Welcome to World War Death! – Chapter 9, Act 1, Strip 41

“Then he could write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform, And tell you ev’ry detail of Caractacus’s uniform: In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, He is the very model of a modern…uh, Professorian-cum-pretend-high-school-stundent.”

Naturally, the ambiguity involving the name of the upcoming sports event triggers the Professor’s reflex for solving mysteries. It’s a fundamental character trait of his, after all – and given the nature of the two alternative names in question, you could argue that there is a certain amount of significance to the distinction.

He is helped by the fact that George Geekish used a cuneiform font to represent the fictious Japanadanese language – to him it all looks the same, anyway, and he’s boundlessly optimistic when it comes to assessing whether the audience will care about some detail or not.

And of course the Professor is able to decypher cuneiform, since that’s the classic bit of arcane and obscure knowledge you need to have to prove that you’re really a multi-discipline genius scholar worthy of a B-movie. In that way, it’s much more impressive than being able to read Japanadanese, which of course I could also simply have enabled him to do. But being able to read the script of a long-dead language is much more scholarly precisely because it lacks the kind of practical applicability that would come with the possibility to take a vacation trip to Ancient Babylon.

Ultimately, though, the Professor can ever only fool himself for a limited amount of time. As much as he would have liked to believe that there is even the slightest chance they could be headed for nothing more sinister than a prefectural high-school tournament, the enormous weight of probability is bound to crush any such naive hope. World War Death, here they come!

More on Monday.