Well, how else could I have handled this? It was Mopey’s turn, because the others had already tried and failed, one by one.* And with Mopey wielding the power of love (as unlikely as that would have appeared at the outset) and the coin-monster wielding financial power, a big confrontation between love and money was inevitably in the offing.
And it could only end in Mopey’s defeat…for one thing, because the dramaturgy of this sort of encounter wouldn’t allow her to win on a first attempt…and for the other thing, because even the magical-girls-genre wouldn’t allow for the degree of unrealism inherent in a clear win of love over lucre.
To dampen the blow, I’ve kept the actual fight off-screen. We all knew what was going to happen, and to make the result canonical, I’ve used a classic set-up: a neutral shot and then a generic newscast delivering the message.
Since I really hadn’t set up the surroundings nearly well enough to deliver anything like an organic neutral shot, I went for a highly generic one instead. And, yeah, hardly anything could be more neutral than a Swedish alphorn infantryman. Because Sweden has a long tradition of neutrality, as everyone will admit…well, everyone who isn’t from Norway. And Switzerland does so, too. (As does Belgium, by the way, but too few people have any idea about that place…) And the alphorn, aside from representing Switzerland here, is also a symbol of neutrality all by itself – because it resides on a kind of ‘neutral ground’ between musical instruments and torture devices, being kind of both and neither at the same time. Like Schrödinger’s cat, only that the cat didn’t sound that dissonant, at least not unless you accidentally stepped on its tail.
I’m assuming that Swiss infantry carry alphorns for communication without having made any attempt at verification…because that would certainly have led to disappointment, and why should I do that to myself over such a trivial matter?
In conclusion: no matter how weird and disjointed this strip is, I think I’ve logically proven that there was no other way. XD
More on Monday.
* Of course they might not have failed if they had attacked all together at the same time – but that would just have been gauche, wouldn’t it? There are rules to this sort of things. They might not be sensible rules, exactly, but they are rules.
…but is that the HO story?
The HO story? Like, https://mymodeltrainsclub.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/the-history-of-ho-model-trains/ ?
I choose to imagine the next scene depicting Mopey just having her flattened under the giant penny from Batman’s cave.
Yeah, the giant penny Batman saved from being stolen by the Penny Plunderer…and then simply kept as a “trophy”. I always found that a pretty odd approach to fighting property crime… XD
He probably legally bought it. With his bat credit card.
Possible, but not likely – people who inherit huge fortunes tend to develop a sort of allergy to paying for stuff. XD