With the Valentine’s Day malady behind us, we can get started on the plot proper – and naturally it starts with a bang.
At some time that tradition served the purpose of waking up those members of the audience who had fallen asleep during the endless ads and trailers before the movies – but once the ads and trailers started including more explosions than the movie proper, that rationale started to lose legitimacy. But I feel it’s still worth doing.
And the bang is sufficiently justified in-universe, anyway, since scientific research at Lillytown University has an established tendency to result in explosions. Particularly around New Year’s Eve, but with some frequency also throughout the rest of the year.
In this elegant way, the setting is re-introduced, and unsurprisingly it’s still the campus of Lillytown U. As ill-defined as that campus is in regards to its features… Another thing established by this first strip is a season – and it’s clearly summer, as evidenced by the color scheme and the cicada sound effects.
Admittedly, that’s actually a stag beetle instead of a cicada…but, in best B-movie tradition, it’s the thought that counts?
More on Monday.
Biff, are you doing it again?
Valentine’s Day is not a New Year, but there is still a possibility of some other obscure holiday happening near that date, the one that is more appropriate to celebrate with explosions.
Had I paid better attention, I could have gotten the strip to coincide with Lunar New Year – I was only off by one week.
On the previous page, you wrote that the chapter name was devoid of specific meaning that you didn’t have to hide it. But it still felt familiar to me. At first I thought it was only because I watched “The tunnel to summer” last year. But now I realized there is also a bit older movie called “The door into summer” and the novel it’s based on. So let’s see if that is a hint for the plot, a red herring or just coincidence.
Your probably referring to the Heinlein novel and its adaptations, but that’s in fact not what I’m alluding to with that title…in that way, it is just a coincidence, on part of Mr. Heinlein. Or his cat…