Collateral Damage – Chap. 5, Act 4, Strip 78

With one of our villains gone, it’s time to see off the other one. And here there’s a drawback involved in using a historical villain – the plot will have to let him escape in the end, in order not to conflict too heavily with what somebody might read in a history book.

And I guess this sort of exit is sufficiently in line with historical reality, anyway – after all, the historical William died of old age in comfortable exile. You couldn’t really say of him that he knew when it was time to quit, but apparently he at least knew when it was high time to quit.

Also make note of his enlightened humanism on full display here: he wouldn’t even have sacrificed the whole continent if there had been a convenient alternative readily available. Once more, I think that’s perfectly in line with the historical character.

Speaking of things being, or getting, in line, Dr. Dutchman Fu’s few remaining henchmen are already reacting to his demise by trying to melt into William’s entourage. It’s not a seamless fit yet, but a pretty commendable effort already.

And yeah, the Kaiser’s engineers didn’t make the self-destruct mechanism overly powerful for just no reason – there were technical issues that practically forced them to. After all, they had to source the explosive materials locally, in South Africa, which used the imperial system of weights and measurements at that time. And it would have been very difficult for the German engineers to convert the numbers in their calculations from grams to grains and ounces. By simply multiplying the grams by a million, though they arrived at tonnes – A unit that was sufficiently close (6%) to its imperial equivalent (tons) to make their shopping trips simple and efficient. So, you see, there’s really nothing to be afraid of when switching from imperial to metric. Unless you’re the continent of Africa, that is…

More on Thurs…uh, sorry, Monday.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.