Well, I haven’t really got a suitable quote by Napoleon to apply to this. I’m sure he would have had something to say about it, but it’s mostly the short and pithy sayings which tend to survive through the ages, and even Napoleon would have been hard-pressed to describe this confusing set of events well, let alone succinctly.

And, yeah, the survival of records is unfortunate, in this case. It’s true that the availability of documents lays the basis for reconstructing events accurately…but their absence helps in reconstructing them in a matter that actually makes sense. Because when there are gaps in the record, you’re allowed to fill them applying common sense and logic…if there are no gaps, you unfortunately have to live with the illogical and senseless way in which events tend to go down in real life. >_>

Fortunately, though, it’s actually not really necessary to try and reconstruct the events depicted here in any sort of detail – especially since the location remains vague, which makes it uncertain which sub-department of the history faculty would even be responsible for it. For the purposes of the comic it’s sufficient to summarize the results: “The good guys are winning! But, suddenly…” And it helps that those results were kind of predictable: With all of the fluffing of Gregory’s heroic and inspirational status, it’s only naturally that the good guys would score success after success…and with the nature of commercial plot writing, it’s just as natural that there would be a setback just before the end.

As for the villain who has to deliver that setback, I stuck with precedent from history. Which I reconstructed from memory, so it’s possible that things got mixed up a bit. Doing proper research wasn’t really called for, and would violate the true spirit of B-movies. And blaming Arnold for everything that goes wrong seems appropriate on any number of level, so…

More on Monday.