Lee Hung Gai’s reflexes have indeed improved dramatically in the course of his employment with Nolan Nobucks Productions. In fact, he jumps at the slightest sound – and his ‘duck and cover’ reflex regularly gets triggered by falling leaves. And that’s with medication. The production medic suggested he should take a couple of decades off to let his nerves recover a bit, but there’s that camera Lee has to pay back…
I think it’s very clever that they script Clark Kent as being a 2nd rate journalist assigned only to filler items. If he was a top rate reporter dealing with world affairs, and displayed the average level of truthfulness and responsibility in his reporting, even Superman couldn’t thwart enough Alien invasions to even out his karma to zero…
And panel four shows how it’s done: ‘Chinese Actor Burns and Curses Flag’ is a completely correct and truthful statement. It’s just that, by leaving out the operative phrase ‘by complete accident’, that truthful statement is transposed into a different context. In the same vein, the main article blasts Lee for ‘being one of the busiest actors and stuntmen in Hollywood, yet only paying 400 $ in US taxes!’ – conveniently leaving out the fact that Lee only earns 600 $ a year, courtesy of his ‘modern slavery’-type contract…
As far as strong leadership is concerned… Well, let’s just say I’m pretty convinced that ‘displays of strong leadership’, or instances labeled as such, have multiplied since the 15th Century – i.e. since leadership no longer necessarily involves being at the head of troops in battle…
By the way, the reason for using an F-16 in panel 5 is that I didn’t want to overly contemporize the sequence. No, I don’t know how that works, I just heard it on the X-2 audio commentary…
More on Thursday – please vote.