Some more exposition, just to get it over with a the start of the chapter, and… Welp. I guess this mostly just makes something explicit that should actually have been obvious enough by implication – but that can’t hurt terribly, and it’s certainly nothing unheard of in a B-movie, now is it?
And…I have no idea whether it’s the same for a reader, but for me, as the author, having it spelt out brought something like emotional closure to the Professor’s disappearance. And it is a bit of an emotional moment, which is also the reason why I couldn’t really end this particular strip with a punchline or gag.
Naturally, you’ll notice I’ve only put the Professor on a bus – I haven’t dropped a bridge on him. But don’t take this as a sign that I intend to bring him back – its just because, why bother with a bridge, anyway? It’s not like this webcomic (or B-movies as the underlying genre) are highly dedicated to realism, so bringing him back from a bridge incident would have been hardly more complicated than having a bus turn back – and I have done it before with characters, haven’t I*? And the bridge thing just wouldn’t have been as nice as this sort of riding off into the sunset…or riding off into the sunrise, as the Professor probably feels he’s doing, according to his words.
More on Thursday.
* Even with a literal bridge, and as early as Chapter 2.
I gotta agree; the letter was worth giving proper focus to, rather than a gag/punchline. I really am gonna miss the Professor, he was one of the things I most remembered from my first read so, so long ago, and having him here from the very, very beginning and finally gone… it’s much different than writing off one of the one-movie-only characters.
It’s been real, Jason.
Yeah, I’m still highly conflicted about the whole thing, myself. It is a pretty drastic departure, but on a certain level it feels very right to me. If you create a character who already starts out as ancient, without implication of supernatural longevity, you can’t have him around for ever and ever, I think. Although I wonder if the recent loss of my parents might color my perceptions in that regard…
Well, Mr. Doctor’s ended to be obvious, but you shouldn’t forget that viewers are goldfish and morons and there are some viewers that not going to watch every single movie from the beginning to the end, because who is masohistic enough to watch 7 B-movies in a row?… You know what? Scratch that last one.
XD Well, morons might be too harsh a word. It simply is much more difficult to keep track of relevant facts when watching a movie, compared to reading a book, for example. So I guess with a webcomic, which probably still counts as written media, I have a bit more leeway there than the medium the comic is based on…but better safe than sorry, and I also really wanted to do this strip, on a certain level.
What… what is Mopey looking out at? That looks like a sidewalk for a cityscape when the setting was established as a small university town surrounded by forests. Are they in an underground bunker-lab/city or did Nolan mix-up the greenscreen background?
On the meta-level, that last one is the most plausible explanation…in-universe, uh…let’s see…
OK, so the canonical explanation is that Mopey has had some flatscreens mounted instead of windows, which display a virtual cityscape. That’s supposed to help students who just moved from a bigger city to Lillytown with adaption to their new surroundings. XD