Yes, Sir Lostalot made no mistake when he assigned Mowgli to the last position on the rope – it might not have made much sense regarding possible climbing accidents, but it was crucial to ensure that Mowgli would be the one who gets abducted by the flying dinosaur. And it had to be Mowgli, because flying dinosaurs always abduct the kid or the girl, and in this case the girl was clever enough to stay behind at the stockade. And it was inevitable that a flying dinosaur would show up, because..uh…because…because it would just be a complete waste to have a Lost World scenario without one. The kid himself seems somewhat underappreciative of the hallowed tradition, but I’m sure he’ll learn his place over time.
Sir Lostalot consciously placed the weak spot of his formation at the rear – if you can’t help having a weak spot in a formation, it’s usually better to have it at the rear than the front, a lesson his old chap Sir Douglas Haig took a while to learn.
As for panel three, every now and then the scriptwriter feels he has to give Umslopodagra some authentically African lines of dialogue – but he isn’t getting paid for doing research…
George Geekish, as you know, believes in mixing different types of effect because he believes it encourages the willing suspension of disbelieve. To pull of this magnificent pterodactyl, he used no less than three different effects: a slightly modified, rather floppy rubber bat left over from an earlier vampire movie, a top-down silhouette he copied from wikipedia and cut out from cardboard, and the top part of a bizarre plastic handpuppet he bought on a street market in Cancun several years back. Taken togehter, the illusion is very near absolute.
More on Monday.