even way before The Truman Show or readin any Philip K Dick novels, that the “real” world is somehow a construct. I had some idea of that when I was about 7 or 8, which was 1965-66 – the idea that the world as I saw it was presented to me in some way and was the only reality, and things I couldn’t see weren’t really happening.
Of course, we spend our adult lives thinking much the same – if we had a visceral experience of how many people were dying (1.8 per second) or being tortured or going through horrible experiences at any one moment we would soon go MAD.
My younger brother back then asserted he originally came from a plant call Astron. I was inclined to believe him, except that Astron was the name of a space board game with a moving surface in which you had to fly through the solar system and avoid running into asteroids etc. So I suspected it was made up.
More on Astron:
https://www.gamesboard.org.uk/cgi-pub/gardpub.cgi?table=examples&pk=12727&command=view
“from a plant call” – from a planet called.
The idea that the world we see is only a construct goes all the way back to Plato and the Allegory of the Cave.
Writers of the 1920’s said that Plato predicted the cinema; of the 1950’s said that he predicted TV.
But I know people who spend a lot of time living in virtual reality and even building their own constructs to live in.
I don’t see how a remote that controls the outside universe implies it is a construct. It just means a person with a remote can shift it around.
DSOtH uses visual puns and slapstick humor. I don’t think Samson is going for deep commentary regarding the world being a construct. The idea of a TV remote effecting only the outside world or perhaps ojbects/pets within the room rather than the TV is an old one. I used to point the remote at the longtime family cat, hoping to change her to a more mellow and cuddlier one.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UniversalRemoteControl
narmitaj – Normally it is the one child claiming that the other child is from another planet, not a child (your brother) claiming that the child himself is from another planet.
As in “I don’t care what my parents say, my brother has to be another planet” or “Meryl sure acts like she is from another planet – how can she be my sister?”