Massacre of the innocents – Chapter 1, Strip 59

It’s iron muscles meeting bandaged dry rot, as battle is joined between bulging Biff Boffenheimer and some skinny, dry, dead bodies. Any bets on the outcome of this one?

The B-Movie Comic Strip No. 59, in which Biff Boffeneheimer finally gets to get his hero- thing going on.

Please consider this fight scene to be my small contribution to realism in mummy fiction. Most B-movie mummies have towering, massive forms imbued with supernatural strength, but get real! Even alive those Egyptians tended to be small and malnourished by today’s standards, then you put them in some crate and let them dry up for 4000 years- how are they supposed to reemerge as beefy hunks? If that would work, all those gymns would be out of business in a hearbeat (Well, I admit most metrosexual- advertising- exec- type persons would have difficulties to squeeze an extra 4000 years into an already busy week.)
Let’s face it, a College quarterback like Biff is going to walk all over even an army of undead mummies. On any day. With one hand tied behind his back. And one shoe lacking a sole. And his trousers slipping. And… you catch my drift, I try to convey the idea that it would be really easy.

Actually, this sequence is inspired by Stephen Sommer’s 1999 ‘Mummy’ once more, more specifically the long squence where Brendan Fraser bullies the undead priests around. The scenes are really well done, admittedly, great fight choreography and great FX, one of the highlights of the movie, in fact. Still, I couldn’t help to feel sorry for the mummies when I saw it, how they obediently drag their decaying bodies towards hunky Fraser to be maimed, torn up, hacked through and otherwise mistreated in any way imaginable. In the commentary track the movie’s editor admits that they were worried of creating this sympathetic effect in the audience, and cut some of the material (of the stuff featuring extras as mummies, they didn’t cut any of the CG-mummies, of course) to make that massacre of the innocents less extensive.

On a disclaimerish note, the way in which Biff employs the machine gun is not the proper way to do it. Not that the proper way would be less dangerous. And not that the John Rambo way, firing it from the hip with a single hand, would be the correct way, so I hardly leave well trodden b-movie paths here.

It’s not that I would have any prejudices towards the ROTC, but Prof. Dr. ardently disaggrees with their academic standards. But then, Prof. Dr. would like to teach every arcane subject in some dead language involving non-latin scripts, just for the intellectual challenge of it. (And, after all, some people consider it a military qualification to be able to ‘write some washing bills in babylonic cuneiform’)

And right here I’d like to take the opportunity to apologize to the English language for the pun in panel 1, the pun in panel 2 and the pun in panel 3. Thank you.
(I know I’m bound for a place in punster hell, just next to this guy: http://bluecrashkit.com/index.php?date=2005-08-07 )

Therefore, please vote for a poor soul bound for punster hell, and come back on Monday, when we will check back with Mopey again.