Death Buy Lemonade is a short film by Kyu-Bum Lee, released in 2010 but uploaded to her YouTube channel May 24, 2011. This would later be adapted into a webcomic following long after the events of the short.
This short animation is about Katie, a little girl in a farm field running a lemonade stand. She requires people to pay 10 cents for a glass of her lemonade, even to a man crawling through a field half alive until he turns gray, and Death flies down from the sky to take him away.
Eventually, there were comic strips of the following adventures of Katie were released afterwards, which center around her and her relationship with Death, and their jobs of stealing souls.
Death Buy Lemonade contains examples of:
- Ambiguous Situation: It is not clear if Death knew what happened and was getting retribution for Katie being stingy, or if he was naive and thought Katie wanted a high five.
- Buy or Get Lost: Katie requires people to pay 10 cents for a glass of her lemonade or they can't come to her stand.
- Death Is Gray: When people die, they turn gray and colorless, and Death comes from a stormy sky to take them away. The dehydrated man and Katie herself fell victim to it.
- Downer Ending: Death gives Katie a lethal high five at the end.
- The Grim Reaper: Death is a naive grim reaper who collects people who die, and carries their bodies to the sky.
- Kids Are Cruel: Subverted. Although she wouldn't give the dying man lemonade unless he paid up, she was devastated when he turned gray.
- Lemonade Stand Plot: This shows Katie when she was a child running a lemonade stand near a farm.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Katie regretted not giving the man lemonade as she looked horrified when he turned gray, but she brushed it off to charge Death with damaging her lemonade stand.
- Oh, Crap!: Katie is shocked when Death comes from the sky to collect the dead man after seeing what happened when she didn't serve him.
- Youthful Freckles: Katie has freckles.