And thus, it begins! A brand new chapter in the ongoing, if meandering and possibly pointless tale of Professor James Epiphanes Doctor and/or Mopey (w/or/w/o Gregory Elminster) and/or Biff Boffehnheimer and/or Snuka. (Cast prediction is provisional, but highly likely, based on empiric evidence.)
Contrary to tradition, I’m revealing the name of the new chapter right away, since I think it doesn’t give too much away regarding the plot. I mean, apart from the fact that the plot will either involve some secret organization (but which B-movie plot doesn’t?) or some of the Professor’s research into the active alkaloids found in the petals of Nymphaea alba and their potential medical applications.
And of course everything else about the nature of the upcoming chapter is already given away by this introductory strip – yes, the new chapter is based on kaiju movies. There was really no way avoiding this early reveal, since the pre-credits monster attack on a lone (model) ship in the heart of a storm is just too much of a staple of the genre to skip.
Therefore, the urecognizable foreign language is obviously Japanese, and the monster is obviously either TV Frank’s mother or spinach. But I should add a disclaimer that such early indentifications are not always reliable, with regards to this particular subject matter. Oh, and the stock footage of a sinking ship is the Austro-Hungarian battleship “Szent Istvan”, this time around – you should always try to mix your stock footage up as much as possible. XD
And as you can see, I’ve changed the panel format and arrangement with the advent of the new chapter. Average screen resolution keeps creeping upward, and it was high time to react. I’ve experimented around a bit and finally came up with the arrangement you can see here – I think it’s a reasonable compromise: the individual panels are larger, so they don’t end up to hard to see and read on a high resolution display, but the width of the whole strip remains unchanged, so you shouldn’t run into any problems with a lower resolution display, either.
More on Thursday!