Fortunately for our friends, their enemy’s pursuit is momentarily checked by the US Armed Forces swinging into action, which they are required to do at this stage of an Alien invasion plot. Unfortunately, the check will really only last for a moment, since the US Armed forces are also clearly required to fail, at this stage of an Alien invasion plot.
But even if you’re only going through the moves, you can at least go through them with gusto. This goes especially for the leathernecked, cussing Air Force commander stock character. And doubly so in a case like this, where his paranoia about Communist plots lurking behind every corner (absolutely obligatory with this character) is actually justified for once. Off course the Air Force has apparently gone rather Baptist off lately, so I slightly modified the cussing to bring the stock character up to date.
Speaking of stock characters, the radar operator in the generic control room is naturally wearing nerdy glasses…that’s a must for that characters, despite the fact that I seriously doubt that the Air Force would really use people with bad eyesight for that sort of job.
The rest of the matter can be confidently left to George Geekish’s stock-footage-fu, that shouldn’t really be any issue at all in this case.
As for the security blanket in the last panel, I’ll leave it open whether that just a conincidence, or wether we’re dealing with General Linus van Pelt, U.S. Air Force, here. But it’s always hard to predict what children will grow up to be.
More on Monday.