The author has confirmed on twitter that the comics have a symbolic meaning. The character of Boswell in particular was hinted to be a representation of Nathan Arch.
Here’s my personal interpretation of the other symbolism in the comics:
Boris is Henry
In the comics, Boris defeats “the Brute” by throwing cans of bacon soup at him, much like Henry does in the game.
Bendy is Joey Drew
He’s arrogant and mean, his schemes backfire on him constantly, and there’s a recurring theme of Bendy stealing people’s things and attempting to sell them, much like Joey Drew did it with his employees’ work.
There’s even a comic where he eats at a restaurant and leaves the other
person with a bill, which is something that Joey was known for doing as
well.
There’s one very interesting character in the comics – Bendy’s neighbor
There’s a running joke with Bendy attempting to steal her cake. This happens in multiple comics strips published throughout the 30s.
Their relationships is quite antagonistic… up until her last appearance.
She finally takes pity on Bendy and lets him have her cake… and then she disappears from the comics forever.
I can’t help but feel like it’s symbolic of something important to the Bendy lore…
The neighbor could be Allison, maybe? Allison’s also big on cooking, and seems to have started out with fairly negative opinions of Joey (she talks to him calmly in DCTL, but I don’t really get the impression she likes him), yet later on she invites him to her wedding and is writing him letters and sending him recipes. And while we don’t know when her letter was sent, it does mention that she works at Archgate films, which probably doesn’t bode well for her – if she is dead, that might’ve been her last letter.
Interesting… there might be some credence to that, as she was the only female character before Alice. I’m tempted to tie a rebirth theme to this, since Joey claimed Alice was the first girl in the series— ignoring Ruby, coupled with the duplicate comics on January 10, 1933 and the “restart” of dates. It’s like the comics in this era rebooted their universe, replacing Ruby with Alice and never mentioning the former ever again. Kind of like how Allison replaced Susie. We could possible bring this even further with Malice and how Susie was “reborn” as her.
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