It’s the most shocking sverve ever! The apparent cameo of Rutentuten and the son of Rutentuten was actually a cameo of the son of Rutentuten and the debut of the grandson of Rutentuten! While the actual cameo of Rutentuten is in this strip, instead! Vince Russo couldn’t have come up with something more surprising.*
And, yeah…that’s the gag. I’m sorry. Originally I was planning to feature Rutentuten’s child in a cameo, quite unironically. But then I realized just how much time has passed since the end of the first chapter of the BMC, and that his son couldn’t possible still be a child. I mean, theoretically he could – we don’t really know a lot about the lifecycle of living mummies. Does living for millennia mean you get a century of childhood first? But, anyway, I decided to acknowledge the passage of time, and it would also be a nice twist. A lame one, sure, but still a kinda nice one. In a further acknowledgement of the passage of time, Rutentuten sports a beard now. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but how else would you visually imply that a millennia-old, dried-up mummy is slightly (relatively to his total (un)lifespan) older than the last time you saw him?
And yeah, Mihashi was smart enough to bring his smartphone along. Naturally, I gave him a newer one than he had on the show. I love modern smartphones, they are so f***ing simple to draw. Just a flat cube, done. Mihashi’s smartphone probably was a great help in finding the pyramid in the first place. Had they had to rely on the methods of navigation that correspond to the age their plane is from, it would have been very difficult and possibly dangerous. With the smartphone, not only did Mihashi always know where they were, he could also see all of the nearby restaurants and study their menus online. Progress.
More on Thursday.
* After a certain point in his career, he literally couldn’t have come up with anything more surprising than this.